Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love And Theater Part 1

Prospero's Son.

Life, books, love, and theater.

Seth Lerer.

PROLOGUE.

First Love.

The autumn I turned fourteen, I came down with whooping cough. Like everybody of my generation, I was vaccinated as a child, and by the late 1960s incidences of the illness had been reduced to one in a hundred thousand. But as ninth grade began, I found myself uncontrollably wheezing after what seemed like a mild cold. Half a dozen deep coughs would come, followed by a grip across my chest that stopped my breathing. I'd stand up, gasping for breath, the air coming in through my tightened throat with a high-pitched whoop. And then I breathed again.

It's not as if I'd been a sickly child: no chronic illnesses, no months in bed, no frail, fantasy-ridden birthdays. All I remember is that from about the age of six till the time I was twelve, I always had a cold. Days would go by when I would sniffle, blow, and watch packs of handkerchiefs fill with sticky green snot. "If you sniffle one more time I'll cut your nose off," I remember my father blurting out once in the car. When I was seven, I was taken to a doctor who drained my sinuses with a pneumatic syringe, and I sat in his office chair, watching a gla.s.s jar fill with bubbling mucus. I read and sniffled my way into adolescence. Propped up in bed, I'd reach for a tissue as often as I'd turn a page. Finally, at twelve, I had my adenoids removed, an awful hospital procedure that left me bleeding from the throat for days and eating only Jell-O for a week. One day after my operation, when we were in a store, I coughed up some blood. A blob of dark, congealing goo stared up from the store's carpet, and as we hustled out the door my mother said, "Well, that's the last time I can go to Loehmann's."

Mom took her anger out on me, but she may have been angrier with my father. Just a year before, he had uprooted us to follow his ambition. Some men dream of being firemen or doctors or air aces. My Dad dreamed of being a high school princ.i.p.al. A dozen years of New York City cla.s.sroom history teaching and low-level junior high administration weren't paying off, and so at thirty-nine he had applied and, miraculously, been accepted into Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Now, he could be "Dr. Lerer" and lead one of the great high schools that made Brooklyn famous: Midwood, or even Erasmus.

In 1965, when I was ten, we moved from Brooklyn into a little house near Cambridge, where I grew strawberries in the backyard and read science fiction in my room. The first day of school, Dad was sent home because he wore a sports shirt to cla.s.s. "Mr. Lerer, all my students wear jackets and ties," he reported his professor saying. The Harvard Club was serving horse meat in mushroom sauce on Fridays. Radcliffe girls wore tartan skirts with their hair in buns. And I was reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, and George Orwell's 1984, imagining myself a hero in the future, with clean sinuses, while Dad went out and bought a dozen white shirts and a clutch of skinny dark ties. He smoked, I sniffled, and I watched him read and study all the books that would define the social science of the 1960s: Daniel Moynihan and Gunnar Myrdal on race, Staughton Lynd on cla.s.s. I scanned his bookshelf: H. R. Hays, From Ape to Angel; Edgar Friedenberg, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms. I had no idea what an atavism was, but I knew I had little dignity. And though I never dared open From Ape to Angel, I imagined it a book of evolutionary science fiction on a par with Huxley-creatures captured by ambitious scientists, placed in some marvelous machine, and transformed into ethereal beauties.

Two years later, despite his Harvard EdD, Dad had still not been transformed from ape to angel. There we were at graduation, with the mayor coming in on horseback and everyone in caps and gowns, looking like characters out of a medieval missal. Commencement 1967: Leonard Bernstein and William F. Buckley received honorary doctorates; ancient alumni strode by with straw boaters, each festooned with a crimson ribbon giving the wearer's cla.s.s year. One such alumnus, nearly blind, came up to Dad after the ceremony and said, "Excuse me, young man, but can you tell me how to get to Adams House, where I used to take my meals." He had 1887 on his ribbon.

That day I decided I would spend my life in college. I read everything I could that summer, opened and closed the local public library, started the new school year charged with a desire to excel. But no white shirts could change my Dad, and eighteen months after receiving his degree, he came home to announce that we were moving. No school would have him as a princ.i.p.al, no system as a superintendent. Desperate, he had taken a job as a management consultant in Pittsburgh at a firm that, he told us years later, then existed only in the briefcase of the man who interviewed him. He had bought a seven-bedroom stone house in the suburbs, and we were all going to drive there after Christmas. Almost overnight, we disappeared-everything packed, the house sold, friends gone. It was as if we had entered the witness protection program. All I managed to keep were my books and a pair of paisley hip-hugger bell-bottoms I'd bought at Truc on Brattle Street-a shop that opened shortly after Yellow Submarine debuted at the movies.

