For Max & Eliza & Olivia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I

Chapter I.i

Chapter I.ii

Chapter I.iii

Part II

Chapter II.i

Chapter II.ii

Chapter II.iii

Part III

Chapter III.i

Chapter III.ii

Chapter III.iii

Part IV

Chapter IV.i

Chapter IV.ii

Chapter IV.iii

Part V

Chapter V.i

Chapter V.ii

Chapter V.iii

Part VI

Chapter VI.i

Chapter VI.ii

Chapter VI.iii

Part VII

Chapter VII.i

Chapter VII.ii

Chapter VII.iii

Part VIII

Chapter VIII.i

Chapter VIII.ii

Chapter VIII.iii

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by David Gilbert

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sometimes Louis saw in his sons a mirror that reflected the best of who he was and he was in awe; other times he hoped to see nothing of himself and would insist on molding the opposite, by force if necessary. Fatherhood is the bending of that alpha and that omega, with the wobbly heat of our own fathers mixed in. We love and hate our boys for what they might see.

—A. N. Dyer, The Spared Man

ONCE UPON A TIME, the moon had a moon. This was a long time ago, long before there were sons who begged their fathers for good-night stories, long before there were fathers or sons or stories. The moon’s moon was a good deal smaller than the moon, a saucer as compared to a platter, but for the people of the moon this hardly mattered. They maintained a constant, almost mystic gaze on their moon. You might ask these people—not quite people, more like an intelligent kind of eggplant, their roots eternally clenched—What about the nearby earth, with its glorious blues and greens and ever-changing swirls of white? Surely that gathered up some of their attention? Actually, not at all. The earth to them seemed a looming presence, vaguely sinister, like something that belonged to a sorcerer. This brings up another question: how did the creatures of the earth feel about its two moons? Well, to be honest, life at that time was rather pea-brained, though recently scientists have discovered a direct evolutionary link between those moons and the development of binocular vision in the Cambrian slug.

But one day—for this is a story and there must be a one day—the moon’s moon appeared bigger than normal in the sky, which the wise men of the moon chalked up to something they called intergravitational bloat. Regardless, it shone with even more brilliance, only to be outdone the next evening, when the circumference had quintupled. Nobody was yet frightened; they were too much in awe. But by the tenth day, when the moon’s moon resembled the barrel of a train bearing down on them, the people started to worry. This can’t be happening. What they loved more than anything suddenly seemed destined to kill them. Oh mercy. Oh dear. A resigned kind of panic set in, as they gripped their roots extra tight and prepared for the inevitable impact, which would have come on the twenty-first day except that the moon’s moon passed overhead like a ball slightly overthrown. Thank heavens it missed, the people sighed. Then they turned their heads and followed its course and soon realized its true path: the distant bull’s-eye of earth. It seemed they were not the players here, merely the spectators. On the twenty-fourth day, roughly sixty-five million years ago, the moon’s moon traveled its last mile and a great yet silent blast erupted from the lower hemisphere of earth. And that was it. Their moon was gone. In its place a cataract of gray gradually blinded all those blues and greens and swirls of white.

The sky where their moon once hung now seemed dark and injured, its color the color of a bruise. A new kind of longing set in as they stared at earth. Someone was the first to let go, likely the most depressed. To his amazement, instead of withering, always the assumed prognosis, he began to float—not only float but rise up and drift toward the distant grave site of their beloved moon. “We’ve all been holding on,” he shouted down, newly prophetized, “all this time just holding on.” Was this suicide or deliverance? the wise men of the moon debated while someone else let go, and then another, three then five then eight rising up into the sky, their eyes casting a line toward earth and a hopeful reunion with their moon. Before any opinion could be agreed upon, the horizon shimmered with thousands of fellow travelers, the moon like a dandelion after a lung-clearing fffffffffffffff. The surface grew paler until eventually only one soul remained behind, a child, specifically a boy. Every second he was tempted to join the others, but he was stubborn and mistook his grip for freedom. Friends and family slowly faded from sight, their pleas losing all echo, and many years later, when the sky no longer included their memory, this boy, now a young man, lowered his head and contemplated the ground. Soon he took his first steps, dragging his cumbersome roots across dusty lunar plains, certain that what was lost would soon be eclipsed by whatever he would find.

