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

by Seth Lerer

His letters come, now already opened, fingered across Aunt Mary’s fountain-pen script. Moe knows not to write anymore. Everyone long before stopped asking if he had a broad back home. Even the sergeant couldn’t give a shit now, and it’s just two days before drill.

  He knew about it, first, from one of the prisoners, who would sing a little in the field and who, in the bus, was just about the only one who smiled. They shared a cigarette by the pit latrine. Die Entführung aus dem Serail, he called it. O, ist es schön, wie lyrisch, wie komisch! Ich habe es geshen, he began, and in a German finer than any of the other men’s, he told him about the performance he had seen at the Vienna State Opera, in 1942, with the great Elisabeth Schwartzkopf.

  The opera begins, he said, with Belmonte in search of his beloved Konstanze, who had been taken by pirates and sold into servitude to the evil Pasha. There is the manipulative servant of the Pasha, Osmin; the beautiful servant of Konstanze, Blonde; the clever servant of Belmonte, Pedrillo. There’s so much, he went on, but the great moment is in act 2, when Konstanze laments to Blonde that the Pasha is in love with her:

  Martern aller Arten

  Mögen meiner warten.

  He listened as the prisoner recited the lyrics, barely getting them through the scrim of the eighteenth-century poetry and the prisoner’s refined accent. “All kinds of tortures may await me,” he translated in his head.

  Nur dann würd’ ich zittern,

  Wenn ich untreu könnte sein.

  “I would tremble only if I were untrue to him.”

  It’s all very melodramatic, he thinks, and he isn’t even sure he’s gotten all the lyrics, but the prisoner acts out the whole thing, with Belmonte searching and Konstanze weeping and Osmin plotting. The opera ends, he concludes, when Belmonte and Pedrillo bring ladders into the Pasha’s garden, Osmin finds them, and then by a twist of plot, the Pasha—and here he can barely follow the long German sentences, with their built-up adjectives and final verbs—lets them go, while Osmin laments that he can’t have them all killed.

  Können Sie ein wenig singen? He asks, and the prisoner turns to him, stubs out his cigarette, and tries a few bars of the tenor aria:

  Konstanze, Konstanze

  Dich wieder zu sehen, dich.

  He sings in a thin, sweet voice, the mist puffing from his mouth, the steam rising from the open pit latrine.

  The opera, he goes on, catching his breath, was a great success, ein grosser Erfolg, when it opened, what with all things Turkish der letzte Schrei (“all the rage”; he knew the idiom) and the music full of Janissary drums. Mozart wrote too, did you not know, the famous “Rondo alla Turca” as the final movement to his sonata in A, another appeal to the taste for Turkish things. The Pasha kept his harem in a special room, called an oda, and Mozart’s audience loved all the innuendos about sex and savagery.

  And he says, I know, Turkisch kan ich ein bisschen. Aber oda bedeudet nur Zimmer, nicht wahr?

  Ja, aber das oda des Paschas—das war ein bestimmtes Zimmer.

  Oda, a special room, a room for women only, a room where the wives would lie on their special couches (divans, he remembered), waiting for the pasha to select one, waiting to be summoned for her duties. Odalisque, he remembers now, the woman lying on the couch.

  And he remembers Professor Hitti, surveying his students, lecturing about the fineries of the Arab world, drumming into their heads the idea of agglutination in the Turkish language, pounding on the lectern, no, no, no, the particles agglutinate into grammatical units, and then his eyes, brown as sardonyx, glint, and he steps away from the lectern and points a finger right at him:

  Lerer—Bu odada kaç pencere vardir?

  That morning he gets up, even before the bugle, with the lyrics in his ears. His uniform is smarter than usual, the shirt and the green tie crisper, and the trousers—which he carefully laid out the night before under his mattress—pressed to a knife edge by his body. There’s mess, and roll, and then the sergeant rounds up the enlisted men for drills, and then the obstacle course, just to keep them trim, the sergeant says, and everybody notices how eager he seems this morning. He grabs his rifle, holding it across his body like a weapon (Lerer, it’s a weapon, not a pet), and he runs faster than anyone else, his feet dancing through the maze of tires, his calves going up and down like pistons, and he throws himself into the mud, loves the mud, keeps his weapon up and out of it, and then flips it around so it hangs from his back by the strap, and he grabs the knotted rope and climbs, fast, faster, with just his forearms hauling himself up out of the mud, and the rain beats on his face, and he gets to the top and throws his leg over the wall, and he grabs on to the knotted rope on the other side and straightens his legs against the wet wall, and he can feel the pride the sergeant finally has in him, and he knows he’s ahead of all the other men.

