by Seth Lerer
I’d never seen them look so good, arms firm, backs supple, eyes closed, pulling together, breathing together, forceful, yet almost serene in the conviction of our loss. Men, I said at the end. Congratulations. In spite of everything, we finished. We looked good. Dad Vail himself would have been proud.
We got back to campus just in time for finals, and two nights later I showed up after dinner at the dorm to find you, just standing there, unannounced, in a blue blazer and deep green tartan wool trousers, with a white shirt and a blue bow tie, your silvering hair swept back down to your collar. You had grown a beard—a mustache and goatee—and the hairs mastered your mouth like the beard Spock wore in that old Star Trek episode. Kirk and his companions had been accidentally transported to a parallel universe, a universe in which Starfleet prowls the constellations for booty, where officers advance on the assassination of their superiors, where sex and daggers hug the hips. And there was Mr. Spock, in 1967, with a beard, as if only in a parallel universe would anybody in authority grow such a thing, as if behind that cold, logical face lay an evil self itching to get out. And you, looking part Spock, part Stanislavsky, slimmed down, standing by the pay phone in the hallway, met my eyes like I had just debarked from a destroyer.
You shook my hand in front of everyone—you never, ever shook my hand, always the hugs, the squeezes, the pats on the back—and you came into my room, surveying the white cinder-block walls on which I had placed nothing (I was only there for a year, I said), and took your blazer off, and folded it inside out, carefully creasing its back, and laid it over my desk chair like you were spreading out the ermine. You lay on my bed, in your white shirt and bow tie, stretching yourself out with your hands behind your back, Manet’s Odalisque right out of Art 101, waiting with the door open for my hallmates to come in and see just who had beamed down.
You were just passing through, coming back from work in Boston to New York. I had to come visit. “How about this weekend? Meet me at the St. Regis, the King Cole Room. You know I always stay at the St. Regis.”
I know why you loved the place. In the 1970s, the hotel had taken on the patina of stage set, and legend had it that Salvador Dalí and Gala would decamp there for the winter, Dalí every now and then posing in the enormous wing chair by the fireplace, fur-coated, with his signature mustache and walking stick.
That Friday afternoon I found my friend Bob, and we got in his car and drove in early weekend traffic to New York—past the decaying luster of New Haven, past the fronton that had just gone up in Bridgeport for the Caribbean jai alai fans, through Rye and Pelham, over the bridge, and down through the Bronx and Harlem to the hotel. Just leave the car in front, I told Bob. My dad’s here, he’ll cover it. I had a fiver in my pocket, and I gave it to the bellman as if I were doling out spun gold, and we walked into the hotel lobby—Bob in his jeans and crewneck sweater, and me dressed for the occasion, in a tweed jacket and a paisley bow tie—looking for Dalí and sidling up to the front desk.
Larry Lerer.
I’m sorry, but we’ve no one by that name here at the hotel.
Lawrence Lerer, then.
No, sir. No Lerer, no Larry, no Lawrence.
“Maybe your dad’s travelling under an assumed name?” Bob ventured.
What name? Who else could he be? Did he leave a message, I’m his son.
No, no message here.
I deflated into the big wing chair. I looked at my watch. Miraculously, we’d made it in time. I poked my head into the King Cole Room. No sign of you. I paced. We waited half an hour. Then you showed up, blowing in through the revolving doors, your floor-length raincoat spreading out behind you like a cape. You don’t remember any of this.
Where were you, are you staying here, you said the King Cole Room, this is my friend Bob, how’s Mom?
And all I can remember now is how you blustered through—well, I thought this would be as good a place to meet as any; yes, I was here for a while but I’m staying with a friend; I don’t see what the problem is, you’re here, I’m here, Bob (if that is his real name) is here, let’s go.
Bob looked at me as if to say, I bet this happens all the time, and we walked through the lobby.
I thought we were going to eat at the King Cole Room, I said, but you just looked incredulously at me.
The focal point of the King Cole Room was a mural by Maxfield Parrish that rendered the king and his court with saturated colors and exaggerated beauties. I’d spent the drive telling Bob all about it, and I reminded him of the sangria Bar Mitzvah, when I sang the “Rebbe Elimelech,” a Yiddish version of “Old King Cole,” with his fiddlers three and his spectacles and his tefillin.
