Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

by Seth Lerer

  We woke up the next morning to the chatter of the prostitutes, their makeup smeared, their costumes disarrayed, their work done. The hotel’s breakfast nook was cleared for the Americans, and my father’s daylight face showed just how far from first class we were, fooled by the naïveté of our Pittsburgh travel agent (“quaint hotel in the heart of old Paris”). Mom and Dad acted out their anger. “How could you?” she accused. And him: “You’re just upset because you’re getting your period.” “That’s it! We’re going to Fouquet’s.” In defiance, Mom announced that we were going to have lunch at the most famous restaurant she could recall, Fouquet’s on the Champs-Élysées. She must have read about it as a teenager, the haunt of Chaplin, Chevalier, and Dietrich; a Brooklyn girl’s fantasy of where the elite meet to eat.

  We were not disappointed. Greeted at the door with graciousness and care by a mâitre d’ with fluent English, the four of us, without a reservation, were escorted to a lovely table in the sun, handed a handwritten menu (which we could not read), and asked what kind of food we liked. “Roast beef,” I said, and he replied, “That’s fine, but I must warn you, it will be very rare.” I acceded. It came, a slab cut from the whole roast, thick and bloody, practically quivering. I don’t remember what anyone else had, but when the time came for dessert, Mom confessed to the mâitre d’ that she had read a story once in which someone had eaten nothing but a perfect peach. He bowed slightly, snapped his fingers, and a young waiter in red came by. Words were exchanged, and, like a magician pulling something from a sleeve, he produced the largest, most fragrant, most perfect peach that any of us had ever seen.

  Two subwaiters arrived. Mom was presented with a clean white plate, a little knife and fork, and a small glass of sweet white wine. The waiter took the peach, gauging its heft in his hand, and then took the back of a butter knife and deftly rubbed it all along the skin. Then, taking a tiny sharp knife, he made a small incision in the cleft. Setting the peach on the plate, cut side down, he placed his fingers around the top, squeezed a little, and the entire skin came off at once, revealing a whole, wet, blushing fruit. Mom clapped her hands together like a nine-year-old. And at that moment I knew that this mâitre d’ knew more about my mother than we ever could: that what she wanted was a taste of magic; that all fruit, of whatever kind, should be presented as if it were sheathed in sin. And for those fifteen minutes that she ate that peach, I loved her.

  We returned three weeks later to a Pittsburgh wreathed in summer smoke blown over from the mills along the river. Anne would not see me, would not answer the phone. I went over to her house to see if she was through with me, to see if all she’d wanted in that field was her adulthood. I knocked and found the door opened by her mother who looked at me as if I were a ghost. “She’s not here.” Who was the ghost now? When sophomore year began, I heard that she had run away, rumored to have become pregnant. Not by me, I was sure, though it was not until my senior year that I dared sleep with anyone again.

  For forty years, I dreamed of her. I dreamed of her in college, when failed dates left me at the movies, and I wondered where she was. I dreamed of her after my parents divorced in the late seventies and left Pittsburgh forever—Mom returning to New York, Dad moving to DC—and I realized that I’d never see her again. I dreamed of her throughout the 1980s in Princeton, where I taught, and where I’d see her red hair in the autumn stubble. I dreamed of her after I moved to California with my wife in 1990, when my college students decided to stage a sixties party and asked me for fashion advice. They stood there in my Stanford office, well-cared-for children of the Reagan years, who knew no social trauma other than the Challenger disaster, dressed in macramé vests, beaded headbands, and paisley bell-bottoms.

  I dreamed of her again, three years ago, the night after I saw my own son, at seventeen, and his girlfriend taking shelter at the laptop in his room. Nights once spent with his hobbies began to pass at the screen. Even when together, he and his girlfriend seemed to text rather than talk. There were no student newspapers to annotate, no notes to pass in class. Desire passed across touch pads, “I love you” evanescing in a keystroke. Will he have relics of his love? I still have bits and pieces of my high school life: a Pittsburgh bus transfer slipped as a bookmark in a novel; a letter written on the flyleaf of a Signet Shakespeare; a Polaroid faded to coppery sheen. One evening my wife and I came home to find him texting on the couch, two dirty dinner plates, two half-filled glasses, and two crumpled napkins on the dining table. He looked at me as if to say, “Don’t tell Mom that I had a girl over.” I quickly cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on, letting the rushing of its spray drown out the noise of our complicity, not letting on to Mom that there was anything amiss. That night, I would stay up until the cycle finished, to restore the clean, warm plates to cupboard stacks, without a trace of her.