  And then he lets go.

  One of the corporals told him once, over mess, how he had heard that when you parachuted out of a plane, it was like time stopped. You couldn’t feel yourself falling, at first. You thought you were holding still and the plane was flying away from you. You just hang there, so you think, and so you have to count out loud, ’cause if you don’t you’ll just lose track of time and be splat on the ground before you know it. You have to count out loud, and when you hit ten, you pull the ripcord and the chute opens. You feel yourself yanked up by the chute. That’s the first time you feel yourself moving. Funny, you know. You’re falling, down, down, down, and the first thing you feel is being pulled up. And then, and only then, you can look down and see where you’re supposed to land. You’ve gotta be real careful, gotta make sure you let your legs kind of crumple out under you, otherwise you’ll just snap ’em like a twig. Then you roll over, stand up, pull up your chute, and hope that all this time no one’s shooting at you.

  That’s how it’s going to feel, he thinks, but without the chute. He’ll just hang there, not looking down, and there’ll be no chute and no one shooting at him, and he’ll be free.

  But he isn’t. He lets go and he drops like a sack of potatoes, feels himself dropping, the air knocked out of him. Thirty feet. Lands on his keester, plop, right in the mud, a big splash. He sinks down about a foot. The whole thing happens in no time. The men are howling. Pointing. Bent over, hands flat out on their knees. Everyone. Except the sergeant. He knows. He walks over, a sad smile on his face, not bothering to quiet the men. You, and you, he points. Get this soldier to the infirmary.

  He lies there in the bed, his back in a brace. They’ve given him some morphine for the pain. Nothing but pain really, just a sprained back. Lucky you fell on your keester, the medic says, between drags on a smoke. Jeez.

  No one visits him. There’s a letter from Mary, wishing him to get better, and a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, and a basin on the floor. He listens for the scrape of a ladder against the outside wall. Nothing.

  His eyes open, and he looks around. He tries to raise his head, but it just falls back against the pillow. He counts, aloud, in Turkish: bir, iki, üç, dört, beş. Beş, he says. Beş. There are five windows in this room.

  Two weeks later, he gets off the bus in San Francisco, his discharge papers in his pocket.

  THREE

  Enter Tubal

  I walked down the stairs and drove home in the rain. Twelve hours later I was in the parking lot of the Neptune Society. As far as I knew, Dad had left no instructions beyond the DNR, and so I called to have him cremated. Their offices were at the San Francisco Columbarium, a freakishly ornate structure overlooking the park. Built in the late nineteenth century, it was arrayed with niches for the ashes of the dead. Each of its ground-floor rooms was named for one of the mythic winds. There were stained-glass windows of angels and a fountain in the courtyard.

  The Neptune Society devoted itself to the care and cremation of the dead. They would take care of everything, they told me on the phone: they’d oversee the body after autopsy, handle death certificates, and manage the cremation and the ashes.

  A gir
l too pretty for the job sat at the front desk, took my name, and walked me over to a small room where I wound up working with a tall thin man with slicked back hair, long sideburns, and a face that looked like it had not seen daylight in a year. He rubbed his hands together, muttered something about returning to the earth, and then gave me a catalog with illustrations of the caskets and the urns that I could purchase. Ornate oak, walnut, and inlaid caskets ranged themselves on the pages. Some were adorned with gold leaf, others had silver fittings. Pictures of carved urns punctuated sentences such as: “Positive identification of the deceased is verified throughout each stage of the cremation process.” I looked up, visibly unsettled by the thousand-dollar price tags.

