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 in Denver that summer, three months before I was born.
I tried to supplement this little collection of facts with information from my grandparents, but they had less to offer than I hoped. “Richard was a genius,” my grandfather said, but when I asked him how my father was a genius he declined to give concrete examples. The most he would say was, “It was impossible to beat him in an argument, although I certainly tried.”
My further questions got no answer so I turned to my grandmother. “What was my father like?”
“He was very intelligent,” she said judiciously. “He worked very hard.” I had the feeling she was sugarcoating the truth, in the hope that she could create a better father in my mind than the one who was already working mischief in my blood.
“Was he a good arguer?”
“I suppose he must have been. He was a lawyer, after all.”
“Why did he run away?”
My grandmother shrugged.
“Did he know he was going to lose the lawsuit?”
“I have no idea. Now stop grilling me, and get some peas from the garden. They’re just big enough to eat.”
That was the sum of the information I had about the Richard Ente Period, which lasted from the summer of 1969 until the spring of 1970, from Woodstock until about Kent State. Over the years I added to it scraps of less relevant or less assimilable information which my mothers let slip in careless moments. When I said I didn’t want to go to school, because I was smarter than everyone there, Celeste said I sounded just like my father. When I wouldn’t go to bed before my mothers, when I protested that if there were rules, then they ought to apply to everyone, adult and child, equally, Marie told me to stop lawyering, for Christ’s sake, it made me sound like a little Richard Ente. From these and other reproaches I learned that my father was a selfish person who didn’t do homework and hardly ever slept, who didn’t say thank you when he received a gift, who forgot to call when he was going to be late, who watched television during the day, who made up stories about places he had not been and people he had not met and told them as if they were the truth. All of which made me think he must have been very interesting, and made me regret not having known him.
Years later, when I was in college, I learned that Richard hadn’t died of a heart attack. My grandmother was very ill; she had a rare blood disease that carried her off to a teaching hospital in Syracuse. I went to see her there, and came in as a medical student was drawing her blood. “Does this hurt, Mrs., uh, Rowland?” he asked, as though he had been thinking about her disease so intently he’d forgotten that she was a person also.
“Of course it hurts,” she said.
The medical student left, and we talked about her illness, which was causing quite a sensation in the hospital. Specialists from several departments had been in to see her; she showed me the bruises on her forearms where they’d drawn vial after vial of blood. On the whole, she seemed pleased to be the object of so much attention. “If I’m lucky,” she said dryly, “they’ll publish me. I asked if there’s any chance they can use my real name.” My grandmother told me about the people who had been to visit: an aunt I hadn’t seen in years, cousins I barely knew. Charles had come several times to resupply her with the mystery novels she loved. My mothers came once. “For an hour,” my grandmother said. “It takes four hours to get here.”
“They should have stayed longer,” I said.
“I worry about them,” my grandmother said. “They want to live like they came out of a clamshell.” It took me a long moment to understand that she was referring to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. “But everyone has a family, even in New York City.” She looked at me with alarming lucidity. “Do they ever talk to you about what happened?”
“In New York?”
“With Richard,” my grandmother said impatiently. She took my hand. She must have known that her own life would soon be over, and that what ever secrets she kept would then be known by no one at all. Her time to tell was limited. And she was selfish, as I imagine many people are at the end of their lives; my feelings mattered less to her than they had when she was well. “You poor boy,” she said, “do you even know Richard shot himself?”
So it came out. One night in the summer of 1970, a police detective called from Denver and told Oliver that Richard Ente was dead of a gunshot wound, in all likelihood self-inflicted. The detective wanted to know if Richard had any next of kin. The only reason he called Oliver was because he’d found a check from him in Richard’s wallet. “We couldn’t help the gentleman,” my grandmother said. “Richard never talked about his family.”
“They didn’t tell me,” I said numbly.
“Exactly,” my grandmother said.
This story flattened me, and it weakened my grandmother also: maybe she had come without knowing it to the age when her last few secrets were what kept her alive. She
