Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love And Theater Part 2

Finally, just to try and get things going, I began.

You know, it's always fascinated me how many of Shakespeare's great characters have only daughters and no sons. Prospero, Shylock, Lear. It's as if they couldn't bear the burden of male children, as if they must be the teachers or the keepers of their daughters, as if male ident.i.ty figures itself against a woman who rebels. Being a parent in Shakespeare-I wonder if it had anything to do with his own sense of fatherhood, or his relations.h.i.+p to his own father. What do you think? Do you think his father really was a Catholic? Do you think his name was really Shakeshaft and he changed it? The father-daughter relations.h.i.+ps are really the most powerful. I mean, after all, who really has a son in Shakespeare?

"Only clowns and kings," my colleague said, not looking at me, almost as if he were speaking to the tea.

Oh, right, of course. I got back on the horse. Remember Henry IV, Part 1, the scene where Prince Hal plays with Falstaff. "Do thou stand for my father." Or the bit at the end, where Hal and Henry meet at battle, and they finish each other's other lines. I loved that bit. Yes, I guess there really are some good sons in Shakespeare. Prince Hal.

"Or Lancelot Gobbo," said the boyfriend, like he was letting air out of a tire.

The wind blew through the fruitless mulberry tree in the garden. A hummingbird pa.s.sed by, held itself almost soundlessly at eye level, and finding nothing sweet or red nearby, flew off.

All this came back to me in the bookstore, and I flipped through to find the scene with Gobbo and his father from The Merchant: Do I look like a cudgel, or a hovel post, a staff, or a prop? Do you know me, Father?

I scanned a few lines down: Do you not know me, Father?

And then I remembered how the afternoon had ended: how I brought the conversation back to Dad as Tubal, how I told my colleague that he'd played in The Merchant at the Folger. And I was back, for a minute, in that garden.

I missed the show, but I've seen the pictures, really a terrific production.

"Really?" my colleague perked up.

And now my father: "Yes, it was a lovely production, all modern dress, remarkable cast."

"Yes, I'm sure. And how did you play Tubal?"

"Well."

And at the close of Henry IV, Part 1, when Prince Hal and the King meet on the field of battle, he turns to his father: And G.o.d forgive them that so much have sway'd Your Majesty's good thoughts away from me!

I will redeem all this . . . , And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son.

FOUR.

Blithe Spirits I must have fallen asleep in the bookstore, and the owner poked me, wondering if I was buying anything that day. "We're not a library." You're not much of a bookstore either, I retorted, and then immediately realized my mistake. I'm sorry, my father pa.s.sed away this week, and I've been thinking a lot about him. I described him to the owner and he knew him immediately.

"Oh, yeah. Old guy. Beard, leather jacket. Came in all the time. Never bought anything. I'm surprised he had a son."

He had two. And a wife.

His silence asked the question.

It's a long story.

"Business is slow."

My parents met as actors, in the Brooklyn College production of Blithe Spirit in 1948. Dad was in his early twenties, out of college, already with an MA and a teaching job. What he was doing back at Brooklyn College starring in stage plays with undergraduates was a mystery to me. But there he was, Charles Condomime to Mom's Ruth, the second wife. We have a picture of the cast, each member signing off under his or her costumed head-an a.s.sembly of Jewish immigrant children, convinced that the surest way to successful a.s.similation was to ape the artifice of 1930s British swells. Decades later, hardly a week went by when, sometime between the salad and the ice cream, Dad would yell out, "d.a.m.n you, Ruth," and Mom would get that look on her face as if to say, "Tell that silly old b.i.t.c.h to mind her own business." It was their play, and "Always" was their song. Without the slightest provocation, Dad would burst into its opening refrain, and he and Mom would do a turn around the kitchen and recall how Morty Gunty or Irwin Mazursky garbled their lines, couldn't act, and now, see how famous they became (Irwin having changed his name to Paul). And as the strains of "Always" filtered down the hall, the Brooklyn College Barrymores came back to life.

We had a theatrical life, and I was put onstage almost as soon as I could talk. Every summer, Mom and Dad would work the camps in upstate New York, Dad directing the plays, Mom doing the sets. When I was five, they put me in the camp itself-the kids' bunk at camp Kee-Wah-while they did the shows. Privileged arena for the Brooklyn aristocracy (that summer, the heir to the Waldbaum's grocery chain was a bed-wetting bunkmate, and the camp boasted such alumni as Lauren Bacall and Paddy Chayefsky), Kee-Wah offered up that blend of Jewish cultural instruction and athletic sadism so characteristic of the fifties summer experience. The camp was run by Isidore ("Izzy") Monees, a man who looked exactly like Mr. Magoo and whose name I always misunderstood as "easy money." He'd bark his orders to his minions and make unannounced spot-checks on bunks just to terrify us.

