IN THE WINTER OF 1972, our entire family went to Rome with a client named Basil so my father could take care of a small legal task for him. Basil was a marijuana dealer, and my father was a criminal defense attorney, but the legal matter was commercial and took only a few days. Then we drove around the country looking at artistic treasures, which my mother believed essential to our development. “A truly educated person needs to spend an afternoon standing in front of a Titian as the light changes,” she told me. “He needs to feel the Sistine Chapel floating over his head.”
My mother had wanted to become an English professor, but her parents pushed her into law school, which she loathed. Since getting married, she had quit the law and devoted herself to a strenuous regimen of culture—museums, theater, classical music—everything she saw as defining the larger world beyond her native Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was parochial, she told us, claustrophobic, terminally stupid. “Just look at your father’s family,” she said. “They all live together on that one little dead-end street, clustered together as if in a shtetl. They never go to Manhattan. They don’t read books. And they don’t like it when anyone else does either.”
We were going to be different. I felt her urgency as our urgency. I remember walking with her into the Uffizi in Florence, seeing the walls covered from top to bottom in dark old paintings in gilt frames, and feeling my heart sink with fear: it was just way, way too much. I was ten years old. My brother David, who was nine, and my sister, Perrin, who was four, had gone with my father in search of a café, and part of me wished I were with them, eating cannoli.
“Isn’t this incredible?” my mother whispered. “We’re in one of the greatest museums in the world. And we’re going to see absolutely everything.”
I never said no to her, because I was afraid of her disappointment: a flicker of her eye, a look of judgment, and then boredom. Becoming a sort of tiny bewildered art aficionado was the way I tried to earn her love. Back in New York, we went to MoMA and the Whitney to see Pollocks and Motherwells, huge paintings that seemed to vibrate against the massive white walls. I’d already decided that I wanted to become an artist, but what I really wanted, on some unconscious level, was to become a painting, so my mother could look at me with the same intense expression she had when we stood in front of a Rothko or a De Kooning: rapt, open, wondering.
In Italy, I did indeed stare up at the Sistine Chapel’s frescoed ceiling, far, far above my head in the afternoon semidark, felt myself pulled upward, as if I were rising above the crush of other tourists, communing with Michelangelo. I walked around the city with my father, amazed by the way the street would curve and suddenly we were in front of something out of a dream: a giant Neptune blowing a conch shell, or a bronze child riding a porpoise, laughing. I remember going to the Coliseum at night and finding out that it wasn’t really a building so much as a rank darkness filled with feral cats slinking among the stones, eating from aluminum pans of pasta. The world was just like art, unpredictable and mysterious, made to surprise.
I remember us all marching into Basil’s hotel room one night to watch him play the guitar. Tall and thin, he seemed to twine around himself as he plucked the strings, and then he stopped and reached up and casually removed his hair—a wig. His own hair was tied up in a bun on the top of his head. He shook it out till it went all the way down his back.
I knew what a wig was, of course, just hadn’t ever seen one; in the moment, it looked as if he were magically changing his hair from short to long. But because no one else said anything I kept quiet, too, until my mother explained later, in our own room. “He wears the wig so the Italian police won’t hassle him.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They don’t like people with long hair—counterculture people.”
And then she veered off in a new direction, because she tended to narrate her thoughts without filter, in a sort of associative stream that never took my age or experience into account. “Basil believes that psychedelics like LSD are the next step in human evolution, that they will lead humanity to new levels of understanding. I’m not completely sure he’s right, but he certainly makes a compelling argument. What do you think?”
Of course I had no idea what to think. What I felt was jealous of Basil, and uncertain about what my mother wanted—what would make her love me. Looking back, I don’t believe she had any real interest in psychedelics or the doors of perception. Rather, I think she was uneasy about the possibility that our family’s situation might be exactly as it seemed: that the clients might simply be criminals, and my father’s profession just a way to make money. Money wouldn’t distinguish us from limited people. She wanted to think we were involved with something intellectual or artistic or at very least bohemian and interesting, something that proved we belonged to the world of freedom and beauty beyond Brooklyn.
And so the opposition between the clients and the law became confused for me in some subtle way with the opposition between my mother’s ruling categories. The clients were art. The police and prosecutors were art haters, philistines. We were art lovers, and my father’s job was protecting art against the stupid and the cruel. That odd take on the situation became an essential part of me, a part of my love for my parents and my belief in their wonderfulness—so much so that I couldn’t help feeling its beautiful reality even once I grew older and saw it wasn’t true.
NINE YEARS LATER, IN the summer of 1981, I learned that my father was under investigation for a long list of crimes, including drug trafficking and weapons possession. I came to the news late, as I’d just gotten back from a junior year abroad in Tokyo, where I’d spent my time watching Noh plays and visiting temples—carrying on my mother’s work, essentially, though now it had become my work, too.
