Searching for Amylu Danzer E-Book

John Rosenthal

• Herausgeber: Waywiser Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 227

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

On the afternoon of February 24th, 1965, Amylu Danzer, a twenty-year-old art student who'd been visiting Jones Beach on Long Island, went missing. A month later, her body was swept ashore some sixteen miles away, at Far Rockaway. In this tender, courageous, and compellingly written memoir, the writer and photographer John Rosenthal looks back on his youthful friendship with Amylu, and, drawing on multiple sources—amongst them his own journals, the testimony of her family and some of the people with whom she studied, newspaper reports of her death, and the eyewitness account of one of the men who found her body—he seeks to answer some of the questions which have haunted him ever since he first learned of her death—questions which were either too easily dismissed or else were too easily answered at the time. Searching for Amylu Danzer is a powerful and unillusioned book, and in writing it Rosenthal has ensured that however short her life was, Amylu Danzer will not be counted as one of those which have no memorial … and are become as though they have never been born.

Leseprobe

Searching for

Amylu Danzer

First published in 2021 by

THE WAYWISER PRESS

Christmas Cottage, Church Enstone, Oxfordshire, OX7 4NN, UK

P. O. Box 6205, Baltimore, MD 21206, USA

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Philip Hoy

SENIOR AMERICAN EDITOR

Joseph Harrison

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Eric McHenry | Dora Malech | V. Penelope Pelizzon | Clive Watkins

Greg Williamson | Matthew Yorke

Copyright in the introduction © Pam Durban, 2021

Copyright in the text © John Rosenthal, 2021

The right of John Rosenthal to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978-1-911379-02-7    |    E-book ISBN 978-1-911379-04-1

Printed and bound by

T. J. International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall, PL28 8RW

to Helen Danzer

“So we beat on, boats against the current,

borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

INTRODUCTION BY PAM DURBAN

I’ve known John Rosenthal since 1965, the year he arrived to teach at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and I came to enroll as a freshman, my bags dutifully packed with every recommended article of clothing and accessory on the school’s checklist.

Over the next couple of years we became members of the same tribe (he was only a few years older than most of us) that gathered in bars and apartments to talk and talk and talk, “… about Keats and Camus and Faulkner and what was wrong with America, which, among other things, included Time magazine, television advertisements, men with briefcases, Bob Hope, Rod McKuen, and best-sellers.” That tribe and those talks accelerated my escape from South Carolina into a world where people took books and art and music and ideas seriously, and here we are, 53 years later, (minus the lulls and gaps that life imposes), friends and fellow-writers, still believing in words and images and art, still talking about the books and stories and writers who thrill and move us: Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, William Trevor, and above all, for John, Marcel Proust.

“Why do we write about the past?” he asked me recently.

One answer, I think, is that we search the past for images and memories that might cohere into a story that “…reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happening,” as Hannah Arendt wrote. Meaning, not in the sense of something ironclad or absolute, something more like a meaningful sequence that gathers events into a consequential shape. After he invited me to write an introduction to this memoir, I searched my own memory for what has made his friendship so long-lasting and important to me, because from the beginning he was an influential friend, and that search has led me to realize that the story of how I became a writer could begin with his friendship and those gatherings at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

This book, as its name implies, traces John Rosenthal’s search for the story of his friend Amylu Danzer’s death and for his place in her life, and here, as in most worthy memoirs, the story isn’t chronological. How could it be? Our memories lie scattered through time; to force those pieces onto a linear timeline would falsify and weaken the power of the connections among those events, and this is not a falsifying book. In fact, one of the great pleasures of this book, which is full of the pleasures of gorgeous prose and humor and clarifying honesty, is the pleasure of traveling with the writer as he traces how the boy who knew Amylu Danzer and the young man who lost her became the man who remembers her now. It’s the pleasure of watching something take shape that works like memory itself, tracking back and forth between now and then, picking up images and events and “questions posed and unanswered” by his life and Amylu’s and fitting them into the developing mosaic that I’m calling a story. It’s the pleasure of watching him question and doubt, and wish he could correct his younger self, as he does in these lines from a scene in which he remembers the last time he saw a troubled Amylu and couldn’t find a way to help her:

And I, the leading man, was ad-libbing.

(“Pipe down,” I want to say to him, after all this time.)

