I wasn’t surprised when my father died. Old men die. And whatever else he was, my father was old. Eighty-seven, I think, and probably older than that inside from a lifetime spent in the indulgence of his three great loves. The first was white-label Jim Beam, and they were inseparable after my father found his taste for bourbon in Korea during the War. He referred to Korea as the Shit-sock of Asia, with that talent for indelible phrases which had made him such a celebrated success at his second passion, the written word. Yeah, my father was Isaiah Moss, that Isaiah Moss, the one who wrote those novels the critics loved, even the strutting bleeding gate types who never liked anything if three other people liked it too. He was that rare author who straddled the great chasm between commercial success and critical acclaim; most lists for the best novels of the 20th century include two of his books. Sometimes three. What that really means is that he became a literary legend and a cultural icon, all while making a fortune. I hated my father.

His third great love, after drinking and writing, was women. He couldn’t get enough, and there was a steady parade of them throughout his celebrated fucking career. As you would expect, a man with his celebrity and wealth never lacked for attractive young company. There was always some new young thing ready to hike up her skirt for Isaiah Moss, either for the notoriety or in the hope that she might become the future former Mrs. Moss, with all the financial security that would imply. Vain hope, that. My father never married, not even my mother. Especially not my mother. The virtual entirety of his adult life was spent with his hands on a typewriter or between firm thighs, and my father was fond of boasting that never did the same thing twice. Not in the bedroom, and certainly not on the page. I wish I could sit here and tell you that I knew in my heart that my mother was his favorite, the true love of his life, but that would be 6 Moss bullshit, and one of the many pieces of advice the old man dispensed to his only son was that lies made for bad writing. So here I am, telling you the truth about a man I never loved, never even really knew, and getting it out of the way early, so you know this isn’t some fairy tale. Because it’s not.

My mother was twenty when I was born, and my father was forty-five. He sent us checks, sufficiently fat that there was enough food on the table and new shoes for me every year, and she could abandon her fiction of a career as an actress. As big of a self-absorbed asshole as he was, Isaiah Moss seemed tickled that he had a child. We met only once, and as I was just a few days old my memories of the visit are understandably scanty. The sum total of his fatherly attention came in the form of money and, perhaps not surprisingly, letters. They would arrive with some frequency throughout my childhood, perhaps once a month, tapering to two or maybe three a year once I went to college. They were odd, rambling missives, full of a kind of broken stream of consciousness from one of the foremost American novelists of his generation. There was some vague paternal advice, occasional tips on how to attract beautiful women (these generally included some variation on “be a famous writer”), and a lot of fragmentary dialogue that suggested he and James Beam had been spending time together. Some were a paragraph or two, some were virtual novellas. The worst part was that the passages were almost always brilliant. Even tapping out drunken throwaway pages to his seldom-seen offspring, the man was a towering talent.

Like I said, I hated him.

The bitch of it is that I was a writer too. Not at my father’s level, but that’s not a level, that’s a pantheon of gods sitting atop Olympus peppering the mortals below with literary thunderbolts. I’d been writing since I could remember. In elementary school we had those little competitions where you would “publish” your best work by stitching it between two pieces of cardboard and covering it with wallpaper. I won three years in a row – it was in the local paper with a picture and everything. I don’t know what happened the fourth year. Then it was scribbling in notebooks and a series of high school English teachers with no idea about my celebrated lineage waxing poetical about my potential in comments home to my mom. She neither encouraged or discouraged me, but instead would hug me in her pillowy grasp and tell me she would love me if I became a cab driver. That was her phrase, “Oscar Kendall, I will love you even if you become a cab driver.” Kendall was her last name, and she gave it to me. The Oscar came from my father, who thought he was the more talented and more heterosexual reincarnation of Oscar Wilde. Of course, that gave me the soporific initials O.K., which might sound cool, but who wants to be just O.K.? I wanted to be more than O.K., even though I suspected deep down that it was probably all I could aspire to.

