The Hero's Body (36 page)

The son
as father, the father as son. It took no great powers of prediction to see that once my own sons arrived, I'd experience a further onloading of my father's absence. He adored small children with a silliness that was wonderful to see, a toy-giving clown and tickler. (If you're looking for the most accurate measure of a person's character, watch him with children; how he treats them will be the best or worst you can say about him.) Even during the many twitchings of my teenage years, when I wrongly thought he was being tyrannical, I never doubted that he'd make a perfectly loving grandfather.

Having children diminishes your need for your own parents. You become the thing you need. Adults don't make children; children make adults. Six and three years old, my kids are boisterous as only boys that age can be. The daredevils scale the twelve-foot built-in bookshelves in our home and then drop, in skydiving form, to the bed below. Destructively physical in their trampling and grappling, their nonstop superheroing, my sons don't notice that someone essential has gone missing. They don't see that they need my father. But
I see it for them; he is a daily lacuna in their lives. I feel a reluctant pride in their athletic talents—they'd
really
rather swing a bat and speed on bikes than read Lewis Carroll with me?—but there would have been nothing reluctant in the pride my father felt. He would have been heroic for them in a manner I can never be. Their loss of him is enormous, and yet minor compared to his loss of them, his loss of the world.

That term,
hero
, thrives within its sundry meanings. From the Greek
hērōs
, it literally means “protector.” Like
love
, it's a term in constant flux: a term with wings. Messiah and messenger, saver of the day.
Christ
derives from the Greek
christos
, “anointed one.” Oedipus and Romulus and Robin Hood, Shakespeare and Joan of Arc and John Brown, Oskar Schindler and Michael Jordan, Batman and Obama. The distressed damsel's squeal of “My hero!” A story's protagonist, in battle with an
anti-hero
. Quester, explorer, guru. The rebel as hero—James Dean, or else Milton's Satan—an up-ender of order. The hero as witness: Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Anne Frank, Primo Levi. The hero as leader, statesman, murderer-in-chief: Augustus, Napoleon, Lenin, Castro. The hero as Everyman, your unruffled parent or selfless sibling, the grandmother who sacrifices years for you, or the donator of a kidney, the neighbor who unsticks your snowed-in automobile. But I keep coming back to its origin:
protector
.

In
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
, Thomas Carlyle separates his study into six units: the hero as divinity, as prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters, as king. Joseph Campbell understood heroes as embarking upon cyclical journeys: the departure from their comfort and unknowing, the initiation into wisdom and their true selves, the return to assume roles of leadership or deliverance. It looks like tough work being a hero; no woman or man should sign up for it. The pedestal all too easily becomes a pillory. But here's Ortega y Gasset: “A hero is one who wants to be
himself.” Or rather, one who has no choice but to be himself, which means the unheroic are those who hide, or who never really comprehend who they are, what they were meant to do. When I say that my father would have been heroic to my sons, I don't mean only that he would have seemed superhuman in his red-and-black helmet and racing suit, in his mastery of tools and the masculine arts, supremely cool, supremely
fast
, in all the ways I am not. I mean also that he would have appeared to them as he was, a man wholly and convincingly himself, a seeker of speed who would not be denied release.

My boys want to know if my father's death is a
tragedy
. They've heard the term employed to describe everything from a school shooting to a rained-on picnic. I tell them that the term has become tired through overuse, but still, they want to know: Is my father's death a tragedy? For me, and for our family, yes, I tell them, it is a personal tragedy, although
private disaster
is how I've thought of it all along. Sophocles would not understand our bandying about of the term
tragedy
whenever something unhappy occurs, and he'd no doubt wince at the widespread redundancy
terrible tragedy
. The Athenian innovators of tragedy had very different, much loftier, notions of what constituted the tragic: a great figure's about-face of circumstance brought on by a concussion of the accidental and the ordained. Oedipus's fate is a maddening paradox, both predetermined
and
his own hubristic fault. Perhaps my father's fate shared some of those classically tragic strands: his hubris on the machine he was ordained to ride.

“What didn't he just stop riding?” Ethan asks me, his six-year-old simplicity sobering, shaming of all rationalization. But that's the rub, I tell him; he could not stop without forfeiting who he was. “Well then, why didn't he just slow down?” Because the Yamaha R1 wasn't engineered for lethargy; it doesn't work without racing. His own sneakers, I point out, were engineered for running. What is he compelled to do, helpless
not
to do, in those lustrous new sneakers—what's
the first thing he does in them? He runs, he sprints. But the analogy is defective, and he knows it. There's that slight strain in his forehead, the slight pursing of his lips, evidence of the thought he suspects is an upsetting accusation and so he pauses before he says it: “So then he did it to himself. He asked for it.”

Those are my own words he's returning to me, precisely what I say to him when he's heedless on his bicycle, when his headlong riding puts him on the pavement with bleeding elbows and knees. Both he and his brother have been fearless on bikes since they were two years old; they skipped training wheels entirely. When Ethan turned two, the smallest pedal bike I could find was still too big, and so I had to modify it, hacksaw the seat post, swap the handlebars. The other parents in our neighborhood often pointed, gasped when one of our tiny two-year-olds sped by without training wheels, and then looked to my wife and me with a weave of accusation and awe. The skill of balance and lust for speed seem to have been encoded in their very cells. Unable to live in me in that way, my father lives in them. I never attempted to curb those abilities, was in fact mutedly proud of them—I couldn't ride a bike until I was five—though they frightened me then and frighten me still.

