The Digger's Rest (5 page)

Mitch stood out like a sore thumb on that
first day. It was the early eighties and the youth of the city had
gone Disco with slick clothes and way too much mousse. But not
Mitch, with his long, untamed, chestnut-colored hair, strings of
hippy beads, tie-dyed tee shirt and ripped, faded jeans; it was
like he’d fallen out of the sixties. The reason for it Jack
wouldn’t come to understand until much later.

Looking back it seemed that he knew Mitch was
different from the first time he opened his mouth. He knew Jack’s
work almost as well as Jack did himself, asked pointed, intelligent
questions and not only never seemed bored, but seemed to go out of
his way to liven the class up for the others, succeeding most of
the time, almost like a translator between the generations.

He knew he’d hit pay dirt with young Bramson
when he read his final paper; insightful, critical and analytical,
professional well beyond his eighteen years. But by then Jack had
already been unofficially mentoring the boy, having coffee to
discuss the fine points of Sumerian and Assyrian art, Jack’s
favorites, and going to museum specials all over the city.

They went on like that, stimulating each
other intellectually, for the next two years. Mitch gave Jack’s
life new interest, someone he could talk to who actually cared
about the same things, and Jack fed Mitch’s unquenchable thirst for
knowledge. He even arranged for Mitch to spend the summer between
his junior and senior years studying medieval art and architecture,
Mitch’s favorite, in the South of France with a former field
colleague.

As he sat watching the drizzle outside his
office window turn to pounding rain, Jack remembered how eagerly
he’d waited for the first class of his upper level course on the
Egyptian Valley of the Kings that September, just so he could see
how Mitch had made out in France. Of course he’d had many postcards
from Mitch, but Jack wanted to see the excitement in Mitch’s eyes
and the growth in his knowledge. But he never came. Jack was sorely
disappointed and waited anxiously for him at the next class meeting
later that week.

When Mitch didn’t attend that one either,
Jack got worried and went to the admissions office to ask about
him. The woman who ran the office, Janice Simpson, took him aside.
She’d had a call from Mitch a few weeks before telling her that his
mother was seriously ill and he wouldn’t be coming to classes for a
while. He called her again two days later to tell her that his
mother had died and he would need some more time off and would make
up his classes later, when he could.

Jack was floored, struck by guilt. Not once
in those years of talking of art and history had they ever
discussed Mitch’s family except in the vaguest terms. Seeing the
depth of sadness in Jack’s expression, Janice Simpson took him into
her office and pulled a newspaper from the side of her desk,
showing him the turned-back open page. There was a small article
and a large photograph of a young woman with long dark hair,
dressed in hippy clothes, sitting on a park bench with a guitar.
The caption read: “Sixties Folk Icon, Melanie Woodward, dies at age
43 of Bone Cancer.”

Jack sat down in the chair next to him and
read the article retracing the career of Melanie Woodward. At the
end of the article it listed her surviving relatives as “…her
sister, Marjaree Walsh, Dayton, Ohio; and her son, Mitchell
Woodward Bramson, Columbia University student, New York City. The
funeral will be held at Campbell’s Funeral Home, downtown
Manhattan.” Jack put his hand over his mouth, stricken,
“Oh…my…God.”

“
Yes, I know,” Janice said, nodding and
wiping a single tear from her cheek, “Poor in New York at
Christmas. We’re about the same age, Jack. You remember that one
don’t you? From when we were young and thought we could change the
world?”

He nodded. He’d gone to see Melanie sing at
least a half dozen times himself, a lifetime ago down at the
Village Vanguard on Bleeker Street, when his own hair was long and
they were trying to stop the war and ban the bomb. And here he had
had her boy so close to him all this time.

He got up hurriedly and took out his wallet.
“Please do me a favor, Janice, call and send something special from
us,” he said and handed her a hundred dollar bill.

“
Yes, of course,” she said, and he was
out the door.

