by Seth Lerer
. . . and to the studious, contemplative philosopher, who, pursuing the plastic hand of nature through all the streams of pure benevolence and love, hath been led, with astonishment and surprise, to the inexhaustible ocean there . . .
I fell asleep but did not dream. The book slipped from my hand, dropped on the floor, and woke me up. My wife came in and said that it was time to go, the afternoon was at an end, and our host had to take her nap. I put the book back, almost telling her of my discovery, but held my tongue. We all drove back to Manhattan in silence, down the Hudson, with the Sunday traffic streaming back into the city, our windows up against the exhaust fumes.
EIGHT
Kaddish
I woke up in Dad’s apartment, holding the pictures from my wedding. The week’s rain had tapered off, and I got up and went into his bathroom to throw water on my face before the drive back down the peninsula. The bathroom was as old and as original as the apartment’s kitchen: checkerboard tiles, old double faucets, the H and the C worn down to shadows on the white enamel handles. As if to brighten it all up, he’d hung an oversize poster of Marilyn Monroe over the toilet. It showed only her face, the outlines merely suggested in black, but the lips full, deep red, and barely parted. I turned my back to it and washed my face, half expecting it to disappear when I reopened my eyes. But there it was, filling the mirror as I raised my head, her lips the only color in the room.
The week after he died passed like someone else’s play. I must have slept and eaten, hugged my son and kissed my wife, but nothing stayed with me. I canceled one class but returned for the next to find my students ranged around the table, each with a card and an embrace. One of the students presented me with an over-large bouquet of flowers. Her mother was from the island of St. Lucia, and she often came to class in Caribbean floral prints. That day, she’d broken off one of the blooms in the bouquet and put it in her hair behind her ear. And as she greeted me, her eyes filled with tears, she was as beautiful as if she’d been one of Miranda’s daughters on that dark island.
I don’t remember what we talked about that day. I do remember that I let them all write final papers on topics of their own choosing—just make sure you use the theoretical materials we read in class, and locate your analyses in the broader arc of the key themes of the course: memory and authority, citation and quotation, gender and interpretation, signification and commodity. For the remaining weeks, we met to discuss their projects; I read rough drafts, held extended office hours. When they came in, it was like transcriptions of telepathy. Each student knew just what to say to prick my attention. One wrote about Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and the hunt for meaning. Another wrote about the Russian poems she had listened to in childhood, read by émigré parents. Another noted that the first words she had ever written, as a five-year-old, were “cat, dog, zoo,” and then she spun out a reflection on how these three words encompassed all of literary understanding, binaries of cats and dogs, literary history as a zoo, each author caged for our amusement. The student with the flowers wrote about Agatha Christie’s Body in the Library and Virginia Woolf: how women shape narratives out of household life, how class and culture mattered to the English, how the reader is a body in the library.
Were they so brilliant that they intuited all my interests? Or was I so transparent that every class became an essay in self-understanding? Were they out to please me, or to get the grade? Was there anything more than duty in those flowers? Poor man, I thought, my library was dukedom large enough.
By the end of the term, I’d called the friends, ordered the food, and set the date for the memorial at our home in Los Altos. We pulled down everything on the living room walls and put up his pictures, and as guests arrived I pointed out Larry in all his different roles. Here’s the photograph at four, in the Buster Brown haircut and short pants. Here’s the Bar Mitzvah portrait, in his yarmulke and tallis. Here are the wedding pictures—look how skinny he is, and look how radiant Mom is. Here are the pictures from his plays: Dracula, the Impresario, the Pasha, Tubal. And over here, the head-shot he commissioned when he moved to San Francisco, looking for a part. Finally, on the table by the guest book, there’s the last photograph. I don’t know who took it, but he’s sitting in a nut-brown leather jacket, mouth half-open, as if trapped in midspell.
