Eulogy: Fiction

Walter Frenesco knew how to go it alone. Back in the early fifties when submarines were diesel-fueled, sausage-shaped tin cans, when only the bravest or most lost souls--for our own unfathomable reasons--volunteered to be submerged, Walter spent months at a time almost a thousand feet deep below the Atlantic's surface.

On the same crew as me, Walter was a quiet man. While the rest of us played five card draw with a dollar ante, he wrote letters, or so we thought. He didn't let on that he had a novel in mind. In fact, I was the only one who knew about the story he worked on the rest of his life.

Why me? He saw I could barely read and write, so he knew I wasn't going to criticize or suggest how to make it better. Walter was too afraid to show his work to an agent or a publisher, even to one of his relatives, but he'd send me a few pages at a time. I guess he just wanted somebody to keep track.

His hero--also a loner--was a mountain climber intent on making it to the top of a high mountain nobody else ever climbed, somewhere in a country called Bhutan. I can't pronounce the name but he wrote it over and over: Gangkhar Puensum.

During his later years as a mail carrier, Walt was the opposite of the so-called postal worker syndrome--the quietly raging guy. He was not burrowing out from hidden animosities; he did not nurse subterranean rages that threatened to blow him and his surroundings to pieces. Walter was a nice man. In forty years of letters from him, he didn't once complain to me of anything.

He liked carrying mail. The job gave him many hours a day to figure out plots, imagine triumphs, slog through undiscovered territory, and picture himself a published author as soon as he retired at 65. Water missed his deadline by one year. I hope his job in the afterlife is not too demanding, because he told me in his final letter that he only had a hundred pages to go.