  ONE

  Rough Magic

  November 2003.

  I was teaching The Tempest when the department office manager called me out of class. My comparative literature senior seminar had eight students, all but one of them young women whose fathers were college professors, social activists, artists, or scientists. It was supposed to be a course in literary theory with an emphasis on gender and interpretation, but the syllabus—Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, Saussure, De Man, Erich Auerbach, and Judith Butler—soon morphed into weekly meditations on authority and pedagogy, reading things for what they weren’t, and the students’ own literary tastes. Theory became a family romance for them, a way of understanding authorship as if it were paternalism, reading as if it were a household chore. We were a few weeks into the seminar, finishing Shakespeare and turning to later versions of the play—the postcolonial Une Tempête of Aimé Césaire, the science fiction of Forbidden Planet—when the office manager opened the door. “You have to come right now.” I stared across the table at my eager Mirandas and said, quietly, “I think we’ll have to stop.”

  I took the call in the department office, and before I even heard the doctor’s voice I knew that Dad was gone. I called my wife, walked to my car without my coat in the rain, and drove to the hospital.

  Driving.

  As a child I never slept. At night, Dad would pile me into the car (no baby seat, no seat belts, a cigarette held out the window) and drive for hours till I dropped off. Sometimes, he would sing as he drove, his tuneless voice repeating the same nursery rhyme over and over.

  I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear,

  But a silver nutmeg, and a golden pear.

  And then I would awake in my own bed, not knowing how I got there, the smell of Kents hanging on my pj’s like a caul.

  Some nights, we’d all go out—Dad, Mom, my baby brother—just to fill the time. Whenever we got out of the car, my eyes would dart right to the ground. I’d pick up anything: a rusted bolt, a spent flashbulb, string, wire, pennies. I was collecting material for some great project, a machine that would transmute these scraps into a mystery, or that would reanimate the tossed-off body parts of old equipment. Every now and then, there’d be a real find. Once, when I was six, we drove out to Long Island to an Alexander’s store to buy my mom a fur coat. In the parking lot, I found a piece of jetsam from another car. It may have been a solenoid, or a carburetor valve, or a gear. Whatever it had once been, it turned into a talisman in my pocket, and I held on to it on the ride back, as I fell asleep against Mom’s new mouton coat.

  And then, after we moved to Boston, there were the endless drives returning to New York to see relatives or friends. We always drove at night. Eight p.m. and the dinner dishes done, my father would announce, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to go.” And sure as simpletons, my brother and I would jump up. Sure, let’s go, what an adventure. Let’s drive all night back to New York. In those days, the two-hundred-and-forty-mile trip took nine hours, over old US highways, turnpikes, and toll roads. Stops along the way, great empty cities like Hartford, trucks, backups, midnight snacks. Then the wall of
traffic when we reached Co-op City. Finally, the place we’d stay. “You’re father was too cheap,” Mom would say, “to spend a night in a real hotel. We always lived on handouts.” But that was the way then. You were expected to drop in, you expected people. Anyone could come at any time. Keep the fridge full, you never know when guests might show up. When we moved to Boston, we kept the fridge full for three years. No one came.

  One day, when I was in eleventh grade, my friends and I drove to Kentucky from Pittsburgh. It was one of those vague Saturdays of late high school, one of those I-don’t-know-what-do-you-want-to-do days, and we piled into our old Renault and drove. Just drove. South, through Pennsylvania coal country, West Virginia hills. Cars up on blocks in gas stations for sale for seventy-five dollars, farm eggs a nickel apiece. We stopped at a roadside place where my friend, to my horror, ordered a liverwurst sandwich, and I don’t know what I had but I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and the counter fell silent, like they’d never seen one before, and who was this kid with the Pennsylvania plates coming in with his buds and a twenty.