But we were out the door, in a cab (what about Bob’s car?), and off to Pearl’s in Midtown. Offering overpriced, watered-down Chinese food, it was the restaurant of the moment, the walls completely black, the table settings black, with brilliant white chopsticks set against them like chalk on blackboard. Of course, we had no reservation, and the place was almost full, but you had a gift for intimidating ethnic waiters, and after a few minutes of Stalinesque diplomacy—what do you mean that table is reserved? I see no one there? We’ll be out in an hour!—we were seated.
No menus, you said, as you brushed away the waiter. We’ll have the minced squab in lettuce leaves, the lemon chicken, the tangerine beef, and the eggplant. Rice all around. I’ll have a Lillet. Men? We ordered a couple of beers.
Your Lillet came, the color of liquid straw. It’s a wonderful drink, you said (a year or so later, I ordered it at a restaurant and the waiter brought it to my date, correcting himself on my prompting with an exaggerated “Sorry, sir”). Bob drank his beer like it was the only thing between him and an invading army, and I knew, as he must have known, at that very moment, why you brought us here. You said nothing. You didn’t have to. We looked around at the skinny men and the skinnier women. We stared as the servile waiters took back dishes that the other diners didn’t like. We watched as the minced squab came and you carefully laid it out in the lettuce leaves, mounding and shaping it into a little sausage, and then rolling the whole assembly up into a lettuce tube and opening your mouth and eagerly putting it in. We watched as you held up the chopsticks and asked for a fork (“chopsticks are such an affectation,” you pronounced). I liked the lemon chicken—deep-fried breast strips covered in a tart syrup—but the tangerine beef was stringy and the eggplant mushy. You ate none of your rice (“I’m cutting back”), and even before Bob and I were done you pushed your chair back and lit up a cigarette, took a deep drag, closed one eye, and looked at me.
“That’s some tie.”
You took a sniff and threw out your left hand like you were conducting an orchestra, but only to pull back the sleeve and check your watch. With the same hand, you snapped your fingers and the waiter brought the check, and you pulled out a wad of twenties and put six of them down without even looking at the bill. Well, men, it’s been a joy, and you got up and threw your coat over your shoulders without putting your arms in the sleeves and stepped out into the Midtown night. And Bob said, “You think I could finish his rice?” We sat there without saying a word, left the restaurant and walked back to the St. Regis where, surprisingly, Bob’s car was still in front, and we got in and drove the two hours back to Middletown.
That spring, the magnolias and the dogwoods opened late, and by the time exams were over, they were just past prime, the pink-edged petals falling like autumn leaves from last November. The literature teacher had made us read the whole of Joyce’s Ulysses, referring in class to chapter titles that I didn’t know existed (where in the book does it say, “Oxen of the Sun”?), and all I got out of the class was his announcement: “Leopold Bloom’s real name was Virag, which is Hungarian for flower.” I never found a girl to sleep with me, while Bob, I later learned, was famous around campus for having gotten laid within an hour of the first day’s freshman orientation. I never went back to the boathouse. I vowed to get the best grades that I could, cash in my AP high
school credits, and finish in three years. I went back to my old fascinations—Anglo-Saxon, Beowulf—decided I would be an English major, go to grad school, teach. I’d keep a journal of the books I’d read. I’d never learn Hungarian or change my name. And I would never ask you if you spoke the truth. Can you forgive me?
The last day of freshman year I packed my books and my records, my stereo and my electric typewriter, and I put on my tweed jacket, even though it was May and humid in the Connecticut valley. I’d asked Bob to take me to the airport, even though it was precisely in the opposite direction from his home in Pelham, but he said he’d drive me anyway. We were leaving the dorm when Billy came out holding his straw boater.
“Listen man, I haven’t lived at home since I was thirteen. You’ll do fine. Consider yourself lucky. I never really knew my father.”
And then he gave me his hat and walked away.
