The Other Side of the World. Jay Neugeboren

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      “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.”

      “Has,” I corrected.

      “Ah—your father’s still alive then, which makes me happy for you both,” Mister Falzetti said, “although it cannot but be hard on you at times, Charlie—to be in the presence of his unrequited ambitions. Or did he live vicariously through your books, Ms. O’Sullivan?”

      “Did you live vicariously through your son, Mister Falzetti?”

      “Of course not. If anything, the reverse is true—Nick admired me more than was good for him.”

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