The New York Trilogy (30 page)

We led a sheltered life out there in the suburbs. New York was only twenty miles away, but it could have been China for all it had to do with our little world of lawns and wooden houses. By the time he was thirteen or fourteen, Fanshawe became a kind of internal exile, going through the motions of dutiful behavior, but cut off from his surroundings, contemptuous of the life he was forced to live. He did not make himself difficult or outwardly rebellious, he simply withdrew. After commanding so much attention as a child, always standing at the exact center of things, Fanshawe almost disappeared by the time we reached high school, shunning the spotlight for a stubborn marginality. I knew that he was writing seriously by then (although by the age of sixteen he had stopped showing his work to anyone), but I take that more as a symptom than as a cause. In our sophomore year, for example, Fanshawe was the only member of our class to make the varsity baseball team. He played extremely well for several weeks, and then, for no apparent reason, quit the team. I remember listening to him describe the incident to me the day after it happened: walking into the coach’s office after practice and turning in his uniform. The coach had just taken his shower, and when Fanshawe entered the room he was standing by his desk stark naked, a cigar in his mouth and his baseball cap on his head. Fanshawe took pleasure in the description, dwelling on the absurdity of the scene, embellishing it with details about the coach’s squat, pudgy body, the light in the room, the puddle of water on the gray concrete floor—but that was all it was, a description, a string of words divorced from anything that might have concerned Fanshawe himself. I was disappointed that he had quit, but Fanshawe never really explained what he had done, except to say that he found baseball boring.

As with many gifted people, a moment came when Fanshawe was no longer satisfied with doing what came easily to him. Having mastered all that was demanded of him at an early age, it was probably natural that he should begin to look for challenges elsewhere. Given the limitations of his life as a high school student in a small town, the fact that he found that elsewhere inside himself is neither surprising nor unusual. But there was more to it than that, I believe. Things happened around that time in Fanshawe’s family that no doubt made a difference, and it would be wrong not to mention them. Whether they made an essential difference is another story, but I tend to think that everything counts. In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

When Fanshawe was sixteen, it was discovered that his father had cancer. For a year and a half he watched his father die, and during that time the family slowly unravelled. Fanshawe’s mother was perhaps hardest hit. Stoically keeping up appearances, attending to the business of medical consultations, financial arrangements, and trying to maintain the household, she swung fitfully between great optimism over the chances of recovery and a kind of paralytic despair. According to Fanshawe, she was never able to accept the one inevitable fact that kept staring her in the face. She knew what was going to happen, but she did not have the strength to admit that she knew, and as time went on she began to live as though she were holding her breath. Her behavior became more and more eccentric: allnight binges of manic house cleaning, a fear of being in the house alone (combined with sudden, unexplained absences from the house), and a whole range of imagined ailments (allergies, high blood pressure, dizzy spells). Toward the end, she started taking an interest in various crackpot theories— astrology, psychic phenomena, vague spiritualist notions about the soul—until it became impossible to talk to her without being worn down to silence as she lectured on the corruption of the human body.

Relations between Fanshawe and his mother became tense. She clung to him for support, acting as though the family’s pain belonged only to her. Fanshawe had to be the solid one in the house; not only did he have to take care of himself, he had to assume responsibility for his sister, who was just twelve at the time. But this brought with it another set of problems—for Ellen was a troubled, unstable child, and in the parental void that ensued from the illness she began to look to Fanshawe for everything. He became her father, her mother, her bastion of wisdom and comfort. Fanshawe understood how unhealthy her dependence on him was, but there was little he could do about it short of hurting her in some irreparable way. I remember how my own mother would talk about “poor Jane” (Mrs. Fanshawe) and how terrible the whole thing was for the “baby.” But I knew that in some sense it was Fanshawe who suffered the most. It was just that he never got a chance to show it.

As for Fanshawe’s father, there is little I can say with any certainty. He was a cipher to me, a silent man of abstracted benevolence, and I never got to know him well. Whereas my father tended to be around a lot, especially on the weekends, Fanshawe’s father was rarely to be seen. He was a lawyer of some prominence, and at one time he had had political ambitions— but these had ended in a series of disappointments. He usually worked until late, pulling into the driveway at eight or nine o’clock, and often spent Saturday and part of Sunday at his office. I doubt that he ever knew quite what to make of his son, for he seemed to be a man with little feeling for children, someone who had lost all memory of having been a child himself. Mr. Fanshawe was so thoroughly adult, so completely immersed in serious, grown-up matters, that I imagine it was hard for him not to think of us as creatures from another world.

