Alvin drove through the darkness before sunrise, trying to decide what he would say at his father's funeral. He thought he might start with the way his father used the family's savings to buy part share in a beryllium mine. Or how he forgot Alvin in the zoo when he was a little boy, and in the men's department at Saks, and at the Macy's Day Parade. And of course everyone knew what the other side of the pendulum swing was like: those periods when he grew silent and withdrawn, when he slept on the couch all day and stared at the TV all night. He would look at Alvin with such a hollow expression, Alvin wasn't sure his father knew who he was.
Alvin had spoken to him on the phone the afternoon of the day he died, but it was an ordinary conversation; neither of them had known it would be their last. Mostly, his father made fun of Alvin's move upstate, the way he made fun of everything Alvin did. "Has anyone there even seen a Jew? Do they ask where your horns are?"
This irritated Alvin more than usual; he wanted to talk about his writer's block and about the possibility that his contract at Greenfield College wouldn't be renewed because he hadn't published anything. But what he said was, "We like it here, Dad. The people are nice. Teaching's fun."
His father gave a dry, stagy chuckle. "What are you teaching them? How not to get published?"
His father had wanted to become a writer when he was young. Later, when Alvin was a boy and his father just out of the psychiatric hospital, they would sit on the stoop in front of their building and make up stories about the people passing by. The bum in the torn coat was hurrying to keep his tryst with the supermodel. The lady in the flowered hat was on her way to throw herself into the river. "Going crazy is the best thing that ever happened to me," his father said to him then. "I've got great material now. All I need is some time to organize my thoughts." His father sat on that stoop for the next twenty years, waiting for his thoughts to coalesce so he could begin his book. Instead, Alvin became the writer, and when his first novel came out (a slight little marriage comedy, based on his courtship of his wife, Judy), his father stopped taking his medication and had to be hospitalized again. Did I do this? asked Alvin, standing in his father's hospital room, watching him sleep his medicated sleep. He had only wanted to give him a gift; the book was dedicated to him.
"The new novel's pretty close to being finished," Alvin had said on the phone. It was about an Edwardian-era plant collector searching for a rare species of wild violet found only in the mountains of Tibet, and he was, in fact, on the second chapter, page 34. He would type a word, and a voice would say, Not that word, no, that's all wrong, and he would erase it and try another word, and the voice would say, Abject shit or Pointless steaming crap, and then a kind of hot dizzy panic would fill his chest, blocking the air until he thought he would black out.
He had tried to describe this sensation to the chair of the English department at Greenfield College. "This is exactly why I didn't want a writer here," the man had said, looking as if he regretted adopting a dog that slobbered on the furniture. He explained that if Alvin wanted his contract renewed he would have to publish. "I'm sorry, but it's really quite simple. No funny little novel, no job."
Judy made a point of being outraged on Alvin's behalf. She reminded him that he had a standing offer from his old friend Dan Slotnick, who had a company back in the city that produced brochures and corporate reports. Alvin was taken aback. "Is that what you want, a corpse that brings home a check?"
"I can't advance my career here, Alvin." Judy made wearable art, fantastic confections of wool and leaves that made the wearer look like a cross between a tree stump and a feral creature. She needed to network with gallery owners and museum curators.
So Alvin had called his father, and after ignoring all the jokes about the Klan and a long screed about the PLO, and after reminding himself that he was an idiot and would regret trying, he had finally gotten around to the faintest suggestion of his dilemma. "This book's a lot more ambitious than the last one. I mean it's set in Tibet, but I've never even been there, and probably never will--"
"Hmmm, gotta go," said his father, his voice turning vague. He had CNN on in the background at all times, monitoring the situation in the Middle East; something about Israel had probably come on.
That evening, he had a massive heart attack and died.
In the back of the car, Alvin's children, Henry and Rose, stared out their windows in solemn awe at the darkness.
"Where are the other cars?" asked Henry, who was four.
"Where is the light?" asked Rose, who was two.
"Go to sleep," said Judy, rubbing her temples.
