“Oh, Papa,” Roberto said. He sounded tired and resigned.
“When she jumped—” Professor Sola said. Asa came out of his daze. But Roberto interrupted.
“No, no. It wasn’t—he was never like you, never.”
“Me? I’m not talking about myself.”
“You plural, you together, you who weren’t brave enough to live, that’s who,” Roberto said.
“And what do you know about bravery?” said Professor Sola, softly, shutting his eyes.
“I’m going back there,” Parker said. “I’m taking the car. Are you coming?” He looked at Asa. Asa shook his head.
“I’m coming,” said Professor Sola.
The river was dragged until one in the morning and the whole of Tuesday as well. Professor Sola sat on the bank in his black suit and watched. Tuesday evening he called Parker and asked him to arrange a memorial service—“Get in touch with his friends. We’ll never have a body.” Thursday at midday a hundred and fifty young men and women gathered in the Solas’ living room, rarely used, where they heard a string quartet by Mozart and a speech on youth by a junior-faculty history teacher at Andover. Professor Sola did not attend. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” was read, and Jerry Kuhn, who’d flown up from New York and seated himself beside Asa, who still felt cold, leaned close to him and whispered, “I knew they’d do that. I knew it.” Jo wore bleached linen; she had cut most of her hair off and her unsuntanned neck rose up from her collar like a white pillar. When it was over everybody left quickly. Professor Sola had decided that the pool needed to be repainted and was having it drained; he was overseeing the workmen during the service. Jerry, who’d caught a glimpse of this scene as he left the house in Asa’s wake, said, “Does he think he’ll find Reuben at the bottom of that body of water?” Asa dragged his bicycle out of its spot in the bushes without answering and rode all the way to Walden Pond for a swim.
It was late in June when Reuben died. Asa caught a cold and stayed in bed reading Sherlock Holmes until a few days before the Fourth of July. Parker called once, to see if he wanted to go to the beach; Asa said no, and Parker didn’t call again. On July 3, Asa put himself on a bus going north to spend some weeks with his grandparents in New Hampshire. He did not drive into town with them to see the fireworks, although this had been one of his favorite events when he was a boy. He stayed home, blowing his nose and reading Maupassant’s short stories, which comforted him with their predictability. He was asleep; even his limbs were asleep, and tingled every time he tried to move them. He woke up briefly at the start of August, when he decided to return to Cambridge. When he got there, he had fallen asleep again. Although it had been easier to cease functioning with his grandparents, who were indulgent and didn’t expect him to do anything more than gather some eggs for breakfast, he was too tired to go back, or go anywhere else. He mowed the lawn, he polished the silver, he ran errands for his father, he did his own laundry. Now and then he surfaced—it was as though he lived underwater, what with the remnants of his cold and the dearth of sensation or emotion—and looked at the calendar. August 29, September 2: He wouldn’t have been surprised to see June on the page and find himself living the whole of the blank and chilly summer over again.
Eventually it was time to register. The authorities had decided, perhaps out of sympathy, to leave Parker, Asa, and Jerry alone in their four-room suite. Roberto was back at Manter Hall for another year of cramming; he took over the empty room as a storage space for the growing pile of stolen objects he was accumulating. While Parker and Asa were unpacking new tweed suits and old Shetland sweaters, Roberto was unfolding Oriental rugs of mysterious provenance and putting first editions of Hemingway into bureau drawers. “Art collecting seems to run in the family, one way or another,” Jerry said to Asa.
Asa refused to speak to Jerry, and Parker refused to speak to Asa. Asa couldn’t forgive the comment about Professor Sola and the pool; Parker couldn’t forgive Asa’s absence at the bridge. Inevitably an alliance developed between Parker and Jerry. They did Baudelaire together (that was how Asa thought of it), speaking French, wearing European-style shirts without buttons on the collar, replaying all the banal conversations they’d overheard in the Union, and spoofing their classmates.
