3

THE MAX I REMEMBER WAS, IF ANYTHING, A LOT crazier than his bookish alter ego in his coming-of-age novel, Like a Forgotten Angel, or the conniving, drug-addled lover of his second ballet-world novel, Gardens of Saturn, in which Laura and the Williamses get the treatment.

For me, emblazoned in memory, are his endless afternoons seated in detention, raven-haired ringlets bowed, chewed pen a miniature metronome below his right ear: supplicant to the texts he worshipped.

And one day in particular, a day of golden spring green that endures in my mind like an urtext of a Winsted spring, or, as Max would have it, a memory point endowed by his facetious whimsy before Vietnam ended our careless days.

The sun was streaming through the immense fantail windows of the schoolhouse study hall, sprinkling the long rows of desks with a tranquil leafy light—a glorious light I cannot remember having seen anywhere else: first sifted through pink dogwoods, then refracted in the antique glass panes, and finally held in a kind of amber-roseate suspension on the two hundred varnished and ink-incised desktops. Riding high in the oak-paneled study hall, where they gazed blankly from their somber niches, were marble busts of classical philosophers and statesmen and generals (faithful copies of ancient originals—with the exception of Lincoln, Grant, and Washington—made to my great-grandfather’s specifications between 1895 and 1908 by an American sculptor working in Rome). These noble paragons stared down from their Olympian perches like slightly jaundiced gods, set in judgment over the living and the ranks of the dead. Reminders of the classical virtues General Alden held dear: freedom, justice, love and honor, as emblazoned in the Winsted motto. Below, carved into the paneled walls were the names of all the graduating classes going back to 1884.

Max mouthed his leitmotif as he caught sight of me, sticking out his tongue at a contemplative Virgil, while waving off a smelly fart, then the finger directed at the chapel beyond the study hall windows: “Chapel of Love . . . Hades’ House.” He was copying out lines from Nabokov’s Lolita. Detention required transcribing lines from a textbook, but he’d quickly realized that no one actually checked the subject matter after the lines were turned in. And nymphets were very much on his agenda. Every now and then, when the duty master wasn’t looking, he would furtively open the top of his desk and read the front page of his Herald Tribune. When the bell ending detention rang, he flung the newspaper at me, as if I were to blame for the headlines, which noted the escalating fighting in Vietnam and introduction of ever-larger numbers of American troops. Max was horrified at a graphic photo of villagers fleeing from a napalm strike that had overshot its target, leaving charred bodies in its wake of jellied petroleum. Of course, he blamed Winsted, Harvard, and DuPont—not necessarily in that order: all breeding grounds of imperialist flunkies. We were all only too well aware that a handful of Winsted’s most esteemed graduates were in top foreign-policy positions, first under Kennedy and then in the Johnson administration. A near score populated the upper ranks of the CIA.

I tossed back the Tribune and tried to change the subject as we exited the schoolhouse. Outside, the warm afternoon air and redolent dogwoods and the rhythmic cracks of batting practice quickly banished the stark black-and-white images of a far-off war. How could any mind, especially a young mind, encompass such a spring and such a scene of horror? Max walked slowly, sometimes taking my arm to bring me to a halt as the report of a distant bat sent a ball soaring into the blue. He sighed. “Know what my father told me after our First Communion:

‘Well, Maxie, this is the happiest day of my life since the Dodgers beat the Yanks in the ’55 World Series.’” Max doubled over with hysterical laughter and, with a tattoo of punches to my shoulder, ambled on. I was yearning to get to crew practice; he to mull over the contradictions of our privileged lives. The ancient stand of bowed and gnarled apple trees glittered a dull scarlet-gray against the two-tone strips of green left by a tractor mower. The halo of dark grass beneath the trees, where the groundskeeper couldn’t duck under the lowest branches, was littered with the shriveled blossoms of Founder’s Day.

As we drew near the varsity diamond, the sharp pops became more insistent, delightful staccato notes that powered those white specks skyward, their graceful dying arcs ending in the upheld mitts of perfectly positioned outfielders. Forever in my mind, the whispered slap of leather on leather belying time’s moving shadow. Max slipped on a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses, as if to disguise the inquisitive sparkle dancing in his eyes—lest the fervent Boston Red Sox fans who plagued Winsted might take him amiss: a Yankees scout on the sneak, caught between a rock and the oedipal contempt of his Brooklyn-born father. Already, he had a gorgeous full-body tan, concealing the few acne blemishes that marred his Sal Mineo jaw where it merged in a graceful half dimple. He had taken to sunbathing in the nude in his secret forest hermitage near the Naushon River. Somehow he’d managed to weasel out of mandatory afternoon sports—lest he injure his hands, maybe claiming the need for practice time on the Steinway grand in the lecture hall. Since the days of the rector, Samuel Williams, and his son and second headmaster, Amory, Winsted held a special regard for the musically gifted, especially pianists. For this alone, Max got cut bigtime slack: tender appreciations that went unmentioned in his novel of renegade adolescence.