But that will have to wait until tomorrow night.

I.i

AND THERE HE SAT, up front, all alone in the first pew. For those who asked, the ushers confirmed it with a reluctant nod. Yep, that’s him. For those who cared but said nothing, they gave themselves away by staring sideways and pretending to be impressed by the nearby stained glass, as if devotees of Cornelius the Centurion or Godfrey of Bouillon instead of a seventy-nine-year-old writer with gout. Rumor had it he might show. His oldest and dearest friend, Charles Henry Topping, was dead. Funeral on Tuesday at St. James on 71st and Madison. Be respectful. Dress appropriately. See you there. Some of the faithful brought books in hopes of getting them signed, a long shot but who could resist, and by a quarter of eleven the church was almost full. I myself remember watching friends of my father as they walked down that aisle. While they glimpsed the Slocums and the Coopers and over there the Englehards—hello by way of regretful grin—a number of these fellow mourners baffled them. Were those sneakers? Was that a necklace or a tattoo; a hairdo or a hat? It seemed death had an unfortunate bride’s side. Once seated, all and sundry leafed through the program—good paper, nicely engraved—and gauged the running time in their head, which mercifully lacked a communion. There was a universal thrill for the eulogist since the man up front was notoriously private, bordering on reclusive. Excitement spread via church-wide mutter. Thumbs composed emails, texts, status updates, tweets. This New York funeral suddenly constituted a chance cultural event, one of those I-was-there moments, so prized in this city, even if you had known the writer from way back, knew him before he was famous and won all those awards, knew him as a strong ocean swimmer and an epic climber of trees, knew his mother and his father, his stepfather, knew his childhood friends, all of whom knew him as Andy or Andrew rather than the more unknowable A. N. Dyer.

All this happened in mid-March, twelve years ago. I recall it being the first warm day of the year, a small relief after months of near-impossible cold. Just a week earlier, the temperature sulked in the teens, the windchill dragging the brat into newborn territory. Windows rattled in their sashes, and the sky resembled a headfirst plunge onto cement. After a long winter of dying, my father was finally dead. I remember standing up and covering his face, like they do in the movies, his bright blue socks poking free from the bottom of the comforter. He always wore socks with his pajamas and never bothered to sleep under the sheets. It was as if his dreams had no right to unmake a bed. I went over and opened both windows, no longer cursing the draft but hoping the cold might shelter his body for a bit. But on the day of his funeral, the city seemed near sweltering, even if the thermostat within St. James maintained its autumnal chill, the Episcopalian constant of scotch and tweed.

