The Last Gentleman and the Purple Sage Wednesday, March 23, 2005

We lost two saints this week. The first you may have heard about. Bobby Short sang cabaret; or rather he was a cabaret, elegant, wily and witty; a champagne bubble of a man. He sang like Cole Porter wrote. He was the montage at the beginning of Manhattan. A class act, another fragment against the ruin. Last year I turned down a chance to see him at the Carlyle, where he held court, another regret I get to take to my grave. But the melody lingers on here and here.

The other was Father Duffy, who taught religion more or less forever at my high school. By the time I got there he looked north of ninety, frail and long-limbed and ribbed like a walnut; he lasted another two decades. He was a nut on golf--he designed a gadget to help your swing, and had a newspaper photo of it taped to his door--and ran a basketball pool every year. (He called himself the "Budokan Bookie," but I don't remember where that name came from.) I must have rushed past that picture hundreds of times, after he dismissed us from class with an abrupt, "OK, go go."

His medium was the mimeo. Every trimester he worked up a bunched of study sheets, in fuzzy purple, with densely typed questions and answers he would review in class and then put on tests. The only one I can remember compared faith in God to faith that the "6 train would stop at 86th Street." Or "fish and tuck": He said that he had come up with these as alternatives to the big-ticket swear words. To drive home the point, he banged the desk and hollered, "Shit! And fuck!" (His theory, I think, was that you didn't really need the curses, just vocal sounds that gave you the same feeling of release.)

After "The Exorcist" came out, he got mistaken all the time for Max Von Sydow. That didn't stop him from being exceptionally kind and generous to an outerborough introvert who was too scared to speak. For that, and the decades of help before and after, God speed him to his reward. Go go.

@ 11:43:00 PM,

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