Asa, as I Knew Him (15 page)

“You think I’m chicken.”

“He’ll give you some brandy, he’ll show you his dirty etchings, you’ll have a great time.” Reuben leaned against the wall with one shoulder, crossed his arms, and smiled. “It’s more your style.”

Asa began to cry; his throat got bigger than his neck, his back and shoulders shook independently of the rest of his body, which he held straight and rigid. One hot tear contrasted on his skin with the cold water; the rest he suppressed. Reuben put a hand on his wiggling arm.

“You’re not going to fool anybody by coming. You’ll just be a liability.”

“Terrific,” Asa whispered. He didn’t trust his throat enough to speak.

“Jesus,” Reuben said, turning away. “I don’t give a damn. Don’t do it for
me
.”

“Why not?” A few more tears got out. Asa drank them. “Why not?” he repeated.

“Look, Asa. We’re pals.” Reuben was facing him again. “I know what you’re like. We’re not the same—but we’re pals. Okay? Okay?”

“You mean it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, what have I been—” Asa stopped.

“Trying to prove? Is that what you mean? I don’t know, Thayer. Peer pressure.”

Asa sniffed and wiped his cheeks. Reuben had retreated again and was smiling in his usual chilly way. “Stop sniveling,” he said. “We’re going now.”

Reuben went back into the dining room. Asa could hear the chairs scraping the floor as Roberto and Parker stood up. He blew his nose and went in there also. Everyone was standing except Professor Sola, who had started on a second cup of coffee.

“We’re off, Papa,” said Reuben.

“Yes, boys. Be back by midnight.” He laughed, and so did his sons.

“And entertain Asa.”

“Asa’s not coming?” asked Parker, addressing Reuben. Asa stood behind his chair. They could all hear the early crickets.

“Asa’s not coming,” said Reuben.

The screen door at the back of the house banged three times, the Porsche’s motor made its small explosions in the night,
and they were gone. Asa stood behind his chair listening to the silence they had left, which was unbroken by Professor Sola. He felt tired, and old, and sat down again.

“What are they really going to do?” asked Reuben’s father, suddenly.

“Climb the Mystic River Bridge.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “You are a brave young man,” he told Asa. “Have a cognac.” Lolly appeared with two glasses. “Here’s to …” He held his glass up and looked at Asa, but didn’t say anything.

“What, sir?”

“Here’s to History,” concluded Professor Sola, after a long pause. “We’ll all be part of it sooner or later.”

When at ten-thirty the car turned into the driveway again, Asa and Professor Sola were on the sofa, bent over a folder of Picasso’s erotic drawings, just as Reuben had predicted. The air conditioner muffled the sound of tires on gravel and the screen door, which banged twice. So Parker and Roberto, materializing out of nowhere in the study whose atmosphere was gilded by the amber-glass lamps that hung from the bookshelves, startled the pair. Professor Sola recovered himself quickly, but Asa had seen a horrible expression fix itself briefly on his face—open eyes, open mouth, eyebrows climbing to his hairline. He clenched his teeth (the Sola sound of grinding competed for a moment with the hum of machinery) and put his face in order.

“Professor Sola—” Parker said.

“Papa—” Roberto broke in.

Asa felt the cold air streaming unpleasantly past his head. Parker’s sleeves were torn, he noticed, and Roberto’s pants were damp and spotted with mud.

“Reuben fell,” Roberto said. “He fell off. We tried, we
couldn’t, we looked, we didn’t see.” He was speaking in bursts, but flatly, each phrase an uninflected exhalation. He sat down in an armchair, but still he kept talking, or what seemed to him to be talking. “We thought maybe, but it wasn’t, there weren’t any rocks, and we tried on the shore, I didn’t see, we heard that splash.”

“Enough,” said his father. “That’s enough now.”

“I’ve called the Coast Guard,” said Parker. “I’m going back. They’re going to drag the river. I’m going back.” He turned toward Asa, fierce. “You should have been there,” he said. “You belonged there.”

Asa was cold. The book, with its sporting couples and beribboned dogs and centaurs, lay open on his lap. He was aware of his toes wiggling inside his sneakers, of Professor Sola’s cigarette burning untended in the marble ashtray. The phone rang. Nobody answered it. Roberto started up again: “It wasn’t easy, we didn’t notice until, there was so much garbage in the river, I never imagined—because it was pretty straightforward.”