My brother David was the one who told me what had happened, one very hot night as we walked down Fourteenth Street. There were a lot of people milling around the sidewalk, somebody with a boom box every few feet, a mishmash of clashing salsa stations. David described how a client by the name of Jay had gotten arrested for planting a bomb that had blown off the hands of a cop, a member of the bomb squad sent to diffuse it. He explained how Jay had turned out to be a fugitive, wanted under a different name, and how our father was suddenly removed from the case by the judge. The DEA raided his office and took all his records, and he had to hire a lawyer to get them back, who then convinced him to go in and answer questions under oath. “They asked about guns, cocaine, orgies, like he was some kind of drug lord.”
I felt strange, light-headed, as if I’d been spinning in circles. I could almost see the two of us walking down the street, as if I were outside myself, hovering. “I don’t get it, why?” I asked.
“Jay’s talking his way into a deal. The more incredible he makes it, the more they eat it up.”
We were at the Hudson by then, standing at the edge of the river, looking out at the water, black and oily. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I asked, finally. The only letters I’d gotten were from our mother, short notes about things like buying socks or getting stuck in traffic on the crosstown bus—well-intentioned lies, I saw now.
“Mom wouldn’t let us. She didn’t want to ruin your experience,” he said.
“That’s incredibly mixed-up.”
“Exactly.”
When we got back to the apartment, our parents were sitting at the dining room table, clearly waiting for us, and I realized that they had deputized David to tell me what they couldn’t bear to tell me themselves. My father’s face, always exquisitely sensitive, now registered the most intense and delicate shame. His father had been a bus driver, unemployed throughout the Great Depression, and he was haunted by the idea of parental failure. All his effort had gone into being the opposite: a guy with money who bought us things, whatever we wanted, as soon as we wanted it.
“It’s a bit of a mess,” he said. “I acknowledge that. But it’s going to be all right.”
“I know it will,” I said, eager to believe.
And then with my mother sitting beside him, he took me through the facts of the case in a very lawyerly way, as if I were a member of the jury.
What I learned was that Jay’s real name was in fact the utterly fake-sounding Ralph Rogers. My father had first met him 1968, when Rogers was a teenage runaway, selling dime bags on the street; he would come by the office, and my father would buy him lunch.
“Your father was always feeding runaways,” my mother cut in to say. “His office was a kind of hangout for the lost.”
My father represented Rogers on a case in 1971, until Rogers jumped bail and went underground. Clients did that sometimes, panicked about the prospect of prison. The very strange thing was that Rogers returned a few years later—just walked into the office sporting a new name. And my father didn’t recognize him.
“Why would he?” said my mother. “His practice was growing. He had hundreds of clients by then.”
My father nodded, his eyes big and earnest. “I was so busy, I couldn’t remember my own name.”
“So busy he didn’t know what day it was,” my mother added.
Anyway, there was no reason to connect Ralph Rogers with Jay. Rogers had been a skinny street kid, but Jay was an adult, clean-cut and dressed in expensive clothes—nothing obviously counterculture about him. He had lots of money and bragged about big deals involving tons of marijuana transported by boat and plane.
“Why did he come back?” I asked.
My father gave one of his supremely eloquent shrugs. “How should I know? And why does it even matter? He hung around the office a bit. We went to lunch sometimes. But I never did any legal work for him.”
“Then you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“Exactly.”
And yet the story was just so odd, even as I sat there exercising total suspension of disbelief. Why would Rogers contact him again, given the risk of being found out? And how could my father not recognize him?
“What happens next?” I asked.
“They will figure out that all of this is bullshit, and then everything will be okay.”
His face was his courtroom face, carefully matter-of-fact, but his eyes were frightened, and I felt such a rush of helplessness that I had to get up and go to my room and shut the door. Standing at the window, I tried to hold myself together by listing all the reasons he was obviously right. Somebody in the prosecutor’s office would certainly see that this was bullshit. Somebody would see that we were intelligent, that we had been to Paris and Rome, that I had lived in Tokyo without ever resorting to English. And then I remembered that afternoon in the Sistine Chapel when I stood in the middle of a crowd and felt myself pulled upward into the ornate ceiling—the feeling that I was actually rising. I wanted to rise up now, hover over whatever was happening to us, the terrible things they were saying about us, the fear in my chest. But I didn’t know how.
LOOKING FOR WITNESSES TO back up Rogers’s assertions, investigators began calling my father’s other clients. It was the equivalent of telling them to get a new lawyer, which of course they all did, as fast as they could: all the clients who supposedly loved us so much, all of them gone over the course of a single summer.
