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

by Seth Lerer

  The ceremony, the lunch, and the exchange of gifts passed without further words between the sets of parents. The museum curator uncle had brought cigars for us all, and the Great Santini (whom I remember chaining them, one off another, when I visited the family in California), took one, bit the end, and lit it up like he was smoking out an infestation. Dad, who had smoked for thirty years, declined, but Mom took one, poked a little hole in the end with her fork, and held it out for me to light it. She sat there with the cigar, letting it burn but not puffing, and looked at me as if to say, “Who am I doing?” and broke into an accented song:

  Falling in love again,

  Never wanted to.

  What am I to do?

  Can’t help it.

  Mom and Dad left on different planes. My in-laws disappeared after the lunch, and we were left with Uncle and his family. I don’t remember how the afternoon passed, but by evening we were all together at the Moon Palace restaurant on Cermak, piling up moo shoo pork and Uncle talking about how we had to visit them—in New York, on Park Avenue where they had lived for twenty years, or in Connecticut, at the farm that his wife’s family had owned since the 1750s. And I remembered, as he talked, what my wife had told me about him: that he had gone to Exeter and Harvard; that he’d found a wealthy Radcliffe girl and married her at nineteen; that his in-laws were descended from the most influential people in the country. I’d spent a day at Regenstein Library researching the two of them. Her father was the founding partner of a major New York law firm and the son of the president of Yale. Her mother was a society scion of a lumber baron and his Virginia Four-Hundred wife. He specialized in the paintings of the Hudson Valley School, and after a brief turn as curator at a museum in upstate New York, had secured a place at the Met, where he’d risen to chief curator of American art.

  And I remembered, at that moment, that this very evening was the first night of Passover; that it had completely slipped my mind; that I had lost track of the Jewish year; and now, on my wedding night, was eating moo shoo pork with my new aunt- and uncle-in-law, thinking, I bet I’m the poorest Jew he’s ever talked to.

  One evening in the early 1980s, I found myself in a rented tux at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. His wife’s many cousins had assembled, along with his Harvard roommates, at a Manhattan club so exclusive that it prided itself on having spurned the current mayor of New York. I sat at a table next to the founding director of the largest optical firm in the world. His formal wear bristled with gold shirt studs, each in the form of a love knot, with matching cuff links and a large, gold love knot hanging from his watch chain. He showed up with a woman at least twenty years his junior, with hair dyed the color of his studs and enough jewelry to arm a battalion of escorts. At one point, somewhere between the tallowy lamb and the watery sorbet, a tall gentleman in his midseventies approached our table. His turnout was impeccable, the lapels just the right width, the peau-de-soie pumps just the right buff. Everyone at the table stopped their babbling, as his visit commanded an absolute respect. And when he came up to me personally, a shiver passed along the silverware. “May I have a word, young man?”

  I got up, and we walked over to a sideboard. “I understand you teach at Princeton, is that so?” Yes, it is. “And am I correctly given to understand, as well, that you are something of a scholar of the classics, yes?” Yes. “Well, have you ever come across the work of Edward Kennard Rand?” Yes, sir, he was a professor at Harvard and one of the most important early twentieth-century figures in the study of late antiquity. He did the defining edition of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, on which I’m writing a book. You know, it’s funny, but I’ve never heard anyone speak of . . .

  “He was my undergraduate advisor.”

  And then he walked away, leaving me at the sideboard with my rented, plastic shirt studs and my unwritten book, watching him retake his seat at a table of his contemporaries like Jacob Marley dining with the dead.

  The following morning, we assembled at the anniversary couple’s apartment on Park Avenue for a midday meal with the visiting cousins. There, I learned that the gentleman who had approached me was a distant relative, a past president of the club, and a grandson of the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. As we assembled for drinks (this at eleven-thirty in the morning), I met relatives from the old St. Louis days, Hudson Valley squires, and my host’s mother-in-law, who close up still had all the aura of the 1920s debutante she’d been and who, in conversation, sounded just like Katharine Hepburn. I sat next to her at the meal, and I looked down at the table setting as if it were on loan from the Metropolitan Museum’s hall of armor. Three forks, arrayed by size, guarded the left side of the gold-rimmed china, while three knives stood at attention on the right. Above the plate sat two spoons, polished to a fineness that reflected my astonished face like a fun-house mirror. Goblets and glasses ranged across the table, and a woman in an apron and a doilied hat stood by the kitchen door. My head went back and forth, until it lodged before the silverware, and Uncle’s mother-in-law put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Just go from the outside in, dear.”

