NORTH ON PARK to 96th Street and down to the river and onto the FDR, the merge always an ordeal, waiting for the opening and then gunning into the lane, but by now the natural aggression of driving—Fuck you, cocksucker—in New York is flowing, a relief since those first few minutes behind the wheel are always doubtful, as if today might be the day you lose your nerve, but once blown free onto the FDR you can sit back and trust your mirrors again and play three moves ahead, pinching the son-of-a-bitch Civic trying to cut in for no real gain, and after the Triborough, forever the Triborough regardless of the RFK rebrand, you can flip on the radio, as I did now, and almost relax. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Something about the hidden dangers of the federally mandated lightbulb. Everyone was outraged. It was ten in the morning and the traffic was light relative to the normal mess. The potholes, the amount of crap on the shoulder, the state of the bridges, suggested a fresh topic for Brian. The roads seemed war-torn. Or maybe that was just my mood. I-278 East to I-95 North and I no longer cared because gray was starting to give way to rudimentary color and driving became a pleasant kind of drifting. The GPS guided me, her sexless charm trumped by her seductive knowledge. Here was a person, a woman, on my side. A wrong turn was merely recalculated. We would never get lost. The two of us had hours together, long gaps between her commands, and while my eyes focused on the basic chore of moving forward, the rest of my thoughts roamed without direction.
It was Richard who smelled the smoke. He was talking with Gerd in the kitchen, voicing his concerns about his father and asking her opinion, if maybe they should hire a nurse, if Gerd had any experience with senior care, and Gerd was saying she thought she could handle the bulk of the issues, at this point at least, when Richard interrupted her and asked if she smelled something.
“What?”
“Like smoke.”
“I have a cold,” Gerd apologized.
Richard followed the smell from kitchen into foyer, pulling himself forward like his nose was on a string. Definitely smoke, he thought. Definitely a something-burning smell. It seemed more cigarette than straight-up catastrophe, like any sidewalk outside an AA meeting, but also heavier, especially the closer he got to his father’s study. The string was now a rope. A cigar? A hundred cigars? Or worse? He dropped speculation and burst through the door, his imagination prepared for a possible blaze, the curtains crawling, the walls engulfed, like one of his all-time favorite movies as a boy and he would sprint in, part Steve McQueen, part Paul Newman. But instead of The Towering Inferno, Richard was greeted by a roaring yet relatively cozy fire in the fireplace. The rest was just smoke. A lot of smoke. “Jesus, Dad.” Richard waved his hands and headed for the windows.
“You still here,” his father said from the couch.
“You forgot about the flue, Dad.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“This is a mess.”
“It’s my mess and you can leave.”
“All this smoke can kill you.”
“Just leave.”
“C’mon, get up, get up.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It’s bad. Now get up.”
Gerd poked her head in. “I called 911.”
“It’s just the flue. Help me get him out of here.”
Gerd and Richard lifted Andrew to his feet, no small ordeal, and Gerd took charge of leading him into the living room while Richard rushed into the bathroom and soaked a few towels. Before smothering the fire, he noticed what was burning, the manuscript pages blooming in reds and blues and greens before withering into a thin film that fluttered in the newly introduced draft. The paper made for quick kindling. Here and there a few lines poked through—Sometimes the only way to free yourself from one of those ruts is to do something awful, really disgraceful, and I was in a terrible rut, the deepest ever, and I—which toyed with Richard’s thoughts. You want Ampersand? Well here you go. The fire said Fuck you and Richard said Fuck you back before he laid the wet towels on top and there was a hiss and a mini mushroom cloud that choked the room. He imagined charred flesh on the other side.
The building’s super appeared with four firemen.
“Only a closed flue,” Richard said, sounding almost demoralized.
Thirty minutes later they got the other news from a policeman.
