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

by Seth Lerer

  Days passed. The barn took shape around the log, wall studs and bracers and then corrugated steel sheets that Arni had cannibalized from a neighbor, nail-pounded into wood frames, and finally plans for a great roof that would peak just at the log’s top. Eythor sighted along the wall rim, and he said something to Arni, who said something to Anna-Solveg, who translated.

  The log is six inches too high. You’ll have to climb up and cut off six inches from the top. Here’s the saw. And she walked away.

  I stood there, surrounded by people I had never seen—not just the family, but strange men in boots and sweaters, one smoking a pipe, another shoving snuff up his nose, men with deep blond hair and dark brown eyes, whose faces hadn’t laughed in generations, men so quietly strong that the rain didn’t even dare wet them, and there I was, soaked to the skin, realizing at that moment that my presence on the farm was news for miles around—that everyone was there to watch me climb the log and cut the top off, in the rain, to see if they could laugh again.

  And the American, green-eyed, dripping wet, slung the bow saw over his shoulder like a real bow, and, finding the still remaining nubs and knots along the log, shimmied up the sixteen feet or so until he reached the top. Then, bracing my legs around the log, I took the saw and began to work. Six inches from the top. I pulled the blade against the wood, and heard the snoring sound of cutting, and the log shook, and I closed my eyes and sawed away, slaying this dragon as the men watched and nobody breathed. After what seemed a lifetime, the top disk of wood sloughed off, and I slid down, my inner thighs now stuck with splinters. I turned to them, waiting for applause, or laughter, or a slap on the back, or a thank-you.

  Já.

  Weeks went by, and the summer chilled. The sun began to skirt the horizon, and we were all outside now, sixteen hours a day, cutting the hay and raking it and baling it and stacking it in the silo. During the winter, when the cows were housed inside the shed and the sheep huddled on the hillside, they would eat the hay we’d cut and baled. By late August, the fishing nets were coming up empty, and Eythor and I drove off to the communal freezer in the town for food.

  There was no cash at Uppsalir. The lambs’ meat and the wool would be exchanged for credits in the town, and Arni’s family would buy their fuel, supplies, and food against the credit of their crop. All of the local farmers kept their meat in a warehouse freezer. Great cabinets, smoking with dry ice, lined the walls. Eythor took a key out of his pocket, turned it in the padlock, and we walked in. Everywhere there were sheep’s heads, blackened with freezer burn. That’s all that’s left, he said, explaining that after the autumn slaughter, the freezer would fill again with fleshy haunches. For now, all we had were the heads. He grabbed a plastic bucket and plucked a few of them, weighing them like melons (if he’d ever seen a melon), gauging their quality by their heft in his hands. They would defrost by the time we returned to Uppsalir, and Solveg would boil them down, letting the bits and pieces of flesh fall from the cheeks, then picking it and shredding it and mixing it with onions and potatoes for a stew.

  One day, about a week before I left, they’d either run out of sheeps’ heads or tired of the meat, and Eythor came in with a bucket of frozen blackness. It was about half full, with the middle raised up in a hump caused by the freezing, and I looked down, seeing flecks of white and little grains, wondering if we now were eating dirt.

  It was sheep’s blood, and it was Drifa’s job to cook it. Drifa, “snow drift,” I thought, as she put her snowy hands into the thick, coagulated mess, palmed it by gobs into a pot, and heated it on the stove. She stirred in oatmeal, milk, a little salt and sugar, and it bubbled and popped. She let it cool, then spooned it into cheesecloth bags, tied them up, and let them dry. That night, she took the bags, now looking like bloodied mozzarella cheese, and put them in a pot of boiling water, poaching them out. She served them up, sliced into rings, with boiled potatoes. I bit in, surprised at how grainy the blood sausages were, gritty against my teeth. The family ate in silence.