And so, in the fall of ninth grade, when my nose and throat flared up, it was the big stone house in Pittsburgh that rattled with my whooping. I missed forty days of school. Friends would bring homework over to the house, and I would dutifully keep up with cla.s.ses, anxious to return. There was a group of three or four girls whom I liked, and before I got sick we would spend our afternoons in the school library, flirting and talking about books, friends, and teachers. During my time at home, one or more of them would show up with the a.s.signments and papers, coyly chatting with my mother at the door, never daring to come into the house and see how I was doing.

One day, I got a stack of readings from one of those girls. Her name was Anne, and she had brilliant red hair, which she kept in place with an Indian headband. With that, her granny gla.s.ses, and her boots, she looked like a sweeter version of the girl with Richard Brautigan on the cover of his novel Trout Fishing in America, which we all were reading at the time.

Anne left a stack of books along with copies of the student newspaper, and I went downstairs, after she had left, to pick them up. As I read through the newspapers, I noticed that along the margins, between the lines, and in the large indents for paragraphs, Anne had written, in a tiny, mechanical-penciled hand, "I love you."

I love you was everywhere. It filled the pages up and down until hardly a white s.p.a.ce was visible. I sat there in bed, poring over her scribbles, again and again. Just seeing those words had a magical, incantatory effect. Reading them over and over was like a talking cure, a formula, as if she were truly wishing me well.

It's hard to remember a time before cell phones, e-mail, and text messaging. We had one phone in the house, and it would never have occurred to me to come downstairs and call her, even if I had had her number. What if her parents answered? What if my parents heard me calling? Instead, I pulled the big white pages out of the closet, found her last name in a column of adults, initials, and numbers, and tore it out. At night, I'd pull the page out from under the mattress, where I hid it, and just read down the initials and the numbers, trying to imagine which one she belonged to, where she lived, and what her parents did.

Weeks later, when I was better, I returned to school, and on an early afternoon in November I found her waiting for the bus. I got on with her and we talked all the way to her stop, where she got out and walked home, and I stayed on until the bus made its entire loop and took me back to school, where I got out and then walked home, an hour late for dinner.

We soon became inseparable. We held hands in the cafeteria, walked to cla.s.ses, kissed in stairwells. I finally went over to her house to meet her parents, a dour couple, older than my own. Her father worked for US Steel and wore rimless gla.s.ses and a dark green hat. Sitting in their living room, still in his suit jacket from the day's work, he looked like John Foster Dulles, presiding over some domestic detente, a relic of the Eisenhower years trapped in the autumn of Abbey Road. My only memory of her mother is of the time she turned to me, almost out of nowhere, repeated my name twice, as if it were a Martian's, and said, "What kind of name is that?"

Anne made me chocolate cakes in her mother's kitchen. She knitted me scarves and gloves. Some afternoons, we sat together on the couch, an afghan covering us, while her father read aloud from The Education of Henry Adams, and she touched my crotch. Some nights, I'd stay for dinner, and we'd watch the war on television, her father silently fuming. I knew better than to say anything, having already been sent home once from school for wearing a black armband in protest (I was sent home two other times: once, for wearing my Cambridge bell-bottoms, deemed inappropriate attire by the homeroom teacher; the other time, for bringing a copy of Portnoy's Complaint to read in study hall). I pa.s.sed the fall of 1969 at another family's dinner table, letting my hair grow to my collar, watching Walter Cronkite and listening to Henry Adams.

By March, Henry Adams had left for England with his father. Prince Sihanouk had been deposed in a Cambodian coup. My hair grew as long as Anne's. And when I showed up after school one day, there was her older sister, sitting at the piano, playing Bach's Prelude in D Major from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and smoking a cigarette. I didn't even know there was a sister. Twenty, tall, she was as strikingly beautiful as Anne was sweetly plain. The house was electric with anger, John Foster Dulles on the phone, talking as if he were renegotiating the Suez treaty. Sister was back, dropped out of college, ready to marry her boyfriend and expecting the family to cover it.

The wedding was in April, and for the occasion I went out and bought a blue blazer with lapels wide as 1950s car fins, red-and-white-striped bell-bottoms, and a blue knit tie so fat I hardly had to worry about b.u.t.toning my shirt. The groom showed up with blond hair down his back and a collection of college buddies strangely reticent to mingle. His own parents were Ohio people-"We're Ohio people," they said, in a way that was supposed to sound meaningfully self-explanatory, like saying, "We're vegetarians." The hippies and the homespun mingled in the Methodist church, and Anne's father gave her sister away with a look on his face like he was pa.s.sing a stone.