I’m not sure just what she had against cab drivers, my mom, but her unconditional love remained one of the simple and enduring foundations of my life. She was never an intellectual giant, which is part of how I know she could never have been the love of my father’s life. I’ve seen pictures, seen how gorgeous she was as a young model. Long black cascades of hair, feline eyes, an hourglass figure that would never run out of sand. I remember when I first became aware that my mother was sexy. I was nine and we were at the beach, sitting on a sprawling towel and eating ice cream. My mother was wearing a two-piece, not even a particularly provocative one, navy blue with white polka dots. Eating ice cream with her kid. And yet strange men made it a point to let their gaze linger, and a few even stopped by to say hello, emboldened by the lack of a wedding ring on my mother’s finger. My mom was polite to them all, but it never moved beyond politeness. It was a breezy day, not cold but not hot, and I noticed the hardness of my mother’s nipples through the fabric of her top. Something in my juvenile awareness made the connection between the overtime her suit was putting in and the masculine traffic at our blanket. None of them, to my recollection, stopped to ask what books she liked to read. I know what Isaiah Moss wanted from Peggy 8 Moss Kendall nine months before I was born, and it wasn’t literary repartee.

I kept writing, kept filling those notebooks, throughout high school and college and even now, even as forty came and went and the furtive secret scribbling that had once been precocious became pathetic. My mother gave me dark hair and decent bone structure, and my father gave me a bottomless well of words. Words usually came easily from that well, flowing fluidly from my mind to my hands to the page, though where he had been a typewriter man, I preferred lined paper and pens. Blue pens, always, never black. Boxes and bins of those notebooks lurk in the basement at my mother’s little house in Connecticut, full of words no one has ever seen and probably never will. Unfinished novels, half-glimpsed scenes, nebulous characters. I don’t need some armchair psychologist to tell me why I never finish anything, why I’ve never sought an agent or publisher, let alone my father’s baleful author’s eye while he was alive. I know why. Good as it is (and with the inherent conceit of the writer, I like to tell myself it is good), it’s not as good as his stuff. Whose is? This is Isaiah Moss we’re talking about, heir to Hemingway and Steinbeck, peer of Vonnegut and Updike, an immortal. Stupid, sure, but there was this part of me that dreamed of the day I’d write the perfect book. I’d send it to him, not for his love or approval, but so he would know that his son was better than he was, that Hercules had outstripped Zeus. The rest of me, the rational majority, knew this was ridiculous. And so the three straight wallpaper wrapped classics remain the entirety of my published works.

I don’t know why I kept doing it. I didn’t enjoy it. It was agony, and it shouldn’t be. Writing should be a joyful exercise, even when it’s work. The ejaculation of words onto the page should include some pleasure, or at least a cathartic measure of release, but for me it has always been just the agony. Suffused with the knowledge of my permanent inferiority, I trudged on nevertheless, sending sentences into an ether I knew would never respond, never judge, never dismiss. I kept writing not out of love but out of inability not to, 9 Joe Pace and the notebooks piled up, missives to the darkness, dreams unrealized, godhood deferred. And I could keep telling myself that it was good.

Because nobody pays advances or royalties on wallpaper covered books written by eight-year-olds, in waking life I made my living as a high school literature teacher at Arcadia, an elite-and-well-aware-of-it private school. Nestled in the maple-lined avenues of southern Maryland just a silver dollar's toss from the District of Columbia, Arcadia was a repository for the precious progeny of senators and the lobbyists who loved them. Diplomats and cabinet secretaries and professional sports team owners and the titans of corporate America sent us their well-dressed scions of privilege and we sanded down their rough academic edges a bit so they could ride the escalator to Georgetown and Harvard and Stanford, and then on up to whatever genteel legacied success awaited. Teaching was as comfortable a place as any to hide while I told myself I was a writer, and teaching paid the bills. Isaiah Moss’s largesse had included footing the bill for my four undergrad years at Dartmouth, but he harbored the quaintly old-fashioned opinion that a man should make his own way in the world. One of his letters to me, in March of my senior year at Hanover, told me what I could expect of him after graduation:

Your classmates’ fathers will undoubtedly be expressing their pride to their spawn in the weeks and months ahead. Dullard plumbers, proud of their engineers, as though it were their accomplishment, as though some detached vital organ of theirs trod the commencement stage. I have never been proud of you. Not once. Why should I be proud? Your achievements, now and in the days to come, grand or feeble as they may be, are yours, not mine. I never swung your bat or kissed one of your little girlfriends or opened your chemistry textbook. I wrote checks, I purchased your health and your tuition. These were not investments made looking forward, with any anticipation of future dividends. I do not desire or rely upon some future familial bond or support in my dotage (when I require a nursemaid, mine will be far, far more attractive 10 Moss than you). These payments have instead been the extirpation of debts incurred via a handful of pleasurable nights in the company of your mother some months before your squalling debut. A child is blameless in the nature of the assignation of its parents, and so I took it upon myself to pay for my crimes. You are a grown man now, or at least at the threshold of such, and my onus is at an end. I am paroled. Men will also be bragging to their sons about their love for them. To this, perhaps, they can lay greater claim than the absurdity of pride. I do not love you. I do not know you, beyond a passing superficiality. I think your mother loves you. Content yourself with that. Love, anyway, bores me. Enclosed is some money. Spend it on a girl.

