Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love And Theater Part 4

It was sheep's blood, and it was Drifa's job to cook it. Drifa, "snow drift," I thought, as she put her snowy hands into the thick, coagulated mess, palmed it by gobs into a pot, and heated it on the stove. She stirred in oatmeal, milk, a little salt and sugar, and it bubbled and popped. She let it cool, then spooned it into cheesecloth bags, tied them up, and let them dry. That night, she took the bags, now looking like bloodied mozzarella cheese, and put them in a pot of boiling water, poaching them out. She served them up, sliced into rings, with boiled potatoes. I bit in, surprised at how grainy the blood sausages were, gritty against my teeth. The family ate in silence.

Last meals, last ch.o.r.es. I said good-bye to Midnight, packed my things, and took a bath. I dressed, and found Solveg in the kitchen. All the men and the girls were in the fields, but they wanted me to know how much they liked me and how much they wished me well. Then she reached into her vast knitting bag and pulled out a turtleneck sweater. She had been knitting it the whole time I was there, just for me. It had white bands and brown bands across it, not dyed but the natural color of the wool. There were no seams, as she had knitted it on circular needles, making, in effect, great tubes of wool. I put my bags down, took the sweater, and pulled it on. It fit perfectly. How did you know my size, I asked, in English, and whether or not she understood me she put her palms flat against my chest and then against my sides and said, also in English, "I looked." And then she kissed me, and I took the bus ten hours back to Reykjavik, to stay with Jonas one more day, then fly back to New York and then to Pittsburgh before going back to Oxford in September.

The second year at Oxford, I did little else but dream. Mig dreymi, I dreamed. The verb is a reflexive one, with the subject only implied. Mig dreymi, literally, "it dreamed to me." I'd fall asleep across my 1930s divan, or on chairs in the Bodleian Library, feeling the scratch of Solveg's undyed wool around my neck. And it would dream to me of Anna-Solveg and her petulance, of Drifa and the blood sausages. I'd silently mouth all the sentences I'd memorized: eg er nmsmar eg er Gyyingur eg elska Islands eg elska ig And when I could not sleep, I'd walk across the colleges to where my rich friend lived, and I would entertain his courtiers like a skald. I'd wear my sweater, and I'd tell them all about the phone that was so old you had to crank it up and call up Central, about the little horse I'd learned to ride, about the driftwood, about the rain, about the hay, and about Anna-Solveg, and when the mood was right, I'd climb the roof-beam and mime sawing the end.

SEVEN.

Upriver I was still sitting at his desk, the phone down, his Ghurka address book still lying nearby. I thought of calling Mom back, thought of everything, but then got up and looked around. Pictures were everywhere. He'd carefully framed sepias of his mother and his aunts, his father at a table playing poker with a cousin. And then the pictures of himself: at two, bundled in a woolen hat and scarf; at five, in short pants and a Buster Brown haircut; at thirteen, in the tallis and the yarmulke of the Bar Mitzvah; and then in the army, with his relatives, with me, with my brother, with my wife and son. There was no picture taken after 1925 that didn't have him in it, and I picked them up from side tables and countertops, turning them in my hands like they were stelae from a tomb. I found my own Bar Mitzvah picture, and then drawers of photo alb.u.ms: Dad and me at my college graduation; Dad and me in the courtyard of my Oxford college; Dad and me in Chicago, when I got my PhD; and Dad at my wedding, with a sheaf of flowers in one hand, his other hand spread out, and his mouth caught in midlaugh, as if to say, can you believe he found her?

I had.

We met on the first day of graduate school. I was sitting in the lounge at Harper Hall when she came in with boxes of books, a small TV set, and a carton of kitchenware. I held the elevator for her, peering into the splitting carton to see knives and forks, plates, a few pans, and a corkscrew. Later that afternoon, I walked by her open door to find her neatly setting books along the only shelf provided: Derrida's De la grammatologie, the Romances of Chretien de Troyes, a set of French plays, and a large, yellow hardback of Hans Kng's On Being a Christian.

Hey.

Hey.

I walked in without being asked and went over to the bookshelf. As she unpacked, I fingered the spines, moving from top to bottom of the English books and from bottom to top along the French. I pulled down the Kng, and opened it at random.

The author will reject no suggestion which may help to make his meaning clear. To this extent all doors remain open to greater truth.

"You into Jesus?" I ventured.

"Oh, I've just been doing a lot of thinking."

Me, too, I said, and didn't see her for a week.

That first weekend of school, one of the older graduate students in the dorm suggested that we all go to the top of the John Hanc.o.c.k Building downtown. There was a bar on the ninety-fifth floor, and he got it in his head that we'd all drive in to the city, take the elevator up, and drink till we closed the place down.

"Top of the John," I ventured, trying to be witty.

"Top of the 'c.o.c.k," he fired back.

Five or six of us piled into his little Honda for the drive, and the sight of us-humanities graduate students at the University of Chicago, dressed in our only suits and ties, or dresses and heels-must have made pa.s.sersby think of us as a circus act. I hardly recognized the girl I hadn't helped move in. She wore a purple, belted dress; her hair was beautifully done; and she had lipstick on. There wasn't room for all of us to have our own seat in the car, and so I sat in the front seat and she sat on my lap. I looked at her and thought (or may even have said aloud), "You really are pretty."

