Penance Before Reconciliation

From the R.M. Dolin novel, “AN UNSUSTAINABLE LIFE – The Book of Darwin“

Chapter 10: Penance Before Reconciliation

Darwin slams his bourbon glass hard on the living room table to better focus his glare. “What do you mean, what do I think? I think it’s the stupidest damn thing you’ve ever done! And that’s coming off an impressive list of stupid-ass things.”

“Well, you’re just afraid of a good adventure,” Vincent calmly fires back before tossing down the last of his Sazerac so he can make a fresh one.

“Yeah,” Darwin dismissively counters with contempt, “keep that happy thought.” He downs the last of his bourbon because he’s not willing to fall behind in this argument.

“I do believe I most assuredly will.” Vincent concludes in taunting arrogance.

Darwin stews while watching his brother mix a Sazerac unwilling to ask for another bourbon. “Here’s the deal Sparky, you don’t seem to get that your world’s changed, you got responsibilities now well beyond your next adrenaline rush. You got a family and can’t be running off doing shit like this.”

“Shit like what?” Gwen gingerly interrupts announcing her entrance from the kitchen unaware of the thick tension she’s carving into. The boys both turn to stare at their intruder in misplaced silence. “I don’t mean to dampen whatever fun you’re having but,” she smiles at Vincent, “your wife sent me out here to get you, she needs your highly trained surgical skills to finish the gravy while she feeds Issac.” From the stern unforgiving way Vincent glares first at Darwin, then at her, she gets a feel, not only for the room but for her sudden need to add additional context. “Her words not mine.”

Vincent downs half of his freshly made cocktail and starts for the kitchen. “Wait!” Darwin demands in a booming voice so authoritarian it freezes his brother. Darwin turns toward Gwen forgetting to tone down his emotions. “Tell me Gwen, do you think it reasonable for my dumb-ass brother, a man responsible for providing for his young wife and infant son, to be taking flying lessons?”

The last thing Gwen wants on Thanksgiving is to be dragged into whatever drama’s driving this hostility between brothers. She looks at Vincent, then at Darwin, then back to Vincent trying to figure out what caused tensions to ratchet up so high when just a few minutes ago everything was fine. Gwen likes to believe she’s a poster child for modern feminism, she is after all an independent woman living on her own in a city that’s increasing slipping into a chaos everyone sees yet no one knows what to do about, and yet, here she is trying to avoid getting caught in a domestic dispute, especially given that part of what her and Ilene decided around the time the turkey went in the oven was that moving to New Mexico to live in a mountain wilderness is something worth considering. It’s not that Darwin’s offered, but Ilene’s right, now that things with Becky have cooled, if she plays her cards right maybe, just maybe, he might-. “Well,” she meekly offers in response to Darwin’s question, “Ilene and I were actually just talking about that.”

“And?” Darwin prompts in a tone suggesting there’s only one right answer, which pushes Gwen even further toward avoidance.

“I don’t personally have an opinion on the matter,” she flatly states. “But whenever Ilene talks about it, she doesn’t seem to have any concerns. In fact, she’s excited about the idea of being able to hop on a plane whenever they want to go wherever they want. She’s even already figured out what a flight to Taos might look like. They’ll fly from here to Springfield to refuel, then over to Amarillo to refuel again, then it’s up and over the New Mexico mountains for a glide down into Taos.”

Having just traveled nearly the very same route on his Harley back in October, Darwin calculates the efficiency of Ilene’s plan relative to flying more directly over Kansas and across the southeast edge of Colorado before jumping over the Rockies into Taos, he quickly concludes Ilene’s right, refueling venues are more reliable along her route and given what happened in Tucumcari, that’s important. “Okay,” Darwin continues as final numbers of his calculation are still rolling in. He hears what Gwen’s saying but is too agitated to listen to what she’s telling him. “Let’s just say in general, take genius over there out of the equation, is it reasonable for a man with major responsibilities to do things involving significant risks that could wind up with him being dead?”

