I had never seen a dead body until I saw my parents’ corpses at the Mineola morgue. I had sent over clothes for them, one of Suchitra’s interns ran that errand, and had chosen coffins online, selecting, as one does, absurdly expensive boxes for them to be burned in. Our home was full of tenured professors, male and female, helping. I had all the help in the world from the leading experts in Sumerian art, subatomic physics, First Amendment law, and Commonwealth literature. But nobody could help me look at the bodies. Suchitra drove me out there in her aging Jeep and because there was no way we could talk about what we needed to talk about we fell into black comedy, remembering particularly gruesome “corpses of the week” from the old HBO series Six Feet Under. My favorite was the woman on a girls’ night out in a rented stretch limo rising through the open sunroof to express her happiness and running face-first into the bucket of a cherry-picker truck. After which her flattened face would have been quite a task for the series regulars to fix.
And then an over-lit room with two gurneys and two horizontal beings under sheets, two horizontal beings who once, horizontal on a different, softer surface, had conjoined joyfully—maybe clumsily—maybe not—I was unable to imagine my parents as gymnastic sex fiends, but I also didn’t want them to be fumbling incompetents—and the result was this blank unthinking entity standing by the gurneys to confirm that they were no longer capable of the act that brought him into being, or of anything else.
They had done their best at the morgue. I went to my mother first and they had removed the terror from her face as well as whatever shards of glass and metal had pierced her and although she was wearing more makeup than she ever did when alive it was her, I could see it was her, and she looked, or I could persuade myself that she looked, at peace. I turned to my father and Suchitra came up behind me and put her cheek against my back and her arms around my waist. Okay, I said, okay, and lifted the sheet. Then finally I wept.
The day after the cremation Nero Golden came across the Gardens to our house—the term “my house” made no sense; my parents were present in every inch of it—and tapped on the French windows with his cane. It was so unexpected—the king knocking on the orphaned commoner’s door—that at first I saw him as an unreal projection of my imagination. In the aftermath of death my grip on the real had loosened. There was an old lady, Mrs. Stone, living on the Gardens (in four high-ceilinged rooms on the piano nobile of a building divided into floor-through apartments), who spoke often of ghosts. This is somebody I haven’t mentioned before, and very likely will leave to her own devices after this guest appearance, a lady whom the Gardens’ children called Hat because of her love of wide-brimmed sun hats, a widow for many years, her former husband a rancher in Texas who struck oil on his land and at once gave up beef cattle for the high life and an internationally admired stamp collection. Mrs. Stone too had buttonholed me by the jungle gym to speak of loss. A death in the family, as also a newborn baby, gave permission for strangers or near strangers to come up and soliloquize. “My husband I never saw after his demise,” she confided. “It seems he was happy to get away. No effort at contact at any time. You live and you learn. But one night on Macdougal Alley I saw a liveried teenage boy—a black kid in a pretty fancy outfit—walking on his knees. Why was he walking on his knees, thought I, there’s no religious history here. Then finally I worked it out. He wasn’t walking on his knees at all. The street level of the alley had risen over time and he was walking on the old ground level and I could only see him down to his knees. A stable boy, possibly, going down the alley to work in the old stables that used to be there in the 1830s, servicing Washington Square North. Or a servant boy, employed perhaps by Gertrude Whitney, who lived there, you know, when she founded her museum. In any case, a ghost, a palpable ghost. And that’s not all.” I made my excuses and left. But the neighborhood’s ghost stories seemed to pursue me in those melancholy days. The ghost of Aaron Burr haunting the Village looking for whores. Musical ghosts, dramatic ghosts, wearing their stage costumes and performing in winter on Commerce Street. My old self wasn’t interested but my orphaned new self let people tell their tales and at night I tried to hear my parents’ laughter echoing in empty rooms. It was in this mood that I saw Nero Golden at the French windows and thought, an apparition. But he was flesh and blood.
“You permit that I enter,” he said, entering before I permitted it. And upon entering, having placed his cane against a wall and seated himself in my father’s favorite chair: “I am a direct man, mister René, plainspoken, who has never found a bush worth beating about. So I say to you regarding your loss that it is your loss. Your parents are gone, don’t concern yourself with them, they don’t exist anymore. Concern yourself with yourself. It is not only that you are wounded and must heal. It is also that now your elders no longer stand between you and the grave. This is manhood. Now you are at the front of the line and the grave yawns for you. Therefore, get wisdom; learn to be a man. If you are agreeable, I will offer my assistance.”
This was an impressive oration. If he intended to shake me out of my sadness by irritating me, he succeeded. But before I could speak he raised a peremptory hand. “I see your reaction from your face, where a thundercloud has settled, threatening a storm. Dispel it! Your anger is unnecessary. You are young and I am old. I ask you to learn from me. Your country is young. One thinks differently when one has millennia behind one. You have not even two hundred and fifty years. I say also that I am not yet blind so I am aware of your interest in my house. Because I think you are kind of a good guy I forgive this, my alternative being to have you killed, ha ha. I think that—now that you are a man—you can learn from all of us Goldens, good and bad, what to do and not do. From Petya how to fight against what is not your fault, how to play when the cards give you a bad hand. From Apu, maybe, don’t be like him. It is possible that he has failed to become profound. From Dionysus, my tormented one, learn about ambiguity and pain.”