Churches are glorified attics, A. N. Dyer once wrote, but now he resembled a worshipper deep in prayer—head lowered, hands crammed against stomach. His posture reminded me of a comma, its intent not yet determined. People assumed he was upset. Of course he was upset. He and my father were the oldest of friends, born just eleven days apart in the same Manhattan hospital. Growing up, this minor divide seemed important, with Andrew teasing the older Charlie that he was destined to die first—it was just basic actuarial math—and Andrew would bury his friend and live his remaining numbered days in a glorious Topping-free state. “The worms and creepy-crawlies will eat you while I swig champagne.” This joke carried on until the punch line became infused with intimacy and what once made young Charlie cry now made him smile, even toward the end. “You really are milking this,” Andrew muttered during his final visit. “I’ve had the bubbly on ice for a month now.” He sat by the bed, like a benched player witnessing an awful defeat. My father was no longer speaking. That bully with the scythe straddled his chest and dared him to breathe, c’mon, breathe. So Andrew decided to give his friend the last word by leaning closer and stage-whispering in his ear, “This is where you tell me to go look in the mirror, with all my pills a day and my ruined joints and unsalvageable lower midsection; this is where you point and say with the awful knowledge of those who go first, ‘You’re next.’ ” Andrew was rather pleased with this comeback. He wondered how far back his dying friend could reach, if apologizing was worth all the dragging up, but really he decided the important thing was that he was here, A. N. Dyer in the flesh, today’s visit no small feat considering the state of his big toe. It had been a two-Vicodin morning. Charlie for his troubles sported a morphine drip. “Just look at us,” Andrew started to say when Charlie’s right hand took unexpected flight and flopped like a dead bird onto Andrew’s knee. His fingernails were thick and yellow, and Andrew recalled from his more macabre youth the keratin that keeps growing after death, which raised his eyes to that weedy Topping hair and how in the coffin Charlie would miss his monthly trim and turn bohemian, like Beethoven conducting his own decay. Unnerved, Andrew gave his friend a gentle pat. His own hand seemed hardly any better. Then Charlie tried to speak, he tried and tried—clearly he had something to say—but all meaning remained locked up in his throat and what rattled free sounded like one of those cheap Hollywood scarefests where the living transform into the contagious undead and you had best run. To his credit, Andrew refused to look away. While he was obviously upset, he also seemed embarrassed, perhaps more embarrassed than upset, as if dying involved a humiliating confession. Please let me go, he probably begged to himself. Release me. After a minute of listening to this hopeless rasp he interrupted by saying, “I’m sorry, pal,” and he placed his hand on Charlie’s chest and kissed him softly on the head. That was good enough, right?

Charles Henry Topping earned a respectable if pictureless two-hundred-word obit in The New York Times—lawyer, philanthropist, trustee, world-class decoy collector, and lifelong friend of the novelist A. N. Dyer, who often wrote about the blue-blooded world of the Toppings and the Dyers. Wrote? I’m sure Andrew marveled at that particular choice of tense. It likely surprised him that my father even warranted a mention in the Times. How little a life required nowadays.

The church organist played the last of the Mendelssohn prelude.

Andrew curled farther forward in his pew, as if pressed by the world behind him. If only Isabel were here. She would have known what to say. “Enough thinking about your miserable self.” She could cut through him like no other. All day yesterday Andrew had sat over his IBM Selectric and found little to recall about his friend except that he liked bacon, liked bacon tremendously. Charlie could eat a whole slab of it. BLTs. Bacon burgers. Bacon and mayonnaise sandwiches. Liver wrapped in bacon. Disgusting. Of course there was more to say (after all, the Times managed two hundred words) but it seemed that so much of the Dyer-Topping friendship was based on those early years when action trumped language and bacon was as profound as anything. Since birth their relationship was as fixed as the stars. That was a large part of its charm. Like many men who keep friends in orbits of various length, a month, six months, a year might pass without talking and yet they could pick right up again, unfazed. The two of them were close without question so why bother searching for answers. Talk centered on the trivial, past and present, on summers and schoolmates, those earnest memories of youth, while the stickier issues, like disease and divorce, death and depression, occurred on the subatomic level: they had their fundamental effect, their important interactions, but they had no identifiable consequence when having a pleasant meal together, a meal likely pushed upon them by their ever-attentive wives.

Charlie sure loved his bacon.

Andrew removed the eulogy from his suit jacket.

How can I read this crap in public? he wondered. How will I even manage to climb the lectern without my gout igniting a thousand crystal-cracking explosions? My bedrock is nothing but chalkstone. From his pocket he retrieved then popped his just-in-case Vicodin, the lint-covered backup to his post-breakfast Vicodin. Just swallowing the pill seemed to hurt, as if ground-up glass were part of its pharmacology. The organist approached her tonal amen. Behind the altar loomed that massive golden screen with its carved miniatures of important church figures, once memorized by Andrew and Charlie during their Sunday school days, with that cow Miss Kepplinger insisting on a metronomic recital of names—St. Polycarp, St. Gregory of Nazianzus—a pause and no snack for you—St. Michael, St. Uriel—and while Andrew had a strong memory—St. Raphael, St. Gabriel—if old Miss Moo were tapping her clubfoot today—the fifth archangel up top, um, the patron saint of all who forgive, um, the angel who stopped Abraham’s Issac-slaying hand, um—he would have gone graham crackerless. But there was no tapping. Not today. Mendelssohn was done and Charlie was dead and Andrew was a few minutes away from mortifying his more famous self in front of all these people.