  “Here at the Columbarium,” he began, “many of our clients value the attention that we give to detail. This a time of challenge for the loved ones, and we offer all the services that take the burden off their shoulders and enable them to say farewell as fully as they can. We can, if you like, arrange a scattering. Of course, if you wish scattering at sea, we’ll need to do some paperwork. And if you move with the remains, you’ll need to file a report with the state. You cannot bury them yourself; that’s the law. We still have niches here available. As you may know, some of the city’s finest citizens are interred here. Mayor Taylor’s family insisted on his resting at the Columbarium. The Klumpke sisters had their ashes placed here in the 1940s—Dorothea Klumpke was one of the first female astronomers, and I often look up and think of how our Columbarium looks more like an observatory than a mausoleum. Harry Jansen is here. He used to be known as Dante the Magician; he coined the phrase ‘Sim sala bim.’ And, of course, Harvey Milk’s ashes rest here. People come from all over the world just to look at his name.”

  I thought of Dad resting with Harvey Milk, with forgotten magicians and astronomers, his ashes shelved behind the marbled winds. I thought of spending thousands on his casket and his urn, burning up the inheritance just to let him know I could, wishing him back alive, to witness this macabre play and to see if, just once, he wouldn’t hit on the attendant.

  “Our clients like to know that they have done their best for the deceased, that they have not skimped, even at the end. Yes, it is true that the casket is incinerated. But how can you put a price on peace of mind?”

  I ordered the cheapest thing in the catalog, a hundred-dollar plywood box, and for the ashes I asked for a plain wooden container with his name on it. He looked at me with all the dour dismissal of a character in a Charles Addams cartoon, but took my check and wrote down the particulars.

  That afternoon, I let the estate agent into the apartment. There was a grad student at Stanford who had heard Dad died, and she was quick to let me know she had a cousin who handled estates. After all, she said, how much of his stuff was I going to keep? I opened the door and let the agent in before me. She stood still in the hallway, her eyes falling on the big Erté sculpture in the middle of the living room; on the walls of Japanese woodblock prints; on the pictures of his mother and his aunt; on the bogus Picasso, the big needlepoint pillows, and the Bokharas. “Your Dad was . . . ,” she began, but then paused.

  Yes, he was.

  She got her pad, pencil, and calculator and began to inventory everything. She had an early version of a digital camera, and took pictures of the walls, the furniture, the floors, the closets. She pulled down the Picasso, only to let me know that these things were not really very rare, even if they were real. “At least,” she laughed, “it’s not a Dalí.” We went through the drawers of watches, almost all of which she let me know were knockoffs. We went over the furniture, we lifted up the rugs, we counted up his hundred and twenty shirts, his shoes, his belts. I asked if it was worth a lot, how much, just ballpark, she thought.

  “Look,” she said, “most of this isn’t worth very much. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but a lot of the artwork is either very common or dubious. What did he pay for these Alishinskys? I can’t imagine getting more than a couple of hundred for them. The jewelry is nice, and some of it is real, but there’s no market for men’s jewelry in my business. The Japanese woodblock prints are cut out of old books and mounted. I doubt that I could get much for them. I could sell the furniture, the kitchen stuff, and all the clothes to a consignment place tomorrow, no problem. Most of the silver seems very personal. Forget it. Keep the rugs. They’re in good shape, but the colors are too striking for most people’s tastes. And I don’t know what you’re going to do with that Erté.”

  She left, saying that she could let me know the estimate in a few days. She’d go online to confirm the prices and the chances of a sale, and get a sense of just how real his stuff was. But the kinds of people who would come to buy the stuff, she let me know, would respond more to notices in the newspaper and flyers on the doors. She’d like to have a day to keep the apartment open, just so people could walk through. She’d take twenty percent of the total sale. And, oh, yes, she was bonded.

  That evening, I held court in the apartment. The long-term friend came by, a man now in his sixties whom I first met thirty years before, when he was blond and tan and thin and spoke in an Oklahoma accent like warm molasses. A new friend from the city stopped in, Turkish, in a crisp button-down shirt, his graying hair manicured into a short mane. They both knew each other, but moved warily around the apartments, like cats seeking out a turf.

