by Alan Cheuse
“They do,” my brother said.
“Our father did a great deed indeed,” I said, with a wink, “in helping my mother to become free.”
“Yes, yes, we have read of it.”
“Have you? How?”
He then told me about our father’s memoir, a copy of which he handed to me immediately upon our return to the house.
“You are named after a character in a novel,” he said. “Perhaps you can tell us if this story is worth preserving beyond the immediate family circle.”
I found myself extremely excited to hold my father’s narrative in my hands. A large dark continent—my own history—lay before me, ready for me to explore.
After some weeks of staying at Emmanuel’s I found my own apartment and went to work for the family enterprise—“as our father would have wanted it,” Emmanuel said. By that time I had read the memoir once, and had begun it again, this time adding my own chapters and interpolations based on the stories my mother had told me—half-chanting sometimes, half-singing, always intense and in her heart-deep and serious way of loving the world even in its most awful and difficult moments, moments sometimes that added together to make years, always speaking what she took to be the truth. Free and educated and standing near the beginning of a grand new American century, of course I wanted see myself as part of this family and to make my way in the world. That was when it came to me, what I must do first to find an answer that would ease my curious heart.
***
The night before I departed, my brother and I—strangers, still, but hoping to know each other in some deeper way some day—took a walk along the piers on the East River, lost in thoughts of our father, and breathing in the stink of salt-fish, and the somehow annealing odor of tar and smoke.
At one point, we stopped under a lamp and he reached into his pocket and handed me a watch.
“This was Father’s,” he said, “and our grandfather’s before that. I would like you to have it.”
Even though I resembled a grown man, I wept a small trickle of tears as I took the gift from him, accepting the generosity of his legacy, which he now made mine. And that night as I wound the timepiece I wondered at the wonder in my heart, that so many turns and twists of feet and breath, so many passages of mind and time, so much evil and so much good had to transpire, for two brothers to be standing here in such a tableau as this, with yours truly now possessing both stone and watch.
The heart, old instrument, wonders, yes, and aches, the heart yearns, mourns, cries, but above all else the heart hopes and longs to be free, even as the ground we tread on, so unsteady where I grew up, and perhaps where you live, too, trembles beneath our feet. Oddly enough, a faint tremor rattled Manhattan—oh, the earth everywhere unstable!—the morning I boarded the ship for Africa, my hand in my pocket, stone in my hand as I began my voyage eastward, hoping that I might find the last, or, with luck, perhaps some of the first pieces of the truth of Eliza’s life—truth, ah, the truth, ever-changing and yet remaining so steady, at least in the distance, that we follow it the way sailing ships follow certain stars to keep themselves on course in calm seas and stormy.
Acknowledgments
With enormous thanks to Kristin O’Shee, Shana Drehs, and, with deep gratitude, Dominique Raccah. Thanks also to Heather Moore, Nicole Lee, and Elizabeth Gutting.
About the Author
Alan Cheuse is the author of the novels The Bohemians, The Grandmothers’ Club, The Light Possessed, and the award-winning To Catch the Lightning, as well as the nonfiction works Fall Out of Heaven and A Trance After Breakfast. As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the writing program at George Mason University.