  Four years later, we finally accepted her invitation to dine at her own house along the Hudson. My wife and I drove in to Manhattan from Princeton on I-95, through the bleak marshes of Elizabeth, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and then crosstown, up Third Avenue to catch the lights, and over Eighty-Eighth Street to Park. Our sad Tercel jostled among the Caddies and the BMWs, and I found a barely legal space between a hydrant and a loading zone. The doorman met us at the awning of Uncle’s building and showed us to the elevator, and we went up. I remembered the apartment from the anniversary—dark, paneled, with a kitchen out of 1935 and a single, black rotary phone in the hallway. A large canvas from the nineteenth century hung in the living room. A bit of American primitivism, it showed unyoked oxen, woolly sheep, and gamboling deer around a riverbank. Under its gilt frame, far too ornate for the painting, was a metal label: The Peaceable Kingdom.

  Uncle was in a foul mood. Having foolishly agreed to drive us all up to his mother-in-law’s, he faced the prospect of two hours in a car too cramped for his self-esteem and was already anticipating my intrusive questions about family and work and paintings and all of the things that made them, to me, as exotic as the Mud Men of New Guinea. The last time I visited the Met, I told him as he filled a carton with the white wine we would drink at lunch, I went straight for the Michael Rockefeller room. Michael Rockefeller, I repeated. You know he disappeared while on an expedition to New Guinea. He loved to collect that crazy stuff. Those amazing wooden sculptures, with their big heads and sticklike limbs, had always captivated me. The body masks, the long boats, and the shields were fascinating in their fearfulness. Ranged on the white museum walls, they stood out like alien armor; as the sound of the drum came to me in my imagination, I could hear the Asmat warriors joust against the spirits. Was that the beat that Rockefeller heard as he fell from his canoe? Was his “desire to do something adventurous”—a phrase repeated in the museum’s brochure—as much an escape from his own demons as into someone else’s dreams? What do you think? Do you think they really ate him?

  “We were at Harvard together,” was all he said.

  We piled into their station wagon for the drive upriver, leaving the tangle of traffic behind us, riding through Yonkers, White Plains, and Tarrytown, past Sleepy Hollow, Hawthorne, and Thornwood to Armonk. Washington Irving country, I remarked, but the name sank like a pebble in the well of his indifference. Tell me about Aunt Bertha, I provoked, thinking that stories of the old St. Louis glory might prompt him to reminiscence.

  “Aunt Bertha. Knew T. S. Eliot. Never stopped talking. Died my junior year at Harvard.”

  And then six beats of nothing.

  “My father died when I was four, and after my mother remarried and moved us to La Jolla, I couldn’t have cared. I left La Jolla because there was no culture. Old ladies keeping books out of the library. Older men building collections o
f bad art. Hollywood screenwriters driving down for three-day drunks. Raymond Chandler lived there. Hated it. Used to tell stories about how he would go into the public library and ask for his own books, just to irritate the librarians. I’m sure I saw him once, getting into an argument with one of those old ladies. ‘Oh, you’re Raymond Chandler, the writer,’ she said. ‘I read one of your books when I was in the hospital last year.’ And then Chandler says back , ‘I hope it didn’t make you worse.’ And then she pulls herself up. ‘I wanted to throw it across the room, it made me so mad. But I didn’t. There was something about the writing.’ That was the thing about La Jolla—every now and then there was something about the writing, but most of the time you just felt everyone was happier not noticing.

  “My sister, your mother-in-law, had to leave school to support herself, but by the time I was a teenager my parents had recovered enough to send me to Exeter and Harvard. The La Jolla schools were rotten. My brother lived through it and managed to wind up at Stanford, but I got out. Another story that passed around was about neighbors of Chandler’s sister-in-law. Seems there was a family from Kansas who moved to La Jolla and put their kids in the public school where they all got A’s, even though they knew nothing and did no work. All the family talked about was how, before they came to California, the kids worked hard and got nowhere near A’s.