When Ethan is there on the pavement with bloodied elbows, I tell him: “Show some caution. You're responsible for your own safety. You did that to yourself. You asked for it.” I say that to him—with a sternness born of fear and love—because it is true, but also because I never got the chance to say it to my father. Caution was anathema to his Sunday clan, and one of my missions as a father—a mission persistently hounded by my own father—is to make sure that caution is never anathema to my sons. When we talk about my father and Ethan accuses him of causing his own death, I honor his perception while honoring the complexity of the truth. I tell him that he is right—yes, my father did it to himself; yes, my father asked for it—but also that he will have to wait several years to read this book,
to see that my father's death was much more complicated than mere recklessness, that he lived in the grip of a powerful legacy, of enormous pressures from the patriarch, pressures that many of us are not fast enough to outrun.

New memories,
I've found, shout away old ones. Looking at early photos of my kids, I can't recall them at those ages. I can see them there in the photos, and I can see myself with them, and I know those moments, those events, occurred, but I simply cannot locate them inside myself. And never mind the photos of ten, fifteen, twenty years past, photos of my father and me. I yearn to recall the details of those days but cannot. I cannot sift through the addling fugues of memory in order to hear the individual notes I want. Our memories, I'm sorry to say, aren't up to us. And if the neuroscientists are to be believed, the mechanisms of memory are so organically unsound, so prone to disruption and deprivation, to revision and error, it seems paranormal that we can remember anything at all.

One of the things I'm sure I remember is this: for a brief while after my father's crash, I comforted myself with the thought that the gods were surely finished using me for target practice. The thought, steeling in one way, was a near masterpiece of self-pity in another. After the childhood abandonment by my mother and the violent early death of my father, I was clear. No more ill tidings for this orphan. Self-pity is by its very nature a cloistered, incestuous view, a fundamentally privileged conception of self, and mine smugly assumed that losing my parents as I had was the worst that could happen to me. Not until you have children of your own do you understand what breed of anguish can be visited upon you.

I'm never not nervous about my kids being maimed or killed, abducted or abused. The fear is always there, at one register or another,
an almost distracting hum of anxiety. When they leave the house in the morning for first grade and preschool, there's not even a flake of certitude that they will return in the afternoon. The way they won't return is one of the ways children have always not returned: traffic disaster or collapsed roof, drowning or inferno, fall or flood, or else another American warp with an assault rifle. We do what we can, take caution, take care, but for many of us, all of life is a crossing of the fingers, a letting go and hoping we'll be spared by calamity. When you have my history, my sense of certain chaos and injury, you're always waiting for another phone call. My phone doesn't ring without my muttering of Dorothy Parker's immortal line: “What fresh hell can this be?” My life is a passive struggle against forces I cannot harness. “Things,” Larkin says, “are tougher than we are,” and that fact impelled me into weightlifting at sixteen years old. It was my attempt to balance the scale. At forty-one, with two small children I try gravely, daily, to protect, I know there's no balancing of that scale. Things will always be tougher than we are.

The child-rearing differences from generation to generation are usually distinct, and each day now I feel those differences with the particular force of my own history. As children we all rode in vehicles without car seats, toddlers on the unbelted laps of Camel-smoking mothers. My own boys, by contrast, don't get on a scooter or skateboard without looking like scaled-down Michelin Men. They've never been inside a moving car without being strapped to seats fit for spacecraft. Come near them with a cigarette and expect a tirade. The notion of handing them a BB gun or hunting bow strikes me as criminally incompetent. The men of my family didn't raise me with much praise or affection, and so for the past six years I've unleashed so much verbal and physical love upon my sons, so much you're-number-one rhetoric, that I fear I'm building coddled autocrats with no notion of necessary struggle. They're only six and three, I know, but nothing ever completely undoes what we do to
them at these ages: not religion, not education or medication, not nonstop sorties of psychotherapy. We damage them one way or we damage them the other.

We also mislead them without meaning to, with ambitious diction,
always
or
forever
. In the saddest scene in John Updike's story “Separating,” Richard Maple, after telling his teenage son that he's leaving the family home, says, “No matter how this works out, I'll always be with you.” When I first read that story at eighteen, it had what felt like a teleporting effect on me. I instantly remembered what I'd long forgotten, that scene with my father slumped on a stool in our darkened kitchen when I was nine years old, when after an hour-long quarrel with my mother, he said to me, “No matter what happens, I'll always be your father.” That sentence had a particular meaning when I was nine: disruptions were coming to our home, my mother would be leaving us, but I could count on him to remain. And he did; he was overwhelmingly there. Now, since his fatal crash sixteen years ago, the sentence means something else altogether. He is still overwhelmingly here. What he told me was much truer than he could have realized:
I will stick around now, yes, and I will stick around long after I'm gone
.