And Sons. David Gilbert
writing, stubborn despite the rejections, that I was working on a novel about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the dawning generation gap, that in fact I was taking a sabbatical next year so I could get a good solid draft down. Like a stage mother I pushed my other self forward.
“Good for you,” Andrew said, politely uninterested.
Full disclosure: I entertained vivid if laughable notions of an A. N. Dyer blurb—A huge talent, my heir apparent—for this hypothetical novel of mine. I already had a title, Q.E.D., which was hands down the best part of the book, and I knew the perfect image for the cover: a William Eggleston photograph of a long-haired redhead sprawled on a lawn as if felled in combat, in her right hand a Brownie Hawkeye camera like an unemployed grenade. But beyond the exterior heft of the book, beyond my name written in Copperplate Gothic Bold—PHILIP WEBB TOPPING—beyond the dedication and acknowledgment pages, beyond those summer months where a teacher must justify his existence, Q.E.D. hardly proved anything at all. Over the course of two years I had written maybe fifty pages, yet still I dreamed of A. N. Dyer’s approval, the book a frame for his signature. I have always had an unfortunate tendency to spin myself into alternate universes. Growing up I had a regular fantasy of an accident leaving me orphaned and the Dyer clan taking me in as one of their own. It seemed so obvious that I was born into the wrong family—a suspicion of many a teenager, I suppose—and I knew I could be a good son, the right son, the proper son to this great man, certainly better than his actual sons. Absurd, my imagination. And it lingers. Even nowadays I can find myself turning in bed and trying to will into existence a time machine. Please let me go back, I’ll plead to the darkness, please let me guide my younger self away from this present mess, let me unlink him from my past so I might fade from his view, a retroactive suicide. The stupid things I’ve done, the outright bad things. My memory is like a series of kicks in the gut, including this beaut: my father on his deathbed and here I am a foundling on my own doorstep.
“A fire would be nice,” Andrew said again.
“Should I?”
“No, no, just speaking in old code.” He went and refilled his glass. His drinking hand trembled in an almost rhythmic meter, like a seismograph registering the effects of nearby destruction. “I feel for you,” Andrew said. “It’s impossibly hard, a father’s decline. You both want to say so much but you’re both so afraid of saying the same thing, something like, I hope I wasn’t a terrible disappointment, or some variant on that theme. Of course in the end the only decent answer is a lie.” With that he took a satisfied, almost ceremonial sip.
Maybe in the back of my mind I took offense. After all, the brutal truth was dying down the hall and I, the weaker truth, was simply doing his best. But I was mostly intrigued by this intimate disclosure and decided to lawyer through the opening and ask about his own father, if he remembered him, since I knew the man had died when A. N. Dyer was quite young. Was this a conscious jab? Not at all. I was just curious and if anything wanted to ingratiate myself and express an understanding of his biography without revealing my absolute dedication. But Andrew’s eyes fell onto the floor as if he spotted a nickel that was hardly worth picking up. “You’re right,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“And it was a car accident. There was no big goodbye between us. I remember almost nothing about him, in fact. Maybe I could claim my stepfather but he seemed fully sprung from my mother’s single-mindedness and didn’t need any words from me when he died. Yes, Philip, you have exposed me.” Andrew opened his arms, a lick of whiskey sloshing over the side. “I am exposed.”
“But—”
“Even worse,” he said, “I think I was cribbing those words of wisdom from one of my books, can’t remember which.”
“Tiro’s Corruption,” I told him, “when Hornsby dies in Formia.”
“God, not even one of my better attempts.”
“Oh, I like that one.”
Andrew made a displeasing sound and put down his drink. A heavy gust hit Park Avenue and for a moment the windows belonged to a small hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. Later that afternoon and all night it would snow and tomorrow school would get canceled and I would email my mistress (forgive the word but all the others are worse) and arrange an afternoon tryst while my wife took the kids sledding. Bad weather always makes me horny. Christ, the recklessness.
“I should go see him,” Andrew said.
“I know it means a lot to him, you being here.”
“I suppose, I suppose,” he said in a defeated tone. What with his boyish mop of white hair and his bygone Yankee exoticism, his meter and repetition, Andrew put me in mind of Robert Frost and his poem “Provide, Provide.” I always did like that poem. Some have relied on what they knew / Others on being simply true. While Frost as a man exists in our head as eternally ancient, A. N. Dyer stands in front of us as forever young, peering from his author photo, the only photo he ever used on all of his books, starting with Ampersand. In that picture he’s pure knowing, his darkly amused eyes in league with a smile that edges toward a smirk, as if he’s seen what you’ve underlined, you fiend, you who might read a few pages and then pause and glance back at his face like you’ve spotted something magical yet familiar, a new best friend waiting for you on the other end. Fourteen novels written by a single, ageless A. N. Dyer. No doubt this added to the mystery, along with his total avoidance of fame. The photo is credited to his wife, Isabel. This marital connection was sweet early on and a possible clue as you imagined those newlyweds in Central Park, in the middle of Sheep Meadow, Andrew reluctantly posing while Isabel framed Essex House for its maximum subliminal message. Click. Hard to believe that was fifty years ago. © Isabel Dyer. The photo remained even after the affair that produced Andy and finished the marriage and secured the final estrangement from his already distant sons. I suppose nothing keeps the end from being hard. But for most readers, A. N. Dyer was forever twenty-seven, so when he took the lectern in that church and looked as old as he had ever looked, the congregation practically gasped as if aging were a stunt gone horribly wrong.
Andrew flattened his eulogy. Hands frisked pockets for reading glasses, the microphone picking up a few grumbles, all vowel based. “Okay,” he said, after which he cleared his throat and pinched his nose clean. “Okay,” he said again, the sentiment towing an unsure breath. Finally he began to read. He was like a boy standing in front of class trying to get through an assignment without a possibly catastrophic lull. “What are we in this world without our friends if family is the foundation then friends are its crossbeams its drywall its plumbing friends keep us warm and warmhearted friends furnish and with a friend like Charlie Topping I was never without a home.” Andrew paused for breath, which was a relief for all our lungs, until he glanced up and asked if everyone could hear him. A handful nodded while a few of us lowered our heads. He went back to reading. “Whenever I was in need of succor—succor,” he repeated the word as though surprised by its appearance, “I could count on Charlie.” From here he started to read slower. “He was an unlocked door with something smelling good in the oven. He was the fire in the fireplace, the blanket draped over the couch, the dog at my feet. He was the shelter when I was the storm.” Andrew paused again, interrupted, it seemed, by higher frequencies. He turned around and pointed to the top of the gilded altarpiece. “Zadkiel,” he said with newfound authority, “that’s the name of that angel up there, the fifth from the left. Zadkiel. Kind of like a comic book character, that’s what Charlie always said to his audience. Mandrake the Magician. Zadkiel the Absolver. Faster than a speeding regret.” Andrew turned back around. “Sorry,” he said to his audience. “I am the storm, right, that’s where we were, me as the raging storm.” Watching him was like watching Lear forget his lines on the heath. He removed his glasses, shielded his eyes from the glare of the inner dim. “Has anyone seen my boy?” he asked. “Andy Dyer?” He searched the crowd as if every face were a wave and there was a small boy overboard, possibly drowning. “It’s important, please,” he said. No answer broke the surface, though I could imagine the whispers of bastard, the giddy apostasy of gossip. “Is he even here?”