That winter, more snow fell in Chicago than anyone could recall. The streets remained unplowed, especially in Hyde Park (which had long been an "independent" ward and, therefore, got few city services). By January, we were walking from the dorm to campus over snowpack as high as the roofs of the parked cars, and every now and then, an antenna would poke through, or we'd sc.r.a.pe along a battered sunroof. We traveled in packs: ill-fitted students from the Midwest and the east coast, terrified of Hyde Park's reputation in the late 1970s, constantly looking over our shoulders even in daylight.

On Sundays we would sit in the dorm, eating take-out Chinese food or fried chicken, and I saw her, with her knife and fork, cutting up the chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s that the rest of us were eating with our fingers. One Sunday, I went out to Ribs and Bibs, a few blocks from the dorm, with money from the group to buy a full-size bucket, and as I stood in line-smelling the hickory wood, the vinegar, the ketchup, watching how they stacked up pieces of white bread at the bucket's bottom, just to soak up all the grease, counting the chicken pieces tossed in with the tongs-a cop car screeched to a halt outside and two policemen threw themselves out, one of them reaching for his gun and the other yelling, "He's in Ribs and Bibs!" I threw a twenty on the counter, grabbed my bucket, and ran out the back. I wondered just who they were looking for-n.o.body in the line looked arrest-worthy, and by the prison tattoos on the guy who served the chicken, I figured he had done his time. Maybe someone was hiding in the kitchen. Maybe someone was in the closet. I ran all the way back to the dorm, puffing in the winter air, holding the hot bucket to my chest, until I blew into the building, ran to the kitchen, and broadcast, "Listen to this." After I told the story, there was silence, and one of the students said, "Maybe they were looking for you."

To be a student at Chicago in those years was to share in the myths of intellect. Giants had walked the earth-Robert Hutchins, Enrico Fermi, Harold Urey, Saul Bellow, Milton Friedman-and the English department prided itself on the legacy of the "Chicago Critics," a group of scholars who took shape in the decades around the Second World War and who formulated, more by accident than by design, a view of literature that stressed the formal understanding of the verbal work, the nature of genre, and a sense of literary understanding grounded largely in the Poetics of Aristotle. Most of the old Chicagoans were dead. Some of their students were professors in The Department. But there remained a group of grad students who'd stayed on, half-believing that Richard McKeon would come out of retirement and teach again, or that Norman Maclean would decamp from his Montana retreat and approve their half-finished theses. These were men in their forties who remembered long-retired faculty as vigorous professors, men who talked about Samuel Johnson's Ra.s.selas as if it were the model for all prose fiction, men who believed that if you just read a book hard enough, if you just paid attention closely, if you just listened, then no critical response was even necessary.

At the beginning of my second year, I took my general exams. I put on a tie, walked into the examination room, and faced the three professors. They welcomed me, looked at my list, and then Wayne Booth-in a white turtleneck and blue blazer, with his deep white beard, looking like Moses in Johnny Carson's clothing-began: "Tell me about the final line of, oh, Great Expectations." And I parried, "I saw no shadow of another parting from her." And he said, OK, how about the last line of Hopkins's "The Windhover," and I replied, "Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion." For thirty minutes, he tried to trip me: Bellow's Herzog, the Middle English Sawles Warde, Otway's Venice Preserved. I'd managed, over the summer, to read so deeply and so pa.s.sionately in all my books, paid close attention so hard, that I'd virtually memorized the texts. I don't think we discussed anything at that exam, but as the other examiners looked on, Professor Booth and I traded quotations until, after an hour or so, he asked how well did I know Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, and I said, "Better than my own Bar Mitzvah portion." And to please him, I recited the beginning: At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer from Cantebrigge, Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, And then I said, you see, it's all about that little river and the mill and how the narrative flows in the s.p.a.ce of time, and there's the Thames, which Chaucer had to cross to get to Southwark and the Tabard Inn, and, of course, you know how the tale responds to the Miller's-a tale all about water, and the flood, and the fear of being drowned not just in life but in language-and then I said, "and the whole thing ends with a proverb": And therefor this proverbe is seyd ful sooth, 'Hym thar nat wene wel that yvele dooth.'

A gylour shal hymself bigyled be.

And G.o.d, that sitteth heighe in magestee, Save al this compaignye, grete and smale!

Thus have I quyt the Millere in my tale.

And he said, more like Moses than like Johnny, "I don't think we need any more. It's traditional for the candidate to step out of the room for the committee to discuss his performance, but in this case I can tell you that you pa.s.sed. Congratulations." And he stood up, pulled his notes together like he was gathering the tablets, and strode out of the room, leaving me and the other two examiners in mute amazement.

Terms pa.s.sed. The girl I met the first day went to dinner with me, once and then again, and soon I was sitting in her room, watching Sat.u.r.day Night Live on her black-and-white TV, leaving a clean pair of underwear in her drawer. Some time in winter quarter, Hans Kng disappeared from her bookshelf. In August, we moved in together.

I read furiously, took my seminars, and put together a hundred-and-forty-seven page dissertation on debate and dialogue in medieval poetry. Still riding on the fame of my oral, I convinced my examiners to pa.s.s the dissertation, got them to write letters for my applications, and two and a half years after entering the PhD program, I interviewed for and received a job offer at Princeton.