Asa didn’t want a friend. He was thinking of concentrating in art history, with a minor in English, or perhaps the other way around. He was taking an intimate slide-lecture course on the history of Western art at the Fogg. Every Tuesday afternoon, from three to five-thirty, he sat in the dark, dusty-smelling basement auditorium and was lulled by a succession of beautiful, colored images looming at the end of the room. There were about fifteen other students, half of them Radcliffe girls; these contrived to bump against him as they went in and out of class. He didn’t pay attention.
One November afternoon, in the middle of Greek vases, there flashed onto the screen a painting, startling in its color and scope by contrast with the ebony and umber of the terracottas, which they’d been looking at for two weeks. “Icarus,” said the professor, “as he was seen a thousand years later. How insignificant he is here. You can barely distinguish him.” The pointer moved to a ripple in the water, bisected by two little legs. “It’s the peasant and the land that are dominant.” And Asa looked. Yes, in the corner, the flurry of drowning, while all around the world hummed and plowed and trod between its furrows. His face got hot and his palms began to sweat. Nobody had noticed—that he was crying, that Icarus was dying. He kept crying and getting hotter, as if the cold that had clamped onto him in the Solas’ study had finally let go, and he were now thawing. All that had been was changed, all the world was different, there weren’t any heroes, there weren’t any summers at the pool to come, there weren’t any myths—Asa’s litany of loss, first enunciated in that basement, became a train of thought he carried everywhere. Down the street to romantic poetry at Seaver Hall, accompanied by his inner chant: No more myths, no more summer; into the Union, filling his tray with meat loaf and custard: Everything is changed, everything is gone. Eventually he got used to it, it was a familiar part of the landscape, this voice that never stopped. He bought a print of Breughel’s painting from the Fogg and hung it on the wall opposite his bed. He stopped going to the museum course; he had gotten what he needed from it.
Asa graduated in 1960 in English, without honors. He and Jerry had resumed relations in the middle of junior year and were going to Paris together to get jobs at the Herald Tribune. Parker had drifted into club life, had written for the Lampoon and given black-tie dinners in his Eliot House rooms, to which he always invited Jerry (who wouldn’t go because of Parker’s friends’ anti-Semitism) and never invited Asa (who would have welcomed a touch of the high life). To their surprise Parker got a summa in history and went straight into graduate school, where he distinguished himself while Asa and Jerry ate tripe and suffered grievous stomach pains. The grim Paris autumn sent Asa back to America and a stopgap job reading novel manuscripts at Little, Brown. They were terrible, but unlike most of the readers, he wasn’t convinced he could write a better one. What had he got to write about? Within three years Jerry was ensconced at a rewrite desk near the Champs-Élysées, Parker had a job waiting for him at Yale when he finished his thesis, and Asa was learning book production—riffling through pages without reading them to count the lines, poring over type catalogues, making deals with paper suppliers.
And by then Roberto had vanished. He was to turn up periodically, always enthusiastic about a new project. Desalinization of Cape Cod Bay was one; for several years he worried about the water table on the Eastern seaboard. Then he got a job at Sotheby’s in London, but that didn’t last long because there was some trouble about the disappearance of a Bernini plaster study for an angel. He was against bomb shelters and for disarmament, and circulated a newsletter on these issues for a year or two; Asa always got a copy. After a long period of silence he resurfaced, having become a documentary filmmaker specializing in Latin America. Sometimes he ap
peared in Cambridge with a new car and a beautiful, sleek woman, took Asa—later Asa and Fay—out to dinner at the Ritz and told incredible stories about his life. Other times he came alone, in Reuben’s Porsche, getting on for a decade old, and sat in Asa’s living room drinking rum and brooding. He stayed in touch with Asa because Asa stayed in touch with Professor Sola, and Roberto had, in his words, “divested” himself of the family. “What’s left of it to divest,” he added. But he wanted the news.