When he arrived at Campbell’s, the
rooms were full to brimming with flowers and famous faces.
Everywhere he looked he saw a face that he could put a voice to
that made it famous.
Leavin’ on a jet
plane, I don’t know when I’ll be back again…These times, they are a
changin’…The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were
ringin’…Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham? Can you tell
me where he's gone? …It's love's illusions I recall. I really don't
know love at all.”

The place was jammed with folkies. He was
surprised to see that there were more than a few rock voices there
too, and even a few R&B and soul voices. It was a virtual Who’s
Who of late ‘60s and early ‘70s faces and voices.

As he made his way to the front of the
room he could see the casket, closed.
God
what that disease must have done to that pretty face, those
beautiful green, feline eyes,
he thought, remembering
her face as vividly as if he were still sitting at a table in that
dark, smoky club, a boy himself, all those years ago. His eyes
searched the room looking for Mitch and saw the back of a head
bowed in the first row, long hair neatly pulled back in a
ponytail.

Walking down the center aisle toward him, he
could only imagine what it must have been like for the boy to watch
her suffer and die that way. Having gone through his own mother’s
death only five years earlier with morphine drips, tubes, machines
and ‘do not resuscitate’ orders, he was as ready for the experience
as any forty-year-old man would be, but Mitch was just a kid, and
not just any kid. He had enough pure intelligence to know exactly
what was going on but none of the emotional maturity to handle
it.

As he approached, he saw that a woman with
long silken blonde hair had one arm around Mitch and was holding
his hand with the other. As he walked over to them, the woman
looked up, startling him. He knew that face and knew then where
Mitch had gotten his name.

Jack stopped before them. The woman gently
patted the boy’s back and got up, inviting Jack to sit down. He
nodded to her his thanks, asking, “Is there somewhere we can be
alone for a few minutes.” She smiled, nodding, then took Mitch by
the arm, leading them to a small room off the main corridor and
shutting the door behind her, left them alone.

He took the boy by the arm and sat down on
the small sofa placed there for that purpose. A moment later, Mitch
looked up at him. His eyes were swollen, his pupils dilated,
telling Jack immediately that he’d been sedated, but the soul
behind them…he would never as long as he lived forget the look in
those eyes. The boy was completely lost, wandering alone,
directionless in a vast desert of loneliness.

“
You could have come to me, Mitch,” he
said quietly and before he realized it, the boy had thrown himself
into Jack’s arms, sobbing great, heartbreaking, heaving sobs of
grief on his shoulder. Jack caught him handily and held him
tightly. “It’s alright, son. You let it go and don’t worry. I’ve
gotcha,” he said, not knowing where the words came from. “I won’t
let you go.”

Jack’s eyes got as misty as the window he was
staring out of remembering that day, not only for what it had done
to Mitch, but what it had done for him and as he sat there staring
out of that window, the same feeling washed over him again. The one
that completed him as a man, because as he sat there in that tiny
room, holding that sad, sobbing boy, he realized it was the first
time he really felt like a father.

It didn’t matter that he had two daughters of
his own almost the same age. Annette had never really let him be a
father to them anyway. From the day they were born, she’d given
them everything and anything they ever wanted. In the almost
eighteen years of their lives, they never once needed him for
anything that mattered, and here was this brilliant, lost boy, his
whole world destroyed before he’d had the chance to become a man,
clinging to him for the strength and support…the love that only a
father could give, needing him desperately to be that for him, and
for the first time in his whole life Jack Edgeworth knew what he’d
been missing. He knew what it meant to be a father to a son who
needed him, and it was a feeling that would change both their lives
forever.

Later that evening Jack accompanied the boy
home with his Aunt Marj. He was amazed how much she looked like
Melanie, the same hair and eyes. They put the boy to bed, and sat
and had coffee; small talk at first, then after she’d guessed that
Jack really had more than just a passing interest in Mitch’s well
being, she began to tell him things, personal, intimate things
about Mitch’s life, and Melanie’s.

