The Abode of Infinite Compassion

At 10 a.m. the Brown Book Store on Providence’s East Side was deserted except for a young girl, willowy and ascetic-looking, thumbing through a thick volume in the philosophy section. The girl's auburn hair was soaking wet and fell down her forehead in stringy clumps. The way she read - noiselessly with only her lips moving and head cocked to one side for dramatic effect - made Marty Humphrey want to throw up on the polyurethane, solid oak floor.

“Strong stuff!” Marty said.

The girl, whose porcelain-pale complexion was offset by a healthy splattering of light freckles on the cheeks and chin, turned the book over in her hands. “Wouldn't know. I only came in here to get out of the rain.” She replaced the book on the shelf and shuffled off.

“God, am I pathetic!” Marty thought. He browsed through the offerings for a good ten minutes before settling on a collection of essays by Hesse.

A week earlier, he came home on spring break from his junior year at Boston University and announced that he was not going back. When his father asked why, Marty sobbed, “Nothing makes any sense; I don't know what I want to do with my screwed-up life.” The emotional outburst had a calming effect, temporarily obscuring the more obvious issue: his 'problem', if he even had the right to describe it as such, was far too ephemeral to elicit any genuine sympathy.

“Why is it strong stuff?” It was the freckle-faced girl with the stringy hair. She smiled and stared at him through clear, brown eyes that were inordinately large for her tiny frame.

“Celine was an bitter man,” Marty stammered, “A nihilist and a malcontent.”

She took the book, Journey to the End of the Night, from the shelf a second time and glanced with renewed interest at the cover. “And you read this morbid stuff?”

The question caught Marty off guard. “Well, yes,” he hedged, “but I don't necessarily agree with everything the author wrote.”

“But you agree with most of it.”

“No, of course not!”

The girl, who couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty, smiled again, even more sweetly. Her delicate features had a fragile, breakable quality. “Where I come from, people don't spend much time in bookstores. If they read anything, it's usually the police blotter or racing form to see which horse won at Suffolk Downs.”

She brushed a strand of wet hair out of her eyes then dried the hand by rubbing it on the sleeve of her jacket. “Do you know Kupperman's Bakery over on North Main Street? I work behind the counter selling breads and pastries, though lately I’ve been in the rear most days running the Batter Blaster.”

“Batter what?”

Blaster. Batter Blaster. Spits out 200 pounds of sticky dough for bread loafs, braided challas, brioches, croissants, éclairs, rolls and buns. Of course you got to change the computerized settings to match size and texture. Wouldn’t want a puff pastry that looked like a five-pound brick.”

The conversation getting weirder by the minute, Marty was having difficulty following her fractured stream of consciousness. “Would you like to go for coffee?” The girl nodded her soggy head up and down. “Better put your hat on,” he added as they reached the door. “It's still raining.”

“Would if I had one.”

Diagonally across the street, was a House of Pancake. The main dining room of the restaurant was decorated in a folk art motif with a collection of pictures made of thinly-cut strips of basswood band-sawed and puzzled together to create country scenes. Marty ordered a coffee and cheese Danish. The girl settled on a glass of milk and the breakfast special. “I’m Rose O'Donnell.” Slathering her toast with jam from a small crock, she hunched over her food with focused intensity. “My family’s originally from South Boston - the D Street projects, where the pit bulls are more dangerous than the muggers.” She momentarily put down her fork and rolled up the sleeve on her left arm to reveal a ragged scar that careened crazily up the wrist halfway to the elbow.

“You don't live there anymore?”

Rose's fine hair was beginning to dry and lay more evenly around her face. “Dropped out of high school three years ago; headed south to Providence and never looked back.”

The winter before Marty went off to college, his father, who had business contacts in Southie, took him for a ride on the Southeast Expressway. It was early February. They exited near Andrew Square and cruised down Broadway past a row of utterly decrepit, low-rise buildings resembling something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The only details missing were the demonic creatures with pointy tails and pitchforks. No trees or shrubs; no children playing out of doors; no adults in the windows or walkways. The only sign of human life was an occasional potted plant or bit of furniture visible behind a dowdy, half-drawn curtain in the fortress-like public housing.

Near an intersection they pulled up at a red light where a man with a plaid cap and no shoes or socks leaned against a telephone pole. Oblivious to the weather, the shoeless man was whistling energetically. An inch of snow was on the ground with the temperature hovering just barely above freezing. Marty's father cleared his throat as though the strange sight merited some formal explanation but said nothing. The light changed and they continued on their way.