Forty people came, many of whom I had never seen before. There were his friends from San Francisco, each accompanied by a woman just for the occasion (this is, after all, the suburbs, my wife had said). Some students from the fifties showed up. One of them, now the film producer I had heard so much about, showed up in a lemon-yellow rented Mustang and a six-day beard. Another of them had been one of my first babysitters. A couple who had worked the summer camps with Mom and Dad came, too. And his hairdresser, who had retired to Florida, had flown in on the red-eye just for this event.
And Mom. There she was, in pearl-gray slacks and a silk blouse, shaking hands and hugging people she had not seen in forty years. She was gracious to all the men, smiled at their escorts, and played with her eleven-year-old grandson on the carpet. She had already met my colleague, the Shakespearean, years before I presented Dad to him, and I asked him to the ceremony, thinking he would understand. His boyfriend had died just a few months before, and he was lonely, listless, underweight. My mother found him.
“Oh, my dear, it’s so good to see you.”
“Hello, Renée.”
“Seth tells me you’ve had your own loss. I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”
“I’m all right. You know, things are hard.”
“Yes, I know. Azoy geht es. Or, as you would have said on the Upper East Side, c’est la vie.”
And then she popped a crab cake in her mouth and found her seat.
I’d pieced together a memorial out of prayers I found in books on Jewish mourning. I built a library of sorrow on my desktop and planned a service based on prayers I’d never heard him say. I blessed him in a language he would barely have commanded. One of my guidebooks limned a service for me, defining the loved one’s passing in “a final breath” and stressing that Jewish law encouraged “brevity in funerals.” I wanted it as short as he would have liked it. High Holidays came back to me. We would sit on the benches and before the rabbi even started, flip to the end of the section in the prayer book, calculating just how long we would have to spend in temple. Passover Seders bubbled up, as we’d speed through the Haggadah before the roasted chicken. The book I liked best was encouraging: a service should be just “a chance to say some words.” But brevity was not finality: “Jews continue to talk with the dead.”
That must be why I became a college professor, I said at the ceremony. For many years, I told his friends, I’ve been a scholar of the past. I’ve written books about medieval and Renaissance literature, about legacies of academic life, about the histories of words and their pronunciation. Most recently, I’ve focused on the history of childhood. Children have learned how to read and write by memorizing alphabets, by imitating sounds and letter forms, by attending to great initials in their Bibles or their Psalters or their history books. Children and literacy come together, as boys and girls learn to read not just books but people, things, experience. A child, wrote one seventeenth-century churchman, “is a man in small letter,” and “his father hath writ him as his own little story.”
I was my father’s little letter (I continued), and I tried to learn his language and his stories. At night, he would tell me fairy tales: “Rumplestiltskin,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” Like all great fairy tales, they were about discovery, remembering, and forgetting. How often in nightmares we sit down to tests having not studied, or forget our lines as the curtain opens. Children’s stories, much like childhood itself, brim with neglected tasks, lost talismans, long-faded rituals; with characters who can’t remember, who misstep in their roles or forget who they are. Never forget. Children’s books teach an art of memory by illustrating figures of its failure.
I gave my eulogy more as
a lecture than a lament. The teacher in me came out, and I pulled out lesson notes.
When I was four (I said), Dad would lull me to sleep with “Rumplestiltskin.” Each night he would begin with the fair miller’s daughter who could, so her father bragged, spin straw into gold. He would tell me how the king heard about her gift, and how he coerced her into spinning for him. One night, as she sat fearful of being found out, a little man appeared out of nowhere. He spun the straw into gold for her and, as repayment, asked for her necklace; the next night for her ring; the third night for her firstborn child. She agreed, and the king soon married her. Years later, when her son was born, the little man came to claim his due. This time he made another deal with the distraught queen: if she could guess his name, he would relent. She made guesses, and so did we.