During the service, I wondered if Andrew still had the smell of smoke in his nose as Richard and Jamie brought him down the aisle of St. James. I was standing near the back, uncertain of what I had done exactly, if I was the dreadful cause. Richard and Jamie led their father forward like sympathetic guards to the gallows. Whatever their burden, the prisoner seemed already dead. People assumed his downcast eye and general slump confirmed his absolute devastation—oh, to lose a child—but Andrew stared down mostly amazed that his feet still touched the ground. Let go and he was certain to haunt the rafters. Unlike my father’s funeral there was no procession, no boys’ choir, though the church was filled with teenage boys and girls, classmates getting their first taste of peer mortality. The boys wore their solemnity like rented formal wear, their emotions as hard to pin as a detachable collar, while the girls tried on this sadness for size, as if the deceased had taken something more precious than virginity. Fellow Exonians Felicity Chase and Harry Wilmers held hands in their pew, though Harry’s palm was prickling with sweat and Felicity was trying to remember the last line of The Great Gatsby, something about a green light and the snow falling faintly. A few pews closer Doug Streff had gotten stoned in honor of his pal, which was an epic mistake, the entire church pressing in on him like he was responsible for every breath. Parents and teachers, old family friends, the usual funeral and wedding crowd, sought comfort in their shoes, ashamed of being in the presence of an Almighty who could allow a seventeen-year-old to get hit by a bus. Once again a handful of A. N. Dyer fans showed up but none of them brought books; they only offered him the communal readership of their tears. What bullshit, Andrew thought, as he was steered to the front of the church, half-expecting Richard and Jamie to shepherd him all the way to the coffin and tuck him inside. But that was bullshit too. He knew exactly what was going on even as his mind was roiled by the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, the organist’s favorite since he was a child growing up near historic Williamsburg. How did Andrew know this? Because at this moment he insisted on omniscience. Like passing Gerd in the third pew he knew that years ago she had answered an advert in a Stockholm newspaper—Surrogates needed, 100,000 kr.—and went to a grand Gothic estate where five-year-old Einsteins daydreamed about time in that slanting Nordic light. Her new employers informed her that a couple in the United States needed help, and after a thorough medical exam and signing a thick contract, she was taken to a dorm to live with other young women, none of them realizing the future they carried. Nine months later, Gerd was forever reshaped into mother and she begged to remain involved with the child, even if just as a nanny. Yes, Andrew knew everything about everyone as the cadenzas in harmonic minor decorated his mind with ribbons of synaptic light worthy of the Grand Illumination. Richard and Jamie positioned him in the first pew. What was the point of this? Death had rendered the story moot, and as in a fable, Andy had transformed from fantastic puppet into plain old boy.
Reverend Rushton spread his arms, and Andrew had him say, I am the resurrection and the life and all the rest, but this time he recast him as Professor Serebryakov, arrogant and ineffectual, and if Andrew had a gun he would have taken better aim than Vanya. He would probably still miss. Our roles might change yet we are fated to the same lines. That sounded fine, but what the hell did it mean? What was his role now? What were his lines? No doubt Edgar Mead, sitting with Christopher Denslow and Rainer Krebs, could jump in and tell him, Edgar Mead who hated himself when he was alone. “This is all bullshit,” Andrew muttered, and Richard and Jamie tried to quiet him but he was ready to push them aside and leave this ceremony, as artificial an ending as anything lowered on a rickety crane. “Total bullshit,” Andrew muttered again. From behind a pair of hands reached forward and rubbed his shoulders with a forgotten yet not forgone touch. “Get through this and we can go home,” Isabel whispered, the word home settling him down, making the infinite local.
Reverend Rushton said his amen and we all sat. There was no eulogy, since no one was in the proper frame of mind to talk, and frankly, Reverend Rushton preferred it this way, having witnessed over the last decade an overabundance of eulogies, some families insisting on as many as three speakers, which turned the whole affair into a grim retirement party. He had a solid homily prepared. He had worked the theme of fathers and sons into the flow from Job 19:21–27a to Psalm 121 to 1 Corinthians 4:14–21 to Psalm 23 to John 6:37–40. And this time around he insisted on a communion. The ritual had its healing place, plus it was an opportunity to introduce the power of the Real Presence to a younger, less sacramental generation. In other words, he had a good crowd. It reminded him of his early missionary days, the best of his life. “Why do you, like God, pursue me never satisfied with my flesh?” the Reverend read. “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!”