The door opened and a boisterous group of college students entered the foyer. The waitress showed the students to an adjacent table. Rose nibbled daintily at a slice of toast while Marty poured himself a second cup of coffee, adding a splash of cream. The sticky-sweet smell of syrups - maple and blueberry - permeated every porous object. “I just dropped out of college.” He told Rose what happened.

“If I’d a problem like yours,” she observed, “I certainly wouldn't be burying my nose in those creepy philosophy books.”

Marty wanted to say something by way of a rebuttal but could think of nothing. Finally, he said, “I felt like I was suffocating at college.”

“And it’s any better here?”

“No, not really.”

Rose finished her breakfast and pushed the empty plate away. She had devoured every crumb and curled up on the booth with her legs tucked under her like a contented animal. “My father wants me to see a psychiatrist, a Dr. Adelman. He helped my Uncle Phil when he had a little problem with his nerves.”

“What sort of problem?”

“Nervous breakdown. He didn't work or hardly talk to anyone for six months.”

“What good is seeing a psychiatrist going to do?”

“You have a better idea?” Marty didn't mean to sound abrupt, but Rose's habit of leading every casual remark down an intellectual cul-de-sac was rattling his nerves. She looked up curiously through drooping, half-closed lids. Marty had the distinct impression that, if no one else were present in the East Side House of Pancake, Rose O’Donnell would have slid down on the warm, wooden bench and, with neither apology nor explanation, gone immediately off to sleep.

“No, I don't have any better ideas. If I did, you wouldn't have found me loitering in the Brown Book Store, pretending to read books I have no use for.”

At the table next to them the college students were laughing raucously. One girl about Rose’s age was plump but pretty - pretty in the way that girls with fair skin and virginal, non-descript features cling to such tenuous assets. A year from now, she might be heavier: despite an earthy smile, it was doubtful she would be nearly as attractive. The girl wore an olive-colored sweater made of a bulky, rough-spun yarn so heavy there was no need for a coat.

“That sweater,” Rose indicated the plump girl, “I’ve seen them in the upscale boutiques on Marlboro Street in Boston. They’re imported from Ireland and cost the better part of a week's wage.” She spoke without rancor. A simple, unambiguous statement of fact. In the street the rain was finally subsiding.

“These students,” she continued in a neutral tone that concealed neither bitterness nor envy, “we're all about the same age, but sometimes I feel a hundred years older, as though we're not even from the same planet." She gulped the last of her milk and dabbed her mouth with the corner of a napkin. “There's a spiritual community in Maine I'd like to visit,” Rose said wistfully. “The Abode of Infinite Compassion.”

“That's a mouthful.” He thought the name sounded a bit grandiose, as though concocted by an advertising executive with a mystical aberration. “You've never been there?”

“No, not yet.”

“Spiritual communes don’t interest me.”

“No, I wouldn't think so.” The waitress returned with the bill; Marty paid it and left a small tip. “Thanks for breakfast, Marty.”

“Good luck, Rose.”

When Marty got home, he found his parents waiting in the living room. “We spoke to Dr. Adelman just a few minutes ago,” his father said.

“Such a sweet man,” Mrs. Humphrey noted. “He was booked solid for the month but rescheduled a client to make room for you.”

“That's nice.” Marty went up to his room and closed the door.

Dr. Harry Adelman, psychiatrist and lecturer, was a recognized expert in a hybrid form of counseling called Constellation Therapy. Dr. Adelman did not just meet with the afflicted party but - as in Uncle Phil’s case - with a cross section of everyone who ever knew him. Fifteen people - friends, family, coworkers, ex-wives - had been pulled together from as far away as Upstate New York and Fall River, Massachusetts to discuss Uncle Phil's problem. It was a regular Cecil B. DeMille's production! Ironically, Uncle Phil actually did get better and emerged from his dark night of the soul. However, as Marty recalled, he remained morbidly depressed and non-functional for many, long months after the last group session with Dr. Adelman. One day in mid-August, Uncle Phil simply snapped out of it; for no apparent reason, he experienced a spontaneous remission and started acting normal again.

The rest of the week passed like the weather, in a tedious, uneventful fog. The cars were streaked with mud and grime from the last snow storm and - for anyone foolish enough to imagine that winter was finally over - the air had acquired a raw edge that cut through a spring jacket like a knife through whipped butter. Shortly after breakfast on Saturday morning, Marty's mother came upstairs. “A Miss O'Donnell is on the line.”

