DEATH AND FISHING IN TUXEDO PARK Copyright George Cathcart 1996 Not many people noticed when Johnny Gosda died in 1981, outside of the entire population of Tuxedo Park, N.Y., and people like me who used to live there. Johnny's obituary didn't make the Times with the corporation presidents and famous authors and formerly famous baseball players. Johnny was a legend only in Tuxedo, where he worked for everyone, tending manicured estates, repairing plumbing, mending walls and painting the trim on the Edwardian mansions. He did something far more important for me: Johnny used to take me fishing. To understand the importance of Johnny Gosda in my life, you first have to understand something about the two distinct populations who call Tuxedo home, Johnny’s population and my father’s. Rich people founded Tuxedo Park, very rich people, people like Pierre Lorillard IV and William Waldorf Astor. Lorillard built the little community in the Ramapo Hills forty miles northwest of Manhattan as a summer retreat for the cream of New York society in 1885. The town plan included a field-stone wall all around the Park, and police even now staff the only entry twenty four hours a day to separate the cream from the ordinary milk of society. Inside, the residents enjoyed macadam roads, an ice house, a fish hatchery, a race track, a club house, boat house, tennis courts and court tennis, and one of the first golf courses built in America. The town began modestly, with just twenty two "cottages," as the residents called their houses, none of which had fewer than five bedrooms. A complete water system helped the residents' servants with their washing and cooking, and one of the first storm sewer systems in the country carried away the effluent of the affluent. And the affluent continued to flow into the Park, nestling homes of increasing splendor and size into the wooded hills and along the shores of Tuxedo Lake, the town’s reservoir of drinking water and sport. The very rich, of course, did not build all these facilities by themselves. They hired cheap, eager labor for the sweaty work. They found all the cheap, eager labor they needed in Ellis Island warehouses, where Italian and Slavic immigrants swarmed daily with little more than vague dreams of a life better than the one they had left behind. Lorillard's agents rounded up eighteen hundred immigrants, housed them in shanties outside the Park's walls and gave them jobs for about ten cents an hour. Those shanties sheltered some very fine craftsman -- woodworkers, stone masons and others -- including Johnny Gosda's father. Tuxedo Park was a model of late nineteenth century capitalistic society. Those with capital indulged in their pleasures and in so doing provided gainful employment for those who had heard the call of the Stature of Liberty, completed the same year that Lorillard opened the gates of Tuxedo to the wealthy. But the wealthy offered the immigrants nothing more than jobs. Tuxedo Park stood as one of the last bastions of the society that the American Revolution had tried to destroy more than a century earlier. Tuxedo for several decades succeeded at maintaining the kind of rigid class structures the residents knew still existed in England. Indeed, many of them had the means and leisure to observe English aristocrats first hand, and they built Tuxedo on that ideal model. Outside the gates, of course, democracy had begun to run rampant. The old order tucked itself into Tuxedo and tried to ignore the storm brewing outside. The new wave of swarthy immigrants and rebellious labor unions kept capitalists nervous, but they had their refuge in Tuxedo. The Poles and Czechs and Italians and Johnny Gosda's Hungarian father built Tuxedo's houses and the roads around the big lake, but they never wet a line in that lake's waters for the fish stocked there -- steelhead and rainbow trout, landlocked salmon, largemouth and smallmouth bass, perch, pickerel and catfish. Only club members could catch those fish, or play golf or tennis or cards or billiards in the men-only bar room in the club house. A rich man could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than an immigrant could join the Tuxedo Club. Tuxedo withstood the raging democracy around it until 1916, when Congress enacted the income tax. Even that had only a minor effect, though, perhaps resulting in the layoff of a household servant here and there. But thirteen years later, the Stock Market collapsed, and Tuxedo nearly went down with it. Some residents lost everything -- or at least everything they deemed important. Mansions burned, and you can still find the ruins, the stone walls crumbling, rats' feet scurrying in the broken glass. But Tuxedo managed to survive by adjusting, by opening its gates just a crack, a very minor crack, and in the 1940s a new breed of Tuxedoite began to arrive -- people who actually worked for a living. Most had accumulated some wealth for their work, and they could buy up the great houses for bargain prices. Some converted the old stables and carriage houses into smaller houses, and a few of the villagers even managed to enter the Park that way, including young Johnny Gosda, who soon learned that just living inside the gate didn't qualify him for membership in the club. Indeed, even those who could afford the mansions at cut-rate prices found club membership far from automatic, particularly if any questions arose about ancestry or religion. My father came into Tuxedo in 1948. He had moved from his native South Carolina in 1930 to seek his fortune, not a well-timed move, but determination got him through. He worked at two menial jobs at a time to