~~~

I was at Arcadia when I found out about his death, at work but not really working. Out on the front steps of Casper Hall between classes, I sat on a cool granite stair unwarmed by the unenthusiasm of an uncharacteristically pale late-spring Maryland sun. It was my favorite spot on campus, the perfect place to smoke when they still allowed it. I didn’t quit because they said my spot was too close to the building and took it away, along with all the other spots like it on campus, but it had made the quitting easier. Most of my cigarettes each day had been there on those steps. I still sat there at times throughout the day, following the schedule if not the full habits of the longtime nicotine addict. To my mind the massive granite steps had long ago molded to the curve of my ass, and it remained a perfect place, if not to smoke then to sit, to watch the periodic streams of prosperous young men and women bustle through the courtyard.

When the clockwork crowds ceased, and the scenery subsided once again to trees and grass and paving stones, I would return to the student papers I was grading or writing samples I was reading. When I grew tired of their tortured syntax, I would turn to one of the yellow legal pads I always had with me to conduct some torture of my own. Yellow legal pads, never white, and always a felt-tipped blue pen. A pen should scratch against the paper, there should be friction. A man should know when he’s writing; it should be a physical act with resistance against the fingers. Ball point pens were too smooth, too easy, and laptop computers were too pregnant with convenient distractions. I stared at the pad, feeling the familiar scant weight of it in my hands. Sometimes there would be writing there, scrawled words in vivid blue decipherable only to me. My handwriting was execrable. If we were living in a Henny Youngman joke from the 1950s, my mother would complain about her son’s terrible handwriting without even the excuse of being a doctor. Sometimes the words were inspired prose, sometimes classroom reminders or shopping lists, and sometimes there was nothing on the page but inane doodles. Not infrequently, as now, the pad was blank. I set it aside and returned to the pile of creative writing papers by my juniors and thumbed through it, glancing at the names at their tops. With most of them, I knew what I was in for. Cecilia Gill’s impeccable cursive would gush about a girl with boy problems, and Kelsie Brower would give me scantily researched historical fiction about heroic women. Nicholas Kentner would tell me a blood-drenched story about murder wasps or murder cowboys or murder hobos. I didn’t mind Nick’s stuff so much. He could make me laugh. I’d find something encouraging to say to all of them, even if I’d be begging for murder hobos to put me out of my misery before I finished. The last paper in the pile was from Anh Meyer.

Anh Meyer. I held it for a minute, just staring at it. Hers was always typed, which I’d long ago demanded because her handwriting was the abysmal scratching of poultry seeking something in the dirt. I’d never met a more confident, more exhausting student in my years of teaching. Very short and very thin, her legs no more than plastic straws sticking out from her blue Arcadia uniform skirt, Anh had been born in her native Vietnam and promptly deposited in an orphanage. Before turning two she was adopted by the Meyers, a childless and prominent Jewish couple both of whom were big wheels helping the D.C. public relations mill churn. Anh was no public relations slouch herself. All year she’d told me (and anyone else in earshot) how good a writer she was, and how she planned to be a great international novelist before she was thirty. Her parents were professional shills, probably the type to tell her that self-promotion is the key to life. She must have listened, because she stood up in my hot classroom the first day that previous September and announced, tiny chin jutting out like the beak of a hummingbird, that before I retired I’d be assigning her books for students to read. I wanted to laugh and puke at the same time. Girl, don’t fool yourself, I thought. Then I read her first submission.