My father had always been prone to what my parents called depression. They didn’t mean that in the medicalized sense current today but as a kind of exasperating character flaw that was a by-product of his genius as a lawyer—a trade-off they considered annoying but unavoidable. Now he slid into the deepest depression I had ever seen, dozing most of the day on the couch, roaming the apartment at night. He had a history of binge eating when he was upset, and this became the binge of all binges, a tsunami of hunger that emptied the house of food, down to the very last bacon bit. At times his eyes looked shocked and frightened, as if someone else had control of his body. At other times his expression was determined and purposeful, as if he were carrying out some dark and inscrutable vengeance on the world. I stumbled on him scooping mayonnaise straight out of the jar with a pack of hot dog buns. I watched him chew bullion cubes. Once I walked into the kitchen and found him standing in the dark, crunching uncooked spaghetti out of the box.
Over the years, I had learned how to fake a certain detachment at times like this, though in fact I seethed with anger underneath, as if he were pushing the dry pasta down my throat instead of his own. He was hurting himself; he was hurting us. “I can boil some water for you,” I said.
“Not necessary.”
“Are you feeling okay?”
He closed the box and put it on the counter. “Excellent, actually.” He was in nothing but his boxers—already so bloated that his clothes didn’t fit him anymore. His eyes had the small, fiery intensity of the terminally sleepless. And then he dropped his voice, as if the next part were top secret. “I got a call this afternoon from someone with a message from Jay.” He paused, his fingers reaching out for the spaghetti box and then withdrawing again. “Jay says I’ve got nothing to worry about. He’ll never testify against me.”
“And you believe that?”
“Of course I do.”
Later that night, David and I went for another of our long walks, in which we engaged in recursive analyses of the legal situation and circular debates about what to do before it was too late. It was clear to both of us that our parents were in denial, but we had no idea how to open their eyes. David believed our current lawyer wasn’t tough enough.
“We need a pit bull,” he said, “someone who will make them pay for every inch of ground until they decide it’s just not worth it anymore.”
The problem was that our father was obviously way too fragile for that kind of approach, and though we talked big, so were we—soft, passive, terrified, resentful of the fact that we still felt like children. We sat on a bench outside a neighborhood playground, trying to imagine a way around our lack of toughness.
“Remember the Angels?” asked David, sounding wistful. “They were really tough.”
Our father had represented Hells Angels for years, and I had watched them in court: huge, silent men who sat at the defense table without emotion, no matter which way the case was going.
“But they’re psychopathic murderers,” I said, as if that explained it.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Of course I can see now that this discussion contained its own form of denial. It allowed us to go on believing that we had made no mistakes, that there was nothing wrong in living with criminals in our strangely starstruck way.
But in early September, right before my departure for school, I came downstairs one afternoon and found my father standing with the phone in his hand, a weird expression on his face. “I just got a call from an old client.”
“Yeah?”
“And it was just such a strange conversation. He kept asking—he seemed to be trying to get me to say—”
“What?”
He sat down on the couch, looking as if some terrible realization were dawning on him, negating everything he knew about the world. “I had the feeling he was recording me.”
A NEIGHBOR ONCE SAID to my father, “I don’t know how you can represent somebody you know to be guilty. They just go back on the street and do it again, hitting old ladies on the head and taking their pocketbooks, or selling drugs to schoolkids.”
I was nine or ten, and I remember the man’s smug outrage, and how it made me shrink back, ashamed and confused. Later, I would learn how to bury those feelings in a complicated smugness of my own, modeled on my mother’s idea of our specialness, our superior culture. But in the moment, I felt the man’s implication fully: we were little more than criminals ourselves.
My father didn’t seem at all put out by this. He explained that the criminal justice system is designed to be adversarial, and that it is the defense lawyer’s job to advocate for his client, not decide who is guilty or innocent. “All I do is make the best argument. It’s the jury that decides.”
“So they get off on technicalities.”
“Well, it’s called due process.” And then suddenly he drew himself up and began to recite something that sounded like a poem: “I didn’t say anything when they came for the drug addict, because I wasn’t a drug addict. I didn’t say anything when they came for the streetwalker, because I wasn’t a streetwalker.” Even outside the courtroom, he was a performer, something of a ham, always launching into a snippet of verse or a long, stagey story. Now his chin was up, his eyes moist with emotion. “I didn’t say anything when they came for the thief, because I wasn’t a thief. So there was nobody left when they came for me . . .”
Of course, I had no idea that he had appropriated those lines from Martin Niemöller, the German theologian who survived Dachau—appropriated them and then retrofitted them to our very peculiar situation. But standing beside him, I felt their odd force, a strange rush of need. I wanted somebody like him to protect me, and in some reflexive twist of consciousness, I think he wanted somebody like him to protect him, too. As much as anything, it was an expression of longing.
To put that another way, my father’s profession was a container in which we placed everything most urgent and troubling in our lives: our desire to be loved, our fear of disaster, our confusion over who was helping whom and what might make us okay.
