I use La Chère only as an example. As destinies go, his is by no means strange—perhaps it is even blander than most. At least he travelled along a straight line, and that in itself is rare, almost a blessing. In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for. In my first year as a student at Columbia, I walked by a bust of Lorenzo Da Ponte every day on my way to class. I knew him vaguely as Mozart’s librettist, but then I learned that he had also been the first Italian professor at Columbia. The one thing seemed incompatible with the other, and so I decided to look into it, curious to know how one man could wind up living two such different lives. As it turned out, Da Ponte lived five or six. He was born Emmanuele Conegliano in 1749, the son of a Jewish leather merchant. After the death of his mother, his father made a second marriage to a Catholic and decided that he and his children should be baptized. The young Emmanuele showed promise as a scholar, and by the time he was fourteen, the Bishop of Cenada (Monsignore Da Ponte) took the boy under his wing and paid all the costs of his education for the priesthood. As was the custom of the time, the disciple was given his benefactor’s name. Da Ponte was ordained in 1773 and became a seminary teacher, with a special interest in Latin, Italian, and French literature. In addition to becoming a follower of the Enlightenment, he took up with a Venetian noble-woman, and secretly fathered a child. In 1776, he sponsored a public debate at the seminary in Treviso which posed the question whether civilization had succeeded in making mankind any happier. For this affront to Church principles, he was forced to take flight— first to Venice, then to Gorizia, and finally to Dresden, where he began his new career as a librettist. In 1782, he went to Vienna with a letter of introduction to Salieri and was eventually hired as “poeta dei teatri imperiali,” a position he held for almost ten years. It was during this period that he met Mozart and collaborated on the three operas that have preserved his name from oblivion. In 1790, however, when Leopold II curbed musical activities in Vienna because of the Turkish war, Da Ponte found himself out of a job. He went to Trieste and fell in love with an English woman named Nancy Grahl or Krahl (the name is still disputed). From there the two of them went to Paris, and then on to London, where they remained for thirteen years. Da Ponte’s musical work was restricted to writing a few libretti for undistinguished composers. In 1805, he and Nancy emigrated to America, where he lived out the last thirty-three years of his life, for a time working as a shopkeeper in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and dying at the age of eighty-nine—one of the first Italians to be buried in the New World. Little by little, everything had changed for him. From the dapper, unctuous ladies’ man of his youth, an opportunist steeped in the political intrigues of both Church and court, he became a perfectly ordinary citizen of New York, which in 1805 must have looked like the end of the world to him. From all that to this: a hard-working professor, a dutiful husband, the father of four. When one of his children died, it is said, he was so distraught with grief that he refused to leave his house for almost a year. The point being that, in the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.
I don’t mean to harp on any of this. But the circumstances under which lives shift course are so various that it would seem impossible to say anything about a man until he is dead. Not only is death the one true arbiter of happiness (Solon’s remark), it is the only measurement by which we can judge life itself. I once knew a bum who spoke like a Shakespearean actor, a battered, middle-aged alcoholic with scabs on his face and rags for clothes, who slept on the street and begged money from me constantly. Yet he had once been the owner of an art gallery on Madison Avenue. There was another man I knew who had once been considered the most promising young novelist in America. At the time I met him, he had just inherited fifteen thousand dollars from his father and was standing on a New York street corner passing out hundred dollar bills to strangers. It was all part of a plan to destroy the economic system of the United States, he explained to me. Think of what happens. Think of how lives burst apart. Goffe and Whalley, for example, two of the judges who condemned Charles I to death, came to Connecticut after the Restoration and spent the rest of their lives in a cave. Or Mrs. Winchester, the widow of the rifle manufacturer, who feared that the ghosts of the people killed by her husband’s rifles were coming to take her soul—and therefore continually added rooms onto her house, creating a monstrous labyrinth of corridors and hideouts, so that she could sleep in a different room every night and thereby elude the ghosts, the irony being that during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 she was trapped in one of those rooms and nearly starved to death because she couldn’t be found by the servants. There is also M. M. Bakhtin, the Russian critic and literary philosopher. During the German invasion of Russia in World War II, he smoked the only copy of one of his manuscripts, a book-length study of German fiction that had taken him years to write. One by one, he took the pages of his manuscript and used the paper to roll his cigarettes, each day smoking a little more of the book until it was gone. These are true stories. They are also parables, perhaps, but they mean what they mean only because they are true.
In his work, Fanshawe shows a particular fondness for stories of this kind. Especially in the notebooks, there is a constant retelling of little anecdotes, and because they are so frequent— and more and more so toward the end—one begins to suspect that Fanshawe felt they could somehow help him to understand himself. One of the very last (from February 1976, just two months before he disappeared) strikes me as significant.
