And Sons (3 page)

Andrew clapped his hands, maybe even cackled. The idea that he or Charlie could repair anything was laughable. Their mothers, and then their wives, did all the repair work, often literally, while their sons, and later their husbands, bungled even the easiest of household chores and came to depend on a general air of domestic incompetence for a sense
of well-being. They were hopeless without their women. Andrew rolled a sheet of paper into the Selectric, always a satisfying action, like adding memory to an empty head. As he copied the words he allowed himself a brief fantasy with Ms. Norbert, Emma in leather and high heels, pushing his face down and riding him like a run-on sentence. Nothing rose from her whip but there was some solace in the harsh slap of keys.

But in the gloom of this day Emma floated like stone. Andrew slipped the eulogy back into his suit jacket and bunkered himself farther into the pew, hoping perhaps that old Miss Moo would forget to call on him. He wondered about Andy—he had escaped outside for a quick smoke but that was four or five cigarettes ago. Then again, what did 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.

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.

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.

B
EFORE 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.

Reverend Rushton took us through the opening prayers.

I myself was beyond tired.

Up front, the coffin glowed with extreme polish. Inside was nothing but a gesture of the man. Per his wishes, he had been cremated, half of
his ashes to be scattered into the Atlantic of eastern Long Island—our summer getaway—the other half to be tossed from the church tower at Phillips Exeter Academy—our collective alma mater. These instructions were a surprise to us, his children. Dad was not one to swim in the ocean, or sail, or poeticize about its vast blue canopy; in fact, he quite publicly disliked sand. And while he was a generous supporter of Exeter and a longtime trustee, he was hardly nostalgic about his prep school days and never touted its pedigree or insisted that his children follow in his footsteps (though we all did). So it seemed odd, these final resting places, as well as inconvenient. New Hampshire? How delightful. But the mahogany coffin with its satin finishes and interior of champagne velvet (dubbed, I believe,
The Montrachet
) was our stepmother’s doing. She wanted something to bury, something to visit, even if that something was just a scoop of her third husband.

“A ten-grand ashtray,” my sister muttered during the arrangements.

“She also bought a plot at Woodlawn,” my brother muttered right back.

“Hate to think how much that cost.”

“Fifty thousand, not including annual upkeep.”

“Unbelievable.”

“And then there’s the headstone.”

The prospect of an inheritance had made them both accountants.

I was—or am—Charles Henry Topping’s second son, the youngest of three. Grace and Charles Jr. were ahead of me respectively and literally: Grace commanded the second pew, her whole family jammed together, the six of them sour yet insistent, like the richest people flying coach, while behind her sat Charles Jr., never Charlie or Chuck, with his two girls, the ever blond and blonder copies of his wife, who was six months pregnant with what I could only imagine was a blinding ball of blazing white light. Then there was me, Philip, the momma’s boy without his momma. I was bookended by my five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter, both of whom dressed like tiny adults mourning their lost childhood. I hadn’t seen them in a few weeks. I always suspected that I could be a bad husband, a bad son, but I always assumed that I would be a good father. Rufus and Eloise were so well
behaved as to be almost offensive. This was the consequence of their angry yet polite mother, who was somewhere in this church waiting for the service to end so she could swoop in and whisk her babes back home. Ashley was probably crying herself. She was fond of my father, and in his quiet way he was fond of her. “She is well built,” he once told me, the opinion having nothing to do with her figure but rather with her overall form. And maybe Ashley was thinking of my mother, a woman she got along with spectacularly well (my mother had an ease with making people feel warm and welcome, though her children were often dubious of her actual impressions), and of course seeing all of these people, the old Topping crowd, many of whom had attended our own wedding ten years before—well, it must’ve been hard for her. We were the ridiculous subplot: the cheating husband, the betrayed wife, the poor poor children. Yes, Ashley was probably crying while all I could do was stare at that coffin and picture the closed mouth of a giant clam, a charred bit of irritant within its velvety folds. As the Exeter motto states,
Finis Origine Pendet
.

But where was the beginning?

I have no idea what my father was like as a boy, or a teenager, or a young man. Even today I find myself poring over the novels of A. N. Dyer in search of possible clues to his other life: the aforementioned Cooley from
Ampersand
, but also Richard Truswell from
Pink Eye
and Killian Stout from
Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men
. I’ll study these characters and I’ll think, Maybe that’s him, in Truswell’s tragic decency, in Stout’s oppressed desires, both their lives slowly collapsing under the strain until a seemingly minor act brings them down. But my father never buckled. He was consistently unsurprising. But just last year I learned he had a stammer growing up, and this news hit me hard, like adding pastel to a police sketch. Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever human form they take can be calamitous for their sons. I have no first memory of the man, only a mild impression of him sitting safely behind a newspaper, the back of his head leaving an ever-present mark on the chair, his oily shadow. I first learned about current events by staring at him silently, waiting for the paper to twitch down. Those poor expectant sons. And who knows what my son sees when he closes his eyes around me? The trip to the
natural history museum, where he caught me weeping? But this story, however poorly realized, is not about me or my father or my own son, though we make our appearances; no, this story is about the man in the first pew, the important man, the man who will live on while the rest of us will fade under the raised arms of a Reverend Rushton somewhere.