There was an abject, helpless quality to his need for his clients. He needed their need for him; it gave him a sense of purpose and a place in the world. When they didn’t call, he would lie down on the couch and gaze up at the ceiling, or stare at a magazine without turning the page. He would eat dinner in silence, examining the label on the ketchup bottle. “Make him get up and take you somewhere,” my mother would tell me, and he and I would slouch off to the park or the zoo or a department store, where he would wander off and lose me. I spent a great deal of time with policemen and zookeepers looking for him, or standing at information desks while his name went out over the PA system. At some point I got smart and took to grabbing on to his coattail, letting him pull me forward while I trotted behind. He was going nowhere in particular, just walking very fast with his head down, deep in thought.
My mother once saw me clutching the hem of his jacket as we got ready to leave a restaurant. “How utterly brilliant,” she said. “I should do that, too.”
Is it any surprise that everything about him was luminous and beautiful to me? That I would sometimes just sit and watch him as he lay on the couch, wondering what he was thinking and what I could do to save us? I tried to tag along wherever he went, even to the bank or the supermarket or the drugstore, to make sure he was okay. But none of that ever satisfied my longing for him, because even when we were together I missed him, as if he weren’t actually there.
The only thing that shook him back to life was a call from a client. When the phone rang, he would jump off the couch and grab it, hoping it was one of them.
This is later, when I was in high school, but I remember him leaping up to get the phone, and then throwing on some clothes. Together we drove to a beachside restaurant on Long Island—a ridiculously long drive—where a client by the name of Stephen Pfeiffer was waiting for us in jeans and no shirt. It was a weekend at the very tail end of summer, and we sat at a wooden picnic table on the restaurant patio, the wind surprisingly cold off the water, the light beautiful.
“Stan, you were right about that thing,” said Pfeiffer.
My father nodded. He looked relieved to be out of the house, alive again. “So it turned out okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I just stayed clear.”
“Wise move.”
I was never sure what that sort of veiled language was about, especially because at other times they could be totally open and unfiltered, but I was used to it, almost as if it were a ritual of belonging, the language of a club at which I could never be more than a guest.
The two men smiled and turned their faces up to the sun, sharing a moment of genuine companionship. Pfeiffer was, like Rogers, a runaway, a street kid grown to adulthood in the marijuana trade. A few years earlier, my father had gotten him off a seemingly unwinnable weapons-possession case, a magic victory that had sealed their connection.
Pfeiffer turned to me. “Your dad is a legal genius, you know.”
Of course I knew; I’d seen it with my own eyes: my father standing in a courtroom with marble walls and high ceilings and tall thin cathedral windows, the judge and jury taking in his every word, laughing at his jokes, believing.
“I do love winning,” said my father.
“Fuck the government,” said Pfeiffer, smiling. He sounded as if he were saying, Isn’t this a beautiful day! What great weather!
My father nodded. “Amen, brother.”
IN THE FALL, THE prosecution started paring back, trying to focus in on charges that might have enough substance to stand up in court. The drug running, the weapons, the orgies all disappeared, never to be mentioned again. It is possible that they had been meant only as a kind of negotiating tool, a way to exert some pressure on us. Now there was just a couple of relatively modest accusations left on the table. It turned out, for one, that my father had in fact done a single small piece of work for Rogers, the lease on a store in Manhattan. And the name on the lease was Jay.
“The paralegal drew that up, not me,” said my father. “I never touched it. In any case, I only knew him as Jay. There was no reason for me to think he was anyone else. I told them that at the very beginning.”
Maybe a different sort of family might have been relieved, even grateful, that he wasn’t at risk for a big prison sentence anymore. But we weren’t that family. We had become obsessed with our blamelessness, our innocence, our goodness; the sheer plausibility of the new charges made them painful to us, and we denied them even harder. I was at school by then, but I would call David to rant for hours about the injustice of it all. He would call me with complicated conspiracy theories. Class was just a place to sit and obsess till I could get to a phone with new points to make, or more exactly, new versions of old points. The space inside my head was completely filled with our drama, and at the center of our drama were the prosecutors and their incomprehensible stupidity, their willful blindness. How could reasonably intelligent people fail to see my father’s goodness, our fundamental innocence?
And then one night in my dorm room, sitting at my desk by the window, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a different picture. It was almost as if I’d turned my head and caught the same scene from a slightly different angle. In this other picture, my father most definitely recognized that Jay was Ralph Rogers: there was no way he couldn’t have recognized him. They may have acknowledged it openly, or they may have left it unspoken. My father may have thought that it didn’t really matter, since Rogers wasn’t looking for a lawyer, just someone to talk to—which was fine, because my father could never have enough people to laugh at his jokes, to drive around town with him on his perpetual search for snacks, to call him up in the middle of the night to interrupt his insomniac’s vigil.
I saw this all very dimly, and then I looked away and forgot it completely. My memory had been wiped clean of something I shouldn’t have ever seen.
When I got home for Thanksgiving, my father was different. No longer eerily upbeat, he had pretty much stopped talking. If you spoke to him, he would glance at you ruefully and light a cigarette. Of course, he refused to answer the phone, believing it was tapped. At my mother’s insistence, the festivities went on around him, without in any way acknowledging the weirdness of the moment. We had a couple of relatives and some family friends over, everyone forced to step around my father, who in my memory, at least, never got up from the TV.