What I also admire here is the honesty with which my friend finesses the difficulty that men sometimes have in seeing the women they write about as more than projections of their own fantasies and fears. What happens in this book feels like an acknowledgment and a dismantling of that process. One of the book’s many accomplishments is John Rosenthal’s willingness to look with what Toni Morrison calls “unblinkingness,” at himself as a young man beset with a “restless shimmering self-regard” and the way in which his willingness to implicate himself frees Amylu Danzer to emerge as a person in her own right, no longer a mirror in which he sees reflected “the special person I hoped I was.”

The greatest pleasure of this book, though, may be how it lingers, and why. For me, writing involves a lot of waiting and listening, and I knew that if there was something I wanted to say about the way the book hung around in my head and made me happy whenever I thought about it or read parts of it again, I’d have to be patient. Sometime during that waiting and listening time, I remembered a talk John gave at the opening of a show of some photographs he took in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina. “It’s up to the artist to make life as complicated as it is,” he said, and I wrote it down, because it felt true in an important way.

After I finished Searching for Amylu Danzer, I read that quote again, and I realized that it described the source of the book’s lingering power and grace. Because to experience life as complicated as it is, the way it happens in this book, is to be invited to remember that life resists being reduced or simplified. It restores the faith I lose so easily, that our certainties and our stories can always be disrupted by new possibilities.

September, 2020

I

Ours was a young friendship based on the assumption that there was an available destiny full of truth and intensity somewhere beyond the boundaries of what we were being taught by our parents, teachers, and ministers. To get there required discipline and a list of things we should never do. We should never try to be cool, never talk about clothes, and never listen to mood music; we should never believe that money was everything, never learn how to play golf, and never become peevish and responsible like our parents. Our goal, quite simply, was to become artists—or at least the sort of people who set their faces against the grain of American life. When we entered our twenties, we still believed everything we believed when we were fifteen because, quite simply, we’d corrupted each other for life.

“Remembering Amylu”

NPR commentary by John Rosenthal on WUNC-FM, 1992

Amylu Danzer, 1957

WHERE ARE YOU?

Broadway was like a river running through the Upper West Side. It swept up everything, spare vacuum cleaner parts, first editions, maybe Amy.

Amylu Danzer was missing.

A flock of pigeons flew above the campus heading to the garbage cans of Broadway. Mounds of snow lay curbside covered in soot and dog piss. Across the river, the snowy clefts of the Palisades.

I tried to extract Amy out of the cold, thin air. I looked for a slant of shoulder, pitch of head, something coltish and familiar. In junior high school Amy had been my first real girlfriend and I was her first boyfriend. We’d lived on Long Island in the small Great Neck village of Lake Success. What had mattered then? The Prophet. Clearasil. Our forty-five collections. One night I’d called the Alan Freed Show on WINS and dedicated “A Rose and a Baby Ruth” to Amylu.

Now she was twenty. A junior at the Rhode Island School of Design.

She was one of the five people in the world I’d recognize in a crowd.

My oldest friend.

Was she looking for me?

I can still hear my mother’s voice that February morning: “Johnny, I just got off the phone with Amylu’s mother. She wanted to know if you’ve heard from her. It seems that Amylu has disappeared.”

Disappearing: a magician’s trick. It meant nothing.

She also told me this: that last week Amy’s parents had received a call from a staff psychologist at RISD who told them that Amy had stopped talking and needed to take a medical leave-of-absence; that three days ago her parents drove to Providence, packed up Amy’s belongings, and brought her back to Great Neck; that yesterday Amy suggested that she and her mother drive to Jones Beach to sketch; that after an hour Amy walked up the beach with her sketch pad and never returned.

The state police found no sign of her.

No one has heard from her since.

My mother insisted that if Amylu showed up at Columbia I should call her parents right away. They were sick with worry. Mrs Danzer thought she might be heading my way.

It was February and Upper Broadway was joyless. The winter had been rainy and cold. Four days earlier Malcolm X had been assassinated in Harlem.

I was a first year graduate student in the Columbia English PhD program and I was supposed to be writing my master’s thesis on Wordsworth. I didn’t like my thesis and I was beginning not to like Wordsworth.

Where are you? I thought. We’ve understood each other since we were kids. That was our gift to each other. Don’t worry. I’ll help you. I won’t call your parents. I’ll read you “Ode to a Nightingale.”

I thought of the whimsical drawing Amy had recently sent me, a charcoal sketch of my car in high dunes, a reference to our summer days at Jones Beach. She’d been silent for months, but then, out of the blue, this drawing. I laughed when I saw it.

I scanned the street. Strangers in heavy coats. In the darkness below, the express train rumbled towards Harlem.

