Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater by Seth Lerer

Author:Seth Lerer [Lerer, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Upriver

I was still sitting at his desk, the phone down, his Ghurka address book still lying nearby. I thought of calling Mom back, thought of everything, but then got up and looked around. Pictures were everywhere. He’d carefully framed sepias of his mother and his aunts, his father at a table playing poker with a cousin. And then the pictures of himself: at two, bundled in a woolen hat and scarf; at five, in short pants and a Buster Brown haircut; at thirteen, in the tallis and the yarmulke of the Bar Mitzvah; and then in the army, with his relatives, with me, with my brother, with my wife and son. There was no picture taken after 1925 that didn’t have him in it, and I picked them up from side tables and countertops, turning them in my hands like they were stelae from a tomb. I found my own Bar Mitzvah picture, and then drawers of photo albums: Dad and me at my college graduation; Dad and me in the courtyard of my Oxford college; Dad and me in Chicago, when I got my PhD; and Dad at my wedding, with a sheaf of flowers in one hand, his other hand spread out, and his mouth caught in midlaugh, as if to say, can you believe he found her?

I had.

We met on the first day of graduate school. I was sitting in the lounge at Harper Hall when she came in with boxes of books, a small TV set, and a carton of kitchenware. I held the elevator for her, peering into the splitting carton to see knives and forks, plates, a few pans, and a corkscrew. Later that afternoon, I walked by her open door to find her neatly setting books along the only shelf provided: Derrida’s De la grammatologie, the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, a set of French plays, and a large, yellow hardback of Hans Küng’s On Being a Christian.

Hey.

Hey.

I walked in without being asked and went over to the bookshelf. As she unpacked, I fingered the spines, moving from top to bottom of the English books and from bottom to top along the French. I pulled down the Küng, and opened it at random.

The author will reject no suggestion which may help to make his meaning clear. To this extent all doors remain open to greater truth.

“You into Jesus?” I ventured.

“Oh, I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking.”

Me, too, I said, and didn’t see her for a week.

That first weekend of school, one of the older graduate students in the dorm suggested that we all go to the top of the John Hancock Building downtown. There was a bar on the ninety-fifth floor, and he got it in his head that we’d all drive in to the city, take the elevator up, and drink till we closed the place down.

“Top of the John,” I ventured, trying to be witty.

“Top of the ’Cock,” he fired back.

Five or six of us piled into his little

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