The Princeton English department at that time was run by a charismatic Arkansan who'd been an undergraduate at Princeton, went to Oxford on a Rhodes, and then came back to teach, get tenure, and chair the department like a small-town Southern mayor. He'd look at you and shake your hand and somehow drag your secrets out of you. He knew just who had slept with whom, who was repressed, and who was barely out. He loved to break careers, coddling fawning a.s.sistant professors right up to the vote against their tenure, and then apologizing-who knew this was coming? He announced, on the morning of my campus interview, "We tenured a woman last year," and it was unclear to me whether he was speaking out of pride or relief. He asked about my family, and I said, "My brother is a senior here." "Well. Oh, by the way, I won't be at your lecture," he announced, as if having a brother who was then a Princeton undergraduate was good enough for him, as if seeing that I wore a Brooks suit and a tie and a white s.h.i.+rt and polished wingtips and knew all about his own work (Are you still writing on Stevens? Isn't Miss Austen the most sublime of novelists? Joyce, of course, is inimitable, I slavered) was the interview itself. Just before he left me in his office, he said, almost as an afterthought, "And what will Mrs. Lerer be doing here?"

And so I asked the pretty girl who sat on my lap in the car, who'd moved in with me and made puff pastry in our apartment kitchen, who'd studied French, who came to campus with a TV and high heels and ate take-out chicken with a knife and fork, who told me stories of her California family and their St. Louis ancestry, who let me know her uncle was the most important curator of American art in the country, who told me of her mother's spinster aunts who grew up next to T. S. Eliot, and whose father, a retired marine colonel, looked exactly, when I'd met him, like Robert Duvall in The Great Santini, to marry me.

We did the wedding by ourselves. We ordered all the food, commissioned engraved announcements, and secured the services of a university Unitarian minister who promised not to use the word "G.o.d" in the service. We invited twenty-four people: my parents and my brother, her parents and her uncle and his family, her sister and her brothers, her high school best friend, my grad school buddies, and my dissertation advisors. Dad and Mom were divorced by then, but they showed up with my brother and played the parents, Dad in a dark suit and floral tie, Mom in a pearl-gray skirt and matching silk blouse. Mid-April still was brisk in Chicago, and we stood outside Bond Chapel at the university, our breath white, mingling that Sat.u.r.day morning, when my future in-laws came up. I introduced my parents and stood by, waiting for something magical to happen, as if Dad would charm them with his diction or Mom would say something adorable about me as a child, but before anything theatrical could transpire, the Great Santini grumbled, "It'll never work out." Why, Dad asked. "They're of different faiths."

The ceremony, the lunch, and the exchange of gifts pa.s.sed without further words between the sets of parents. The museum curator uncle had brought cigars for us all, and the Great Santini (whom I remember chaining them, one off another, when I visited the family in California), took one, bit the end, and lit it up like he was smoking out an infestation. Dad, who had smoked for thirty years, declined, but Mom took one, poked a little hole in the end with her fork, and held it out for me to light it. She sat there with the cigar, letting it burn but not puffing, and looked at me as if to say, "Who am I doing?" and broke into an accented song: Falling in love again, Never wanted to.

What am I to do?

Can't help it.

Mom and Dad left on different planes. My in-laws disappeared after the lunch, and we were left with Uncle and his family. I don't remember how the afternoon pa.s.sed, but by evening we were all together at the Moon Palace restaurant on Cermak, piling up moo shoo pork and Uncle talking about how we had to visit them-in New York, on Park Avenue where they had lived for twenty years, or in Connecticut, at the farm that his wife's family had owned since the 1750s. And I remembered, as he talked, what my wife had told me about him: that he had gone to Exeter and Harvard; that he'd found a wealthy Radcliffe girl and married her at nineteen; that his in-laws were descended from the most influential people in the country. I'd spent a day at Regenstein Library researching the two of them. Her father was the founding partner of a major New York law firm and the son of the president of Yale. Her mother was a society scion of a lumber baron and his Virginia Four-Hundred wife. He specialized in the paintings of the Hudson Valley School, and after a brief turn as curator at a museum in upstate New York, had secured a place at the Met, where he'd risen to chief curator of American art.

And I remembered, at that moment, that this very evening was the first night of Pa.s.sover; that it had completely slipped my mind; that I had lost track of the Jewish year; and now, on my wedding night, was eating moo shoo pork with my new aunt- and uncle-in-law, thinking, I bet I'm the poorest Jew he's ever talked to.

One evening in the early 1980s, I found myself in a rented tux at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. His wife's many cousins had a.s.sembled, along with his Harvard roommates, at a Manhattan club so exclusive that it prided itself on having spurned the current mayor of New York. I sat at a table next to the founding director of the largest optical firm in the world. His formal wear bristled with gold s.h.i.+rt studs, each in the form of a love knot, with matching cuff links and a large, gold love knot hanging from his watch chain. He showed up with a woman at least twenty years his junior, with hair dyed the color of his studs and enough jewelry to arm a battalion of escorts. At one point, somewhere between the tallowy lamb and the watery sorbet, a tall gentleman in his midseventies approached our table. His turnout was impeccable, the lapels just the right width, the peau-de-soie pumps just the right buff. Everyone at the table stopped their babbling, as his visit commanded an absolute respect. And when he came up to me personally, a s.h.i.+ver pa.s.sed along the silverware. "May I have a word, young man?"

