The Other Side of the World (6 page)

I said that even though Mister Falzetti was a lousy piece of work, it was still something to lose your only child, and that there was this too: that after Nick died, I kept remembering what Max said once when he'd come home from the funeral of a colleague's daughter: that the rabbis taught that although there was a word for a child who lost his parents, and for a husband or wife who lost a spouse, there was no word for someone who lost a child, so terrible was the loss.

“That's the mush side of your father's brain talking,” Seana said. “Sentimental crap. When he gets into his rabbinic groove, spewing homilitic pap, I head for the exits.”

“You've never had a child to lose,” I said.

“So?”

“So how would you know what it's like?”

“Loss is loss.”

“I don't buy it,” I said. “There are losses, and there are losses. They're not all equal.”

“And imagination's imagination,” Seana said. “It can go anywhere and feel anything. You don't have to lose a child to feel what it would be like to lose one.”

“Methinks she doth protest too much,” I said.

“Give it a rest, Charlie,” she said.

“What I think is that if you'd ever had a child yourself, and if…”

“
Goddamn you
!” she said, and whacked me hard across the face with the back of her hand, then walked away, fast.

I caught up to her, grabbed her by a shoulder, and turned her around. “
Hey
—!” I began, but before I could say anything else, she wrenched her shoulder free and pushed me away.

“I gave you fair warning,” she said. “I gave you fair warning, and I'll do it again. Don't you
ever
talk to me like that. Don't you ever,
ever
talk to me like that, do you hear? I'd have made a good mother if I'd wanted to—a damned good mother.”

“I agree.”

“Prick!” she said, and she drew back her hand to whack me again, but then let it drop to her side, and walked off toward the near end of the boat landing.

Neither of us spoke again until we were back in the car and were approaching the Falzettis' house. The house was large, and set on a slight rise that overlooked a small fishing harbor that contained one of three islands owned by Andrew Wyeth and his wife. The Wyeths' island was set in the mouth of the harbor and covered about twenty acres, with a beautiful old lighthouse at one end that the Wyeths had used as their home before they'd bought two other islands in the area, and before they'd moved back to Pennsylvania. I told Seana about the Wyeths, and suggested that if we stayed a few days, we might visit their other two islands, which were much larger than this one—four to five hundred acres each—and that Wyeth's wife had turned these
two islands into wildlife refuges where local fishermen could base their operations.

“Thanks for the good news on the environmental front,” Seana said, and she punched me on the arm, lightly. “So okay—here's what just happened: because I'd convinced myself you were tougher-minded than your father, I became momentarily disillusioned—upset with myself—for having been blind to the squishy regions of your sensibility. You were right about Max, though. He'd be a distraction.”

 

When Nick's mother opened the door—she was a short, compact woman with light blue eyes that, like Nick's, were almost translucent, and gray hair that had a hazy purple sheen to it—I hugged her and told her how sorry I was about Nick, and as I did I recalled that the first time Nick invited me to his parents' home we were halfway through a meal she'd set down for us before I realized she was his mother, and not the housekeeper.

Mrs. Falzetti said it was good to see me again and that I looked wonderful, then wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. I introduced her to Seana, who had been one of my father's students, I said, and—the story we'd contrived on the way north—was on her way to a writer's retreat near Acadia National Park, and (but why was I surprised?) Seana said something sweet and appropriate about it being impossible to feel what it would be like to lose one's only child.

Mister Falzetti came to us then—“Call me Lorenzo,” he said at once, and I hugged him too, which seemed to surprise him—his body stiffened—and told him how sorry I was about Nick, and that Nick had been my closest friend and had always looked out for me. Mister Falzetti was wearing a navy-blue blazer, a powder-blue mock-turtleneck, gray flannel slacks, and white deck shoes. I'd first met him at a UMass homecoming football game nearly twenty years before, and he looked the same now
as he had then: lean, strong, and, in his yachting outfit, though without a captain's hat, what my father would have called ‘natty.'

