much as it is a tale of husbands and wives, then, this story is just as much—perhaps even more—about fathers and sons.
And knew the minds of many men.
From Miami we flew home to New York. It was night. As we settled into our seats, the stewardess mentioned that there was “bad weather” waiting at home. Daddy briefly looked up from the book that he was reading, registered the information, and then went back to the book. Soon after we were in the air, however, the pilot announced that, because of the weather, there would be a lengthy delay before we could land; we would have to “circle.” The plane started to bank gently, and for a long time we went round and round. Up where we were, there was no weather at all: the night was as dense and matte as the piece of velvet a jeweler might use to display his stones—like the jeweler from whom, my mother once whispered to me, her own father had bought her engagement ring, haggling in a narrow back room on Forty-Seventh Street with an old Jewish man, one of Grandpa’s many, many friends, who rolled some uncut brilliants onto the black cloth as he and my grandfather argued in Yiddish, all because my father didn’t have enough money to buy the kind of stone her father thought she should have—the sky was like a piece of black velvet and the stars were like those brilliant winking stones. I knew that we were going in circles because the moon, as round and smoothly luminescent as an opal, kept disappearing and then reappearing in my window. I had a book of my own that night but ignored it when the circling first began, happily looking at the moon instead as it went past once, twice, three, four times, I eventually stopped counting how many times it showed its bland face to me.
My father wasn’t looking at the moon. He was reading.
But then he always seemed to be reading. My father, whose parents never got beyond high school, once told me a story about how he became a great reader. Having been misdiagnosed with rheumatic fever in the seventh grade, he’d had to stay in bed for months, and during that period he became attached to books. There’s nothing you can’t do if you have the right book, he liked to tell his five children, and he, at least, lived by his own rule. He was never happier than when puzzling over his latest haul from the public library, some volume about how to play jazz guitar, how to play drums and recorder, violin and piano, how to write pop lyrics, how to construct a built-in wet bar, how to build an accelerator for the barbecue coals, how to make a compost heap, Colonial furniture, a harpsichord. At the end of Book 5 of the Odyssey, when the love-mad nymph Calypso finally allows Odysseus to leave her island and make his way toward home, she fetches a set of tools that she had hitherto kept locked away and gives them to the shipwrecked man; it is with these few tools, and whatever trees and plants there are to hand, that the hero builds himself the raft on which he begins the final legs of his journey home. Whenever I read this passage, I think of my father.
In part because he seemed always to be coiled over a book, always to be using his own mind and absorbing the contents of others’, when I was a child I thought of my father as being all head. The impression that his head was the greater part of him was enhanced by the fact that he went bald when he was still quite young, certainly by the time I was a small child, and the impression I had was that the massive brain beneath his skull had expanded to the point where it had, somehow, forced the hair from his scalp. Many of my memories of him start with an image not of his face—the sallow oval with its arced brows and narrowly set dark brown eyes, the long broken nose with the rubbery swerve at the end, the thin-lipped mouth that tended to be set in a tight frown—but of his head, which, devoid of hair, seemed almost touchingly exposed, available to injury. A fringe of residual hair made a U around the base of his head, this U being dark throughout my childhood, gray later on, then shaved, and then, bizarrely, a little fuzzy again because of the drugs he had to take. And then there was the forehead, nearly always wrinkled in concentration as he thought his way through a problem, an equation, my mother, one of us.
This was the head that was bent, that night of the long and circling plane ride, over a book.
What was my father reading? It isn’t impossible that it was a Latin grammar, or maybe Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman epic that nods so elegantly to its Greek archetypes. Although my father spent his working life among scientists and equations and figures—first in his job at Grumman, an aerospace corporation, where whatever he did was unknown and unknowable to us, since the facility he worked in was top secret, and besides, as he later pointed out to me, I wouldn’t understand; and then, after he retired in the 1990s, during a second, decade-long career teaching computer science at a local university—he took pride in the fact that he had once, long ago, been a Latin student. Oh, he would say sometimes, when I was in college and majoring in Classics, Oh, in high school I read Ovid in Latin, you know! And I, instead of being impressed, as he hoped I would be, by this early feat of scholarship, noticed only that he’d pronounced the poet’s name with a long o: Oh-vid. My father’s mispronunciations, which embarrassed me a great deal at one point in my life, were the inevitable result of him having been the bookish child of parents who had no education to speak of; I suspect a good many of the proper names and words he had encountered, by the time I was old enough to disdain his errors, were words he’d never heard uttered aloud. Only now do I see how greatly to his credit it was that he himself would be the first to joke about these gaffes. I was in the army before I realized there was no such thing as “battle fa-ti-gyoo”! he’d say with a tight little grin, and if I happened to be there when he was telling this joke on himself I would wait, with a complicated pleasure, for the person he was telling it to to realize that the word in question was “fatigue.”
So my father liked to boast that he had been good enough in Latin to read Oh-vid in the original, although I came, in time, to know that a great regret of his was that he had stopped studying Latin before he had a chance to read Virgil. The knowledge that my father had never finished Latin, had never read the Aeneid, gave me a faintly cruel satisfaction, since I myself pursued and eventually completed my classical studies and had, therefore, read Virgil in Latin; and Virgil’s Latin, as I would sometimes take pleasure in pointing out to my father, was denser, more complicated, and more difficult than was Ovid’s.
Throughout the years I was growing up, my father would occasionally make a stab at recouping what he had lost all those years ago, back in the late 1940s. I would sometimes come home to Long Island on spring or fall break to find his copies of Latina pro populo (“Latin for People”) and Winnie ille Pu lying next to the black leather recliner downstairs in the den where he would try, and often fail, to find the solitude he craved. Already when I was a child of seven or eight or nine, I was reading books about the Greeks and their mythologies, drawn, no doubt, by the allure of naked bodies and of lascivious acts, by the heroes and the armor and the gods, the ruined temples and lost treasures, and although I never suspected it at the time, I now realize that my father liked the idea that I had an antiquarian bent.
Years later—long after I had failed, in high school, to master the math courses that would have allowed me to go on to study calculus—my father would occasionally remark that it was too bad, because it’s impossible to see the world clearly if you don’t know calculus. He said this not to hurt me but from, I believe, genuine regret. It was too bad, he would say; just as, at other times, he would say that it was too bad that I couldn’t appreciate the “aesthetic dimension” of math, a phrase that made no sense to me whatsoever because I associated mathematics with being forced to perform fruitless exercises that had no purpose, and only much later did I realize that they only seemed to have no purpose because I wasn’t working hard enough, or maybe wasn’t being taught well enough (Why isn’t your teacher explaining these things better? he would exclaim, shaking his shiny head in dismay, although when I asked him to explain the same things he would shake his head again, confounded by my inability to grasp what was so clear to him), and so I went on cluelessly through junior high school and high school, uncomprehendingly copying out diagrams and geometric shapes and quadratic equations, having no idea what they were supposed to be leading to, like someone forced to practice scales on a guitar or piano or harpsichord without guessing that there was