“You mean like having zero survival skills and deciding on a crazy-ass whim to winter in the wilderness at a place where countless people die every year from their pigheaded foolishness.” Vincent enthusiastically litigates as he re-enters the fray, feeling profoundly satisfied about his keen ability to strike back with clarity and precision. “Maybe you get mauled by bears, bitten by rattlesnakes, clawed by mountain lions, hunted down by a hungry pack of wolves, die from heat stroke or from hypothermia, or just get lost and die from being stupid?”

Gwen looks at Vincent unnerved at just how rapidly his anger escalates. She glances toward the kitchen in desperation, then back at Vincent, hoping, pleading for Ilene’s intervention.

“Well first off genius,” Darwin hammers home, “bears hibernate in winter, as do rattlesnakes; no one’s been eaten by wolves since they’ve been re-introduced and I’m pretty damn sure no one’s getting heat stroke in winter.”

“Oh yeah! Well hypothermia is what will most likely get you, I mean after getting lost from being stupid.” Vincent takes another run at his Sazerac. “Statistically speaking,” he sarcastically adds.

“Care to wager?” Darwin taunts. “There’s a dead-pool back in Taos you can probably buy into. Current book has me not lasting till spring.”

“Hook me up for a piece of that action brother.” Vincent asserts with confidence.

There’s a momentary ceasefire as both sides seem content to end things in a draw, that is until Darwin angrily reignites the conflict. “The comparison isn’t even close. For one thing, I know what the hell I’m doing and I’m not responsible for a wife and baby!”

“Boys!” Ilene calmly but sternly states as she stands in kitchen doorway holding Issac who’s attempting to suckle through her blouse. “Not on Thanksgiving.” With that simple and declarative statement, the conflict ends in stalemate. Ilene smiles flatly before instructing her husband, “you have gravy to make.” She looks down at Issac smiling warmly and gently caresses his head. “And I need to feed little Issac so his little tummy’s not in turmoil.”

Vincent walks to the kitchen without saying a word and Ilene follows. Gwen awkwardly stands in the living room unsure if she needs Darwin’s permission to be excused. “I ah, think I need to mash potatoes or at least some such something that requires me in the kitchen.” She beelines for the door leaving Darwin to stew over his empty drink.

With Ilene feeding Issac, Vincent making gravy, and Gwen mashing potatoes, Darwin’s left with nothing to do but fix another bourbon. He considers the things he said to Vincent alongside the things he wishes he hadn’t and decides to move on. Staying angry is not really how he and Vincent roll after a heated argument that’s usually about something inconsequential; they just move on, no excuses, no apologies, no saying sorry. Because they don’t keep score, what’s the point. That’s pretty much how it’s been since they were kids and like any set of siblings close in age whose parents live distracted lives, it just is what it is.

The thing about Darwin and Vincent is that no matter how emotional stuff gets, no matter how physical it becomes, they never stay angry or hold lingering grudges. It’s because of a pact they made their first summer at adventure camp; between counselors deriving way too much joy for pushing them past their pain and punishing them when they gave up, and older campers bullying them whenever no one was watching, Darwin and Vincent built an impenetrable survival bond that became the basis of their pact. No matter what happens they vowed, or how it happens, they will always have each other’s backs. That’s not to say the pact hasn’t been mightily tested at times or strained over the years, even torn a time or two; but never ever has it come close to faltering.

As Darwin pours bourbon over the large ice cube he drops into the center of his glass, he resurrects one of the more memorable moments with Vincent when things could have gone horribly sideways had it not been for their pact. It was a night in high school when the two of them concoct the wildly stupid idea of crashing a south-side dance. Vincent had just broken up with his girlfriend, again, and was looking to prove to himself he didn’t need her. It’s impossible to have a story begin with a statement like that without the ending clearly foreshadowed, but there they were, riding the L from their affluent North Shore station near Addison and Clark, south, past the projects to the DP part of town where ‘Displaced Poles,’ who had just immigrated to Chicago, lived in walled-off separation like medieval surfs.