“In a book I once read by Peter Freuchen,” Fanshawe writes, “the famous Arctic explorer describes being trapped by a blizzard in northern Greenland. Alone, his supplies dwindling, he decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm. Many days passed. Afraid, above all, that he would be attacked by wolves—for he heard them prowling hungrily on the roof of his igloo—he would periodically step outside and sing at the top of his lungs in order to frighten them away. But the wind was blowing fiercely, and no matter how hard he sang, the only thing he could hear was the wind. If this was a serious problem, however, the problem of the igloo itself was much greater. For Freuchen began to notice that the walls of his little shelter were gradually closing in on him. Because of the particular weather conditions outside, his breath was literally freezing to the walls, and with each breath the walls became that much thicker, the igloo became that much smaller, until eventually there was almost no room left for his body. It is surely a frightening thing, to imagine breathing yourself into a coffin of ice, and to my mind considerably more compelling than, say,
The Pit and the Pendulum
by Poe. For in this case it is the man himself who is the agent of his own destruction, and further, the instrument of that destruction is the very thing he needs to keep himself alive. For surely a man cannot live if he does not breathe. But at the same time, he will not live if he does breathe. Curiously, I do not remember how Freuchen managed to escape his predicament. But needless to say, he did escape. The title of the book, if I recall, is
Arctic Adventure.
It has been out of print for many years.”
In June of that year (1978), Sophie, Ben, and I went out to New Jersey to see Fanshawe’s mother. My parents no longer lived next door (they had retired to Florida), and I had not been back in years. As Ben’s grandmother, Mrs. Fanshawe had stayed in touch with us, but relations were somewhat difficult. There seemed to be an undercurrent of hostility in her toward Sophie, as though she secretly blamed her for Fanshawe’s disappearance, and this resentment would surface every now and then in some offhand remark. Sophie and I invited her to dinner at reasonable intervals, but she accepted only rarely, and then, when she did come, she would sit there fidgeting and smiling, rattling on in that brittle way of hers, pretending to admire the baby, paying Sophie inappropriate compliments and saying what a lucky girl she was, and then leave early, always getting up in the middle of a conversation and blurting out that she had forgotten an appointment somewhere else. Still, it was hard to hold it against her. Nothing had gone very well in her life, and by now she had more or less stopped hoping it would. Her husband was dead; her daughter had gone through a long series of mental breakdowns and was now living on tranquilizers in a halfway house; her son had vanished. Still beautiful at fifty (as a boy, I thought she was the most ravishing woman I had ever seen), she kept herself going with a number of intricate love affairs (the roster of men was always in flux), shopping sprees in New York, and a passion for golf. Fanshawe’s literary success had taken her by surprise, but now that she had adjusted to it, she was perfectly willing to assume responsibility for having given birth to a genius. When I called to tell her about the biography, she sounded eager to help. She had letters and photographs and documents, she said, and would show me whatever I wanted to see.
We got there by mid-morning, and after an awkward start, followed by a cup of coffee in the kitchen and a long talk about the weather, we were taken upstairs to Fanshawe’s old room. Mrs. Fanshawe had prepared quite thoroughly for me, and all the materials were laid out in neat piles on what had once been Fanshawe’s desk. I was stunned by the accumulation. Not knowing what to say, I thanked her for being so helpful—but in fact I was frightened, overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of what was there. A few minutes later, Mrs. Fanshawe went downstairs and out into the backyard with Sophie and Ben (it was a warm, sunny day), and I was left there alone. I remember looking out the window and catching a glimpse of Ben as he waddled across the grass in his diaper-padded overalls, shrieking and pointing as a robin skimmed overhead. I tapped on the window, and when Sophie turned around and looked up, I waved to her. She smiled, blew me a kiss, and then walked off to inspect a flower bed with Mrs. Fanshawe.
I settled down behind the desk. It was a terrible thing to be sitting in that room, and I didn’t know how long I would be able to take it. Fanshawe’s baseball glove lay on a shelf with a scuffed-up baseball inside it; on the shelves above it and below it were the books he had read as a child; directly behind me was the bed, with the same blue-and-white checkered quilt I remembered from years before. This was the tangible evidence, the remains of a dead world. I had stepped into the museum of my own past, and what I found there nearly crushed me.
