The Abode of Infinite Compassion by Barry Rachin (historical books to read .TXT) 📕

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.

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Publication Date: 10-04-2010

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