Enough about books and iron pens, Andrew thought. Andy should be the one sitting here, trying to muster some pity with Richard and Jamie, who might glimpse their father before he turned forever into rock. A wave of mourning broke toward the altar, and Andrew sensed Jamie getting lost in turbulent water. He was the one who went to the hospital after Richard had called him and told him what happened, Jamie jumping into a taxi with Alice, who insisted on coming. In the emergency room they were escorted into a smaller waiting area that seemed reserved for the particularly dire, inside which another couple sat, their bodies wringing the air. Thankfully Gerd showed up and could tackle the questions on all the forms. A doctor eventually appeared and he crouched in front of them and with a gentle voice, like he was reciting a grim but thoughtful tale, told them how Andy had suffered multiple traumas, the first being the impact of the bus to his body, the second and far worse being the impact of his head to the street, and between the swelling in the brain and the cardiac arrest, they could never get him properly stabilized, and despite their greatest effort, he unfortunately succumbed. Gerd covered her mouth as though blocking the news from getting in, and Jamie grabbed Alice’s hand and squeezed. He remembered being thrown by the word succumb. He pictured Andy being attacked and no longer fighting but standing firm and letting go, like Sean Connery on the bridge in The Man Who Would Be King, a movie he loved as a boy. The doctor asked if he wanted to see his son before they moved him, and Jamie was in no shape to correct the mistake and simply accepted the promotion. Son, brother, father, what did it matter anyway? The boy was dead. Before leaving he turned to the other couple and wished them good luck, which he hoped was a decent thing to say but later feared the opposite. Good luck? The doctor guided him through the ER to a nearby trauma room, en route describing what Jamie would see, the body and its effects, the bruising, the procedures, the extreme measures taken, which frightened Jamie. Suddenly he was scared of misery and its hollow question. “I just want you to be prepared,” the doctor told him. Jamie went into the room alone. The floor had been recently cleaned, the supporting machinery unhooked and pushed aside, avoiding eye contact, it seemed. Under the normal hospital smell lingered incongruously the first few drops of summer rain on hot pavement. Jamie thought of turning around and leaving, but instead stepped forward like he was fessing up to stealing. Only Andy’s head was exposed, his face less scathed than Jamie’s; the rest of him was wrapped snugly in a blue sheet. The body possessed an uncanny stillness while everything else in the room resembled a whirlwind. It’s nothing like sleep. It’s the opposite of sleep. And please no using the word peaceful. Jamie stared for a long minute, his feet sensing an edge, whatever emotion overcome by the vastness of the fall. Unsure what he was doing exactly, he reached down and touched Andy’s chest and with his other hand touched Andy’s forehead. Again with the stillness. The skin was damp. A few sharp hairs anticipated an eventual need for a razor, and a cluster of pimples embarrassed his chin. There was that sundial nose, fully formed and recognizable, and those thin lips, forever sphinxlike. This was his last face, already foundering. “I’m sorry,” Jamie said. He placed his thumb on the faint worry line that over the years would cut a deep trench and he tried to draw up from the boy via a mystical kind of energy he never believed in all the memories from his young life. He offered it space in his own body, to fit wherever it might fit. He performed this improvised ministry and when he came to the end, or the beginning, he said once again, “I am so sorry,” not quite grasping the apology though sensing somewhere the reason. It was all too much to bear, right up to the moment in the church when his father surprised him by wrapping his arm around his shoulder and pulling him close.
From Job 19 on to Psalm 121. And from I-95 to I-91 to I-84 to I-90. Trees and farmland grew more prevalent, the sense of space near bursting, as if these roads were rope holding together an overstuffed suitcase. Past Worcester. Past Lowell. As a longtime trustee my father did this same drive four times a year for twenty-four years, alone and probably listening to his cherished Bach cantatas. He loved to drive though we his children considered our mother the far superior driver, the three of us nervous in the backseat whenever he slipped behind the wheel, only because he was so careful and exact, unlike Mom, whose roadster moves we took as confident rather than reckless. She measured success by time whereas he graded himself on every turn, every press of the brake, apologizing for every unanticipated action. We never noticed his driving, only the other cars passing by. But on those quarterly excursions to Exeter no one judged him. I signaled for every lane change, even when there was no one behind me, in honor of him. I always hated these returns to school. And my mother drove so fast, desperate to break her record of four hours and two minutes. But if there wasn’t a chance of notching a new best, and if I struck her as particularly despondent, after turning onto 125 she would stop at Eggies Diner and I would order a bacon burger deluxe and a vanilla shake—my last meal, she always teased, her eyes wanting to wipe the unwipable grease from my chin.