He looked at Seana then, and seemed taken aback that she was there, but recovered quickly and spoke to her in his usual cold, confident way: “You're Seana O'Sullivan, aren't you,” he said.

“That's correct.”

“I'm an admirer of your two novels,” he said, and he led us into the living room, which was handsomely appointed in a soothing combination of contemporary furniture—sleek plastics and stainless steel—and antiques: an oak sideboard, a large French country table, rush-covered ladder-back chairs, electrified oil lamps, and, around the room, discretely placed, a dozen or so model ships, some of which, I knew, Mister Falzetti had made: fishing boats, sailboats, steamboats, ocean liners, and fully rigged tall ships like those you see in pirate movies.

If you'd met him in this setting, or in the home Nick had grown up in, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an upper middle class suburb south of Springfield—the house in Maine had been the family's country home until Mister Falzetti retired and they moved here full-time—you would have thought he'd probably gone to Harvard or Yale, and had been the CEO of an old-line WASP corporation. But it wasn't so. “What my dad does is to turn shit into gold,” was the way Nick had described his father to me. Mister Falzetti had grown up in the North End of Boston, one of nine kids from a poor Italian immigrant family, and had started out, at fourteen, digging sewer lines for a company in Newton, after which, when he was sixteen, he'd moved to a small, mostly Polish farming town in Western Massachusetts where he set up his own business—mowing lawns, plowing driveways, pumping out septic tanks. Though he never finished high school, he was a fanatic about education—the one thing, he liked to say, the bastards can't take away from you. And when it came to smarts—Nick loved quoting him on
stuff like this—being a Wop among Polacks was like being the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. By the time he was twenty-one, he owned his own company, which pumped out shit and sludge from people's basements and septic systems, dug up their leach fields, put in their sewer lines, and plowed and repaired their driveways, and he'd also been able to corner lucrative contracts for school bus routes, waste treatment operations, and road work—salting, plowing, repairs—in a half-dozen Western Massachusetts towns.

“So let's get to it, Charlie,” he said as soon as he'd poured wine for me and Seana. “Tell us about Nick, since, except perhaps for poor Trish, you knew him better than anyone. Tell us about our boy: was he happy near the end?”

“Not especially,” I said.

“He drank a lot, didn't he.”

“He drank a lot.”

“The man from the embassy said that his alcohol level at the time of death was off the charts.”

“Probably.”

“Then tell us something else: Are you glad he's dead?” he asked, and before I could answer, he pointed a finger at me. “The truth now, Charlie. Don't dissemble with me. Is it a
relief
? Were you glad when it happened or, in the immediate aftermath, let's say, when the actuality—its irreversibility—hit home?”

“No.”

“You're a liar, but a credible one,” he said. “Nick always admired that quality in you—your ability to fool people into thinking you were just an ordinary, okay guy. ‘My friend's a regular good-time Charlie,' he used to joke. You were the only person he knew whose way of being was a refutation of the truism that one cannot both be sincere and seem to be sincere at the same time.”

“I miss Nick more than you can know,” I said.

“I intend no criticism,” Mister Falzetti said. “We're all upset,
each in our own ways, but I'll tell you this: you did make a terrific team, you two—like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, I used to think—Nick ever ebullient, risk-taking, wild, and so shrewd he ultimately did himself in, but in love with life, my son was!—and you, almost as smart as Nick but with an essential—what shall we call it?—naïveté? reserve? timidity?”

“Call it sleep,” Seana said, and walked by us, to a large bay window on the south side of the room.

“That's Henry Roth, of course,” Mister Falzetti said. “He lived not too far from here, on a shit-ass farm plopped down between villages named Freedom and Liberty. The way I see it, he fled New York and came here to live so he could teach himself not to write and not to be a Jew.”

“He didn't succeed at either,” Seana said.

