The Songbook of Benny Lament

by Amy Harmon

You know why money is the root of all evil?” I shook my head. “Why?” “Because if you don’t have money, it affects everything else. It’ll drive a man into the ground if he can’t take care of his own. That’s what men were put on earth to do. Protect. Provide.

“I don’t care what they think. Sooner or later, they won’t think about me at all,”

“Don’t fall in love with the wrong woman, Benny. Best advice I can give ya. I can’t make you strong enough to survive that. Every fighter I’ve ever known was either made or broken by the women in his life. You remember that.”

it’s a good thing I’m not a fighter,” I said. “We all have our battles, Benny Lomento,”

“You remember what I said, Benny,” he called after me. “Don’t be like old Bo. Choose the right girl.”

How do you make the world care, Benny?” “You tell them your story.”

“Lord God, lift us up,” Alvin pleaded. “Give us courage and protection. Bless our voices and our hands. Take away our fear and give us faith. Comfort Benny. He is a grieving son who has lost his father. He needs you, Lord God, and we need him. We thank you for your goodness and mercy in bringing us together, and we pray over the journey ahead. In Jesus’s name, amen.” “Amen,” Lee Otis echoed loudly.

I just try to be better. I’m not a good man, but I do my best.” “Maybe that’s the definition of a good man. Doing your best.”

“Sure. Prejudice is human nature, and it isn’t always ugly or violent or even obvious. We all make judgments, some of them justified, some of them not. We’re taught a certain way of thinking and doing, we’re taught to blame or justify, and a lot of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it. And that’s true of everybody.

Growing up in New York, I’d seen how people grouped up according to ethnicity, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t just preference, just families looking out for each other. It made sense to me that people wanted to live among people with similar customs and cultures and language. I thought people segregated themselves because they wanted to. Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem—it didn’t occur to me that many people didn’t have an option.”

“Together now, together tomorrow, together forever,”

We didn’t go to his funeral to pay our respects; we went for Maude Alexander. For a man with so much wealth and power, there were very few in attendance. His wife had died not long after Maude. His oldest son was killed in the last days of the Second World War. His youngest son, an ambassador to somewhere, didn’t attend. “He worked every day of his life,” the pastor said in his eulogy. “Never has there been a harder working man or a man more committed to his country.”

It occurred to me, sitting at the funeral service for Rudolf Alexander, that he’d rejected the things I too had once disdained. Family. Connection. Posterity. Responsibility. Like me, he was a man who had loved his work, but at the end of his life no one had loved him.

I’ve come to terms with Pop and the choices he made. I’m done holding that grudge and asking those questions. Maybe his choices allowed me to make better ones, and that’s all we can leave to our kids. A better choice.