  Last meals, last chores. I said good-bye to Midnight, packed my things, and took a bath. I dressed, and found Solveg in the kitchen. All the men and the girls were in the fields, but they wanted me to know how much they liked me and how much they wished me well. Then she reached into her vast knitting bag and pulled out a turtleneck sweater. She had been knitting it the whole time I was there, just for me. It had white bands and brown bands across it, not dyed but the natural color of the wool. There were no seams, as she had knitted it on circular needles, making, in effect, great tubes of wool. I put my bags down, took the sweater, and pulled it on. It fit perfectly. How did you know my size, I asked, in English, and whether or not she understood me she put her palms flat against my chest and then against my sides and said, also in English, “I looked.” And then she kissed me, and I took the bus ten hours back to Reykjavik, to stay with Jonas one more day, then fly back to New York and then to Pittsburgh before going back to Oxford in September.

  The second year at Oxford, I did little else but dream. Mig dreymði, I dreamed. The verb is a reflexive one, with the subject only implied. Mig dreymði, literally, “it dreamed to me.” I’d fall asleep across my 1930s divan, or on chairs in the Bodleian Library, feeling the scratch of Solveg’s undyed wool around my neck. And it would dream to me of Anna-Solveg and her petulance, of Drifa and the blood sausages. I’d silently mouth all the sentences I’d memorized:

  Ég er námsmaðr

  Ég er Gyðyingur

  Ég elska Islands

  Ég elska þig

  And when I could not sleep, I’d walk across the colleges to where my rich friend lived, and I would entertain his courtiers like a skald. I’d wear my sweater, and I’d tell them all about the phone that was so old you had to crank it up and call up Central, about the little horse I’d learned to ride, about the driftwood, about the rain, about the hay, and about Anna-Solveg, and when the mood was right, I’d climb the roof-beam and mime sawing the end.

  SEVEN

  Upriver

  I was still sitting at his desk, the phone down, his Ghurka address book still lying nearby. I thought of calling Mom back, thought of everything, but then got up and looked around. Pictures were everywhere. He’d carefully framed sepias of his mother and his aunts, his father at a table playing poker with a cousin. And then the pictures of himself: at two, bundled in a woolen hat and scarf; at five, in short pants and a Buster Brown haircut; at thirteen, in the tallis and the yarmulke of the Bar Mitzvah; and then in the army, with his relatives, with me, with my brother, with my wife and son. There was no picture taken after 1925 that didn’t have him in it, and I picked them up from side tables and countertops, turning them in my hands like they were stelae from a tomb. I found my own Bar Mitzvah picture, and then drawers of photo albums: Dad and me at my college graduation; Dad and me in the courtyard of my Oxford college; Dad and me in Chicago, when I got my PhD; and Dad at my wedding, with a sheaf of flowers in one hand, his other hand spread out, and his mouth caught in midlaugh, as if to say, can you believe he found her?

  I had.

  We met on the first day of graduate school. I was sitting in the lounge at Harper Hall when she came in with boxes of books, a small TV set, and a carton of kitchenware. I held the elevator for her, peering into the splitting carton to see knives and forks, plates, a few pans, and a corkscrew. Later that afternoon, I walked by her open door to find her neatly setting books along the only shelf provided: Derrida’s De la grammatologie, the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, a set of French plays, and a large, yellow hardback of Hans Küng’s On Being a Christian.

  Hey.

  Hey.

  I walked in without being asked and went over to the bookshelf. As she unpacked, I fingered the spines, moving from top to bottom of the English books and from bottom to top along the French. I pulled down the Küng, and opened it at random.

  The author will reject no suggestion which may help to make his meaning clear. To this extent all doors remain open to
greater truth.

  “You into Jesus?” I ventured.

  “Oh, I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking.”

  Me, too, I said, and didn’t see her for a week.

  That first weekend of school, one of the older graduate students in the dorm suggested that we all go to the top of the John Hancock Building downtown. There was a bar on the ninety-fifth floor, and he got it in his head that we’d all drive in to the city, take the elevator up, and drink till we closed the place down.

  “Top of the John,” I ventured, trying to be witty.

  “Top of the ’Cock,” he fired back.