The sky lightened till it became the color of scuffed chrome. Alvin watched the kids in the rearview mirror, vaguely surprised that they belonged to him, that he had landed in a family of four, the arbiter of disputes over why it rained and who was more loved. He had never wanted to be a father; his energy had always gone into being a son. His dedication to writing was a son's mission: carrying his father's dream forward. He had said yes to Judy (not once but twice) because he had little practice at saying no. The best he could do was to negotiate terms: they had agreed that she would cut back on her time in the studio and pick up some hours in her friend Nunzio's clothing store. Alvin would take on a fifth remedial composition class at the College of Staten Island (it took him three trains, the ferry and a bus to get there) but would still get to keep two mornings a week free for his fiction. Deal done, he would impregnate her. "Oh, god, this is exciting," she had growled, lying naked beneath him on the night they began officially to try for Henry. "We're going to create a life."
"And you'll talk to Nunzio, right?" he'd asked.
Instead of answering she had nibbled on his ear.
In the end Judy had not gone to work at Nunzio's store. A gallery owner praised one of her pieces, and she decided that it would be crazy to cut back now that she was on the verge of being discovered. She spent her pregnancy in the studio making hats out of wire and moss, and once Henry was born she hired a nanny for four afternoons a week so she could continue with matching handbags and shoes. At $20 an hour, the nanny was the most expensive thing in the Goldhammer apartment, which otherwise contained some battered Ikea furniture and a lot of baby teethers with cat hair on them. Alvin took on not one more remedial comp class but two, as well as a freelance gig writing brochures for Dan Slotnick. He worked on his novel while rocking Henry, usually half-asleep as he scribbled on the back of an envelope or a bill. He would find these scraps in his pocket the next day: He stood on the peak looking out over the valley -- what kind of flowers? Purple? fuckfuckfuck im fucked.
The strange thing was that the more wreckage they caused, the more beautiful the children seemed to grow. Alvin found himself staring at them in odd moments of the day, overcome with the hopeless adoration others felt for movie stars. Even now, after a morning doing deep breathing exercises in front of his novel, he would take one of them on his lap and instantly his heart would stop pounding, the air would enter his lungs. He would tell himself that a life spent making these children happy was a good life, and for the moment he would believe it; tears would fill his eyes. And yet the next morning, returning to his laptop, he blamed them for sapping the energy that should have gone into his writing. They had exhausted and broken him, leaving him with a body he did not recognize: paunchy and gray, with permanent dark bags under his eyes.
"Let go," screeched Rose.
Alvin glanced in the rearview mirror. She was tugging on one leg of a pink plastic pony and Henry was pulling on the other. "Henry, that's hers," he said, knowing that the warning was useless. The routine was as deeply ingrained as the lines on his face: Henry would yank the pony out of Rose's grip and Rose would begin to shriek; Judy would grab the pony from Henry and hand it back to Rose, who would then grip it pitiably, as if she were the Little Match Girl standing in the rain. And over the next half minute all of that did in fact happen, with the sole difference that, instead of quieting down, Rose launched into another scream, longer and louder than anything Alvin had ever heard before. "Can you stop her?" he asked Judy.
"Can you?"
Only when he finally pulled to the side of the road did Alvin realize that his hands were shaking. He turned around to look at Rose, who seemed as perplexed as any of them at what was happening. Her body trembled as the sound passed through, seemingly from some other source: the outrage of the whole world channeled through one little girl.
Alvin got out onto the shoulder, closing the door behind him. He felt as if he were still speeding forward at eighty miles an hour, the earth whirling from his feet and yet somehow remaining exactly the same. Wasn't that the truth about his life? Going and never getting anywhere? He took a few tentative steps away from the car, speaking to the highway, trying out the words he would use at the funeral. "My father stole $49 from me when I was eleven -- fished the roll of bills out of the container of Lincoln Logs in which I'd hid it. I have no idea how he knew it was there, but he was incredibly resourceful when it came to getting cigarette money. I didn't say a word. I just wanted him to be happy. I thought that if he were happy we'd all be happy."
