WHEN ALL OF THIS HAPPENED I thought of myself as old. Amazing. Every day I am more and more convinced that we can only use time to measure our own shadows, and while we might think of memories as the sun, they are at best a torch. In terms of Bea I was certainly old. Much too old. I should have known better. After losing my family and my job and my good name—whatever that means—I still called her and still took her to Bemelmans and still brought her back to the Hotel Wales where, despite everything, I still kept a room. Absurd. Amazing and absurd. But Richard and Jamie had put me in a mood. I hoped for a reunion but all I found was the old flickering, and me feeling around for a path. The Dyers perform their secret ministries, and we Toppings, or this Topping in particular, strains to catch his name on their lips. I remember summer beach picnics organized by the Dyer and Topping women, the mothers curating our good cheer; Isabel took the photographs as Eleanor posed the players, the two of them hoping that these happy pictures might stand in for how we looked back, a prefabricated nostalgia. If fathers are unknowable, then mothers are all too visible, a reminder of our earthly attachments. At some point between the swimming and the exploring of dunes and the tossing of various discs and balls, I would gravitate to the doldrums, hoping for sympathy. My dad was always quiet yet genial, like a foreigner who could only respond with a few common expressions. By the age of twelve I had pretty much given up on him and even told my mother so in a moment rife I’m sure with Freudian overtones. “I don’t think I really love him,” I said. She looked at me as if I had handed her something homemade and easily broken. “That’s okay,” she told me, touching the back of my head. “You will someday.” During these family get-togethers my attention would wander over to A. N. Dyer, and I swear I could read my own discomfort in those inkwell eyes. I’d watch him toss a stick for one of the dogs, his right arm cranking it a good distance, my legs tempted to give chase. Absurd. At the Wales I ordered room service—champagne and strawberries, shrimp cocktail, crème caramel—since I had shortchanged Bea on the glamorous portion of the evening. She stretched herself on the bed, on a duvet of faded florals, geraniums mostly, and began to answer texts on her phone, thumbs flying, feet heeling away shoes, a youthful gravity spreading her legs, like branches wet with snow. In my defense, I loved her. Then again, I’m guilty of easily falling in love, of confusing the abstract with the concrete, hoping those words might cast me as a caring individual and dispel my notions of a sinister center. I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen.
I went over and touched her.
“The Bea’s knee,” I said.
She grinned but continued with her texting.
There were no other affairs before Bea, though I had become prone to late-night wanderings into the seamier side of the Internet. To my eyes at least, a new sexual revolution was taking place. Self-exposure now seemed a rite of passage, a flash of breast carrying the weight of a wink and full frontal nudity nothing more than a big warm hello. So many women, barely women, were allowing themselves to be photographed in all sorts of compromised states. And every day more flesh was added to the rolls. Were these amateurs or pros? Was this the way of the world or simply the way of the World Wide Web? I honestly had no idea. But regardless, these youthful exploits went begging at my fingers. In my day pornography was a pleasant if offensive joke, strictly the province of professional creeps and dirty uncles. At Exeter and Yale I was a good citizen, a thoughtful man, certainly better than I am today, marching in Take Back the Night rallies, volunteering at Planned Parenthood, reading Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. I would have spat on anyone using the word bitch, let alone whore or cunt. My world had no fucking. Maybe people screwed or got laid. They banged on occasion. But even one-night-stands went through a certain due process. Between Helen Dieter and my wife I had seven sexual partners, only three of whom I dated for any length of time. This is no excuse, I understand. Nine is a fine number. And I was happy with Ashley, happily married, happily entangled in parenthood, the love functional yet consistent. But then came the second blush of middle age, which, in combination with the discovery of Internet porn, roused my hibernating adolescence, who realized all that he had missed and all that he was missing, one naked girl at a time.
I unzipped for Bea.
