Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

by Seth Lerer

  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 unbuttoned 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 assist. 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-sex 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 tortoiseshell glasses, 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 assignations.

  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 password for his e-mail.

  Call his lawyer and accountant.

  Call his only living cousin.

  Call Mom.

  Call my brother.

  Cancel class 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 bitch. 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 Erté 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 disassembled rack. I reached in and pulled up a handful of matchbooks: the Stud, the End Up, Badlands, Moby Dick.

  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?

  The buzzer rang, and a tall, balding man with a thick Irish accent stood at the door. He introduced himself as one of the building’s custodians, and he said right away that he had heard about my father’s death, he was so sorry.

  “Larry was a great tenant and such a wonderful friend, and I know this will seem strange right now, but he promised me his car.”

  His car?

  “Yes, I’d like his car.”

  Now?

  “Well, yes. I’m going away for the weekend, and I’d really like to have his car.”

  Look, I just got here and I can’t give you his car. I can’t even find his will. Let me settle the estate and then we can talk.

  “Oh. Can I at least have the keys to borrow it for the weekend?”

  All right, sure, bring it back on Monday, and if it isn’t here I’ll call the police and tell them you stole it.

  It was a tiny Celica convertible, all bla
ck. Dad barely could get in and out of it, it was slung so low to the ground. The last time he drove to my house, I met him at the driveway, and he had to grab his thighs to lift his legs out of the pedal-well and plant them on the ground before he could haul himself out of the seat. Like Franklin Roosevelt getting out of bed, I thought. Once up, though, he could steady himself, though he still had his hand on my shoulder. That afternoon, he got me and my then-ten-year-old son to squeeze inside (me in the front, the boy, beltless in the luggage space behind the seats). He swung out of the driveway, turned, missed two stop signs, and shot up the highway ramp. He crossed two lanes, put it in fifth, and hugged the median like a slot car. We went as far as one of the exits that took us into wooded hills, curved around horse paddocks and Christmas tree farms, crested the skyline drive and caught a glimpse of bay and ocean out of each window, before turning back along the hairpins into suburbs nestling in for dinner. Streetlamps were on, but he kept his headlights retracted, darting like a bat between the slower-moving sedans. Then he killed the engine, coasting to a silent stop before our driveway, less than half an hour after we had left.

  “Let’s go again!” my son cried.

  I gave the Irishman the keys and thought, I hope he never brings it back, and closed the door.

  TWO

  The Abduction from the Seraglio

  I went back to his closet, looking for anything to make him human. I found his pictures in his private’s uniform, his discharge papers, and a carbon copy of a posting to Camp Carson, Colorado. Some of the pictures were studio shots from Brooklyn, taken on leave. There he is in the khakis, with his pompadour and his nose too big for the rest of him. Some were snapshots, all with his mother or Aunt Mary—none with his father or anyone else. The documents reported an injury, a medical discharge, and putting the dates together, I realized that he had served no more than sixteen months and was out before D-Day.

  He never talked about the army. Even Mom was surprised. “When I first met him,” she began one evening, after they had been divorced for a decade, “he had been out three years and never said a word. Even in the late forties, Brooklyn College was full of men still in their military haircuts and their good posture, ready to light your cigarette and tell you everything about the service. I went to college hearing about Anzio and El Alamein, and once I went to the movies with a man, a very nice, tall fellow with a good smile, and when the lights went down and the music started to blare he broke into a cold sweat, said he had to go outside for a smoke, and never came back.”

  “To this day I’ve no idea what he did in the army. The young men would brag in the cafeteria, and he would just sit there, silent, smiling, and when faces turned to him he’d say something like he was an interpreter, or in intelligence, or that things were so sensitive he really couldn’t say. All I knew was that he was drafted on his eighteenth birthday, tested out of combat duty, and spent part of 1943 at Fort Dix and part of 1944 at a POW camp in Colorado, translating for German prisoners. Aunt Mary told me once he called her every day from Colorado, begging her to get him out. She said eventually he injured his back during some exercise, and they just had to discharge him. One day I went through his stuff, old cartons that his mother had told me to take, and there were notes in something I couldn’t read. They looked like classroom language notes, and I held them out, like they were love letters to another woman, and said something like, and what are these, and he said that after Fort Dix a few of the boys were tested for their language skill and he passed so high on the exam that they sent him to Princeton for the summer to study Turkish with Professor Hitti, as part of some diplomatic plan. But it fell through just a few weeks into the course, and so they transferred him to German, where they trained him to be an interpreter for the POWs. So the Turkish notes just sat there in a box. He didn’t even know he had them anymore. He said that after all that work he could remember only one sentence in Turkish: Bu odada kaç pencere vardir?, which means ‘How many windows are in this room?’ What a strange thing to remember.

  “That’s all I know, really. You ask him.”