SIX
Iceland
I left the restaurant and walked back to his apartment in the rain. He had been dead two days and, still, I couldn’t get Mom on the phone. I had called a friend of hers. No answer. I had called my brother. “Oh, she’s fine.” Find her, I barked. Finally, that night, I got ahold of her. She had turned the ringer down on the phone one evening and forgotten to bring it back up.
He’s gone.
“Thank God. What a relief for all of us. You know it’s a blessing that boy of yours won’t have to grow up with him. He never cared about anyone other than himself. Don’t fool yourself. He never really loved you. You were his pet.”
His pet. I tried to think of anything that would confound her: remember Brooklyn, and the trips to Jack’s and the museum; remember how he let me grow those strawberries, or how he bought that great big house for us, or how he took us all to Europe?
But all that vanished, and all I could think of was one morning during winter break, my senior year in college. I was lying in bed in the big stone house in Pittsburgh, when I heard him on the phone.
“He wants to make a career out of Old English. Can you believe that? He wants to go to Oxford. We took him there when we were all in Europe—you remember, he was fifteen—and I guess he never got over it. He’s applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. Of course, we don’t think he’ll get it.”
I didn’t. I got a Keasbey Scholarship instead. Funded by the largesse of a Philadelphia widow, the Keasbey was available to students from the northeast colleges and universities. A kind of baby Rhodes, they called it, and after an interview with four sad lawyers in blue suits, I got a phone call in the dead of winter telling me I’d been awarded the scholarship and I was going to Hertford College, Oxford, to study English philology.
“Philology” means love of language, but for a college student of the 1970s it was much less a case of love than of fantasy. J. R. R. Tolkien was a philologist: a scholar of Old and Middle English, of Old Norse and Old Welsh, of dialects and diphthongs. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were grounded in his linguistic play. Runes scattered across pages; etymologies danced in the dialogue. Old Bilbo Baggins of Bag End meant nothing more than Bilbo of the cul de sac—as if Tolkien had looked back at nine centuries of French incursion in the British Isles, only to retranslate English life back into Anglo-Saxon; as if he could, with a stroke of his philology, undo the Norman Conquest.
I read Beowulf in junior high. I had been exiled to the library for some infraction (probably passing love notes in math class), and I pulled a copy off a shelf, attracted by the glittering cover. It was really a children’s edition, but it had amazing illustrations: Grendel strode across the pages, dripping with blood, his skin an electric green. He walked across the misty slopes, over the moorlands, bearing God’s ire. I remembered how the names, even in the children’s prose translation, sounded like incantations: Wealhtheow, Hrothgar, Unferth. The translation also gave the flavor of the Anglo-Saxon, with its short, monosyllabic words and its attempts at alliteration. A few years later, in high school, we read the Burton Raffel translation, and I then trooped off to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh to get a copy of a facing page, Anglo-Saxon/modern English edition. I sat up nights reading the text aloud, trying to get a feel for the language and the phrasing. Kennings—those noun metaphors—gripped me: “road of the whale” was the sea; “God’s candle” was the sun.
The old Germanic words reminded me of my parents’ Yiddish. The prefix for the participle in the Germanic languages is ge-. In Old English, geworhton meant “built”; gesceawod meant “had gazed upon.” I listened to recordings made by Helge Kökeritz, the Swedish-born Yale professor, as he intoned Beowulf in something like a blend of bardic thrill and Scandinavian frost: “Geworhton ða Wedra leode, helo on hoe, se waes heah and brad.” Then the people of the Weder-Geats built a mound on the hillside, it was high and broad. And later, Beowulf’s funeral pyre, built in ten days (betimbredon on tyn dagum). I danced to the alliterations, tripped my feet over the meter. I turned to Grendel, marking his way along the moorlands. I found his mother, gemyndig, mindful, remembering, harboring a grudge. I saw the fractured bodies of the Danes and thought of Mom’s gehacktet tsuris, hacked up troubles.