“Don't know anybody by that name.”

“She says she met you at the Brown Book Store.”

Marty went to the phone. “How’d you get my number?”

“By calling all the Humphreys in the phone book.” Her voice had a bright, musical resonance - like the breathiness of a bass flute - which he hadn’t noticed during their first meeting. “A bunch of friends are driving to the commune on Tuesday, and I thought you might like to come along.”

“I have an appointment with a psychiatrist on Wednesday.” Marty told her about Dr. Adelman and Constellation Therapy.

“Sounds like a barrel of laughs. You don't suppose he'd want me to attend one of the sessions?”
“That's not funny.”

“No, it isn't. I'm sorry. Look, if you're interested, we'll be leaving from my apartment around 10:00 a.m.” She gave him the address.

“Were there a lot of Humphreys?”

“What? Oh, yes. About twenty-four. Yours was two-thirds of the way down the list. No big deal.” Her voice trailed away into a reflective silence. “If you decide to come, bring a sleeping bag and warm clothes.” She hung up.

Later in the afternoon, Marty counted all the Humphreys in the Greater Providence phone book. Twenty-four people with the same name as his were listed. Exactly twenty-four. And Rose called sixteen of them just to track him down!

Tuesday morning, shortly after his parents left for work, Marty dashed off a slavishly apologetic note and loaded a sleeping bag into the trunk of his Volvo. Less than two miles from Rose's apartment on Camp Street, he pulled into the parking lot of the Stop and Shop and shut the ignition off.

What if the ditsy girl’s call was a self-serving ploy?

Her modus operandi: make the college dropout pay for everything - food, lodging, gas, tolls - on the 400-mile drive to the outskirts of Bangor. No Dutch treat on this metaphysical trip to hell! He could see the ruse playing itself out in his mind’s eye. Marty - gullible idiot and unwitting chauffeur - would pull up at the curb. “My friends had a change of plans,” she’d chirp before jumping into the passenger's seat. Then he'd be stuck with the cunning, little sociopath for the next four days. At that moment, he hated Rose O'Donnell more than anyone on the planet - in the galaxy!

Marty’s breath was coming in shallow, jagged bursts that made his chest hurt; a heaviness, a weird torpor was settling in the part of his brain that controlled rational thought. “Get a grip!” he shouted out loud. An elderly woman lurched away from the car, almost falling on the wet pavement, and scurried into the market. Marty started the engine and drove to the apartment. When he pulled up in front of the three-story, wooden tenement on Camp Street, Rose was sitting alone, just as he had suspected.

“We need to talk,” Marty said tersely, but the front door flew open and two girls and a young man joined them.

“These are my friends.” Rose introduced everyone; the two girls got into the car directly in front of Marty's. “Eddy says not to worry if we get separated. We'll touch bases at the commune.” The car in front pulled out, but Marty sat immobile in the front seat next to Rose. “Something wrong?”

Marty told her what had happened in the parking lot of the Stop and Shop. “So neurotic!” Rose seethed. “You deserve a Dr. Adelman!”

Marty was struck by a tidal wave of self-loathing. It was bad enough not accepting Rose's invitation at face value. By baring his soul he insured that - like everything else in his colorless, one-dimensional existence - the trip to Maine would be a bust. He was a hypocrite, a lowly slug, a worm-boy (he discovered the demeaning term in an article on women's issues in Boston Magazine). He was a sniveling coward who hid behind the soft cover of paperbacks. And what right did he have to lecture Rose about disaffected, French philosophers? He was no better than any of the revolting characters in Celine's twisted prose. “I apologize for living,” Marty mumbled. He put the car into gear and edged out into traffic heading in the direction of Route 95 north. Rose sat stiffly on the seat next to him, staring straight ahead with her thin, bloodless lips clamped tightly together.

The year Marty graduated from high school, he pooled a portion of money saved from part time jobs and graduation presents for a two-week, backpacking tour of Europe. He bought a Eurail Pass and Fodor’s Europe on $10 a Day, the plan being to sleep at inexpensive pensions and youth hostels along the route. England, France, Luxembourg, Southern German, Italy and the French Riviera - the entire itinerary had been worked out in his head. In theory. But when the plane touched down at Heathrow Airport, eighteen year-old Marty Humphrey blinked, panicked. An ice pick of terror punctured his belly and sent him scurrying aboard the next, available flight back to the States. From Logan Airport, he took a taxi to his parent’s home. It was one a.m. The not-so-prodigal son had been gone less than forty-eight hours! His mother threw her arms around him and cried hysterically; his father growled, “Jerk!” and slunk back to bed.

