Nine days into 2020, my grandmother, who’d been living the past year at a nursing home near my aunt Ann in the Catskills, died. My father went to be there with her in her final hours, and it was a moment of redemption for him and his siblings. Ann had struggled to forgive my father for his eulogy of her son sixteen years earlier. About my cousin, the closest thing I had to a brother, my father delivered a rambling monologue about life and poetry and suicide that included the line “little fucker took himself out.”
Another sibling was still mad that my father had left his three sisters and one brother at my grandfather’s deathbed vigil with the farewell line “Some of us have jobs to get back to.” (All had sacrificed to be there. Ann was an accountant, and it was tax season.)
He was my ride home, so I’d left with him. Moments before my grandfather died, he opened his eyes and looked at everyone assembled around his deathbed—four of his five children, several of his grandchildren. But he did not see my father or me. At that moment, we were being stopped by a policeman on the Taconic State Parkway for speeding back to Manhattan.
So everyone was glad my father was handling this death better.
The day after my grandmother died, Neal and Oliver and I went to meet my parents for dinner at a restaurant upstate. My mother arrived first. On his way there, my father drove off the road into a ditch. There was snow on the ground, but that wasn’t why. He’d just overshot the turn in the darkness and found himself unable to get back onto the road. A car stopped for him and two men in suits got out. They were—of course they were—morticians. They helped him call us. Neal volunteered to drive to where he was to wait with him for the tow truck. In the meantime, my mother and I drank martinis and chatted with Oliver about school. Less than an hour later, Neal and my father arrived at the restaurant together.
When my father walked in, his hands were shaking. He said he was rattled from the accident and also from Grammy’s death: “She grabbed my head between her hands, and that was her last communication. She was suffering horribly.”
Next to me, I felt Oliver tense up. He loved his great-grandmother. Once a month or so we visited her, and they discussed books and Norwegian history. They were also pen pals. I tried to signal to my father that he shouldn’t talk around Oliver about Grammy being in pain.
“I’m sure she was at peace,” I said. “When Lanny was dying, the hospice nurses told us that the death rattle sounds scary and painful, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“Oh, no, she suffered a lot,” my father said.
I said something about one of her best friends, and my mother quipped, “Grammy was nobody’s best friend.”
Oliver piped up: “She was my best friend.”
He calls a lot of people his best friend, but I swear he means it every time.
The rest of the dinner, Oliver was a little loopy. He’d felt nauseous in the car and had taken a Dramamine. During the meal my father said to him, with sarcasm: “Well, you’re riveting company.”
Aside from the two pink-cloud weeks, he hadn’t really changed much. Even though he’d been told he was dying and his life’s work had burned up in a fire—two jolts to the system that might have caused another man to radically alter his outlook—he was still sometimes engaging, sometimes wounding, and you never knew which you’d get.
Neal said, “It’s like if in The Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge woke up the next day and threw open the window and asked what day it was, he heard, “‘Why, Christmas Day!’ and then said, ‘Good to know. Back to work, everyone.’”
At the restaurant, I switched the conversation to Frank O’Hara, still a safe harbor. We talked about a controversial book in which a writer offered a hodgepodge of specious arguments suggesting that O’Hara didn’t write one of his more famous poems, in which he talks with the sun about death on Fire Island, where he would later die. The book’s author suggests that since the poem was clearly a masterpiece but never seen during O’Hara’s lifetime, it must have been forged after his death by Kenneth Koch.
Poet Tony Towle, who knew O’Hara and his typewriter, said that O’Hara definitely did write that poem. Koch’s estate and O’Hara’s estate both sent their lawyers after the book. It was ultimately still published by a small press but without the quotations of O’Hara’s and Koch’s material.
My father and I have never liked that particular poem much. We decided it was more likely that O’Hara wrote the poem but didn’t circulate it because it was too twee.
“In other news,” I said, “my new book seems to be doing okay. It’s only been a few days since it came out and it’s at number forty-three on Amazon.”
“Where’s my book?” my father asked.
I picked up my phone and checked. “Number twenty-one thousand,” I said.
“That seems good, too!” my mother said.
As we were leaving, Oliver hugged my father and said, “Bye! Sorry I wasn’t better company.” Then as he walked away, he whistled a happy song.
“And that is how you don’t become a neurotic Schjeldahl,” Neal whispered to me.