Where was she?

It’s almost sixty years since I walked down Broadway looking for Amy, and during all those years images remain, contend with each other—Amylu, at seventeen, bursting long-legged sun-splashed from the waves at Jones Beach, rills of water streaming from her hair; Amy, last seen, walking beside me, heavier, stiff, chalk-faced, mysteriously silent, something of the injured animal about her, stoical, looking away. I keep asking myself the same questions—what happened, why?—and, decade after decade, I arrive at a different answer. I never stop asking these questions. I never stop answering them. I remember what I can.

Amy is the only constant and she never stands still.

Whenever I dream of her, which isn’t often, she appears as an enigmatic and radiant young woman. In her presence I feel inadequate and a little pointless. She is breezy with me, abstracted, and I am confounded. She never acted that way. Once I nervously asked her (because I was close to waking) if I were dreaming and she replied. “That’s up to you.” Once I asked her why she disappeared and she said “A ruse was necessary.” Sometimes she says nothing. Sometimes she only smiles.

BLOCKPRINT

My name is John Rosenthal and I am a photographer and a commentator on the National Public Radio show, All Things Considered. Robert Sheeran, Director of RISD Alumni Relations, has been kind enough to forward my letter to you … I am presently writing a book about a student who attended RISD in 1962-1965, Amylu Danzer, who, like you, wrote articles for the student magazine, Blockprint … I am perhaps a little too late for this investigation. Even those who knew her at the time may draw a blank twenty-seven years later. But it’s possible that someone has preserved some vivid recollection of her. I’m interested in anything you might remember about this young woman. Did she ever articulate a grievance with the world in a specific way? Did she act strangely, or was she simply quiet? Did her peers ever comment on her sadness? Did anyone think she was ill? Did she have a roommate? A friend, lover?

1992 letter sent to contributors to Blockprint, the RISD student magazine

TUTTI FRUTTI

(1957-1959)

Amylu was a year or so younger than me and two grades behind. When I first met her at the Lake Success swimming pool in Great Neck in 1955—a pale, blue-eyed, blond girl, five inches taller than me, who always looked like she’d just arrived at her own surprise party—I was thirteen, and, according to Great Neck standards, literary. I’d read bestsellers like Marjorie Morningstar and Not As A Stranger, and, unlike my peers who were still reading books about famous inventors, I could talk to a sensitive girl like Amy about the mystery of love. I liked poetry too. Sitting next to Amy under the large oak tree beside the Danzer’s screen porch, I read The Prophet to her and she would close her eyes, listening carefully.

“Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup,” I’d intone into the bright suburban air. “Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.”

Amy and I agreed: two people shouldn’t eat from the same loaf.

We agreed about everything and even hated the same words: golf and canasta, to name just two.

A year later, in 1958, my parents moved to an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan and packed me off to Cheshire Academy, an old and undistinguished prep school fifteen miles north of New Haven—known as The Reformatory among the locals. My junior-high romance with Amy—a matter of love notes, secret kisses, and dancing to Little Richard—couldn’t survive long distance, and soon Amy found a local boyfriend.

I was crushed. I couldn’t believe it. What would they talk about?

Six months later Amy wrote me a letter and asked how I liked Cheshire, and our friendship began.

I wanted to write letters to Amylu as if I were Holden Caulfield and my pals horsed around like the guys at Pencey Prep, but Cheshire wasn’t like that. It was a wilderness of boys, some of whom were dangerously stupid. For a while I was lonely. Then I wasn’t. Life became intense, sarcastic, savage, and smart. A semi-wicked English master, an owlish man with quick, stony eyes who waved his cigarette gracefully in the air, told me that Kahlil Gibran wrote sentimental garbage. Another master, a handsome old Irish bachelor with a deep tuneful voice, told me to read Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and write down every word I didn’t know, starting with “circumambient.” I wrote letters to Amy celebrating my new gravity. I told her about Norman Mailer who said that Negroes were hip and white people weren’t. I also told her I was acting in plays and could do impersonations of Kirk Douglas and Marlon Brando.

Amy had responded to my letters with wide-eyed enthusiasm. From her perspective—a quiet, artistic girl stuck in the 9th grade with whooping boys —I might have been a mountaineer describing the shifting beauty of Italy.

Over vacations we’d get together. She’d take the train in from Long Island and we’d see a movie or my parents would get us tickets to a Broadway show. I’d do my impersonations for her. Recite my lines. Tell her about Ferlinghetti. She’d tell me about her art projects.

