And Sons (57 page)

“Excellent,” he said. “I’ll be standing to the east, appareled in celestial light.”

“Wordsworth,” I said, as if being challenged.

Mr. McIntyre seemed taken aback. “Good for you.”

I stood up straighter, like I was taking position in front of his class. “ ‘It is not now what it was before, wherever I may turn, by night or by day I learn, the life I once saw I see no more.’ ”

“I am impressed,” he said.

“I can still recite the whole thing,” I told him.

“Maybe after a few drinks,” he said, turning to leave.

I started the corkscrew climb, my father in one hand, keys in the other, and after passing a small room on the second floor, and on the third floor church bells I vaguely recalled hearing on Sundays and Wednesdays, the spiral ended and the remaining ascent came via ladder to the aforementioned trapdoor. I tried to imagine my father’s tassel loafers clambering up those rungs. Maybe he was giddy with adventure, pushing through the hatch like he was sneaking into another world. I pulled myself up. The roof was solid but I feared the small square opening in the floor, as if making someone fall was every trapdoor’s fantasy. The view gave the campus an intimacy that was contradicted on the ground. To the north the huge academy building with its white bell tower and clock face lorded its hour in every direction, but from this particular vantage the weathervane, a triple-masted sailboat, stole the show, its bow pointing toward the Squamscott and the Great Bay beyond. The sun still had some time before hitting its rosy stride. Shadows stretched, and my eyes saw the work required in keeping this world still, the mortar troweled for every brick, the mansard slate dealt in solitaire rows, the game of tic-tac-toe on the other side of Louis Kahn’s scrim. My past blurred into the students walking back to their dorms after dinner and I gathered them up and told them everything would be fine.

I spotted Mr. McIntyre, towheaded in this light.

He waved.

I waved back.

Inside the box the ashes were sealed in a plastic liner that proved impossible to rip or pull apart and left me quickly defeated and angry, all this travel and time, all this good-son determination, and I couldn’t open the stupid bag, curses coloring my effort as well as the threat of old childhood frustrations brimming into tears. Then I remembered the key chain and its pocketknife. Along with its vintage brassy excellence there was an engraving on the handle—
WE THIS WAY
—that continued onto the blade—
YOU THAT WAY
—its meaning secondary against its ability to cut through plastic, which it did nicely. I widened the gap with my fingers, releasing a talc of dust. Here he was. My father. The ash was finer than expected, soft gray sand from a beach of pulverized bone. I dug my hand in, to feel the mass give way through my fingers, a gesture that seemed far from creepy, if anything seemed mandatory. I went to the edge of the roof. A slight but helpful breeze blew to the east. I lifted the box toward Mr. McIntyre in a gesture of cheers. I should say something, I thought, something beyond “I love you.” I tried to picture my father standing up here taking in this view with Bertie, the old poets on their lips, and a strange but familiar awareness came over me, like when you sit in one of those tiny chairs in kindergarten and knead Play-Doh with your son or daughter, or when you read them a book you once cherished, those moments where you live on both sides, the life already seen but today differently met, and it seems like time becomes, I don’t know, becomes more physical, I guess like on a cellular level, the great goddamn understanding trickling through your blood, from top to bottom, bottom to top, the journey knotted in the vicinity of your stomach. As the shadow of Phillips Church hinged forward, I looked over Exeter as both a fiction and a fact, and using my father’s runaway eyes I stared down at that old teacher staring back up, his scarf a thin blue flame. He waited for the ash to fall this way or that, and I opened my father’s heart and as if descended from the sun let him live another story, a story free of A. N. Dyer, free of his family back in New York, his own private story put to rest right here. I saved nothing for the ocean and hoped a kind and helpful wind might blow Charlie Topping toward Bertram McIntyre.

Back in St. James, Reverend Rushton faced the coffin and spreading
his arms said, “Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant young Andrew. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.” And on that cue the pallbearers appeared. They hoisted the coffin and started down the aisle, the organ launching into “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” which, though long forgotten, was familiar from my younger days.

Hands reached out from both sides of the aisle, in some cases stretching awkwardly just to touch the coffin, classmates and friends leaving their final mark on notions of immunity while those older paid respects to their worst fears and the relief of being spared.

