"And when I put that together with people thinking their zillions of thoughts—right now they're out there thinking and thinking—I get this floaty feeling." He paused. "On the way home in the car when we were all quiet, I thought about how everybody's thoughts keep changing. The thoughts that people were having during the game turned into new thoughts when we were in the car. That was then, but this is now, but then that now is gone, and there's a new now. Right now, I'm saying right now, but it's over before I've finished saying it."
"In a way," I said to him, "that now you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present. Does that make sense to you?"
"Yes," he said. "Definitely. I like things to last for a long, long time." Matthew looked up at me. Then he took a breath. "I've made up my mind, Dad. I'm going to be an artist. When I was little I thought I would try for the Major Leagues. I'll always play ball, but that's not going to be my job. No, I'm going to have a studio right here in the neighborhood and an apartment close by, so I can visit you and Mom whenever I want." He closed his eyes. "Sometimes I think I'll make great big paintings, and other times I think I'll make pretty small ones. I don't know which yet."
"You have time to decide," I said. Matt turned onto his stomach and gripped the covers. I leaned down and kissed his forehead.
When I left Matthew's room that night, I stopped in the hallway and leaned against the wall for a couple of minutes. I was proud of my son. Like a rush of air in my lungs, the feeling grew, and then I wondered if my pride wasn't a form of reflected vanity. Matthew's thoughts echoed mine, and that night when I listened to him, I heard myself, and yet as I stood there I knew that I also admired a quality in Matthew that I didn't have. At eleven, he was bolder and more certain than I had ever been. When I told Erica about our talk, she said, "We're lucky. We're lucky to have him. He's the best boy on earth." And after that hyperbolic declaration, she rolled over and fell asleep.
On June twenty-seventh, the six of us crowded into a rented minivan and drove to Pennsylvania. Bill and I carried two leaden duffel bags into a cabin Matt and Mark were going to share with seven other boys and greeted their counselors, Jim and Jason. The pair reminded me of an adolescent version of Laurel and Hardy—one thin, the other rotund— both grinning broadly. We briefly met the camp director, a hairy man with a pumping handshake and a hoarse voice. We strolled around the grounds and admired the mess hall, the lake, the tennis courts, and the theater. We lingered over our good-byes. Matt threw himself into my arms and hugged me. Only at night did I get such affectionate treatment anymore, but he had clearly made an exception for that farewell. I felt his ribs through his T-shirt as he pressed himself against me, and I looked down into his face. "I love you, Dad," he said in a low voice. I answered him as I always did. "And I love you, Matt. I love you." I watched him embrace Erica, and I noticed that he found it a little hard to withdraw from his mother. Erica removed his Mets cap and stroked his hair away from his forehead.
"Matty," she said. "I'll embarrass you with a letter every day."
"That's not embarrassing, Mom," he said. He held her tightly and pressed his cheek into her collarbone. Then he lifted his chin and smiled. "This is embarrassing."
Erica and Violet prolonged our departure with futile reminders that Matt and Mark brush their teeth, wash themselves, and get enough sleep. When we reached the car, I turned around to look at the boys. They were standing on the wide mowed lawn beside the camp's main building. A large oak tree spread its branches over them, and behind them the afternoon sun shone on the lake, its light catching the ruffle of waves on the water's surface. Bill was driving the first leg of the trip home, and after I had taken my seat beside Violet in the back, I turned again to watch the two figures recede as the van moved down the long driveway toward the road. Matthew had raised his hand to wave at us. From that distance, he looked like a very small boy wearing clothes that were too big for him. I noticed how thin his legs were under his wide shorts and the narrow line of his neck above his billowing T-shirt. He was still holding his cap in his hand, and I saw a tuft of his hair blow up and away from his face in the wind.
TWO
EIGHT DAYS LATER MATT DIED. ON JULY FIFTH AT ABOUT THREE o'clock in the afternoon, he went canoeing on the Delaware River with three counselors and six other boys. His canoe hit a rock and capsized. Matt was hurled out, hit his head on another boulder, and was knocked unconscious. He drowned in the shallow water before anybody could get to him. For months, Erica and I went over the sequence of events, looking for the guilty party. At first we blamed Matt's counselor Jason, who had been in the stern, because it was all a matter of inches. Had Jason steered two or three inches to the right, there wouldn't have been an accident. An inch to the left, the collision would have occurred, but Matt wouldn't have hit the rock in the water. We also blamed a boy named Rusty. A few seconds before the crash, he had raised himself up and out of his seat in the middle of the canoe and wiggled his buttocks at Jason. In those seconds, the counselor lost sight of the shallow rapids in front of him. Inches and seconds. When Jim and a boy named Cyrus pulled Matthew out of the river, they didn't know that he was dead. Jim performed mouth-to-mouth, blowing air in and out of Matt's still body.
They flagged down a car on the road, and the driver, a Mr. Hodenfield, sped across the border to the nearest hospital, in Callicoon, New York— Grover M. Hermann Community Hospital. Jim never stopped breathing into Matt. He pressed on his chest and blew air into him over and over, but at the hospital Matthew was pronounced dead. It is a strange word, "pronounced." He had died already, but in the emergency room, they spoke the words and it was over. The pronouncement made it real.
Erica took the telephone call late that afternoon. I was standing only a few feet away from her in the kitchen. I saw her face change, watched her clutch the counter, and heard her gasp the word "No." It was a hot day, but we hadn't turned on the air conditioners. I was sweating. Looking at her, I began to sweat more. Erica scribbled words on a pad. Her hand shook. She gulped for air as she listened to the voice. I knew that the call was about Matthew. Erica had repeated the word "accident," then written down the name of the hospital. I was ready to leave. Adrenaline surged through my body. I ran for my wallet and the car keys. When I returned to the living room with the keys in my hand, Erica said, "Leo, that man on the telephone. That man said that Matthew is dead." I stopped breathing, shut my eyes, and said to myself what Erica had said aloud. I said no. Nausea welled up into my mouth. My knees buckled, and I grabbed the table to steady myself. I heard the keys jangle as my hand hit the wooden surface. Then I sat down. Erica had gripped the other side of the table. I looked at her white knuckles, then up at her contorted face. "We have to go to him," she said.
I drove. The white and yellow lines on the black road in front of me held my complete attention. I concentrated on the lines and watched them disappear under the wheels. The sun glared through the windshield, and I squinted now and then through my sunglasses. Beside me sat a woman I hardly recognized—pale, motionless, and dumb. I know that Erica and I saw him in the hospital and that he looked thin. His legs were brown from the sun, but his face had changed color. His lips were blue and his cheeks gray. He was Matthew and he wasn't Matthew. Erica and I walked down hallways and spoke to the medical examiner and we made arrangements in the hushed atmosphere of deference that surrounds people who have just stepped into grief, but the fact was that the world didn't seem to be the world anymore, and when I think back on that week, on the funeral and the cemetery and the people who came, there is a shallowness to all of it, as though my vision had changed and everything I saw had been robbed of its thickness.