“Do you love Dad?” I once asked her on one of these occasions, my tone leading the question toward an obvious No, perhaps feeling the sting of our imminent parting and sensing in our closeness something that must’ve trounced any love she had for my father.
She squinted, which at my cynically earnest age I took as politics, and said, “I do love him. He’s a very sweet man. The secret is you have to adjust your expectations, Philip. Don’t get trapped in other people’s opinions and how they view things. You are in charge of your own happiness, even in high school.”
“Well, I’m not happy,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. Was she sick by then, even if in the early stages? So many of my memories have her undiagnosed and leave me wanting to tell her to please go to the doctor and insist on a CT scan of your abdomen. “Just do your best,” she told me while applying lip gloss. “Shower every morning and every night. Keep your sheets and towels clean. Remove all clutter from the floor. Control what you can control and try to take pleasure in it. Make one decent friend. Avoid wearing too much brown. Always keep in mind that there is life after this, Philip, you just have to die a bit to get there.” Her compact snapped shut and she smiled. “And so ends the lesson. Thanks be to Mom.” How do we survive being so loved once?
But today Eggies was closed, forever, it appeared, and I would have to press on. My father’s ashes were in a duffel bag in the backseat. Almost two hundred pounds had been rendered down into an intimate five, though I still imagined a complete man inside the box, like a genie who would appear in a furl of smoke, a captive to other people’s desires. To my brother’s and sister’s relief I had taken charge of the New Hampshire half of the scattering, and later this summer, early August, we would gather at the beach and as a family would conclude the rest into the ocean. It had been more than twenty-five years since my graduation from Exeter. The number boggled. Those intervening years, if a person, would be old enough to get married and have a family while my legal separation from Ashley was a colicky two-month-old and Bea was a few weeks away from giving birth to straight-up extortion. In death my father and Andy could share the same crib, with my mother babysitting as a high school senior. Time is a form of propagation. It takes from us its cuttings and strikes the stem into the earth. Here! When we look back the shape bears a resemblance but is possessed by a different spirit, as if a third person has grown between the then and the now, memory’s holy ghost.
When Exeter appeared, it looked the same, if quainter and more idyllic, a well-crafted old-fashioned New England boarding school rather than a stockade in Federal brick. The students walking along Front Street came across as both younger and older than the boys and girls in my day, almost parading like they were performing their daily accomplishment. The natural striving unnerved me. I tried to warn them against me, this cautionary tale rolling by in a Land Cruiser. I imagined Andy here, the vision chilling me, like a cold drip from the back of my mind. “I got hit by a fucking bus.” Sometimes I continued the story for him. In college. At cocktail parties. On a first date. I got hit by a bus once. Yep. Like a bus bus. Like a big bus. On Fifth Avenue. Slammed right into me and sent me flying. Swear to God. Shoes off and everything. Standing on the curb, tired and hungover, and I guess I leaned forward, or stepped forward, probably just lost my balance and bam! this bus, this fucking bus, hits me. No question the story would evolve over the years, versions where Andy would stretch the truth for the sake of a cute girl’s smile, where he would blame his forgetfulness on the whole being-hit-by-a-bus thing, where he would tell people that every day since was a gift, maybe over dinner and too much wine, claiming that it had changed him, that something in him had been jostled clear and he became, well, lighter and heavier, if that made sense. And then Andy would go mum, seized by a thought no longer within reach. Amazing how a whole life, a thousand complicated emotions and regrets, can boil down into a single ache. The GPS cheered my arrival, her voice revealing a hint of surprise, like she had doubted me all the way.
