Trees, suffering and enemies

I used to believe that the world was a balanced and just place. That if I were pained about something, but did my time and paid the pain tab, then something good would happen to me in the same measure to balance out the bad thing. I believed I would get a consolation prize that was just as good as whatever I had lost. My belief that the world worked like that probably came from the transformation stories that were everywhere when I was a kid: the awkward girls who turned into heart-throbs; the underdog wearers of ratty gym clothes who became tennis champions.
My personality and body — melancholy optimism edged with Pollyanna in an unusually tall girl — made me vulnerable to these stories and I believed them. Or, I did, until one of my friends, a poet well read in a dangerous way, shared this line with me from Dostoevsky.
"There is only one thing that I dread," the Russian said, "not to be worthy of my sufferings."
Somehow, until that moment, I had managed to ignore the possibility that I could have a dark time and it would never swing over into light, that I could have trouble or disappointment that would never pay off in a tennis trophy or an engagement ring or some equivalent prize.
Having this realization might sound like the normal learning curve one takes into adulthood, had it not happened this year, when I am 43. Maybe I was lucky to be able to suspend the truth about the world's lack of balance for as long as I did, but the landing into reality felt like a hard one when it finally happened.
Fortunately, a piece of literature from a very different time reminded me of another way to look at pain and pain's pay-offs — the novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," a staple on fifth-grade reading lists everywhere.
I had wanted to re-read this book, because even though a lot of time had passed since I read it when I was a fifth-grader myself, an image from the book had always stayed with me. It was blood, coughed up onto a down pillow by a young man dying of consumption. The family in the story was poor so they didn't throw the bloody pillow in the garbage after the man died. They covered it with new cloth and gave it away as a present. The recipient of the gift never knew about the blood, dried and secret under the soft, white cotton.
I wanted to know if that image were actually as unsettling as I remembered it. Because some images, capable of making you feel as though your gut is tickling up into your lungs the first time you encounter them, have no staying power. I speak, for example, of James Cagney's trussed-up dead body, delivered to his mother's apartment in the 1931 film "The Public Enemy." He tumbles, eyes wide-open, towards the camera and it's horrifying. But the second time you see the movie, dead Jimmy's tumble is a little less shocking. By the third time it's just Hollywood corny.
The consumption pillow, for what it's worth, has staying power. The image is every bit as gruesome as I remembered it.
But what resonated with me as much in my re-read of the book, were passages about Brooklyn kids with head lice.
The children without lice would taunt the children with lice. When the children with lice got kerosened free of the pests, those very children would join the group of lice-free taunters. Their experience, wrote author Betty Smith, humiliating as it was, taught them no empathy.
It's different now, in this relatively easy world that's not so hard-scrabble as turn-of-the-century New York, with all its vermin and coughed-up lung blood, Triangle Shirtwaist fires and airless tenements. "Sufferings" do teach empathy. Maybe Dostoevsky would have considered the acquisition of a sympathetic heart an adequate pay off.