Many a night grading papers was spent intermittently clicking onto another couple fucking, ass fucking, cock sucking, double cock fucking, fist fucking, click-click-click, yet still I needed more. I couldn’t rest until I had seen it all and please God let me see it all so that I may rest. Hell is other people fucking. To allay myself of the virtual, I began to dabble in the consequential and created a secret email account (Larrymacawber@yahoo.com) and trolled Craigslist and joined an online dating service. I never moved past the most superficial contact and more often scared myself into three or four days of abstinence, that is, until one afternoon in mid-January. I was in SoHo shopping, hoping the J.Crew down here had a hipper edge than the J.Crew uptown, when a dark-eyed woman came up to me as I thumbed through a stack of chambray utility shirts and asked if I needed help. I said yes, please, and she took me around and updated my wardrobe to the tune of two thousand dollars. Somehow during the exchange I charmed her—I remember teasing her about her almost hidden tattoo—and by the end I signed her up as my personal shopper. That’s when the emails began. Of course, when I came home loaded down with bags, Ashley praised my self-reliance—she usually bought my clothes—though a few of my fashion choices she found dubious.
Bea started rubbing me while finishing her text one-handed.
I’ll spare you the details of that night and all the nights before, non-nights really, nights stolen from the middle of the day, like the two hours at the Sheraton near LaGuardia, or the hour and a half at the Howard Johnson’s in Brooklyn. It’s all too easy to imagine. Nothing new there. But on occasion I find myself crouching down and shining my light in her direction, seeking a great and passionate affair instead of a twenty-year-old girl making shadow puppets with her hands. Forgive me. And forgive me for the next morning when I waited outside my old building reeking of cocktail sauce and sex. I knew that Ashley would soon be down to walk Rufus to Buckley—he was in kindergarten—and then taxi Eloise to Chapin—she was in second grade. Except for the funeral, I had been dodging them, too mortified to deal with the situation, though I did have the excuse of my father dying. Strange, I was at my best as a son when I was at my worst as a father. A. N. Dyer would have had a field day with the likes of me.
Look at Philip Topping, gathering up the morning sun like a cormorant in herringbone, while the better-formed flocks of Upper East Side bird passed by, their stomachs full of grain rather than the squirmier aspects of life.
Ashley was unsalvageable. She was forever devastated by my actions, as she told me, rather dramatically, early on—“I will never get over what you’ve done to me! Never!”—though soon she discovered her survivor’s instinct, her ability to plow ahead, that sharp McCracken chin the furrowing blade. She began to exercise every day. She ran a marathon. She got back into graphic design and rekindled an interest in experimental theater (whereas I was an opera man). A year later she met an Irish expat and remarried and had another child, a girl named Charlotte. Funny how life has a way of justifying itself. Thanks to her misery, she was never happier. Plus she had the pleasure of watching me curl into a small turd-shaped ball, my destiny guided by a dung beetle. But as of that morning her happy prospects still seemed an impossibility, and I was the asshole king finally making an effort with his kids. I would take Rufus to school, the logical paternal choice; I would lift him onto my shoulders and bounce him to Buckley, show my face to the teachers, to the administration, to the parents: Philip Topping, guilty yet resilient. I grew Hollywood hopeful. But when 8:10 A.M. passed and there was still no sign of them I went over to Carlos the doorman and asked if they had come down yet. He told me they had left two days ago for spring break. Fuck me. Of course they had. A week in Lyford Cay. I even said, “Fuck me,” and Carlos, fuck him, grinned, and I slipped further into A. N. Dyer’s world.
Philip turned from the building and started to creep south, a journey of twenty-two blocks that might as well have taken twenty-two years. Time streamed forward and backward, with Park Avenue as the opposite of Lethe—every street brought a damp realization of what he was and what he would forever be.
When I returned to the apartment Gerd was frantic. Richard and Jamie were due in thirty minutes, and Andy was still upstairs in bed while Andrew was in the bathroom downstairs, the shower running for twenty minutes, like maybe he had slipped and broken something, like maybe he was trying to yell but instead was drowning, “like maybe he’s getting poached,” Gerd said to me. The poor woman. Bagels and cream cheese and smoked salmon and a variety of muffin and morning pastry and fruit overwhelmed the kitchen, the sink bunched with an assortment of flowers in search of vases, and on top of this, on top of the squeezing of oranges and the brewing of regular and decaf coffee, Gerd was trying to resuscitate the apartment, to shock the living room into breathing again, to peel open the eyes of the dining room and let it glimpse once more a table spread with food. “I just want it to be nice,” she told me as she straightened the chairs, “for Andy.”
