From the archives: Testament

More than twenty years ago, my college mentor recommended Testament in one or another of the several classes and seminars I took with him. When I was home a couple of weekends later, my mother channel-surfed in lieu of conversation, and William Devane's face flickered across the screen. "Can we watch this for a bit?"

It wasn't a long movie, over in a quiet horror and a sob.

I remember it now as my first genuine glimpse into the lives of adults, of families. (And this is, of course, the gift of good books, films, artworks, music, etc. -- that they help us understand what is real and true in ways in which what is real and true has not yet done, perhaps cannot do.)

The film, which was brilliantly cast with gifted actors (Jane Alexander, Devane, the young Luke Haas) who actually look like a typical nuclear family in a California hamlet, opens twenty-four hours before a nuclear attack. In Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Emily cries out in Act III, "I can't. I can't go on. It goes too fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed." This is, of course, the essence of Testament's extended first act: that the father challenges the son to make the hill but pedals ahead, that the youngest would prefer to be a rat in the school production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (a wish denied that serves as heartbreaking foreshadow), that the mother fails to awaken in time to exercise, that the husband and wife make love rather than continue a painful discussion, and so on. Piano practice. Breakfast. Clutter. School. Work. Answering machines. Unfinished projects. Unspoken fears. Unmet expectations. Pain and beauty, the extraordinary and the commonplace. Life. And no one really notices. The rhythms and grace notes that underscore everyday life grow too subtle, pass unmarked, end uncelebrated.

And then the world winks out, a few lights at a time. We can wish that we remember everything, and how we survived, the mother tells her son as the movie concludes.

But is being the last woman standing on the cusp of the end of the world something a girl dreams of when she grows up?

Watching Testament two decades later, sharing it with my oldest child, a perceptive and sensitive filmgoer, I was challenged -- again -- to examine the course and content of my life. If it were all over tomorrow, would today have been enough?
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I had hoped to acquire a copy of the short story on which the film is based, "The Last Testament" by Carol Amen. Today I stumbled upon this posting to a message board:

Looking to buy the April 1987 edition of Ellery Queen, Vol 89, #4, No 529; Ed. Eleanor Sullivan.

This issue should contain the story "Last Testament" by Carol Amen starting on pg 86.

If single issues aren't available or you don't want to break up the entire year's issues, let me know, I'd be willing to buy the whole year's worth if need be. I'd really just like a readable copy of that story- it was the basis of the 1983 American Playhouse movie "Testament" about post-nuclear war affecting a single family in California. The original story apparently was published in 1980 in the St Anthony Messenger, a small Catholic monthly... but I'm unable to find a copy of that magazine. The author, Carol Amen is deceased (1987) and I've not been able to locate any assigned agents for her work.

Perhaps the librarians can help me.

[In July 2007, they did. See this entry for more information.]
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I couldn't sleep last night, so I brewed some more coffee and padded through the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie. I think that I began to understand why so many people choose to slip-slide through life. Literature or art or music or conversation that makes. us. think. hurts. It forces us to re-examine ourselves and our lives in ways that may... that will disappoint us. Reconciling who we are with who we thought we might be is hard work. It is easier, then, to watch "The Apprentice," post silly polls to faceless "friends" on a chat board, hide in the bathroom with the latest issue of People, live behind the unexamined rules of an organization, work without joy, sleep without really dreaming. Yes, it is easier to slip-slide on a sled of such soul-deadening (non)choices, easier to slip and slide toward nothingingness than to choose to walk to the very edge of its chasm, to feel its black fingers caress the essence of you, and then to pull away, renewed, recommitted to making today matter more than yesterday.
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Have you read Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Last Night of the World"?

"We haven't been too bad, have we?"

"No, nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble -- we haven't been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was being lots of quite awful things."

Bradbury misstepped there, I think. I reread the story last night in the wake of Testament and decided that he misstepped. While we must be something more than not too bad, I'm not certain that being ourselves is such an unworthy goal. Being our best selves, that is, and by doing so inspiring in those we love and those we meet the desire to be, in turn, their best selves. So that even if a big part of the world is being lots of quite awful things, we are not allowing the everyday to pass unnoticed and uncelebrated.

Testament (1983)