With each station stop they pass, their bravado builds as they boast about yet to be realized romantic conquests. For North Shore boys, South Side girls are intoxicatedly exotic, aloof, and most definitely dangerous, which only makes their daring more debonair. They couldn’t have been at the dance more than twenty minutes when things go sideways, Vincent, always the smooth talking one of the two, is dancing with this gorgeous DP honey who barely speaks English and talks so fast in Polish, Vincent can’t comprehend anything she’s saying. A later postmortem indicates, based on what happens next, that she’s joking about how her boyfriend doesn’t like her dancing with strange boys. They do manage to make it out of the dance hall, but not unscathed and definitely only after moments when it didn’t seem likely they’d ever see sunshine again.

That’s how it is between them, how it will always be, which is why Darwin feels the harshness of his anger melting away like ice on the hard edges of the cube in his bourbon glass.

“Excuse me,” Gwen meekly interrupts. She glances back toward the kitchen for reassurance where Ilene, with Issac attached, is gesturing her to continue. When she turns back toward Darwin, she’s startled to find he’s now staring directly at her while oddly, she can’t really say he’s looking at her. It takes a little more muscle than she thought it should, but she does find the fortitude to continue. “Dinner’s almost ready and-” Gwen suddenly decides this plan her and Ilene cooked up is not gonna work, she starts her retreat to the kitchen, but her path is blocked by Ilene again gesturing for her to continue. With dignified retreat no longer an option she has no choice but to follow through with their flawed plan. “Well,” she says through an unintended giggle she tries to hide, “the table needs to be set, and I can use some help.”

It takes a few brain cycles for Darwin to process Gwen’s request. He’s not opposed to helping, it’s just setting the table doesn’t come up as a probable task in the context of where his mind is at. “Of course,” he says snapping himself back into the moment. He sets his bourbon down and goes to the hutch to fetch Ilene’s fine China that she inherited from Helen. As Gwen places brown-on-orange holiday dinning mats around the table, Darwin follows positioning a small plate on top of a larger plate in the center of each mat. Gwen next sets pre-folded cloth napkins on the right side each plate while Darwin arranges the flatware, items Ilene also inherited from Helen. As he sets the small forks, he fondly remembers past Thanksgivings and his mom telling him ‘small fork, big fork, knife, outside in.’ Something she would say, “every young man of refinement should know.” Darwin’s glad Ilene gracefully welcomed mom’s dinnerware into her home rather than insist on starting her life with Vincent with dinnerware that’s not pre-memoried.

With the last fork set, Darwin watches Gwen taking her time properly aligning glassware. “How’s work at the library,” he asks in an effort to cut through the awkwardness of their silence.

Gwen glances up from her task, “Huh?”

“The library, isn’t that where you work?”

“No,” she answers deeply offended, “I work at a daycare.”

“Huh,” Darwin shrugs not thinking too much about it but also not concerned he got it wrong. “For some reason I always thought you worked at a library.”

An awkward silence ensues building in agonizing energy like steam in a tea kettle that can’t escape fast enough. “I like kids,” Gwen finally bursts out unable to take the tension. After a moment that is again bubbling in silence, she continues in a much more subdued tone. “I work in a daycare,” she repeats unable hide being hurt Darwin doesn’t know that. “Because I like kids and it’s very rewarding. I read them stories, teach them new things, and I love playing games just to watch their utterly uninhabited joy. Sometimes I wonder why the more we grow the less we embrace the purity of joy.” She fidgets with a wine glass. “One girl, Jenny, I taught to play domino’s because she’s always counting. I love watching the way she diligently counts the dots on her tiles then carefully figures out where one side might match an open tile on the board. Seeing how overwhelmingly happy she gets when she makes a match is-” Gwen stops abruptly to see if Darwin’s even listening and is pleased, he gestures for her to continue. “Jenny’s going to make a good scientist someday, maybe even an engineer like you.”