Marty Humphrey - world traveler and fearless adventurer! The idiotic bon vivant, whose European vacation lasted only slightly longer than it takes a pair of fertile rabbits to copulate. The summer passed in a swelter of self-loathing and malicious, ‘backpacking’ jokes. If Marty had lost his nerve and a few hundred dollars, it didn’t mean he was a rotten person. It wasn’t half as bad as sodomy or incest. It just felt that way through the rest of the steamy summer until he escaped to the safe haven of college anonymity.

His parents forgave his foolishness because they loved him. His friends never let up. In the end, what he needed was the humility to forgive himself his romantic and dim-witted naiveté. It took Marty a year to put the European vacation behind him. But now, once again with so many details of his life at loose ends, was this latest fiasco just one more bathetic installment in the Marty Humphrey Vaudeville Show?

They had been traveling for an hour and a half. Just outside of Newburyport, Marty pulled the car into a rest area. “I'm a paranoid asshole. Guilty as charged! Maybe it's hereditary,… a congenital defect. I don't know.” Marty put his foot on the gas and moved back onto the highway. “I can't make you talk to me if you don't want to.”

Ten minutes later, as they were moving over a cantilevered bridge, Rose reached into her pocket and withdrew some change. “For the toll,” she said pressing the money into the palm of his free hand. They crossed into Maine and continued on in the direction of Portland.

“Foliage’s changing.”

“More birches and firs,” Marty noted. The sun was out and, because the air was dry, it didn't seem nearly as cold. Rose opened the window a crack and fiddled with the radio. Along with the foliage, the music had shifted to a mish mash of country western and 1940’s big band selections. When they hit Freeport, Marty left the turnpike and pulled into a diner. They ate quickly, without talking and were back on the road in half an hour.

They passed through a series of toll booths but, otherwise, traffic was scanty and the Volvo cruised comfortably at sixty. “After Maine, what’ll you do?” Rose asked. Marty said that he was hoping she could use her influence to get him a management position at Kupperman's Bakery. “Unfortunately, my word doesn't carry much weight with Herb Kupperman or anyone else in the Jewish community.”

With every revolution of the odometer, the country grew wilder, less populated. Occasionally an isolated farmhouse would loom into view as they rounded a bend in the road. The farms invariably gave way to a smooth stretch of untainted country. Five miles on, they came across a barn with a tractor and rusty harrow lying idle in a field. Then more empty space. And there were signs: Beware of Falling Rocks; Deer Crossing; Soft Shoulder (What does someone do, Marty thought, to prepare for a soft shoulder?); Next Gas Station 22 Miles.

The muck and the misery of the D Street Projects did not extend this far north, but perhaps the locals suffered from a different brand of personal blight brought on by the frigid winters, loneliness and physical isolation. Fifty feet ahead, a brown hawk nested on a scruffy pine. The bird watched the car approach impassively before spreading its massive wings and flying off in the opposite direction, beating the air with thick, visceral strokes.

Rose sat facing him, her back resting comfortably up against the side door and hands clasped around her legs. Offsetting her delicate features, her eyes held a dreamy glow, a glossy brightness that lit up her face, Marty reached out and traced the curve of her cheek down around the lips, across the chin and lifted his hand away before the finger caromed onto the pearly neck. “What do you want from this trip?”

Staring out the passenger window at the endless procession of fat, alabaster birches, Rose gave no indication she heard the question. On a sharp descent, they passed a series of runaway trailer ramps, bottomed out and headed up another steep incline. She teased a scrap of paper from her wallet and handed it to him.

The leaves on the trees become
like the pages of the Holy Book
when the eyes of the heart are open.”
Persian poet, Saádi

Ten minutes later as they passed over a ridge with slabs or marbleized granite rising fifty feet on either side, the girl shifted in her seat. “I want my heart turned inside out, if that's not too much to ask.”

Marty had a mental image of the ragged scar curling crazily up the fleshy underside of her arm. “Not unreasonable,” he replied. “Definitely not too much to ask.”

Entering Bangor, they left the interstate and followed the Penobscot River in a northerly direction. The fading sunlight sifted through the treetops, but Marty felt no sense of urgency. They would reach their ultimate destination long before darkness fell.