Anh Meyer could write.

She wrote with a singular, authentic voice that was unlike anything else I’d read before. It was still juvenile in places, heck, she was sixteen, but there were sustained stretches of prose that brought me to tears against my will. I wanted to hate every word, to be able to sit her down and gently let her know just how much work there was ahead of her to become even a competent writer, let alone a professional one. And that she could probably forget about dreams of world fame. Instead, I was left with the daunting realization that at sixteen, she was probably a better natural writer than I would ever be. God, I hated her for that. Almost as much as I hated my father. I knew how to drag a struggling student up to scratch, how to pick out what they did well and give them plenty of time to find their way to basic mediocrity. And I knew how to take a middling student and show them some rungs they could climb. I even knew how to take a talented kid and work with them on the next steps in a craft in which they showed promise. Hey, that’s teaching, right? That’s the gig, and sometimes I even enjoyed it. What I didn’t know how to do was sit a Derby winner.

Anh Meyer was going to be a novelist. She’d said as much, and she had the chops to back it up. That, I had no idea what to do with. I sat there on my bench in the courtyard and read the last thing she’d write for me that year, her final draft of a story she’d authored dramatizing her own life’s story. It was her best work yet. What little guidance I’d been able to provide she’d immediately incorporated, and in some cases she ignored my suggestions and her story was better for that, too. She took me through the death of each of her four grandparents in the war, through her mother’s life in the sex trade, to her abandonment in Hanoi. It was scintillating. I was suffused by envy, ugly and shameful, envy of my student, envy of this girl who had gone from the orphanage to this kind of expressive brilliance in less time than it took me to fill a legal pad with garbage. My hand shook a little as I held her pages. I wished I still smoked so I could light it on fire. I stood with a sigh, turning toward the ashtray that was no longer there to dispose of the cigarette that was not in my hand.

No one had stopped to talk to me during my time on the steps that morning, which was unusual. Three or four times a day I would assume my perch in front of Casper Hall, almost always joined at some point by a colleague or a student. In the old days, I would share a smoke with them. The faculty, not the students. At least, usually not. For ten years I had been sitting on those steps. I was still in my early forties, but I had achieved the distinction of becoming an institution without getting old. I kind of liked that. I enjoyed dispensing advice in the courtyard like some mountaintop Eastern guru; I even liked when students came to complain about exams or grades or some other grievance. Our previous Head of School at Arcadia, an elbow-patch academic throwback improbably named Cabot Rutledge had once groused that Oscar Kendall could be mistaken for a gargoyle on those steps, and if he wanted statuary in front of Casper Hall, he would commission it himself, and he would select something far more impressive. I outlasted that Head. I had outlasted three. With one singular exception, Heads of School were ephemera.

A few days remained in the spring term at Arcadia School, the closing days of my tenth year teaching and rotting in its historic classrooms amidst its flowering privilege, and I was tired. Maybe Rutledge had been right, and I’d become more gargoyle than guru, hiding out here where it didn’t matter who I was or what I did. My father had been an adventurer, a seeker of truths, a life-glutton. I was none of those things. “What the hell, Chrys,” I sighed. Chrys didn’t answer, but then she never did. She was a white oak, a pretty wooden centenarian that took root outside Casper Hall when both tree and hall were saplings, and the school itself was young. Around World War II faculty from the history department had named the growing tree Chrys after the Greek dryad Chrysopeleia, the nymph of a sacred oak who married a mortal man and with him founded the ancient Greek kingdom of Arcadia. History faculty must have been as much fun at parties in the 1940s as they are now. Still, the name caught on as these things do at places like Arcadia. I called the tree Chrys like everyone else, and sometimes talked with her when the legal pad was blank. I didn’t mind that she never answered. It was nice to get the last word once in a while. Tradition claimed that kissing under her boughs brought luck to both parties. It was a theory I’d yet to test.