put himself through law school, and then he went into the insurance industry and became a rapidly rising star, earning both money and prestige and living in a nice apartment in Forest Hills. But by 1948, he had had enough of New York City, and he had accumulated the means to do something about it. He packed up my mother and his three sons (I was his newest, born in 1947) and brought us to a rambling old frame house in Tuxedo Park, where he left us each day to ride the train an hour into the city to earn the money to pay off the mortgage and send us to the best schools he could find. My father went to some pains to make sure we didn't think we had descended from the same aristocratic stock as many of our neighbors. He never let us forget that he had worked his way to privilege, not inherited it, and he expected all of his sons (six of us eventually) to do the same. He taught us middle class values, and he gave us middle class tools: hard work, church and a sense of at least fiscal responsibility. Of course I did not eagerly pick up those tools, but when I needed them many years later, I found them essential. But first I had to decide for myself that I did not need great wealth, big houses and country club memberships. For that I credit Johnny Gosda. Johnny and my father had a symbiotic relationship. My father had a large yard full of trees and grass and rock gardens and too little time to take care of it. Johnny Gosda had skill, integrity and a strong back, and he became my father's gardener and all-round handyman, jobs he performed after he came back each evening from his factory job down the road from Tuxedo. Johnny also had acquired the skills and dreams of a dedicated fisherman, and he knew what swam in the big lake. But he lacked any hope of ever having the club membership that would allow him to set his hook in the jaws of those silvery trout and shimmering bass. On the other hand, my father had such a membership, which allowed me to enjoy the privileges -- and take guests. And so, when I reached the fairly obnoxious age of eight years, my father, who did not like to fish, and Johnny Gosda, who loved to fish, reached a mutual agreement. I would take Johnny fishing on the lake as my guest, in his rowboat. I did not understand the nature of the relationship at the time, but that didn't prevent me from participating with great enthusiasm. Johnny picked me up late on summer afternoons, after he had tended the gardens of his clients and looked in on the temporary homes of a few others to earn his wages. He drove us in his rattling old pickup truck to the boathouse. There he ignored the jibes of the workmen who took care of the boats but never got invited to fish in the lake by an eight-year old boy. He would unload his little rowboat, put my life vest on my scrawny body, make sure my worm can had plenty of wriggling bait, and then he rowed us out onto the lake, where we sat in the silence of the gathering dusk and caught fish. Well, mostly Johnny caught fish. Occasionally I hooked a little sunfish and brought it gleefully to the boat. Johnny beamed happily for me and help me unhook it and put it back in the water, since my fish invariably fell below the minimum size limit. I never felt much disappointment about putting the fish back, though. I sat in awe of this man with the dirty fingernails and the firm jaw and the big cheap cigars, and a smile that lit up the eyes in the middle of his deeply creased face. I fished with worms. Johnny used hooks on which he had wrapped feathers and fur and tinsel to make them look like insects or tiny fish in the water. I dunked my worms straight down below the boat and got backlashes on my reel even at that. Johnny did magic tricks with his long bamboo fly rod, whipping it back and forth with a light swishing noise to make his line longer and put his flies on the water just where he wanted them. I believed the swishing noise helped him catch fish. I also believed him when he claimed that the cigars that sizzled out when he dropped them in the lake helped him catch fish. He caught a lot of fish. We sat there on the lake, Johnny Gosda and I, fishing, occasionally catching fish, swatting mosquitoes. Johnny also talked. He believed deeply in the value of silence in fishing, but he talked enough to keep himself from getting bored. Mostly, Johnny talked about fish. He talked mostly to himself, but he injected my name -- nobody else has ever gotten away with calling me "Georgie" more than once -- often enough to make me think he was talking to me. We rowed to some spot in the middle of the lake -- I still don't know how he knew where to stop -- and he helped me get my worm in the water before tying a fly on the end of his leader. He scanned the water through narrowed eyelids and finally, for no reason I could see, he grinned and winked and pointed and said, "Right over there, Georgie." Then he began whipping that long rod back and forth until he could let that little bundle of feathers drop on the water almost without a ripple. For a moment the world shut down, no sound, no motion disturbed the absolute stillness. And suddenly, the water around the fly erupted, and Johnny grunted and lifted his rod, which immediately bent over nearly double. For a moment, line screamed from his reel, and Johnny cackled and giggled and grunted. And then he turned the fish, began easing it toward us, and with a shout he lifted it over the gunwales and into the wicker creel at his feet. I thought of Johnny as old then, although I have reached his age now and no longer consider it so old. But he had deep creases in his dark face that made him seem older than