“That’s good,” Darwin says in a tone Gwen can’t decipher as dismissive or distracted. “The world’s never gonna run out of a need for more engineers. We’re like little beavers ya know, always busy, always building. Sometimes I think the worse form of torture anyone could inflict on me, is to lock me in a room with nothing to do, I literally think I’d go insane.” Darwin considers his new life in the New Mexico wilderness and the purpose behind the purpose people probe when they ask what the hell he’s doing. Of course, he never truthfully answers, not because it’s none of their business, which it isn’t, but because he’s not willing to face that darkness and how strange it would be to tell them he went into the wilderness to face a darkness he’s afraid to face. Now that Gwen’s poked his dragon, Darwin cautiously continues, only with a tone she instantly sees betraying a burden Darwin keeps buried or at least keeps only to himself. “Sometimes,” he says in voice that’s weakened and withdrawn, “it’s not enough to build, eventually the things you’ve built need fixing; and sometimes, things that can’t be fixed still need fixing. It’s a burden ya know, even a curse if you buy into old gypsy superstitions.” He stares deep into Gwen’s eyes with a force so piercing she’s astonishingly unsettled. “Imagine if you can, that what you built broke humanity, how do you fix that?”

Gwen has absolutely no idea what Darwin’s talking about and the way he’s talking scares her. She feels the need to say something; maybe to change the subject, maybe to tone down the emotions, but certainly, not to probe any deeper.

“I built a snare one summer at adventure camp,” Darwin continues before Gwen can interject. “Not just some piece of shit contraption to barely pass counselor inspection like Vincent’s and the others. No, when I build something it’s important it be top shelf. The counselors are way impressed, say they never saw anything like it, one even called it a work of art. I was proud, so proud that these two hands created something impressive, created art. The counselors had everyone set their snares out that night as part of our training in wilderness survival. The next morning mine is the only one that has a rabbit. Again, the counselors are amazed, no one’s ever actually snared a rabbit before, in fact, I think the snares are designed not to, but I’d made a few modifications because when I build, it has to be functional perfect. The other campers are impressed, even jealous, but I’m sick to my stomach over the horror of what I’d done and the realization of what my mind is capable of conceiving. What I built as art without taking the time to consider down-stream consequence had become an instrument of death and that’s something I’ve never fully reconciled.

“Sure, Vincent and I hunt, but that’s different, we harvest from nature for food. That rabbit was a senseless death; he died for camp amusement and nothing else and the image of him stuck in my snare haunts me. That’s the lesson of the rabbit; that engineers, and anyone who builds, has an obligation and responsibility to know the consequences of what they’re doing. It’s not enough to just build with a purpose in mind, you must understand every conceivable distortion and bastardization of your work, every outcome and scenario, and ask yourself, is it wise to continue.”

Gwen’s not certain what Darwin’s rabbit story has to do with Jenny playing dominoes or Vincent flying airplanes, but his intensity is way beyond her comfort zone.

Darwin picks up his glass with purpose and takes a long pull of bourbon. “I would like to work in a daycare,” he says to himself as much as to Gwen. “Being a playground engineer where the worst I can do is build sandcastles that don’t hold up to rain. That would bring me joy. In the real world though, we don’t get build playground castles so instead, we build things we think are for good only what we create winds up being evil.”

As the ferocity of the trance Darwin has on Gwen ratchets up, she wants to look away but has become captive of his pain, an anguish she’s never experienced and never conceived he was capable of. No matter how much she wants to, how much she needs to, she can’t escape looking into the darkness of his torment as if drawn there by a wicked magic spell.

“There was a Priest at Saint Stans,” Darwin restarts. “Father Madryski, he was the school counselor I think, at least he’s the guy you go see when you get in trouble. He had a kindness he couldn’t hide even when trying to discipline, along with this expression he liked to use, one I probably heard over a hundred times in his office, ‘penance before reconciliation.’ If you were sent to see Father Madryski for something really serious, after he was done counseling, he’d say a pray for you, I never knew what the hell he saying because it was in Latin, but I knew how it ended because he’d make me recite it with him: ‘mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’ I looked it up once, it means ‘through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.’ At first, I didn’t fully understand or appreciate what that meant, but as my visits to his office persisted and the severity of my sins escalated, I acquired an understanding.”

Gwen mistakenly thought Darwin’s stare could not get more intense but now finds out she was wrong.