I got up, and we walked over to a sideboard. "I understand you teach at Princeton, is that so?" Yes, it is. "And am I correctly given to understand, as well, that you are something of a scholar of the cla.s.sics, yes?" Yes. "Well, have you ever come across the work of Edward Kennard Rand?" Yes, sir, he was a professor at Harvard and one of the most important early twentieth-century figures in the study of late antiquity. He did the defining edition of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, on which I'm writing a book. You know, it's funny, but I've never heard anyone speak of . . .

"He was my undergraduate advisor."

And then he walked away, leaving me at the sideboard with my rented, plastic s.h.i.+rt studs and my unwritten book, watching him retake his seat at a table of his contemporaries like Jacob Marley dining with the dead.

The following morning, we a.s.sembled at the anniversary couple's apartment on Park Avenue for a midday meal with the visiting cousins. There, I learned that the gentleman who had approached me was a distant relative, a past president of the club, and a grandson of the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. As we a.s.sembled for drinks (this at eleven-thirty in the morning), I met relatives from the old St. Louis days, Hudson Valley squires, and my host's mother-in-law, who close up still had all the aura of the 1920s debutante she'd been and who, in conversation, sounded just like Katharine Hepburn. I sat next to her at the meal, and I looked down at the table setting as if it were on loan from the Metropolitan Museum's hall of armor. Three forks, arrayed by size, guarded the left side of the gold-rimmed china, while three knives stood at attention on the right. Above the plate sat two spoons, polished to a fineness that reflected my astonished face like a fun-house mirror. Goblets and gla.s.ses ranged across the table, and a woman in an ap.r.o.n and a doilied hat stood by the kitchen door. My head went back and forth, until it lodged before the silverware, and Uncle's mother-in-law put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Just go from the outside in, dear."

Four years later, we finally accepted her invitation to dine at her own house along the Hudson. My wife and I drove in to Manhattan from Princeton on I-95, through the bleak marshes of Elizabeth, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and then crosstown, up Third Avenue to catch the lights, and over Eighty-Eighth Street to Park. Our sad Tercel jostled among the Caddies and the BMWs, and I found a barely legal s.p.a.ce between a hydrant and a loading zone. The doorman met us at the awning of Uncle's building and showed us to the elevator, and we went up. I remembered the apartment from the anniversary-dark, paneled, with a kitchen out of 1935 and a single, black rotary phone in the hallway. A large canvas from the nineteenth century hung in the living room. A bit of American primitivism, it showed unyoked oxen, woolly sheep, and gamboling deer around a riverbank. Under its gilt frame, far too ornate for the painting, was a metal label: The Peaceable Kingdom.

Uncle was in a foul mood. Having foolishly agreed to drive us all up to his mother-in-law's, he faced the prospect of two hours in a car too cramped for his self-esteem and was already antic.i.p.ating my intrusive questions about family and work and paintings and all of the things that made them, to me, as exotic as the Mud Men of New Guinea. The last time I visited the Met, I told him as he filled a carton with the white wine we would drink at lunch, I went straight for the Michael Rockefeller room. Michael Rockefeller, I repeated. You know he disappeared while on an expedition to New Guinea. He loved to collect that crazy stuff. Those amazing wooden sculptures, with their big heads and sticklike limbs, had always captivated me. The body masks, the long boats, and the s.h.i.+elds were fascinating in their fearfulness. Ranged on the white museum walls, they stood out like alien armor; as the sound of the drum came to me in my imagination, I could hear the Asmat warriors joust against the spirits. Was that the beat that Rockefeller heard as he fell from his canoe? Was his "desire to do something adventurous"-a phrase repeated in the museum's brochure-as much an escape from his own demons as into someone else's dreams? What do you think? Do you think they really ate him?

"We were at Harvard together," was all he said.

We piled into their station wagon for the drive upriver, leaving the tangle of traffic behind us, riding through Yonkers, White Plains, and Tarrytown, past Sleepy Hollow, Hawthorne, and Thornwood to Armonk. Was.h.i.+ngton Irving country, I remarked, but the name sank like a pebble in the well of his indifference. Tell me about Aunt Bertha, I provoked, thinking that stories of the old St. Louis glory might prompt him to reminiscence.

"Aunt Bertha. Knew T. S. Eliot. Never stopped talking. Died my junior year at Harvard."

And then six beats of nothing.

"My father died when I was four, and after my mother remarried and moved us to La Jolla, I couldn't have cared. I left La Jolla because there was no culture. Old ladies keeping books out of the library. Older men building collections of bad art. Hollywood screenwriters driving down for three-day drunks. Raymond Chandler lived there. Hated it. Used to tell stories about how he would go into the public library and ask for his own books, just to irritate the librarians. I'm sure I saw him once, getting into an argument with one of those old ladies. 'Oh, you're Raymond Chandler, the writer,' she said. 'I read one of your books when I was in the hospital last year.' And then Chandler says back , 'I hope it didn't make you worse.' And then she pulls herself up. 'I wanted to throw it across the room, it made me so mad. But I didn't. There was something about the writing.' That was the thing about La Jolla-every now and then there was something about the writing, but most of the time you just felt everyone was happier not noticing.