  Five or six of us piled into his little Honda for the drive, and the sight of us—humanities graduate students at the University of Chicago, dressed in our only suits and ties, or dresses and heels—must have made passersby think of us as a circus act. I hardly recognized the girl I hadn’t helped move in. She wore a purple, belted dress; her hair was beautifully done; and she had lipstick on. There wasn’t room for all of us to have our own seat in the car, and so I sat in the front seat and she sat on my lap. I looked at her and thought (or may even have said aloud), “You really are pretty.”

  That winter, more snow fell in Chicago than anyone could recall. The streets remained unplowed, especially in Hyde Park (which had long been an “independent” ward and, therefore, got few city services). By January, we were walking from the dorm to campus over snowpack as high as the roofs of the parked cars, and every now and then, an antenna would poke through, or we’d scrape along a battered sunroof. We traveled in packs: ill-fitted students from the Midwest and the east coast, terrified of Hyde Park’s reputation in the late 1970s, constantly looking over our shoulders even in daylight.

  On Sundays we would sit in the dorm, eating take-out Chinese food or fried chicken, and I saw her, with her knife and fork, cutting up the chicken breasts that the rest of us were eating with our fingers. One Sunday, I went out to Ribs and Bibs, a few blocks from the dorm, with money from the group to buy a full-size bucket, and as I stood in line—smelling the hickory wood, the vinegar, the ketchup, watching how they stacked up pieces of white bread at the bucket’s bottom, just to soak up all the grease, counting the chicken pieces tossed in with the tongs—a cop car screeched to a halt outside and two policemen threw themselves out, one of them reaching for his gun and the other yelling, “He’s in Ribs and Bibs!” I threw a twenty on the counter, grabbed my bucket, and ran out the back. I wondered just who they were looking for—nobody in the line looked arrest-worthy, and by the prison tattoos on the guy who served the chicken, I figured he had done his time. Maybe someone was hiding in the kitchen. Maybe someone was in the closet. I ran all the way back to the dorm, puffing in the winter air, holding the hot bucket to my chest, until I blew into the building, ran to the kitchen, and broadcast, “Listen to this.” After I told the story, there was silence, and one of the students said, “Maybe they were looking for you.”

  To be a student at Chicago in those years was to share in the myths of intellect. Giants had walked the earth—Robert Hutchins, Enrico Fermi, Harold Urey, Saul Bellow, Milton Friedman—and the English department prided itself on the legacy of the “Chicago Critics,” a group of scholars who took shape in the decades around the Second World War and who formulated, more by accident than by design, a view of literature that stressed the formal understanding of the verbal work, the nature of genre, and a sense of literary understanding grounded largely in the Poetics of Aristotle. Most of the old Chicagoans were dead. Some of their students were professors in The Department. But there remained a group of grad students who’d stayed on, half-believing that Richard McKeon would come out of retirement and teach again, or that Norman Maclean would decamp from his Montana retreat and approve their half-finished theses. These were men in their forties who remembered long-retired faculty as vigorous professors, men who talked about Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas as if it were the model for all prose fiction, men who believed that if you just read a book hard enough, if you just paid attention closely, if you just listened, then no critical response was even necessary.

  At the beginning of my second year, I took my general exams. I put on a tie, walked into the examination room, and faced the three professors. They welcomed me, looked at my list, and then Wayne Booth—in a white turtleneck and blue blazer, with his deep white beard, looking like Moses in Johnny Carson’s clothing—began: “Tell me about the final line of, oh, Great Expectations.” And I parried, “I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” And he said, OK, how about the last line of Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” and I replied, “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion.” For thirty minutes, he tried to trip me: Bellow’s Herzog, the Middle English Sawles Warde, Otway’s Venice Preserved. I’d managed, over the summer, to read so deeply and so passionately in all my books, paid close attention so hard, that I’d virtually memorized the texts. I don’t think we discussed anything at that exam, but as the other examiners looked on, Professor Booth and I traded quotations until, after an hour or so, he asked how well did I know Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, and I said, “Better than my own Bar Mitzvah portion.” And to please him, I recited the beginning:

  At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer from Cantebrigge,

  Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge,

  And then I said, you see, it’s all about that little river and the mill and how the narrative flows in the space of time, and there’s the Thames, which Chaucer had to cross to get to Southwark and the Tabard Inn, and, of course, you know how the tale responds to the Miller’s—a tale all about water, and the flood, and the fear of being drowned not just in life but in language—and then I said, “and the whole thing ends with a proverb”:

  And therefor this proverbe is seyd ful sooth,

  ‘Hym thar nat wene wel that yvele dooth.’

