There was an old Victorian house in Fredonia. 7 Central Avenue. Eleven girls lived there.
Ben moved in, too, when he started at SUNY Fredonia in 1974.
He was an avid herpetologist, and he collected snakes from everywhere, keeping them in cages or in old pillowcases strewn around the house.
One night, a tiny black snake escaped from its temporary home in the living room. Ben tried to reassure his housemates that the snake was perfectly harmless: “Honestly, I could slather mouse juice all over my naked body, and that snake would not bite me.”
Mouse juice? thought the girl who told the story.
What the fuck is that?She was not reassured and vacated the house for a week. But the snake had seemingly disappeared, so she moved back in.
Many years later, when she was living in San Francisco, a friend who’d remained in Fredonia sent her a newspaper clipping: The old woman who lived next door to the house on Central Avenue had just discovered a seven-foot-long Florida Black Snake roaming around her front yard, and no one could figure out what the hell it was doing in western central New York.
I think that was my favorite of all the
in memoriam Ben stories.
Weaving together, as it does, the three central motifs of Ben’s life: Snakes, women, and the butterfly effect.
The memorial was not quite as awful as I feared. It was held at Cinemapolis, which Brett closed for the day. (Quite the honor, that.) TSWSOITC and I went in on the food. RTT did the photo slide show and the music playlist. Sixty or so people showed up.
Sarolta came with an entourage. I felt so, so badly for her. That mind meld trick of Ben’s: He was still there inside her brain. A snake in a cage.
Meanwhile, she is ricocheting between intensest grief and most furious rage. The whiplash has thrown her completely off balance.
I could hardly avoid talking to her.
“I honestly hoped he’d changed,” I told her. “I was rooting for the two of you. Though even so… There were times when I’d look at you, and I’d think,
Should I say something? But you wouldn’t have listened to me if I had. You would have written me off as a jealous X—“
“I
would have listened to you,” said Sarolta.
“No, Sarolta. You
wouldn’t have. You didn’t like me very much.”
“Well, that’s because he said the most horrible things about you—“
Of course, he did, I thought.
Sarolta broke down completely during the programmed part of the event, when people took to the stage and delivered prepared eulogies.
I went up to her afterwards, embraced her helplessly. “Everything that was
good in Ben loved you, Sarolta,” I said.
(A platitude? Sure. But aren’t memorial services made for platitudes? I only wished I’d found a conversational opening for
Today is the first day of the rest of your life!)
She looked at me then with such a stricken expression of grief and terror. “I feel so
alone!” she cried. “We were so close, so close. It was like he was here inside my mind, another voice. And now, there’s
nothing. Just an
emptiness. I miss him
so much.”
Oh, boy, do I know what that feels like, I thought and patted her arm clumsily.
I also had a long conversation with Billy, who was another person Ben had hooked with his patented mind meld gambit. Fairly early on in life when they were both still in middle school.
“Ben made me the person I am today,” Billy told me, and I thought,
Well, you’re a nice person, Billy, and I like you, so no offense. But let’s face it: That’s not much of an endorsement.Billy never left Schuyler County.
Billy seemed to think I knew more about Ben’s first marriage to Sharee Carton than I actually did.
I knew absolutely nothing about Sharee except that she shared Ben’s enthusiasm for tattoos and heroin, and was something of a sci fi groupie, having fucked Harlan Ellison, George R.R. Martin, and—coup of coups in those pre-HBO
Game of Thrones days—William Gibson. (We
are talking the late 80s and early 90s after all.
Neuromancer was all the rage!) Oh. And that she was
Australian.
“All I know about Sharee was that Ben was
terrified of her when he and I first got together,” I said.
“Terrified of
Sharee?” said Billy, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“Yes. Because he loved her so much that he would do
anything for her. He simply could not stand up to her. And so, he took the rap for her when they got busted, and ended up going to jail—“
“He took the rap for her?” Billy said. “Oh, no. That isn’t true. He got busted because he was the one they found shooting up in the car—“
I laughed. “Why does that not surprise me?”
“Sharee was a little wild, but she was a pretty nice person really—“
“What a fuckin’
liar he was,” I said.
Billy nodded warily. “I got burned many, many times in the beginning. But then I made the decision not to open myself up that way to him—“
“Well, when you were
living with him, attempting to have a
life with him, you could not make that decision,” I said. “He lied and lied and
lied, and every single time, I went for it. One would think I was quite stupid! Only I’m
not stupid.”
“I know,” Billy said.
“And then I’d confront him about his lying.
Why do you keep doing this? I’d ask. And he’d get that look—“
“Oh, yes. I know that look,” Billy said softly.