I was the youngest person there, and as I sat in the pew with Anne all I could think of was her father reading Henry Adams. "As far as outward bearing went," wrote Adams in an early chapter, "such a family of turbulent children, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check, should have come to more or less grief." Anne's father must have read these words, must have recited them to us, convinced that, in the end, his own would grow up much like Henry's family, "to be decent citizens."

But they did not. The sister and her husband were escaping to Canada, his ushers standing at the ready to drive them all night along the highway to the border. He was avoiding the draft. She was three months pregnant. But at the wedding, we all danced to Let It Be on the hi-fi, hugged during "Two of Us," kissed during "Across the Universe." I looked at Anne, listening to the words "nothing's gonna change my world," and thought that everything would stay just like it was. And then, when "The Long and Winding Road" came on, I could see in her sister's eyes a sadness of such depth as I'd never seen in anyone. "The profoundest lessons," Henry Adams wrote, "are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanently warp the mind."

That night, we sat on the unswept rice. Sister and new husband were gone; parents had returned home. We looked up at the stars and I saw them all as messages in bottles, washing up on our illicit sh.o.r.e. Anne took my hand and whispered in my ear, although no one else was there.

"I know what to do, now. She told me all about it, told me it would be fine."

"Told you what?"

"You know," Anne said, splaying her fingers on my lap.

Two days later, we went out to an open field after school. Even though it was May, the ground was still stubbly with the broken stalks of last fall's gra.s.ses, and the new growth hadn't come up far enough to soften the ground. She brought a blanket, and we made our bed over the stubble, lying side by side for nearly half an hour before we touched. Her eyes were closed the whole time, and I looked at her red hair as it crinkled and crept into the gra.s.ses by the blanket's edge. I touched her, and before I could turn that touch to a caress, she had her jeans off and her arms around me, pushing me into her. Everything then came off, I found her, and almost before we started it was over.

I looked down and we both were covered in blood. At first I thought it was mine, but then I realized that maybe this is what happened to a girl the first time. Then I realized that my mother would see blood on my underwear when she washed it. What was it, what had happened? She would sit me down under the kitchen lights like a prisoner of war and grill me till I broke. She'd beat her open palm against her forehead, as if I had violated her.

Anne shook me out of this rictus of remorse, bunched up my underwear, cleaned all of the blood off my legs, then hers, and threw the evidence into a ditch.

"Just go home in your jeans, walk in like nothing happened, and, if it's that important to you, get another pair of underwear on as soon as you can."

By this point, I was running only on my autonomic nervous system. Henry Adams and the Beatles had pa.s.sed far out of my mind, and I was living in Portnoy's Complaint. All the t.i.tillations of Philip Roth's book had now morphed into terror. "Tell me please," I heard my mother saying, just like Alex Portnoy's, "what horrible things we have done to you all our lives that this should be our reward?" It's nothing, Mom. Just a little blood. "Nothing? Nothing?" she would repeat over and over again, and I sat there in the gra.s.s imagining her fit and remembering how I had coughed up blood at Loehmann's. And then, before I knew it, I was back home sitting in my dirty jeans at the dinner table, eating iceberg lettuce with Green G.o.ddess dressing.

A week or so later, my parents announced that the whole family, including my eleven-year-old brother, was going to Europe for the summer. Dad had a friend when he was teaching in New York who had a ritual when he returned from vacation. "What did you see?" you were supposed to ask, and he would say, "Everything." "How did you go?" And he would p.r.o.nounce, "First cla.s.s." We flew to Paris, coach, from New York and arrived after midnight, Paris time. My mother had a little high school French, and when we got into the taxi at the airport, she announced the address of our hotel in a perfect, high school accent: soixante-huit Rue des Martyrs. The cabbie turned around and looked this middle-cla.s.s American family up and down in disbelief. Thinking she had not said the address correctly, she gave him the letter from the Pittsburgh travel agent who had arranged our hotel stay. He shrugged his shoulders and drove us on.

Our hotel was just off the Place Pigalle, the heart of the hooker district. Even in 1970, there were prost.i.tutes everywhere. Rouged and high-heeled, they patrolled the streets as if they had just reclaimed Paris from the German occupation. We lugged our bags up to the room and, without unpacking, fell asleep.