I had no words for what was happening and therefore no way to think about it. All my energy went into pretending that we were the same and I wasn’t afraid. The result was a strange sense of unreality, as if my life were a stage set and I was playing myself rather than being myself. I didn’t ask my parents any questions because I didn’t want to hear anything that would throw off my performance—anything that would trip me up and reveal that I was terrified.
My father and I spoke only once the entire vacation, when he came up to me with a yellow legal pad in his hand. “You’re interested in writing,” he said.
“Well, yeah, sort of.” I’d taken a couple of poetry workshops in school.
“I’ve written something.”
He sat down and read me the opening of a scene about a man who puts the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. I remember it as carefully written, in a close third-person point of view, running something like this:
He placed the barrel in his mouth, and for the first time in years he felt like a human being, in control of his destiny. He realized now that this was what he had been longing for all that time, a sense of control. He would decide his fate, no one else.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s well written,” I said, recalling that it was very possible there was a shotgun in the house, a gift from a grateful client, which he used to keep under his bed. He’d taken it out and shown it to me once, years earlier, and I remembered its heavy dark strangeness, its air of power and menace.
“All I have to do is finish it,” he said.
“Don’t rush. You could write a whole novel if you wanted to.”
He put down the pad. “Nobody would believe it.”
To this day, I am deeply ashamed that I didn’t tell anyone about what he had written, given that it obviously sounded like a suicide threat. I know that I understood the seriousness of what had happened: I’d gotten through the moment holding my breath, as if I were walking across a plank laid over a deep crevasse. But once the moment was gone, I didn’t even check under his bed to see if the shotgun was still there; I simply locked the whole episode away, out of reach. And when he offered me a ride to the airport the following afternoon, I was just glad that I wouldn’t have to take a cab.
That was a mistake. By the time we were on the Grand Central Parkway, he was going much, much faster than the rest of traffic, casually drifting from lane to lane, oblivious of the other cars, which were doing everything they could to avoid us. I must have looked scared, because he stared at me with an oddly bemused expression, speaking as if he and I were both other people, the words so fundamentally not his that to this day they don’t exist for me and I can’t remember them. What I do remember is shrinking back against the passenger-side door, wondering if I should risk grabbing for the wheel before we flipped and crashed.
And then he smiled at me from a seemingly infinite distance. “Don’t worry, I’m back,” he said. It seemed to be true: the car straightened out and started to slow.
“Where’d you go?” My voice came out squeaky and small.
He gave a smug laugh, as if this were a ridiculous question.
At the terminal we enacted a sort of normalcy, hugging and saying goodbye at the curb as if nothing unusual had happened, and then I walked inside on shaky legs and down the long corridor to my gate and got on my flight, my mind circling the absurd thought that my father had, perhaps, just experimented with the idea of killing us both. That was impossible, of course. The truth, I knew, was that he loved me. He was the one who had stayed up with me all night when I got a bottle of whiskey from the liquor cabinet and drank myself sick in high school; he was the one who drove me up to college for freshman orientation and cried when it was time to leave, covering his face and running to the car so I wouldn’t see. The smell of his aftershave and the touch of his big hand on my shoulder were among the most essential facts of my life, running through my earliest memories back to the point when memory itself started. Maybe I had filled some sort of weird caretaker’s role—I was dimly aware of that possibility. We would drive through the city for hours together when he was depressed, from Katz’s for pastrami to Junior’s for cheesecake and the Hong Fat Company for roast pork, red as candy apples. On those nights, we ate till eating felt daring, like jumping from the high diving board, as if it were an expression of exuberance rather than fear. But I didn’t regret any of that: those hours had healed my own loneliness, too.
How could that strange, blurry car ride to the airport, the things he’d said to me then, so foreign that I couldn’t even remember them, outweigh the evidence of twenty years of love? By the time I reached my dorm room, the episode in the car had started to feel distant and dreamlike, almost as if it were a story I’d made up, a figment of my imagination rather than an actual event. As with his fictionalized suicide note, it never occurred to me that I might tell anyone. My silence didn’t feel like secret-keeping so much as space-making, a kind of careful pushing away, as if I were closing a window, inserting a pane of glass between me and what was happening to us.