The Dyers followed close behind, Richard and Jamie helping their father along, Isabel minding them as if they were moving an heirloom through a narrow hallway. Emmett and Chloe and Candy completed this family tableau. Richard would go back to California soon, and Jamie and Isabel would take on the bulk of the caring for Andrew, though Gerd did most of the work. Her loyalty grew even stronger after Andy’s death, verging on devotion. But eventually a full-time nurse was required and a hospital bed would replace the desk in his study. Isabel had lunch with Andrew a few times a week and would sometimes read him crime novels and always accept his apologies, which toward the end were a near constant and hard to bear.

No longer of sound mind or body, A. N. Dyer put Richard and Jamie in charge of his literary estate, and though the Morgan Library was disappointed in the lack of
Ampersand
and insisted on a price reduction, in late April they happily took possession of his papers and started the labor-intensive process of cataloging the material. Richard surprised Jamie by maintaining his father’s aversion to film adaptations, rather vociferously too—“We are doing what he wants, no questions asked”—but after he died, and Andrew lived for another five years, four years longer than anyone anticipated, Richard contacted Rainer Krebs and Eric Harke, who was now too old and battered to play Edgar Mead, but he wanted to direct. In fairness the movie wasn’t a disaster—it had moments of true inspiration, particularly the invented scene along the Cornish-Windsor Bridge—but for the most part
Ampersand
the movie hewed too closely to
Ampersand
the book and revealed a flaw that many people had always suspected, specifically that the book was emotionally claustrophobic. Richard and Jamie had better luck three years later with
The Spared Man
, which Richard wrote and Jamie directed. It was a small movie, done extremely well, with Eric Harke playing the lead. For their next project they’re reviving one of their own earliest collaborations,
The Coarsers of Bedlam
.

The coffin approached its final stretch. A black man in a white robe opened the church doors in anticipation of its continuing outside, and the air pushed in. The day was sunny but cold, a reminder that winter still had its role, and I was amazed by how fast I could feel the chill. It’s like in the theater when an actor lights a cigarette and instantly you smell the smoke. Are our senses that keen? Is it the smoke we smell or the memory of smoke, our anticipation of what’s to come? How much of experience is merely filling in the blanks from earlier experience? I was near the last pew, likely singing too loud. But I once had a decent voice. The coffin passed by, and it was incomprehensible to think of Andy personified within that wood. I thought about reaching over and
adding my handprint, but as my tone suggests, I refrained. The show of emotion seemed distasteful. Then again, maybe I worried that beneath the dead lay the undead waiting for an excuse to burst through. The Dyers struggled to keep up with the coffin’s pace. Andrew resembled Oswald right after he was shot. Did that make me Ruby? And Richard and Jamie avoided eye contact but I could feel their scrutiny like a phantom limb around my throat.

We choose what we see. Or what we don’t see. I hated them yet I loved them, knowing that they knew me in full. I thought I heard Richard whisper to his father, “Pay no attention,” and I wondered if I had some sway on its meaning, or was he making an unconscious, possibly conscious, allusion to the last line of
Ampersand
, in the epilogue, after Edgar Mead bumps into Veck?

Did the ghost of my father haunt these proceedings as well? There are so many possible meanings, victim or villain, son or father, me or you. The Dyers were outside now, heading toward the waiting limousine, and while a reception was to follow I was certain Andrew would go back to his apartment with Richard and Jamie.
Pay no attention
. But to what? The hymn finished and the organ tiptoed into the postlude. People started to move from pew to aisle, red-eyed and unsteady, slowed as if their mourning were as deep as chest-high water. What happens now? Where should I go from here? My concern was mostly focused on the next ten minutes but it also stretched into the coming
week and month and year. I saw Ashley alone and was glad she saw me, her anger briefly subsumed by a sadness I dared wrap myself in. While talking was out of the question, I did manage the merest opening of my hand, and I hoped she recognized something in that wave, whether a glimpse of my children or of my father or of just plain me, something in that code that was worth keeping, even if only from a distance. There were other familiar faces as well, old students and friends. After a certain age you have to pretend that people care about you. For a moment I imagined rushing past them all, my shoes going
clock
against the limestone
—clock-clock-clock-clock
as I hustled down the steps outside and ran toward the limo, my imagination uncertain of what I would do or say when or if the window rolled down, if the limo was still parked or already heading home, if the Dyers would hear me or notice me chasing behind, if they would let me continue with this dream for a while longer before I had to return to my small room. But in my defense, I remained where I was, head lowered and in tears, and I would remain in place until the whole church emptied. But do you even care? Who are you anyway? Somewhere, I swear, I think I heard bells.