I took off my overcoat and helped with the flowers.
I knew flowers thanks to my mother. In Southampton we had wonderful gardens, in all states and styles, which she constantly tended to in green clogs, an oversized button-down shirt, a tennis visor. She snipped at whatever needed snipping, never pleased with the lilacs near the tennis court or the rhododendron around the cottage, dreaming of a greenhouse, a gift my father offered every year but which she pooh-poohed as too expensive. She was wary of ever appearing to try too hard, which of course took great effort. She was a believer in the natural graces, and when she got sick, she never once thought of putting up a fight. But she was famous for her gardens. And I was her faithful assistant. I deadheaded, I pruned (there is a difference), I weeded, I mulched. By the time I was nine I could identify most varieties of flower, whether in the field or in chintz, and my older siblings accused me of sucking up, as if being a loving son was the same as being a teacher’s pet. Typical. The teasing was particularly merciless when I won best of show for juniors at the Southampton Garden Club’s annual flower show (won it three years in a row, in fact). Once married, I forsook Long Island for the McCracken family compound in upstate New York and gave up gardening, without regret. But as I stood over the sink and rushed through arrangements, I must have remembered my mother somewhere in the task, a loss briefly filled, an illusion of a life maintained, like water for those stems. I placed the vases around the apartment and was putting the last one on the table in the front hall when the doorbell rang.
Andrew was still in the bathroom.
Andy was still upstairs.
Gerd was changing in her room.
I was near the door so I answered.
Richard stood front and center, the bow to the family ship. When he saw me, his expression ran aground. “Philip?”
“Hi, Richard.”
My hands were still wet from the flowers.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, wiping away the moisture.
“I’m staying here.”
“Here as in here, in this apartment?”
“Yes.” I smiled at the family behind him. “Please, come in.”
Richard remained stuck by the door as the rest of the crew abandoned ship. I introduced myself and told them I was an old friend, like since forever, but then I noticed Richard flinch so I clarified the relationship. “Our fathers were very old friends, like from day one.”
“How nice,” Candy said, sharing with me her undeniable warmth. She wore tight embroidered jeans and furry boots, a coat more in tune with ski slopes than sidewalks. I half-expected her to whoop and come to a sliding stop. It was odd to think of Richard’s family as tourists here in New York, but that’s what they were, and for that reason their faces lacked a certain patina, of the city in their blood, I suppose, which made them seem extra shiny, untainted by the everyday corrosions of ambition.
“Let me take your coats,” I said.
Richard refused the offer. “Where’s my father?”
“He’s still getting ready,” I said. I brought them into the living room, improvising my duties as host. Thankfully the glob of spit from a few nights ago had been cleaned up or had dried into nothing. Or was it my imagination? I did my best to advertise the furniture as if great comfort lay ahead rather than mild suspicion. Small talk commenced regarding their visit to New York—any sights? any shows?—with Candy taking on the role of spokesperson. Most of my attention wavered sideways, onto Richard and how the years had treated him versus how they had treated me. He was definitely winning. But his trim physique and solid good looks had no love for the competition, his eyes the veteran of—
“What?” he said with an accusatory tilt.
“Excuse me?”
“You were staring at me.”
“No,” I said. “Or I don’t think I was.”
Thank goodness Gerd walked in just then. She was wearing of all things a maid’s uniform, which gave her the distinct impression of being swallowed whole by a leaping killer whale. “This is Gerd,” I said, my tone not entirely sure.
Gerd smiled—I imagined teeth digging in—and mentioned food.
It seemed everyone had already eaten at the Carlyle.
“No food at all?” she asked. “I thought this was a brunch.”
“I had waffles from Belgium,” Chloe said. “They were beyond delicious.”
Emmett rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I had toast from France.”
“Mom!”
“Emmett.”
“You heard that, waffles from Belgium?”
“Not now, Emmett.”
“You want her to be a waffles-from-Belgium kind of person?”
Richard stepped in. “Emmett, please.”
But Emmett was pushed a little further. “Tonight I guess I’ll have chicken from parmigiana.”