  But that’s what I learned from Dad: to pull a twenty from your wallet like it’s magic, to show up out of nowhere and amaze the crowd and disappear.

  Years later, I was listening to an interview with Shari Lewis on the radio, and she went on, not about Lamb Chop or her bangs, but about her dad. He was a founding member of Yeshiva University, and in the evenings after classes he would teach her magic tricks. “My father,” she reflected, “was like the official magician of New York.” Passing a closet one day, “Daddy heard my sister screaming to be let out. He opened the door, and my sister was nowhere to be seen.” Shari had discovered her ability to throw her voice. Her parents put her onstage at eighteen months. “My parents were school teachers. They ran summer camps, and I was put onstage with a crepe-paper bow.”

  My father was the unofficial magician of New York. He did no juggling, no ventriloquism. Unlike my friends’ fathers, he could not fix a leak, start a lawn mower, or change a broken lightbulb with a raw potato. He worked, instead, his magic in the car. The theater of his majesty was the front seat, as he drove almost without looking, talking to me next to him, waving at strangers out the window. I swear he had a third eye in his left ear; otherwise, how could he see the road?

  We would drive for hours around Brooklyn, often with one of his friends (usually a former student who, now in his twenties, had little to do but cruise the city with a teacher and his kid), down Pitkin Avenue to Jacks, looking for two-dollar sport coats, or to the Knox Hat Shop, where rows of dark felt hats lay like corpses. I never remember my father wearing a hat, though. It was all part of his magic: the pompadoured hair, the high forehead. He didn’t need a hat to pull anything out of. Some days we would walk into a restaurant, and people would turn, as if they’d expected us. We’d enter elevators, he would count to three and snap his fingers, and the doors would close. How did he do it? One night, when I was seven, we drove deep into Manhattan, parked, and came upon the Union Carbide Building. Inside, there was an exhibit about atoms, chemistry, and power. A model of a uranium atom spun inside a great blue plastic globe. It was like being taken on a tour of matter’s very heart, and I held his hand as if he were my Christmas ghost flying me over unexpected streets.

  I grew up longing to relive his skill. Once at a conference in the 1980s, I turned the corner of a book exhibit with two graduate students in tow, only to find a champagne reception in progress for a newly minted author. We were all handed glasses as if we had been expected, and I turned to my students and smiled. “Like how I did that?” There was the time, when I was teaching a freshman seminar at Stanford, that I trooped the students into downtown Palo Alto for a final lunch, and before we could hit the restaurant, we were accosted by a famous TV anchor with a mike: what did we think of the Starr Report? It was breaking news, and all the students spoke into the mike, on camera, with a poise that came from years of suburban assurance, and I said to them, when it was over, “How many other teachers get you on TV?”

  And then there was the night when I was eight when Dad failed to come home. Just months before, he had bought a new, silver Firebird convertible. We’d put the top down, cruise around, and put the top up (that was a day’s play). He always said he could never afford that car, but he bought it anyway. It stood out like an open zipper on the dull street of my third grade. And then, one night, he did not come home. We went to bed. Mom woke me up at six or seven in the morning to say that he’d been in a bad accident, but he was fine. What happened? He had gone to a meeting—an investment club? a teacher’s union thing? a temple board group?—and when it was over, the car wouldn’t start. He had called for a tow, was sitting on the hood smoking a cigarette, when something possessed him to get back inside. And then the crash. A drunken driver, we were told, plowed into the parked car, with Dad inside it, sending the whole thing skittering down the block, the emergency brake still on.

  The car was totaled (the first time I’d heard that word). Nothing salvageable. The next day, he went out and bought the dullest, most anonymous car he could find, a deep green Chevrolet Impala. And that summer, we drove to Boston in it.

  Fifteen years later, after the divorce, we reconvened for my brother’s Princeton graduation. Mom and I sat there in a dorm room, waiting for Dad to pick us up and take us to the ceremony, and she opened up.