I told my mother that Amy was a platonic friend, but she just sighed and said “There’s no such thing. Poor Amy.”

The author, 1957

SPATTERING PAINT

More than fifty years ago, I stood on a railway platform at Penn Station, searching for Amylu. Where was she? Not wanting to look over-eager, I kept arranging myself in different ways—right hand in pocket, both hands in pockets, head cocked to the left, head cocked to the right, a half-smile, an amused smile, no smile, my eyes scanning the platform, my eyes elsewhere, nowhere, withdrawn, as if I’d been lifted by a thought so engaging that I’d forgotten why I was here or even where I was. Then Amy’s pale face appeared in the crowd rushing out of the train, the sweet, artless face of my first girlfriend in junior high—the first girl I ever kissed, four years ago, and now my friend. She hadn’t spotted me yet and she wore a concerned expression. Then she saw me and smiled broadly. She waved and I waved back—forgetting whatever pose I’d decided on. As she came towards me, half-skipping, I noticed that her blue beret was teetering and the right collar of her tan trench coat lay twisted beneath the strap of her purse. Amy, as usual, all awry. She was fifteen, past the age when girls showed excitement in public—but not her. We hugged until I let her go, and, as we walked out of Penn Station, she told me breathlessly that she’d just a read a book by Herman Hesse called Siddhartha. Siddhartha was a seeker of truth. He’d been a Brahmin but had veered off to find his own path through life.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. Brahmin? Path?

It was 1960, a a Saturday morning, just before Easter.

Heading east from Penn Station we walked across 34th Street to Fifth Avenue buffeted by a playful wind that flattened skirts against the legs of laughing women.

We’d planned to spend a couple of hours at the Museum of Modern Art and then fool around in the city until late afternoon when Amy would catch a train back to Great Neck. On the windy street we chatted and laughed a little too easily. We hadn’t seen each other since Thanksgiving and hadn’t found our rhythm. (Awkward memories of our junior high romance—love vows and Ricky Nelson songs—still floated in the air above us.)

I was about to launch into my new Brando impersonation when I remembered Chucky D., a kid from Lake Success, and I asked Amy to tell me the details of his mother’s suicide. Chucky, who was a year or so younger than me, had always been goofy. When I lived in Great Neck, I used to imitate him—bobbing my head up and down, stuttering the words that began with a “p.” I hadn’t seen him in three years.

“She killed the dogs too?”

“Yeah. They were in the car with her.”

“She attached a tube to the gas pipe?”

“Yeah. And closed the garage door.”

“They were huge,” I said. “German Shepherds. I remember them dragging her down the street.”

I put my hand out in front of me as if I were holding a leash and lunged forward, floppy like a mime. Amy laughed her happy familiar laugh and our self-consciousness vanished.

As we turned north on Fifth, a tall woman in a white leather jacket crossed the street carrying a small white poodle.

“Somebody should shoot that thing—”

“Stop!” Amy said, laughing and leaning into my shoulder. Buses roared by and cars honked and a gust of wind lifted a woman’s dress over her face. Garters and a juncture of pink underwear; I looked away, my eyes burning. Then I looked up again. The woman stiff-armed her dress down and offered Amy an embarrassed smile as she passed by.

The wind rattled the canopies of stores.

I wanted to do my Brando, but Amy tugged on my arm and I followed her eyes across the street to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“Isn’t it amazing?”

When I was around ten, my Godmother, a Catholic, took me to St. Patrick’s and asked me if I wanted to light a candle for the dead. I said yes. She dropped a coin in a box and told me that when I lit the candle I should offer a silent prayer. I lit the candle and prayed for Eddy Duchin, a famous piano player who’d died of leukemia the year before.

“Gothic’s my favorite architecture,” Amy said.

I didn’t know what to say. Who had a favorite architecture?

Amy launched into a puzzling account of a cathedral that had burned down in medieval times and everybody in the town had rebuilt it. A nameless sculptor had carved a beautiful angel in an alcove above the choir loft that nobody would ever see.

“Why did he do that?”

That year at Cheshire I’d played Caliban in The Tempest and Coney in Home of the Brave,for which I’d won the Best Actor Award in the New England High School Drama Festival. I was a born actor and I knew it and so did everyone else. I didn’t want to wait around a few hundred years to become famous. I wanted to make a surprise entrance into the world.

We stared at the soaring twin spires with their stone leaves and arches, their pointed vaults and extravagant round windows, and moved on.