"The world," wrote Henry Adams, "contains no other spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side." Would I be farmed out to a hooker, returning home to Anne with newfound skills? I couldn't get her father's voice out of my ears. It drowned out the street sounds, and I fell asleep hearing his drone. "The amus.e.m.e.nts of youth had to be abandoned," he would read, transforming Adams's easy irony into an injunction. But even the half-dream of Henry Adams couldn't keep me from the hotel window when a violent crash pulled us from sleep. I saw two cars, crumpled like concertinas, their windshields splattered across their hoods, and the two drivers, seemingly unhurt, screaming at each other. They yelled in something far beyond my mother's high school French for almost half an hour. Then, anger spent, they climbed back into their cars and drove away, each crumpled cha.s.sis creaking back and forth like a circus prop.

We woke up the next morning to the chatter of the prost.i.tutes, their makeup smeared, their costumes disarrayed, their work done. The hotel's breakfast nook was cleared for the Americans, and my father's daylight face showed just how far from first cla.s.s we were, fooled by the navete of our Pittsburgh travel agent ("quaint hotel in the heart of old Paris"). Mom and Dad acted out their anger. "How could you?" she accused. And him: "You're just upset because you're getting your period." "That's it! We're going to Fouquet's." In defiance, Mom announced that we were going to have lunch at the most famous restaurant she could recall, Fouquet's on the Champs-elysees. She must have read about it as a teenager, the haunt of Chaplin, Chevalier, and Dietrich; a Brooklyn girl's fantasy of where the elite meet to eat.

We were not disappointed. Greeted at the door with graciousness and care by a mitre d' with fluent English, the four of us, without a reservation, were escorted to a lovely table in the sun, handed a handwritten menu (which we could not read), and asked what kind of food we liked. "Roast beef," I said, and he replied, "That's fine, but I must warn you, it will be very rare." I acceded. It came, a slab cut from the whole roast, thick and b.l.o.o.d.y, practically quivering. I don't remember what anyone else had, but when the time came for dessert, Mom confessed to the mitre d' that she had read a story once in which someone had eaten nothing but a perfect peach. He bowed slightly, snapped his fingers, and a young waiter in red came by. Words were exchanged, and, like a magician pulling something from a sleeve, he produced the largest, most fragrant, most perfect peach that any of us had ever seen.

Two subwaiters arrived. Mom was presented with a clean white plate, a little knife and fork, and a small gla.s.s of sweet white wine. The waiter took the peach, gauging its heft in his hand, and then took the back of a b.u.t.ter knife and deftly rubbed it all along the skin. Then, taking a tiny sharp knife, he made a small incision in the cleft. Setting the peach on the plate, cut side down, he placed his fingers around the top, squeezed a little, and the entire skin came off at once, revealing a whole, wet, blushing fruit. Mom clapped her hands together like a nine-year-old. And at that moment I knew that this mitre d' knew more about my mother than we ever could: that what she wanted was a taste of magic; that all fruit, of whatever kind, should be presented as if it were sheathed in sin. And for those fifteen minutes that she ate that peach, I loved her.

We returned three weeks later to a Pittsburgh wreathed in summer smoke blown over from the mills along the river. Anne would not see me, would not answer the phone. I went over to her house to see if she was through with me, to see if all she'd wanted in that field was her adulthood. I knocked and found the door opened by her mother who looked at me as if I were a ghost. "She's not here." Who was the ghost now? When soph.o.m.ore year began, I heard that she had run away, rumored to have become pregnant. Not by me, I was sure, though it was not until my senior year that I dared sleep with anyone again.

For forty years, I dreamed of her. I dreamed of her in college, when failed dates left me at the movies, and I wondered where she was. I dreamed of her after my parents divorced in the late seventies and left Pittsburgh forever-Mom returning to New York, Dad moving to DC-and I realized that I'd never see her again. I dreamed of her throughout the 1980s in Princeton, where I taught, and where I'd see her red hair in the autumn stubble. I dreamed of her after I moved to California with my wife in 1990, when my college students decided to stage a sixties party and asked me for fashion advice. They stood there in my Stanford office, well-cared-for children of the Reagan years, who knew no social trauma other than the Challenger disaster, dressed in macrame vests, beaded headbands, and paisley bell-bottoms.

I dreamed of her again, three years ago, the night after I saw my own son, at seventeen, and his girlfriend taking shelter at the laptop in his room. Nights once spent with his hobbies began to pa.s.s at the screen. Even when together, he and his girlfriend seemed to text rather than talk. There were no student newspapers to annotate, no notes to pa.s.s in cla.s.s. Desire pa.s.sed across touch pads, "I love you" evanescing in a keystroke. Will he have relics of his love? I still have bits and pieces of my high school life: a Pittsburgh bus transfer slipped as a bookmark in a novel; a letter written on the flyleaf of a Signet Shakespeare; a Polaroid faded to coppery sheen. One evening my wife and I came home to find him texting on the couch, two dirty dinner plates, two half-filled gla.s.ses, and two crumpled napkins on the dining table. He looked at me as if to say, "Don't tell Mom that I had a girl over." I quickly cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on, letting the rushing of its spray drown out the noise of our complicity, not letting on to Mom that there was anything amiss. That night, I would stay up until the cycle finished, to restore the clean, warm plates to cupboard stacks, without a trace of her.

