by Seth Lerer
Have I stopped? My son always had troubles with his memory. He would forget to brush his teeth, stumble over assignments, fail to recall basic math facts, or sit quietly, lost in a dream world, while the rest of us remembered our chores. He never wrote well. The pencil would slip from his hand, the point would break. I could never read his homework.
At the facility in Utah, he was obliged to write letters home. The staff would take his angry, scrawled pages and scan them into PDF files, send them to us, and await replies. I’d pore over his penmanship, digitally remade on my screen. I’d try to get past all of his forgetting—how he wouldn’t own up to his habits, how he led us astray, how he would deny and dispute everything he was accused of doing, and just why he was out in the mountains in the first place.
Where was the prince I played with? When I dropped him at the schoolyard, in those evenings after high school, would he transform into a beast? When he went out on his own, friends with cars picking him up, should I have expected him to come home changed, blood between his teeth and sweat streaming?
In his first letter home, my son asked for one book: Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. I knew immediately why. It is a story of a group of Union prisoners who escape a Confederate camp toward the close of the Civil War. They build a balloon and set off, but the wind blows them off course and they wind up on an uncharted island where they have to rebuild civilization itself. They mine saltpeter for gunpowder, smelt ore, fire pottery, even create the instruments for electricity. When a shipment of equipment washes up on shore, they cannibalize it for both needs and luxuries. And when, in the end, Captain Nemo makes his return appearance, they realize that they were not alone—that all this time, they were under knowing eyes. I believed when I received his letter that I must have taught him something—that if he were going to find his way back, it would be through a book.
He took that book with him, eight weeks later, when he went off to wilderness therapy. From northern Utah, with its mountains and its June snows, we drove him six hours south, into the Red Rock canyon lands, and dropped him off in hundred-degree heat. For three months, he would live with a group of boys in desert sands, hiking unblazed trails, cooking for himself, and sleeping without tents or tarpaulins. He had a pack, a bedroll, and a book, and midway through his journey, we drove out to visit him. The therapist assigned to him met us in a small town near the Arizona border, and we drove ninety minutes into nowhere. And there, stopping by a landmark I could never find again, he was. He’d grown a frazzled beard, his hair was long, and he was brown with sun and dirt. When I collected rocks and minerals, I’d look for stones that had been blown by wind and sand so that they had a natural shine. Desert polish, I called it. That’s what came to mind when I saw him, and we sat together, his mother and I, his therapist and him, and we talked about how he’d learned to wipe his bottom with live leaves, how he chewed on the juniper and wildflowers, how the team left jugs of water at each campsite, but how he had also learned to forage for refreshment. One day, he told us proudly, he ate nothing but crickets. And then he took out a ziplock bag of seeds and raisins, and he offered some to me and to his mother, and he said, “This is lunch.”
I thought: this is his Iceland, this his time alone, the solitary sky spread out above him like a bedsheet for his dreams. I thought: and let me tell you of my own time, walking across rivers to bring fish for dinner, herding cows, living amid a language not my own. Let me tell you about the sheep-head dinners and the blood-pudding, and the day the relatives came and they bought a tomato. Let me tell you all of this, as we sit here in the dirt, eating your seeds.
But I did not. I sat there thinking only of the move that we would make when we returned: from Palo Alto to La Jolla, a move that had been in the works for over a year but that we’d planned to finalize that fall. I’d wanted so much to be solicited, so much to have an island of my own, a dukedom large enough. My Stanford classes had grown smaller in the years since Dad had died. The course I had been teaching that fall never regained its popularity. Enrollments fell away. I found my undergraduates more focused on their résumés than on the reading. No more Mirandas filled the rooms.
And so, when a deanship opened up at the University of California at San Diego, I applied. In the interviews and recruiting visits I bragged about how I knew the area, how I’d been visiting since the late 1970s when I first met my future in-laws, and how much my wife was hoping to move home. I varnished stories of my mother-in-law’s family, of Sunday dinners on Mount Sole-dad, of how she had graduated from La Jolla High School before going off for one aborted year at Pomona College, of how her marine husband brought the family back to San Diego County to serve at Camp Pendleton. I told them how my wife had been the valedictorian of Carlsbad High School, of how she’d gone on to college at Berkeley, of how we truly cared about the University of California.
My future colleagues enticed me with stories of the founding of the campus. A former military installation, it became the seedbed for Roger Revelle’s idea of a university. Émigré physicists would share space with composers; oceanographers would find solace at the Playhouse. I listened as men who had smoked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos assured me of their love of Mozart. They told me of Revelle’s accomplishments: how he discovered in the chemistry of seawater the proof of global warming; how he imagined modern universities as the equivalent of medieval cathedrals.