I have to say I instantly liked the boy, the way he slung a softer version of his father’s glare, like he was taking in a pleasant sunrise and not the heat of the day. I was on the verge of adding my two cents about veal from picatta when Richard, staring at me, toggled his head so that the past jibed with the present and I was once again a sign of uncomfortable humidity. “Why are you here, Philip? Don’t you have a family?”
“We recently split, my wife and I.”
Candy sighed her sympathies.
“And I lost my job.”
More sighs from Candy.
“And I don’t know if you heard but my father died last week.”
Sighs verging on coloratura from Candy.
“Your dad nicely invited me to stay here until I get back on my feet.”
“That’s really sweet,” Candy said. “Friends and family are so—”
Richard cut her off. “Yeah, we’re very sorry. Where are you sleeping?”
I paused, possibly for effect. “Your old room, I think.”
“My old room?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
Richard’s eyes seemed to sink until level with a watery horizon, miles of visibility turning into a few grasping inches. Even his children noticed, I think. They watched him like he was too far away to help. Candy went over and slipped an arm around the latitude of his belt and gave him a sexy equatorial squeeze. “Strange being back, huh?” she said.
Richard asked again where his father was.
Candy squeezed tighter. “Has it changed much?”
He muttered about coming all this way, about making an effort.
Candy jostled him hard enough to clear the skip.
“What?”
“Has the place changed?”
“I don’t know.” He looked around. “It seems emptier, that’s for sure. And grayer. Depressing. Like crashing down into Kansas instead of Oz.”
“And whose feet are under the house?” Candy asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question, baby.”
I couldn’t help but grin.
“What?” Richard said.
“Nothing.”
“No, please, I insist, what?”
And so I told him, smiling because it was a fond memory, how every time I thought of that movie I remembered how the Dyers came over to our house during that summer when the rain never stopped, and how my father had a 32 mm print of The Wizard of Oz and he would set up the projector in the living room and pull down the screen, and we kids would gather around and watch it over and over again. “Seems so prehistoric now,” I said. “That was our VCR.”
Richard shook his head. “That happened maybe once.”
“It happened all the time, at least that summer.”
“Once.”
“That summer was like the summer of The Wizard of Oz,” I said.
“I remember once and it was at someone’s birthday.”
“Yes, my birthday. But then we kept on going. It was like every day. I showed the movie to my kids a couple of months ago, a rite of passage, I think, and it really is quite fascinating,” I said, perhaps slipping into teacher mode, “how we all see The Wizard of Oz when we’re about the same age, like six, seven years old, right. We all share that cultural DNA, that Oz gene. And for the two of us”—I directed my attention to Richard—“it goes all the way back to our fathers, who saw it together when it first opened in August of 1939 at the old Capitol Theatre in Times Square. And afterwards Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney got up onstage and did a little routine.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Richard said, asshole in the subtext.
It was a reasonable question. But first, a bit of backtrack: After my father died my brother was appointed the executor—more like executioner—of the estate while I took on the job of archivist. It was a task no one else desired or deemed important, since the value was sentimental and by then mourning had become monetized, but I needed something to fill my time, so I holed up in his library and began to sift through his papers, well maintained as befitting a good lawyer. There was plenty of surface: maintenance records for bygone vehicles; warranties for old appliances; invoices stretching back fifty years; decades of tax returns; letters, memos, notes involving assorted trustee duties; records of semiprofessional obligations; collections of expired passports and driver’s licenses in which I could see him age in bureaucratic leaps; even a copy of my grandfather’s will that had specific instructions concerning the distribution of his tennis trophies as well as his 1928 Davis Cup team blazer (it went to Uncle Jimmy, the eldest). None of these things were precious, but it is amazing how a bill of sale for a 1972 Ford Country Squire ($4,318.67) can surprise you with tears. But there were glimmerings below the surface: an accordion folder filled with letters my grandmother had saved, letters my father had written from school, well scripted and postmarked once a week, their content Soviet-style propaganda—The varsity baseball