Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [138]
“I’d be alarmed if it did,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s a fake.”
He had put the two petals beside the artificial rose to convey the illusion of reality and to illustrate that everything in life was perception—that just because you assume something is true, it ain’t necessarily so.
My sister Jocelyn also went to Harrington, and the two of us spent a lot of time on the phone comparing notes about our sessions with him. She loved him deeply because he was the father she never had. His wife was also very kind. She was a former concert pianist who sometimes played Rachmaninoff in an adjoining room during our sessions.
Once Dr. Harrington told me about a patient who came to see him; after ten or twelve minutes she stood up, said, “I’ve learned what I wanted to know, and I want to thank you very much,” and then walked out the door. I always remembered this story, and once I asked him, “Why do we always have to talk for an hour? Sometimes I don’t want to talk for more than twenty minutes.” He agreed, and unless it was an important session that might go on for two hours, I’d get up and leave regardless of the time. One day after about three years I got up and said, “I don’t know whether I have to come back here anymore. I’d like to come back and talk to you, but I don’t think I need to.”
And that was the end of my therapy. I never went back, but I was a different person for having known him. He was a wonderful friend who helped others in my family, too, and through humor he taught me a lot about myself. He simply had a talent for it. Most of all, G. L. Harrington taught me how to forgive—myself and others.
53
I SUSPECT SOME READERS who have reached this point in the book are asking themselves, “When’s Brando going to talk about the Indians? Isn’t he obsessed with the plight of the American Indian?” I bridle at this, more in exasperation than in anger, because I’m confronted with it over and over again from people who, perhaps to please me, mention “the plight of the American Indian” as if it were something that had happened on another planet in another era—like a drought in equatorial Africa or the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, as if the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people were some sort of a historical curiosity, even an act of God, that humankind had nothing to do with and bore no responsibility for. This grates on my soul.
What astonishes me is how ignorant most Americans are about the Indians and how little sympathy and understanding there is for them. It puzzles me that most people don’t take seriously the fact that this country was stolen from the Native Americans, and that millions of them were killed in the process. It has been swept from the national consciousness as if it never occurred—or if it did, it was a noble act in the name of God, civilization and progress. The number of Indians who died because of what we called Manifest Destiny has always been a subject of debate among scholars, but I believe that the majority of informed historians and anthropologists now agree that between seven million and eighteen million indigenous people were living in what is today the continental United States when Columbus arrived in the New World. By 1924 there were fewer than 240,000 left; their ancestors had been victimized by centuries of disease, starvation and systematic slaughter.
If people acknowledged a similar ignorance about the Holocaust, they would be regarded with amazement. But that’s how it is for most of us when it comes to Native Americans. To my mind the killing of Indians was an even larger crime against humanity than the Holocaust: not only did it take more lives, but it was a crime committed over centuries that continues in some ways to this day.
Ever since I helped raise funds for Israel as a young man and learned about the Holocaust, I’ve been interested in how different societies treat one another; it is one of the enduring interests of my life. In the early sixties I read a book by John Collier,