"My sister, your mother-in-law, had to leave school to support herself, but by the time I was a teenager my parents had recovered enough to send me to Exeter and Harvard. The La Jolla schools were rotten. My brother lived through it and managed to wind up at Stanford, but I got out. Another story that pa.s.sed around was about neighbors of Chandler's sister-in-law. Seems there was a family from Kansas who moved to La Jolla and put their kids in the public school where they all got A's, even though they knew nothing and did no work. All the family talked about was how, before they came to California, the kids worked hard and got nowhere near A's.

"My stepfather's mother came from a family that had all gone to Exeter and Harvard, so they got me in. That was where I discovered art. Real American art. Not quilts or watercolors or those Shaker boxes, but great paintings. Back then, a professor would put a slide of a Frederick Church up on the screen and say, 'This is a candy box. This is what they liked in the nineteenth century.' 'Nineteenth-century' was the most pejorative term you could think of. Sure, for the most part, nineteenth-century American painting is a provincial art. It's a mixed bag. French impressionist art of the 1880s, for example, is simply superior. But I'm convinced that, at its best, American art has a beauty and emotive power that is very much its own."

I listened to a conversation that had soon become a lecture, and remembered many of his phrases from a New York Times interview he'd given just a couple of years before. "Curator of the Hour," it was t.i.tled, and it gave a story that, even in the confines of the car, he was unwilling to enhance. I waited, but he said nothing to texture the caricature of the Times: An angular man with a chiseled face and silver at the edges of his short brown hair. Behind horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, his eyes are green and direct. He wears, characteristically, three-piece suits complete with watch-fob.

I waited for his explanation of his habit, for something behind the Times's surprise that, no Eastern blueblood, in fact, he was born in Colorado, the son of an Army officer, and raised in California-small-town California at that. He remembers, as a boy, being alive to all things visual.

He'd drifted slightly into the left lane, just as a semi slung along his blind spot and blasted out a hoot that sent him overcompensating to the shoulder. He recovered, got us back into the middle of the turnpike, and his mouth closed like the panel of a mailbox. I'd half hoped he would rehash that article-relive his triumph of rehanging the famous Was.h.i.+ngton Crossing the Delaware. At nine hundred pounds, according to the Times, "it needed special brackets to support it." Once it was up, he thought it slanted to one side, and sure enough, a careful measurement of the paining showed that it was indeed a half inch lower on the right side. The painting was duly lowered and the errant bracket remounted. It seemed like quite an expense for half an inch that n.o.body else saw.

I waited, unrequited, for the story of how n.o.body had seen, as well, the value of the Twachtman that he compelled the museum to buy a dozen years before. As the Times told it, here was this "green" a.s.sistant curator, making his first pitch to the board, and asking them to buy a large landscape, Arques-la-Battaile, by the forgotten American impressionist, John Twachtman. It had, he'd told the reporter, "come right down the middle of the pike at me." The pitch was difficult, the painting odd, the board silent, the curator brand new. But that night, the director called to say the purchase had been approved. And he'd been proved right. The Twachtman, now, was esteemed as one of the great American landscapes.

The week before, I'd gone off to the Princeton Art Library to call up a reproduction of the painting, hoping for a point of conversation. It didn't seem like much to me. Some gra.s.ses crisscrossed in the foreground, while flat water stalled behind them; then a riverbank, and then a gray horizon. I thought of Michael Rockefeller on his river, swimming to the drum, the surface flecked with blood and broken spear tips. But there was nothing of that here: the color palette was washed out, as if Twachtman had drawn a sponge across the face of the water. What had the curator, as green as the river gra.s.ses, seen in it? What came right down the middle of the pike at him?

Taking the Times reporter on a tour, he stopped before the painting, now hung in a place of pride: It is only here that he stops. All around him is the cacophony of last-minute pounding, drilling, winching. It is a noise level which will never be heard here again. But he stands quite still, staring at this painting, oblivious to all. "Listen to this painting," he says. "Listen to the silence."

We drove in utter quiet for the next half hour. And I imagined him, listening for silence on a flattened canvas, no touch of lurid color to disturb the green he saw reflected in his green eyes, no drum, no song; a peaceable kingdom, clear water for a boy alive to all things in small-town California.

We pulled up to the door, and he slammed the gears.h.i.+ft into park. He opened the trunk and lifted out the carton of wine bottles like they were Howard Carter's treasure. The girl was at the door-the same one in the same ap.r.o.n and cap who had a.s.sisted at the anniversary lunch. His mother-in-law appeared from behind the library door, her eyes comically magnified by the large lenses of her post-cataract gla.s.ses. Within minutes we were in the kitchen, sitting at a little table, Uncle opening the wine, the girl fiddling with the range. The gas flame came on with a whoop, and soon the nook was filled with the competing smells of melting b.u.t.ter, canned fish, and hot cream. Working the pan with her right hand, she took two eggs out of the carton with her left, broke them over the pan and quickly s.h.i.+fted hands to whisk them in. The wine worked like a drug on him. His shoulders dropped, his belly afforded release, and a mask of pleasure fitted to his face. I tried it: sharp tints of gravel, just a touch of flower, and a puckered citrus edge. We sat. Linen napkins, repousse silver, cut crystal. The girl pulled four pieces of toast out of the oven, cut them into diagonals, and placed two on each plate. She spooned the concoction from the pot on to the toast points: creamed canned salmon, thickened with egg. Bits of pink fish floated on the yellowed sauce. Blots of brown nutmeg stained the top. And the toast points sank in the afternoon like Michael Rockefeller's dugouts.