A slow dirge escaped from the bells in the high clock tower of Tappan Hall, the imposing administrative building that stared sternly at Casper from across the flat-stone courtyard. Tappan was the oldest and most beautiful of the buildings on campus, a four-story orgasm of the Romanesque Revival style so popular on private school campuses when it was erected a century before. Pointed minarets of red-brown brick rose from each of the four rounded corners, gray Munson slate from Canada tiled the slanting roofs, and attentive rows of fourteen-foot windows lined each smooth-mortared wall. The building’s most iconic feature was the clock tower 15 Joe Pace stretching an additional two stories above the main structure, piercing the sky with phallic vitality. When the bells rang out from her depths, as they did now, no one on campus could mistake the time. Even in this age of cellular phones and smartwatches, many students and more faculty relied on that venerable timepiece to mark the hours of the academic day.

Tappan Hall was named for Lionel Tappan, the godfather, or perhaps midwife, of Arcadia School. During the Civil War, Colonel Tappan commanded the 2nd Maryland Regiment Cavalry in New Orleans. He left much of his left arm in Louisiana in 1864 along with the remains of his two sons, Enoch and Thomas. A widower and now childless, he bequeathed his sprawling family farm in Maryland, snug against the northern shore of the Potomac River, to the education of young men. It would take almost three decades for the old man to die, but Tappan Hall was finally built in 1889 on a central rise of the property, with majestic views of Maryland and Virginia both. A grim oil portrait of Tappan was placed in the vestibule, and there it remained. Father Lionel startled generations of students with his long forked beard, his armless left shoulder, and the searing cinders of his eyes. It was a remarkably lifelike portrait, with the crisp and unforgiving detail rendered by the photographic style of the time, and it was enormous. Another Arcadia legend held that if you were looking into the eyes of The Colonel when the bells rang in the tower, you lost a year of your life. Consequently, few lingered in the entryway near the colossal portrait, the better to avoid a chance encounter with those hellish eyes at the wrong time. Not me. I would stand there, returning Colonel Tappan’s stare, questing into those soot-black eyes with my own, groping for a past well out of reach. Sometimes the bells rang. With any luck, I’d be robbed of a year vegetating in assisted living.

It was in that vestibule that Dr. Collingwood found me. It wasn’t unusual to see her out of her office; Phyllis Collingwood was one of those Heads of School who considered it part of her duty to prowl the campus, seeing and being seen, distributing her regal presence to all of those in her care. In her own way, she was as impressive and unsettling a figure as the late and supposedly lethal Lionel Tappan. Well above six feet tall and impossibly slender, Dr. Collingwood moved stiffly with a slight bent to her posture, giving the impression of a towering and mildly hungry praying mantis, an image reinforced by her outsized rimless glasses. She was a gray mantis; her hair manicured steel, her skin the kind of fading charcoal you sometimes saw in older black women, skin that seemed to be tired of being black along with everything else it was tired of. Dr. Collingwood was the smartest and toughest person at Arcadia. She was also the only person on campus who knew Isaiah Moss was my father.

“Doctor Kendall,” she said, her voice gravel and authority and fatigue. Phyllis Collingwood was the only one who ever called me Doctor. I think she used it because she liked to tell Arcadia parents how many PhDs there were teaching their cossetted offspring. I was uncomfortable with the honorific myself. Not long after earning my doctorate in Literature at Boston University, I was coming back from some academic conference and had peeled my name tag off my lapel and stuck it on the binder I was carrying. The young woman sitting next to me on the plane must have noticed it, because she put her hand on my arm and asked with dewy admiration if I was a doctor. I was young and newly divorced, she was pretty and nearby, and so I said I was, which led to a couple of cocktails and promising conversation. Midway through the flight, there was some commotion a few rows away. Like some ludicrous scene from a movie, a stewardess called for a doctor to help a man who apparently was choking. “Right here!” called my seatmate, and I managed to somehow turn red with embarrassment and white with terror at the same time. “He’s a doctor!” Heads and eyes swiveled toward me. “Is he choking on his words?” I asked weakly. Fortunately, an elderly cardiologist was also on the flight and was able to minister to the man who had so inconsiderately neglected to chew his food, so there were no casualties other than my pride. The look the pretty young woman gave me, of reproach and disgust, curdled in my gut. I haven’t called myself “Doctor” since.

