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Article Excerpt
"Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to
know the future...."--Lucy Grealy
On a spring evening in 2003, I met three friends for dinner. The air felt crisp, and the sky glowed such a brilliant blue that it looked artificial, as if backlit for a movie or play. These friends and I call ourselves the Hudson Club. We pretend to be an elite society, but our only real membership requirement is that we all once lived in Hudson, Ohio. When I moved there in the fourth grade, Hudson, a small village in the northeastern part of the state, was nearly surrounded by farms. The farms have long since been replaced by sprawling developments containing huge box-like homes: what we, in Chicago, refer to as McMansions. All four members of the Hudson Club live in Chicago now. Paul, a tall, thin writer with large eyes as rich and brown as the buckeyes I used to collect on Oviatt Street, moved to Hudson, like me, in grade school. Before coming to Chicago about ten years ago, he lived in New York, where he attended film school and later worked for Martin Scorcese, who gave him a small role in Good Fellas. Grant, an attorney with the type of laugh that inspires me to tell funny stories, boarded at Western Reserve Academy, a preparatory school in Hudson. Grant's grandfather built one of the first buildings in Hudson, a cheese warehouse, now part of the academy named Hayden Hall. The final member, Tom, is a freelance illustrator and cartoonist whose drawings frequently appear in the New Yorker, also an accomplished swing dancer and pianist. The four of us meet every few months to share cocktails and dinner, memories of Hudson, gossip about former "Hudsonites" (as we were all called at one time), and to tell what we hope are clever stories. Our primary goal is to amuse each other, almost as if we are our own little Midwestern roundtable, sans the Algonquin.
On that evening, as we entered the restaurant, Tom handed me a manila folder containing a newspaper clipping.
"Have you seen this yet?" he asked. A few years younger than I, Tom is traditionally handsome, with razor-sharp cheekbones and blond hair. Usually a line of dark ink is visible under each of his fingernails, a result of working all day on his drawings. I didn't really know Tom in Hudson, though his sister was in my graduating class. (Once in elementary school, I went over to her house and we played with miniature yellow and pink plastic horses.) Given the playful nature of my relationship with Tom, I expected the article to make me laugh. Instead, I unfolded the newsprint to see a startlingly clear black and white photo of an old friend--relatively unchanged from when I had last seen him about twenty-five years earlier--staring up at me from a prison halfway across the world.
My knees buckled.
My friend, Sandy, disheveled and unshaven, was the solitary white journalist in a photo of four reporters, standing within iron bars, sharing a large bottle of water. Only he and one of the other men in the picture looked directly into the camera. Their faces presented sharp contrasts in color, yet seemed strangely similar. They both looked wise and haunted and steadfast. Clear-eyed. World-weary but not broken. The corners of both sets of lips turned slightly upward, as if they saw the irony of their situations. Journalists who had become the news. When I sat down at the restaurant table, I took out my reading glasses. The caption of the New York Times clipping read, "Last month the Zimbabwe government arrested reporters...." I couldn't read further; I was drawn back to Sandy's eyes. They reminded me of those eyes, in old portraits, that are painted to give the illusion of following you around the room. And they did follow me. Even when the article was folded in my purse, and later placed in the back of a drawer, Sandy's eyes continued to trail me. It was as if he were looking at me from across the decades, only I had been thrown back in time to my little office at the Hudson Times, where we had worked together nearly a quarter of a century earlier, and he was peering at me from the future.
The Hudson Times, a weekly newspaper, was headquartered in a small, gray-shingled, two-story house with a wide front porch. My office, also the reception area, was the former living room. The advertising manager occupied the dining room, directly across from me. As editor, Sandy had a more private office, what presumably had been a back bedroom, as well as the entire upstairs where he lived. The kitchen was, well, still the kitchen, both for Sandy's personal use and my bagged lunches and...
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