In the weeks that followed, I continued to go through the motions of being myself, a student in his last year of college. The kids around me were going on job interviews, applying for graduate schools, but I didn’t know what to do, or whom to ask for direction. I’d call home, and my mother would say that everything was fine, my father in the living room watching TV, but she didn’t seem to have the energy to ask about me or my plans and I never pressed her. I was having trouble sleeping: I would sleep for a couple of hours and then wake up in a panic, gasping for air, my heart skittering in my chest. It felt as if I were back in the car on the way to the airport, sliding between lanes. Afterward, I would sit at my desk, drinking bourbon and trying to read the eleventh-century Tale of Genji in classical Japanese, with two different dictionaries open alongside. The sentences were unbelievably long and complicated, like vines entangling an ancient palace, and I would follow each strand as best as I could, trying to see the wonders hidden underneath, even as the bourbon made the print blur and my head spin. Really, it was another attempt to circle back to that moment in the Sistine Chapel when I stared up at the ceiling and felt myself rise above the confusion of who we were, artists or criminals or just plain fools. Up there, it wouldn’t matter anymore: we would be safe, and I would be able to sleep.
MY FATHER WOULD HAVE had a pretty good chance at trial if he’d fired his lawyer and hired a pit bull, as David wanted. Rogers would have looked awful under cross-examination. But there was no money left, and even if there had been, my father was too fragile to testify on the stand. Just being around him you had a sense of his weirdness, even when he remained absolutely silent: the pouchy red eyes, the strange, angry look on his face. A plea bargain was fast and cheap, and we were certain that nobody was going to send a fifty-five-year-old man to prison on charges like these. The judge noted that there seemed to be no clear motive for the crime, no financial incentive, no reason other than an “excessive need to serve.” Nevertheless, when the time came, he sentenced my father to three months. Ralph Rogers went free, no jail time at all.
I was back in Japan when this happened, studying on a scholarship at the University of Tokyo, and I got the news in a single brief letter from my mother, probably written in great sorrow: just a quick recitation of the facts, free of the sugarcoating you really long for when it’s not offered. At the end, in a sort of postscript, she added that my father didn’t want me to write to him; he wanted to be left alone.
That request may have been about nothing beyond his sense of failure, but at the time, it felt like an accusation. It felt as if he was saying that I had failed to take care of him as I was supposed to, as I had when I was a little boy and we had driven around the city at night when he couldn’t sleep. My face stung, as if he had slapped me—and then I caught myself and methodically folded up the letter, slipped it into the garbage, and went about unpacking my groceries. Later, as the weeks passed, I made a conscious effort not to think about him or the prison camp in Danbury, Connecticut, where he was now living—until one night when the phone woke me, and I picked up the receiver.
I still slept badly, but every couple of weeks the exhaustion would accumulate and I’d fall into an incredibly deep slumber like this one, so deep I could barely speak.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s not easy to get to a phone in here.”
“No, no, I was up.” I struggled to put words together, afraid that if I didn’t talk, he might slip away and never call back. “How are you?”
“Fine, fine, listen, I’ve got a friend here who wants to start a business exporting hair to Japan.”
“Hair?”
“Yeah, human hair, to make wigs.”
He explained that real human hair is the most lifelike thing you can use to make a wig, and that Japanese wig makers can’t get enough to meet demand. “The market’s there, the problem is the import licenses, and that’s when I thought of you.”
“Sure, I can help,” I said, starting to worry about who this friend was and what I might be getting into. For one dreamlike moment I imagined his friend murdering people for their hair. “Whatever you need.”
“That’s great,” he said, and then fell silent for a little while. “How have you been?”
“Good,” I said, not knowing how to begin.
“Good, good, listen, there’s a line for the phone so I better go,” he said. “I’ll call again soon.”
Afterward, I sat drinking tea as the window turned blue, feeling his voice continue to vibrate inside my body, the sound of the past, of home.
Many years later, my father would tell me that he had no choice but to talk about wigs because his friend, who was paying for the call, was standing beside him; really, he’d just wanted to hear my voice, and this was the only way he could afford to do it. But there was no way for me to know that, and I was left feeling as if he were trying to draw me into a shady scheme. He then added to my contradictory sense of injury by never calling again.
Instead, my mother came for a visit with an extremely large suitcase that took up an entire corner of my one-room apartment, and we went about the weird project of seeing the sights as if we were ordinary tourists and not humiliated, heartbroken criminals, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Museums, castles, temples, shrines: we followed a strict and rigorous schedule, dutifully reading all wall plaques and examining every object, down to the smallest scrap of calligraphy, until it was closing time and we were forced to return home, too exhausted to be afraid of the future.
One afternoon, we took the train to an old area of town called Yanaka and wandered in and out of the temple graveyards, rising above our sense of failure and grievance long enough to become entranced by the great beauty of the place. One graveyard in particular held us for a long time because it was full of hundreds of small Buddha statues that had been broken into fragments; someone had painstakingly collected the pieces of each figure and grouped them on the ground in neat rows, as if planning to come back and glue them together. The effect was otherworldly: the broken-up baby-size statues laid out like skeletons at an archeological dig, their calm Buddha faces lost in dreams . . . For a moment I forgot about being doomed, and just breathed. And then I looked over at my mother and saw that she held one of the heads in her hands and was staring into its eyes.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Put that back.”
“Your father would love this.”
“Put it back right now,” I hissed.