ONE.

Rough Magic.

November 2003.

I was teaching The Tempest when the department office manager called me out of cla.s.s. My comparative literature senior seminar had eight students, all but one of them young women whose fathers were college professors, social activists, artists, or scientists. It was supposed to be a course in literary theory with an emphasis on gender and interpretation, but the syllabus-Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, Saussure, De Man, Erich Auerbach, and Judith Butler-soon morphed into weekly meditations on authority and pedagogy, reading things for what they weren't, and the students' own literary tastes. Theory became a family romance for them, a way of understanding authorship as if it were paternalism, reading as if it were a household ch.o.r.e. We were a few weeks into the seminar, finishing Shakespeare and turning to later versions of the play-the postcolonial Une Tempte of Aime Cesaire, the science fiction of Forbidden Planet-when the office manager opened the door. "You have to come right now." I stared across the table at my eager Mirandas and said, quietly, "I think we'll have to stop."

I took the call in the department office, and before I even heard the doctor's voice I knew that Dad was gone. I called my wife, walked to my car without my coat in the rain, and drove to the hospital.

Driving.

As a child I never slept. At night, Dad would pile me into the car (no baby seat, no seat belts, a cigarette held out the window) and drive for hours till I dropped off. Sometimes, he would sing as he drove, his tuneless voice repeating the same nursery rhyme over and over.

I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear, But a silver nutmeg, and a golden pear.

And then I would awake in my own bed, not knowing how I got there, the smell of Kents hanging on my pj's like a caul.

Some nights, we'd all go out-Dad, Mom, my baby brother-just to fill the time. Whenever we got out of the car, my eyes would dart right to the ground. I'd pick up anything: a rusted bolt, a spent flashbulb, string, wire, pennies. I was collecting material for some great project, a machine that would trans.m.u.te these sc.r.a.ps into a mystery, or that would reanimate the tossed-off body parts of old equipment. Every now and then, there'd be a real find. Once, when I was six, we drove out to Long Island to an Alexander's store to buy my mom a fur coat. In the parking lot, I found a piece of jetsam from another car. It may have been a solenoid, or a carburetor valve, or a gear. Whatever it had once been, it turned into a talisman in my pocket, and I held on to it on the ride back, as I fell asleep against Mom's new mouton coat.

And then, after we moved to Boston, there were the endless drives returning to New York to see relatives or friends. We always drove at night. Eight p.m. and the dinner dishes done, my father would announce, "Well, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go." And sure as simpletons, my brother and I would jump up. Sure, let's go, what an adventure. Let's drive all night back to New York. In those days, the two-hundred-and-forty-mile trip took nine hours, over old US highways, turnpikes, and toll roads. Stops along the way, great empty cities like Hartford, trucks, backups, midnight snacks. Then the wall of traffic when we reached Co-op City. Finally, the place we'd stay. "You're father was too cheap," Mom would say, "to spend a night in a real hotel. We always lived on handouts." But that was the way then. You were expected to drop in, you expected people. Anyone could come at any time. Keep the fridge full, you never know when guests might show up. When we moved to Boston, we kept the fridge full for three years. No one came.

One day, when I was in eleventh grade, my friends and I drove to Kentucky from Pittsburgh. It was one of those vague Sat.u.r.days of late high school, one of those I-don't-know-what-do-you-want-to-do days, and we piled into our old Renault and drove. Just drove. South, through Pennsylvania coal country, West Virginia hills. Cars up on blocks in gas stations for sale for seventy-five dollars, farm eggs a nickel apiece. We stopped at a roadside place where my friend, to my horror, ordered a liverwurst sandwich, and I don't know what I had but I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and the counter fell silent, like they'd never seen one before, and who was this kid with the Pennsylvania plates coming in with his buds and a twenty.

But that's what I learned from Dad: to pull a twenty from your wallet like it's magic, to show up out of nowhere and amaze the crowd and disappear.

Years later, I was listening to an interview with Shari Lewis on the radio, and she went on, not about Lamb Chop or her bangs, but about her dad. He was a founding member of Yeshiva University, and in the evenings after cla.s.ses he would teach her magic tricks. "My father," she reflected, "was like the official magician of New York." Pa.s.sing a closet one day, "Daddy heard my sister screaming to be let out. He opened the door, and my sister was nowhere to be seen." Shari had discovered her ability to throw her voice. Her parents put her onstage at eighteen months. "My parents were school teachers. They ran summer camps, and I was put onstage with a crepe-paper bow."