The news wasn’t good. Professor Sola had had a throat cancer and now whispered and wheezed his infrequent sentences. He rarely saw anyone except Asa, who had started visiting while he was at Harvard out of desperation and continued visiting out of duty. The professor spent most of his time in his study with the amber lights on, making a catalogue of his art holdings; these had been increased by Roberto’s hoard, which had been abandoned by Roberto and presented by Asa to the father as recompense for losing his other son. Roberto had disappeared when Asa was a sophomore and still dependent on Professor Sola’s company. He went there every Friday night for dinner and listened to rambling monologues about Rembrandt, Germany in the twenties, the Harvard English faculty, and the problems of the pool.
“You know, it only alienated my neighbors more when I built the pool. They thought it was the height of ostentation. I was prepared to invite them all, to consider it their pool as well. They didn’t want it in the vicinity.”
“Why alienated them more? What had alienated them to begin with?” Asa asked. He had learned that Professor Sola, unlike Reuben, didn’t mind being asked direct questions.
“Oh, why does anybody dislike the Jews? I never knew.”
“It was that?”
“Maybe.” The old man said nothing else, and Asa felt unsatisfied, for once.
He found out, too late to make any difference, all that he’d wanted to know about Reuben’s mother. Blonde and rich, she’d passed for Aryan, supplied her husband and infant (Roberto; Reuben had been born in America) with food, obtained passports for the family and gotten them out of Germany, and killed herself five years later. “Why not?” Professor Sola had said, telling this story one long summer evening. “What was the point of her life after that? She’d saved the people she cared about, given me two children, compromised her identity, abandoned her country. Her work was done.”
“Did you feel the same?”
“Did I want to die? Well, yes, but she died first, and there were the boys, so I stayed.”
Asa never forgot his saying “stayed,” as though the world were a place, like Boston or Paris, and there were other places to be.
“And what was her name?”
“Marthe. Martha.”
So Grace remained a mystery. It was a mystery Asa pondered by himself in his living room late at night, after Roberto had come and gone, or anytime he felt adrift or startled by some memory of the past. He avoided the Solas’ end of Brattle Street, driving down Mount Auburn to get to his parents’ house on Sundays when he and Fay went there for dinner. He braved that five-pronged intersection only when he intended to visit Professor Sola.
And at the end of the sixties, Professor Sola died. His cancer had recurred, and he told Asa he didn’t intend to have it treated. Asa wrote to Roberto, care of General Delivery, Hollywood; the letter returned after two weeks, addressee unknown. He put a few ads in the movie trade journals, called Parker at Yale, but Roberto was untraceable. There was a strange funeral at the Mount Auburn Cemetery with Asa and Fay and their baby girl, two cadaverous professors emeritus of English, and Lolly. Lolly had arranged the service, which consisted of a Unitarian minister reading Psalms. Reuben’s marker was on the left, Marthe’s on the right.
Roberto turned up several weeks later, drank rum, listened to the news, and talked about home computers, which he claimed were the wave of the future. Never, in all those years, in all those evenings Asa spent with Roberto or his father, did any of them say Reuben’s name.
After Professor Sola was dead, Asa unrolled the Breughel print, which he’d kept in the back of the off-season clothes closet in the guest room, and tacked it above his desk, which stood in a corner of the living room. Fay didn’t like it. “I think that’s an ugly painting,” she said more than once. “It’s depressing, that’s what.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Asa. “It’s about how life goes on, you know?” But he used it to get depressed with. During the day, or when there were people in the room, he never looked at it. At night, after Fay, tired from the baby, went to sleep at nine, he’d sit on the sofa, and stare at the plowman, the hillside, the feeble effort of Icarus not to drown, and drink his scotch, and—what? He described it to himself as “remembering.” But he avoided specific memories. He drifted around in the past, smelling the roses that studded the Solas’ garage, seeing again the finely turned column of Jo’s arm, tasting the chlorine in his throat from too many dives into the pool. Occasionally he tasted real tears. And sometimes he heard his old litany: No more summer, no more myths—but it was halting and faint and had lost its power to hypnotize. Because life did go on, he and Fay had bought a shack on the Cape and had their own summers now. So what was he lacking, and what was he crying for?