  I did. Years later, when I was teaching at Princeton, I called him up and asked him to tell me about the summer there, about Professor Hitti and what he studied. Princeton in the forties. Must have been amazing. Einstein was there, right? Everybody else was out at Los Alamos, but Einstein was there. Did you ever see him? What about Hitti? I’ve got a colleague now who remembers him. But all he said was, “It was a long time ago.”

  The only other bit of information I could glean was when he blurted out one afternoon in Palo Alto, while I was barbecuing and our son, then two or three, was digging in the backyard, that watching him dig reminded him of his friend Moe, who went through basic training with him and then spent a hundred and forty-seven days in a trench on a Pacific island, and then met him in San Francisco after they were both discharged and rode back on the train all the way to New York with him.

  I stood up with his army photos in my hand and looked up at his walls, plastered with pictures of himself. There was a set of photos from the Washington Opera’s 1985 season, when they did Mozart’s Impresario as a curtain-raiser for The Abduction from the Seraglio. Dad managed to get himself the two nonsinging roles: the first, the Impresario himself (Der Shauspieldirektor, a title he would spit out more like Yiddish than like German), and then the Pasha from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a title even he could not whip his tongue around). One of the photos, in garish color, had him draped in gold and red sateen, with a lopsided turban and his arms out, like he was welcoming applause for simply showing up.

  Couldn’t even carry a tune, I thought, famously tone-deaf, to the point where even the one song he could just barely sing—“Blue Moon,” with its repeated notes and simple scale—wavered like an old record on the Victrola, running out of spring.

  I looked out his window, and the rain blew against the glass like the sound of a Janissary’s drum.

  . . .

  That fall (I imagined), it rained every day in Colorado, sweeping across five hundred miles of plains until it shattered against the barracks. He would wake up every morning, lather and pretend to shave, and then stand with the staff sergeant for roll and for inspection, and then they would troop the prisoners out in army-green buses to the wheat fields. Groups of boys, most no older than he was. Someone must have figured that months on the prairie would drive everybody nuts; they had to find something for all of them to do, prisoners and guards. And so they bused them out to the great farms in the flatlands, where they dug the wheat rows in the spring, then cultivated in the summer, and then in the fall scythed their way across, an army of fieldhands, marching in stubble.

  He would sit with the prisoners in the buses, turning the sergeant’s bark into the vowels they could understand. He’d sit, still, in the bus while they went out and cut the stalks, sometimes standing in the open door smoking a cigarette, sometimes running into the wheat field when a prisoner had to pee, to walk him to the pit latrine across the stubble, standing with him, his hand on a sidearm he never fired.

  That night, after the canned ham and potatoes, he would stand in line at the base phone, waiting to call Mary, waiting to tell her how horrible it was, how he was so much younger than everyone else (or so it seemed) and how they taunted him, and how the sergeant called him in because someone had found one of Moe’s letters, and the sergeant stood there with the letter, open in his hand, reading it like it was a map of an invasion, interrogating him about his loyalty, about this man’s army, about Aunt Mary. He knew Aunt Mary knew people (I know people, you always said), and maybe she could write a letter or get an appointment with an important person. He missed Princeton, with its summer leaves brushing against the leaded windows of the lecture hall. He missed Professor Hitti, who lectured about how the Europeans got everything they knew from the Arabs, and how he ran the language classes like an orchestra conductor, leading them all in unison until, occasionally and without warning, he’d point at someon
e and get them to stand up and solo a sentence:

  Bu odada kaç pencere vardir?

  But Mary would just listen and remind him of his duty and remind him not to let anyone know, and yes, you have to eat the ham, and just don’t do anything you’ll regret, and we’re all thinking of you, even your parents.

  That night, like every night, he’d hang up and walk back, fighting against the wind and the rain (six feet tall and a hundred and forty-seven pounds), to the barracks, and he’d think, what can I do, what can I do now? And he’d figure that he’ll do it next week, when they put all the enlisted men through the obstacle course, just to keep them in shape. By now, he can go through the course in his sleep (and does, waking up in a cold sweat out of a dream): the run through the tires, the scattering across the wet ground under the poles, the rope swing, the zigzagging through the dummy minefield, the climb up the wooden wall with the knotted rope, up, up thirty feet, then swing your left leg, then your right leg, over and then down, rappelling on the other side, and then more mud.

  The next six days were glacial. Roll, the ride, the scything, seemed to take longer and longer. The sky pelted rain, and the prisoners would come back into the bus dripping wet, bits of stalk and awn stuck to their uniforms. He remembers a day, years ago, when Mary showed him her dresses and laid each one out on the bed, and he touched them, and she told him how the little patterns had been put on specially, in an extra-special way. Appliqué. He looks at the soldiers covered in rain-glued wheat bits and mouths, silently, the word. Appliqué. Nobody looks at him. By this point, they’ve learned not to look, though every now and then his eyes meet those of one of the prisoners, and they lock on, if only for a second, and then turn away, and his skills as a translator are needless.