My father was the unofficial magician of New York. He did no juggling, no ventriloquism. Unlike my friends' fathers, he could not fix a leak, start a lawn mower, or change a broken lightbulb with a raw potato. He worked, instead, his magic in the car. The theater of his majesty was the front seat, as he drove almost without looking, talking to me next to him, waving at strangers out the window. I swear he had a third eye in his left ear; otherwise, how could he see the road?

We would drive for hours around Brooklyn, often with one of his friends (usually a former student who, now in his twenties, had little to do but cruise the city with a teacher and his kid), down Pitkin Avenue to Jacks, looking for two-dollar sport coats, or to the Knox Hat Shop, where rows of dark felt hats lay like corpses. I never remember my father wearing a hat, though. It was all part of his magic: the pompadoured hair, the high forehead. He didn't need a hat to pull anything out of. Some days we would walk into a restaurant, and people would turn, as if they'd expected us. We'd enter elevators, he would count to three and snap his fingers, and the doors would close. How did he do it? One night, when I was seven, we drove deep into Manhattan, parked, and came upon the Union Carbide Building. Inside, there was an exhibit about atoms, chemistry, and power. A model of a uranium atom spun inside a great blue plastic globe. It was like being taken on a tour of matter's very heart, and I held his hand as if he were my Christmas ghost flying me over unexpected streets.

I grew up longing to relive his skill. Once at a conference in the 1980s, I turned the corner of a book exhibit with two graduate students in tow, only to find a champagne reception in progress for a newly minted author. We were all handed gla.s.ses as if we had been expected, and I turned to my students and smiled. "Like how I did that?" There was the time, when I was teaching a freshman seminar at Stanford, that I trooped the students into downtown Palo Alto for a final lunch, and before we could hit the restaurant, we were accosted by a famous TV anchor with a mike: what did we think of the Starr Report? It was breaking news, and all the students spoke into the mike, on camera, with a poise that came from years of suburban a.s.surance, and I said to them, when it was over, "How many other teachers get you on TV?"

And then there was the night when I was eight when Dad failed to come home. Just months before, he had bought a new, silver Firebird convertible. We'd put the top down, cruise around, and put the top up (that was a day's play). He always said he could never afford that car, but he bought it anyway. It stood out like an open zipper on the dull street of my third grade. And then, one night, he did not come home. We went to bed. Mom woke me up at six or seven in the morning to say that he'd been in a bad accident, but he was fine. What happened? He had gone to a meeting-an investment club? a teacher's union thing? a temple board group?-and when it was over, the car wouldn't start. He had called for a tow, was sitting on the hood smoking a cigarette, when something possessed him to get back inside. And then the crash. A drunken driver, we were told, plowed into the parked car, with Dad inside it, sending the whole thing skittering down the block, the emergency brake still on.

The car was totaled (the first time I'd heard that word). Nothing salvageable. The next day, he went out and bought the dullest, most anonymous car he could find, a deep green Chevrolet Impala. And that summer, we drove to Boston in it.

Fifteen years later, after the divorce, we reconvened for my brother's Princeton graduation. Mom and I sat there in a dorm room, waiting for Dad to pick us up and take us to the ceremony, and she opened up.

"That accident. Please. There was no meeting. It had been a tryst. You know what he is. I knew it when we married. I brought him home to meet my mother after we were in the Brooklyn College production of Blithe Spirit together. She said to me, 'Who is this man who is an actor?' And at the wedding, Aunt Gussie came up to me and said, 'You know, he's a f.a.gelah.' Well, what did I care? I wanted to get out of that house, and he married me. My father was sick. G.o.d, how I still miss him. He sold chocolates and smoked cigars. He taught himself to sing by listening to John McCormack records. He loved to dance. Six weeks after I married, he was dead.

"To his credit, your father got me going after that. He forced me to finish college, forced me to get that master's degree, shoved me out of the house to go to work. We had a good time, acting in the plays at night and then going to the Garfield Restaurant for cheesecake. But then you were born, and then your brother, and everything changed. He was never home. And when he was, he brought his boys with him. The year you were born, he was teaching a ninth-grade cla.s.s at Huddie Junior High, and all the kids chipped in and got you a blue blanket. I still have it. They were your first babysitters. Then they became his friends. It was fun at first, but after a while I knew what was going on and resented it. He'd bring home these men, now in their twenties, and I'd have to make them dinner while they sat around, and I would have to watch them worship him. Him. A ninth-grade teacher.