“Trying to remain incognito?” I asked, watching the panorama of the school glide by across his face.

“Every little bit helps. They can’t accuse this Jew boy of deicide.” “Max, give it a fucking rest.”

“Okay—okay, I know: I know I’m paranoid.”

“Who’s the letter from?” I grabbed an envelope from his shirt pocket. “Beth-an-ey.” He snatched it back. “Her second this week.”

“You got one from Sally yesterday—such a horndog. How do you do it?”

“Just gotta love ’em, Pete, just got to give ’em some of that ole-time lovin’.” He made a little jerking motion with his arm, a leering smile and lascivious bit of tongue work. “Your Dr. Zeus was quite the charmer in that department.”

“Hey, broad brows and lightning strikes—knock ’em dead.”

“Listen, I only get to write to my girlfriends, see them over vacations, when I am permitted to give up my monastic vows.”

“A long, hard summer, no doubt.”

“Ah . . . I shall estivate in the horizontal up the Canale Grande,” Again with prancing fingers, head thrown back, humming a Vivaldi harpsichord sonata, only to segue into a current hit. “Hey, where did we go/ Days when the rain came?/ Down in the hollow/ Playin’ a new game/ Laughing and a-running, hey, hey . . .”

“Behind the stadium/ With you, my brown-eyed girl,” I sang out. “Hey, hey . . . except she had blue eyes. Don’t think I didn’t see you under the apple trees.”

“Is that all you ever think about?”

Max stopped and stared at me, clucking like a mother hen, then spitting it out.

“You do like girls, don’t you?” “Of course I do.”

“So tell me about your little Lo-li-ta, your lo-lo, your la-la—your divine lo.”

“Drop it, Max. I’ve told you; I’ve known Laura Williams since I was a kid.”

“That disqualifies?”

He gave me an exasperated look and pushed his glasses down his nose in imitation of the Reverend Paul Oakes.

“You know, you don’t have to lust only in your heart.” He threw his arm around me and humped my thigh. “Ah, my tender virginal friend, if you only understood the goddess of my idolatry, all that you are missing. Ah . . . La Serenissima . . .” Max brought his fingers to his lips and let fly with a heavenward kiss. “They never burned a heretic there.”

“Where?”

“Venice. Meine mutter is teaching a master class at the music academy in Venice this summer—on the Canale Grande, no less. I’ve been enlisted.”

“My grandmother took me to Venice on our last trip together. There was this general skinned alive by the Turks, and they sent his flayed skin back to Venice as a warning; they stuck it in an urn in one of the churches.”

Max gave me a queasy squint and then made a motion, as if dispersing a bad smell.

“Did I ever relate to you Saint Jerome’s views on virginity?” Max composed himself with palms down, hands outstretched, in imitation of Paul Oakes readying himself in the chapel pulpit. “‘I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. . . . Though God can do all things, he cannot raise a virgin up after she has fallen. He is able to free one who has been corrupted from the penalty of her sin, but he refuses her the crown.’”

“Where do you pick up this crap?”

“Where else, Oakman’s study, his little lending library—better to know thine enemy. How ’bout this: Saint Augustine beat off in church as a kid.” Max made a face and pumped his fist crotch-high. “Not that I can blame him. I get the urge, too, during a long, boring sermon.”

“Max,” I yelled. He had veered off the path to take a shortcut across the Circle. Walking on the Circle, except on Sunday, was strictly verboten.

I began to follow him, but stopped when I caught sight of two prefects in the distance.

“Max,” I called again, and pointed to the two figures loitering in front of the dining hall. Catching sight of them, he retreated back to the path.

“Damn,” he mumbled, “the Spanish Inquisition has got their spies everywhere.”

“Shortcut not worth three black marks, huh, Max?”