  “My stepfather’s mother came from a family that had all gone to Exeter and Harvard, so they got me in. That was where I discovered art. Real American art. Not quilts or watercolors or those Shaker boxes, but great paintings. Back then, a professor would put a slide of a Frederick Church up on the screen and say, ‘This is a candy box. This is what they liked in the nineteenth century.’ ‘Nineteenth-century’ was the most pejorative term you could think of. Sure, for the most part, nineteenth-century American painting is a provincial art. It’s a mixed bag. French impressionist art of the 1880s, for example, is simply superior. But I’m convinced that, at its best, American art has a beauty and emotive power that is very much its own.”

  I listened to a conversation that had soon become a lecture, and remembered many of his phrases from a New York Times interview he’d given just a couple of years before. “Curator of the Hour,” it was titled, and it gave a story that, even in the confines of the car, he was unwilling to enhance. I waited, but he said nothing to texture the caricature of the Times:

  An angular man with a chiseled face and silver at the edges of his short brown hair. Behind horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes are green and direct. He wears, characteristically, three-piece suits complete with watch-fob.

  I waited for his explanation of his habit, for something behind the Times’s surprise that, no Eastern blueblood,

  in fact, he was born in Colorado, the son of an Army officer, and raised in California—small-town California at that. He remembers, as a boy, being alive to all things visual.

  He’d drifted slightly into the left lane, just as a semi slung along his blind spot and blasted out a hoot that sent him overcompensating to the shoulder. He recovered, got us back into the middle of the turnpike, and his mouth closed like the panel of a mailbox. I’d half hoped he would rehash that article—relive his triumph of rehanging the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware. At nine hundred pounds, according to the Times, “it needed special brackets to support it.” Once it was up, he thought it slanted to one side, and sure enough, a careful measurement of the paining showed that

  it was indeed a half inch lower on the right side. The painting was duly lowered and the errant bracket remounted. It seemed like quite an expense for half an inch that nobody else saw.

  I waited, unrequited, for the story of how nobody had seen, as well, the value of the Twachtman that he compelled the museum to buy a dozen years before. As the Times told it, here was this “green” assistant curator, making his first pitch to the board, and asking them to buy a large landscape, Arques-la-Battaile, by the forgotten American impressionist, John Twachtman. It had, he’d told the reporter, “come right down the middle of the pike at me.” The pitch was difficult, the painting odd, the board silent, the curator brand new. But that night, the director called to say the purchase had been approved. And he’d been proved right. The Twachtman, now, was esteemed as one of the great American landscapes.

  The week before, I’d gone off to the Princeton Art Library to call up a reproduction of the painting, hoping for a point of conversation. It didn’t seem like much to me. Some grasses crisscrossed in the foreground, while flat water stalled behind them; then a riverbank, and then a gray horizon. I thought of Michael Rockefeller on his river, swimming to the drum, the surface flecked with blood and broken spear tips. But there was nothing of that here: the color palette was washed out, as if Twachtman had drawn a sponge across the face of the water. What had the curator, as green as the river grasses, seen in it? What came right down the middle of the pike at him?

  Taking the Times reporter on a tour, he stopped before the painting, now hung in a place of pride:

  It is only here that he stops. All around him is the cacophony of last-minute pounding, drilling, winching. It is a noise level which will never be heard here again. But he stands quite still, staring at this painting, oblivious to all. “Listen to this painting,” he says. “Listen to the silence.”

  We drove in utter quiet for the next half hour. And I imagined him, listening for silence on a flattened canvas, no touch of lurid color to disturb the green he saw reflected in his green eyes, no drum, no song; a peaceable kingdom, clear water for a boy alive to all things in small-town California.