"I understand," his mother-in-law said, as I picked at my points, "that you like books. Why don't you find your way into the library and see what you turn up." She p.r.o.nounced "library" with two syllables. By now, most of the wine was gone and I was not alone in leaving an unfinished lunch plate, so I got up and walked through the hallway to the largest room I could find filled with books. It was a quiet s.p.a.ce, well lit, facing the parkland to the rear of the house. It had jasper-green walls and embossed white figures on the wainscoting. At first, I thought it looked like Wedgwood, but then I realized that it looked exactly like the room in Kubrick's 2001, where Keir Dullea, now prematurely old, sits in his dressing gown to have his food. I couldn't tell, at first, in what order the books were shelved, but then saw that they were ordered by their size: large folios flat on the bottom, then the quartos, octavos, and duodecimos. Not all were old, but none looked read. I took down a blue-bound copy of The Education of Henry Adams, to find Henry Stimson's bookplate on the inside cover: Stimson, secretary of war to two presidents, Hoover's secretary of state, supervised production of the bomb. There was a story around Princeton, told by the remaining Oppenheimer cronies, that Stimson crossed off Kyoto as a target because he remembered the city from his honeymoon (the bomb went, instead, to Nagasaki). I opened another, a late eighteenth-century Cicero, and found here the bookplate of Elias Boudinot.

That fall, I had been named the Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton. An honor reserved, so they told me, for the junior faculty they hoped to tenure, the preceptors.h.i.+p gave a.s.sistant professors an extra year's leave, a research account, and a t.i.tle. When I received the letter telling me about the award, I flipped to the back pages of the Princeton Register to see its history.

In memory of Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, and Trustee, 17721821 19501951 A. Warren, Jr., English 19541954 A. Warren, Jr., English 19581961 A. A. Sicroff, Modern Languages 19611964 C. F. Brown, Comparative Literature 19671970 O. R. Young, Politics 19701973 S. Molloy, Romance Languages and Literatures 19731976 S. A. Barnett, Anthropology I knew S. Lerer, English, would go underneath, along with the dates, 19841987. The year I got it, I would read myself to sleep over the Princeton Register, scanning the lists of everyone who had ever had a preceptors.h.i.+p, imagining my name among those of my senior colleagues and the well-known dead, then turning pages to read off the lists of chaired professors, reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century, and imagining myself among them.

Elias Boudinot. Like Henry Stimson, he had been a distant relative of my host. I reached for another book, by Boudinot himself: The Age of Revelation. Foxed page after page of turbid prose fell through my fingers. Instead of reading it, I smelled it, and it had that rich, dark smell of leather, damp, with insect leavings. I sat in one of the stuffed chairs and turned the pages, scanning, first, for anything of interest, then, as I tired, for my own name. A hundred pages in, I found it: "the children of Seth distinguished from the children of Cain, by the appellation of the sons of G.o.d." I looked for the word "Jew" and found it: "the Jew for his darling partiality to his own nation and ceremonial law." I sat there like an adolescent with his first unabridged dictionary, looking for the dirty words, just to see them in print to prove that they exist. I looked for the word "love": . . . and to the studious, contemplative philosopher, who, pursuing the plastic hand of nature through all the streams of pure benevolence and love, hath been led, with astonishment and surprise, to the inexhaustible ocean there . . .

I fell asleep but did not dream. The book slipped from my hand, dropped on the floor, and woke me up. My wife came in and said that it was time to go, the afternoon was at an end, and our host had to take her nap. I put the book back, almost telling her of my discovery, but held my tongue. We all drove back to Manhattan in silence, down the Hudson, with the Sunday traffic streaming back into the city, our windows up against the exhaust fumes.

EIGHT.

Kaddish I woke up in Dad's apartment, holding the pictures from my wedding. The week's rain had tapered off, and I got up and went into his bathroom to throw water on my face before the drive back down the peninsula. The bathroom was as old and as original as the apartment's kitchen: checkerboard tiles, old double faucets, the H and the C worn down to shadows on the white enamel handles. As if to brighten it all up, he'd hung an oversize poster of Marilyn Monroe over the toilet. It showed only her face, the outlines merely suggested in black, but the lips full, deep red, and barely parted. I turned my back to it and washed my face, half expecting it to disappear when I reopened my eyes. But there it was, filling the mirror as I raised my head, her lips the only color in the room.

The week after he died pa.s.sed like someone else's play. I must have slept and eaten, hugged my son and kissed my wife, but nothing stayed with me. I canceled one cla.s.s but returned for the next to find my students ranged around the table, each with a card and an embrace. One of the students presented me with an over-large bouquet of flowers. Her mother was from the island of St. Lucia, and she often came to cla.s.s in Caribbean floral prints. That day, she'd broken off one of the blooms in the bouquet and put it in her hair behind her ear. And as she greeted me, her eyes filled with tears, she was as beautiful as if she'd been one of Miranda's daughters on that dark island.