In one pile: Fanshawe’s birth certificate, Fanshawe’s report cards from school, Fanshawe’s Cub Scout badges, Fanshawe’s high school diploma. In another pile: photographs. An album of Fanshawe as a baby; an album of Fanshawe and his sister; an album of the family (Fanshawe as a two-year-old smiling in his father’s arms, Fanshawe and Ellen hugging their mother on the backyard swing, Fanshawe surrounded by his cousins). And then the loose pictures—in folders, in envelopes, in little boxes: dozens of Fanshawe and me together (swimming, playing catch, riding bikes, mugging in the yard; my father with the two of us on his back; the short haircuts, the baggy jeans, the ancient cars behind us: a Packard, a DeSoto, a wood-panelled Ford station wagon). Class pictures, team pictures, camp pictures. Pictures of races, of games. Sitting in a canoe, pulling on a rope in a tugof-war. And then, toward the bottom, a few from later years: Fanshawe as I had never seen him. Fanshawe standing in Harvard Yard; Fanshawe on the deck of an Esso oil tanker; Fanshawe in Paris, in front of a stone fountain. Last of all, a single picture of Fanshawe and Sophie—Fanshawe looking older, grimmer; and Sophie so terribly young, so beautiful, and yet somehow distracted, as though unable to concentrate. I took a deep breath and then started to cry, all of a sudden, not aware until the last moment that I had those tears inside me—sobbing hard, shuddering with my face in my hands.
A box to the right of the pictures was filled with letters, at least a hundred of them, beginning at the age of eight (the clumsy writing of a child, smudged pencil marks and erasures) and continuing on through the early seventies. There were letters from college, letters from the ship, letters from France. Most of them were addressed to Ellen, and many were quite long. I knew immediately that they were valuable, no doubt more valuable than anything else in the room—but I didn’t have the heart to read them there. I waited ten or fifteen minutes, then went downstairs to join the others.
Mrs. Fanshawe did not want the originals to leave the house, but she had no objection to having the letters photocopied. She even offered to do it herself, but I told her not to bother: I would come out again another day and take care of it.
We had a picnic lunch in the yard. Ben dominated the scene by dashing to the flowers and back again between each bite of his sandwich, and by two o’clock we were ready to go home. Mrs. Fanshawe drove us to the bus station and kissed all three of us goodbye, showing more emotion than at any other time during the visit. Five minutes after the bus started up, Ben fell asleep in my lap, and Sophie took hold of my hand.
“Not such a happy day, was it?” she said.
“One of the worst,” I said.
“Imagine having to make conversation with that woman for four hours. I ran out of things to say the moment we got there.”
“She probably doesn’t like us very much.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so.”
“But that’s the least of it.”
“It was hard being up there alone, wasn’t it?”
“Very hard.”
“Any second thoughts?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t blame you. The whole thing is getting pretty spooky.”
“I’ll have to think it through again. Right now, I’m beginning to feel I’ve made a big mistake.”
Four days later, Mrs. Fanshawe telephoned to say that she was going to Europe for a month and that perhaps it would be a good idea for us to take care of our business now (her words). I had been planning to let the matter slide, but before I could think of a decent excuse for not going out there, I heard myself agreeing to make the trip the following Monday. Sophie backed off from accompanying me, and I didn’t press her to change her mind. We both felt that one family visit had been enough.
Jane Fanshawe met me at the bus station, all smiles and affectionate hellos. From the moment I climbed into her car, I sensed that things were going to be different this time. She had made an effort with her appearance (white pants, a red silk blouse, her tanned, unwrinkled neck exposed), and it was hard not to feel that she was enticing me to look at her, to acknowledge the fact that she was still beautiful. But there was more to it than that: a vaguely insinuating tone to her voice, an assumption that we were somehow old friends, on an intimate footing because of the past, and wasn’t it lucky that I had come by myself, since now we were free to talk openly with each other. I found it all rather distasteful and said no more than I had to.
“That’s quite a little family you have there, my boy,” she said, turning to me as we stopped for a red light.
“Yes,” I said. “Quite a little family.”
“The baby is adorable, of course. A regular heartthrob. But a bit on the wild side, wouldn’t you say?”
“He’s only two. Most children tend to be high-spirited at that age.”
“Of course. But I do think that Sophie dotes on him. She seems so amused all the time, if you know what I mean. I’m not arguing against laughter, but a little discipline wouldn’t hurt either.”
“Sophie acts that way with everyone,” I said. “A lively woman is bound to be a lively mother. As far as I can tell, Ben has no complaints.”
A slight pause, and then, as we started up again, cruising along a broad commercial avenue, Jane Fanshawe added: “She’s a lucky girl, that Sophie. Lucky to have landed on her feet. Lucky to have found a man like you.”
“I usually think of it the other way around,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be so modest.”
“I’m not. It’s just that I know what I’m talking about. So far, all the luck has been on my side.”