  “That accident. Please. There was no meeting. It had been a tryst. You know what he is. I knew it when we married. I brought him home to meet my mother after we were in the Brooklyn College production of Blithe Spirit together. She said to me, ‘Who is this man who is an actor?’ And at the wedding, Aunt Gussie came up to me and said, ‘You know, he’s a fagelah.’ Well, what did I care? I wanted to get out of that house, and he married me. My father was sick. God, how I still miss him. He sold chocolates and smoked cigars. He taught himself to sing by listening to John McCormack records. He loved to dance. Six weeks after I married, he was dead.

  “To his credit, your father got me going after that. He forced me to finish college, forced me to get that master’s degree, shoved me out of the house to go to work. We had a good time, acting in the plays at night and then going to the Garfield Restaurant for cheesecake. But then you were born, and then your brother, and everything changed. He was never home. And when he was, he brought his boys with him. The year you were born, he was teaching a ninth-grade class at Huddie Junior High, and all the kids chipped in and got you a blue blanket. I still have it. They were your first babysitters. Then they became his friends. It was fun at first, but after a while I knew what was going on and resented it. He’d bring home these men, now in their twenties, and I’d have to make them dinner while they sat around, and I would have to watch them worship him. Him. A ninth-grade teacher.

  “Here’s what I think: one night he was going off to meet someone, and someone else had heard about it and they set out to get him. Someone tried to kill him plowing into the parked car like that. Maybe it was one of those boys, or an angry dad, or somebody from school he made a pass at. It doesn’t matter. I’m telling you, that’s why we moved to Boston. How he got into Harvard is a mystery to me. And the only way he got that degree was because the dean of the school, who saw right through your father, was killed in a plane crash. So they had to give him the degree. You wonder why he couldn’t get a job back in New York? Everybody knew.

  “It was no better in Boston. Those families we spent those horrible Thanksgivings with—do you think those kids knew about their fathers? There was that Frenchman and his family, and every chance he got he’d hug Larry and say things like, ‘I love you like a madman.’ And then there was that Englishman who worked in the local school system. Do you remember that big old house in Cambridge? Dad loved that man because he had an accent and an eye patch. When he first introduced me to him, I thought he looked like Claude Rains. Your father probably thought so too. You and your brother and the other kids were upstairs watching TV, and the four adults were
downstairs, cleaning up the dishes, and their hands touched.

  “We could have had a life in Boston, too, but your father couldn’t let it go. He did get one job offer out of grad school, at the school of education at Texas A&M. I remember he came back from the trip, and his advisor came to dinner: Dr. Hunt, a wonderful man, a Texan, Eisenhower’s assistant secretary of education, a decent, decent man. He turned to Larry and he said, ‘If you go to College Station there will be a cross burning on your lawn the first night. Think of your children.’ And Larry thought he was talking about being Jewish.

  “If you ask me, the only way he got that job in Pittsburgh was he slept his way into it.

  “The man was a liar. And a terrible driver. I can’t get into a car with him, the way he talks and tailgates and weaves around. Is he really going to pick us up? I’d rather walk. It’s a miracle he hasn’t died in a car.”

  He died in a hospital bed. He had gone in for heart-valve surgery, his voluble Argentinean surgeon assuring me that it was all routine. My father introduced me in Yiddish as mein zindel, the surgeon smiled and babbled something about nachas, yichas, and sachel. He shook my hand and six weeks later—after losing thirty pounds, after a regime of Coumadin, after two return visits to have his heart restarted—my father checked himself into the emergency room with back pain and just stopped living on the gurney.

  I found the hospital and parked illegally on a side street, went in at the first door I saw, and found a desk. “My father passed away. I’m here to see the body.” The nurse looked at me, unfazed, as if I were picking up my dry cleaning. She asked my name, got on the phone, and soon directed me to a room in another wing. An elevator, two hallways, a double door, and then a suite of rooms around a nurse’s station. I mentioned his name. “Are you his brother?” No, I’m his son. Now she looked at me as if I’d lied, but she got up and walked me to the room, pulled back the curtain, and left me there.