I don't remember what we talked about that day. I do remember that I let them all write final papers on topics of their own choosing-just make sure you use the theoretical materials we read in cla.s.s, and locate your a.n.a.lyses in the broader arc of the key themes of the course: memory and authority, citation and quotation, gender and interpretation, signification and commodity. For the remaining weeks, we met to discuss their projects; I read rough drafts, held extended office hours. When they came in, it was like transcriptions of telepathy. Each student knew just what to say to p.r.i.c.k my attention. One wrote about Poe's "Purloined Letter" and the hunt for meaning. Another wrote about the Russian poems she had listened to in childhood, read by emigre parents. Another noted that the first words she had ever written, as a five-year-old, were "cat, dog, zoo," and then she spun out a reflection on how these three words encompa.s.sed all of literary understanding, binaries of cats and dogs, literary history as a zoo, each author caged for our amus.e.m.e.nt. The student with the flowers wrote about Agatha Christie's Body in the Library and Virginia Woolf: how women shape narratives out of household life, how cla.s.s and culture mattered to the English, how the reader is a body in the library.

Were they so brilliant that they intuited all my interests? Or was I so transparent that every cla.s.s became an essay in self-understanding? Were they out to please me, or to get the grade? Was there anything more than duty in those flowers? Poor man, I thought, my library was dukedom large enough.

By the end of the term, I'd called the friends, ordered the food, and set the date for the memorial at our home in Los Altos. We pulled down everything on the living room walls and put up his pictures, and as guests arrived I pointed out Larry in all his different roles. Here's the photograph at four, in the Buster Brown haircut and short pants. Here's the Bar Mitzvah portrait, in his yarmulke and tallis. Here are the wedding pictures-look how skinny he is, and look how radiant Mom is. Here are the pictures from his plays: Dracula, the Impresario, the Pasha, Tubal. And over here, the head-shot he commissioned when he moved to San Francisco, looking for a part. Finally, on the table by the guest book, there's the last photograph. I don't know who took it, but he's sitting in a nut-brown leather jacket, mouth half-open, as if trapped in midspell.

Forty people came, many of whom I had never seen before. There were his friends from San Francisco, each accompanied by a woman just for the occasion (this is, after all, the suburbs, my wife had said). Some students from the fifties showed up. One of them, now the film producer I had heard so much about, showed up in a lemon-yellow rented Mustang and a six-day beard. Another of them had been one of my first babysitters. A couple who had worked the summer camps with Mom and Dad came, too. And his hairdresser, who had retired to Florida, had flown in on the red-eye just for this event.

And Mom. There she was, in pearl-gray slacks and a silk blouse, shaking hands and hugging people she had not seen in forty years. She was gracious to all the men, smiled at their escorts, and played with her eleven-year-old grandson on the carpet. She had already met my colleague, the Shakespearean, years before I presented Dad to him, and I asked him to the ceremony, thinking he would understand. His boyfriend had died just a few months before, and he was lonely, listless, underweight. My mother found him.

"Oh, my dear, it's so good to see you."

"h.e.l.lo, Renee."

"Seth tells me you've had your own loss. I'm so sorry. How are you holding up?"

"I'm all right. You know, things are hard."

"Yes, I know. Azoy geht es. Or, as you would have said on the Upper East Side, c'est la vie."

And then she popped a crab cake in her mouth and found her seat.

I'd pieced together a memorial out of prayers I found in books on Jewish mourning. I built a library of sorrow on my desktop and planned a service based on prayers I'd never heard him say. I blessed him in a language he would barely have commanded. One of my guidebooks limned a service for me, defining the loved one's pa.s.sing in "a final breath" and stressing that Jewish law encouraged "brevity in funerals." I wanted it as short as he would have liked it. High Holidays came back to me. We would sit on the benches and before the rabbi even started, flip to the end of the section in the prayer book, calculating just how long we would have to spend in temple. Pa.s.sover Seders bubbled up, as we'd speed through the Haggadah before the roasted chicken. The book I liked best was encouraging: a service should be just "a chance to say some words." But brevity was not finality: "Jews continue to talk with the dead."

That must be why I became a college professor, I said at the ceremony. For many years, I told his friends, I've been a scholar of the past. I've written books about medieval and Renaissance literature, about legacies of academic life, about the histories of words and their p.r.o.nunciation. Most recently, I've focused on the history of childhood. Children have learned how to read and write by memorizing alphabets, by imitating sounds and letter forms, by attending to great initials in their Bibles or their Psalters or their history books. Children and literacy come together, as boys and girls learn to read not just books but people, things, experience. A child, wrote one seventeenth-century churchman, "is a man in small letter," and "his father hath writ him as his own little story."

I was my father's little letter (I continued), and I tried to learn his language and his stories. At night, he would tell me fairy tales: "Rumplestiltskin," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." Like all great fairy tales, they were about discovery, remembering, and forgetting. How often in nightmares we sit down to tests having not studied, or forget our lines as the curtain opens. Children's stories, much like childhood itself, brim with neglected tasks, lost talismans, long-faded rituals; with characters who can't remember, who misstep in their roles or forget who they are. Never forget. Children's books teach an art of memory by ill.u.s.trating figures of its failure.

I gave my eulogy more as a lecture than a lament. The teacher in me came out, and I pulled out lesson notes.

When I was four (I said), Dad would lull me to sleep with "Rumplestiltskin." Each night he would begin with the fair miller's daughter who could, so her father bragged, spin straw into gold. He would tell me how the king heard about her gift, and how he coerced her into spinning for him. One night, as she sat fearful of being found out, a little man appeared out of nowhere. He spun the straw into gold for her and, as repayment, asked for her necklace; the next night for her ring; the third night for her firstborn child. She agreed, and the king soon married her. Years later, when her son was born, the little man came to claim his due. This time he made another deal with the distraught queen: if she could guess his name, he would relent. She made guesses, and so did we.