He was not yet fifty when he died. For the last six months of his life, after the doctors had given up hope of saving him, he lay in the spare bedroom of the Fanshawe house, watching the yard through the window, reading an occasional book, taking his pain-killers, dozing. Fanshawe spent most of his free time with him then, and though I can only speculate on what happened, I assume that things changed between them. At the very least, I know how hard he worked at it, often staying home from school to be with him, trying to make himself indispensable, nursing him with unflinching attentiveness. It was a grim thing for Fanshawe to go through, too much for him perhaps, and though he seemed to take it well, summoning up the bravery that is possible only in the very young, I sometimes wonder if he ever managed to get over it.

There is only one more thing I want to mention here. At the end of this period—the very end, when no one expected Fanshawe’s father to last more than a few days—Fanshawe and I went for a drive after school. It was February, and a few minutes after we started, a light snow began to fall. We drove aimlessly, looping through some of the neighboring towns, paying little attention to where we were. Ten or fifteen miles from home, we came upon a cemetery; the gate happened to be open, and for no particular reason we decided to drive in. After a while, we stopped the car and began to wander around on foot. We read the inscriptions on the stones, speculated on what each of those lives might have been, fell silent, walked some more, talked, fell silent again. By now the snow was coming down heavily, and the ground was turning white. Somewhere in the middle of the cemetery there was a freshly dug grave, and Fanshawe and I stopped at the edge and looked down into it. I can remember how quiet it was, how far away the world seemed to be from us. For a long time neither one of us spoke, and then Fanshawe said that he wanted to see what it was like at the bottom. I gave him my hand and held on tightly as he lowered himself into the grave. When his feet touched the ground he looked back up at me with a half-smile, and then lay down on his back, as though pretending to be dead. It is still completely vivid to me: looking down at Fanshawe as he looked up at the sky, his eyes blinking furiously as the snow fell onto his face.

By some obscure train of thought, it made me think back to when we were very small—no more than four or five years old. Fanshawe’s parents had bought some new appliance, a television perhaps, and for several months Fanshawe kept the cardboard box in his room. He had always been generous in sharing his toys, but this box was off limits to me, and he never let me go in it. It was his secret place, he told me, and when he sat inside and closed it up around him, he could go wherever he wanted to go, could be wherever he wanted to be. But if another person ever entered his box, then its magic would be lost for good. I believed this story and did not press him for a turn, although it nearly broke my heart. We would be playing in his room, quietly setting up soldiers or drawing pictures, and then, out of the blue, Fanshawe would announce that he was going into his box. I would try to go on with what I had been doing, but it was never any use. Nothing interested me so much as what was happening to Fanshawe inside the box, and I would spend those minutes desperately trying to imagine the adventures he was having. But I never learned what they were, since it was also against the rules for Fanshawe to talk about them after he climbed out.

Something similar was happening now in that open grave in the snow. Fanshawe was alone down there, thinking his thoughts, living through those moments by himself, and though I was present, the event was sealed off from me, as though I was not really there at all. I understood that this was Fanshawe’s way of imagining his father’s death. Again, it was a matter of pure chance: the open grave was there, and Fanshawe had felt it calling out to him. Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them. But this is a difficult point, and I can’t be sure of any of it. I stood there waiting for Fanshawe to come up, trying to imagine what he was thinking, for a brief moment trying to see what he was seeing. Then I turned my head up to the darkening winter sky—and everything was a chaos of snow, rushing down on top of me.

By the time we started walking back to the car, the sun had set. We stumbled our way through the cemetery, not saying anything to each other. Several inches of snow had fallen, and it kept coming down, more and more heavily, as though it would never stop. We reached the car, climbed in, and then, against all our expectations, couldn’t get moving. The back tires were stuck in a shallow ditch, and nothing we did made any difference. We pushed, we jostled, and still the tires spun with that horrible, futile noise. Half an hour went by, and then we gave up, reluctantly deciding to abandon the car. We hitch-hiked home in the storm, and another two hours went by before we finally made it back. It was only then that we learned that Fanshawe’s father had died during the afternoon.