Murray Cutler faced me and never looked more like meat, and he tried to turn away, but he was too weak. “Yet one story always stood for another. He invented the truth,” I said. “Now you tell me a story.”
I sat watching him, and it was as if a succession of episodes might be running through his mind, all their cruel details twitching on his face.
I returned to my own empty room in my mother’s house. I relived all the hopes and fantasies one feels in a childhood bedroom. I suffered the overfamiliar ceiling, the walls, the window: like a cell I’d served a sentence in, that I was confined to again. I hardly stirred from the house until a month later, to accompany Mother to the gravesite. “I want to visit Dad,” she had said at breakfast that day, cutting a sausage, then putting down her knife.
We were standing at the grave when Mother said, “Your teacher Murray Cutler died. It was in the paper.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Dad respected him so much. He was a Harvard graduate, you know. Dad was so proud that he took you under his wing. What’s wrong?”
I had begun to cry, sniffling, then sobbing with an odd hopeless honk of despair.
“He thought the world of you,” she said. “Dad knew that. He used to talk about it to me.” And then she was comforting me. “Go on, let it out, Jay, I know how much he meant to you.”