Each night, Dad and I would go through scores of names, from the familiar to the mad: Charles, James, John; then names of friends and relatives—Sam, Sid, Norman, Sy; and then the Yiddish names, like incantations from a distant magic—Chaim, Lebbel, Mendel, Menasha, Velvel. The queen kept guessing, too, and eventually she sent a messenger in search of the little man. This messenger came upon a campfire with a ring of little men. And in the middle, in the very fire, was the imp, dancing and singing, “Rumplestiltskin is my name!” So, when the little man came back and asked, “What’s my name?” the queen said, “Rumples-tiltskin.” And he stamped his foot so hard he drove it into the ground, and then he picked himself up by his other leg and tore himself in half.
This was my favorite bedtime story, I went on, and as I tell it to you now, I know I was his firstborn and that he was so afraid of losing me, and I was so afraid of losing him, and so, in the bedroom that I soon would share with my new, baby brother, we would sing our songs and play with names.
And at that moment, though I had said nothing, I knew why my brother was not there, why he refused to share in Larry’s ceremony, why Dad had favored me. I broke the tension and my own regret by saying that it was traditional, as I understood things, for family and friends to say a few words about the deceased, and if anyone wished to speak, we’d all be glad to hear it.
Right away, the man who showed up in the lemon-yellow Mustang, the producer who was once, nearly fifty years before, a student in his ninth-grade class, stood up.
“The thing that I remember about Larry is his socks. The first day of ninth grade he showed up—the teacher, in a corduroy suit and a bow tie and these purple socks. Who wore purple socks? I’ll never forget it. He stood up and he told us he was going to teach us something about English literature whether we liked it or not. I don’t remember a thing he said. But I’ll never forget those socks. Larry was great. Even when I was working in Hollywood, I always made time for him. Let him use my place in LA, the one in Bolinas, too. It’s funny, he always used to think I’d get him into pictures. I loved him like a father, but he was no actor.”
Another man stood up, a member of the same ninth-grade class, the man who was my babysitter the year I was born.
“I’ll never forget the day Larry took me for my driving test. My dad had a Plymouth Ventura, and it was a pouring rainstorm, and you know in those days they tested you on the hand signals. Even if the car had directionals, you had to stick your hand out to signal left, and then do this bent thing with your elbow if you were going right, and then the opposite way if you were going to stop. So there we were, lining up in the car for the test. I was eighteen, and Larry was sitting in the passenger seat having a cigarette, like we were going to a movie. It was my turn, and I pulled up to the white line and began. It was pouring rain, and I had to have the window open the whole way to do the hand signals. By the time I’d done half the course, I was soaked, and by the time the test was over there was a little puddle down by the pedals. I passed, and Larry was great; we went out for an egg cream afterward at Garfield’s. Years later, when he went into the hospital for his hernia operation, I felt I had to pay him back, so I drove him to the hospital that morning.
“Seth, you’ll remember the day we went out in the boat. You couldn’t have been more than six, and Larry and I and my niece, who was about your age, all drove down to the harbor in Canarsie, and we rented a little motor boat. I don’t know what Larry had in mind, but I remember the guy at the rental dock looking very funny at us—two guys, two kids. We got in, and I remember how you sat up at the prow and liked to feel the spray on your face. Larry pulled the throttle out full, and we sped along, past tugboats and sailboats, and then he cut around to bring us back and he probably lost control, and we wound up stuck on a sandbar near the shore. The outboard motor had stalled out, and the propeller was jammed in the sand. And Larry took off his mocs and rolled up his pants and got in the water, it was up to his knees, and he squished through the sand to try to get the propeller unstuck. He pushed and the boat moved a little, and he stood back and said, fire it up. So I pulled the cord and the motor started, and I turned the lever to engage the prop and the thing just whined and spun and jerked up out of the sand and flipped itself up on the balance bearing of the engine mount. There was this propeller in the air, spinning and spitting water and sand, and there was Larry, covered in crap.”