Just leave right now, shouted in his head.

Pull the old fire alarm and bolt.

He blamed the whole mess on the second Mrs. Topping, my stepmother. Lucy had the unique ability to corner a person on the phone. “He did love you,” she told him the day after my father died.

“Yes,” Andrew said.

“So so much.”

“Yes.”

“So proud to have you as a friend. So proud. Just plain proud of you.”

“And I he,” Andrew said, wondering if he was speaking English or Mandarin.

“And the boys, and Grace, they love you too, like a second father really.”

“Their father was a good man.”

“You have such a way with words. As a matter of fact …”

It was ridiculous, her flattery, or perhaps mockery since her lips often pursed the thinnest of smiles, passed down from a particular brand of suburban housewife who could appear both dense and all too wise, like any service industry veteran. Yet somehow by the end of the conversation the divorcée from Oyster Bay had nabbed her prized eulogist. A goddamn eulogy? What could be worse? Maybe a graduation speech. A wedding toast. Andrew had said yes despite the clearest of professional and private intentions, had said yes despite the fact that his last novel, The Spared Man, was published ten years ago and most of that was cribbed from something he had abandoned twenty years before—since then nothing new from the celebrated author of Ampersand and Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men and a dozen other books, not even a letter of decent length. Sometimes it seemed a vital piece had gone loose in his brain and he could feel the bit rattling around, a temporal gear that had slipped its carriage and no longer stamped thoughts into proper words and sentences. He was, in effect, broken. Often he wanted to jam a screwdriver into his ear. Like last night, in his study: he was sitting at his desk distracted by the recent reissue of his books, with that stupid business on their spines (if arranged chronologically they revealed a red line that traced the peaks and valleys of a cardiogram), which, while clever enough, did not take into consideration the random heart conditions after midnight, the arrhythmias and shortnesses of breath and implied flatlines, the irrational fear of sleep, the old friend recently dead and only a few hours to sum up his life. Four-thirty in the morning and chest-deep in his own grave, Andrew reached for that most loathsome and inguinal of writing instruments, the laptop computer. He lowered himself into the underworld of the Internet. Almost as a lark he did a Google search (was he the only one who noticed in its logo a babyish connotation, a sort of infantile infinite?) for eulogy and help and please. Within an hour he found his Eurydice:

My dear friend,

I am here to offer you my very deepest sympathies for the loss you have recently suffered. In this time of grieving it can seem overwhelming to deliver an eulogy in front of an audience of friends and family and clergy and strangers let alone writing said eulogy with all the care it so obviously deserves and all in a matter of a few fraught days. What can you give but tears? Believe me I know what you are going through. I myself was beyond bereft and scared when my brother-in-law asked me to give the eulogy for my much loved but tragically deceased sister and while I was afraid I might not do the lovely part of her life justice I preserved and there were such good feeling and warmth for my words that since then I have written and delivered eulogies for my father, my cousin, my uncle, two of my aunts, my grandmother, countless dear friends, even poor newborns abandoned I have remembered. If you want to skyrocket your confidence and save precious time and rest assured in delivering a memorable tribute to someone who once meant so much to you, then www.eulogiesfromtheheart.com is the most important website you will visit today. My Instant Eulogy Package will give you everything you need to stand tall with appropriate and meaningful sorrow. Let me help bring forth the loss that is struggling within you.