When we arrived at the museum I paid for Amy’s ticket. “Two please,” I said to the cashier, forcefully enough to forestall any objection Amy might make to my generosity. An awkward moment, which I pulled off.

To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of hanging out at the Museum of Modern Art.

“Well,” I said as we went through a turnstile, “that was pretty shitty, killing Chucky’s dogs too.”

“She must have been really unhappy,” Amy said.

“She had really weird teeth.”

“I don’t think I ever saw her teeth.”

“How do you not see someone’s teeth?”

“Maybe she didn’t open her mouth wide.”

“Jesus, Amy, her teeth opened her mouth wide.”

Amy looked at me.

“You think her teeth had something to do with her suicide?”

I didn’t say it but I thought ugly people were always in for a bad time. So did my mother, whose father had been a dentist in Tennessee.

Then Amy was standing in the middle of the room pointing the way a child points, almost jumping up and down. She was wearing a dark green plaid kilt (gold pin flashing) and dark green sweater. Her coat was over her left arm. Somewhere there was leather purse with a gold buckle on a flap. Her eyes were bright and she was pulling on my sleeve.

“Look, there it is!” she cried.

“What?”

“Over there!”

Embarrassed, I looked across the room and saw the painting or whatever it was.

“That?”

“Yes! that’s who Miss Stevens was telling me about, Pollock! He’s avant-garde!”

I looked in the direction Amy was pointing.

“What’s avant-garde?”

“It’s French. It means, you know, different, something like that.”

We stood in front of the large Pollock painting. “What’s so different about vomit?” I asked.

Amy laughed. She always laughed at my jokes. But she continued to stare at the painting, her eyes wide and widening.

“He drips paint. He drips paint on canvas. That’s so —”

I leaned into the painting. Thin black and white ropes of congealed paint. Bits of bright red paint like blood. Like vomit.

An older man wearing a blue blazer and tassel loafers, and a woman wearing gloves and dark red lipstick, stood beside us looking at the Pollock painting. The woman’s cheeks were powdery, as if she’d been in storage; her lips tightened and her nose lifted slightly. The man glowered and offered a make-believe laugh. Then he turned to the lady with the lipstick and said, “Whatever happened to beauty?”

I agreed with him, though I didn’t want to.

“You think this is art?” I asked.

Amy didn’t answer me, as if she were in church.

Across the room a skinny guy with a goatee was explaining Picasso’s Blue Period to his frizzy-haired girlfriend who kept nodding her head as if she had palsy.

Blue period, vomit, faces with three eyes. I was ready to leave.

“Speaking of vomit, I said, “the other night in dining hall this kid from the Dominican Republic got sick and puked on the table. Some of it landed on the guy next to me and he got sick and puked back across the table.”

Amy was listening to what I was saying, and smiling a little, but she wasn’t laughing. She was looking at the Pollock painting as if she were in love. What a sensitive girl.

I told her how everybody was jumping out of their chairs to get away from the vomit and Mr Jackson was telling everybody to stop acting crazy, even though he was checking his own clothes. “It was really funny.”

But apparently it wasn’t. Amy continued to smile the kind of smile that could ruin my day.

A museum guard in a dark green jacket with a yellow stripe on its cuff slouched beneath an arch, his arms crossed. His pompadour was black and shiny, the lines of a comb embedded in its high arching wave. He looked sullen and bored and I wondered what he made of all this. Probably not much. A different orbit. A toothpick suddenly drifted from one side of his mouth to the other. A neat trick. The thought crossed my mind that he wasn’t going to have much of a future with a toothpick in his mouth. Or was this his future? Giving directions to the toilet, telling idiots not to touch the paintings?

The guard glanced up and saw me looking at him and I looked away.

My future without a toothpick spread before me like a field in soft sunlight.

Did the guard envy me, people like me, with our futures? In college I would read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thoreau and John Dryden. I would star in plays. The guard probably thought his life was good if he could drive down Broadway in a white convertible with his arm around a pretty girl. Of course that wasn’t bad, especially if the girl got his jokes.

CENTRAL PARK

After an hour of drifting aimlessly from room to room we left the museum, with its white walls and quiet voices, and walked up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. The early afternoon city was bright with a big blue sky and barreling yellow taxis; a white cloud floated like a sleepy whale above Bergdorf Goodman; buses accelerated up and down the avenue, clanking manhole covers.

Cocking my head, I lit a cigarette and let it dangle from my bottom lip. As we walked among the throngs of shoppers, I tried to find the right expression to go with the cigarette.

Bemusement.