I parked in front of Jeremiah Smith Hall. The headmaster wanted me to say a quick hello, and walking up those stairs and into that building, my old insecurities returned stronger than ever but now with the added pleasure of being chained around the ankle of a middle-aged man. Awkward past, meet disappointing future. By the time I lugged myself up to his office, I was apologetic with sweat.
“Philip Topping,” he said, as though instilling truth into my name. He was a year into the job and younger than me and already had the bearing of a man who represented the beloved George Stone era. He absorbed my humidity with an unflappable smile. “How was the drive?”
“Fine.”
He crossed his arms. “Too many sad occasions lately.”
I nodded.
“First your father, and then Andy Dyer. Just terrible. How is Mr. Dyer doing?”
“Okay, I suppose,” though I had no idea. The only contact I had from A. N. Dyer after the funeral was a short letter asking if Andy had said anything right before he died, and since I had already misled him once with my father, I didn’t quite trust myself again. That’s not true. Maybe I wanted A. N. Dyer to suffer over the unknown facts, to turn his imagination against himself. Either way, not a word had passed between us.
“The whole school is in shock,” George Stone said. “We had our own memorial service, and Richard and Jamie Dyer came up, which was nice, to have them here as part of the Exeter family, and they stayed on for the A. N. Dyer Award, what with it being the fiftieth anniversary of Ampersand, and we decided to have no Veck, just Richard and Jamie announcing the winner. It was very moving. And I think it helped. There’s going to be a scholarship in Andy’s name.”
Did he expect a contribution?
“Tough, tough times,” he continued. “You know your father co-headed the search committee that hired me. I got to know him before his health turned. We had lunch in New York, the two of us. Such a wonderful, dedicated trustee. His kind is always missed.”
When was the last time I had lunch with my father? The early nineties maybe. “I appreciate you letting us do this, with the ashes. I imagine it’s out of the ordinary but I’ll be discreet, I promise. It’s more of a gesture than anything else.”
“Are other family members coming?”
“No, just me—well, Bertram McIntyre will be there.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” George Stone grinned despite himself, like he had trained over the years to be a sober and all-encompassing citizen, a good, solid man, when in reality he was still stuck in high school. “I’ll be thinking of your father—what time?”
“Sunset.”
“Perfect.”
We shook hands and I left, relieved to be rid of his young authority. It was only four o’clock, so I drove to the Exeter Inn and tried to have a nap and failing that tried to call my children. I had taken on twice-a-week responsibilities. But Rufus and Eloise’s innocence only made my guilt seem more pronounced and I stumbled near tears whenever in their company. Who needs a father like that? So after almost dialing, I put the phone down. Around 6:15 P.M.—I was very focused on that digital clock—after thirty minutes of five-minute deadlines, I got up and showered, stirred only by the last second.
Bertram McIntyre was waiting outside the main entrance of the church. In blazer and tie, he was schoolboy immemorial, though with a stylish accent of blue scarf. He appeared older but essentially unchanged since my days, more pinched around the shoulders perhaps, as if plucked from the earth by a giant. But when he saw me he let loose with a smile that flicked his age into the nearby bushes, like growing old was a nasty habit. Not only did he take my hand but he squeezed my arm. For a moment I thought I was his favorite student. “Philip Topping,” he squeaked.
“Hello, Mr. McIntyre.”
“Bertie now, please. So good to see you, Philip, so good.” His enthusiasm was notched with an emotion that students only heard when he read certain passages aloud, like the living wall of whales in Moby-Dick with their endless circling during the slaughter—Mr. McIntyre, Bertie, would choke up and we students would jab our tongues in unison. “You look well,” he told me.
“I wish I felt better,” I answered, my honesty unexpected.
He pointed to the box. “Is that him?”
“Yes.” I made a show of weighing its heft.
Mr. McIntyre nodded, his mouth trying to maintain an unbiased grin. He placed his right hand on top of the box and proclaimed, “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” and then turned toward the church entrance and said, “Shall we?”