That summer when I was five, I had a counselor who was a medical student. He insisted on playing doctor with us-a whole bunkload of the barely toilet-trained. He'd bring out his stethoscope and reflex hammer at all hours, giving us exams (I think I had suppressed the horror of it all until, when my own son was five, I told him I had to go off and give my students an exam, and he said, "Will you use a stethoscope?"). There was also my Israeli accordion instructor. He would show up in sandals (the first man I ever saw wearing sandals), play "The Flight of the b.u.mblebee," and then hand over the accordion. "Now, you play." At one point he said something in Hebrew about my performance, and I quit the accordion then and there.

But I could not get out of playing so easily. The year before, I wasn't even in the camp and Dad put me onstage. All I remember is that I was supposed to be a horse, and as I was running around the stage in a circle, the counselor playing the piano yelled out, "Seth Lerer." It was the only name I heard. Had she called everyone's name, or just mine? And the summer I was five I was a dog, the emcee of a talent show where everyone was dressed as animals. And I remember, too, another show when I was costumed as a doctor (I borrowed the counselor's stethoscope), with "Ben Crazy, MD," written on my smock. And even earlier-I must have been just three-there is a memory of Dad insisting that I put on a large diaper and get on a platter, trussed up like a roast pig with a tomato in my mouth, while the drama staff danced out intoning, "Larry Lerer, Larry Lerer, Larry Lerer," to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus.

His name, my name, they blend together. For years, I heard his name yelled out. Hardly a week went by in Brooklyn when I didn't hear a voice calling out, "Mister Lerer, Mister Lerer! Remember, Kiss Me Kate, 1954? Another opening, another show . . . ," and some poor pimpled adolescent would be going through the motions of a show my Dad had put on years before. It was as if he had taught, or directed, everybody. There were fat little boys and svelte women, on street corners, at newsstands, in Ohrbach's, everywhere. "Mister Lerer!" Once, years later, when I was a college student, we all went to Martha's Vineyard for the summer. Driving around, we found a bit of sh.o.r.e that turned out to be a nude beach. Of course, Dad had to drag us there; what an adventure. And my brother and I, now too embarra.s.sed to say anything, and my mother, with that "It's child support!" look on her face, sitting there while Dad strutted around naked, deep in the narcotic of his exhibitionism. And then, from out of the surf, "Mister Lerer, Mister Lerer! Remember, Kiss Me Kate, 1954? Another opening, another show . . . ," and now a middle-aged fat man in a red beard, dancing along the sand, his genitals flying this way and that, a pendulum to mark the time.

Play after play, my parents marked their time. After we left New York in the mid-1960s, we moved to Boston, then to Pittsburgh. Suburban amateur groups, conditioned to the well-meaning posturing of Junior League matrons, would gape in awe at Mom and Dad's flamboyance. Whenever we moved into a new town, they would seek out the theatricals, much as someone else's parents might seek out the church or the good schools. The parts were all impostures. When we lived in Needham, Ma.s.sachusetts, Mom and Dad starred in a local production of The Rivals. He was Captain Absolute, the das.h.i.+ng scion of the minor aristocracy, feigning to be young Ensign Beverley to woo Lydia Languish (Mom). Captain Absolute. The name became a clarion at home. For in the mid-1960s, TV was full of superheroes: Mr. Terrific, a mild-mannered clerk who takes a special potion; and Captain Nice, a momma's boy whose potent pill made him the Superman of the suburbs. Such shows should really be appreciated as the origin of camp, playful tales of effeminates who find themselves transformed for public maleness. Did Dad take a pill each morning? What were the potions of his public self? In those Rivals days, he would return from work and, entering the kitchen stage right, would announce, "It's Captain Absolute." And Mom, languis.h.i.+ng in her days alone, would hide her secret novels and the LPs and make a dinner that he would never finish before charging out, quoting a line crus.h.i.+ngly out of context: No, no, I must prepare her gradually for the discovery . . .

He never did.

Another town, another show. Once, they played in The Odd Couple. Dad was Felix, the neat freak, and Mom was Gwendolyn-or Cecily, I always got them confused. Neil Simon's Pigeon sisters, I discovered later, had the same names as the ingenues in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a play my parents never did, but one they raved over in a performance at Stratford, Ontario, where the great William Hutt played Lady Bracknell in repertory one year with King Lear.

I'd often wondered if Dad would age into Lear or Lady Bracknell, but there was no question about Mom. She remained born to play her part, Renee, named after Renee Adoree, a silent film star of the 1920s whom her father must have coveted. She stares out of the photo at her grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, three years old with the look of a born performer: pouty, blank, covered in that ennui that years later would become the core of her Ruth. And there she is, in the portrait for her wedding, looking in a mirror and adjusting her veil. The camera catches her reflection, not her full face, and for all the world she looks less like a bride-to-be than an actress preparing for a part, surrounded by the mirror lights, the makeup, the costumes.