Sincerely and again with deepest condolences,

Emma Norbert

Yes, Andrew thought, Emma Norbert understood. Her photo was front and center, her face soft with the sweetest kind of intelligence, even if the eyes were punctuated with too much makeup, like unnecessary quotation marks. But you could tell she was an honest if dyslexic mourner. Emma had the real words while all Andrew had was artifice. Drunk with scotch and swirled with Vicodin, he considered the fourteen books that would stand as his testament, a handful of older critics giving their kind words, a handful of younger critics challenging such weary opinions. Oh Emma, Andrew thought, what would you say about me for $29.99? He plugged in his information, his credit card number, then pushed ENTER. In five minutes he had his choice of fill-in-the-blank eulogies.

They say that at the end of our time on this earth if you can count a few good friends you are a fortunate person. I know that I am fortunate because I could always count on [insert name] to be the truest friend I ever did know, and today I am sick with despair, doubly sick because [insert name] is not here to repair me with his/her kind words and loving heart …

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.

I just hope I was half the friend that [insert name] was to me, and in the end, when my time is up, God willing I will once again find myself with him/her and we can (a favorite shared activity) again. The sun might set, but there is always the promise of a new day, always the promise, always.

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.

Thine be the glory, risen, conq’ring Son;

Endless is the vict’ry, Thou o’er death hast won

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.

Make us more than conq’rors, through Thy deathless love:

Bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above.

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.

I.ii

BEFORE 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.

“You may be seated,” he said.

The eulogy came first. It took nearly a minute for A. N. Dyer to trudge up to the lectern—even my youngest strained for a view—and I remember thinking, What’s happened to him? His spirit no longer seemed to reach his extremities but pooled around his torso and only fed the essentials. I had last seen him a month earlier, when he visited my father on a Saturday in mid-February. He showed up at the apartment in a knit cap and a wool overcoat and still resembled one of those timeless preps, ruddy and lean, who wore their old age the way a mischievous boy might wear a mask.

“Philip,” he stated solemnly as I opened the door. It forever amazed me that he knew my name, even if he was my godfather. “Freezing out there,” he told me.

“I know, unbelievable,” I said.

That February was an ice age in miniature. Andrew asked if I had a fire burning, I said no, so he clapped his hands and requested a drink. We went into the library, where he browsed through the brown offerings before pouring himself a glass of Glenfiddich. A moment was spent admiring the complete set of miniature ducks and shorebirds carved by Elmer Crowell and lovingly displayed in specially crafted vitrines. Crowell was a master decoy maker, though neither my siblings nor I had any idea of his name let alone his reputation until three years ago, when we put the entire collection up for auction. It was, in certain circles, a big deal. I myself always found them embarrassing, a notch above toys; where other families had real art, in some cases serious art, we had a Very Plump Black-Bellied Plover by Obediah Verity. And my father didn’t even hunt.

“I’ve always liked this room,” Andrew commented. “So very marshy.”

“I suppose.”

“You know your grandfather was quite the shot.”

“That’s what I’ve always heard.”

“Famous for it really. Practically his career. That and tennis and golf and fishing and drinking. And don’t forget the women. He was one sporty bastard, always on the lookout for something to catch or kill or thwack.” Andrew stopped in front of a black duck carved by Shang Wheeler, its surface worn from years of working the water, a half-million-dollar patina. He touched its smooth head. “It does seem an honest art form, in terms of endgame.” He mimed a shotgun and blasted the air. “I for one always missed. They told me I was wrong-eyed, whatever that means, plus I tended to aim too low.” His arched mouth wrapped a certain drawl around his words, a lockjaw that stretched back to the earliest Dutch diphthongs. It was a handsome if easily ridiculed voice, a fellow writer once claiming that A. N. Dyer spoke as if he had Quaaludes stuffed in his ears. “Sorry I haven’t visited as much as I should,” he said.

“Please.”

“Been busy.”

“I’m sure.”

“How are the wife and kids?”

“Fine,” I said, which at the time was true.

“And are those Buckley bums still sucking their thumbs?”

I nodded, privately ashamed of my fallback career though publicly proud of my noble profession. A few years had stretched into an almost unfathomable fifteen of teaching fifth grade at that most patrician of New York elementary schools, three generations’ worth of Topping and Dyer boys on its rolls. I would soon get fired.