  “Larry was hopeless with machinery,” the old friend began. “I knew him for thirty years, and he could never seem to turn anything on. When he moved in, he called me to set up his stereo. I put the whole thing together, programmed his favorite radio stations, put in a CD, turned it on, and said, ‘Happy?’ A month later I was back here and the same CD was in the changer. As for e-mail—he could barely use it. I’ll give you his password, but I doubt you’ll find anything. He never wrote to anybody and my guess is all you’ll find is spam. The thing you’ll want to do is call his lawyer and get the will cleared up. Then you’ll want to go to the bank. I’ll show you where he kept the safe deposit box key. Don’t worry about the credit cards. Most of them were in my name, anyway, and besides, Larry loved walking around with cash. Most days, he’d have two or three hundred dollars on him. The one thing he was careful about, though, was checks. He had an old-style checkbook, with the stubs that stay in when you tear a check out, and he kept boxes of them. I’m sure you’ll find them, though I don’t know what you’ll do with them.

  “I know a lot of the names in his address book, but not everyone. Let’s face it, he had a limited repertory: Jackson Fillmore for dinner, the Marina at sunset, movies at the Kabuki, Yerba Buena, morning coffee at Tully’s down the street, the gym. After a while, everybody knew the script, and so he had to find new people to impress.

  “The most important thing you need to understand about your father was that he was terrified of being alone. It wasn’t so much that he needed company but that he needed an audience. Just being there to watch him order the veal chop was enough; and then to nod when he asked, ‘Is yours good?’ and then to force down a big dessert because he wanted you to eat. He loved to send presents. Only thing was, he would call you right away to make sure that you got it; never gave you a chance to write a thank-you note, or call him first. I always told him that he shouldn’t drive that little car around the city, so he took the bus. We’d sit there, and he’d talk to me, but loud, and his eyes would dart around to see if everybody else was listening, and if he caught a glimpse of someone eavesdropping, he’d turn and talk to them. One day he got off in Japantown, and I swear he expected the other passengers to applaud.

  “He was shattered when nothing theatrical turned up. You remember he had done all that theater in DC. Look at his walls, the pictures from the shows: there he is as Van Helsing in a Dracula adaptation; there he is as the Impresario and the Pasha in two Mozart operas; there he is as Tubal in The Merchant of Venice, the Folger Shakespeare Library performance. Nothing came up here; well, you know there is no theater here, or none to speak of. And certainly nothing
for him. He had a friend you’ve probably heard of, a studio executive, and Larry bugged him for a part—anything, a cameo, a walk-on. A couple of years ago he was jumping up and down that he was going to get something in an Adam Sandler movie—the old man that Sandler’s character picks up and carries across the street to impress his son. He wouldn’t stop: what should I wear, how should I walk? Like he was auditioning for Hamlet. Then he came over one night, more laughing than crying, to say that the producer called: ‘Hey, Larry, sorry about the part; Adam wants a black guy.’

  “Oh, and those hats. I never saw him wear any of them, either.”

  Would you like something personal of his?

  “Like what.”

  But then the other friend piped up, that he had been with Larry when they bought the Picasso lithograph. He recalled, too, how Larry used to let him wear his watches, and how he had always admired a silver Cartier. I took the Picasso off the wall—six lines, evoking a face—and gave it to him. I rifled through a drawer and found thirty watches. Most of those are fakes, the friend said. I pulled the whole drawer out and presented it to him, like a doorway mother offering a bucket full of candy to a trick-or-treater.

  Take the one you want.

  And the old friend sat silently, embarrassed that he never wore any of Larry’s watches.

  I’ll tell you what, I said to him. I’m going to go out for a while and run some errands in the neighborhood. You have a key. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Take anything you want and go. And get rid of all that equipment in the closet.

  I walked down the hill to a musty used bookstore. No one was inside, and I opened up the door to hear its attached bell ring in the dark. A short man with a mop of hair came out, looked at me as if I had disturbed some alchemical experiment, and slipped into the back room. There were a few fine-binding books, some shelves of “first editions,” and a shelf of popular psychology. A small case had a sign above it, “Literature,” and there was an old Shakespeare from the 1930s, cracked, with gaudy lettering and fading photographs of great performances inside. I opened to The Merchant of Venice, and saw the tempest at its start. Antonio, the merchant of the title, enters, sad and weary. Salarino tells him that his mind is tossing on the ocean; his ships, his merchandise, remain in doubt. “Thou know’st that all my fortunes are at sea.”