Elephants Can Remember

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote "there are no second acts in American lives."

When I was rereading Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember, some unexceptional sentence crystallized the pattern in her mysteries that for people who labored for the British Empire, there were three, clear and distinct acts: one’s youth in England, one’s time in India and one’s retirement back to England. If one had children abroad, they were sent home to relatives to ensure the first act.

The pattern fits the basic quest motif of a young man setting out to prove himself, then returning home. Home, in Christie’s mysteries, was rarely the actual birthplace, because, with World War II, there were no unchanged homes. Even her St. Mary Mead had been developed. Still there were places in England where returned colonials could cluster.

Her books also include the unfinished stories of people who leave for South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada that is the theme people attribute to Fitzgerald’s comments in his notes for this unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Once people achieve or fail at whatever it is they first intend, there is nothing left to do, no place to return.

Michigan is like the England of primogeniture where there was so little opportunity, younger sons had to leave to live, then to the military or church. Most people in my high school graduating class have moved elsewhere as the economy shifted south and west. Some have returned to care for their parents, or have moved to be near their children to be looked after. But for most, the temporary move has become a permanent alienation from their childhoods.

Perhaps it’s why we cling to the idea of our class reunions. Nearly half the people I graduated with keep in touch with the local reunion committee, although far fewer actually make the trip cross country to the events. We maintain a collective fiction that we were once a community, and that some part of us still cares about those people we really don’t want to spend any time with again.

If I say these are people with whom I spent 13 years of my life, it makes the relation sound stronger than many marriages. If I try to think of one person I actually saw most days of those years, I cannot. People came and went, we moved from five elementary schools and several country ones to a single junior high, peer groups changed.

And yet, in a community where people were able to spend their entire public school life, there were ties. For many, churches like the Methodists, Catholics and Baptists brought children together from the scattered neighborhoods. For boys, there was organized softball in summer, for girls Camp Fire Girls or dance lessons in winter. There was the swimming hole, the skating pond and area lakes where children with similar interests became aware of one another.

I grew up when television sets were just being purchased and our youngest years weren’t spent in isolated living rooms with siblings watching whatever was on. In those years, the two available stations were both the same network, and there was often little worth seeing anyway.

We also came of age before conglomerates began buying, then downsizing local industries and people had to move with their parents when they were in high school. Only children of the college faculty and oil field workers led the migratory existence that characterizes so many today.

In the first years after graduation there were those who attended or sent back notices of Fitzgeraldian bravado that hoped to prove they had finally gotten the best of those who snubbed them then. That wish for vengeance or triumph has inspired many class reunion novels, including Jane Haddam’s Somebody Else’s Music and Jo Dereske’s Miss Zukas and the Island Murders.

But with time, none of my classmates has achieved great success and few have even had the stable marriages they had expected. We have had to settle for whatever it is we have become. If we’ve been able to overcome the demons that drove us in adolescence and can care about who we once were, no matter how ruefully, then indeed we do care about these people who were part of that world.

Our class has become a collective illusion, a virtual community we inhabit as we age that gives us a sense of that third act when social and economic realities have made the actual return impossible.