And they assured me that the place was safe, now. My in-laws’ La Jolla was long gone, shattered when Revelle broke its restrictive covenant. “You can’t have a university,” he said in tones that ultimately cost him the first chancellorship of the campus, “without having Jewish professors. The Real Estate Broker’s Association and their supporters in La Jolla had to make up their minds whether they wanted a university or an anti-Semitic covenant. You couldn’t have both.”
La Jolla got its Jews and its university, and I got the job.
In the fall of 2010, my wife moved to La Jolla with me, and we moved our son into an independent living program in Los Angeles. We would drive the hundred miles each month to see him, to convince ourselves that we were doing right, that he was well. But the outcome was mixed, and by the summer he was in another house in LA.
Last chance, I thought.
That summer, I would drive up on my own on weekends, take him out to dinner, and watch him order in a restaurant, eat platters of salads and onion rings, and every now and then, share a dessert with me. Saturday afternoons, we’d wander into bookstores, and I’d watch as he selected Moleskin notebooks for his jottings, handbooks for his hobbies, or a novel of adventure.
Thou didst smile,
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burden groaned, which raised in me
An undergoing stomach to bear up
Against what should ensue.
. . .
As his time away drew to a close, we met one evening at Skylight Books in Los Angeles for a reading by my former student. She had been a member of that class the day my father died, nearly eight years before. She was the one who wrote about her first story, “cat, dog, zoo,” and she had graduated, done an MFA, and published her first novel. There she was in a bookstore surrounded by her family and friends, a girl I still remembered as nineteen, incongruous to me in lipstick and a floral dress, reading from her novel about a young girl in a dystopian future. America has been shattered by an ecological disaster, and a generation has decamped to an offshore island where everything comes from the sea and where dim memories of cities hover in their heads like myths. The mother of the teenage heroine is missing, and as the book begins the girl is fingering a silver charm, a family heirloom of a forgotten world:
The charm was silver, a small scaly bullet-shape that her mother had explained was called a pinecone. . . . Darcy had imagined pinecones were fruit and wondered what they tasted like. The charm itself tasted familiar and foreign, like Darcy’s own teeth and like
some far-off salty earth, and sucking on it gave her a furtive, inward pleasure.
She read, and my son, now nineteen himself, looked at her like an oracle, as if to say, “You know, I’ve actually eaten pinecones.” We bought the book for him and he devoured it in a day. It was, he told me later, like living in the wilderness.
I had believed in books. And I believed in fairies. I’d hoped that, one day, he would emerge off the ground, like Jean Marais, in cap and cape, leaving the beast behind. Trespassers will be prosecuted. But now, there is no one left to do the prosecuting. The imagination, be it the Hundred Acre Wood or Wonderland or the Beast’s castle, never, in the end, truly prosecutes its trespassers. Everyone gets a second chance. And so have we. I have not been admitted to his secret places, but I think I’d rather find us welcomed there than in the countless classrooms of our back-to-school nights, looking out of windows onto playgrounds, or across glass partitions of probation. Du verre, ce n’est pas du verre.
After sixteen months away, our son is back with us now. Like Shakespeare’s Puritan successors, we have shuttered up the playhouse of his passion. My wife and I moved out of the old house, boxed his lab away, and put his childhood books back on the shelves. Our tempest cooled, he sleeps not as a monster but a man. My wife cooks simple meals, and we sit down together, dinners shorn of drama. And Prospero, entering in act 4, turns to the son he never had, and asks forgiveness:
If I have too austerely punished you,
Your compensation makes amends, for I
Have given you here a third of mine own life.
EPILOGUE
The Soldier’s Tale
In the spring of 2011, I was approached with an idea. A cellist in the Music Department thought that it would be great fun to put on Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and have me play a part. It would, he promised, fill the hall. After all, he said, how many times does someone get to see a dean onstage?
In preparation, I spent weeks listening to the piece on YouTube. The Soldier’s Tale recounts the story of an infantryman who makes a deal with the devil, trading his treasured violin for a book that, it turns out, lists future values in the stock market. In the course of the performance, he dies and returns to his hometown, only to discover that no one can see him. Eventually, he tricks the devil into playing him at cards, wins back his violin, and beats the devil into dancing. The props call for a fiddle and a book of spells, but there are no directions about stage sets or costumes. There is no singing; the actors read their lines in set pieces, interlarded with musical vignettes played by a chamber orchestra.
Originally, the cellist had thought of casting me as the devil, but he changed his mind when a retired faculty member—a performance artist, now nearly eighty, who had shared in some of the original Happenings of the 1960s and had lost none of her girlish narcissism—all but insisted on performing. The chance to cast her as the devil was too tempting for him, and so I was reassigned the soldier’s part.
We spent days trying to rehearse. The artist could barely come in on cue and spent most of our rehearsal time trying out dance moves that her body now could only hint at. The narrator was played by a British art historian, chosen for his plummy accent and his height, though he found it too difficult to speak in rhythm with the music and, eventually, stopped coming to rehearsals all together. But I was there for all of them: on time, on point, on book.