Mom rediscovered her theatrical gifts after she and Dad divorced. She'd moved back to New York, to Jackson Heights in Queens, but found it changed so much since her childhood that streets were barely recognizable. Old Jewish women jostled on the street with recent emigres from Argentina. Colombian drug dukes (the lords were elsewhere) shared office s.p.a.ce as bogus travel agents with south Indian accountants. Korean dry cleaners paid rent to Greek landlords.

One day, on a street full of saris, it occurred to Mom to join the Yiddish theater. What was left of the old legacy of Second Avenue was now ensconced in an Episcopalian church bas.e.m.e.nt deep in midtown. The Folksbiene-the people's stage-had been revived, and Mom auditioned for a role in Shop, a bit of twenties agitprop that was selected as the troupe's seasonal opener.

When Mom got the part, and when the show was set, we agreed to see her. I drove in from Princeton with my wife, who found all this as much an anthropological venture as a family obligation, as if Margaret Mead had actually married one of those Samoans and was every now and then compelled to show up at some ritual of mutual humiliation. When we arrived, we found ourselves the only people in the audience under seventy, and we took our seats-under our own power-waiting for the play to begin. There was Mom, the young shop worker, speaking a stage Yiddish far removed from 1930s Brooklyn. The stage was filled with sewing machines nearly as old as the actors themselves, though I suspect the cast had more metal parts, not to mention plastic and batteries, than did the manual machines.

During the intermission, as my wife and I wandered around what had been conjured into a theater lobby, someone came up to us and asked, in Yiddish, what we were doing there. I noted that my mother was in the play.

Which one was she, he asked, and I said something to the effect of, Oh, the one on the right in the big chorus scene.

"Oh," he replied in English. "The ingenue."

She always was, whether performing or painting. Her art was as much a part of her as acting, and I grew up with her portraits and her still lifes. She painted brilliant circles on my bedroom walls, and one day after kindergarten she taught me to paint. Colors ran goopily from my brush, until she taught me how to hold it, how to get the watercolor on just right, and how, if you put a little bit of paint on one edge of the brush and turned it in a circle on the paper, you would get a little circle, shaded on one side and light on the other. I dipped the brush into the purple paint just as she showed me, and we painted grapes. They cl.u.s.tered on the s.h.i.+ny paper as they cl.u.s.tered in the backyard of our Brooklyn neighbors-an Italian family who actually had a grape vine and a fig tree (which they ritually bound in canvas every fall).

Mom learned to paint her canvas fruits at the Brooklyn Museum Art School under William Kienbusch, an abstract expressionist and scion of a wealthy Princetonian family. He was always "Mr. Kienbusch" in my mother's stories: elegant, well traveled, impeccably turned out. I Googled him and found his photograph from 1956: T-s.h.i.+rt, paintbrush, dark eyes, and a lower lip to die for. He seems to have spent a good deal of his time, when not teaching (according to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website), traveling through Europe. Three volumes of his journals lie in the Smithsonian. They are in the form of letters to his mother, telling her of Spain and Greece, the Prado and the Parthenon. "He gives his impressions of Athens in long pa.s.sages," notes the website, "and describes eating lunch with the Greek King and Queen and other guests at the exclusive Propeller Club."

Mom's only travels in those days were to the Brooklyn and Metropolitan museums, and the only royalty she dined with was the carpet king of Flatbush, who commissioned her to paint a circus mural in his house using his own face for the ringmaster. One day, she put my father in the circus. In a portrait she painted in the early 1950s, he is making up as a clown before an act. He's looking in the mirror, applying eyeliner, his face already whitened. The face is stretched out, as if to take the makeup more evenly, but I think that it's more a look of surprise than of preparation. The eyebrows raised, the mouth wide open. It's a look of fear, of fascination. How different from the serene Mr. Kienbusch, staring out from my computer screen, meeting my gaze, uncostumed, the paint confined to his canvas. What did my mother see in him? What did she see when she looked in the mirror of her wedding picture? What did my father see as he made up before a show?

As a child, I saw mirrors everywhere: windows at night, the backs of spoons that made each dinner a fun-house, my reflection in Mom's eyes.

The TV sat in the den like a black mirror of my soul, until my father came home. Then we would spend the early evening watching game shows. "Zu sugen, dem emes!" he would shout in Yiddish, complete with a flourish of a hand, as if it were a magic spell. To Tell the Truth. That was his favorite, but they all were there: I've Got a Secret, What's My Line? The game shows of the fifties and sixties were all about finding out, all about exposing impostures of the everyday. Find the real violinist, the man who married a princess, the woman who can recite the Bible by heart.

