Closing Time (45 page)

My father reacted to nearly losing his only son the way he reacted to all disasters: by retreating into the convenient obliviousness of the alkie and refusing to discuss it. Clearly, he was taken aback by what had occurred; with an infant sister already written up on his rap sheet, prematurely shipping a son to the morgue would probably have put the kibosh on any hopes of entering the Kingdom of Heaven. We never had another knock-down, drag-out fight after that, because to him my botched suicide attempt was proof of emotional delicacy, suggesting that the infrastructure of sanity in my personality was so fragile that an ill-chosen word might push me over the edge. From now on, he would have to walk on eggshells in the way only he could.

I spent two weeks in the hospital recuperating from the first twenty years of my life, then passed the remainder of the summer at friends’ houses or in New York with my two older sisters. I cannot recall my first visit home afterward or when I next saw my father. He did not visit me in the hospital, not out of malice or indifference but because the professionals thought it would be a bad idea for us to see each other. A few weeks later, I moved into inexpensive lodgings my mother found in the classifieds, a functional little room on the third story of a stately home that sat two blocks down the street from Saint Joseph’s College, directly opposite the cardinal’s residence. There were two other tenants in the house: a hairstylist who looked like David Lee Roth ten years before even Roth dared to and a scrawny Chinese math major who drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, spent twelve hours a day playing cards and the other twelve waiting on tables in a Chinese restaurant. It was as if he were competing for a coveted ethnic-stereotype award and wanted to make sure he locked it up early. He graduated summa cum laude, a remarkable achievement for someone who never went to class and never, ever went to bed.

My senior year in college was unexpectedly sublime. Because I had the highest grade-point average among liberal arts majors, I was eligible for an independent-study program called the College Scholar. It meant that instead of attending classes like everyone else, I could follow a directed-readings program and spend all my time exploring the world’s foremost literary masterpieces. The whole thing was very sixties; who needed classes and teachers and peers and term papers when you could stay in bed, get loaded, and read
The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
? Freed from the normal constraints of the otherwise rigorous Jesuit curriculum, I devoured the works of Molière, Corneille, and Racine, as well as the collected plays of the career criminal Jean Genet and the right-wing Catholic poet Paul Claudel, whom I compared in an original though ultimately pointless honors thesis whose unsurprising conclusion was that Genet and Claudel had almost nothing in common, except that a lot of French people found them contemptible and annoying. I also read every play by Shakespeare’s major contemporaries—John Ford, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Ben Jonson—arriving at the similarly unsurprising conclusion that, compared to the thirty-seven plays churned out by the Bard of Avon, their work didn’t add up to much. It also didn’t add up to much compared to the works of Molière, Racine, and Corneille or, for that matter, Claudel and Genet.

When I was not busy studying, I would attend any affordable concert in the tristate area, whether rock, jazz, or classical, only drawing the line at country-and-western—culturally irrelevant to a young urbanite—and folk, which made my skin crawl, as it had ever since I was first exposed to Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and others of their pop Stalinist ilk back in the seminary. At these concerts, like everyone else in my age group, I would consume an intimidating quantity of alcohol, even if Mahler’s Eighth was on the program. I also started dating a vivacious, ruddy-cheeked, raven-haired girl from the suburbs whose father had taken early retirement from the post office so he could sit home and read the Great Books. Every weekend when I turned up at her house, I would find him lounging in a recliner, working his way through Plato’s
Republic
or
The Decameron,
a stein of beer poised on the adjoining table.

“That Boccaccio was sure a character,” he would cheerfully greet me with as I strolled into his house. “By the way, there’s plenty of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the fridge.”