“It’s just lying there. It doesn’t belong to anyone.”
I never argued with my mother, because I knew from long experience that I was bound to lose, but temple-robbing was a line I did not want to cross. Instantly, intuitively, I felt that it would destroy my connection to Japan.
She began stuffing the Buddha head in her purse.
And then a very angry voice yelled in Japanese, “Hey, you there, stop that!”
I looked up and saw a monk standing on the veranda of the temple building, staring at us. He’d evidently been there for some time, watching.
“Go home!” he roared in Japanese. “Get out of here!”
“Put it back,” I whispered to my mother, who meekly complied. I bowed low to the monk.
“Get out!” he screamed.
My mother and I walked quickly together, as fast as we could, gripping one another’s arm for comfort, heads bowed in shame, out the gate and down the street, as the monk bellowed, “Get out of here! Get out! Out!”
The act of taking that Buddha head was so small and so gratuitous that it seemed, paradoxically, to cut deep into who we were. On the train home, we didn’t look at each other, and we never mentioned what had happened.
My mother left soon after, and I fell into a period of depression. The sight of her trying to push that stone face with its forgiving smile into her purse kept playing in my mind, along with the roaring of the monk, telling us to get out. Anger at her and pity for her got so mixed up inside me that I couldn’t lift myself from the tatami, and I spent a couple of days just staring out into the building’s tiny courtyard, with its potted plants and rake and shovel and metal barrel for burning leaves, acknowledging what I’d always secretly known: that Japan was just a beautiful dream, a fantasy in which I imagined shedding an older version of myself for a newer, less conflicted, one. If only my mother hadn’t come to visit, bringing her extra burden of sorrow, I told myself; if only the monk hadn’t been standing there, watching; if only I were less like my parents, less awful, maybe then I could still believe.
LIFE IN NEW YORK was different when I got back. My mother had found work as an attorney for the City’s child welfare agency; every morning, she put on a suit with big shoulders as if strapping on armor, packed her briefcase with files, and marched out the door to the subway, looking determined and a little frightened. David had gotten a job as a veterinary lab technician at the Animal Medical Center and was living in an apartment on Sixteenth Street he sublet from a former client of my father’s (though the man would come back eventually and throw him out in the middle of the night, and he would end up moving to Brooklyn). My sister, Perrin, was at a progressive boarding school in Massachusetts, learning how to paint pictures and take care of a cow.
My father was home by then, driving a Meals on Wheels truck for a synagogue on the Lower East Side as part of his court-mandated community service, but otherwise showing none of the earnest desire to rejoin society expected of an ex-con. When not driving the van, he sat in front of the TV, eating and smoking, a strange sort of grief on his face.
I needed advice, but he was in no shape to give any, so I went for long walks to get out of the apartment, touring the scenes of my youth, nostalgic for a time when we browsed used books at the Strand and watched samurai films at the Regency on Broadway and argued with great passion about the best place to get linguini in white sauce or Hunan beef. Back then, my only goal in life was to be an art lover in the strange way my parents and I defined that endeavor, encompassing the clients and their eccentric undertakings and everything counterculture and interesting. Insofar as I ever thought of an adult occupation, it was stirringly vague: painter, philosopher, novelist. I had no idea what to do next, no idea how grown-ups generally put a life together so that they don’t look shameful to other people. I had a vague sense that a job of some kind might be in order, but I’d never had one and didn’t know how to go about looking. And then one afternoon, down by the World Trade Center, I saw a group of Japanese tourists getting out of a big tour bus, gathering around a tiny Japanese woman holding a little red flag on a long pole: a tour guide. She started to march across the vast concrete plaza and they followed behind, like chicks following a hen.
I can do that, I told myself.
And I did. I got a job with a Japanese travel company working as a Japanese-speaking tour guide, taking groups around the city. I would rumble around New York in a gigantic bus, interpreting the world for them through a microphone. Look to your left, I would say in Japanese, and watch the bright, open faces swivel left. There is the Empire State Building, 103 floors, 1,250 feet tall if you include the antenna. It takes 1,872 steps to get to the top. Look to the right. There is Macy’s Department Store, the same as in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, starring Maureen O’Hara and John Payne, which won three Oscars in 1947.
I stood at the front of the bus, one hand gripping the microphone, my other arm wrapped around a pole, acting as if I were an authority, a source of truth. But of course what I felt was the exact opposite, the complete emptiness of everything I knew of life. My old view of the world made no sense to me anymore, and yet I wasn’t quite rid of it, either, because I had nothing to replace it with. It floated behind everything, like a double exposure—like a reflection in the bus window.
Back at home, I would take off my suit and tie and look in on my father. He talked infrequently, but when he did it was an acidic monologue about the prison camp and the prison guards, whom he called screws—a term that sounded so retro that I thought maybe he was making it all up from old Cagney movies. Except that occasionally he would retreat to a darkened room and weep.