"Here's what I think: one night he was going off to meet someone, and someone else had heard about it and they set out to get him. Someone tried to kill him plowing into the parked car like that. Maybe it was one of those boys, or an angry dad, or somebody from school he made a pa.s.s at. It doesn't matter. I'm telling you, that's why we moved to Boston. How he got into Harvard is a mystery to me. And the only way he got that degree was because the dean of the school, who saw right through your father, was killed in a plane crash. So they had to give him the degree. You wonder why he couldn't get a job back in New York? Everybody knew.

"It was no better in Boston. Those families we spent those horrible Thanksgivings with-do you think those kids knew about their fathers? There was that Frenchman and his family, and every chance he got he'd hug Larry and say things like, 'I love you like a madman.' And then there was that Englishman who worked in the local school system. Do you remember that big old house in Cambridge? Dad loved that man because he had an accent and an eye patch. When he first introduced me to him, I thought he looked like Claude Rains. Your father probably thought so too. You and your brother and the other kids were upstairs watching TV, and the four adults were downstairs, cleaning up the dishes, and their hands touched.

"We could have had a life in Boston, too, but your father couldn't let it go. He did get one job offer out of grad school, at the school of education at Texas A&M. I remember he came back from the trip, and his advisor came to dinner: Dr. Hunt, a wonderful man, a Texan, Eisenhower's a.s.sistant secretary of education, a decent, decent man. He turned to Larry and he said, 'If you go to College Station there will be a cross burning on your lawn the first night. Think of your children.' And Larry thought he was talking about being Jewish.

"If you ask me, the only way he got that job in Pittsburgh was he slept his way into it.

"The man was a liar. And a terrible driver. I can't get into a car with him, the way he talks and tailgates and weaves around. Is he really going to pick us up? I'd rather walk. It's a miracle he hasn't died in a car."

He died in a hospital bed. He had gone in for heart-valve surgery, his voluble Argentinean surgeon a.s.suring me that it was all routine. My father introduced me in Yiddish as mein zindel, the surgeon smiled and babbled something about nachas, yichas, and sachel. He shook my hand and six weeks later-after losing thirty pounds, after a regime of Coumadin, after two return visits to have his heart restarted-my father checked himself into the emergency room with back pain and just stopped living on the gurney.

I found the hospital and parked illegally on a side street, went in at the first door I saw, and found a desk. "My father pa.s.sed away. I'm here to see the body." The nurse looked at me, unfazed, as if I were picking up my dry cleaning. She asked my name, got on the phone, and soon directed me to a room in another wing. An elevator, two hallways, a double door, and then a suite of rooms around a nurse's station. I mentioned his name. "Are you his brother?" No, I'm his son. Now she looked at me as if I'd lied, but she got up and walked me to the room, pulled back the curtain, and left me there.

He lay in the bed on his back, his mouth open, his skin the color of old parchment. It was as if they'd hooked a vacuum pump to his navel, drew the air out of him, and then left him on the mattress.

The doctor came in, a full ten years younger than me, shaken, his collar unb.u.t.toned and his tie loose. "I'm very sorry. He came in last night with back pain, and we thought it might have been a kidney infection, so we put him on an IV drip of antibiotics and rehydrated him, and let him sleep." Now, reading from the chart: "The nurse checked in on him at noon today, and he was ready to go home. But when she came back fifteen minutes later he was cyanotic, in respiratory failure, asystolic. He was carted without response, and we declared him at 12:20. Do you want some time with him alone?"

I signed the forms and authorized an autopsy.

I walked out of the hospital and found my car. A sodden parking ticket stuck out from under the windshield wiper, and I tore it up. Now it was pouring rain, the San Francisco streets pitched up like waterslides. I inched out of my illegal spot, turned up the hill, and drove to his apartment building.

When Dad moved to San Francisco six years earlier, he wanted a great address-a number and a street that, when he mentioned it to someone in a store or on the phone, would cause them to gasp or smile and recognize him for the master that he'd hoped to be. The same as when he got his Harvard EdD, he put "Dr. Lawrence Lerer" on his checks and flew as "Dr. Lerer"-until one day (he'd regaled me with the story), someone had a heart attack on a plane, and he was called up to a.s.sist. It was certainly a good address: a 1930s, faux-Spanish apartment building on the corner of Pacific Avenue and Fillmore Street. With its wrought-iron gate, its Mexican tile floor, and its arched mosaic lobby, it looked, at street level, like a set for a Zorro movie. But the apartments were tiny and unrenovated. His still had the 1930s kitchen, with a big white porcelain sink and enameled stove; the living room had old sash windows; and the bathroom had the black-and-white tile of a chessboard. When I first saw the place, the day he moved in, I thought-well, that's it, he's finally found a place that looks like where he grew up. I changed my mind, the year before he died, when I was watching local news on TV. There was the building, and a reporter, and a story about a couple who kept pit bulls in their apartment, one of which had attacked another tenant, a woman in a same-s.e.x relationship, and about how the whole building was full of gay men and women and run like a private club.