Alvin's mother stood on the torn-up grass near the open grave, along with some aunts and uncles and an extremely heavy man in a tan cardigan who Alvin recognized as belonging to his father's bipolar support group. "You'll say something?" his mother asked, holding Alvin's hand as if he might run away. She was dressed in one of the navy blue suits she wore to sell apartments. She had been her company's top seller six of the last ten years. "I yelled at him. One of his goddamn cigarettes had fallen on the carpet and was burning a hole. I didn't know he couldn't breathe."
"He liked when you yelled at him. He liked the attention." It was true; after his hospitalization, his father had seemed to give up on adulthood. He was willing to be a bad boy as long as he could be a boy and avoid failing as a man.
She closed her eyes. "I'd do things differently now."
The rabbi motioned them into a circle and began racing through the Hebrew prayers, as if late for a train. Alvin's mother seemed to drift into a sad reverie. Alvin was aware of the others closing ranks, trying to pay attention to the strange and bewildering task of putting his father in the ground when so many other things -- the missing sock, the overdue parking ticket -- called out for their attention. The aunts and uncles craned forward, as if listening for who would be next. The man from the support group pulled out some kind of Native American ceremonial feather, gripping it in both hands. Alvin took Henry's hand in his, as if it would keep him from flying away.
"How long is Grandpa going to be dead?" asked Henry
"Forever, honey. Remember how we talked about that?"
"I mean when will Jesus bring him back to life?"
Alvin glanced down at the boy, whose face was unreadable, and then over at Judy, who lifted an eyebrow. He looked around at the others, who seemed not to have heard. Alvin's father had been right in the way that a broken clock is right: there weren't a lot of Jews in Greenfield. The town itself had a vocally Christian feel: there were Christian plumbers in the phone book and a Christian Karate studio in the mini-mall and a Christmas tree and nativity scene in front of the courthouse and many, many cars with What Would Jesus Do? bumper stickers on their fenders -- all of which Alvin had considered harmlessly exotic, even interesting, till this moment. He lowered himself down to the boy's level. "Jews don't believe that, Henry."
"But I do."
"You're a Jew, so you don't."
Judy joined the huddle, wiping the hair from Henry's forehead, as if clearing the way to see into his mind. "You want Grandpa to come back, don't you?" she asked.
Henry looked embarrassed, as if it were a baby wish.
Alvin was a little surprised, because his father had not spent all that much time with the kids, even before the move upstate. He was too busy tracking events in the Middle East, reading whatever paranoid, rightwing blogs he could find on the Web. He would call Alvin to update him on just how apocalyptic the situation had become. "The Iranians have nuclear missiles in hardened silos. The photos are on the Internet."
"Dad, I know the fate of Israel is in your hands, but could you tear yourself away to visit your grandchildren?"
"These people won't rest until every single Jew is dead, including your children."
"All the more reason to visit now, isn't it?"
There was a moment of disdainful silence. "Of course," said his father, exhaling cigarette smoke. "You think you're exempt from the next Holocaust."
Yet every once in a while Alvin would take Henry to the playground by their apartment building and find his father sitting on a bench in the sun, fat and catlike, with those frightened brown eyes. In one hand he would have a cigarette and in the other a dirty little action figure, clearly bought from a street vendor along the way. He would hold it out toward Henry in silent greeting, his hand shaking from three decades of lithium.
When Alvin looked up the rabbi was standing above him. "Mr. Goldhammer, your mother tells me that you have a few words to say?"
"No, nothing," said Alvin.
In the end, it was the fat man in the tan cardigan who gave the eulogy. His voice turned out to be high and sweet, and he closed his eyes as he told about the kindnesses that Alvin's father had performed in his bipolar group: How he had sat up all night with one woman when her husband had died; how he had traveled to the Bronx twice a week to visit somebody else in the mental hospital. Alvin had listened, relieved that someone else was doing the talking, but also jealous: of the attention his father had expended on strangers, and of how naturally the fat man's words flowed out of him, without doubt or struggle.
