to his father, until late, very late, when they join together for a great adventure; a story, in its final moments, about a man in the middle of his life, a man who is, we must remember, a son as well as a father, and who at the end of this story falls down and weeps because he has confronted the spectacle of his father’s old age, the specter of his inevitable passing, a sight so overwhelming that this man, who is himself an expert storyteller, adept at bending the truth and at outright lying, too, a manipulator of words and hence of other people as well—this man is so undone by the sight of his failing father that he can bring himself no longer to tell his lies and weave his tales, and has, in the end, to tell the truth.
Such is the Odyssey, which my father decided he wanted to study with me a few years ago; such is Odysseus, the hero in whose footsteps we once traveled.
(Education)
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2011
… the pretext for Telemachus’ journey is the inquiry about his father; but for Athena, who advises it, the aim is education. The son would not have become worthy of his father had he not heard from his father’s companions about his deeds; he knows how to behave toward his father on the basis of the stories that he has heard about him.
—Ancient commentator on Odyssey, 1.284 (“Go first to Pylos and question godlike Nestor”)
(Fathers and Sons)
One of the rare stories that my father liked to tell about his youth—rare, that is, while we were growing up, since as he got older he became increasingly talkative about his past, although it must be said that his stock of anecdotes could never really compete with the funny and dramatic tales that my mother and her father told—was the one about how his classical education had come to an end.
One day, he would begin, one spring day toward the end of the war (my father always referred to World War II simply as “the war,” the way that some ancient bard might say the word “war” and mean “Troy”), it must have been the end of my junior year in high school, my Latin teacher, who was a very natty guy, a European refugee—a German, I remember, he got away just in time—my Latin teacher asked a bunch of us what we were planning to do the next year. We were fourth-year students, we’d been taking Latin since the seventh grade, and that year we’d been reading selections from Ovid.
Oh-vid.
My father might, at this point, clear his throat. He was a German guy, he repeated. I remember he always tried to dress well, although you could see his clothes had been washed a lot, the collar was frayed and the elbows of his suit were shiny. So that day, he asked us who was planning to continue with the Latin language into our senior year. See, senior-year Latin was the climax of Latin study, when you finally got to read Virgil. The Aeneid.
During more recent retellings of this story I would note the way in which he would linger on the details of the teacher’s clothes: the frayed collar, the shiny elbows. The fact that he’d even noticed such things would have struck me, earlier on, as odd, since my father was notorious for his indifference to clothes; he had as an unerring a sense for wearing the wrong thing as certain people do for wearing the right thing. On the first night of the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, as we were dressing for the captain’s cocktail party, he started to button himself into a shiny brown shirt, and I said, Daddy, we’re on a Mediterranean cruise, you can’t wear brown polyester, and I took the shirt and walked to the balcony and threw it into the sea. Whaaat!?! he cried, that was an expensive shirt! He strode across the stateroom to the balcony and looked forlornly down as the shirt, which on contact with the water had taken on a dense animal gleam, like the skin of a seal, briefly bobbed along until it finally sank under its own weight. Only when he was entering his late, nostalgic phase—I must have been in my mid-thirties at the time—did he surprise me with an anecdote that explained his fastidious attention to his long-ago teacher’s dress. While he was studying as an undergraduate at NYU, he said one day (a university, he liked to remind us, that he’d been able to attend because of the GI Bill; which, in turn, he had been able to take advantage of because he had joined the army at the age of seventeen, precisely for the purpose of being able to go to college, to get an education)—while he was in college he had worked at Brooks Brothers. He gave his tight little grin when he saw me reacting to this news. Well, he said, it was only in the packing room, but I learned something! As he said this I could feel the presence of a shy, stubborn pride just beneath the surface of his self-deprecation, a slight vainglory about his brief entrée into the rarefied world of patrician American taste: as if to say, See where I got? Not bad for a boy from the Bronx. When he said, but I learned something, I had a sudden vision of him as a youth of twenty, impossibly slender as he was then, his trousers awkwardly crimped around the narrow waist, held in place by a belt, tiptoeing through the vast mahogany-paneled sales floors on Madison Avenue, clutching some paper-wrapped package as he loped beneath the coffered ceilings and the chandeliers, gawking at the gleaming paneling with its sleek brass fittings—not at all very different, I like to think, from the way in which, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus’ young son goggles at the rich decor of the palace of the Spartan king Menelaus, the long-suffering husband of Helen of Troy, when Telemachus visits him as part of his fact-finding mission about his missing father. “Zeus’ court on Olympus must be like this!” exclaims the naïve youth, who in the poem is twenty, the age my father was when he worked at Brooks Brothers.
So, my father would repeat as he recalled his German-refugee Latin teacher, the one who’d tried to dress with flair even though his clothes were so poor, so he asked us who was going to go on into the fifth year, to read Virgil.
Here my father would pause. He was re-creating the silence that had fallen in the classroom in the Bronx all those years ago.
Nobody said anything, he would then say, not quite meeting my eye. The teacher asked the question once, and then he asked again, and no one said a word.
Sixty-five years after this event took place, long after the teacher and his frayed collars and dashed hopes had disappeared, long after many of the boys who had squirmed in that embarrassed Bronx silence had become men and then fathers and then grandfathers and then, like my father, old men who had become, suddenly and improbably, nostalgic about old and unredeemable mistakes—sixty-five years later, my father shook his head and pursed his narrow lips into the tight familiar line.
I still remember the room, he said, because it was so quiet. We were too embarrassed to talk. And the teacher suddenly looked at us and pointed his finger at each of us like this—(here my father put on a stagy German accent) and said, “You refuse de riches of Fergil! Diss, you vill regret!” And then he closed his briefcase and walked out of the room.
After a moment my father said, As I remember it, that was the end of Latin instruction in that school.
Remember, he added, it wasn’t the best high school, but still it was a good school.
I did remember, dimly: some story that someone had once told us, my mother, my aunt, I can’t recall who, maybe one of my uncles. Daddy had been the smartest kid in junior high school, a math whiz, but for