But the truth was, these were game shows about us. The TV of the 1950s broadcast secrets. The Army-McCarthy hearings filled the screen in the year before I was born, and I grew up overhearing all my parents' arguments about the guilt or innocence of others. Are you now or have you ever been . . . ? Before McCarthy, there was Rapp-Coudert, a state legislative committee that held hearings on the "subversive att.i.tudes" of New York public school and college teachers (this was in the early 1940s, but it was as fresh as Friday in my house). Inquests of this kind went on for a decade. My mother's favorite professor at Brooklyn College, Harry Slochower, had spent her whole undergraduate life under investigation for his "sympathies," and he was eventually dismissed in 1952.

We sat there in the den, watching domesticated versions of the trials my parents feared. The game shows deflected social terror. They channeled the anger and the fascination of a nation reared on loyalty oaths and security investigations, HUAC and "Red Channels." The urge to expose was still there, only now, under the benign and bow-tied aegis of Bud Collyer or Garry Moore, the stakes were simple.

I've got a secret. And the biggest secret was the s.e.x behind it all. Just think about those black-and-white interrogators. Instead of Kefauver or Murrow, there was Robert Q. Lewis, Bennett Cerf, Peggy Ca.s.s, Dorothy Kilgallen-as s.e.xually ambiguous a panel as you would find. Woody Allen lays all this out in one of his movie skits, where a rabbi comes on a game show and reveals his secret wish: to be tied up and beaten by a s.h.i.+ksa while his wife sits at his feet and eats pork. I've got a secret. What's my line? To tell the truth, it was always about desire: how could we transgress, and would they ever find out?

And then there was Beat the Clock.

We lived in the theater of interrogation, and my parents shaped their sympathies to fit their fears. There's an old joke my mother's cousin used to tell about the 1970s, when vans of young Orthodox men trolled the streets looking for lapsed Jews to enfold. "Are you Jewish?" they would ask strangers on the street. Those who weren't said, "No." Those who were said, "Who wants to know?"

We all wanted to know, and for my family Judaism was as much a play as anything else. There were the costumes of the faithful, the rites and rituals, the shows of Sabbath and Seder. For Reform Jews of my mother's generation, the great fear was not the gentile but the deeply observant. Her bitterness reserved itself for the believers of her own kind, and the New York of my childhood filled itself with bearded men and covered women I was taught to loathe. On day, Mom's mother went into the hospital. It was around the corner from the old Lubovicher seminary in Brooklyn. Mom and Dad left me with my younger brother in the car. Now, I could not imagine leaving a pet in an unattended vehicle, let alone two boys, eight and four. But if I did, what would I say to them? Don't touch the dashboard, leave the wheel alone, keep the doors locked. No. From my mother it was, Don't look the Lubovich in the eye. We had these superst.i.tions about them-that they wouldn't let you take their picture, that they wouldn't count off in gym cla.s.s, that if they met your gaze you would turn into a goat. But I think what my parents really feared was that if they looked you in the eye they'd turn you back into a Jew. a.s.similation, pa.s.sing, whatever you called it, could be wiped away before what Mom feared was their terrifying gaze. They were the real spirits of my nightmares, and my earliest memory is of a dream in which my bed is surrounded by dancing flames, each with a leering, bearded face.

Maybe what terrified Mom most was that her children would be stolen. Abducted into orthodoxy, we would have denied her the salvation of her social soul. My son the doctor, my son the lawyer, my son who pa.s.ses. I had a friend in high school who became a Chasid, much to the derision of my family. These were my father's fears as well. We'd have to do the pa.s.sing for him, as, later in his life, we would show up at public events just to prove that he had children.

For us, it was always a costumed life, and from the wardrobe of my Judaism I'd put on one more. My brother was Bar Mitzvahed in suburban Pittsburgh in June 1972. By then, my parents were living so far beyond their means-a seven-bedroom stone house, a gardener, and a Mercedes-that one great fling would hardly dent their debts. Dad had a way of hearing about "the best" of everything. Friends, lovers, coworkers-somebody always told him about the best restaurant, or the best movie, or the best lawn service. Invariably, they turned out to be fly-by-night, or someone's brother, or a front for illegal operations (once, we turned up at a Polish restaurant in Pittsburgh where, it was immediately apparent, no one had eaten in years, there were no menus, and we had to be out by eight o'clock). As my brother's Bar Mitzvah rolled around, Dad came home with news of the best caterer in Pittsburgh. Sight unseen, food untasted, he retained them. We would have the ceremony at the temple in the morning, then come home and they would be set up, the party in the garden, everything in order. And so, when we turned the corner at one-thirty, we saw the big "Wilson's Catering" truck, and, emerging from it, a family of African Americans, in livery, toting great platters of ribs, ribeyes, roasts, and greens. A white-toqued server carved, and women in the kinds of maids' uniforms you see now only in p.o.r.nography took drink orders. It was high theater all right, and for years all Pittsburgh talked about the Lerers' soul food Bar Mitzvah with the same blend of awe and horror as the court of Louis XIV must have talked about the king inviting Moliere to sit in his presence.

