was already dead, the coroner has explained to him, at the point of impact with a shagbark hickory. Lowell closes his eyes and imagines the scattershot of nuts, kettledrummers of death. Although the wreckage of the car is absolute, and although Lowell’s stepmother (his father’s young third wife) was barely able to identify the body, the mortuary certificate indicates, Death due to natural causes: heart attack.
“Fortunately,” Lowell explains in an all-night hamburger joint, “the accident happened in the small hours of the morning and there were no other cars on the road. My father was only sixty-seven.”
Lowell can imagine himself repeating all this, casually, from time to time, and after several drinks, to strangers at parties and in bars.
At the cemetery, Lowell feels strangely lightened. He wonders if the sense of freedom, the sense of a lifelong congestion clearing, might be what other people call happiness. He wonders if he might be able to begin to be as other people are. Now officially orphaned, he feels for the first time in his life not-lonely. Rain is falling lightly, which seems appropriate. An old self is being washed away. Lowell feels clean and new. He is barely able to restrain himself from a gregarious impulse to tug at the sleeve of one of the other pallbearers, a total stranger in an officer’s uniform, some former colleague of his father’s no doubt, and say: I was an only child. For many years, I tried with all my heart and soul to please my father, but I was a disappointment to him.
He manages not to splash confession on the pallbearer’s sleeve, but he does nod at his stepmother and smile. She is small and pale and looks, Lowell thinks, rather striking dressed in grief. Is she beautiful? He supposes so; his father always had an eye for women; but since this thought evokes the memory of Lowell’s own mother, he shies away from it. Even so, his stepmother or the occasion or something else makes him smile again. His smile goes on too long. Elizabeth, his stepmother, raises an eyebrow in surprise and stares at him.
Words, intoned, drift between and obscure Lowell’s view.
… exceptional service to his country … Mather Lowell Hawthorne, guardian of our most precious … unsung work, and invisible, but essential to the preservation of liberty and justice for all.
Mather Lowell Hawthorne’s widow is not much older than her stepson, who now, on impulse, pulls a gardenia from the wreath that she has placed on his father’s coffin and hands it to her. Some of the mourners exchange glances. Elizabeth begins to cry then, soundlessly. Her hair, rain-wet, clings to her cheeks, and Lowell wonders if perhaps they may begin to become not-lonely together.
Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of Mather Lowell Hawthorne, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope …
“I hardly knew my father, really,” Lowell tells Elizabeth later, hours later, over drinks in a quiet lounge. “I worshiped him when I was little. He wasn’t often home, but when he was, he used to sit on my bed and tell me stories. Strange stories to tell a child, I suppose, but I was greedy for them. I hung on his every word: Greek gods and goddesses, the Iliad and the Odyssey. My favorite was Odysseus tied to the mast, trying to hurl himself into the sea while the sirens sang.”
“How old were you?”
“Four. Five.”
“Must have given you strange dreams,” Elizabeth says.
“I still have mermaid fantasies. I get a humming in my ears whenever I see a woman with wet hair.”
“Sometimes,” Elizabeth says, lowering her eyes and studying the stem of her glass, “in the middle of the night, I would find him reading Homer in his study. He said it calmed him.”
“That was always his first love. But he won prizes in math and science too, and that’s where he went.”
“He claimed all he ever really wanted to be was a classics professor.”
“Sometimes I believed that,” Lowell says. “But mostly I didn’t. What made him take the direction he finally did, I’ve never understood.”
“They needed linguists,” she says. “In Intelligence. That’s what he told me. Especially ones with scientific training as well. An old friend from his prep school recruited him, he said.”
“He used to have me reciting Homer in Greek at dinner parties when I was six,” Lowell says. “Like a little parrot. His personal performing dwarf. Still, he was less strange to me then than later.”
“It was like living in parallel universes, he said. All the time. Simultaneously.” Elizabeth sighs and turns the stem of her wineglass in her fingers, clockwise, three revolutions. “I was never sure which one he was in when he was with me.”
“He was always somewhere else. Even when he was with us, he wasn’t with us. I never really knew him at all.”
“I didn’t either,” she says.
“I wanted so much to please him, but he kept on raising the bar. I could never measure up. So of course I chose to measure down. Easier to get his attention.”
“I had the same problem,” she says. “I could never measure up either.”
“That’s not true.” Lowell stares at her. “You were the ideal Washington hostess, he told me. Everything my mother wasn’t, he said.”
“I tried,” she says. “I was sad when you stopped accepting our invitations.”
“Not your fault,” he assures her.
“You and I never got a chance to know each other.”
“No. Well. Nothing to do with you.”
“So why?”
“Well, he just made me too nervous. I always felt like I was twelve years old again, not measuring up. And then, Rowena … I mean, my own marriage falling apart. I didn’t want one of his third-degrees.”
“Your father was sad too. When you stopped coming, I mean.”
“That’s a laugh. My father couldn’t stand sadness. My mother was sad for years, and it irritated him. It irritated him to have me around.”
“I think you’re wrong,” she says. “I think he missed you. He was very proud of you.”
“Oh no, believe me, he was embarrassed by me. He sent me to his own boarding school—”
“Yes, I know.”
“—but I blew it. Loser in a school for winners. My father’s name was on all the honor boards, Mather Lowell Hawthorne, gold medal in this, gold medal in that, Latin, Greek, math, physics, athletics, glee club, drama club. Awful. Like a millstone around my neck. Most expensive private school in Massachusetts, and I could always see him thinking sow’s ear when he looked at me.”
“He kept a photograph of you on the bedroom dresser.”
“He did?”
“You’re