Back in Greenfield that night, he lay in bed beside Judy, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. His Tibet novel would never be finished in time; it was in fact an unfinishable piece of crap. Soon he would be sitting in a cubicle at Slotnick Communications, composing press releases on the surprising medical benefits of triple-thick shakes and naturally-grown tobacco. Is that what his father had secretly wanted for him, to fail as he had failed -- to know the taste of his despair? Why else would he have planted in Alvin the need to speak, while simultaneously robbing him of his voice? But the truly pathetic thing was that, even now, Alvin found himself getting out of bed and carrying his laptop downstairs to the kitchen table. He had become the white rat that cannot stop pressing the lever, no matter how many times it gets the electric hairdo. He began to type:
When Alfred Levanthal was eleven, his father, Jeremy, shimmied his way onto a girder atop the Brooklyn Bridge and sat there, a plastic bag full of money cradled in his arms. He spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital after that, and then came home with a bag of prescriptions and a diagnosis of manic-depression. "Explains everything, doesn't it?" he said to Alfred, meaning the business failures, the legal troubles, the spending sprees. He looked oddly relieved. Alfred, who was just getting used to this new version of his parent, could sense that his father liked being ill, just as he himself did when there was a test in school. "It's a disease, you know," continued Jeremy, "like diabetes or hyperthyroid. It can be controlled. See this pill?" He pulled a large white oval out of his pill box. "This makes you feel like Swiss cheese." He swallowed it. "And see this one?" He held out a blue triangle. "This one makes you feel like you're dead."
"You'll be okay, right?" asked Alfred.
"Oh, sure," said Jeremy, lighting another cigarette -- two others were already burning in the ashtray. "Just remind me to wear my pants when I go outside."
The room took on a strange, charged stillness. Alvin had never been able to write about his father before, but the man in the passage was most definitely him: the same man who smoked in the back of movie theaters, who stuck his finger into the little tubs of lox spread in the supermarket and then replaced the lids. Alvin felt an almost primitive relief fill him up, like light fills a glass left on the windowsill: his father had come home.
In the morning, he began sketching out a novel about Jeremy and Alfred, and in the days that followed, he wrote like the fat man talked, the words tumbling out without second thought. It was easy to write when the little voice in his head was quiet, when he no longer had to defend himself from charges of stupidity and ineptitude -- doubly easy in this case, because all he had to do was keep close to the facts, like a boat hugging the shore. He remembered how his father had told him that the hardest part of being crazy was having no one to talk to, and how, without even really deciding, Alvin had made it his mission to listen. They spent all their time together, sitting in the donut shop on the corner or the McDonald's across the street, his father recounting the achievements of all the great men who were also bipolar: Jesus, Leonardo, Shakespeare -- an extremely long list. He believed that madness could become genius if you learned how to harness the energy, and he put Alvin in charge of keeping him harnessed. Alvin checked his father's pill case each morning to make sure he took his lithium, kept a calendar with his doctor appointments. What a privilege to be your dad's closest companion, to be responsible for his sanity. He hadn't understood that instead of being happy they would just become lonely together, that it would take a book to finally assuage their shared loneliness.
Writing that book was like walking out of prison: the world seemed to stretch out to meet him, exquisite in every detail, glowing with possibility. He burst into the department chair's office to tell him that he would have a novel ready in time for his contract renewal, a work so beautiful and important that it would put Greenfield College on the literary map. He told Judy that Greenfield College could kiss his ass, and Dan Slotnick could take sloppy seconds. The new book would land him on Oprah. Judy looked at him with a mixture of disappointment and resignation, but he really believed what he was saying. It was the best description he could offer of what was happening inside him, the complicated turning of the locks, the heavy doors swinging open. He put Henry on one knee and Rose on the other and told them that Daddy might not be able to play with them for a while because he was writing something very important, a book about when he was a little boy and Grandpa was very sad and Daddy tried to make him feel better.
"Don't we do that for you?" asked Henry, an uncertain smile on his face.
"Do I look sad?" asked Alvin, surprised and a little confused by the tentative look on the boy's face. "No, I'm incredibly happy." He gripped both children to his chest, feeling the warmth of their cheeks against his palms.
The leaves fell, the windows iced over, but no matter how fast Alvin wrote, the end of the book hovered out of reach. Late at night he studied the calendar, counting up the days left to him. He obsessed about losing his job.