All of which brings me back to Mom the ingenue, singing about a sweatshop on a borrowed stage. Shop was a play about the worker's plight, about illicit love among the sewing machines. But it was also a play about the theater itself: about the magic of material, about how immigrants cut the patterns of their lives out of the bolts, about how dress and drama always go together. Little wonder that its playwright, the pseudonymous H. Leivick, was also the author of The Golem-perhaps the most famous play in all the Yiddish repertory, a story of a monster conjured out of clay, a haunted creature, a miscreant. We all have ghosts and golems in our lives (could you imagine Blithe Spirit in Yiddish-A Freyliche Geyst?), and all that we can do is dress up in disguise or paint away the winter.

Years after Mom had given up the people's stage, she took to her apartment's walls in Queens and painted birds and branches. The wooden wardrobe, too, took on her colors, as a twig arched over the armoire and met its mate against the wall. My wife thought it looked so natural, but I knew that this was a stage set. Mom had painted herself in, transformed her flat apartment into a one-bedroom theater. "For G.o.d's sake," says the ghostly Elvira in the final act, "not another seance." But the door is open and the table set.

FIVE.

Vaseline University I finished my performance, and the bookstore owner turned to look out the window. Night had fallen. He had made no sales that day. He got up without speaking, opened the door and held it for me, his unkempt hair soon covered with the evening's misty spittle.

"Keep the book."

I hadn't eaten all day, and I walked up Fillmore Street toward his apartment, stomach growling. I pa.s.sed the Tully's and the bank. I looked into the window of the Jackson Fillmore Restaurant and saw his empty seat. I walked in, told the waiter, my Dad used to eat here all the time, loved to sit in the window right there. Mind if I take the table? I'll be out in an hour.

I sat down facing his old seat, ordered the veal chop, and turned to his absence.

The spring of my senior year in high school, you disappeared for weeks. There were the business trips to New York and San Francisco, and whenever you would leave, I'd have to drive you to the airport just to keep the car. We'd get up at five so you could get the first plane out, as if you couldn't wait to leave, and I'd be back home by 6:30, barely knowing what to do until first period. One morning, I was so sleepy, you drove us both out (I would take the car back), and as you pulled up to the terminal, you stuck your hand out to adjust the side-view mirror and it fell out of its frame and shattered on the ground. The noise jarred me, and you shot me a glance, just to make sure I was awake, and threw yourself out of the car, not even closing the door, and then, turning in the terminal doorway, shouted out, "What do I care about a mirror? I make fifty-five thousand dollars a year," and spun on your loafer through the automatic door, as if "To Be Continued" were flashed across the screen.

You weren't there, that spring, when the thin envelopes arrived. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst-all of them wait-lists or rejections. My only package came from Wesleyan, to which I had applied late and listlessly, because you had a friend whose son had gone there in the 1960s and described it as a "fine school." No one in Pittsburgh in the early 1970s had heard of Wesleyan. There was Ohio Wesleyan, but that was not it. There was Wellesley, and every now and then someone would taunt me in my final weeks of high school: Wesleyan-isn't that a girls' school? And then there was your father, whom we visited that summer on the way to check out the campus. We stopped for an afternoon at the apartment in Brooklyn, the apartment in which your parents had lived since the 1940s, and Grandma Tillie boiled a steak with noodles and we sat around the tired kitchen while Grandpa Norman found his teeth, and then, when he asked where I was "attending college," he repeated the school's name over and over in his accent. "Vaseline? You're going to Vaseline?"

In the fall of 1973 I entered Vaseline University, armed with a box of opera LPs and a stereo, an electric typewriter purchased just for the occasion, and a handful of books. We all had private rooms in the dorm, and I dumped my stuff and found an open door. Unpacking there was a tall, brown-haired boy from Manha.s.set, who, as I entered, was hanging something up that looked to me like a bathrobe.

Cool robe.

"It's not a robe, it's my gi. For karate. You got any dope?"

Thirty-six hours later, we had heard that, dressed in his gi, this guy had jumped through a cla.s.sroom window, screaming something that sounded like j.a.panese, and his room had been cleared out and vacuumed clean. I ran into the RA that afternoon, and jerked my thumb over to the guy's room.

"One down," was all he said.

After two days, another guy moved in-Phil, twenty-six, returning after, as he put it, "some time on my own," with an Irish wolfhound named Lucille that lived in the room and, rumor had it, had borne his child.