team should be stellar this year—though once in a while a flash of truth—I am happy, or happier, but I am still lonely, but maybe that’s just my lot, or should I say my lack of a lot—slipped in. Then there were the letters from my mother, with her optimism for the future even if the future reached only a few days: I just know we are going to have a lovely Saturday night together. She was thirty-one when she wrote that, and thirty-three when she wrote, In a week I become Mrs. Charles Henry Topping, but tonight I remain Miss Eleanor Garrison Gould, the troublesome Ellie, a stubborn EGG soon to be hatched. What kind of bird will I be? Hopefully not one your father will want to shoot! Considering those times, my mother was old when she got married, older than my father, and though I never heard any reason why this was the case, there were whispers from an aunt that she had had her heart broken, terribly broken, and it was a minor miracle that she had recovered at all. Recovered? Had this aunt suggested something I was too young to understand? I never did unearth any letters from my father to my mother, which was a relief since I could only take so much intimacy. But the real find in terms of this story came from an old shoe box, Weejuns from Bass, size five, retrieved from the far reaches of the lowest drawer. Inside were twenty-two letters from A. N. Dyer, a few of them bearing the brunt of obligation, a mother’s striving for manners, though most seemed inspired by actual friendship with my father. That said, I could never tell the tone of these one-way conversations. Defensive? Dismissive? Good old-fashioned ribbing? There were other things in that shoe box too: a pretty good drawing of a cocker spaniel; a half-full pack of Lucky Strikes; a gnawed number-two pencil; a red rubber ball; an unfired shotgun shell; a wrinkled Exeter tie; a handkerchief crusty with blood; a collection of brass buttons. I had no idea what to make of this mishmash, but they contained an energy, a consciousness of touch, that begged for my hands to complete the circuit. My father’s secret stuff. Loose photographs were in there as well, snapshots of Charlie with Andrew in front of Buckley, in Central Park, at the beach in Southampton, the two of them side by side yet formal, like already veterans of the past, soothsayers who saw their own fate. Or maybe it was just my lack of imagination to view my father as a real living boy. Either way, among these photographs was one taken in front of the Capitol Theatre under the marquee for The Wizard of Oz, and as further proof, Richard, you eternal prick, my father had saved the ticket stub and the playbill that was autographed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, but before I could lay down this trump the doorbell rang. It was Jamie.
Everyone was glad to see him, which was always his gift.
Richard let his family dive in first with hellos before stepping in.
“Where’s Dad?” Jamie asked.
“I have no idea.”
“But he’s here?”
“Supposedly.”
“And Andy?”
“Supposedly as well.”
Jamie spotted—“Philip?”—me standing in the background, the nervous spear-carrier in this royal house. His natural ease with the unexpected won the day, and he approached with a handshake at the ready. “Been a while. I am so sorry about your dad.”
I was genuinely touched.
“And I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”
“Jamie was just at Sylvia Weston’s funeral,” Richard told me. “Remember her?”
“Of course. But I thought she died in the fall.”
“What fall?”
“I mean in autumn, not like in a tumble.”
“It wasn’t a funeral, per se,” Jamie clarified to his brother.
“So she’s been dead for a while?” Richard asked.
“Since late September.”
“And I’m just finding out now.”
“I guess,” Jamie said.
“Such a lovely girl,” I added, in the mood to remember and of late having a limited audience to remember with. “And totally down-to-earth. The two of you—the two of them,” I said to Candy and the children, wanting to draw them in and maybe get them on my side, “they were the golden couple of high school, like one of the seven wonders of the teenage world, the Colossus of Rhodes holding hands in the middle of the quad.”
“Calm down, Philip,” Jamie said, checking my sentiment before breaking me down to size. “Why are you here exactly? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pleasure to see you, I’m just curious.”
“He’s staying here,” Richard said.
“Like here here?”
“Like here in my room here.”
“Does Dad know or are you hiding under the bed?”
My insides rattled their old cage. “Your father’s been very nice to me.”
“Fascinating.”
“I’ve had a tough few months,” I said.
Jamie seemed to catch the rain forming within my clouds, and he frowned sympathetically and touched my shoulder, this taste of compassion nearly crushing me.