Marjaree’s face glowed as she told him how
very proud she was of her sister’s independence, and her spirit,
her courage in coming to New York City by herself to become a
singer. But then her expression changed from pride to sorrow when
she started to tell him about, what she politely called, “The
Bramson Matter.”

It seems that Melanie had developed quite a
loyal following among the young people who came to hear her sing,
not surprisingly the boys in particular. Jack, knowing inside that
he was one of them, kept it to himself.

She remembered getting her first letter from
Melanie telling her that she’d met “a special boy” named Julian
Bramson, a graduate student at Harvard. She told Jack that Melanie
had known him for over a year before she found out that he was not
just any boy, but the sole heir to an enormous steel fortune built
by his grandfather, and then enlarged three fold by his father,
making them one of the wealthiest and most influential families in
the Northeast. Jack didn’t need the description she gave to know
who she was talking about. He knew who Julian Bramson was, and was
stunned for the second time in one day to find out that Mitch was
not only Melanie Woodward’s son, but the son she had with Julian
Bramson, the third.

Marjaree went on to tell him that Melanie was
less than thrilled by the money, being more or less a hippy and a
social freedom fighter, but it seemed that she really loved the
boy, and they ran off and got married during that summer of love.
“That’s when the trouble began,” Marj told Jack over their third
cup of coffee. “They weren’t even married a month when Mellie had a
visit from Annabelle Bramson and two of her lawyers and they hadn’t
come for tea.”

“
They’d come to tell her to her face
that she was an ‘unsuitable’ match for Julian and tried to buy her
off, offering her one million dollars if she agreed to annul the
marriage. When that didn’t work, they threatened her. The old woman
said that she’d use all the resources at her disposal to ruin
Melanie’s budding career which at that point had just started to
flourish. When she didn’t bow to threats, they left and took
another tack.”

“
When Julian came from school to be
with her again the next weekend, he brought a suitcase, an empty
one, and took all of his things out of the apartment. He childishly
told her that he was sorry, but that his mother was the
administrator of the trust left to him by his father and
grandfather until he turned thirty, and that his mother would see
to it that neither of them would see a dime if he didn’t agree to
the annulment. Then he really broke her heart. When she told him
that she was pregnant, his parting words to her that day were, ‘…in
that case, it would probably be best if you took the
million’.”

“
And she did,” Marj told Jack. “But she
never touched a red cent of it. She put the whole thing in a trust
for her unborn child and then went and had what they called in
those days, a nervous breakdown. That bastard had broken her
spirit.” Marj said bitterly and started to cry. “I came out here to
be with her until she had the baby, but I could see in her eyes
that she’d never be the same again. Mitch was born in a psychiatric
clinic upstate six months later,” Marj said as she wiped the tears
streaming from her eyes.

“
Then when Mellie was strong enough to
be to be on her own again, she took the apartment in a poor
neighborhood behind First Avenue and East Sixth Street. I stayed
there with them for almost two years and took care of Mitch while
she went back to work. I tried to convince her to use some of the
money to get a better place, but she wouldn’t have any part of it.
She said that for her to use any of that money would be ‘giving in
to them, like she was being paid for like a prostitute’ and she
would never give them that satisfaction. She’d rather struggle in
poverty as an honorable woman than ever have Mitch grow up thinking
she’d sold him out and have him be ashamed of her. That was when
she wrote Through My Child’s Eyes, although it wouldn’t be recorded
for another year.

“
That winter we struggled, all of us,
so hard. I worked as a waitress over at the Second Avenue Deli
while Mellie watched Mitch, then at night she would sing in the
folk clubs and cafés and I would baby sit. That was when she wrote
Poor in New York at Christmas.”

“
She told me she was walking over by
the Bowery on the way home from a club date on Christmas Eve when
she saw a young woman in tattered old clothes and no coat standing
in the cold outside a shelter holding a little boy in her arms. She
told me it was like looking into a mirror and her heart broke for
that woman, and herself. She took off her own coat and hat and gave
it to the woman, along with all the money she’d made that night,
about a hundred dollars, and told her to go feed her boy and find a
decent place to stay for the night.