Other times he wondered what he should wear on Oprah. Bruce Willis could play Jeremy in the movie, but who would play Alfred? That kid from "The Sixth Sense"? Then too he had moments when all the noise in his head suddenly fell away and his body filled with a clear cold hunger that had nothing to do with money or fame. He had come to believe that his true self, the person he would have become if things hadn't gone wrong, was hidden somewhere inside the book. All he needed was to write that person into existence and the sadness of his days would make sense, his children would sing at their games, and his wife would once again stroke his hair when they lay in bed -- as she had in the past, before the bills and the moss shoes that wouldn't sell and Alvin's struggles with writer's block. So he kept going, using every spare moment to add another paragraph, another bit of dialogue, until one night he found himself writing the big scene in which Alfred catches Jeremy stealing his money. He did it in a headlong dash, not even glancing at the screen while his fingers raced to keep up with the nasty, jagged dialogue flying through his head. And so it was a while before he realized that something had gone wrong. Instead of resolving itself, the conflict had turned irredeemably ugly, and it was getting worse:
"You took my money," said Alfred.
"I needed it," said Jeremy, as if this answer should be completely sufficient.
"What don't you need?" asked Alfred. "You need everything, all the time."
"You fucking little shit," said Jeremy. "Hanging over me like I have cancer, like I'm some kind of sick person. Do you know how irritating that is?"
"It's your idea, you're the one who always pulls me along. I want to see my friends."
"Then don't. I don't want you with me."
The rejection made Alfred burn. "I wish you had jumped!"
"What did you say?"
Alfred felt a moment of fear, followed by a kind of wild excitement -- the thrill of the rollercoaster as it begins its descent. "You heard me. I wish you had jumped! We would be better off without you around."
Jeremy stood silent now, breathing heavily, an odd smile on his lips, as if this was exactly what he had always suspected.
"You should be dead," said Alfred, obliging.
Alvin's face burned with shame. It didn't matter that this particular conversation was made up, that in real life he had not dared to say a word, too afraid that his father might stop taking his medicine. Alfred and Alvin merged in his mind and he despised them both equally: one for his vicious blurting, the other for his doglike silence. Were those the only choices? He stared at the computer screen with something like despair as the little voice in his head, back after so many months, took up its monologue: Look what you've done, you idiot. You've said what you really think. The spell is broken. The book is ruined.
The frost cleared from the windows, the snow melted, the air softened, the backyard turned green, but Alvin remained locked in winter. Unable to write, he sat by his laptop like a mourner beside a corpse, listening to the little voice whisper in his ear: The truth is that you're glad he's dead. And why not? He stuck you with your love of failure. Alvin could find nothing to say in his defense, or in his father's. Periodically the kids tore through the room. "Daddy, don't be sad!" shouted Rose. "I'll tell you a joke!" yelled Henry. Alvin focused on staying in his seat till the clock struck twelve and he could get up for lunch.
And then one day he came back from the kitchen to find Henry hovering over the laptop, one hand frozen in the air above the keyboard like a thief caught mid-act. "What did you do?" asked Alvin, already a little breathless at the thought of disaster. The entire novel was contained in a single electronic file.
"Nothing," said Henry, his eyes growing large and frightened.
Alvin removed him from the chair like a sack of flour and then stared at the screen: the novel was gone. He pressed a few keys, searching the folder and then the trash bin. "Goddamn it. You erased my book about Grandpa."
"Rose did it," said Henry.
"You little shit," said Alvin, his voice shaking. "I'm sick of you ruining everything all the time."
Alvin fled. He burst from the front door and trotted down the street, head down like a man leaving the scene of a crime. Pretty soon he was running: past the dirty little houses with their brown lawns and thirsty shrubs, past the gas stations and churches -- the weedy heart of Greenfield. He wanted to reach the little park by the courthouse, where he could sit on a bench and be alone, but his lungs were already burning, and in a couple of blocks he was doubled over, gasping for air. When he could straighten he turned and walked home, where he sat on the steps. Mr. Capote, the cat, crouched beside him, and together they watched the purple thunderclouds massing off to the south -- one of those big storms that signaled the approach of summer. Years before, when his first novel came out, Alvin had imagined that there would be a whole string of others, that he would win awards, travel, speak at public events -- that he would make his father proud while simultaneously leaving him far behind. Now he had to learn how to live the life he actually had without becoming cruel.