  We pulled up to the door, and he slammed the gearshift into park. He opened the trunk and lifted out the carton of wine bottles like they were Howard Carter’s treasure. The girl was at the door—the same one in the same apron and cap who had assisted at the anniversary lunch. His mother-in-law appeared from behind the library door, her eyes comically magnified by the large lenses of her post-cataract glasses. Within minutes we were in the kitchen, sitting at a little table, Uncle opening the wine, the girl fiddling with the range. The gas flame came on with a whoop, and soon the nook was filled with the competing smells of melting butter, canned fish, and hot cream. Working the pan with her right hand, she took two eggs out of the carton with her left, broke them over the pan and quickly shifted hands to whisk them in. The wine worked like a drug on him. His shoulders dropped, his belly afforded release, and a mask of pleasure fitted to his face. I tried it: sharp tints of gravel, just a touch of flower, and a puckered citrus edge. We sat. Linen napkins, repoussé silver, cut crystal. The girl pulled four pieces of toast out of the oven, cut them into diagonals, and placed two on each plate. She spooned the concoction from the pot on to the toast points: creamed canned salmon, thickened with egg. Bits of pink fish floated on the yellowed sauce. Blots of brown nutmeg stained the top. And the toast points sank in the afternoon like Michael Rockefeller’s dugouts.

  “I understand,” his mother-in-law said, as I picked at my points, “that you like books. Why don’t you find your way into the library and see what you turn up.” She pronounced “library” with two syllables. By now, most of the wine was gone and I was not alone in leaving an unfinished lunch plate, so I got up and walked through the hallway to the largest room I could find filled with books. It was a quiet space, well lit, facing the parkland to the rear of the house. It had jasper-green walls and embossed white figures on the wainscoting. At first, I thought it looked like Wedgwood, but then I realized that it looked exactly like the room in Kubrick’s 2001, where Keir Dullea, now prematurely old, sits in his dressing gown to have his food. I couldn’t tell, at first, in what order the books were shelved, but then saw that they were ordered by their size: large folios flat on the bottom, then the quartos, octavos, and duodecimos. Not all were old, but none looked read. I took down a blue-bound copy of The Education of Henry Adams, to find Henry Stimson’s bookplate on the inside cover: Stimson, secretary of war to two presidents, Hoover’s secretary of state, sup
ervised production of the bomb. There was a story around Princeton, told by the remaining Oppenheimer cronies, that Stimson crossed off Kyoto as a target because he remembered the city from his honeymoon (the bomb went, instead, to Nagasaki). I opened another, a late eighteenth-century Cicero, and found here the bookplate of Elias Boudinot.

  That fall, I had been named the Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton. An honor reserved, so they told me, for the junior faculty they hoped to tenure, the preceptorship gave assistant professors an extra year’s leave, a research account, and a title. When I received the letter telling me about the award, I flipped to the back pages of the Princeton Register to see its history.

  In memory of Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, and Trustee, 1772–1821

  1950–1951 A. Warren, Jr., English

  1954–1954 A. Warren, Jr., English

  1958–1961 A. A. Sicroff, Modern Languages

  1961–1964 C. F. Brown, Comparative Literature

  1967–1970 O. R. Young, Politics

  1970–1973 S. Molloy, Romance Languages and Literatures

  1973–1976 S. A. Barnett, Anthropology

  I knew S. Lerer, English, would go underneath, along with the dates, 1984–1987. The year I got it, I would read myself to sleep over the Princeton Register, scanning the lists of everyone who had ever had a preceptorship, imagining my name among those of my senior colleagues and the well-known dead, then turning pages to read off the lists of chaired professors, reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century, and imagining myself among them.

  Elias Boudinot. Like Henry Stimson, he had been a distant relative of my host. I reached for another book, by Boudinot himself: The Age of Revelation. Foxed page after page of turbid prose fell through my fingers. Instead of reading it, I smelled it, and it had that rich, dark smell of leather, damp, with insect leavings. I sat in one of the stuffed chairs and turned the pages, scanning, first, for anything of interest, then, as I tired, for my own name. A hundred pages in, I found it: “the children of Seth distinguished from the children of Cain, by the appellation of the sons of God.” I looked for the word “Jew” and found it: “the Jew for his darling partiality to his own nation and ceremonial law.” I sat there like an adolescent with his first unabridged dictionary, looking for the dirty words, just to see them in print to prove that they exist. I looked for the word “love”: