Of course I was happy, too—and bored, devious, gluttonous, curious, normal. I loved baseball. As comfort I had my mother, a particular grandfather, and books. I think probably I was more grown up than most children; I knew from a very young age that my father, who at that time was a drug addict—heroin, I think, but nobody has ever spoken about it with me, though by the time I reached middle school he “only took pills”—was untrustworthy. I loved him.
He died six months before I departed the States for Oxford, a heart defect. It was a month or so afterward that I had submitted a late application to the university. When I left Alison and America I annexed the fact of his death away to one of the least-visited chambers of my heart. I don’t think anyone at school knew other than Anneliese, whom I had told in a fit of self-pity one afternoon.
Seeing my mother jerked something primal in my brain, and I thought, Yes, that’s right, the other human I’m half of is gone.
What was he like? “You always take the side of the dead,” Gabriel García Márquez wrote. So I will say that my father was terrifically bright and fun, at home in conversation, though with sometimes a scary avidity in his eyes—a manic one. He had a terrible temper. He had less sense of right or wrong than most people. He was small, shorter than I am. His weight fluctuated. He was seedily handsome.
His childhood was conventional like mine. My grandfather (who outlived his son) had been born into the true New York Episcopalian aristocracy, which existed from around 1850 to 1950. How to describe it? He and his brothers, my father’s uncles, grew up in a town house on Fifth Avenue that is now the consulate of Gambia. When the diocese needed a new bishop my great-grandfather sent a succession of men up to Andover to deliver guest sermons, a kind of road test, and selected the one his boys recommended for the job. For two straight years in the thirties the family had a horse finish dead last in the Kentucky Derby. Each Sunday they had a supper in which every dish was white. They had a huge farm in northern New Jersey, which they sold in the fifties, and is now a two-hundred-unit apartment complex. When my great-grandfather died many of the flags of Park Avenue flew at half-mast, north of Fifty-ninth. When the family cat was lost and then found there was a story about it on the front page of the New York Herald. What’s left of that? Portraits, silver, gold carriage clocks, the family nose, old menus from the Waldorf, some money.
After Yale and Yale Law my grandfather became a partner in a New York law firm and moved his family to Sixty-fifth and Fifth, with a cook and a maid who lived in. My father was a passable, distracted student but a great athlete—baseball and golf. The first hint of change came in college, though in his telling some trauma of youth had been boiling away before then, whatever would lead to his addiction, ultimately. Perhaps. However it came to pass, he started taking drugs. During his sophomore year at Vassar, he dropped out and took the refund on his tuition to move to New York. It was the first of a dozen times that he took money from his father without bothering to tell anyone.
New York: Heroin was his primary addiction from all I can gather, then methadone when I was a child, then heroin again, but he smoked pot, dropped acid, took pills, did coke … He disappeared for the first years of my life (after six months of an attempt at marriage with my mother, inspired solely by her pregnancy) into a blank netherworld of drugs and downtown, music, squalor. My grandfather, who had a deep soft spot for his only son, gave him an allowance, so he never worked. One of my favorite things to do as a child was sit in a big plush armchair at this grandfather’s law firm, eating pink rock candy and listening to tales of my father’s childhood athletic feats. My grandfather always wore a suit and a hat, and ran rule over dozens of subordinates, but during those afternoons he left behind his grown-up ways and the two of us, seventy-five and eight, escaped into a conversation in which my father was perfect once more, unaged, immortal.
Until I was seven I wasn’t permitted to see him. It was when he was on methadone, which is the drug you take when you’re getting off heroin, that I could. From my seventh birthday to my twelfth or so he was tolerably healthy, then again from my seventeenth birthday on, when he stopped using drugs again. Around then a manuscript he had begun about the golden age of jazz began to absorb him, and between that, the Dodgers, and a daily trip to the clinic, he just about led a normal life. Normal, well; he was violent, narcissistic, angry, spiteful, a bully, to the people—me and his father—who loved him most. There were moments in between when everyone loved him again. It never lasted.
He was a figure of fascination to me. When I was seven or eight he would lurch back into my life for an occasional Sunday, usually first to the church where we had both been baptized for the ten o’clock service, Christ dissolving on our tongues, then to a lunch, then, the afternoon appearing endless, in an aimless trek between baseball card shops, record stores, movies, and restaurants. (All of his childhood passions were intact, so our interests coincided.) I remember a great deal of advice about alcohol. He drank at lunch and again when we stopped for my ice cream sundae at three thirty. Only hold a champagne glass with your left hand, close to your heart; a rosé is acceptable during a picnic in the South of France between May and August; a Bull Shot, not a Bloody Mary. Wrinkles of the WASP code. It gave me such happiness to be with him.
Then there was a bad Sunday, and for three years afterward we weren’t together unsupervised.
It was spring. He picked me up in the morning and we got straight into a cab, which surprised me because in general he didn’t have much money, his father covering his few steady expenses directly. The cabdriver double-checked the address with him, surprised, which in retrospect was an ominous sign, and then we made our slow way through upper Manhattan: first past the gleaming pitiless brick buildings of Park Avenue, doormen outside them wearing gold-buttoned coats, like generals in the Crimean War, then toward the shabbier reaches of Yorkville, yellow tenements with zagging black fire escapes, crowded with dead plants and smoking mothers, and finally across the Rubicon of 125th Street.
“Where are we going?”
“To see a friend of mine,” he said.
“I have to pee.”
“Afterward.”
We stopped in a poor neighborhood. I was scared of black people when I was five, I don’t think I knew better. (I still often am, I suppose, it’s awful but it’s true, even writing it makes me realize that, and I feel a horrible compression of guilt.)
My father found the door he was looking for, which belonged to a vacant brownstone. “Wait ten minutes?” he asked the cabdriver.
The cabdriver looked at me and then shook his head. “Sorry.”
We stood on the sidewalk. This was the eighties, before corporate money disciplined the city into Orlando, swept Times Square free of needles, and gentrified Harlem. As the taxi pulled away my father looked down at me. “I’ll be inside five minutes. Tops.”
“I can’t go in?”
“It’s not for little boys,” he said. “Wait right here. You’ll be fine, I’ve walked around here a million times. People are friendly. When I’m back we’ll go to Joe’s and get a slice.”
I watched him go in and then sat down on the stoop, miserable, feeling waves of sickness. I felt like I wanted to cry. For so long I had heard that my father was unstable, and here it was, the terrible proving moment. (I think now: What was I wearing? Who was that boy? Orwell: “What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.” I imagine my Yankees jacket, my one indispensable piece of clothing then, some blue jeans, my Yankees backpack.) We were supposed to be at the Great Lawn. My glove would have been in my backpack. It’s pure treacle, evanescence, stupidity, but I can think so clearly of the glove—the signature of Don Mattingly in it, my favorite player, careful creases where I had left it folded underneath my bed. Self-pity can be gratifying, true, strange. Strange to think it all happened, it was briefly as real as right now. It was the newest event in the world
.
After a minute my father came out, and my heart lifted, it was over. I was wrong. “Did your mom give you any money? For emergencies?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He looked at me as if I were useless. Then he went back inside. The worst part now was how badly I had to pee. I had had to since I left my apartment and it was getting close to intolerable, and even though the look on his face was running through my head on a loop like a GIF, I almost forgot the situation I was in, where I was. I thought about knocking on the door, but in the end what I did was go into the little alley next to the building and peed, with carnal relief, against the wall.
The alley connected through to another avenue block, and as I zipped up I saw something from my life every day: a New York City bus. I ran down the alley (yes, I must have been wearing the backpack, because I remember it bumping) and got on it without hesitation, submitting myself to the great uncaring safety of New York officialdom. Forty minutes later I was home. What I remember chiefly from the bus ride is thinking that at least we had been alone, that I didn’t want to embarrass him. I thought of how I could protect him in the way I told the story. I must have failed, because it was a year before I saw him again.
That was my father. How I miss him! We had the same name, and it occurred to me once that when I write my own name down I’m writing his, too. There’s a shiver of religion in that. But no, maybe I only wish there were, and there’s not. He’s gone. Nothing, not superstition, not even love, will change that.
* * *
That week was my mother’s fiftieth birthday, and there were two separate parties for her. Aside from that she made me go to yoga twice (the girls were beautiful, I’ve never been to a yoga class or a rock concert where I didn’t fall in love) and every evening we watched a movie.
After eight days in Boston I went down to New York and spent five more on my friend Matt’s couch, seeing everyone who still lived in the city—or, everyone. While they were at work during the days I went to my old places, Central Park and the Met. (The Petrus Christus Carthusian; Breughel’s mowers; the Lavoisiers; Dendur; the Frank Lloyd Wright room: I check in on those five every time.) Nothing makes a New Yorker feel at home after a long absence like walking through Central Park with coffee, while the tourists on the footpaths argue about where they are and consult massive, wind-flapped maps, stopping in large groups at inconvenient places. Give them a dirty look and an exasperated sigh as you step around them, and you feel with a derisive majesty that you’re once again a member of the federation that really possesses Manhattan.
I debated each day whether or not to call Alison. Finally, the day before I left, I did. We agreed to meet under the clock at Grand Central and then have lunch in the mezzanine.
Her brown hair looked thicker than I remembered, longer, too, and she was pale. She was a Thoroughbred: leggy, slim, tall, slightly restless. She had on long brown boots over jeans, a black blazer with the arms pushed up, and big hoop earrings. When she smiled, her teeth, even and brilliantly white, shone, slightly wetted.
I ordered as expensively as possible, which caused Alison to roll her eyes and smile. “You happy now?” she asked.
“Your dad still lets you use his account here, right?”
“Like he’ll notice anyway.” She smiled. “So how’ve you been?”
“Not bad. What about you?”