Among all the surrounding brick, Phillips Church stood its neo-Gothic ground, a piece of humble geometric granite: rectangle, triangle, square. It seemed the sole survivor of an apocryphal past. The church’s squat tower was defensive in nature and I could imagine archers firing into Exeter’s civilizing horde, every arrow espousing an equation from below. Inside, the vaulted ceiling ribbed with wood and the lung-like organ pipes gave the impression of being swallowed whole by a living creature and you were satisfied to be its bait, a different feeling from St. James, which had me fighting all the way. During communion at Andy’s funeral, I remember shuffling down from those last rows and Jeanie Spokes sidling up to me. “Hi,” she whispered like she was uncrumpling a note.
I frowned hello.
“I’ve been wanting to talk,” she said.
I continued frowning.
“You were there, when it happened.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but did he seem upset?”
I tried to shush her with my eyes.
“I just, I need to know,” she said, her eyes red-rimmed, as if she had exhausted her supply of tears and had now moved on to blood.
It was taking forever to get to the front. Reverend Rushton must have been thrilled with the turnout.
“Before it happened,” she went on, “did he seem upset?”
“I’m not sure,” I responded. “But this isn’t the place.”
“Like do you think it was totally an accident?”
Was there an accusation in her tone? I turned to gauge her expression, but she was busy matching her pace to the shamble on the floor. Did she recognize my scuffed wingtips? They were three sizes too big, my feet almost embarrassingly small, and with every step my heel lifted and chafed, lifted and chafed. “I’m not sure what really happened,” I said.
“But do you think he could have stepped out on purpose?”
The people in front of us approached the altar and kneeled.
“The body of Christ.”
“The blood of Christ.”
“Do you think he could have …”
On my left the Dyer boys clutched their father like brackets, trying to hold him close without taking complete ownership, while in the pew behind, Isabel seemed to study them as though diagramming a simple yet complicated sentence. These men are my boys. Space opened up and I went ahead and kneeled, my ankles popping free. Jeanie soon joined me. It was obvious this was her first communion. She cribbed my pose and loudly chewed the wafer, her eyes expressing only the wonder at not being struck down by lightning. And maybe this gave her the boldness to pause in front of A. N. Dyer’s pew and say, “I loved your son,” in the tone of a blameworthy bride. But she was innocent and later I told her so. Repeatedly. I probably told her too much. But we all told Jeanie Spokes too much, even Andrew, who in exchange wanted to know everything about Andy. Eventually she disregarded our basic comfort and insisted on greater guilt, crafting her memoir Ellipsis around the biography of A. N. Dyer. It was something she called memeography, a term that thank goodness never took. Walking back to her pew, did she even notice Emmett staring at her?
In Phillips Church Bertram McIntyre gripped my arm with a sweet senior touch and led me to a heavy wooden door. “I have my own key,” he said proudly. “Not that I can climb those stairs anymore. But in my more devout days I had a regular habit of going up for a drink and a cigar. My own secret clubhouse. And when your father visited, he would join me. It’s a humble yet lovely view.” Mr. McIntyre flicked on the lights and peered up a narrow stone stairwell. “At the top is a trapdoor. You’ll need this key”—he specified which one—“to unlock it.” The keys were ringed around a pocketknife, its weight and smoothness instantly enviable.
“Up there?” I asked.
“There’s no nun waiting, I promise,” he said.
“Let’s hope not.”
“I’ll go and watch from the street.”
“And maybe afterward we can get a drink.”
“I’d like that.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I’ll be standing to the east, appareled in celestial light.”
“Wordsworth,” I said, as if being challenged.
Mr. McIntyre seemed taken aback. “Good for you.”
I stood up straighter, like I was taking position in front of his class. “ ‘It is not now what it was before, wherever I may turn, by night or by day I learn, the life I once saw I see no more.’ ”
“I am impressed,” he said.
“I can still recite the whole thing,” I told him.
“Maybe after a few drinks,” he said, turning to leave.