I remembered that day, just as he had. I remembered, I added too, the year that Larry was commuting between Cambridge and Brooklyn, and on weekends we’d go back to that marina in Canarsie and go out on the party fishing boats. We found an old guy, Captain Jack, which I doubt was his real name, and he’d take us out with a bunch of old men. The first time we went out, Dad and I got so seasick we couldn’t even fish. But he insisted we go out again, and a couple of weeks later we did and I caught a big black bass—as Dad lay in the hold looking green. I remember Mom cleaned and cooked that fish and it was great. The next week, we drove down to Captain Jack’s, and he was there with a group of older men I’d never seen before. They were standing around, smoking, and I remember Jack coming up to Dad saying, look I can’t take the boy out today. You, fine, but not the boy. It’s, well, it’s too rough.
And then I looked at Mom and risked it. Of course (I said), my mother always thought that Captain Jack was running drugs or guns, or doing something for the mob, and to this day she believes that that morning he was going out beyond the twelve-mile limit to drop off a body in the sea, or meet a Cuban boat.
She laughed, and I knew I had her.
Would anyone else like to speak?
The hairdresser who had flown in from Florida stood up, just to say that Larry meant the world to him, that they were friends for twenty-five years, and that the best piece of advice he’d ever heard came from Larry: just do what’s right for you. A married couple who’d come in from New York recalled how Larry and Renée were such great friends at camp, and, “Renée, remember the camp sing?”—at which point, he broke into “Harvest Moon,” but with rewritten lyrics about everyone at camp.
No one who knew him only from San Francisco spoke. Two Turkish brothers stood in the back. One was the man I remembered from the apartment, in his crisply pressed striped shirt, with his carefully trimmed gray hair. The other, over six feet tall, came in a leather jacket, with a mustache and goatee and slicked-back black hair. Khan. That was his name. He’d introduced himself as Khan. No subject, no verb. Khan.
They said nothing during the afternoon.
I stood there, thinking about Larry’s socks and driving in the rain, and boats, and camp theatricals, and “Harvest Moon.” And then The Tempest came back to me:
Down with the topmast! Yare! Lower, lower! Bring her to try with main-course. A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather or our office.
Just do what’s right for you.
If you can command these elements to silence . . . use your authority.
I lifted up a prayerbook, then, and Hebrew spilled from me like spells. Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba. Yizkor elohim nishmat Leb ben Noah sh’halach l’olamo. I said that, in traditional Judaism, you would tear your clothes, or a part of them, to expose
the heart and signify a fissure in the family. “Jacob rent his clothes, put sackcloth on his loins, and observed mourning for his son many days.” But now, we do it symbolically. And I picked up a remnant from his closet, a small piece of flannel that must have been left after he’d had a pair of trousers altered, and I held it up and said the prayer and ripped it so forcefully that flecks of wool flew off and mingled with the dust against the sunlight.
Graves at my command
Have walked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art.
And with the service done, I clapped my hands together and invited everyone to eat out on the patio, and Mom stood up and kissed me and said, “I guess I was just tired of playing the beard.” And my eleven-year-old son, ill at ease throughout the afternoon, suddenly quieted.
NINE
Lithium Dreams
He had always been antsy child, ill suited for the classroom chair or dinner table. Dad doted on him, though, expecting him to love him for his gifts: enormous model airplanes, giant Lego sets, illustrated books on dinosaurs and fish and the elements. We tried to take him to a baseball game once, but we had to leave before the seventh-inning stretch, the boy bored and overheated. Instead of stories about sportsmen, we read tales of chemical discovery or strange facts about metals. He loved the Dorling Kindersley books, with their full-color pictures of mineral specimens and the men who founded science. Shortly before Dad died, I’d bought him John Emsley’s Nature’s Building Blocks: An A–Z Guide to the Elements, and we would sit up nights, A now being for Astatine, and B for Boron. We’d read about the rare earths, and names as unpronounceable as sauropods hovered in the air as he sank into sleep: Praseodymium, Dysprosium, Rhenium, Ytterbium. Some nights, we’d speculate on all of the unnamed, coded elements beyond those that had been firmly found: Unununium (111), Ununbium (112), Ununquadium (114).