“That’s why I’m there,” Darwin says answering the question Gwen didn’t ask. “In New Mexico, for penance.”

“Huh?” Gwen offers finally able to escape Darwin’s spell long enough to respond. Well, maybe not escape so much as be paroled, she really doesn’t know if there’s a difference.

“You want to know why I moved to New Mexico to live off the grid in the wilderness. Everyone wants to know. It’s my penance.”

“For what?” Gwen sheepishly asks, unsure she’s ready or allowed to know the answer.

Darwin takes a moment to assess the impact of answering. He’s never said out loud, even to himself, why he needs penance and now he worries that uttering the words might make what happened at Berkeley more real, more consequential. He recalls his family legend about the gypsy woman back in Poland and what she shared with Erik’s mom; ‘thoughts,’ the old gypsy said, ‘are like little pieces of fate you hold in imprisoned, but speaking them, frees the fate you don’t want out to intervene in your life but if you don’t free fate, it only builds in strength so you must let it out.’”

Darwin stares at Gwen feeling the full weight of her unasked question compelled for the first time to answer. “The reason I need penance is for the things I’ve done contributing to the demise of humanity.” There, he said it out loud, he released the forces of fate he could no longer hold in the prison of his soul. It’s Father Madryski’s fault, he’d always end his counseling sessions talking about how God needs you to share your burdens with him out loud, that if you can’t admit them to yourself, God can’t hear your prayers for forgiveness or be able to help you heal.

“What you’re saying sounds horrible,” Gwen reacts. “So horrible I’m sure it’s an exaggeration.” She only says that to console Darwin because while she may not know what he’s talking about, she can see in his eyes that what he says is true. She suddenly doesn’t want to know anything else, knowing more will only cause her to like him less and she’s suddenly uncertain about that.

Darwin continues his confession anyway. “It’s why left California; I had to get out. It’s why I’m in New Mexico. In part for penance, in part to heal and find forgiveness, and in part, to fix the damage I’ve caused even though I don’t know how, but neither does the beaver when his dam breaks, all he knows is he has to be busy placing one stick at a time into the breach.”

Gwen’s experiencing Darwin on a never before known level. She always assumed because he’s a PhD, he’s a deep thinker, but she’s never seen him act anything other than light and silly around her, probably because the only time they interact is during celebrations. Now, here stands this man she’s always admired and felt fondly about, revealing snakes down to levels even Dante would be reluctant to explore and it’s terrorizing. And yet, she’s compelled to explore. “What about the reconciliation that follows penance?” she asks.

With his soul in full disclosure, Darwin’s not holding back and is about to launch into some aspects of reconciliation he’s working through when, in an act of divine intervention, the kitchen door flings open, and Vincent pops out holding a large platter that hosts a golden browned turkey with stuffing around the edges. He’s followed by Ilene carrying bowls of vegetables, potatoes, corn, and cranberries. After a couple more trips back and forth to the kitchen, the table is set. Once Ilene has Issac in his bassinet, Vincent leads the prayer finishing with a moment of remembrance for Byron and Helen. As Vincent readies his carving knife to make the initial slice into the golden-brown bird, he looks up at Darwin grinning, “I’m thinking after dinner you and I take a little airplane ride,” he teases. “Show you what I know, which hopefully includes remembering how to land,” he smiles with satisfaction that this is the final battle in the war he’s re-started. “You know what they say, a good landing is one you walk away from and a great landing is when you can reuse the aircraft.”

Darwin bounces back with equal sarcasm, “Absolutely we should that! In fact, I’ll run over to Lenny’s and grab his shovelhead so you and I can zip down the Kennedy lane-splitting past all the drunk drivers on our way to Midway. It’ll be a hoot.”

“Or” Vincent quickly counters enjoying the banter, “and I’m just spit balling here, we could walk over to Murphy’s and watch the Bears kick the shit out of the Lions.”

“You boys can,” Ilene referees in pleasant approval. “But I’ll be expecting you straight back when it over, I’m in the mood for some Pinochle.”

“Yes ma’am.” Both boys concur with childish joy as they dive into their feast.