The September after college, I raided Brooks Brothers for tweeds and flannels, packed my books in steamer trunks, and spent seven days on the Queen Elizabeth II sailing from New York to Southampton. This was the ship the Rhodes boys sailed on, and I quickly was excluded from the group. Not one of us, where did you say you went to college, what were you planning to “read” when you “went up”? No one had heard of the Keasbey, and for these tall young men off to read Philosophy and Politics and Economics at Christ Church and St. Johns, a boy in tweeds planning on doing philology at Hertford was met with as much distaste as if I made them watch me put ketchup on peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
Hertford. It was little college, famous for its replica of Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, for the fact that Evelyn Waugh had been there in the 1920s, and for its execrable food. A story that I heard within a day of arriving was that, as a joke, some students had inserted tiny half-pence pieces in their uneaten Brussels sprouts and left the plates to be cleared by the staff, and then three days later one of the college tutors bit into a half-pence piece at high table dinner. I was assigned a two-room suite furnished with couches of Waugh’s vintage, a “scout” who would make the bed, and a tutor, who left our first meeting halfway through, realizing he was out of cigarettes, stunning me to silence with his slang: “Sorry, must pop out for a fag.”
I found a group of Americans from New College who had clustered, as a kind of court, around a boy I’d gone to college with (but didn’t know), who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and, as his first activity on arriving in England, bought a Triumph TR-7 convertible and drove it right up to the college gates to unpack. He hosted parties in his rooms: cheeses and wines I’d never heard of, pipes and cigars. One side of his family had been in the wine business in Europe before the war, and he knew his bottles better than I knew Old English. He taught me to look for key terms on the labels: “mise en bouteille au chateau.” A cru bourgeois, he noted, can sometimes be just as good as a premier cru, and for half the price. One evening, he set up a raclette table in the common room: a half a wheel of cheese sat in front of the fireplace, just close enough to let the open cut warm into softness. Slices of firmly boiled potatoes stacked themselves on plates. He showed us how to take each slice, run it along the soft side of the cheese, and bring it to our mouths just as it cooled. I watched him perform, and as the cheese strung out in spider strands he opened his mouth and popped the whole thing in, like Grendel gobbling a Dane.
In my prewar rooms, I read the Ormulum and the Orthoepists (a group of seventeenth-century scholars who invented systems of phonetic transcription), memorized sound changes from Germanic to Old English, and translated Gawain and the Green Knight. The Oxford of the 1970s had an elegiac quality about it. J. R. R. Tolkien and W. H. Auden had both died within two years of my arrival, and Oxford mourned them with a gowned theatr
ics that could barely compensate for the indifference it had had to them when they were living. Tolkien: medieval, fantastic, inward-looking. Auden: emotive, modern, all too real. They were the two poles of the university, and my tutors were their students and their self-appointed heirs. One of them did her thesis under Tolkien in the 1950s, and one day midway through my first year, she asked me what my first name was. It’s Seth. “Oh, that’s your first name? I thought your surname was Seth-Lerer and I always wondered what a Christian name would be before that.” Another tutor could not have been more than thirty-five but had the affect of an aged heiress from an Agatha Christie novel. Her first words to me in our tutorial on Middle English dialects were, “Do you know your don?” My don? I thought you were my don, recalling, proudly, that the word “don” came from Latin dominum, by way of Spanish Don, and was the Oxford colloquialism for a college tutor. “No, no, I mean Richard Your Don, author of the Handbook of Middle English Grammar.” Oh, Richard Jordan, the German philologist whose Handbuch der mittelenglishen Grammatik of 1925 had appeared in an English translation in the early 1970s. “Yes. Your Don.”
I joined a group of student poets who seemed thrilled to have an energetic young American among their ranks. We talked about the writers that we loved in ugly pubs, and we agreed to meet every Tuesday, in one of the college lounges, to share our work. At the first meeting, we went around the room and everybody read their poems. There were elegies for unborn sisters, paeans to dogs, some fractured lyrics, and then me. I read a poem I had written on the death of Robert Lowell, and made much of the fact that it had been accepted by the Sewanee Review for publication that spring. I went through the poem, analyzing all the references, making a claim for formal verse, and talking about Lowell’s impact on my life—his early iambic pentameters, his mania, his stance against the war. The next Tuesday I showed up at the lounge. Nobody else was there.