It is of this account Will thinks as he starts out on his project. A portrait of his father in the first person. What better way to get to know a man than to see through his eyes, walk in his shoes. He will dust off the old textbook—if he hasn’t sold it off already—and get to work. Henry tells him, “You do this right and you’ll have the catharsis it took your father a lifetime to achieve.”
From his mother, relics. As they’d never formally divorced, she had inherited the bulk of her husband’s effects. In the course of three major moves, she has divested herself of much of it, but what remains—in two large plastic bins—she unearths from the back of a closet. Clothing neatly folded. Random photographs: a woman passed out, a dog and a cat, a guy smiling with a crying kid, several lurid close-ups of bruises and busted lips. An old musical score. A stack of letters addressed to the prison with various return addresses. Old journals and manuscripts. Two books, one by Rushdie and a slim volume in French. He sits with his mother at the kitchen table in her apartment sorting through it all. She says, “Do you remember what you said on your first trip out to see him?”
Will hadn’t wanted to go. He was terrified at what might happen. He wept on the ride up. His mother said he could stay in the car with his grandparents, but she said it in a way that made him ashamed of even considering the option, so he went in. He hardly recognized his father. He was bald, and his eye was full of blood. Will could barely look. But he had never in his life seen his father so happy to see him. He swept Will up in his arms and pressed him close, and he smelled like shaving cream. He sat and listened to his parents talk. His father told his mother about the people that he knew here, and his mother told him about her life, and they talked about Will, even though he was sitting right there. By the end of the visit, they were touching hands across the table. When they said good-bye he hugged his father and whispered in his ear, I’m sorry. His father whispered back, I’m sorry, too. Will wept, hard, heaving for breath, and wouldn’t take his mother’s hand. In the car he made a promise.
“I promised to visit him every weekend,” Will says.
“I should have kept you to it.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference. I was already at school, fighting for my life.”
It occurs to Will that this project, playing the role of his own father, will require him to complete an Oedipal journey he’s been on for the past ten years. To become his mother’s husband, her lover. Setting the lid on the box now, he regards her across the table. She is still beautiful. Age has hollowed her out some, given her face a new angularity. Her hair is long, which she keeps braided most days in a single black satin rope down her back. In her late thirties, she is younger than the parents of many kids he grew up with. He introduced her to one of his roommates some weeks back who went flush at the meeting. “That’s your mother?”
Will says, “You don’t have to sacrifice your life, too, you know. You deserve to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“When was the last time you were on a date?”
“Ugh, I thought we were talking about happiness.”
“You should find someone.”
“You should get this stuff out of my house. It’ll finally free up enough space in that closet to hang my dresses.”
From the documentary, eyewitnesses. He orders the DVD online; when it arrives, he does the painstaking work of transcribing his father’s words, in a sense trying to learn his father through the very fingertips. He contacts the filmmakers. Two have moved out to Los Angeles. The third manages a movie theater in Soho. Will arranges the meeting. On the phone, the man seemed overjoyed to hear from him, eager for a reunion. And yet, standing in the large atrium of the movie theater, the man does not recognize Will, and Will has to wave him over.
They sit at one of the cast-iron café tables. “This place is going out of business,” he says, “can you believe it? After twenty-one years, it’s the end of an era. There just aren’t enough of these kinds of movies made anymore to sustain a box office for them. At least not in the US. And what’s an arthouse without art? For all of your father’s talk, that was one thing he got right. We live in a post-art world. The promise that Susan Sontag saw in film—it’s lost. We just don’t have the attention span for cinematic art. Two hours squirming in your seat, struggling with something you don’t understand? It’s too much for most people.”
They talk about their time together a decade ago. Halloween, Thanksgiving, the prank-call marathon. The man carefully sidesteps Will’s lie—the confrontation in the court’s bathroom, the man’s own testimony during the trial—which Will is grateful for. Will explains his project. He pulls out a voice recorder and asks if it would be okay to record what they talk about, and with the man’s consent Will presses RECORD. Will asks how he knew his father, and the man describes their first meeting in the library at Morningside Conservatory many years ago, the gangly teenager with floppy hair penciling in notes on a piece of staff paper. As it turns out this man and Will’s father have much in common, both native Manhattanites born into the arts. He talks some about his own history—his own mother and father, his pursuits and dreams, his misadventures in love. He talks about the profound effect Will’s father had on him.
“I was very impressed by your father, Will. I wanted his passion, his drive. This was a time in my life when I was looking for the Answer, capital A, and your father seemed to have it—or at the very least was in hot pursuit of it—and so I followed him to the end of his road. He found the answer, I think. Ironic that it turned out to be one I already had. In An, in Viktoria, in Penelope.”
“My mother.”
“I was very taken with your mother. In the end, that’s all I was really looking for. As you know, being an only child can be a lonely business, and back then I thought I needed a packed movie theater of people, a national audience, to end the loneliness. But I didn’t need an audience. I needed a wife. A son. A family.” He had declined the invitation of his two friends to come out to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. He no longer wanted that. What he wanted he’d lucked into some months after his promotion to manager seven years ago. She was his first hire. When the weekend manager quit, he pushed for her promotion just so that he could ask her out and not be in danger of workplace harassment. She now manages their sister theater on the Upper East Side. They were married in 2004, and she has borne him two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, age two and age five. He shows Will the pictures. His wife is now pregnant with their third.