“Long cut, you mean—uncircumcised Philistines.” He spat, eyeing the prefects. “Only this place could make even the grass sacrosanct— create another icon of inviolability.” He grimaced and brought a choking hand to his throat. “What’ve you got in there?” He made a grab for my bulging pants pocket.

“It’s nothing.”

He collared my neck in a half-Nelson and began riffling my pockets. “What is this shit . . . piece of brick?” He tossed the brick fragment in the air, where I caught it. “More arrowheads, and hey, Mouseketeers, a rusty nail?”

“It’s an iron nail,” I protested, pointing out the squared-off edges, “and over two hundred years old.”

He wrinkled his nose at the rusty residue on his fingers.

“You sure are an oddball scavenger.” He handed back my finds and glanced across the Circle to see if the prefects were gone.

“It’s called archaeology.”

“Chip off the old blockhead—huh. When will you learn you can’t dig up the past; it’s all . . . in you.” He daggered my chest and sidestepped back onto the grass, holding out his arms as if walking a tightrope.

What Max never understood, even as he disparaged my scavenger instincts, is that archaeology is more about creating the past than discovering it. The stuff we dig up remains mute unless we give it a story.

And the more distant, the more obscure the past, the more it becomes our creation. Even the most splendid artifacts beg us to breathe life into them and tell their tale; it is all about fiction, peer-reviewed and scholarly fiction, perhaps, but fiction nevertheless. In this, Max and I were more on the same page than he ever suspected.

“Come on, featherbrain, tell me something I don’t know, give me some more lowdown on your dad’s sleuthing; surely you know more about his cloak-and-dagger stuff than you’re divulging to your best pal.”

We’d agreed this was off-limits. My mother and grandmother had told me exactly zero about my father’s days in the OSS and, later, the CIA. It was only his years as a world-famous archaeologist before the war that had registered in my youthful imagination (I had read all his books and articles many times over), and a deep-rooted sense that the only real truth was something you turned up, that you could touch. I saw his life, the one glimpsed in the archaeological journals and his magazine articles, his letters to his mother, as one dedicated to historical inquiry backed up by facts, artifacts, a life of integrity and academic probity. His boyhood room at our home in Elysium was my shrine to that probity.

“I told you; I barely remember him, and the CIA stuff is all classified.” He gave me a shove. “You’re so fucking brain-dead. You’re so weirdly incurious. Almost as weird as your chapel.” “Hardly. It’s the Williams Chapel.”

“How are you ever gonna get laid, Hawkman? You think the chicks want to talk about football, you think she’s going wet her panties over some cruddy arrowhead—hey, babe, I’ve been out cruisin’ for arrowheads all day.”

“It’s Algonquin and it’s over three hundred years old. And you can hold it in your hand—it’s real, Max, a real piece of the world and a human story.”

“Shit, you’re such a lost cause.”

We stopped and eyed the proud Gothic facade of the chapel, contentedly bathed in afternoon sunlight. Max wagged his finger.

“And speaking of lost causes . . . how do you people manage to reproduce anyway?”

“Chapel sex,” I said, desperate as always to keep the ball in play.

I saw a wicked smile crease his lips as he jittered his flattened palm in front of my face like Moe in the Three Stooges, bonking me on the head as I ducked away.

“You’re as blinkered as the rest.” He grabbed my arm and started hustling me toward the entrance. “C’mon, maybe what you need is a personally guided tour of your precious”—in perfect Boris Karloff—“Chapel of L-o-v-e . . . Hades’ House.”

“And bl-o-o-d of Christ.” We screamed with laughter.

Max held the heavy oak door open for me, bowing as I passed. Inside, it was strangely cool, the crickets silenced, echoing shadows redolent of marble polish, Clorox, and beeswax-infused mahogany. A shaft of light struck the wall of carved limestone across from the door, where the large dedicatory inscription to General Alden took pride of place. The exquisitely chiseled inscription describing his exploits and wounding at Antietam was surrounded by a decorative border of broken shackles. Memorials on either side commemorated early masters and school staff who had fought in the Civil War: “Heroes of the Great Rebellion.”

As we walked the side aisle, our footsteps echoing off the checkerboard of black-and-white Carrara marble, Max took my arm as Virgil had Dante’s. Above us in the high vaulting of the nave, a saffron-blue iridescence filtered downward from the La Farge windows. Max stopped and pointed out the smaller memorials carved into individual blocks of limestone.