That look. It was when you busted Ben in a lie that his changeling ancestry was most apparent. Something happened to his eyes. They filled with an otherworldly luminosity and liquidity. That would have had to have been
tears, right? I mean, ‘cause that’s the way human physiology works. But then the very contours of his
face would change; he would become unspeakably
ugly.
Demonic, one might even say.
I’d never talked to anyone before who knew about
that look.
So,
that was interesting.
Else?
The RTT entourage turned out in full force, too.
I’d been very, very worried about RTT. That’s the reason why I volunteered to shoulder so much of the work and so many of the costs associated with a memorial service for someone I divorced 10 years ago.
Honestly, though?
RTT seemed
fine. He’s gone back to work. He and his crew even went to a concert the night before I arrived in Ithaca.
I mean, now that all the busy work involved with planning the memorial is behind him, maybe he will crash and burn.
It’s the logical expectation, in fact.
But I don’t know.
Robin was so fully
there when his father lay dying, he has nothing to reproach himself with. And I suspect
that’s a large part of why so many people come undone in the face of death. They feel
guilty. They think,
If only I’d done more...RTT could not possibly have done more. He’d been completely devoted.
He
did break up with the fabulous Rachel, though, which kind of broke my heart. ‘Cause I just
love Rachel. She is brilliant, beautiful, resourceful and
completely devoted to RTT, a fact that never failed to amaze me.
Oh, darlin’! I want to tell her.
I’m his mother, and I love him, and I know he looks like a movie star, but you could do so much better!Rachel was clinging to me because she couldn’t cling to him, so I gave her several pep talks. “It’s not you,” I said. “It’s the
timing.”
Which is both true and not true: It
is the timing, but it’s also the fact that while RTT is firmly heterosexual, his closest emotional relationships have always been with other males, a fact that makes me nervous since it points to a distrustful relationship with—ahem!—his mother. Who happens to be
me!
RTT’s deepest romantic attachments have always been with rich young women like Cait and Marissa who come from accomplished and protective families. Privilege wafts off them like perfume. This gives RTT the illusion that he’s won some kind of
prize when he secures their affection. Get thee behind me, Gatsby!
Rachel is entirely self-made. Plucky.
Resilient. She is working her way through school!
RTT is too boorish to see how rare and wonderful this is.
“You deserve
so much better,” I told Rachel. She was actually weeping, and I was combing her hair.
I’ve always found it the irony of ironies that a complete social misfit like myself gave birth to two sons who are “popular” in the full high school sense of the word.
###
TSWSOITC gave the most interesting eulogy.
Genealogy is his hobby.
And so, he spoke of the history of the T______ family in the Southern Tier. How in the early 18th century, the first T______ emigrated to Tompkins County from Connecticut. Of course, it was Albany County back then.
The T_______s loaned their first and last names to many places their the district: Trumbulls Corners, a hamlet in the northwestern part of Newfield Township, was actually named for Ben's great great grandparents.
Every other generation or so, a T______ named one of his sons “Benjamin.”
Each of these Benjamins lived a vivid and unusual life.
A Benjamin T______, for example, was a private in the Union Army who saw action in the trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War. He lost his testicles to frostbite; spent the remainder of his life lurching about in a laudanum haze back on the farm
Remarkable how often throughout multiple generations those Benjamins and their drug problems popped up!
What if the changeling creature is in thrall to the cadence of the name itself, Benjamin T______? The name when it's attached to a particular cluster of DNA acts like a genie's bottle. Every other generation or so, when a child of that bloodline and name is born, the changeling is forced to manifest!
You could write a pretty riveting fantasy novel using that premise.
I figured the Tburg flat would be filled with out-of-town members of the RTT posse. Their dirty socks, their empty pizza boxes, their grungy spliff butts. Their awful Netflix choices.
So I opted to stay in an airbnb.
The airbnb I usually stay in in Tburg was all booked up, so I ended up staying at an airbnb in Etna.
Etna is just up the road from Freeville.
It’s odd: My marriage to Ben lasted 17 years. And yet the only memories I can readily access don’t come from the marriage at all but from that horrible, horrible 24-month period following our divorce, when I was destitute and living in Freeville.
Nine years ago, I spent hours and hours and
hours sitting on the banks of Virgil Creek with Milo, watching the beavers at work and at play. I became
obsessed with beavers!
No sign of beavers now. And the Japanese knotweed is taking over. It’s an invasive species.
This is the old railroad track where I used to walk Milo:
The people who owned this barn kept ponies:
The ground would be covered in three feet of snow, and
still the ponies would be out in that field with no type of blanket or covering.
It’s a hardscrabble life in the Southern tier.
Here is that awful house owned by madman Lee. Every tree on his property was hung with thousands of broken CDs! A very eerie effect, particularly when the sun was out. The broken CDs glinted and made a weird whispery noise when the wind blew through them.
What a creepy place Freeville was.
So long, Ben.
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