A distant fanfare of coughs sounded and we were drawn from the living room into the entry hall and this developing sight: A. N. Dyer emerging from his study. The coughing was bright enough to put the rest of him in shadow yet he managed to creep into view, wearing the same suit he wore at my father’s funeral, minus the necktie, and sporting a pair of slippers that whispered an undertone of shh, shh, shh. We all leaned forward upon his approach as if reaching for ropes to help drag him forward, his hand lifting and forestalling hello for one final reach into his lungs, which was followed by a disconcerting swallow. That’s when we noticed his face. He must have recently shaved. Or attempted to shave. Tears of toilet paper clung to his cheek, chin, and jowl. He was Santa with a bloody beard, the twinkle in his eye the gunk that stops the drain.
“If you think this is bad, you should see the bathroom,” he told us.
The unexpected joke put everyone at ease, except for Chloe, who backed into her mother’s arms. I’m not sure Richard even heard the humor; he was busy following his own, more sentimental script as he stepped forward and clasped his father by the arm, his expression leafing through a dozen readable emotions before landing somewhere between apology and forgiveness. It was one of those moments, thankfully rare, when you can spot another person’s core needs, almost by accident—absolutely by accident since those needs are almost graphic when blatant, like seeing the musculature and tendon required to prop up hope. I could see the scene playing in Richard’s head.
INT. A. N. DYER APARTMENT/ENTRY HALL—DAY
Richard is shocked by how old his father has become. His idea of the man, trapped in a yesterday of twenty-five years ago, lies shattered on the floor.
RICHARD
It’s good to see you.
Andrew trails Richard’s gaze to the floor.
ANDREW
I’m sorry for that.
RICHARD
Me too.
Andrew looks up. Are those tears breaking in his eyes?
ANDREW
I haven’t been the best father. I know that. It might be too late but I know that.
RICHARD
It’s only 10:30 a.m. We have the whole day ahead of us.
Candy starts to cry.
RICHARD
Dad, this crying woman here is my wife, Candy.
ANDREW
What a wonderful name.
Candy moves forward and hugs Andrew unexpectedly. Andrew is at first thrown by this show of emotion but then gives in to the embrace.
CANDY
It’s so nice to finally meet you, Mr. Dyer.
Andrew glances at his newly minted grandchildren.
ANDREW
—you can call me Grumps.
RICHARD
Grumps?
ANDREW
That’s what I came up with. Is it okay?
RICHARD
(smiling)
It’s perfect.
Richard turns to his children.
RICHARD
Say hello to your Grumps.
Emmett and Chloe rush into Grumps’s arms.
Even if sickly sweet, how could anyone not wish for a version of this? But before Richard could say anything, Andrew ripped up the script by noticing the lack more than the gain. “Wait. Where’s Andy?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said.
“Is he here? In the apartment? Have you seen him yet?”
Richard stepped back. “We’ve been waiting for the both of you.”
Gerd appeared from the kitchen.
“When did you become a nun?” Andrew asked.
“It’s my old uniform.” She pulled at the fabric. “Guess I’ve lost some weight.”
“Has everyone met Gerd?” Andrew gestured introductions with his hands, which looked heavy and unwieldy, knuckles like knots of lead. “She’s a much more important person than this costume suggests. Put on normal clothes, please.”
“Okay.”
“And where’s Andy?”
“Upstairs. Should I get him?”
“Please, and if he’s still in bed, empty a bucket on his head, like my stepfather once did—twice actually. I used to sleep like that. You know what my first thought waking up would be? I can’t wait to go back to bed. Now I can’t sleep at all. Now my first thought is, Did I really sleep? Because if I did then my dreams are nothing but dreams of not falling asleep. How’s that for cruel? The gout doesn’t help either. I have gout by the way. Funny word. Gout. And goiter. I don’t have a goiter, but gout makes me think of goiter. Sounds almost Victorian. Dickensian. Goiter & Gout. Now there’s a law firm, with Rickets & Scurvy as future partners.”
As Gerd headed upstairs, Richard and Jamie shared a look, which I tried to join since I had the inside track on the man and could convey his fragile state of mind with a simple furrow and tilt. But the brothers weren’t interested in my insightful semaphore. “We should sit down,” Richard decided, his hand returning to his father’s shoulder.
Jamie agreed.
“No,” Andrew said, “let’s wait for Andy first.”
“But Dad—”
“No, we’ll wait.”