Quite simply, the best love he’d ever known.
The Discrepancies
What Asa had said to me was, “I had a boyhood friend who died.” This was in passing, in the middle of a conversation about friendship. “Who?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s dead.”
“I know.”
“His name was Reuben. He had an accident.”
“When was this? What kind of accident?”
“Oh, it was ages ago. We were teenagers. He was climbing something and he fell.”
“What?”
“What?”
“What was he climbing?” Sometimes conversation with Asa was impossible. He would retreat into stupidity and I would have to spell everything out for him.
“He was climbing the Mystic River Bridge. What do you want to know all this for?”
“Don’t you want to know things about me and my life?”
“Sure.” And his face settled into the expression of lust that he thought was affection. He was capable of affectionate feelings, but these produced a worried expression, as though it hurt to feel them. “I want to know everything.” He put his hand on the back of my thigh and slid it down to the dip behind my knee. We were in his office; in a week he was going to be forty-two. He didn’t want to know anything about me except how my breasts fit into his palms. We were still in the kissing stage.
“So?” I said.
“Huh?” He had gone behind his cloud. Was it purposeful or inadvertent? Maybe he was hung over. I examined his enormous eyes: bloodshot, but that wasn’t unusual. Still, they were puffy underneath and he smelled of witch hazel, which, being slightly alcoholic, gave me the impression of booze by association.
“Are you asleep? Tell me the story.”
“I was up too late,” he said. This was his euphemism for having drunk too much the night before. He picked up a pencil and pressed the eraser to his lips. He had a habit of caressing inanimate objects in my presence. He would fondle his ruler, stroking it up and down, press paper clips to his cheeks, tap himself on the head with his magnifying glass. I enjoyed his displacement; it was I he wanted to press to his flesh. A year later I was reduced to being jealous of his tools. “You kiss the ruler but you won’t kiss me!” I said to him three weeks before I left my job. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he responded.
But this day, when he put his pencil to his mouth, I was bold and we were enough in love so that when I moved it and put my lips there instead, he kissed me back. The pencil fell on the floor. I tasted him—shaving soap at the corners of his mouth, his coffee, his Lucky—and sighed. He sighed too. It was morning; hours would have to pass before we held each other.
“So what happened?”
“He was a daredevil. Very good-looking, one of those boys who’s the natural
leader of the group. I worshiped him—I guess.” The pencil, retrieved, was tapped on his chin while he pondered whether he had, actually, worshiped. “He was Jewish,” Asa said, looking sidelong at me.
“Did he look it?” I asked.
“What’s that mean?”
“Joke,” I said. “Go on.”
“He was an extremist, always pushing himself. Anyhow, he was doing this crazy thing, climbing this bridge, and he fell off.”
“Were you there?”
“No. I chickened out at the last minute and stayed home looking at pornographic art with his father. His father had a hell of an art collection.”
“What was he like?”
“Who?”
“Reuben.” I kicked the leg of his desk.
“Oh, I don’t know. We were such kids. He wasn’t a very nice person, I suppose. I don’t know if I’d like him now.”
“But you liked him then?”
“I was crazy about him,” he said. He said it with the same tone he used to say “You’re a marvel,” or “You’re extraordinary,” or any of the other things he murmured to me at odd moments passing me in the hall.
“What wasn’t nice about him?”
“I think he was manipulative. Also, I think he was immoral. Amoral? Which do I mean?”
“How do I know?” He was always asking me what he meant. “Immoral means evil. Amoral means lacking a sense of right and wrong.”
“Amoral. That’s just what he was.”
Then his phone rang and I went back to my office. It took months for me to extract that story from him. And there’s a lot he never told me. I had to extrapolate and invent. When he said, “Then we went on some cockamamie break-in to the museum because Jerry wanted to look at a painting,” I had to supply the painting, the pebbles on the roof, the state of his mind.
Asa, as I Knew Him Page 12