She smiled at this—briefly, enigmatically, as though judging me a dunce, and yet somehow conceding the point, aware that I wasn’t going to give her an opening. By the time we reached her house a few minutes later, she seemed to have dropped her initial tactics. Sophie and Ben were no longer mentioned, and she became a model of solicitude, telling me how glad she was that I was writing the book about Fanshawe, acting as though her encouragement made a real difference—an ultimate sort of approval, not only of the book but of who I was. Then, handing me the keys to her car, she told me how to get to the nearest photocopy store. Lunch, she said, would be waiting for me when I got back.
It took more than two hours to copy the letters, which made it nearly one o’clock by the time I returned to the house. Lunch was indeed there, and it was an impressive spread: asparagus, cold salmon, cheeses, white wine, the works. It was all set out on the dining room table, accompanied by flowers and what were clearly the best dishes. The surprise must have shown on my face.
“I wanted to make it festive,” Mrs. Fanshawe said. “You have no idea how good it makes me feel to have you here. All the memories that come back. It’s as though the bad things never happened.”
I suspected that she had already started drinking while I was gone. Still in control, still steady in her movements, there was a certain thickening that had crept into her voice, a wavering, effusive quality that had not been there before. As we sat down to the table, I told myself to watch it. The wine was poured in liberal doses, and when I saw her paying more attention to her glass than to her plate, merely picking at her food and eventually ignoring it altogether, I began to expect the worst. After some idle talk about my parents and my two younger sisters, the conversation lapsed into a monologue.
“It’s strange,” she said, “strange how things in life turn out. From one moment to the next, you never know what’s going to happen. Here you are, the little boy who lived next door. You’re the same person who used to run through this house with mud on his shoes—all grown up now, a man. You’re the father of my grandson, do you realize that? You’re married to my son’s wife. If someone had told me ten years ago that this was the future, I would have laughed. That’s what you finally learn from life: how strange it is. You can’t keep up with what happens. You can’t even imagine it.
“You even look like him, you know. You always did, the two of you—like brothers, almost like twins. I remember how when you were both small I would sometimes confuse you from a distance. I couldn’t even tell which one of you was mine.
“I know how much you loved him, how you looked up to him. But let me tell you something, my dear. He wasn’t half the boy you were. He was cold inside. He was all dead in there, and I don’t think he ever loved anyone—not once, not ever in his life. I’d sometimes watch you and your mother across the yard—the way you would run to her and throw your arms around her neck, the way you would let her kiss you—and right there, smack in front of me, I could see everything I didn’t have with my own son. He wouldn’t let me touch him, you know. After the age of four or five, he’d cringe every time I got near him. How do you think that makes a woman feel—to have her own son despise her? I was so damned young back then. I wasn’t even twenty when he was born. Imagine what it does to you to be rejected like that.
“I’m not saying that he was bad. He was a separate being, a child without parents. Nothing I said ever had an effect on him. The same with his father. He refused to learn anything from us. Robert tried and tried, but he could never get through to the boy. But you can’t punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can’t force a child to love you just because he’s your child.
“There was Ellen, of course. Poor, tortured Ellen. He was good to her, we both know that. But too good somehow, and in the end it wasn’t good for her at all. He brainwashed her. He made her so dependent on him that she began to think twice before turning to us. He was the one who understood her, the one who gave her advice, the one who could solve her problems. Robert and I were no more than figureheads. As far as the children were concerned, we hardly existed. Ellen trusted her brother so much that she finally gave up her soul to him. I’m not saying that he knew what he was doing, but I still have to live with the results. The girl is twenty-seven years old, but she acts as though she were fourteen—and that’s when she’s doing well. She’s so confused, so panicked inside herself. One day she thinks I’m out to destroy her, the next day she calls me thirty times on the telephone. Thirty times. You can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like.
“Ellen’s the reason why he never published any of his work, you know. She’s why he quit Harvard after his second year. He was writing poetry back then, and every few weeks he would send her a batch of manuscripts. You know what those poems are like. They’re almost impossible to understand. Very passionate, of course, filled with all that ranting and exhortation, but so obscure you’d think they were written in code. Ellen would spend hours puzzling over them, acting as if her life depended on it, treating the poems as secret messages, oracles written directly to her. I don’t think he had any idea what was happening. Her brother was gone, you see, and these poems were all she had left of him. The poor baby. She was only fifteen at the time, and already falling to pieces anyway. She would pore over those pages until they were all crumpled and dirty, lugging them around with her wherever she went. When she got really bad, she would go up to perfect strangers on the bus and force them into their hands. ‘Read these poems,’ she’d say. ‘They’ll save your life.’