And Sons. David Gilbert
twenty minutes mean to a seventeen-year-old? Or an hour? Even a year? All that future ahead was a bright light shining under the door, the present just a narrow peephole. Still, Andrew wished he could reach over and touch the boy’s knee and maybe settle himself with a self-confirming glance. Andy was the answer to that late-night question: Am I alone? No. You have him. But where was he? Andrew thought about turning around and looking but the idea of wading through the collected crowd, the various social connections, the past that grew thin but never snapped, if anything grew more elastic, exhausted him. It was a history he couldn’t deny. Like an Appalachian boy who done good, the entire Upper East Side had embraced his early success, even if his novels tended toward the Upper West, with friends of his mother and stepfather praising the reviews and magazine articles and asking about sales and potential awards and if Darryl Zanuck had come calling yet, these same hands congratulating him decades later when he ripped them apart in the Henry Doubleday diptych (American Ligature and The Gorgon USA), but by then there was no cause for outrage. A. N. Dyer was famous. Andrew cleared the ever-prolific phlegm from his throat, a thirty-second job nowadays. Yes, the pews behind him carried the junk DNA of his life, useless perhaps but within their folds he might glimpse his mother, long a ghost, making her giddy rounds and he might overhear a kind word said about his father, who died the day after Christmas when Andrew was just eight. But rather than turn he continued to peer ahead, disoriented, like somebody mistaking a mirror for a way out.
The organist roused into the first chord of the processional hymn, “Thine Be the Glory.” The congregation stood and angled toward the back, though A. N. Dyer remained seated, seemingly too distraught to move. First came the boys choir, followed by the clergy, the coffin, and finally we Toppings, led by the Widow Lucy. No doubt her black ensemble with fur trim and fat satin buttons caused a stir among a few of the ladies who expected no less from Mrs. Oyster Bay. The original Mrs. Topping, aka Eleanor, my mother, would have been understated to the point of high style, a woman, like so many of her generation, who took her cues from Jacqueline Kennedy, to the point where you could imagine all these women the survivors of some public assassination. But in Lucy’s defense, she had drawn the short straw, having been tied to my father for all the difficulties—the first bout of esophageal cancer, the mental confusion, the heart failure in conjunction with the second bout of cancer—and she had made his last years as comfortable, as happy, as possible, even if she droned on about thwarted trips to India, to Cambodia, to Xanadu, I swear. Only the cruel would have criticized that ridiculous Halston knockoff hat. She deserved this big wedding of a funeral, in full choir.
Thine be the glory, risen, conq’ring Son;
Endless is the vict’ry, Thou o’er death hast won
Andrew, still sitting, thought, or sensed, sort of breathed in the air and comprehended the years within the particulates of this church, where nothing changed, not even the smell, which was similar to his father’s closet, and how as a boy he could stay huddled on top of sharp-heeled shoes, not quite hiding but not quite not hiding, almost wanting to be found though he’d instantly feel foolish—yes, winged within this constancy were numerous past weddings and christenings and funerals, God knows how many times sitting in this church and Andrew hardly believed in God.
Make us more than conq’rors, through Thy deathless love:
Bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above.
Boys like pocket-size men passed by in their red and white frocks. This slow-moving, high-pitched train startled Andrew, and he realized, Oh crap, I should be on my feet, the service has begun. He grabbed the pew and eased himself up, hobbled only by a memory of pain, thanks to the Vicodin. Some of us gave him a weary grin as we entered our reserved pews. Lucy and Kaye Snow, her daughter from her first marriage, slipped in beside Andrew. Kaye was an unmarried breeder of Wheaton terriers, though seeing her you might have guessed Pomeranians. But her true profession was aggrieved yet devoted daughter, a career she had thrived in for nearly forty-seven years and from which she would never retire. Kaye smiled at Andrew. She must be very talented with dogs, he thought.
Lucy reached over and touched his forearm. “How are you feeling?”
“What’s that?”
“You look peaked.”
“No, I haven’t,” he misunderstood. “Have you seen Andy?”
“No. Is everything all right?”
Andrew assumed she was asking about the eulogy. “Oh, it’ll be fine.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“All of this,” she said, her hands spreading as if the human condition were roughly the size and weight of a melon, then she fixed his collar and brushed a bit of dandruff from his shoulders. “I wish I had a comb.”
Daughter Kaye grimaced, a sentiment that seemed tattooed on her lips.
“Anyway”—Lucy waved to a friend—“thank you for agreeing to do this.”
The hymn concluded and Rev. Thomas Francis Rushton stood before the congregation and spoke those familiar words “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord …” though there was nothing particularly immortal about his delivery, just the words themselves in intimate soliloquy “… and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die …” the Reverend reminding Andrew of an Astroff from a production of Uncle Vanya he had seen many years ago, when he hated the theater a little less “… I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth …” Andrew trying to remember what Sonya said during that last scene, something about the futility of life and how we must play the hand of our remaining days “… and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God …” where in Christ’s name was Andy and how many cigarettes did the boy need “… and no man dieth to himself …” Andrew himself a pack-a-day smoker until he was fifty and still he yearned for the morning smoke “… whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s …” seventeen years old and smoking, just like his old man “… Blessed are the dead …” Andrew breathed in and imagined his lungs in harmony with the boy’s “… for they rest from their labors …” and that’s when he shuddered, terrified by what his next breath might bring.
Reverend Rushton declared, “The Lord be with you.”
“And also with you,” replied those in the know.
“Let us pray.”
In the pause before the Our Father began Andrew whispered, “What have I done?” loud enough for some of us to hear.
BEFORE CHARGES OF NARRATIVE FRAUD are flung in my direction, let me defend myself and tell you that A. N. Dyer often used my father in his fiction. Not that my father seemed to care or even notice much. But I certainly did, ever since I was a teenager and first read Ampersand. I spotted the immediate resemblance to Edgar Mead’s best friend, Cooley, the awkward but diligent student who was raised in a household of athletes, crazy-haired Cooley who rejected sports for study except in the case of Ping-Pong. That was my dad. His zeal for Ping-Pong seemed to belie his nature until you realized it was his way of telling you he could have been a sportsman himself, as great as his brothers and sister, as his own father, who was the last gentleman amateur to reach the quarterfinals at Forest Hills. Using the abbreviated language of angles and spin my dad would lecture you on not wasting your talents—match point—on silly pursuits. Historically speaking, he probably missed being sensitive by eight to ten years, depending on where you date the New Man era; rather, he grew up shy, then aloof, then distant, his feelings best relinquished from the palm of his hand—a firm grip, a pat on the back, a semi-ironic salute. He was the master of the goodbye wave. Closing my eyes, I can still see him, an unspoken sorrow on his face—“Oh well”—as he lowered his hand and propped that small racquet over that small ball, embarrassed by even the smallest victory.