The remains of one man's day - men's reticence - Column

More than a year has rattled past since I saw Remains of the Day, but the character played by Anthony Hopkins has become a face whose shaded eyes and strangled lips I recognize everywhere I go. I have seen him on Metro North trains, in coffee shops, leaning out of car windows. He once served me in a dream.

The slow-moving, understated film concerns an English butler whose devotion to a life of service keeps him alone, unloved, and unfulfilled. At the end of his day, all that remains is hollow intention.

I cannot escape the remains of that movie. It was about my father who devoted the soul of a lifetime to his business. It was about my good friend, a contractor, who carried on at work through the terrible darkness of his father's death; my nephew Jake who wrote a painful story about a boy's inability to tell a girl he loved her; my dear sons who daily grow less able to cry out at the awful pain of life, or to double over with laughter at the absurdity of it all.

It is about the silence of men.

And so, of course, it is about me, though to look at my raucous, unprivate life with seven children, a sensuous wife, and a healthy disrespect for rules, you'd think that I saw a different film from everyone else. I didn't.

The following anecdote is embarrassing to tell because it points out how petty I am, how imprisoned I am by my silence. Some time ago a publisher of some renown bought a weekend retreat in our dead-end lane. It got the locals talking because everyone figured that property values would increase. But I was also privately thrilled because I'm a writer. The serendipity of his arrival seemed like going from fly fishing a raging creek to dropping a line in a stocked pond.

Logic--and my good wife--urged me to be neighborly, to stroll over and introduce myself. Once on his doorstep, she imagined, we would find a companionship of spirit. He would pass my work on to his editors with instructions. Fame and fortune would be a commission away.

Yet the winter and spring passed and I did not walk the half mile to his house through the woods. Whenever I replayed the neighborly visit scene in my head, it felt fawning.

So I did nothing. And months later when I finally did meet the man--I backed my Jeep into his rental car!--I did not use the coincidence to my advantage. We laughed about finally meeting "by accident." Then he accepted my apologies and we went our separate ways.

In retrospect, I guess it would have been okay to let it slip that I am a writer, just as I suppose it would have been all right if someone spoke for the butler in the movie and told the maid that he loved her. I suppose. But not really.

After the movie, my wife said she was frustrated and angry with the butler's unwillingness to take that one step, to utter that one sound that would have gotten the Emma Thompson character to complete his life. Finally. But my friend, Steve, the building contractor, whispered that he wished the film had gone on for hours.

Me too. A light had been turned in my own corridor of silence, and in the shadows I saw the faces of the men I know. I wanted to linger there in that quiet hall for a while longer.

Every day since memory took root--back in the thickening darkness of my own private adolescence--I have had a sense of having to coerce myself through some flimsy curtain that separates me from all that I yearn for--companionship, love, approval, joy. Even now, at forty-nine, when I come home from work to a family that I love with all my heart, I must urge myself--bully myself on the darker days--to part the gauzy folds of this lonely retreat before I walk through the door.

So I do it, compel myself to do it. Still, at the risk of seeming overly dramatic (and thus less a man), it is always done with a sense of peril to my identity, my notions of duty and dignity, my stubborn, protected privacy. It is as if I am stepping onto a stage of my fondest dreams where the lights are suddenly too bright, the floor too slippery, the laughter too loud, the life too livid.

But I do it, although it would feel safer to disappear behind the newspaper. Or hide in the bathroom. Or find some dutied solace in work. The remains of a man's day.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Commonweal Foundation
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