I'd signed up for a great books sequence, a yearlong course whose syllabus integrated history, philosophy, and literature, from Greek antiquity to high modernism, all to be taught by a team of faculty. The philosophy professor had hair down his back, wore a white turtleneck with a large medallion on a chain, and insisted that we take our shoes off and sit in a circle on the floor because "that's how the Greeks did it." The literature professor had just arrived, having received his PhD at twenty-four, and he liked to have us over to his apartment to listen to the Pachelbel Canon and talk about the books. We'd sit on his Goodwill furniture and drink white wine, and one time, when I wanted to impress him with my understanding of Greek theater, I got up and looked around and found him in the kitchen talking to one of the girls about his father's having been a Hungarian amba.s.sador, and as she bent down I quietly turned and left and could never listen to Pachelbel again.

And as the snow fell in Connecticut, I would repeat the chorus of Aristophanes's Frogs, brik-kik-kik-kax, koax, koax, louder and louder just to see if I could get the image of that kitchen out of my mind. One morning I stepped out of the communal bathroom in the dorm to see a young man standing there, stark naked in the hallway, his blond hair falling over his eyes, his right hand brus.h.i.+ng it up in a movement so natural and fluid that I thought, does he actually know he's naked. He caught my eye and stuck his hand out and said, half with a shrug and half with a toss of his head like Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, "I'm Billy. I came here to act."

I didn't even know there was a theater department.

"There isn't."

In his room, wearing a silk robe and holding a burning cigarette (which he never brought to his lips), he laid out his plan to stage The Importance of Being Earnest. Billy would be Algernon, and he'd pull the cast together. He had the costumes already, of course, and the biggest challenge would be getting people here to memorize their lines, but he had worked with worse. I'd done some acting, I began, but he brushed me off with a bit of cigarette ash that arced its way into my lap.

"No, no, no. You have to understand. I'm looking for talent."

For the next three weeks, Billy would leave the dorm, crunching across the rimy lawns in a straw boater and a candy-striped jacket, twitching his hand like he was conducting an orchestra of frogs, reciting all the parts from The Importance of Being Earnest to himself. I never saw him go to cla.s.s, but by the end of term he had cast the play and got the s.p.a.ce-the library and lounge of one of the departments. He'd found a boy, even more handsome than himself, for Jack Worthing; a quiet, overweight girl for Lady Bracknell; two women who, to this day, I'm a.s.suming were paid escorts as Gwendolen and Cecily; a lecturer with a British accent to play Chasuble; and as Miss Prism, a tall, dark-haired soph.o.m.ore with a face out of a Lewis Carroll photograph, whose name was Merle k.u.mmer.

There were no posters, no announcements, no calls. Somehow, we knew to a.s.semble at 10 p.m. in the College of Letters Lounge. There must have been a hundred of us from the dorms, from cla.s.ses, from Billy's school in DC, and, too, there was the Hungarian. There was no stage, no curtain, and no furniture. Billy strode into the center of the room, cleared a s.p.a.ce, and the play began.

He ate the cuc.u.mber sandwiches with an aplomb that showed that he'd been eating them all his life, and when he spoke to Algernon's manservant, Lane, it was with an ease that must have come from living with a household staff. The first act brought out Ernest and Lady Bracknell, and the quiet, overweight girl found her voice behind makeup and costume that had made her unrecognizable to her cla.s.smates. We sat, rapt, listening to Algernon on Bunburying-on how his character traveled from city to country, acting out different lies, different personae-and to Ernest revealing that he was Jack in the country, and then to Lady Bracknell, who, upon interrogating Ernest about his having lost his parents, turned to the audience and intoned: "Both? To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune-to lose both seems like carelessness." We howled, and when Ernest revealed that he was found in a handbag, her incredulous intonation-a handbag?-turned this young girl into the very essence of dragonhood.

We couldn't wait through intermission, clamoring for the next act, and then the next. We nodded in our undergraduate self-knowingness as Cecily explained that she could only love someone with the name of Ernest. We held our breath for Jack and Ernest to reveal themselves as one, for Cecily and Gwendolen to fall in love again, for Miss Prism to reveal that it was her bag, that she was writing a three-volume novel, that she was the governess of long ago. Prism! Lady Bracknell called, and Merle k.u.mmer sidled across the stage, her face a mask of late-Victorian humiliation, and we all applauded.

The genius of a great performance is to get you to imagine yourself in it. I looked around the room and saw the Chasubles and Prisms, the girls who would grow up into Aunt Augusta, and I saw how they looked on, mouthing the words of the play, seeing themselves in character. I looked at all the handsome boys, some of them still in prep-school penny loafers and crewneck sweaters, others in denim work s.h.i.+rts and barefoot. I looked at Billy, beaming at his great theatrical success, mugging at the lines and twitching joyously at every laugh. But this was not my play. I thought of you and Mom, playing in Blithe Spirit, The Rivals, The Odd Couple; tried hard to see you on the makes.h.i.+ft stage. And I imagined you both, at the play's end, turning as Jack and Gwendolen turn to each other: JACK: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?

