You have done a lot for me, though you never knew it. I’m trying to reciprocate.
The TV cameras were still on you when Eagle Eye — in real life Valerie O’Doul — asked what you were going to be doing with yourself now: you said, “Val, if I could only, like, drop down a few floors and live an ordinary life.”
I think I’ll incinerate my file on Heights hors d’oeuvres.
At twelve I returned. Bernie Scheindlinger’s mother drove me all the way from school to the 36th Street subway, so I skipped seven stations and because 36th is an express stop I could bypass four more local stations by catching a Sea Beach to Pacific Street, where just as its doors were closing I caught my 4th Avenue Local. When I sprang into the front car there was Hugh Blood with his feet up along one yellow straw seat reading the ads. He’d been at school that Saturday morning working on the newspaper.
My father hadn’t been able to make the match. He was in the kitchen with my mother when I came in, sitting with his hand on The Peloponnesian War. To his eager question I replied that we’d been “vectorious.” My mother had on a dark blue hat and a lighter blue — or was it gray — wool suit. She reminded my father that Joey would be delivering her order from Bohack, and my father wondered if Joey’d taken offense when she asked about the typewriter the other day. She was about to leave to go to Manhattan with Russell Pound to see some “abstracts” by a young westerner he was interested in who’d gotten very excited reading Pappy Pound’s remarks on paint-perishability in his Ryder book. My father wanted all the scores of the match, singles and doubles. He was wearing his new light brown slippers and a gray cashmere sweater. He always looked young. His teeth were good, they hadn’t worn blue at the end, and his hair was good too, he parted it in the middle; and he had a quick smile that was full of surprise and respect. Later, when he was really dying, he looked for a time even younger. My mother said, “I’m off,” and they touched lips. But I’d forgotten about the lacrosse game, I’d meant to phone Bob from school to see if he was coming out for it.
Damn! and I had a paper to write that I’d have to hand in in longhand. My mother now said, as she went into the hall, that Bob had called. My father had the refrigerator open and turned to say that my step-grandfather had phoned to ask me to go to the Museum of Natural History with him that afternoon; my father said he’d promised I’d call back. I have not told John’s (Zo-an’s, Zon’s) story here, Dom, but I now think it makes an absence. Displaced from New England at twenty, never quite making it back except for a month in the summer and never for longer even in his long, neatly ordered widowerhood, he was now six months away from retiring; he would leave New York and go back up north; he had until now always made me feel I was smart, but he was getting dogmatic. All these details won’t bring you back, Dom. Even to ask (say), “Who was that Sue you mentioned? where does she fit in?” I don’t think even Bob knows about her even though she was my great-aunt — which is something else Al has in common with Bob. My mother, from the hall and holding the front door open, had to tell my father twice to please shut the refrigerator, she’d defrosted it only two days ago. If Bob was going to play lacrosse after all maybe I could get a ride back out with him and his father. I should have phoned from Poly.
My father made two fried egg sandwiches, and if it would bring you back into this former space of yours, Dom, I’d describe the goldgray damp of the grease coming into the Pepperidge Farm white. He said, “You can’t wait till your birthday for a new typewriter.” It sounded Jewish, but I wasn’t perfectly sure what he meant. He said he was going into the bedroom for a nap. He took Thucydides from the kitchen table.
I have to finish this ancient history now or it will last for the rest of my average life-span. One day a man came out of the psychiatrist’s inner office, shutting the door, and stood at the coat rack and talked to Ted: three insurance firms seemed to have got this man’s name all at once and one of them just chuckled and said, “You’ve got a sense of humor” when the poor, irascible guy demanded of the salesman why he was trying to sell somebody who had only six months to live and no company would insure him and he didn’t want insurance anyway. Despite the salesman’s chuckles, it was true, yes, six months the man’s doctor had given him. And Ted wondered why he was seeing a psychiatrist (and then for a second if that was what he meant by “doctor”) but Ted didn’t say anything except, sympathetically, “They’re stupid,” but the man stopped with his coat half on, arms pinioned, and said, “They are not stupid.” Ted tells me things. He says he wants someone to get something out of all that shrinking money. Ted is in group dynamics at college. Group dynamics, it sounds like a stock. As my father turned to leave the kitchen I unaccountably rose with my mouth full of yolk and bread and asked if he wanted to go to a movie, but he said thanks he would read Thucydides, and when he walked into the dining room we both remembered and in unison said, “Bohack!” having forgotten for a second that we couldn’t both go out. Of course the suspect Joey could leave the carton on the doormat but there was danger of theft — maybe even from Joey — and anyway my father wanted to stay in. He’d been away on business the weekend before and since he couldn’t possibly get back for Russell Pound’s party he’d stopped in Washington to see Cooley. My father was born in 1900, Cooley in 1896. Cooley is not a close relation, but I called him Uncle. As soon as my parents’ bedroom door closed, Bob and Petty rang our bell. I saw my father bundled dead into Joey’s deep silver carrier and the big lid banged down. That Junior Corona — if it was a Corona — softens in recollection: its carriage and keys and the black center lid over the type-bars become almost soft, malleably soft, as a new crisis hardens out into undue clarity: I mean the injustice to me three years before of Dr. Cadbury, who Akkie had just now told us was having an operation on his gut; but I really mean my mere urge to expatiate toward the end of Cadbury’s midterm three years before. It was at first the expatiation of a pupil so free in his knowledge and syntax that the exam question turned into an invitation to art or play; in essence, all I said was that in some later Assyrian reliefs the figures could have been freed by first cutting away a small tissue of stone but for some reason were not, and after all it wasn’t as if they’d been on the sea floor waiting for Captain Nemo. Cadbury rebuffed me sorely in the margin; my father phoned him and complained; I was embarrassed; Cadbury and my father both backed off, and I was left with an A minus. My pyramids don’t soften, I can tell you: they are greater than ever: greater far than that well-known entrepreneur’s plan for a poured-concrete facsimile in California one foot higher than the great pyramid.
When I opened the front door Bob and Petty were hand in hand — no Joey — and she said, “Bob didn’t play in the lacrosse game.” They looked married. “His father was terrible to him,” said Petty, “and so were the people at school; if he slipped off the window sill, it could happen to anybody. I think I was rude to his father, but it’s funny, he sort of gave up; he took it.”
I stood aside. Vectors everywhere, then and now. I now believe the elevator I’m guiding up here is the near one, the west. Its acceleration is wholly controlled by vectorcraft. I have switched on your late TV but my trip to the foyer and kitchen is invisible on this 8 1/2 by 11 Sphinx bond of yours. Your Hungarian son-in-law wondered where your typewriter was. Is there an answer in the words to which I have led myself? But so many of those have been removed by him. If you aren’t dead after all, I didn’t do that either. When my father died in ’52 he’d been reading Lawrence’s letters and hoping to go to New Mexico to recuperate. But if you’re alive in the two parts of my confession, I guess I did do that. In the kitchen your TV screen is a bright blank.