Each night, Dad and I would go through scores of names, from the familiar to the mad: Charles, James, John; then names of friends and relatives-Sam, Sid, Norman, Sy; and then the Yiddish names, like incantations from a distant magic-Chaim, Lebbel, Mendel, Menasha, Velvel. The queen kept guessing, too, and eventually she sent a messenger in search of the little man. This messenger came upon a campfire with a ring of little men. And in the middle, in the very fire, was the imp, dancing and singing, "Rumplestiltskin is my name!" So, when the little man came back and asked, "What's my name?" the queen said, "Rumples-tiltskin." And he stamped his foot so hard he drove it into the ground, and then he picked himself up by his other leg and tore himself in half.

This was my favorite bedtime story, I went on, and as I tell it to you now, I know I was his firstborn and that he was so afraid of losing me, and I was so afraid of losing him, and so, in the bedroom that I soon would share with my new, baby brother, we would sing our songs and play with names.

And at that moment, though I had said nothing, I knew why my brother was not there, why he refused to share in Larry's ceremony, why Dad had favored me. I broke the tension and my own regret by saying that it was traditional, as I understood things, for family and friends to say a few words about the deceased, and if anyone wished to speak, we'd all be glad to hear it.

Right away, the man who showed up in the lemon-yellow Mustang, the producer who was once, nearly fifty years before, a student in his ninth-grade cla.s.s, stood up.

"The thing that I remember about Larry is his socks. The first day of ninth grade he showed up-the teacher, in a corduroy suit and a bow tie and these purple socks. Who wore purple socks? I'll never forget it. He stood up and he told us he was going to teach us something about English literature whether we liked it or not. I don't remember a thing he said. But I'll never forget those socks. Larry was great. Even when I was working in Hollywood, I always made time for him. Let him use my place in LA, the one in Bolinas, too. It's funny, he always used to think I'd get him into pictures. I loved him like a father, but he was no actor."

Another man stood up, a member of the same ninth-grade cla.s.s, the man who was my babysitter the year I was born.

"I'll never forget the day Larry took me for my driving test. My dad had a Plymouth Ventura, and it was a pouring rainstorm, and you know in those days they tested you on the hand signals. Even if the car had directionals, you had to stick your hand out to signal left, and then do this bent thing with your elbow if you were going right, and then the opposite way if you were going to stop. So there we were, lining up in the car for the test. I was eighteen, and Larry was sitting in the pa.s.senger seat having a cigarette, like we were going to a movie. It was my turn, and I pulled up to the white line and began. It was pouring rain, and I had to have the window open the whole way to do the hand signals. By the time I'd done half the course, I was soaked, and by the time the test was over there was a little puddle down by the pedals. I pa.s.sed, and Larry was great; we went out for an egg cream afterward at Garfield's. Years later, when he went into the hospital for his hernia operation, I felt I had to pay him back, so I drove him to the hospital that morning.

"Seth, you'll remember the day we went out in the boat. You couldn't have been more than six, and Larry and I and my niece, who was about your age, all drove down to the harbor in Canarsie, and we rented a little motor boat. I don't know what Larry had in mind, but I remember the guy at the rental dock looking very funny at us-two guys, two kids. We got in, and I remember how you sat up at the prow and liked to feel the spray on your face. Larry pulled the throttle out full, and we sped along, past tugboats and sailboats, and then he cut around to bring us back and he probably lost control, and we wound up stuck on a sandbar near the sh.o.r.e. The outboard motor had stalled out, and the propeller was jammed in the sand. And Larry took off his mocs and rolled up his pants and got in the water, it was up to his knees, and he squished through the sand to try to get the propeller unstuck. He pushed and the boat moved a little, and he stood back and said, fire it up. So I pulled the cord and the motor started, and I turned the lever to engage the prop and the thing just whined and spun and jerked up out of the sand and flipped itself up on the balance bearing of the engine mount. There was this propeller in the air, spinning and spitting water and sand, and there was Larry, covered in c.r.a.p."

I remembered that day, just as he had. I remembered, I added too, the year that Larry was commuting between Cambridge and Brooklyn, and on weekends we'd go back to that marina in Canarsie and go out on the party fis.h.i.+ng boats. We found an old guy, Captain Jack, which I doubt was his real name, and he'd take us out with a bunch of old men. The first time we went out, Dad and I got so seasick we couldn't even fish. But he insisted we go out again, and a couple of weeks later we did and I caught a big black ba.s.s-as Dad lay in the hold looking green. I remember Mom cleaned and cooked that fish and it was great. The next week, we drove down to Captain Jack's, and he was there with a group of older men I'd never seen before. They were standing around, smoking, and I remember Jack coming up to Dad saying, look I can't take the boy out today. You, fine, but not the boy. It's, well, it's too rough.

And then I looked at Mom and risked it. Of course (I said), my mother always thought that Captain Jack was running drugs or guns, or doing something for the mob, and to this day she believes that that morning he was going out beyond the twelve-mile limit to drop off a body in the sea, or meet a Cuban boat.

She laughed, and I knew I had her.

Would anyone else like to speak?