young son in tow, Aeneas first undergoes a series of elaborate wanderings (meanderings that remind us of the Odyssey) before he settles in Italy, the land that has been promised to him as the homeland of the new state that he will found, where he must then fight a series of grim battles against the locals (warfare that reminds us of the Iliad) in order to establish himself and his people forever. While he lacks the cruel glamour of the Iliad’s Achilles or the seductive slyness of Odysseus, Aeneas does embody a dogged sense of filial obligation, a quality much prized in Roman culture and signaled by the Latin adjective most often used of Virgil’s hero: pius, which means not “pious,” as might seem natural to an English-speaker’s eye, but “dutiful.” The proem of the Aeneid is seven lines long; the first of these, in which the poet announces that he will sing of “wars and a man,” arma virumque, is itself a nod to both the Iliad, which is above all about “wars” or “arms,” arma, and to the Odyssey, whose own first line, as we know, announces that it is about “a man.”
A proem, therefore, can not only summarize its own action, look into its own future, and forecast, in miniature, what is to come, but can nod gratefully backward in time at the earlier epics, the archetypes, to which it is indebted.
When I was growing up, there was a story my father liked to tell about a long journey he and I once made, a story that hinged on a riddle. How, my father would inevitably ask at some point as he told this story, not quite looking you in the eye while he talked—a habit my mother disliked and about which she would sometimes scold him because, she would say, it makes you look like a liar, a reproof that amused us children because one thing that everyone knew about my father was that he never lied—How, my father would ask when he told this story, can you travel great distances without getting anywhere? Because I was a character in this story, I knew the answer, and because I was only a child when my father started telling this story, I naturally enjoyed spoiling his telling of it by giving the answer away before he reached the end of his tale. But my father was a patient man, and although he could be severe, he rarely scolded me.
The answer to the riddle was this: If you travel in circles. My father, who was trained as a mathematician, knew all about circles, and I suppose that if I had cared to ask him he would have shared with me what he knew about them; but because I have always been made nervous by arithmetic and geometries and quadratics, unforgiving systems that allow for no shadings or embellishments, no evasions or lies, I had an aversion even then to math. Anyway, his esteem for circles was not the reason he liked to tell this story. The reason he liked to tell it was that it showed what kind of boy I had once been; although now that I am grown up and have children of my own, I think that it is a story about him.
A long journey he and I once made. In the interests of precision, a quality my father much admired, I should say that the trip we made together was a homecoming. The story starts with a son who goes to rescue his father, but, as sometimes happens when travel is involved, the journey home ended up eclipsing the drama that had set it in motion.
The son in question was my father. It was the mid-1960s, and so he would have been in his mid-thirties; his father, in his mid-seventies. I must have been four or so; at any rate, I know that I wasn’t yet old enough to go to school, because that’s why I was the one chosen to accompany my father. It was January: Andrew, four years older than I, was in the second grade, and Matt, two years younger, was still in diapers, and my mother stayed home with them. Why don’t I take Daniel, Marlene? I remember my father saying, a remark that made an impression because until then I don’t think I’d ever done anything alone with him. Andrew was the one who went places with Daddy and did things with him, handed him tools as he lay on the concrete floor of the garage under the big black Chevy, stood next to him in front of the workbench in the basement as they pored over model airplane instructions. I thought of myself, then, as wholly my mother’s child. But Andrew was in school, and so I went with Daddy down to Florida when my grandmother called and said, Come quickly.
In those days my father’s parents lived on the ninth floor of a high-rise apartment building in Miami Beach overlooking the water—a building, as it happened, that was located next door to the one in which my mother’s father and his wife lived. I doubt that the two couples spent a lot of time with each other. My mother’s father, Grandpa, was garrulous and funny, a great storyteller and wheedler; vain and domineering, he devoted a good deal of thought each day to the selection of the clothes that he was going to wear and to the state of his gastrointestinal tract. Although he had only one child, my mother, he’d had four wives—and, as my father once hissed at me, a mistress. The average length of these marriages was eleven years.
My father’s father, by contrast—Poppy, the object of our traveling that January when I was four—barely spoke at all. Unlike my mother’s father, Poppy wasn’t given to displays of, or demands for, affection. A small man—at five foot three he was dwarfed by my tall grandmother, Nanny Kay—he always seemed vaguely surprised, on those occasions when we drove to Kennedy Airport to pick up the two of them, when you gave him a welcoming hug. He liked being alone and didn’t approve of loud noises. He’d been a union electrician. You’ll hurt the wiring! he would cry out in his high, slightly hollow voice when we ran around the living room; we would tiptoe for the next fifteen minutes, giggling. He took his modest enjoyments, listening to comedy shows on the radio or fishing in silence off the pier in back of his building, with quiet care—as if he thought that, by being cautious even in his pleasures, he might not draw the attention of the tragic Fury that, we knew, had devastated his youth: the poverty so dire that his father had had to put his seven brothers and sisters in an orphanage, his mother and all those siblings and his first wife, too, all dead by the time he was a young man. These losses were so catastrophic that they’d left him “shell-shocked”—the word I once overheard Nanny Kay whisper as she gossiped with my mother and aunts under a willow tree one summer afternoon when I was fourteen or so and was eavesdropping nearby. He was shell-shocked, Nanny had said as she exhaled the smoke from one of her long cigarettes, explaining to her daughters-in-law why her husband was so quiet, why he didn’t like to talk much to his wife, to his sons, to his grandchildren; a habit of silence that, as I knew well, could be passed from generation to generation, like DNA.
For my father, too, liked peace and quiet, liked to find a spot where he could read or watch the ball game without interruption. And no wonder. I’d heard from my mother about how tiny his family’s apartment in the Bronx had been, and I’d always imagined that his yearning for peace and quiet was a reaction to that cramped existence: sharing a foldout bed in the living room with his older brother Bobby, who’d been crippled by polio (I remember the sound as he leaned his iron leg braces against the radiator before we got into bed, he told me years later, shaking his head), his parents just yards away in the one small bedroom, Poppy listening to Jack Benny on the radio, Nanny smoking and playing solitaire. How had they managed before his oldest brother, Howard, went off and joined the army in 1938? I couldn’t imagine … And yet since he himself had gone on to have five children, I had to believe that my father also, paradoxically, craved activity and noise and life in his own house. Why else, I sometimes asked myself, would he have had so many kids? Once, when I was talking about all this with Lily—the boys were small, Peter maybe five or six, Thomas, never a good sleeper, tossing restlessly in his crib, muttering little cries as he slept, not yet two—I asked this question about my father out loud. Lily looked at me and said, Well, you grew up in a crowded house with lots of siblings, and you wanted to have kids, didn’t you? And it was a lot more complicated for you! I grinned, thinking of how it had all begun and how far we’d come: her shy request, when she’d first started thinking of having a child, whether I might want to be some kind of father figure to the baby; how nervous I’d been at first and yet how mesmerized, too, once Peter was born, how increasingly reluctant I’d grown to return to Manhattan after a few days visiting with them in New Jersey; the gradual easing, over months and then years, into a new schedule, half a week in Manhattan, half in New Jersey; and then Thomas’ arrival somehow cementing it all. Your first kid, it feels like a miracle, almost like a surprise, my father had said