As soon as I had a cold lager in my hand, he would begin grilling me about the vital lie or the causes of the Peloponnesian War or whether Brutus was a hero or a snake to betray his good friend Julius Caesar, who may have been his bastard son via his mistress Servilia. Because he was a working-class man who had little formal education, it was sometimes difficult for him to grasp exactly what Plato or Suetonius or Gibbon was driving at in a certain passage, or to place Ernest Hemingway’s no-frills style in historical context vis-à-vis Theodore Dreiser and Émile Zola. Still, there was something heroic about this menopausal self-actualization project, this armchair quest for the autodidact’s Holy Grail. Out there somewhere, just beyond the horizon, lay a world of unimaginable splendor and sophistication, and though it might sometimes seem out of reach, if you kept on reading, studying, striving, you could one day arrive there. I admired him for his undertaking and continued to date his delightful daughter long after I knew the relationship was going nowhere, because I enjoyed his company at least as much as I enjoyed hers. In another life, he might have been my father. And a very good one he would have been.

One other memory stands out from my final year in college: the four-hour course I took every Tuesday afternoon at the Barnes Foundation, the secretive, pugnaciously antisocial art museum whose grounds abutted the campus of Saint Joseph’s College on the Lower Merion side of City Line Avenue. For decades, the museum had refused to open its doors to the public, limiting its audience to authentic cognoscenti, whose ranks, it had decided, did not include art critics, museum directors, curators, art historians, or, for that matter, most cognoscenti. It was like one of those spooky South Philadelphia social clubs, which, by the very act of barring its doors to non-Italians, immediately deepened the atmosphere of intrigue and menace when in fact all anyone was doing inside was smoking
Toscanis
and hiding from their wives. In the case of the Barnes Foundation, its ardently publicized passion for obscurity and seclusion and its high-decibel entreaties to be left alone made people wonder exactly what was going on behind its locked doors. What was going on was simple: A bunch of crackpots, plus the half-dozen people in the art world they did not despise, were hiding indoors with $6 billion worth of modern art, gloating over the fact that only a few hundred museumgoers a year ever got to see their breathtaking collection of Soutines, and even then only because the foundation had a gun cocked to its head. Lots of museums are haughty, but the Barnes was downright mean.

Only recently had a lawsuit brought by the state of Pennsylvania compelled the furtive, spiteful institution to open its doors and let ordinary people see its fabulous collection. The Barnes, founded by a man who had made a fortune in the eyewash racket but was now long dead, had compromised with the authorities by deigning to allow a microscopic number of guests to visit the museum a few times a week, but only after securing hard-to-obtain reservations. The institution also announced that it would offer a ponderous art-appreciation course to select members of the community, whose numbers would include ten students from Saint Joseph’s. Aspiring aesthetes were admitted only after a personal interview with Albert Barnes’s mentor, coconspirator, and, some said, mistress, the lovely but very strange Violette de Mazia.

De Mazia, like Barnes, was quite the eccentric. Every Tuesday, once we had all been padlocked inside the museum for the entire afternoon—no one was allowed to leave early, not even if nuclear war erupted—she would waft into the main gallery clad in a billowing gown color-coded with the paintings to be discussed that day. She would then perch her sparrowlike body on a tall stool, stare at us from behind her dark sunglasses, and lecture in a high-pitched voice for four hours straight, vainly attempting to convince the ninety members of the class that there were no bulls or matadors or picadors or symbols of Spain’s decline or its Catholic past in the Picasso painting hanging on the wall directly behind her, because paintings consisted only of color, light, geometric structures, shading, and amorphous, ineffable entities called “broad human values,” which the rest of us referred to as “B.H.V.’s.” The bulls and matadors were optical illusions.

Sometimes the anorexic Gaul would hang the paintings upside down to prove that a great work of art was equally riveting no matter which way you looked at it, but none of us had any idea what she was talking about, most certainly not the middle-aged Teuton with the black eye patch, who was widely suspected of being a Nazi spy—a latter-day Rip Van Winkle of fascist bent who had somehow managed to sleep through all the fireworks back in the forties and was now trying to make up for lost time by infiltrating one of the most esoteric corners of the art world. De Mazia, a bantamweight, if that, would sit in exactly the same spot where Bertrand Russell once ensconced himself while he was giving a series of lectures that ultimately became
The History of Western Philosophy.
When Russell complained that the nudes were making it hard for his students to concentrate, Barnes more or less replied, “My dear fellow, what nudes?” It was that kind of operation.