“Sure, but—”
“We’re going to wait right here, so enough.” A pause. “Please.”
Richard relented as if he could see the smaller man peeking around the larger façade, the man who was powerless to grant you your childhood wish, who could only push into your hands the desire to be an adult. “Um Dad, this is my family,” Richard said.
“Yes, of course, your family. Hello.” Andrew accepted the introductions. “Forgive my appearance, my reality as well. Glad to meet you. Thanks for coming. Hope you enjoy the show.”
“Dad,” from Jamie.
“Nothing.”
“And how old are the two of you?” Andrew asked Emmett and Chloe.
“Sixteen,” Emmett said.
Chloe remained unnaturally quiet.
“She’s thirteen,” Emmett said.
“Sixteen and thirteen. Both good ages. Both difficult, in their way. I’m seventy-nine. Nearing eighty. I never thought I was going to be this old, thought I’d die middle-aged, like my own father. Coleridge, you know, the poet, of ‘Kubla Kahn’ and ‘Ancient Mariner’ fame—Do they still read him in school?—he would have been a greater man, certainly more famous, if he had died earlier, right up there with Keats, who if he had lived longer would have been discussed in the same breath as Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Who, you say? Exactly. Sometimes life can seem like an experiment gone wrong. But enough of that. My best days ahead are somewhere upstairs, coming down soon, I hope. Andy’s only seventeen. You’ll like him.” As Andrew talked a few of the pieces of toilet paper loosened and began to wave in the word breeze, adding an element of suspense to his stream of consciousness, until finally one detached and helicoptered to the floor. “Uh-oh,” he muttered, “I’m molting.”
“Maybe we should get you to a chair,” Jamie said.
“If anything I could use a bier.”
“Kind of early for that,” Richard said.
Andrew spelled “B-I-E-R” then asked if he required a definition. This brought a half smile to Emmett’s face and gave Andrew his first taste of success as a grandfather. “Regardless,” he went on, “you’re right about it being too early for a beer. Emmett, my boy, do you think you could do your grandfather a tremendous favor and go down that hall to where there’s a bar, really just a bottle of Dewar’s, and pour me a drink in one of those stubby glasses?”
“No problem.” Emmett disappeared, already his ally.
“Dad, he’s only sixteen.”
“It’s not a particularly difficult drink to make.”
“I want to make a Dewar’s too,” Chloe piped in.
“See what you’ve done,” Richard said.
“I think I like having grandchildren around.”
“Are you already drunk?”
“Not already. If anything I’m giddy from loss of blood. It’s the Coumadin’s fault. Either way, the match is about to burn my hand and I’m just thrilled at having company—not company, family, back in this apartment after too long a time, and perhaps I’m nervous, and I thought a drink might settle me down. I am also, Richard, quite old enough to be drunk at any hour.”
Emmett reappeared with the scotch near the lip, every step a test of balance.
“Now there’s a boy with a good solid pour.” Andrew lowered his head as if taking communion, sipping a half inch before accepting the glass. “My compliments. The ratio of scotch to air is flawless. Yes, I really do like having the grandchildren around. Chloe, dear, there’s a syringe in my desk drawer—I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” Andrew suppressed a rare smile. “We are all agreed, I need to shut up. Maybe I’ve been working too hard.”
“Working on what?” asked Jamie, curious. “Something new?”
“The same old same old really.”
Gerd came back downstairs. “He’s on his way.”
“Excellent. The family reunion can soon begin.” Andrew took a serious slug of his drink, then another. “We are all feeling happy, right?” he said, wiping his mouth against his sleeve. More confetti fell from his face, and I imagined myself falling as well, letting go of whatever bloody scrap I was holding on to and drifting away. What was I doing there anyway? Andrew put the glass down on a nearby table and commented on the lovely flowers, and before I could’ve excused myself, I was drawn back in.
“Philip did all the flowers,” Gerd said.
“Forgot you were here, Philip.”
I heard the smirks from Richard and Jamie in my head.
Faggot.
“A talent just like your mother,” Andrew said. “What kind are they?”
“Carnations, monkshood, lobel.”
Phaggot.
“Does the Southampton house still have those wonderful gardens?”
Phaggot flower boy.