The day he moved in, I took him to lunch. He wore a four-hundred-dollar merino sweater, square tortoisesh.e.l.l gla.s.ses, a gold bracelet, and a heavy ring. The maitre d' looked us up and down, like he was reading a Chinese newspaper, and then sat us in the back, as far away from anyone as possible. The waiter came over, and before he could open his mouth, Dad took his arm and said, as sincerely as he could, "Can you believe my son is taking me to lunch?" "If that's your story," he shot back.

I had no key, and I stood there in the rain ringing the manager's bell till she came out and I introduced myself and told her he was dead. She threw her arms around me, told me how much everyone in the building had loved him, gave me a spare key, and told me I could come and go as I wanted.

The elevator jerked me up, I got off, and walked into the apartment. A half-filled coffee cup sat on the dinette table. Bowls still flecked with cereal were stacked in the sink, the bed was unmade, a Newsweek was open on the couch, and the red light on the answering machine was flashing. I played the messages. "Larry baby, this is Miguel. Where were you last night? You know how much I miss . . ." I stopped it and erased the tape. I rifled through his desk, looking for anything to anchor me. His address book and calendar popped up, a thick, brown-leather Ghurka thing. I didn't open it; I smelled it. I picked it up and brought it to my nose and there was his smell, the smell he had always had, as long as I remembered, part tart cologne, part cigarette, part sweat. I split it like a bean. There was his handwriting, the same as always, with the large curved L's, the open a's, and the flourish at the end of each name. November 6: Tony, 5 pm. That was today. I flipped back: names and times, no details, no addresses. Weeks of one-named a.s.signations.

I must have made thirty phone calls, sitting at his desk. I called the students from the 1950s, all of them neatly entered under their last names, all with updated numbers and addresses. "He was my best friend." "He was remarkable." "Just tell me where and when, and I'll be there." "I loved him." And then, the one piece of advice: "You know, Seth, at this moment, there is nothing you can do that will be wrong. Act on your instincts." And so I made a list.

Call his brother.

Call his boyfriends.

Get the pa.s.sword for his e-mail.

Call his lawyer and accountant.

Call his only living cousin.

Call Mom.

Call my brother.

Cancel cla.s.s for next week.

There was no love in those calls. "I'm sorry for your loss." "It was bound to happen." "I'll get you the papers." "He was the stone in my shoe." The closest thing to missing him came from his cousin, who just blurted out, "That son of a b.i.t.c.h. How dare he die and leave me all alone?"-this from a woman he had not seen in twenty years.

I watched the rain spittle across the windows, thinking how he had been exiled from his own family, how he lived in his little island with his woodblock prints, his aunt's old silver, sepias of his grandparents, Bokharas, needlepoint pillows, and a large Erte sculpture stuck like a ship's prow right in the middle of the living room. I planted myself on the barque of his bed, surveying the horizon of the half dozen books on his shelf (two of which I'd written, two more of which I'd given him). The play we had talked about that morning repeated in my ears, each broken line reminding me of him: My father's of a better nature, sir, Than he appears by speech.

I got up and opened the closet. There were a hundred shirts, all pressed and still in their dry-cleaning bags. There were-I counted them-twenty-four pairs of shoes. There were a dozen cashmere scarves, thirty belts hanging on hooks. There was a shelf of hats: flat woolen caps, broad-brimmed fedoras, baseball caps, a Stetson. I pushed aside the rack of suits and there, behind them, on another rack, were fur coats, reaching to the floor. There were half a dozen leather jackets, leather vests, and leather pants. Three shopping bags were stacked against the back wall. I poured them out. A spiked dog collar rolled out first, then a whip handle, long steel chains, a set of cuffs. Wrapped in a towel was a disa.s.sembled rack. I reached in and pulled up a handful of matchbooks: the Stud, the End Up, Badlands, Moby d.i.c.k.

Look what a wardrobe here is for thee!

I found an inlaid wooden box, a crust of cocaine still inside it. In his drawer, I found a roll of twenties, four hundred dollars. I pulled everything out. Turning back to the desk, I sliced through the papers: threatening letters from a spurned lover, a restraining order against someone else.

Rough magic, robes, utensils, things of darkness.

Are you not my father?