Will asks about his father, for him to relate anything that might shed light on the kind of man he’d been. “I used to think it was shamelessness, with your father. And I mean that quite literally. You know those people, missing that part of their brain that allows them to sense pain? They only know that they’ve burned themselves after they smell flesh cooking on the stove coils. That your father literally didn’t have the capacity for shame is what I mean. But that day up there on the stand I realized—he’s humiliated! This man is nothing but shame. Has been this whole time, his whole life maybe. To know this and then to look back on those things he did publicly, that he made public. Shocking things, humiliating things. This took courage to do. Your father was brave, Will. And he loved you a great deal. You have to believe that. And as strange as this may sound, those shocking and humiliating things? He wrote those things to protect you. He was trying to protect you from himself, the only way he knew how.”
At their parting, they hug. The man, Will’s one-time babysitter, walks him down the front steps of the theater and wishes him luck with his project. They make plans to speak again.
From here, Will heads south, to the address he’s been given. The man told Will that after Doc’s passing two years ago, Cynthia had left to be with relatives back in New Jersey and the carriage house was sold, but Will wants to see for himself.
It is, unsurprisingly, a boutique clothing shop now, like every other shop in the neighborhood. Its exterior is meticulously restored and
barely recognizable but for the distinctive proscenium arch. This is now fitted with a single piece of plate glass and serves as a window display. Faceless mannequins wearing red cotton dresses and black leggings assume poses of impatience: hand on hip, arms folded. The entrance is through the side door. Will steps inside. It’s freezing. The place is gutted raw and dimly lit. The hip-hop beat suggests a fancy cocktail lounge. There isn’t a single person working here who’s a day older than Will. He doesn’t bother to ask any questions; it’s clear nobody here knows anything. He takes a few pictures with his phone and leaves.
He has enough to go on, or at least enough to start with. So at home, alone in his room, he begins:
I was born on November 29, 1968, to Cynthia Bonjorni and Arthur “Doc” Morel Senior. I lived on Greene Street and West Broadway in New York City. In this vein he writes several pages. A few hours later, though, he stops, frustrated. Even though the facts are right, none of the sentences feels authentic. The costume does not fit. This much is clear, and no amount of aping around in it will help him accomplish what he has set out to do. And besides, he can’t see his father while he’s walking around inside his suit. He needs to be able to see the man.
So. Forget the first-person father. He tries again, like this:
The earliest memory I have of my father is from the age of four. He has me by the hand and we are heading up the front walk of our apartment building in Queens. But soon enough, Will finds himself deep into the woods of his own life, his father lost somewhere along the trail.
On a blank index card, in felt pen, Will writes, Who is Arthur Morel? and tacks it onto the corkboard above his writing desk, next to the picture Henry brought over earlier that week: lush Vietnamese foliage, crowded village in the background. A recent photo, Henry explained, of a place that had been razed in the late sixties by Agent Orange. “Given time,” Henry said, “even scorched earth recovers.”
Will takes a step back. He spends the rest of the evening cleaning his room. He organizes his books on the small homemade bookshelf by his closet. With a notepad and pen at his side, he sits up in bed listening through earphones to the interview with his former babysitter, transcribing a few of the more salient moments. Then he turns off the light and goes to bed.
The next morning, with a fresh cup of coffee, he begins again. Henry is right. The mornings are much better for thinking. His head feels like a clear autumn day. He looks through his notes from the night before. Most of it is in shorthand, barely legible, but among the scrawl is a sentence that calls out to him:
The editor I was to fire worked out of his one bedroom in Herald Square. Promising, he thinks, more promising at least than last night’s efforts.
Will fires up his laptop and types out the line into a blank document, and when he does this, a window opens. There is something about the point of view, through the eyes of the man whose life has run parallel to his father’s, eliding at key moments. Who talked about his father with great admiration, the first man to ever describe his father to him in fatherly terms, as courageous, protective. This is who should tell the story: his father’s only friend.
Maybe, just maybe, he can show Will the way.
Acknowledgments
A heartfelt thanks to Bob Dolan, first and foremost, for penning The Dead Guy’s Son and for the ensuing adventures in filmmaking that it inspired.
Thanks to Mark Doten, whose sharp eye and editorial telepathy transformed this manuscript into the novel I’d been hoping for.
And Bronwen Hruska, along with the rest of the Soho team for their outright enthusiasm, and for taking a chance on this book.
Thanks to Douglas Stewart, whose faith in my abilities is a bottomless well.
To John Bean, for helping me figure it all out.
Good friends Leigh Anderson, Zoe Finkel, Jason Grunebaum, and Melissa Kirsch: Thank you for your valuable feedback on a messy first draft. And thanks to other readers along the way for their time and kind words: Jami Attenberg, David Gordon, T Cooper, Margarita Shalina, Michael Seidenberg and Cale Hand.
Thank you to Columbia University mentors Victoria Redel and Binnie Kirshenbaum for their support and generous public praise. Also to Sigrid Nunez, Thomas Beller, Sam Lipsyte, and Jessica Hagedorn, other mentors whose teaching has been invaluable.
To the Owen Summer Residence Fellowship, for providing me with an environment perfectly suited to writing a book.
And, of course, a round of thanks to the Tracys: Catherine, Arnold, Claudia, Sam, Dee, Peter, Alec, Alexandra, and Aunt Joan Carvo. I couldn’t ask for a more supportive and encouraging group of in-laws.
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