“San Francisco. No one who lives there calls it Frisco.”
“Is that so?” Charles lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You know, I had my heart set on going out there, back when. San Francisco, or Big Sur, more like it. One of those hippie places right on the ocean.”
“You were a hippie?”
“I wasn’t anything. I was just a kid.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
Charles coughed. “Things got in the way.”
I wondered if he meant the war. Around the time I was born, Charles had enlisted in the Army, against the wishes of my grandfather, who wanted him to become a lawyer, or a banker, something commensurate with the family’s status in Thebes. Instead he went to Vietnam. No one in the family was entirely clear on what he’d done there; all we knew was that he came home knowing how to fix cars. With money grudgingly loaned him by Oliver, he opened a garage in Maplecrest, the next town over. The business grew quickly; by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, Charles had four tow trucks, a half dozen drivers, and a pretty secretary named Mrs. Bunce who gave me sour-cherry sucking candies.
“You should come visit,” I said. “I’ll go to Big Sur with you.”
Charles looked at me in a way that I didn’t understand, as if, I thought, he’d known what I was going to say before I said it. “Maybe in a while,” he said.
He left a few minutes later. I walked him out, and when he saw Norman Mailer’s car in the driveway he stopped, transfixed by horror. “Holy Jesus,” he said. “Tell me you didn’t drive across the country in that.”
“It runs OK. It just makes a grinding sound when it goes uphill.”
“I’ll bet it does. What is it, a seventy-seven?”
“Seventy-six. It used to belong to Norman Mailer, the Norman Mailer. My ex-girlfriend thinks I was stupid to buy it, but it turns out to be a pretty good car.”
My uncle laughed. “At least you aren’t gay.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, or even why Charles would think I was gay, until I remembered that he hadn’t seen me since I moved to San Francisco. No gay man in the city would have thought for even a second of dressing like I did, but my uncle couldn’t be expected to know that.
Charles said he’d come back in a couple of days to see if I was still alive. He climbed into his truck. I wanted to stop him from going, because it hurt me to think that after ten years apart we had made such poor impressions on each other, and also because I was afraid to be alone in the house, but it was too late; his truck honked and was gone, two red lights dropping into the deep blue of twilight in the country.
The radio was still on in the kitchen. “Speaking as a woman of generous proportions,” a caller said, “I just want to let everybody know that I feel good.”
I opened a can of chicken noodle soup and heated it on the stove. Outside, the wind whispered in the oak tree. In my hurry to leave San Francisco I’d packed only one book, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which I’d been meaning to read for months; but as soon as I started it I realized that I was not in the mood. Reading a novel, especially a contemporary novel, with its small stock of characters and situations, felt like being stuffed into a sleeping bag head-first: it was warm and dark and there wasn’t a lot of room to move around. I looked through my grandparents’ books and eventually chose Progress in Flying Machines, a purplish hardback with a winged contraption stamped on the front cover in gold. My grandfather had liked reading to me from it when I was a child. Published in 1894, it was, he said, the book that inspired the Wright brothers to build their airplane. What this meant was that none of the flying machines described in Progress in Flying Machines had ever flown. The book was a catalog of failures: giant wooden birds with flapping wings, aerial rowboats beyond the power of any human being to propel, corkscrew-crazy helicopters which under the best of circumstances never left the ground. I often wondered why my grandfather thought this was appropriate bedtime reading for a child. Maybe he hoped the book would teach me the importance of hard work and persistence, and give me faith that what looked like failure could be transformed, by history’s alchemy, into magnificent success. Perhaps he was also preparing me for the likely if not delightful possibility that the success would belong to someone else. As he didn’t tire of telling me, “Remember, it isn’t just the successes who matter. Even the ones who fail get us somewhere, if we learn from their mistakes.”
He meant this to be reassuring, but I found it sad: even as a child I suspected that the person he was reassuring was himself. And in fact my grandfather’s history, like that of many of the so-called pioneers of flight, was largely the story of his failure to get off the ground. My grandparents lived on the rent from properties they owned in Thebes, but over the years my grandfather had tried to increase this income by means of various schemes, not one of which did anything but fail. My mothers told me about them with acid glee: there was the time your grandfather bought real estate in Catskill, they said, he took a bath on that. There was the time he sold seeds from your grandmother’s garden! Even Mary couldn’t believe it and she loved those plants. And then of course there was the lawsuit, the great battle with Joe Regenzeit, which he lost. Oliver was not discouraged. That was what irked my mothers most of all: to see my grandfather fail, and fail again, and not give up. It wasn’t just that my grandfather’s hopefulness reflected badly on his common sense; it also made him unbeatable. No matter how high my mothers climbed, they could never have the satisfaction of getting above Oliver, who was always, in his sober way, hoping for something better.
My soup was ready when I came back to the kitchen. I opened a beer and sat down to read. At midnight, half drunk and far from sleep, I called Alice. Her voicemail picked up again so I read it a sentence from the book in front of me: “If one had an unlimited height to fall in, affording time to think and to act, he would probably succeed in guiding himself at will.” I added: “Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to let you know I got here OK. The house is a disaster, it’s going to take like a hundred years to clear it out. And my uncle is dying. Miss you. Bye.” I made up a bed on the sofa. The bedroom where I used to sleep was full of boxes, and I didn’t want to sleep in my mothers’ room, because I was haunted by the memory of what had happened there thirty years ago.
THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD
Whenever Celeste said my father’s name, she made a face; the four syllables, RICH-ard EN-tee, left her pursed lips like the taste of something rotten. Richard Empty, she called him, but when I asked what she meant, whether my father had really been empty, she only shook her head, as though to say that actually she had meant the opposite, and I was not supposed to understand. Despite my mothers, and to spite them, I was endlessly curious about Richard Ente. I collected facts about him the way other children collect stamps or baseball cards, and I assembled them into a story that I reviewed from time to time, solemnly, just as I went over the deposits and withdrawals in my savings account, checking and double-checking the total even though it was never more than a hundred dollars.
This is my father’s story: once upon a time there was a lawyer named Richard Ente. Six foot two, eyes of blue, nonetheless a New York Jew, Richard came to Thebes in 1969 to sue Joe Regenzeit on my grandfather’s behalf. Richard was handsome, and my mothers didn’t meet many strangers. They couldn’t get enough of him and— to their surprise, probably— he didn’t find them silly, or provincial, or young. Richard must have been fifty at the time, my grandfather’s age; my mothers were sixteen. I don’t know how Richard chose between them, but in the end, the one he fell in love with was Marie, and their love was, what, I don’t know, lovely, but brief. Oliver caught his lawyer romancing his daughter; Richard fled in my grandfather’s sports car, and my grandfather chased him in my grandmother’s station wagon. For some reason the two cars collided, and it was a miracle neither Richard nor my grandfather was hurt. The love-suit was over but the lawsuit went on, until, on the morning of the day when the jury was to announce the verdict in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc., Richard Ente ran away from Thebes. He died of a heart attack