“Correct,” Mister Falzetti said and, moving across the room to Seana, pointed to the lighthouse. “Now take poor Wyeth,” he said. “The son of a bitch timed his death all wrong—packed it in three days before they inaugurated that young black tennis player, so he didn't get anywhere near the press and publicity he craved.”

“Tennis player?” I said.

“The young Ashe boy, he's in the White House now, isn't he, even though he has AIDS? I call it a miracle.”

“Arthur Ashe is dead, and has been for some time,” Seana said.

“Perhaps,” Mister Falzetti said. “But what difference? I admire the cool athleticism and affect, the way he rope-a-dopes his opponents, plus—all-important—the fire within. The man's a worker—I refer to our president—and he's a fighter too, you just wait and see. Plenty smart—smarter than Wyeth, who chose to live under his father's thumb his whole life. That's where the rage came from, of course.”

“We were hoping the two of you would stay for dinner,” Mrs. Falzetti said. She sat by a stone fireplace, in a narrow wooden
chair, her hands clasped on her lap. The fire was low and bright, and drew the chill from the air. In the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that surrounded the fireplace I saw what looked like the same books that had been in the living room in Longmeadow, and that Nick bragged were not just there for show:
The Encyclopedia Britannica
,
The Harvard Classics, The Great Books
and
Syntopicon
, and uniform sets of novels by nineteenth and early twentieth century authors: Dickens, Twain, Hardy, Trollope, Scott, Stevenson, Eliot, James, Cather, Dreiser, Howells, Forster, the Brontës…

“It would please us if you would,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “We could talk about Nick, and look through old photo albums. And if you haven't yet found lodging, we have a small guest cabin out back you're welcome to use.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Seana said. “Perhaps we can raincheck the invite, and join with your husband's desire to dance on graves on some other occasion.”

“I understand,” Mister Falzetti said. “I
can
be irritating at times—offensive, some say—but I've read and admired your books, as I said, and there's no lack of offense there for those so inclined. Your work's marked by what I'd call a grim severity, and I like severity, admire it in prose as much as I do in people.”

“It really would be no trouble at all,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “And we needn't talk about Nick if doing so would make you uncomfortable.”

“And I've read interviews with you,” Mister Falzetti said. “The few you've allowed, that is—quite shrewd to minimize them and keep the mystery going, which is something Wyeth, for one, never understood—and I've noticed that you never mention your family. So a question for the author: How come no mention of family?”

“Because I have none,” Seana said.

“Oh?”

“I excommunicated them at an early age.”

“But—let me guess—you did have a mother and father. Most of us, I'm told, have mothers and fathers.”

“Maybe,” Seana said. “Depends upon how you define your terms.”

“There's something to be said for that,” Mister Falzetti said. “For example: if you think of that young black man's strength of character and the fact that he only knew his father for a single month of his life, and if you then consider the lives Nick, or even Charlie here, have had—young men who've never had to dream up their fathers, it tells you something.”

“Tells you what?” Seana asked.

“That's correct,” Mister Falzetti said, and he refilled Seana's wine glass. “But tell me about Shulamith, if you will, since it's a middle name you've chosen to keep. Are there Jews in your lineage?”

“There are Jews everywhere,” Seana said.

“True enough,” Mister Falzetti said. “There may even be Jews in my family, from a time when the Moors overran Southern Europe and mingled with the Italians and Spanish. Did you know—forgive the tangent, but did you know that the Roosevelts—Franklin, Theodore, and Eleanor—were descended from Dutch Jews named Rosenfeld? Rosen-
veldt
, to be exact.”

Seana sat down next to me and squeezed my arm. “Oh Charlie, let's blow this joint, okay?” she said quietly, mocking me affectionately with my own phrase.

Mister Falzetti poured himself more wine. “Now, your father's short story about
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
coming true, is, in my opinion, his single most brilliant creation,” he said. “It rivals the best in Roth—in any of them: Henry, Philip, or Joseph—and it's a damned shame he only wrote one novel, because that novel is a real knockout. I always thought he could have been another Nabokov, the mind and gift he had.”