GWENDOLEN: I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.

That night, we sat in Billy's room, replaying all the scenes, drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes, and miming all the accents. But when I tried to play, Billy just looked at me. "The line is immaterial," each word transformed from its original into a slight so deep that I thought I would never heal.

My first semester ended in the winter of the oil embargo, and the campus turned down the heat in every building to save money. January intercession had been canceled, spring semester would start late, and we prepared for an unantic.i.p.ated stretch of six weeks back at home. Some of the boys were going to Florida, or to Europe, but I was getting ready to head back to Pittsburgh, looking for a ride to Bradley Field and the Allegheny Airlines flight. Two nights away, and we were packing up, talking about the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War that autumn. A few of our cla.s.smates had left that October, flown to Israel on a day's notice, claimed right of return, and enlisted in the army. At least one was dead. We talked about whether we should have done that, and I looked around at boys whose names were only shards of Jewish selves: Larry, Jon, Mark, Bill; Green, Fink, Ross, Coplon. One of the boys admitted that his parents had been Jewish, but he'd never been Bar Mitzvahed, never studied Torah, didn't even know the prayers. The RA-a blunt senior who had spent the whole fall studying for his LSATs-stood up and announced, "Well then, we'll have to give you a Bar Mitzvah now! Lerer, you're in charge. Get the gear, I'll get the book." The RA banged on everybody's door and woke them up-"Get up, Bar Mitzvah in ten minutes!" I went into the bathroom and dislodged a roll of toilet paper, strung it out and pulled off three foot sections, draped them around everybody's shoulders, and drew blue lines with my ballpoint on the ends. We put on any hat we had-furred ones with ear flaps, an old man's fedora, Billy's straw boater-and at one in the morning we a.s.sembled at the head of the dorm's hall, the nineteen-year-old Bar Mitzvah boy, the RA, and me, all in our toilet-paper tallises.

Bar'chu et Adonai hamevorach Baruch Adonai hamevorach le'olam va'ed Baruch atah Adonai, Elohenu melech ha'olam, Asher bachar banu mikol ha'amim Venatan lanu et torato, Baruch atah Adonai Notayn hatorah Someone pulled out a Bible, and we got the Bar Mitzvah boy to read the pa.s.sage I had read for my own Bar Mitzvah five years before: the story of how Abram became Abraham, the story of G.o.d's covenant with the Jews, the lessons of the circ.u.mcision. He read in English and I remembered the Hebrew then as precisely as I remember it now: V'yehi Avram, ben tis.h.i.+m shana, v'tesha shanim. V'yerah adonai, el Avram, v'yomer elav: Ani el shaddai, hit haleach l'fanai, v'hiyea tamim.

And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Lord thy G.o.d; walk before me and be perfect.

We called each of the boys up for an aliyah, and I renamed all of them: Greenberg and Finkelstein and Rosenbloom and Kaplowitz; Lebel and Yankel and Mendel and Velvel. They doubled over as I blessed them in their toilet-paper tallises and earflaps. By now the noise of celebration had roused the floor above us, where the girls lived, and they came down in their Lanz nightgowns and Dr. Scholl's sandals. One girl, who had grown up in Barbados, ran upstairs and came back down with a couple of bottles of red wine and half a dozen oranges and a wash-bucket, and she poured the wine and cut up the oranges to make sangria, which we pa.s.sed around and drank in sacramental service. On the sidelines, Billy stood there, in his silk robe and lit cigarette, and when I paused to look him in the eye, he took a drag and said, "I'm told my father was a Jew."

As the ceremony drew to its close and we had made that night another Jewish man, the girls turned to me and said, Sing something Jewis.h.!.+ The sangria bucket was empty and wine-red flecks bled into the blue lines on the tallises, and they turned to me, and even Billy c.o.c.ked his head. And thinking of the only song I knew, the song you sang on car rides and in restaurants, the song that made us clap along, I sang: Az der Rebbe Elimelech Iz gevoren zeyer freylach Iz gevoren zeyer freylach Elimelech Hot er oysgeton di tfilen Un hot ongeton di brilen Un geschikt nokh di fiddler drey.

I mimed the lines, becoming giddy as I took off my tallis, replaced my gla.s.ses, and called at the end: Where are my fiddlers three? Lebel, Yankel, and Mendel turned on their heels and bent their knees and mimed their fiddling, dancing and twitching, and I kept on singing: Un az di fiddledike fiddlen Hobn fiddledike fidlen Hobn fiddledike fidlen hobn zey And as the snow fell in Connecticut, the cinder-block hall ruptured into one of Chagall's roofs, and green with wash-bucket sangria we danced.