That evening, after dinner, Alvin called his mother. He wanted to tell her about the lost novel and the lost job, about the end of his life as a writer, but she began talking in a torrent, updating him on what she called her grieving process, and he did not interrupt her. "I've had a breakthrough," she said. "I dreamed about him last night. We went to a supper club and danced to a swing band."
It was just the kind of thing his father would never have done, of course. "I'm glad for you," said Alvin, wondering if the grieving process was just a chance to make the dead obey, now that they had no choice in the matter.
"Have you seen him?" asked his mother.
Alvin looked out the window at the storm clouds sealing off the last of the open sky. Perhaps the novel had been a kind of grieving process, too, a wish to remake his father into somebody he could forgive and then forget. "I never dream," he told his mother, though in fact he dreamed all the time, mostly about sex and violence. The night before, an enormous man had put Alvin in some sort of choke hold, crushing the air out of him till he woke up gasping and frightened, Judy wrapped in her own mysterious visions beside him.
His mother had a client on the other line and had to go. Downstairs, the kids were sprawled on the floor in front of the TV, Judy on the couch, an art magazine open in her lap. She was already planning her return, figuring out who to phone and where to send her slides. He sat down beside her, and she placed her hand on his knee. She had been exceedingly nice to him all afternoon, rubbing his back and making him Jell-o for dessert, even after he'd confessed the things he'd said to Henry. Maybe his father was right about the comforts of failure. He scooped up Mr. Capote and stroked his neck, listening to the rain begin to fall. The cat twisted this way and that, excited by the storm, and when the first clap of thunder broke he bared his teeth and bit Alvin on the hand. "God damn fuck it!" said Alvin, sweeping him off his lap. Mr. Capote skittered across the floor and then turned to hiss, ears flattened.
"Poor thing," said Judy. "He can't even accept the love he craves."
"What kind of crack is that?" asked Alvin, squeezing the wound, which was puffy and red.
Judy looked at him cautiously. "It's going to be all right, sweetie. Change is good."
Henry came over and examined the bite, turning Alvin's hand this way and that -- the first time they had touched all afternoon. "Do you want to hear something really sad?" Henry asked. "When a rattlesnake bites people they die in two seconds. One, two!" He crumpled to the floor in an extraordinary rendition of sudden death: eyes closed, jaw slack, limbs haphazard.
There was another thunder clap, already much closer; the storm was heading their way. "Henry, get up," said Alvin, nervous in spite of himself. As far as he could make out, the boy's chest neither rose nor fell. Was he holding his breath? Could a little boy suffocate by holding his breath? "Come on, this isn't funny."
"He's exploring," said Judy, sounding worried. "He wonders what it's like. That's perfectly natural, isn't it?"
Was it? Alvin gave Henry a gentle shake. "This isn't a good game. You're scaring your mother."
Rose squatted to inspect her brother. "Wake up, Henry," she said, in her sweet singsong voice, heartbreakingly small and beautiful against the sound of the rain beating against the windows. "Wake up, please."
The thunder pounded once like a gigantic fist on the door, making the whole house rattle. Henry opened his eyes at last. Rose looked up, her face blank, and then began to scream: so high and sharp and cruel that it seemed to come from inside the storm itself. "It's just thunder," said Judy, lifting her onto her lap and rocking her as she recited the usual things: Mommy's here, everything's okay, nothing to worry about. But it didn't do much good, because in the next moment another explosion filled the house, so impossibly loud that it seemed to happen inside Alvin's head.
"Turn it off!" screamed Rose.
"I can't," said Alvin, feeling strangely helpless, as if this were another way he was failing as a father. "I'm sorry, sweetie, I'm so sorry."
Judy examined Rose with the look of primitive certainty she got when staring at a piece of wearable art. "She's frightened of her own anger," said Judy. "If we tell her it's okay to get angry, she won't be so scared of the noise."
