his own way, my father, too, was a man of pain.
I could picture him, scowling as he drove, talking to himself silently, his thin lips moving over narrow teeth that were grayish yellow after years of smoking, a habit he had quit all at once one day in 1970, I suspect because “going cold turkey” was the severest way to stop, the most painful. I’d watched my father drive many thousands of times over the years: nosing the car along the hushed streets of the neighborhood we lived in, shaded by maples and pin oaks, the houses seeming to peer out suspiciously through their shuttered windows; grinding along on exhaust-choked interstates and turnpikes to summer barbecues and holiday parties, to the apartment buildings in Brooklyn or Queens where mysterious relations of my mother lived, elderly people whom we could faintly hear, after we rang the doorbell, as they shuffled to answer the brown-painted steel doors, with their many clanking locks and the peepholes through which they would cautiously peer after we rang, one eye looming gigantically, comically, through the convex glass, like the single eye of some mythic monster. I would watch him drive to the school concerts, orchestra, band, choir, chorale, madrigals, autumn, winter, and spring; drive us to summer camp, to piano and cello and guitar lessons, drive us to bar mitzvahs and weddings and, as the years passed and my grandparents and the parents of Mother and Daddy’s friends started dying (and then, later, as their own friends themselves started dying), would drive in funeral processions, too, during which he liked to complain bitterly about motorists who failed to yield to the slow-moving cortège, because as much as he hated ceremony of any kind, which he vehemently did, he had a great regard for the dead, even those he hadn’t much liked while they were alive—out of respect, I suppose, for their having finally done the hardest, most painful thing of all.
As my father drove he would often, spontaneously, hunch his narrow left shoulder, as bony as the wing of a chicken, toward his ear, as if in a spasm, and as he did this his lips would curl into a grimace, the unconscious gesture you might make if you’re carrying on an argument with yourself about something, maybe something to do with your numerous children, their frequently delayed travel plans, or the money they say they need to make the long trip to see you; maybe it is yet another replay of some ancient debate with your wife, perhaps about her reluctance to travel (which is the reason you yourself, who are curious about the world, eager to see it, never go anywhere); perhaps about something else, something even older, the exchanges so familiar by this point that you can play both parts equally well as you drive your big white car, which is one of the few luxuries you permit yourself—a kind of compensation, maybe, for all the places you didn’t go.
It doesn’t matter what you said, it was how you said it.
Oh, stop writing scripts for me already!
Well, Daddy would never have let them talk to me that way.
Oh, your father, your father! Trust me, he wasn’t such a hero. I know things …
My father’s thin frame would tense as he replayed these ancient conversations in his mind, the left shoulder twisting upward, his right hand at the twelve o’clock mark on the wheel, his lips moving soundlessly.
I supposed his lips were moving in just that way as he pulled into my driveway that January day, maneuvering the comically large vehicle with exaggerated caution, as if to say, It wasn’t easy to get here. And the first thing he said, in fact, as he swung both legs out the driver’s-side door and reached for the inside handle above the window to hoist himself out of the soft bucket seat—a thing I had never seen him do until recently—was, as I knew it would be, “You can’t believe the traffic!”
He loved to complain about how difficult it was to get places. You can’t believe the traffic! was the refrain that ran through our childhood, our adolescence, even our adulthood, long after we’d left the neat white house and the trim white car and the baggy white sweaters behind; the sentence would explode out of his mouth as soon as he arrived somewhere, as unvarying and formulaic as the stock phrases that Homer resorts to when describing certain kinds of typical scenes or actions, sunrises or banqueting or arguments, “When Dawn the child of morning appeared with her fingertips of rose” or “When they had put away desire for food and drink” or “What speech has escaped the barrier of your teeth?!” So, too, with my father and driving. The parkway was a nightmare! he would say as he walked through someone’s door, or The Long Island Expressway is one giant parking lot! he would cry as we arrived, late as usual, at some function, and we would all nod, even though, in certain cases, we knew that this wasn’t quite true, wasn’t entirely the reason we were late. (For instance, if our destination was a religious service of any kind, he would leave the house at the precise time the service was supposed to begin, and then pretend, when we got there an hour late, that we’d hit traffic on the way.) Even when he wanted to get somewhere on time—to his friend Nino’s, for instance, with whom he’d worked when they were both young men pursuing graduate degrees in mathematics, or to play tennis on Tuesday evenings with his work buddy Bob McGill—it seemed that some implacable traffic god was against him. We would pile into the car, all seven of us, Andrew in the front passenger seat because he got “car sickness” if he sat in back, Matt and Eric and Jennifer in the deck, me in the backseat next to Mother (who liked to sit in the back so she could put her right leg, purpled with the varicose veins her many pregnancies had left her with, up on the front seat between my father’s right shoulder and Andrew’s left shoulder, because this way I can rest my bad leg), and pull away from the curbside with plenty of time to spare, and yet even then the traffic would be somehow bad, the expressway like a parking lot, and we’d be late.
You can’t believe the traffic! my father exclaimed as he pulled himself out of the car that January morning, stomping both feet into the white powder, his footprints like angry exclamation marks in the snow. As I stood on the porch awaiting him, I could see how gingerly he made his way up the steps, because of his great fear of falling. As he gripped the handrail, he looked up at me and asked me what we’d be covering in the first day of class, and I said, The beginning.
Now, an hour into the first session of the class, it was clear he didn’t think much of Odysseus.
One week before the start of classes, I’d sent an e-mail to the students enrolled in the course, asking them to read Book 1 in advance of the first class session and to come prepared to share their thoughts about why the epic begins the way it does. The class would be meeting every Friday for just under two and a half hours, from 10:10 in the morning to 12:30, with a short coffee break around 11:15. On this first day of the semester, I wrote to them, we’d spend the first half of the session talking about Book 1. After the break I’d be lecturing about the basics of Homeric poetry: the history of the debate about how Homer’s poems were originally composed, the nature of oral poetry, elements of epic technique, and my expectations for the course.
I also mentioned that my father would be sitting in on the course. Better to warn them, I thought, so his presence on the first day of class wouldn’t be a distraction.
So, I declared, looking down the length of the seminar table at 10:15, I’ve asked you to think about how the Odyssey begins. We can’t have a full discussion of Book 1 today—next week we’ll be talking about 1 and 2 in detail—but we can at least get the ball rolling. What strikes you right away about the opening of our poem—anything strange, anything worth noticing?
A boy who was sitting at the far end of the table grinned and said, It’s long! He had deep dimples that undercut whatever cool his carefully groomed scruff was meant to convey. As I rolled my eyes, the slender, dark-eyed girl sitting next to him elbowed him sharply. Girlfriend and boyfriend. Her eyes were so black that you couldn’t tell the irises from the pupils.
Try harder, I said drily. What’s your name?
The scruffy boy said, Jack.
