In 1963, Albert had purchased a house in Sarasota. Four bedrooms, pool, a wedge of private beachfront, a low, long modernist slash set into the white sand with palm trees for shade and bougainvillea crawling along the fence. It was penicillin for the gray New York winter.
I bought it for Sydney, Albert said. So I told myself. We’d taken a vacation down there, just the two of us, winter of ’62. Had quite a time. We were like kids again. I had an agent on the phone the day after we flew home. Signed the papers in April. A little temperance on my part might have been in order, but it was as if I were under the influence of some kind of drug. Only time in my life I’ve let passion get the best of me.
We enjoyed that house immensely. When there was no moon, it was as dark as pitch, and the frogs sang all night. Like paradise. The winter of ’73, John and his wife had been there for a few days, and their boy was with them, of course. He was three, quite a talker. And at the age where they collect absolutely everything. He had his little pail filled with shells and dead bugs, scraps of plastic, whatever he came across. He could barely carry the damn thing by Tuesday. It was a Tuesday when Tracy and Filomena got there with their families. I can’t remember my own name sometimes but I can tell you it was a Tuesday.
Albert was affectless. His voice didn’t waver. The story came out of his mouth as evenly as a kite string unspooling into the sky. Why would I expect histrionics? my father thought. These things happen every day.
As if to answer him, Albert said, Normal Tuesday. That’s the bitch of it, of course. There’s a pleasant breeze, and the pleasant breeze doesn’t stop blowing. The palm trees keep swaying, the waves keep breaking. You hear the cars out on the road, and of course the people inside are carrying on with their lives as if nothing has happened. Their day is a normal day. Go to the beach, take a nap, make a sandwich. And for a moment or two, you yourself don’t know that anything has changed. The event has taken place, yet you still occupy your happy place among the unwitting.
There was no signal, no sign. I don’t believe in omens, Albert said. Convenient answers to thorny questions.
My father nodded.
Everything that’s gone wrong with this country boils down to convenience. And the first convenience is superstition, Albert said.
He paused to consider the clock on the mantel.
This will all go, he said. I’ll lose all of it. The ability to reason, the ability to make a convincing argument. I’ve seen it. It all goes, and it goes in a horror. At the end you’re just holes for food to go in and out of.
He paused again to look at the clock.
It was boiling out. We had the air on and the doors were closed. We were inside, he said, just on the other side of the sliding glass doors. Fil had made a recording of John at some festival or another, and she’d put it on the reel-to-reel. Fil was very supportive of his singing. She and Tracy were his protectors, his biggest fans, of course, as older sisters will be. And there’s John, in the middle of this, like a king on his throne. Now, you lose sight of your child, you don’t hear him playing, you wonder where he is, don’t you? You wonder where your child is. Wouldn’t you wonder where your child is?
I suppose so, my father said.
That clock, Albert said.
My father turned to look at it.
It was a gift, but I can’t remember who it was from. Now, I focus my mind on retaining the details of that day and I still have them. He tapped the side of his head. Not for long, though. Not for long.
A death certificate, he said, requires classical precision. It puts one in the mind of those little monks at their desks, toiling over their Latin manuscripts, don’t you think? Wet-drowning. Asphyxia. The language, I’m talking about. This is an area that would appeal to you, I’d think.
My father made a plaintive gesture.
I went to the—to see the body. I went to the. Goddamnit. Good poets read medical texts and good doctors read poetry. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that what they say?
Sounds plausible, my father said.
Plausible, Albert sniffed. Indeed. A plausible thing to say. I won’t mind losing the proper names for things, not as long as I can still imagine the thing itself. You’re not one of those neoliberal bed wetters who believes that without the word to describe it, the thing evaporates? Disciple of high priest Chomsky? You’re not a member of that faction, are you?
Oh, I don’t think so, my father said.
Yes, I wouldn’t have taken you for one of those. The conceptual—that’s what worries me. I’ll lose the abstractions and I won’t even know what I’ve lost. I saw this happen to my father. At first you can’t call up the words for things. That’s just forgetting someone’s name. You can still carry on a conversation. The name is lost in the clouds, so what? But losing time—my father’s comprehension of time vanished and just like that, he was an empty body. His ability to remember numbers, gone. Ability to understand