“Spirits of fathers past, huh?” said Max, nudging me. I shrugged. He ran his fingers over some particularly beautiful lettering. “Ah, the Libro d’Oro.” A queer rapture came into his dark eyes. “What secrets of their prison house could they tell?”

“They’ll outlast your insipid scribbling in the Great White Way.” He looked at me, intrigued.

“Ah, remember, my dear boy, that only the ephemeral has life, only in the passage does our soul have motion; walled monuments are only the silent boundary markers of death, from which there is no return.”

I recited from memory: “‘Even in the House of Hades there is left something, a soul and an image, but there is no real heart of life in it.’” This was Achilles mourning the spirit of Patroclus from Lattimore’s Iliad, which I had just devoured.

How smart we thought our ideas, that our verbal dexterity alone might weave a cloak to keep us safe.

But there is bullshit . . . and there is bullshit. Max’s was a kind of rehearsal, a playing with disguises, a few of which—his and mine—filtered into the pages of his novels. I must have heard the kind of claptrap that flowed that day in a hundred variations. And yet . . . I have to admit, his beguiling words, unlike my more pedantic reflections—how can I put it?—had something of the effect of a pebble dropped into a deep well: the wait, the silence, the tiny distant splash . . . and later, sometimes years later, the outward-bound ripples catch you unawares. As they do on the pages of his novels . . . as they do here.

He raised his eyebrows at the hint of emotion in my voice at Achilles’ sentiments and released his grip on my arm, reaching his long, tapering fingers to the inscription on my father’s memorial.

JOHN DAVENPORT ALDEN III

1914 – 1954

WHEREFORE BY THEIR FRUITS

YE SHALL KNOW THEM.

“Strange words for such a man?” he said. “Yeah, any better suggestions?”

“Hmm, what do you think, one of his CIA buddies?” Silently, I squeezed the arrowhead in my pocket.

As if considerate of my sensibilities—I never knew him to be unkind to my face—he turned and beckoned me toward the nave. Cool pastel light played across the choir stalls and glittered in paisley shadows on the white marble altar, where a plain gold cross shimmered. Max looked around as though slightly lost and loosened his tie à la Rodney Dangerfield doing stand-up. He shook his head and seemed to bite his lip. All I could think was, Dear Brutus drawn back to the scene of assassination.

“I mean . . . it’s so . . . squeaky—clean. It’s like some kind of Brooks Brothers religion, so well tailored and fully cut that you don’t even realize there’s a body beneath. I mean, this is supposed to be Christianity—right? So where’s Christ?” He gestured upward and turned where he stood, his brown eyes staring blankly like those in the marble face of Virgil in the study hall. “Nowhere to be found: out of office—out to lunch. The cross on the altar is empty—no crucified body rent with wounds, no stigmata streaming blood, no crown of thorns, no agony or passion, no sorrow or weeping. Where the hell is this godhead we’re supposed to worship?”

Max stared up at the color-swarming windows of stained glass, those justly famous windows by John La Farge executed in 1890 at a price of $18,000 a pop, or nearly $400,000 in today’s money. (These figures are detailed in Max’s novel, precisely as he copied them from the artist’s invoices in the school archives. Just another example of how fastidious Max could be with facts when they interested him.) Max stood there, entranced, his face luminous as he projected his voice like an actor to the upper balcony.

“And what’s all this, pray tell?” He gestured to the sunlit windows above. “Abraham and Isaac, David and Goliath, Samson destroying the temple, Moses and the Ten Commandments?” He shrugged and shook his head. “Those are my people—goddamn it.” And then he eyed me as if somehow I were to blame. “You’ve fucking enlisted my people in your little charade. No, no—worse: You’ve fucking stolen our material! And then messed with it. And what about Jesus’ mother? At least the Catholics admit that Jesus had a mother. But you’d never know it from the Winsted chapel—no Virgin Mary need apply here. They prefer women to be as inessential as possible, not even created from dust like Adam—the good earth—but born from his side, from a fucking rib no less. And God knows my people probably started it with all their fastidious taboos about menstruation and impurity. But this is raised to another level of obscenity. To drink the Savior’s blood—imagine! It’s a fucking pagan ritual: eating the dead god’s body and blood. And this blood thing—huh? What’s all this fear of defilement, this sin and guilt business? Who’s kidding whom? Why is it that they always want to set things apart: men and women, life and death, body and soul, heaven and earth, good and evil, God and man?” His lips trailed spittle as he raged on like the poor spirit of Achilles among the shades. “To justify their power, that’s what; to hold sway with another ideology, to break the seamless unity of life on their misbegotten cross of power . . . or drop napalm on innocent peasants. The evil is in us; it’s not some theological abstraction.”