A couple of weeks later, as I applied liquid eyeliner in a Virginia hotel room before a reading, I got a call from my agent: my book had just hit the New York Times bestseller list. In the preceding decade, several books I’d ghostwritten had made the list, but this was the first bestseller that was all mine. I felt overcome with joy. I called Neal. He put me on speaker so I could hear him and Oliver cheering.
I emailed three author friends who’d already been on the list, and they all wrote right back with lots of exclamation points and all-caps congratulations. Jason told me I should report to the secret bestsellers’ club for my smoking-jacket fitting. I emailed my parents to tell them the news. My mother wrote back a lovely note about how much I deserved it and how proud she was. My father responded with an email of one word: “Zoom!” and then he never said anything else about it.
That was January.
By March, New Yorkers were dying by the thousands of the coronavirus. To keep my parents safe, I moved them out of their East Village sublet and to their place in the Catskills. Neal, Oliver, and I stayed at our house fifteen minutes away from them. Two days into our lockdown, Oliver’s well-fed turtle devoured her roommate, a goldfish she’d been living alongside for two years. It didn’t seem like a good omen.
To give us all something to look forward to once a week, Neal and I hosted movie nights at our house. At these dinners, Oliver showed his grandparents the planes and tanks he’d built from model kits. We ate dinners in the backyard and then watched movies on a silver projection screen we’d found years earlier at a garage sale—Defending Your Life, The Lady Eve, Shane. My father ate giant bowls of popcorn and boxes of movie candy, and in those moments he seemed happy.
I returned to listening to the Frank O’Hara tapes, trying to make something out of them that would be useful to or engaging for somebody. I started writing my own thoughts about the tapes and the fire and the cancer. And as I reflected on my father for hours a day, I realized that I might be more like him than I’d been willing to admit.
My whole childhood, I wished he’d be kinder, more stable, more available. When he finally was, when he stopped drinking, I was too busy. I spent most of my time with another family. When I began writing, I erased his last name and never even asked him how he felt about it. I took his worst moments—learning he would die, seeing his life’s work burn—and used them for material.
I was now writing something that he might hate because I was following in his footsteps, trying to put being a writer first. I felt more tenderly toward my father than I had in a while. He was eccentric, but I understood him. If he’d died then, the ending would have been a happy one. I could have mourned him with the belief that I’d wrapped it all up, made peace.
But he did not die then, and so we continued to fight.
One day as we sat outside in the sunshine, my father told me that Spencer had begun learning Sanskrit.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes!” he said, mistaking my shock for enthusiasm. “Spencer just keeps expanding his erudition in all directions!”
I looked at him smiling at the thought of his smart best friend, and I thought back to when I’d told him, when I was twenty, that I was so good at Sanskrit translating that a professor had offered to help me obtain a fast-tracked and subsidized Asian Studies doctorate. I’d thought he’d be pleased. I’d already gotten a mostly free ride to college. Now it looked like I could get a PhD, too.
He’d looked disappointed and spat out: “So you’re going to be a fucking academic?” with the repulsion Silent Generation fathers reserved for their hippie children’s resolve to tune in and drop out. Then he slammed a kitchen cupboard.
Thinking it would win him over, I’d printed out a translation I’d done of which I was particularly proud. It was of a poem that was thousands of years old. When I finally got him to look at it, he only had one comment, about my adjective choice in a verse about a palace: “Rooftops can’t really be arresting, can they?”
Someone looking at us from outside as he talked about Spencer’s illustrious Sanskrit scholarship would have seen a father and daughter spending time together on a beautiful day. I maintained the illusion by not flinging my cup into the air, screaming, and running to my car.
After all, no one, I felt, would feel sympathy for me. There’s no DSM-5 entry for preferring your friend to your child, no mandatory sentencing minimums. I was overreacting. And yet I felt a little like we were in a dumb modern production of King Lear and thought of what Frank O’Hara said: “Anyone who chose Goneril and Regan deserved what Lear got.”
Then I remembered that the play didn’t end so well for Cordelia either.
On the phone while I cooked another big dinner, I told my friend Tara how angry my father made me, how as I was making enchiladas for him and the rest of the family, I kept muttering about things my father had said.
She said that no matter how anyone else acted, I should continue to do what I knew was the right thing.
“Which is?” I asked.
“Making enchiladas,” she said.