And then one day I saw him answer the phone, listen for a while in silence, and then put the receiver back in its cradle—pressing down with his hand, as if trying to close the lid of a box that didn’t want to shut.
“This phone is tapped,” he whispered to me.
I, too, had noticed some problems with the connection, but the idea that it was tapped didn’t make a lot of sense, especially considering that everything was over now, his case finished, his time served. When I told him that, he gazed at me condescendingly, pitying my naïveté. And in that moment, I had a dim, half-formed thought that he might actually be crazy.
He got up very quietly and went to his room. A little later, he came out combed and dressed and left the apartment to see Stephen Pfeiffer, the man we’d once met for lunch at the beach, the only client with whom he’d remained close. When he returned late that night, he was carrying something new, an old-fashioned vinyl flight bag, which he hid under the orange shag carpet in David’s old bedroom, creating a hump that was impossible to miss. Then he sat down in an easy chair to watch it, brooding.
The next day, David came by after work and took me aside. “That bag is full of money.”
“How do you know?”
“I took it out when he went to the bathroom.”
Money had a new kind of urgency for us. Once it had been the thing my father needed more and more of so he could spend it more and more quickly without actually feeling any better. Now it was something we didn’t have enough of and needed for the rent and the electric bill.
“How much?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. It’s packed full.”
A couple of days passed and I did nothing, just watched my father watch the lump in the carpet, until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What are you going to do?” I asked him one night, as he sat smoking in his chair.
It was a strange feeling, asking a question after all the missed opportunities over the last few years. It felt like stepping out onto a high ledge, with the same sense of a fall about to happen. His face turned furious, agonized, and I realized that he had been waiting for me to ask him this.
“Why should I tell you?” he asked.
“Don’t you think I deserve to know?”
“No, I don’t.”
But of course he told me anyway; having it both ways was always the family style. He was planning to drive up to Buffalo, he said, where Stephen Pfeiffer lived. Pfeiffer knew someone there who would sell him a false passport he could use to cross into Canada and then fly to a third country, where he could start a new life under a new identity.
“But why?” I asked.
He told me that the government was angry he’d gotten off so lightly the first time and was now plotting to frame him for something really big.
“The case is over. You’ve served your time.”
“It’s not over for them,” he said. But of course what he meant was that it wasn’t over for him, that it never would be.
I could feel my face growing fragile, as if it were made of glass. “Where are you going to go?” I asked.
He lit another cigarette, looking cagey. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
We fell into silence. I looked around at all the objects I’d grown up with: the shag carpet, the bunk bed, the big chest of drawers, the nubby armchair in which my father sat—all those familiar things which made the world feel knowable, stable. They seemed to be tilting now, like the deck of a ship in heavy seas. But my father just stared out the window at the cityscape beyond, imagining his journey to safety.
That journey would, in fact, remain imaginary. He would sit in that chair for days, smoking and watching TV, staring out the window, trying to gain the strength to pull the flight bag out from under the rug and leave for Buffalo. Eventually, he would give up his vigil and wander the house, as if testing an alternative wish, to stay. In the process he would spend the money till it was gone, the bag squashed flat: vast quantities of Peruvian take-out chicken, Italian shoes with monk straps, a silver bracelet. Some months later, he would begin seeing a psychiatrist, who would start him on medication, and in a couple of years, he would actually win his law license back and practice law again, in the same courthouse where he was once sentenced to prison—practice with modest, self-deprecating humor and a newfound sense of caution.
But on that first evening, there was no way for me to know how it would finally end, and I stumbled out to my own room, almost drunk on fear. I had to get to the Hotel Edison on West Forty-Seventh Street to lead a nightlife tour: dinner at a steak house, then drinks at a Folies Bergère–themed nightclub where we would watch women dance around in plumes. Just pulling on my suit and tying my tie seemed to take forever, and I had trouble finding my flag, but I got out the door and onto the subway, and then suddenly I was standing in the Edison’s worn lobby, the tourists slowly gathering around me, shy and tentative.
“I have the great honor of serving as your tour guide tonight,” I said in Japanese, bowing deeply. “Of course, I beg your forgiveness for being American. I will nevertheless try my best. Please rest assured that you can depend on me.”
I raised my flag, and they followed me out the front doors to the sidewalk and onto the bus. The pneumatic doors closed, and we took off down Forty-Seventh Street, then turned on Eighth Avenue and headed uptown.
I stood at the front of the bus with the microphone, one arm wrapped around a pole for balance. The city I’d grown up in was moving past, a shiny patent leather darkness full of beautiful lights. I looked over the seats and saw the tourists gazing back at me with their expectant, trusting eyes, and I knew that I needed to speak. This was the point where I normally introduced myself and explained the schedule, the places we would be going, and the things we would be doing. But the words wouldn’t come, even as my heart beat faster. What I really wanted to tell them was that I didn’t know if my father would be there when I got home. That I had no idea where we were going.