“Tell it to Hitler or Stalin, or Mao—you’re a perfect candidate for rehabilitation in the Cultural Revolution.”

I have this lingering image of Max turning and turning there before me in the nave, a slow-motion whirling dervish, light shining within his puzzled eyes as he raved on, seemingly desperate to draw down the plague gods that haunted him. I was mystified yet strangely touched, as if he had removed some blindfold from my eyes and the chapel stood barren around me. First the rituals, then the very stones—Attila could have done no more. I can’t properly explain the distancing from life such moments with Max produced—the furious ferment in our adolescent brains that made light of the world as we found it. For things like the chapel (temples and sanctuaries and holy places: and I’ve excavated more than a few) have always been with us and, I suppose, always will be, even when the faith inspiring their creation is moribund. And yet these places, like memories of home ground, retain a hold in our hearts—a kind of innocent awe at the faith that once inspired them. To entirely disregard such things is to impoverish ourselves.

What Max could never grasp, at least not then, not in the beginning, is that certain places, like the greatest novels, take us over because of their affecting associations of voice and tone, a grace and intimacy of spirit . . . for the music does matter.

In his first novel, this scene in the chapel ends with the following: “‘My people got it in the neck—hecatombs for your fucking sins? Like your Christ, your Jew sacrifice, they got crucified by the millions.’ Saul shrugged his shoulders, tears streaming down his cheeks, and walked away from his erstwhile friend, knowing that on this and other things they would never be of one mind.”

No, Max did not leave his erstwhile friend, nor did he argue when I told him he’d be the first in line for reeducation in Mao’s Utopia. He smiled gently, that knowing smile of his, and took my arm and, like the poet had with another wanderer into the realms of the dead, led me down the nave to the enormous Saint-Gaudens bronze memorial dedicated to the rector’s first son.

SAMUEL WILLIAMS II

—A JOY TO HIS FAMILY,

LIGHT TO THE AGES.

Max reached to the bronze angels, to the young women’s faces in three-quarter profile, at once remotely aristocratic but with the barest hint of sensual release in their full parted lips and compressed eyebrows. These were the celebrated models of Saint-Gaudens, and the architect Stanford White, and his painter colleague Thomas Dewing (who painted the murals at Hermitage). Many were the young daughters of poor Irish immigrants recruited off the streets of New York, seduced in a hidden studio and bachelor pad set high above Madison Square Garden, custom-made by White for secret trysts. That exquisite irony did not make it into Max’s novel. I watched his delicate yet incredibly strong fingers try to read the rapture on those longing faces (trembling under the lustful gaze of the artist-seducer?), as if the lucent turquoise patina might yield to his entreaties.

Then he was on to the lettering embellished in the Winsted colors of gold and crimson and black.

The inscription celebrates the short life of the rector’s eldest son, Samuel Williams II, a Harvard graduate barely twenty-six, who had died tragically and scandalously in 1891.

Like a reader of braille, Max closed his eyes and let his fingers play over the relief lettering as if searching for the notes to a lost melody.

He whispered, “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”

I shrugged. “I suppose . . . just what it says . . . ‘let your soul float free on the river of life, the river of Time.’”

“Yes, yes—the boilerplate, but don’t you see. That’s the point . . . the deceit . . . all of it hushed up and then forgotten. Nobody remembers— or cares.”

“Enough, I’m out of here—already late for crew practice.”