his years. And when Johnny caught a fish, those creases became canyons and spread from the corners of his grin and his twinkling eyes. I have never seen any other eyes that twinkled like Johnny's except on a child. His eyes gave away his true age, literally shining out from the deep creases, his teeth bared as he grinned and shouted as though each fish was his first or his last. He had his fly back on the water within a minute. As Johnny rowed back toward the boathouse lights in the dark, he often talked to me about education. My father must have told him I hated school, although I may well have told him that myself. So Johnny used himself as an example of the value of education. Johnny Gosda had left school after the second grade. He could barely read and write his own name. At times I didn't see a problem with that. Johnny Gosda could catch fish and enjoy doing it, and he didn't needed an education to do that. But I also knew what Johnny did for a living. I knew I didn't want to pull weeds all my life. Johnny told me I would if I didn't get my education. I promised him I would, although I didn't mention that I wouldn't work very hard at it. I learned something important on those calm summer nights out on that lake with Johnny Gosda. Although I still have a hard time articulating the lesson, I think it goes something like this: If something you do makes you happy and doesn’t hurt anyone else, you should do it and do it as often as you can, no matter how miserable you feel the rest of the time. I couldn't, at that time, imagine anything more miserable than what Johnny Gosda did to raise the sweat on his brow and earn his daily bread. Stooped over in the weeds day after day, pushing wheelbarrows full of sod and getting paint and putty all over him seemed the worst way in the world to spend time. I thought Johnny Gosda had as much unhappiness as a person could stand. But every time he caught a fish, it chased away the misery as if someone had just told him he would never have to pull another weed the rest of his life. I realize now, of course, that Johnny never thought of himself as miserable. He lived through his wonderful Teresa and their two children, who did get their education. He took as much pride in the converted stable he called home as the rich took in their mansions, and he took as good care of his home as he did those of the rich. I don't think he ever envied the rich. He had no reason to envy them. He knew what many of them did not, that he could live simply and grow happier. He also knew how to catch fish better than most of them, and he certainly knew that they had paid more in club dues to stock those fish than he could earn in a year. But Johnny got no satisfaction from vindication. Johnny's clients respected him, and he respected them without envy. As the years passed and social barriers fell further, a few club members even gave him blanket permission to fish on the lake as their guests any time. I had long since left Tuxedo by then. While I still lived there, though, I learned to row my own boat, and I even learned to cast and to catch fish by myself. One day I landed a three-pound smallmouth bass on a plug. I ran all the way home with it, my eyes stinging with tears of pride and joy. And before I even cleaned it, I called Johnny Gosda on the phone to tell him about it. You'd have thought he caught the fish himself. Childhood started to fade for me when I went off to boarding school, and it vanished when I had to drop out of college and join the Army in 1966 and went to Vietnam in 1968. Johnny's lessons about education began to sink in then, and I returned to college determined to make it mean something. Then I got a newspaper job in South Carolina, got married, and suddenly I had not seen Tuxedo in five years. I took my wife there for a week in 1976. We went to a cocktail party where Johnny Gosda manned the bar, another of the ways he earned his living. He did that as well as anything else he did. He remembered everybody's drink and usually had it poured by the time they got to the bar. He guessed at mine and got it right. We talked for a while. He told me about great fishing in the lake, and he looked around and said softly that he had taken a big steelie from the south end two weeks earlier. His eyes still shone like a child's but the creases around his smile had grown deeper. I beamed, too. He had not just told me about a fish; he had trusted me with the information that he had caught the fish illegally, at night. I went out the next day and caught a fine bass and a couple of perch. By the time I got back to Tuxedo again, five more years had passed, and the world had turned upside down for both Johnny and me. I realized as I drove around the lake on a cool April day that Tuxedo Park had not changed. It still clung to its gentility, and it will as long as its residents are determined to keep it that way. I saw just one boat out on the lake. I saw it as I came around the curve and down the hill that brings the lakeside road literally to the side of the lake. At the same moment I saw the old man walking toward his car. He had a spinning rod with a silver spoon tied on, but he had no fish. I squealed to a stop and backed up. The old man had stopped to watch me. Most people would have described him as expressionless, but I could see the twinkle in his now deeply set eyes. "Johnny Gosda!" I cried. "It's me, George Cathcart, do you remember me?" "Of course I do, Georgie," he said through his grin. "I recognized you when you drove by, and I wondered why you didn't stop at first." "You knew I'd stop for you, Johnny." "I hope so," he said, his grin