Andrew lifted his glass. “Life as an educator, very honorable.”

Perhaps too defensively I told him that I was still writing, stubborn despite the rejections, that I was working on a novel about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the dawning generation gap, that in fact I was taking a sabbatical next year so I could get a good solid draft down. Like a stage mother I pushed my other self forward.

“Good for you,” Andrew said, politely uninterested.

Full disclosure: I entertained vivid if laughable notions of an A. N. Dyer blurb—A huge talent, my heir apparent—for this hypothetical novel of mine. I already had a title, Q.E.D., which was hands down the best part of the book, and I knew the perfect image for the cover: a William Eggleston photograph of a long-haired redhead sprawled on a lawn as if felled in combat, in her right hand a Brownie Hawkeye camera like an unemployed grenade. But beyond the exterior heft of the book, beyond my name written in Copperplate Gothic Bold—PHILIP WEBB TOPPING—beyond the dedication and acknowledgment pages, beyond those summer months where a teacher must justify his existence, Q.E.D. hardly proved anything at all. Over the course of two years I had written maybe fifty pages, yet still I dreamed of A. N. Dyer’s approval, the book a frame for his signature. I have always had an unfortunate tendency to spin myself into alternate universes. Growing up I had a regular fantasy of an accident leaving me orphaned and the Dyer clan taking me in as one of their own. It seemed so obvious that I was born into the wrong family—a suspicion of many a teenager, I suppose—and I knew I could be a good son, the right son, the proper son to this great man, certainly better than his actual sons. Absurd, my imagination. And it lingers. Even nowadays I can find myself turning in bed and trying to will into existence a time machine. Please let me go back, I’ll plead to the darkness, please let me guide my younger self away from this present mess, let me unlink him from my past so I might fade from his view, a retroactive suicide. The stupid things I’ve done, the outright bad things. My memory is like a series of kicks in the gut, including this beaut: my father on his deathbed and here I am a foundling on my own doorstep.

“A fire would be nice,” Andrew said again.

“Should I?”

“No, no, just speaking in old code.” He went and refilled his glass. His drinking hand trembled in an almost rhythmic meter, like a seismograph registering the effects of nearby destruction. “I feel for you,” Andrew said. “It’s impossibly hard, a father’s decline. You both want to say so much but you’re both so afraid of saying the same thing, something like, I hope I wasn’t a terrible disappointment, or some variant on that theme. Of course in the end the only decent answer is a lie.” With that he took a satisfied, almost ceremonial sip.

Maybe in the back of my mind I took offense. After all, the brutal truth was dying down the hall and I, the weaker truth, was simply doing his best. But I was mostly intrigued by this intimate disclosure and decided to lawyer through the opening and ask about his own father, if he remembered him, since I knew the man had died when A. N. Dyer was quite young. Was this a conscious jab? Not at all. I was just curious and if anything wanted to ingratiate myself and express an understanding of his biography without revealing my absolute dedication. But Andrew’s eyes fell onto the floor as if he spotted a nickel that was hardly worth picking up. “You’re right,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“And it was a car accident. There was no big goodbye between us. I remember almost nothing about him, in fact. Maybe I could claim my stepfather but he seemed fully sprung from my mother’s single-mindedness and didn’t need any words from me when he died. Yes, Philip, you have exposed me.” Andrew opened his arms, a lick of whiskey sloshing over the side. “I am exposed.”

“But—”

“Even worse,” he said, “I think I was cribbing those words of wisdom from one of my books, can’t remember which.”

“Tiro’s Corruption,” I told him, “when Hornsby dies in Formia.”

“God, not even one of my better attempts.”

“Oh, I like that one.”

Andrew made a displeasing sound and put down his drink. A heavy gust hit Park Avenue and for a moment the windows belonged to a small hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. Later that afternoon and all night it would snow and tomorrow school would get canceled and I would email my mistress (forgive the word but all the others are worse) and arrange an afternoon tryst while my wife took the kids sledding. Bad weather always makes me horny. Christ, the recklessness.