He whispered, “The prodigal son, Sam—a golden-haired athlete and classics scholar. Three years out of Harvard, he committed suicide. He was part of a crowd of known homosexuals, artists, composers, and poets. Jumped into the Charles dead drunk out of shame and unhappiness and anxiety that he’d be revealed and bring disgrace to his family—especially his father, Samuel, the rector, who had cofounded Winsted with your great-grandfather. Sam’s younger brother, Amory Williams, second headmaster, knew all about it—and worse. Amory had been taken on to teach classics—here, at Winsted; he was part of the same homosexual underground, that Harvard circle of aesthetes. Amory taught classics for almost thirty years at Winsted before he became headmaster. All the nude classical statues of male heroes and gods in the classics classrooms belonged to him. This man—think of it—the man your grandmother fired, taught here for decades, taught beautiful young boys their Latin and Greek, their Ovid and Homer, watched them grow, watched them swim nude in the pool he had specially built for his lovelies, watched them go off to the First World War and never return . . . and as far as anyone knows, never laid a hand on any of them. And he loved this chapel, this place above all things. The rector, his son Amory, and his daughter, Isabella, built the chapel to Sam’s memory, son and brother—that golden boy—who embodied, in the eyes of his demimonde, the highest Platonic ideals of boy love, the ennoblement of patriarchic values . . . the light, the color, the music, the poetry and incense of the Mass, the mystic unity in the risen body of Christ. Think of it: Amory’s headmaster, teacher of classics, a homosexual—who married late and to a fabulous, wildly talented artist—forever filled with unrequited love for his young students and the Episcopal Church.” Max took my arm and brought his face close to mine. “I mean, doesn’t it just slay you? The ambiguities and unrealized feelings—the delicious contradictions that haunt this place—everywhere you look. I mean, zap, wham, powee-e-e.”

I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, if he was making it up as he went along—but what a compelling tale. (And accurate in many but not all details!) What wonderful grist for the future novelist. No wonder he became so obsessed with this story once it began to materialize in his mind. I felt stupid, incurious, if not simply benighted. Within weeks of Founder’s Day, galvanized by my exchanged glances across the nave with Suzanne and Laura Williams, when, for a few magical moments on a certain Sunday—two at most—in spring, the Saint-Gaudens memorial becomes magically illuminated by the angled sunshine through stained glass, he’d already managed to plow through the two published volumes of school history, purloined school records from the library archives (as he later purloined my father’s letters), and was slowly, very carefully and systematically stealing files from the headmaster’s office. He’d even gone into the archives of The Boston Globe and Boston Herald. All this and more would notoriously find its way into Like a Forgotten Angel. (The New York Times Book Review heralded its publication like a nonfiction exposé of the eastern establishment.)

And yet for all his digging and intuitive genius, he missed the back story, and with it, my father’s story. He came tantalizingly close, getting most of the sad scandals surrounding the suicide of the rector’s son and Amory Williams’s disastrous run as headmaster and dismissal by my grandmother (casus belli of the families’ split), but missed the most extraordinary tales of all. I hasten to add, this is always the fatal flaw of careless historians: They become enchanted only by the details that fit the story they’ve already fallen in love with.

“The thing I don’t get,” he went on, fingering the intaglio inscription from the Essays and Letters, “is the uneven pattern of the wording, the letters highlighted in gold. You see the pattern they make, like a mushroom or a tree; but if you justify the left margin and read the letters in vertical rows top to bottom and bottom to top, it spells out: “Eternal love and peace—Pearce Breckenridge.” I can’t figure it out. Who is Pearce Breckenridge?

That’s how close he got, literally at his fingertips.

Perhaps I am being unfair, for it took me half a lifetime and the fall of the Berlin Wall to be able to answer his question. Part of the answer was contained in the envelope my grandmother handed to my father just days before he left, the one containing the 1877 clippings from the Natchez Weekly Democrat and the thirty-odd Pinkerton reports, and part lay in the correspondence between General Alden (who had been well acquainted with ciphers in his army days) and the rector, Samuel Williams, from 1863 to 1890 that my grandmother had selectively dug out of the family archives. Max had easily deciphered the memorial inscription, a feat—unlike the staggering complexity of deciphering Linear B, which obsessed my father and his colleagues—not to be sneezed at.

I could not then, even as a budding historian, conceive such a tangled coil of causation—even now it boggles the mind—around my own family. But one thing certainly was dawning on me: Something very dear and near to me was under threat . . . and my best friend could not be trusted.

Like Odysseus pouring his blood libations in Hades, Max had stirred up our underworld spirits.

It happens when you break the cocoon of childhood, when the past is no longer the past. When you turn your head to the flash of movement in your peripheral vision: the thing glimpsed in the mirror behind you, between lines on a page that seem strangely familiar . . . in a woman’s sigh of release when she looks right through you, and you realize you are alone . . . and never alone.

Never . . .

And so I find myself returning to the image that endures—not the comic stand-up, the persecuted outsider and addicted balletomane of his novels, but my Max, like an ecstatic shaman, slowly turning in that prismatic glow from the La Farge windows, traveler in the fourth dimension, as he embarked on his journey into our hearts and lives, as he began to deconstruct the world as we found it, and so confound us with his.

Where he remains. We his subjects and abettors. His prisoners in time.