At that, his father began to laugh. “Pretty straightforward! As a climb, you mean? It wasn’t much of a challenge, you mean that? You can’t understand how it happened, because Reuben kept saying how it wasn’t very difficult? Do you mean that?” He sat up and opened his eyes wide. “Do you, Roberto?”

“Oh, Papa,” Roberto said. He sounded tired and resigned.

“When she jumped—” Professor Sola said. Asa came out of his daze. But Roberto interrupted.

“No, no. It wasn’t—he was never like you, never.”

“Me? I’m not talking about myself.”

“You plural, you together, you who weren’t brave enough to live, that’s who,” Roberto said.

“And what do you know about bravery?” said Professor Sola, softly, shutting his eyes.

“I’m going back there,” Parker said. “I’m taking the car. Are you coming?” He looked at Asa. Asa shook his head.

“I’m coming,” said Professor Sola.

The river was dragged until one in the morning and the whole of Tuesday as well. Professor Sola sat on the bank in his black suit and watched. Tuesday evening he called Parker and asked him to arrange a memorial service—“Get in touch with his friends. We’ll never have a body.” Thursday at midday a hundred and fifty young men and women gathered in the Solas’ living room, rarely used, where they heard a string quartet by Mozart and a speech on youth by a junior-faculty history teacher at Andover. Professor Sola did not attend. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” was read, and Jerry Kuhn, who’d flown up from New York and seated himself beside Asa, who still felt cold, leaned close to him and whispered, “I knew they’d do that. I knew it.” Jo wore bleached linen; she had cut most of her hair off and her unsuntanned neck rose up from her collar like a white pillar. When it was over everybody left quickly. Professor Sola had decided that the pool needed to be repainted and was having it drained; he was overseeing the workmen during the service. Jerry, who’d caught a glimpse of this scene as he left the house in Asa’s wake, said, “Does he think he’ll find Reuben at the bottom of that body of water?” Asa dragged his bicycle out of its spot in the bushes without answering and rode all the way to Walden Pond for a swim.

It was late in June when Reuben died. Asa caught a cold and stayed in bed reading Sherlock Holmes until a few days before the Fourth of July. Parker called once, to see if he wanted to go to the beach; Asa said no, and Parker didn’t
call again. On July 3, Asa put himself on a bus going north to spend some weeks with his grandparents in New Hampshire. He did not drive into town with them to see the fireworks, although this had been one of his favorite events when he was a boy. He stayed home, blowing his nose and reading Maupassant’s short stories, which comforted him with their predictability. He was asleep; even his limbs were asleep, and tingled every time he tried to move them. He woke up briefly at the start of August, when he decided to return to Cambridge. When he got there, he had fallen asleep again. Although it had been easier to cease functioning with his grandparents, who were indulgent and didn’t expect him to do anything more than gather some eggs for breakfast, he was too tired to go back, or go anywhere else. He mowed the lawn, he polished the silver, he ran errands for his father, he did his own laundry. Now and then he surfaced—it was as though he lived underwater, what with the remnants of his cold and the dearth of sensation or emotion—and looked at the calendar. August 29, September 2: He wouldn’t have been surprised to see June on the page and find himself living the whole of the blank and chilly summer over again.

Eventually it was time to register. The authorities had decided, perhaps out of sympathy, to leave Parker, Asa, and Jerry alone in their four-room suite. Roberto was back at Manter Hall for another year of cramming; he took over the empty room as a storage space for the growing pile of stolen objects he was accumulating. While Parker and Asa were unpacking new tweed suits and old Shetland sweaters, Roberto was unfolding Oriental rugs of mysterious provenance and putting first editions of Hemingway into bureau drawers. “Art collecting seems to run in the family, one way or another,” Jerry said to Asa.

Asa refused to speak to Jerry, and Parker refused to speak
to Asa. Asa couldn’t forgive the comment about Professor Sola and the pool; Parker couldn’t forgive Asa’s absence at the bridge. Inevitably an alliance developed between Parker and Jerry. They did Baudelaire together (that was how Asa thought of it), speaking French, wearing European-style shirts without buttons on the collar, replaying all the banal conversations they’d overheard in the Union, and spoofing their classmates.