“I should go see him,” Andrew said.

“I know it means a lot to him, you being here.”

“I suppose, I suppose,” he said in a defeated tone. What with his boyish mop of white hair and his bygone Yankee exoticism, his meter and repetition, Andrew put me in mind of Robert Frost and his poem “Provide, Provide.” I always did like that poem. Some have relied on what they knew / Others on being simply true. While Frost as a man exists in our head as eternally ancient, A. N. Dyer stands in front of us as forever young, peering from his author photo, the only photo he ever used on all of his books, starting with Ampersand. In that picture he’s pure knowing, his darkly amused eyes in league with a smile that edges toward a smirk, as if he’s seen what you’ve underlined, you fiend, you who might read a few pages and then pause and glance back at his face like you’ve spotted something magical yet familiar, a new best friend waiting for you on the other end. Fourteen novels written by a single, ageless A. N. Dyer. No doubt this added to the mystery, along with his total avoidance of fame. The photo is credited to his wife, Isabel. This marital connection was sweet early on and a possible clue as you imagined those newlyweds in Central Park, in the middle of Sheep Meadow, Andrew reluctantly posing while Isabel framed Essex House for its maximum subliminal message. Click. Hard to believe that was fifty years ago. © Isabel Dyer. The photo remained even after the affair that produced Andy and finished the marriage and secured the final estrangement from his already distant sons. I suppose nothing keeps the end from being hard. But for most readers, A. N. Dyer was forever twenty-seven, so when he took the lectern in that church and looked as old as he had ever looked, the congregation practically gasped as if aging were a stunt gone horribly wrong.

Andrew flattened his eulogy. Hands frisked pockets for reading glasses, the microphone picking up a few grumbles, all vowel based. “Okay,” he said, after which he cleared his throat and pinched his nose clean. “Okay,” he said again, the sentiment towing an unsure breath. Finally he began to read. He was like a boy standing in front of class trying to get through an assignment without a possibly catastrophic lull. “What are we in this world without our friends if family is the foundation then friends are its crossbeams its drywall its plumbing friends keep us warm and warmhearted friends furnish and with a friend like Charlie Topping I was never without a home.” Andrew paused for breath, which was a relief for all our lungs, until he glanced up and asked if everyone could hear him. A handful nodded while a few of us lowered our heads. He went back to reading. “Whenever I was in need of succor—succor,” he repeated the word as though surprised by its appearance, “I could count on Charlie.” From here he started to read slower. “He was an unlocked door with something smelling good in the oven. He was the fire in the fireplace, the blanket draped over the couch, the dog at my feet. He was the shelter when I was the storm.” Andrew paused again, interrupted, it seemed, by higher frequencies. He turned around and pointed to the top of the gilded altarpiece. “Zadkiel,” he said with newfound authority, “that’s the name of that angel up there, the fifth from the left. Zadkiel. Kind of like a comic book character, that’s what Charlie always said to his audience. Mandrake the Magician. Zadkiel the Absolver. Faster than a speeding regret.” Andrew turned back around. “Sorry,” he said to his audience. “I am the storm, right, that’s where we were, me as the raging storm.” Watching him was like watching Lear forget his lines on the heath. He removed his glasses, shielded his eyes from the glare of the inner dim. “Has anyone seen my boy?” he asked. “Andy Dyer?” He searched the crowd as if every face were a wave and there was a small boy overboard, possibly drowning. “It’s important, please,” he said. No answer broke the surface, though I could imagine the whispers of bastard, the giddy apostasy of gossip. “Is he even here?” Still nothing. “Are you here, Andy?” Silence. “I need to find him. Please.”

Somewhere within this infinite realm of being, or potential being, I’m the one who stands up and approaches the lectern, who gently takes A. N. Dyer by the arm and guides him back to his pew, rather than my stepmother, who did the charitable thing while I just sat there and waited for my name to be called.

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