The day before the scheduled performance, I went out on my own to buy some props and costumes for the show. I drove into Oceanside to find the largest Army Navy Surplus store in Southern California. Nestled between the marine base and the water, Oceanside was as busy with military as it had been thirty years before, when I accompanied my father-in-law to get some hardware for a home repair project. Just like that day, I walked the streets in a button-down shirt and loafers, threading through the crowds of overly tall twenty-year-old boys and their even younger wives, the only man with a beard in a sea of shaved heads. I found the Army Navy store and walked along its aisles, pulling down a camouflage shirt and a matching cap, grabbing a bullet belt, and picking up out of a bin marked “Five Bucks Your Pick” a discarded gas mask. I went up to the counter, spreading my haul before the cashier like Viking booty, when a young man threw the front door open so hard that it banged against the wall. He must have been six-six, blocking the California sunlight with his shoulders, booming.
“I just got back from a year in Afghanistan. Some son of a bitch stole my bedroll. I need another one.”
And as if I had vanished from the counter, the cashier left me, strode down one of the aisles and picked up a new bedroll for the returning soldier. Ringing it up without even noticing me, she called the soldier “hon” and told him she’d knock off half the price, just for him. He stood there, all bald head and bicep, and looked down at my camo shirt and cap and belt and gas mask and said, more in confusion than in sneer, “You going to war, buddy?”
No, I said. I’m in a play.
The next night, we went on. The hall, in fact, was full, and even though we had had only one complete rehearsal, everyone felt confident that it would be a great success. I stood at the back of the theater in the shadows, wearing my camouflage cap and shirt and carrying a backpack with the soldier’s fiddle in it. I hung the gas mask around my neck and waited for the music. It started, and the British art historian—who had shown up five minutes before the performance, in a tuxedo—read his lines impeccably, and I trudged through the audience as heads turned and a few people clapped. I walked up on the stage and opened my mouth to speak, and with the first word out there was a loud twang. We all turned to find that a string had broken on the bass fiddle. The conductor stopped the performance right there, and the bassist went offstage to change the string. We would begin again.
I stood there, my mouth still half open, not sure if I should remain in character, wearing my camo cap and thinking, no one will ever take me seriously after this.
After what seemed two phases of the moon, the bassist returned and we began again.
I read my lines, the artist came on, mincing in leotards with a butterfly net, turning an allegory of World War I into a hippie happening. Nothing went wrong after that point; we hit our cues. The lines we read, in the version of Michael Flanders, sounded more like Dr. Seuss than Stravinsky, but as we came to the end and the musicians played the closing chorale, I read to the audience’s silence:
No one can have it all,
That is forbidden.
You must learn to choose between.
One happy thing is every happy thing:
Two, as if they had never been.
We each successively walked offstage, the narrator, the artist, and me, and as the last notes ended the audience stood up, applauding loudly our audacity, and we came back onstage and took our bows, and then, backstage, I greeted everyone—students and colleagues, old couples who had no other place to go, people half-expecting me to be in makeup, and a woman who broke through the crowd carrying a copy of a book I had written, saying she had only that day heard that I would be in the performance and, please, would I autograph it. She gave me the book, and I told her how touched I was that she had come. I took off the camouflage cap and took up her pen, and resting the book against her back, I signed my name.
. . .
I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear,
But a silver nutmeg, and a golden pear.
I kept two items from Dad’s closet: the nut-brown leather jacket and a silver tie. Two weeks after he died, I put them on, and my wife and I went into San Francisco to the Castro Theater. Mildred Pierce was showing, and it was one of those nights when moviegoers at the Castro were expected to dress up in period costume. The line tailed down the block—women with hair in snoods, lipstick as red as Christmas, and the men in soft fedoras, wide lapels, and two-tone shoes. We stood in line, the late-November chill frosting our breaths, and someone looked at me, looked right through to the jacket and the tie, knew them as he had known his own palm
, opened his lips and closed them, silently, only the white air coming from his mouth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began in autobiographical essays originally published in the Southwest Review and the Yale Review. I am indebted to Willard Spiegelman, editor of the Southwest Review, who supported my first efforts, graciously offering advice and encouragement. Sections from chapter 4 appeared as “My Mother, the Ingénue” in Southwest Review 91 (2006): 349–58. A much earlier version of chapter 9 appeared in Southwest Review 93 (2008): 531–42. I am grateful to J. D. McClatchy and the staff of the Yale Review for their commitment to my earliest essays on children’s literature and for their expert editing of my writing. A few sentences in chapter 10 are adapted from “Children’s Literature and the Art of Forgetting,” Yale Review 92 (July 2004): 33–49. An earlier version of the prologue appeared in Yale Review 98 (October 2010): 39–48.