That winter break, I wandered around Pittsburgh, looking into bookstores near the university, driving past my high school haunts. My grades came in the mail: B's all around. Seems that I simply didn't get the purpose of this great books program; seems that I didn't understand just what it meant to "keep a journal" in these cla.s.ses. Keep a journal, said the Hungarian. Maybe the other kids had gone to schools where the phrase meant something like, write personal, sensitive essays on the books we're reading, type them up, and hand them in, but to me it meant scribble down what you are thinking when you think it. I wrote about The Importance of Being Earnest and the Bar Mitzvah. I wrote about how alone I was and how I thought that you were seeing someone else, and what did Mom think. I wrote of how I showered in the evenings in the gym, afraid of running into Billy. I don't know what my teachers made of this, but they seemed as baffled at me as I was with them. It was six weeks before second semester would begin, and all my high school friends were back at their own college campuses by early January. By then, you were off on business trips again, though there was that one evening when you stayed for dinner. Mom made the shrimp dish that I liked and the big salad with the Green G.o.ddess dressing. She was too exhausted to eat. You were, as you reminded us, "cutting back," and my brother, who was fourteen, had spent that year eating nothing but SpaghettiOs. So I was left to eat the whole meal by myself. At one point you looked me right in the eye and said, "Have you thought about a sport?"

A sport? I'd done nothing athletic in high school, managing at one point to get out of senior gym cla.s.s all together with a doctor's note that Mom had forged. Wesleyan was hardly a sports school-the football team hadn't had a winning season in years, and a bunch of students were pet.i.tioning for ultimate Frisbee as a letter-eligible activity. As far as I knew, the only sport that mattered around campus was women's field hockey, and that was largely out of the desire to watch eighteen-year-olds at this newly coed college run around in tartan skirts with sticks. Then there was the crew. I'd seen them in the autumn, rowing on the Connecticut River in the afternoons, curly-haired white boys rippling out of a Thomas Eakins painting.

Sure. I'll sign up for crew.

I called the athletic department and was told that training would begin a week before the term. I packed my books and records and my clothes and got a plane, got Mom to drive me to the airport, and flew to Bradley Field and paid a taxi forty dollars to drive me to Middletown. The dorm was closed up and unheated, but I managed to get let in by a pa.s.sing janitor. I still had my room key, and I threw my stuff down. Then I thought: I'd never rowed a boat.

The crew was filled with boys who had been rowing since they were thirteen. Kent, Choate, Andover-all the prep schools had teams, and these boys came to it as naturally as I came to complaining. There was no chance of getting in a boat. But the coach looked me up and down and said, "What do you weigh?" I shaved a little off. One-thirty. "Drop ten pounds and you can be the c.o.x of the lightweight boat."

I spent the first weeks of the semester losing weight, talking to students about just what a c.o.x did, and running down whatever I could find about how the sh.e.l.ls worked, what an ergometer was, and how I was supposed to steer the boat. I'd hang out in the boat house, looking at the pictures of the crews from past years, all the way back to the 1880s. There were the boys, looking much older than I looked, I thought, in striped jerseys and big mustaches, posing with the oars. Each year the mustaches got smaller, the parts in their hair inched from the middle to the side, and the boys seemed younger, until by the 1920s they were totally clean-shaven, posed in profile with the oars, looking altogether like the casting call for a Noel Coward play.

I bought a sweat suit and wore it constantly, imagining that I could sweat the pounds off. Afternoons, I'd be at the Nautilus, pus.h.i.+ng the lead weights with my legs. I skipped lunches, trying to imagine what would help me shed the weight the fastest way possible. One day, I ate nothing but prunes. By mid-February I weighed one twenty-four.

The c.o.xswain is the only person facing forward in a scull. His primary responsibility is to steer the boat. In our sh.e.l.ls, there were wires soldered to the rudder, and I held one in each hand, pulling to move the rudder and direct the boat. The c.o.x's job, as well, is to call out the stroke, keep up the pace, and urge the rowers on. A sh.e.l.l's speed is measured in the strokes per minute. Thirty-two is a good clip; thirty-six, and we pulled a wake. To keep the stroke, I had a stopwatch tied with string over my right thigh. The coach taught me to count the strokes over thirty seconds, and then multiply by two. I'd call out, "pull, pull, pull," and with each word the eight boys facing me would pull deep on their oars, then lift them out of the water at the stroke's end, turn them so that the blade shot back flat over the surface, and then turn them back so that they caught the water just below the surface for another pull. The really good oarsmen would know just how deep to set the blade, maximizing pull and minimizing drag. They'd know just how to twist the oar to get the blade up (this was known as feathering). Watching a really good eight, you'd see them seamlessly working as one, pulling and feathering, moving the boat forward in a perfect skim, breathing together.