“How’s your mom?” she asked.
“Oh, she said hi and sent this.” I took a small wrapped box out of my messenger bag. It was a set of Hiroshige notecards. “Open it later.”
She smiled. “Thanks. I’ll write her.”
“So? How about you?”
“Oh, I’m okay.”
“Work is good?”
“Yeah.” She kind of smiled. “Anyway. Have you hooked up?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“I kissed a girl.”
“Who, Sophie? Ella?”
They were just names to her, from the start of the year. “No, some random. What about you?”
She hesitated, whether because of prevarication or fear of vulnerability I couldn’t tell, and said, “No. Not me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You can now. I was being stupid.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can’t wait to tell people I’m open for business.”
“No, I—”
“You’re going to be jealous.”
“Probably.”
“Would you be?” she asked. Her voice was as light as nothing.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable imagining you with someone else.”
She hesitated, staring into her sparkling water, then said, “I heard you called up Chuck Rode in Washington? He shot me an e-mail afterward, asking if it was true we were dunzo.”
“Yeah. There are no jobs. I’m going to sell out instead.”
“I can already see you in the McDonald’s uniform.”
“Hilarious. Oh, look, my glass of Mumm’s.” When the waiter had set it down and left, I lifted it by the stem with my left hand. “Tell your dad thanks.”
* * *
It was sunnier when I got back to Oxford. In Fleet’s beautiful sunken gardens, leading back to the river, were littered snowdrops and crocuses. At the bar at night the doors were opened out to the patio, letting in a breeze.
“What’s up, ugly,” said Tom, peering over the banister when he heard the door open. He came down the stairs and took one of my bags. “How was Murrika?”
“Fine.”
“Anil’s taken to singing in the shower.”
“Oh no.”
“This morning it was one that went ‘Sucka nigga, nigga nigga, I throw the sucka in the front for the ones who front. Sucka nigga, nigga nigga, nigga nigga.’ Then he repeated that about sixteen thousand times.”
“HATERS ARE GOING TO HATE!” Anil’s voice called down the flight of stairs to the second story.
I laughed. “How can you hear him over the shower?”
He looked pretty well. “Will, you’ve been gone too long. We could hear him because we listened at the door, of course.”
I tried Anneliese that night and agreed to meet up with her the next morning for breakfast. Sophie answered a similar text by saying, Can’t hang out for a while, sorry. Only Ella didn’t respond at all, to texts or phone calls. I didn’t see her until three days later at Hall. I asked her where she had been.
“Working,” she said. “It’s been terrible. Sorry about the phone calls.”
“That’s okay.”
She looked at me. “Uh, well, I promised I’d sit with Peter.”
That was my reserved chess friend, the one whose brave and futile battle against Giorgio and Richard was a source of admiration to us all. “You did?”
“Actually we’ve started seeing each other,” she said.
“You’ve—really?” Peter was sweet but so quiet, and Ella with her tattoos and hair and boobs: There couldn’t have been two more different people in college. As I absorbed this new information I saw Tom come toward me from the door to Hall and then veer off when he saw Ella. “What about Tom?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“You’re fine with that?”
“I’m fine with that,” she repeated sarcastically, as if I were being stupid. “Look, I’ve got to go. Are you sitting with Tom?”
“You can’t even sit with him?”
“Oh, no, I’m fine with sitting with him, but I said I’d sit with Peter.”
“Can we all sit together?”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Then I’ll sit with you guys.”
Finally she smiled at me. “Really?”
“Yeah, obviously. I see Tom all the time.”
“Thanks,” she said.
For a week or so it was awkward to be friends with them, and certainly for a while Ella appeared upset when she saw him, in the subtle ways a friend can see. Gradually they could be in the same room.
Tom, to his credit, always tried to include her. I guess her anger subsided. By May she, Tom, and I could all hang out together without any serious tension. Though it didn’t mean Ella had moved on.
* * *
Giorgio and Richard surpassed themselves that first week back, as they seemed to whenever Tom and I happened into a student government meeting.
We had gone to the MCR looking for a game of table football. Peter, now with Ella by his side, was faithfully recording for posterity every clause and sentence in the accreting record of Giorgio and Richard’s official madness. Ella and Tom exchanged nonglances when we came in.
There was obviously an argument going on. Peter, in his quiet way, kept mumbling, “But it’s a quarter of the spring budget,” and Bert, the third-year who always came to meetings, said, “And only seven people could go! Nobody I know even likes skeet shooting.”
“This is about skeet shooting?” I asked.
“Wait,” said Tom, “only seven people can go at a time? And are you two on that list?”
“In a supervisory capacity, Tom, yes, we must perforce be there,” said Richard.
“But not shooting. Simply supervising. That’s a relief, because it means seven people from the MCR can go.”
Richard reddened. “After all the energy we’ve put into this, we would shoot as well … Giorgio has a gun and I…” Here he trailed off in a growing din.
“So there are five open spots?”
The Last Enchantments Page 21