Ms. de Mazia was an amazingly fine-looking woman for one so emaciated and advanced in years (she was already in her seventies but born in France, which gave her an unfair advantage over all the other women in the room), and Barnes’s collection of Matisses, Gauguins, Renoirs, and Soutines was second to none, so I thoroughly enjoyed that course, even though, as soon as she started talking about broad human values and hanging the Picassos at cockeyed angles, I could see that she was as mad as a hatter.

Back home in Olney, which I rarely visited after Susan’s death, things were much the same. In the long run, the near-tragedy of the previous summer had not noticeably improved my father’s disposition. He continued to drink with homicidal zeal; he continued to conduct his nocturnal colloquies with invisible specters; he continued to sink into the abyss he had been sinking into since 1958. None of it was of any consequence to me; I would never live in his house again, and whatever happened to him from that point onward was his business. When people used the word “father” in my presence, it was like hearing a once-familiar term from a foreign language whose vocabulary I had now forgotten.

He may have felt the same way about the word “son”; whatever his views on the suicide attempt, our estrangement was complete. The rupture was cemented when I phoned home in May of my senior year to announce that an organization called the Alliance Française had awarded me a $2,000 scholarship to spend a year in France. My French teacher Tom Donahue had suggested that I apply for the scholarship at the end of my senior year, a suggestion I viewed as ludicrous because, even though I could read the language reasonably well, my spoken French was almost actionably bad. He assured me that this did not matter, because the Alliance Française promoted French culture, not French grammar, and as I had already read the complete works of Molière and Racine, something no one else under the age of twenty-one in the Greater Delaware Valley could purport to have done, I would have the inside track on the competition. He also said that he could arrange for me to be the final applicant interviewed by the Alliance board, loping in at dusk, by which point the judges would be so weary of perky Swarthmore francophiles smitten by the nuances of the future anterior tense that they would literally fall down on their knees and beg me to take the money.

This is exactly what came to pass: I entered the room and, when asked why I wanted to spend a year in France, immediately ran through the whole F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce sleeping-on-the-floor-at-Shakespeare & Company-when-we-were-very-young-and-very-happy routine, then casually observed that every great non-French writer I could think of—Dante, Erasmus, Edith Wharton, George Orwell, James Baldwin—had lived in Paris, though none of them had died there. I had cribbed this material from Henry Miller, fully aware that, like many of Miller’s assertions, it was not true: Oscar Wilde died in Paris, as did Samuel Beckett. Be that as it may, my spiel manifested an edifying, if jejune, savoir faire; my determination to become a writer was unquestionable; and at least I did not pretend to hold any special place in my heart for the vanished splendors of the future anterior tense, much less the preterit. They gave me the two thousand smackers.

In immigrant lore, when the eldest son becomes the first member of the family to graduate from college, and when he tops it off by winning a scholarship to spend a year in Paris, the parents react jubilantly. Even if no one else in the family has ever been to Paris or has any real expectation of ever getting there, the idea of spending a year in France is imbued with transparent symbolism; it is not some indecipherable cuneiform. But there was no rejoicing on North Second Street when my parents heard my news; they were charter members of an ethnic group that lacked the capacity to enjoy anyone else’s good fortune. They knew that a year in France meant a lot to me, that it was far and away the most important event in my life. But it meant nothing to them. Their lack of enthusiasm did not derive from fear that I would get above my station and expose myself to the uninterrupted series of brutal disappointments that life held in store. Nor was their blasé response an expression of the equally popular Irish-Catholic belief that human existence was a zero-sum operation—that one man’s success by definition was offset by another man’s failure. It was simply a case of my news being irrelevant to them. They were working-class people; they had been beaten down by life. My good fortune was not about to raise their salaries, heal their illnesses, repair their appliances, fix their marriage. Joy was an emotion to which they had long ago lost access.