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been there in a while.”
Roses are red.
“I remember that rose garden,” he said.
Faggots are Philip.
“But no point in getting rolled by useless memories.”
Hearing Andrew mention useless memories, I saw an opportunity to ask about The Wizard of Oz and perhaps educate Richard about our fathers’ past, but once again I was frustrated by an entrance, this time Andy, who appeared at the top of the stairs, like some allusion to a fairy tale, and A. N. Dyer was determined to uphold the spell, practically applauding his arrival. “Here he is, in the flesh.”
Andy, hair styled by his pillow, took in this tableau. He seemed dubious of whatever awaited him.
“Come on down,” Andrew said.
“What happened to your face?”
“It’s all the pills. They water down the blood.”
“You look trapped inside a snow globe.”
“See, he’s funny,” Andrew said to the group. “Very funny.”
Andy came down the stairs, but before greetings were exchanged he rubbed his face as only a teenage boy can, investing himself fully in the task. “Hey,” he finally said, blinking us into being, more pauper than prince.
“Of course, you know Jamie,” Andrew said.
“Oh yeah, hey.”
“And this is Richard and his family, Candy, Emmett, and Chloe.”
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
“Nice to finally meet you.” Richard extended his hand like a marine.
“Sorry about being asleep,” Andy said. “Kind of rude of me.”
“That’s okay,” Andrew told him. “A boy needs his sleep.”
A brief silence followed, everyone smiling with no direction, one of those awkward moments where families realize they are essentially a collection of strangers with a few things in common, like this old, unsteady man here who looked around as though waiting for his offspring to notice the obvious.
“Well,” Andy finally said, “what this boy really needs is a big cup of coffee. Anyone else?” Only Emmett took him up on the offer and they both headed into the kitchen. Emmett might have been a year younger but he seemed older by four, safely on the other side of adolescence while Andy struggled through chin-high water. But their faces were obviously stamped from the same Dyer mold—the wedge nose, that brow—that made its first American mark with Jacob Dierickx, who amassed a tidy sum in the manufacture of wampum, only to be outdone by his Anglicized descendants, in particular Peter Dyer and his foresight in repurposing a rope factory into the Union army’s biggest supplier of fabric. It was odd to think of Andrew and Richard having teenage boys in common.
With the boys gone, Andrew seemed to instantly flag, like a man who had just missed his flight and whatever the pleasant destination had been lost. He turned to Richard and Jamie and told them that they needed to talk “sooner than later,” he said, “like now.”
“Sure,” Richard said. “How about we all go and sit in the living room?”
“No, no, just you and me and Jamie, just the three of us in my study.”
Richard smiled toward Candy and Chloe. “But Dad …”
“That’s all right, you go and talk,” Candy said.
Chloe looked toward the kitchen. “Can I have coffee too?”
“It won’t be for long,” Andrew promised. “I’ll make it short. Or I’ll try to make it short. And then we can all catch up. But right now it’s important that I speak to these two alone. Philip, maybe you can entertain the womenfolk. I know Gerd has plenty of food. Andy can show Emmett Central Park. Walk around. Do whatever. We’ll be finished soon enough. But we need to talk, right now, just the three of us.” Andrew’s tone suggested an offense, decades old, that was in need of airing. Why do we always expect our fathers to yell? Without further debate Andrew started to shuffle back toward his study, shh, shh, shh, his left hand balancing along the wall, while Richard and Jamie lowered their heads and followed along, like the plow behind the oxen churning up a stretch of long-neglected earth.
“I can’t stay long,” I called to them.
I’m not sure they heard me. But it was true, I did have things to do. Evidence to obtain. Later that day in my father’s apartment I would liberate from his desk the box of Weejuns from Bass. Done with sharing, I would tuck this small treasure chest under my arm and would hustle to leave, my stepmother, two parts polite, one part nosy, stopping me near the front door, mindful of belongings being whisked from her possession. She would ask me what I had there, pointing to the shoe box, and I would tell her that they were for Rufus, his first pair of grown-up shoes.
“It begins,” she’d say, trying to smile.
“It begins,” I would tell her.
The door to the study closed.
The secret to being a good thief is being as obvious as possible.