She wrapped Rose in her arms, rocking her back and forth. "It's okay to be angry, sweetheart. Mommy gets angry too sometimes." She paused for a moment and then added, "At herself, of course, not you. She's never angry at you."
Alvin didn't quite follow the logic but jumped in anyway. "You can be mad at me, honey, you don't need to feel scared. Henry can be mad at me too. I deserve it. Be mad at Daddy."
There was a moment of silence as Rose looked from face to face, seemingly intrigued by this new sort of attention, but then another thunderclap shook the house and she went back to screaming. Judy began rocking her again, her voice running like a stream underneath the noise: It's okay to be angry, it won't hurt you, there's nothing to be afraid of, everybody gets angry, even Mommy, even Daddy.
A couple of hours later, the thunder was over, the kids were asleep, and Alvin lay in bed beside Judy, listening to the rain. For some reason he kept thinking about an afternoon many years before, when they were still dating. It had been late fall, the light from the window white and cold. She told him she was going to make a coat for a forest princess, and then spent the rest of the afternoon selecting crisp red maple leaves from a box, examining each one as if some essential information about the world were written on it. He had watched for hours, struck with her pleasure in choosing, how it took her otherwise ordinary features and made them beautiful. It was, he realized now, the moment he knew he would marry her.
He turned his head on the pillow, feeling her warm breath on his face. "What's it like when you're making one of your pieces?"
"It's like I'm at the center of the universe." She smiled slightly without opening her eyes.
The coat had been marvelous, a floor length mantle of shocking red that rustled loudly when she walked, leaving a trail of leaves behind. "But what does that feel like?" He was always off to the side. His father was at the center; that was their deal.
"Go to sleep," she said, intertwining her limbs with his.
When her breathing become deep and regular he slipped out of her grasp, went down to the kitchen and sat at the Formica table, looking out at the darkness of the yard. He thought about the time that his mother pulled some strings to get his father an interview with a management company run by a friend of a friend. He had gained a lot of weight and his business suits no longer fit, so he wore a pair of gray slacks he couldn't button at the top and a big yellow sweater stretched to the limit of its weave; it made him look like a beach ball. The bus stop was across the street so they marched to the corner and waited at the light, his father watching the traffic as if it were an impassable torrent. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his pill case and took one of his pills. When the light changed, he didn't cross; when it changed back, he turned, walked back to the stoop and sat down, watching the pedestrians until a man in a shabby blue raincoat and carpet slippers walked by. "He's going to his doctor's to find out he has cancer. From there he'll go to the Empire State Building to jump from the observation deck. And at home on his answering machine will be a message from the doctor saying whoops, it's not cancer, it's just a wart."
It was clear they were playing the story game. "Mom's going to be mad," Alvin said.
His father held up his hands, which shook from the lithium. "Who's going to hire me?"
Later, in his teens, full of the first rush of adulthood, Alvin had gone on a self-improvement kick. He had started lifting weights, using hair gel, and he had started to write. All of this made him look down on his father. If you've got a problem, you solve it, he told himself; you don't avoid it, you don't wallow in it. But twenty-odd years later, Alvin finally understood what it must have felt like for his father: to know that the problem could not be solved because it was you.
Alvin glanced up and saw Henry standing in the kitchen doorway, looking a little stunned, as if still half in a dream. "Grandpa told me that Jesus was going to bring him back to life," he said, blinking.
"It was just a dream," said Alvin, resisting the urge to tell him what an unlikely duo the two made. "You dreamed about him because you miss him, that's all."
"He's going to get me a Nintendo DS," said Henry, as if this were more to the point.
Alvin held out his hands and the boy came to him in that magical way that children do, as if nothing were simpler or more natural. "Your grandfather is here," said Alvin, touching a finger to Henry's temple. "Inside you. He'll always be here."
"Will you die too?" asked Henry. From the look on his face, he'd been saving up the question for a while.
Alvin turned the idea around in his mind, feeling its strangeness transfer to the brightly lit kitchen, the night outside his window, the boy looking grave and beautiful in his Power Ranger pajamas -- and then he put his hand to Henry's forehead, to feel his final resting place.