I started the corkscrew climb, my father in one hand, keys in the other, and after passing a small room on the second floor, and on the third floor church bells I vaguely recalled hearing on Sundays and Wednesdays, the spiral ended and the remaining ascent came via ladder to the aforementioned trapdoor. I tried to imagine my father’s tassel loafers clambering up those rungs. Maybe he was giddy with adventure, pushing through the hatch like he was sneaking into another world. I pulled myself up. The roof was solid but I feared the small square opening in the floor, as if making someone fall was every trapdoor’s fantasy. The view gave the campus an intimacy that was contradicted on the ground. To the north the huge academy building with its white bell tower and clock face lorded its hour in every direction, but from this particular vantage the weathervane, a triple-masted sailboat, stole the show, its bow pointing toward the Squamscott and the Great Bay beyond. The sun still had some time before hitting its rosy stride. Shadows stretched, and my eyes saw the work required in keeping this world still, the mortar troweled for every brick, the mansard slate dealt in solitaire rows, the game of tic-tac-toe on the other side of Louis Kahn’s scrim. My past blurred into the students walking back to their dorms after dinner and I gathered them up and told them everything would be fine.
I spotted Mr. McIntyre, towheaded in this light.
He waved.
Inside the box the ashes were sealed in a plastic liner that proved impossible to rip or pull apart and left me quickly defeated and angry, all this travel and time, all this good-son determination, and I couldn’t open the stupid bag, curses coloring my effort as well as the threat of old childhood frustrations brimming into tears. Then I remembered the key chain and its pocketknife. Along with its vintage brassy excellence there was an engraving on the handle—WE THIS WAY—that continued onto the blade—YOU THAT WAY—its meaning secondary against its ability to cut through plastic, which it did nicely. I widened the gap with my fingers, releasing a talc of dust. Here he was. My father. The ash was finer than expected, soft gray sand from a beach of pulverized bone. I dug my hand in, to feel the mass give way through my fingers, a gesture that seemed far from creepy, if anything seemed mandatory. I went to the edge of the roof. A slight but helpful breeze blew to the east. I lifted the box toward Mr. McIntyre in a gesture of cheers. I should say something, I thought, something beyond “I love you.” I tried to picture my father standing up here taking in this view with Bertie, the old poets on their lips, and a strange but familiar awareness came over me, like when you sit in one of those tiny chairs in kindergarten and knead Play-Doh with your son or daughter, or when you read them a book you once cherished, those moments where you live on both sides, the life already seen but today differently met, and it seems like time becomes, I don’t know, becomes more physical, I guess like on a cellular level, the great goddamn understanding trickling through your blood, from top to bottom, bottom to top, the journey knotted in the vicinity of your stomach. As the shadow of Phillips Church hinged forward, I looked over Exeter as both a fiction and a fact, and using my father’s runaway eyes I stared down at that old teacher staring back up, his scarf a thin blue flame. He waited for the ash to fall this way or that, and I opened my father’s heart and as if descended from the sun let him live another story, a story free of A. N. Dyer, free of his family back in New York, his own private story put to rest right here. I saved nothing for the ocean and hoped a kind and helpful wind might blow Charlie Topping toward Bertram McIntyre.
Back in St. James, Reverend Rushton faced the coffin and spreading his arms said, “Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant young Andrew. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.” And on that cue the pallbearers appeared. They hoisted the coffin and started down the aisle, the organ launching into “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” which, though long forgotten, was familiar from my younger days.
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes …
Hands reached out from both sides of the aisle, in some cases stretching awkwardly just to touch the coffin, classmates and friends leaving their final mark on notions of immunity while those older paid respects to their worst fears and the relief of being spared.
Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might.…
The Dyers followed close behind, Richard and Jamie helping their father along, Isabel minding them as if they were moving an heirloom through a narrow hallway. Emmett and Chloe and Candy completed this family tableau. Richard would go back to California soon, and Jamie and Isabel would take on the bulk of the caring for Andrew, though Gerd did most of the work. Her loyalty grew even stronger after Andy’s death, verging on devotion. But eventually a full-time nurse was required and a hospital bed would replace the desk in his study. Isabel had lunch with Andrew a few times a week and would sometimes read him crime novels and always accept his apologies, which toward the end were a near constant and hard to bear.