  A gylour shal hymself bigyled be.

  And God, that sitteth heighe in magestee,

  Save al this compaignye, grete and smale!

  Thus have I quyt the Millere in my tale.

  And he said, more like Moses than like Johnny, “I don’t think we need any more. It’s traditional for the candidate to step out of the room for the committee to discuss his performance, but in this case I can tell you that you passed. Congratulations.” And he stood up, pulled his notes together like he was gathering the tablets, and strode out of the room, leaving me and the other two examiners in mute amazement.

  Terms passed. The girl I met the first day went to dinner with me, once and then again, and soon I was sitting in her room, watching Saturday Night Live on her black-and-white TV, leaving a clean pair of underwear in her drawer. Some time in winter quarter, Hans Küng disappeared from her bookshelf. In August, we moved in together.

  I read furiously, took my seminars, and put together a hundred-and-forty-seven page dissertation on debate and dialogue in medieval poetry. Still riding on the fame of my oral, I convinced my examiners to pass the dissertation, got them to write letters for my applications, and two and a half years after entering the PhD program, I interviewed for and received a job offer at Princeton.

  The Princeton English department at that time was run by a charismatic Arkansan who’d been an undergraduate at Princeton, went to Oxford on a Rhodes, and then came back to teach, get tenure, and chair the department like a small-town Southern mayor. He’d look at you and shake your hand and somehow drag your secrets out of you. He knew just who had slept with whom, who was repressed, and who was barely out. He loved to break careers, coddling fawning assistant professors right up to the vote against their tenure, and then apologizing—who knew this was coming? He announced, on the morning of my campus interview, “We tenured a woman last year,” and it was unclear to me whether he was speaking out of pride or relief. He asked about my family, and I said, “My brother is a senior here.” “Well. Oh, by the way, I won’t be at your lecture,” he announced, as if having a brother who was then a Princeton undergraduate was good enough for him, as if seeing that I
wore a Brooks suit and a tie and a white shirt and polished wingtips and knew all about his own work (Are you still writing on Stevens? Isn’t Miss Austen the most sublime of novelists? Joyce, of course, is inimitable, I slavered) was the interview itself. Just before he left me in his office, he said, almost as an afterthought, “And what will Mrs. Lerer be doing here?”

  And so I asked the pretty girl who sat on my lap in the car, who’d moved in with me and made puff pastry in our apartment kitchen, who’d studied French, who came to campus with a TV and high heels and ate take-out chicken with a knife and fork, who told me stories of her California family and their St. Louis ancestry, who let me know her uncle was the most important curator of American art in the country, who told me of her mother’s spinster aunts who grew up next to T. S. Eliot, and whose father, a retired marine colonel, looked exactly, when I’d met him, like Robert Duvall in The Great Santini, to marry me.

  We did the wedding by ourselves. We ordered all the food, commissioned engraved announcements, and secured the services of a university Unitarian minister who promised not to use the word “God” in the service. We invited twenty-four people: my parents and my brother, her parents and her uncle and his family, her sister and her brothers, her high school best friend, my grad school buddies, and my dissertation advisors. Dad and Mom were divorced by then, but they showed up with my brother and played the parents, Dad in a dark suit and floral tie, Mom in a pearl-gray skirt and matching silk blouse. Mid-April still was brisk in Chicago, and we stood outside Bond Chapel at the university, our breath white, mingling that Saturday morning, when my future in-laws came up. I introduced my parents and stood by, waiting for something magical to happen, as if Dad would charm them with his diction or Mom would say something adorable about me as a child, but before anything theatrical could transpire, the Great Santini grumbled, “It’ll never work out.” Why, Dad asked. “They’re of different faiths.”