Asa didn’t want a friend. He was thinking of concentrating in art history, with a minor in English, or perhaps the other way around. He was taking an intimate slide-lecture course on the history of Western art at the Fogg. Every Tuesday afternoon, from three to five-thirty, he sat in the dark, dusty-smelling basement auditorium and was lulled by a succession of beautiful, colored images looming at the end of the room. There were about fifteen other students, half of them Radcliffe girls; these contrived to bump against him as they went in and out of class. He didn’t pay attention.

One November afternoon, in the middle of Greek vases, there flashed onto the screen a painting, startling in its color and scope by contrast with the ebony and umber of the terracottas, which they’d been looking at for two weeks. “Icarus,” said the professor, “as he was seen a thousand years later. How insignificant he is here. You can barely distinguish him.” The pointer moved to a ripple in the water, bisected by two little legs. “It’s the peasant and the land that are dominant.” And Asa looked. Yes, in the corner, the flurry of drowning, while all around the world hummed and plowed and trod between its furrows. His face got hot and his palms began to sweat. Nobody had noticed—that he was crying, that Icarus was dying. He kept crying and getting hotter, as if the cold that had clamped onto him in the Solas’ study had finally let go, and he were now thawing. All that had been was changed,
all the world was different, there weren’t any heroes, there weren’t any summers at the pool to come, there weren’t any myths—Asa’s litany of loss, first enunciated in that basement, became a train of thought he carried everywhere. Down the street to romantic poetry at Seaver Hall, accompanied by his inner chant: No more myths, no more summer; into the Union, filling his tray with meat loaf and custard: Everything is changed, everything is gone. Eventually he got used to it, it was a familiar part of the landscape, this voice that never stopped. He bought a print of Breughel’s painting from the Fogg and hung it on the wall opposite his bed. He stopped going to the museum course; he had gotten what he needed from it.

Asa graduated in 1960 in English, without honors. He and Jerry had resumed relations in the middle of junior year and were going to Paris together to get jobs at the
Herald Tribune.
Parker had drifted into club life, had written for the
Lampoon
and given black-tie dinners in his Eliot House rooms, to which he always invited Jerry (who wouldn’t go because of Parker’s friends’ anti-Semitism) and never invited Asa (who would have welcomed a touch of the high life). To their surprise Parker got a
summa
in history and went straight into graduate school, where he distinguished himself while Asa and Jerry ate tripe and suffered grievous stomach pains. The grim Paris autumn sent Asa back to America and a stopgap job reading novel manuscripts at Little, Brown. They were terrible, but unlike most of the readers, he wasn’t convinced he could write a better one. What had he got to write about? Within three years Jerry was ensconced at a rewrite desk near the Champs-Élysées, Parker had a job waiting for him at Yale when he finished his thesis, and Asa was learning book production—riffling through pages without reading them to count the
lines, poring over type catalogues, making deals with paper suppliers.

And by then Roberto had vanished. He was to turn up periodically, always enthusiastic about a new project. Desalinization of Cape Cod Bay was one; for several years he worried about the water table on the Eastern seaboard. Then he got a job at Sotheby’s in London, but that didn’t last long because there was some trouble about the disappearance of a Bernini plaster study for an angel. He was against bomb shelters and for disarmament, and circulated a newsletter on these issues for a year or two; Asa always got a copy. After a long period of silence he resurfaced, having become a documentary filmmaker specializing in Latin America. Sometimes he appeared in Cambridge with a new car and a beautiful, sleek woman, took Asa—later Asa and Fay—out to dinner at the Ritz and told incredible stories about his life. Other times he came alone, in Reuben’s Porsche, getting on for a decade old, and sat in Asa’s living room drinking rum and brooding. He stayed in touch with Asa because Asa stayed in touch with Professor Sola, and Roberto had, in his words, “divested” himself of the family. “What’s left of it to divest,” he added. But he wanted the news.

The news wasn’t good. Professor Sola had had a throat cancer and now whispered and wheezed his infrequent sentences. He rarely saw anyone except Asa, who had started visiting while he was at Harvard out of desperation and continued visiting out of duty. The professor spent most of his time in his study with the amber lights on, making a catalogue of his art holdings; these had been increased by Roberto’s hoard, which had been abandoned by Roberto and presented by Asa to the father as recompense for losing his other son. Roberto had disappeared when Asa was a sophomore and still dependent on Professor Sola’s company. He went there every
Friday night for dinner and listened to rambling monologues about Rembrandt, Germany in the twenties, the Harvard English faculty, and the problems of the pool.