now bigger than a fisherman's lie. We stood by the road and talked. At first we talked about fishing, of course. I told him I hoped to do some during my visit to my brother, who now lived in the house we had grown up in. He warned me to get a license, then added he had reached the age where he no longer had to. He told me he had just come down to look the lake over. The sunfish had begun to move onto their beds, so things would start picking up soon. I asked him if he had caught any steelhead lately, and he told me about a 22-pounder he had winched in the previous autumn. "They're still in the lake," he said, looking around as though someone might listen in on us. "I hooked one last week. Tore all the line off the reel before I could turn him. Must have been 30 pounds." The twinkle shone brighter as he told me that, and for a moment I felt eight years old again, back in the boat with Johnny, watching him whip that rod back and forth, chewing his cigar and crying, "There he is, Georgie," as another bass grabbed his fly. But even I had a life beyond fishing now, and Johnny wanted to know what I was doing with it. I told him I was trying to make a living as a writer, and I planned in a few weeks to go back to school to get the last credits for my degree. He beamed, and his eyes shone. "Good boy, Georgie." Just then the town police car drove up and squealed to a stop. The chief got out, nodded at Johnny and glared at me. Tuxedo's finest still had as their main mission to protect the walled town from riff raff. He had no reason to recognize me. "This is Mr. Cathcart's son," Johnny said with pride in his voice. The chief softened a little, chatted for a few minutes and then drove off. Johnny laughed and said the chief resented him because he had access to all the finest houses in town, not to mention the lake. Not even the chief of police could catch the trout of Tuxedo Lake, but Johnny could. "You still married?" he asked me. "Nancy died last September. She had cancer." He looked pained for a moment, and he told me, as I had heard, that he had lost his Teresa the year before. We talked about dying and dignity and the importance of living while you can. We learned that our wives had died bravely and with pride, and we talked about how you can live both lonely and happy. Death was our new bond. Fishing had always held us together and always would, but now we had both come face to face with our own mortality, and we no longer had any fear, but neither of us knew how to say that. "Teresa died just like she wanted to, and I had her cremated before hardly anyone knew about it, just like she wanted. She didn't want anybody making a fuss over her. That's how I want to die, too." "Me, too, Johnny. I think we only mourn for ourselves, not for the person who died." "Yeah, and that's not what they want anyway." "Right." We might have talked for an hour, or maybe just ten minutes. A week would not have sufficed. The boy and the man had become the man and the old man, and we could talk of things the boy and the man never could. We had given new life to an ancient friendship and strengthened it with death. But we still had the mutual respect of the boy and the man, and just for a moment, I felt a surge of both youthful innocence and adult experience; I felt complete. I saw it all in the twinkle in Johnny Gosda's eyes, and I knew why I loved him so much. I told Johnny I would call him in two days to see if we could go fishing. I had taken up fly fishing, and I wanted to learn from him. "I'd like that, Georgie," he said. We shook hands, and I drove off. In the rear view mirror I could see him peering into the lake, looking for nesting sunfish. When I got back to Tuxedo Park, I couldn't find Johnny. His phone rang and rang, but I didn’t even get to see the twinkle of his smile. I returned to South Carolina the next day, and I asked my brother to call Johnny and let him know I'd tried to reach him, and I would fish with him the next time I came up north. Two months later, on June 11, a lady driving by the lake saw Johnny fishing alone in his boat. She glanced away for a moment, and when she looked again, the boat was empty. Not until the next day did the firemen and paramedics find his body on the bottom of the lake he loved so much but nearly had to beg to use. My bother’s wife called that night to tell me about it. I felt angry before I felt sad. But I could not direct my anger at anyone or anything, except maybe myself for failing to reach him that day and missing the chance to fish with him one more time. But that could not sustain anger, so I just felt sad. The next day I remembered that Johnny did not want me to feel anger or sadness. I remembered the softness in his creased face as he talked about his own aging and inevitable death. I had said he'd catch fish in that lake for ten more years, but I didn't need to. He had no fear, and I know he had no fear as the water filled his lungs and he sank on that June afternoon. As the day went on, I realized that Johnny Gosda had died the perfect death, in the midst of the one activity that always made him happy. That afternoon, I pulled weeds in my vegetable garden, and I felt happy for him and for me. I have a theory about heaven and hell. I think where we go after we die depends on our state of mind at the time we die. We just stay in that state forever once we leave our bodies. I know that for Johnny Gosda eternity will be like the day the steelhead stripped the line from his reel and left him grinning at the possibilities. Johnny went to heaven. The End Thanks for reading this. If you have comments or questions, e-mail me. Take me home.