To all, life thou givest, to both great and small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all.…
No longer of sound mind or body, A. N. Dyer put Richard and Jamie in charge of his literary estate, and though the Morgan Library was disappointed in the lack of Ampersand and insisted on a price reduction, in late April they happily took possession of his papers and started the labor-intensive process of cataloging the material. Richard surprised Jamie by maintaining his father’s aversion to film adaptations, rather vociferously too—“We are doing what he wants, no questions asked”—but after he died, and Andrew lived for another five years, four years longer than anyone anticipated, Richard contacted Rainer Krebs and Eric Harke, who was now too old and battered to play Edgar Mead, but he wanted to direct. In fairness the movie wasn’t a disaster—it had moments of true inspiration, particularly the invented scene along the Cornish-Windsor Bridge—but for the most part Ampersand the movie hewed too closely to Ampersand the book and revealed a flaw that many people had always suspected, specifically that the book was emotionally claustrophobic. Richard and Jamie had better luck three years later with The Spared Man, which Richard wrote and Jamie directed. It was a small movie, done extremely well, with Eric Harke playing the lead. For their next project they’re reviving one of their own earliest collaborations, The Coarsers of Bedlam.
Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight.…
The coffin approached its final stretch. A black man in a white robe opened the church doors in anticipation of its continuing outside, and the air pushed in. The day was sunny but cold, a reminder that winter still had its role, and I was amazed by how fast I could feel the chill. It’s like in the theater when an actor lights a cigarette and instantly you smell the smoke. Are our senses that keen? Is it the smoke we smell or the memory of smoke, our anticipation of what’s to come? How much of experience is merely filling in the blanks from earlier experience? I was near the last pew, likely singing too loud. But I once had a decent voice. The coffin passed by, and it was incomprehensible to think of Andy personified within that wood. I thought about reaching over and adding my handprint, but as my tone suggests, I refrained. The show of emotion seemed distasteful. Then again, maybe I worried that beneath the dead lay the undead waiting for an excuse to burst through. The Dyers struggled to keep up with the coffin’s pace. Andrew resembled Oswald right after he was shot. Did that make me Ruby? And Richard and Jamie avoided eye contact but I could feel their scrutiny like a phantom limb around my throat.
All laud we would render; O help us to see
’Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.…
We choose what we see. Or what we don’t see. I hated them yet I loved them, knowing that they knew me in full. I thought I heard Richard whisper to his father, “Pay no attention,” and I wondered if I had some sway on its meaning, or was he making an unconscious, possibly conscious, allusion to the last line of Ampersand, in the epilogue, after Edgar Mead bumps into Veck?
We said our goodbyes. Veck walked south, and I walked north, and I decided that after all these years it was good to see him again, damn good, that he had turned into a good man, a good solid man, that this good solid man had stepped nicely in front of the boy, and if you didn’t pay attention, well, you could miss a lot about someone right under your own nose.
Did the ghost of my father haunt these proceedings as well? There are so many possible meanings, victim or villain, son or father, me or you. The Dyers were outside now, heading toward the waiting limousine, and while a reception was to follow I was certain Andrew would go back to his apartment with Richard and Jamie. Pay no attention. But to what? The hymn finished and the organ tiptoed into the postlude. People started to move from pew to aisle, red-eyed and unsteady, slowed as if their mourning were as deep as chest-high water. What happens now? Where should I go from here? My concern was mostly focused on the next ten minutes but it also stretched into the coming week and month and year. I saw Ashley alone and was glad she saw me, her anger briefly subsumed by a sadness I dared wrap myself in. While talking was out of the question, I did manage the merest opening of my hand, and I hoped she recognized something in that wave, whether a glimpse of my children or of my father or of just plain me, something in that code that was worth keeping, even if only from a distance. There were other familiar faces as well, old students and friends. After a certain age you have to pretend that people care about you. For a moment I imagined rushing past them all, my shoes going clock against the limestone—clock-clock-clock-clock as I hustled down the steps outside and ran toward the limo, my imagination uncertain of what I would do or say when or if the window rolled down, if the limo was still parked or already heading home, if the Dyers would hear me or notice me chasing behind, if they would let me continue with this dream for a while longer before I had to return to my small room. But in my defense, I remained where I was, head lowered and in tears, and I would remain in place until the whole church emptied. But do you even care? Who are you anyway? Somewhere, I swear, I think I heard bells.