“Doctor Kendall,” Dr. Collingwood repeated, “Won’t you come and sit with me in my office?” My first instinct was that either I had done something wrong or one of my students had, but the not unkindly look behind those massive glasses told me it might be something else entirely. Dr. Collingwood had a formality about her, a whiff of dignified gentility from another age. She was unfailingly polite without ever being familiar, and was my favorite of the Heads I’d worked for at Arcadia. Dr. Phyllis Collingwood wasn’t ephemera. She was the opposite of ephemera. There was a solidity to her, a kind of inescapable gravity that belied her skeletal frame. She’d been poached a few years before from one of the prestigious downtown DC schools to replace Cabot Rutledge after the Regents fired him for the crime of being terrible at his job, and since then she had established herself as the most competent, intimidating head of school most of us had ever known.

Her office was spacious, airy and filled with greenery. There were dangling tendrils of ivy, snug little clusters of violets, voluble spider ferns, an improbably vast potted ficus. There weren’t any family pictures in that office, because Dr. Collingwood didn’t have any family that I knew of. Just plants. She had no patience for the independence of cats, so Dr. Collingwood loved her plants instead, doting on them as only as an aging chaste lesbian could. At least, some of us in the faculty believed she was a chaste lesbian. Others claimed that she wasn’t chaste at all but led an active night life in Baltimore, and a few years back a rumor circulated that she had once been married to Willie Mays. I think Dr. Collingwood enjoyed letting the mystery persist, though she’d never admit it.

A pair of simple slat-backed oak chairs faced the Head’s desk, and I sat in one. They were handsome enough, though hard on the cheeks. Dr. Collingwood once told the assembled faculty of Arcadia School that she didn’t want anyone finding themselves too comfortable in her office. “The day a problem takes more than thirty minutes to solve is the day I retire,” she said. Seventy had come and gone, and she was still on the job. Her chair, of course, was thickly cushioned and upholstered with a rich red leather. Settling behind her massive wooden desk, Dr. Collingwood placed her pointy, bony elbows on the surface, laced her long, bony fingers together, and fixed me with her inscrutable, bony gaze.

“Doctor Kendall,” she said, “I am sorry for your loss.” I stared at her. “My…loss?” She squinted at me through her large glasses.

“Your father?” My stomach filled up with a sudden coldness, like I’d swallowed all the ice cubes from my glass at once.

“What about my father?”

“You don’t know?” she asked, tilting her regal head and looking at me with skepticism.

“Know what?” There was a pause, as though she were considering.

“I presumed you knew. Very well, then, we’re in it now. Doctor Kendall, I am very sorry to say that your father passed away yesterday.”

“Isaiah Moss is dead?” I asked. It was her turn to stare at me.

“Was Isaiah Moss your father?”

“Yes.”

“Then your father is dead.” She made no move to reach out for my hand or offer comfort. There was nothing aloof or cold in the absent gesture; Phyllis Collingwood was simply not a woman made for casual warmth. Isaiah Moss dead. It was as though someone had torn down the Pyramids or filled in the Grand Canyon. Some things are supposed to be eternal.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Twitter.” I laughed then, because it was funny. It made sense that the world knew before I did. I felt surprise, I felt loss, but I did not feel grief. Something was missing now from the world. It had been a month or two since I’d gotten a letter, and now I’d never get another one. That voice, that masterful voice, silenced forever.

“If you need a moment…”

“A moment is more than he ever gave me,” I replied, and the firmness in my own voice came as something of a surprise. “Thanks for letting me know. Is there anything else?” Dr. Collingwood shook her head slowly, quietly. I nodded, stood up, and left. On my way out of the building, the bells rang. I could feel Colonel Tappan’s eyes on my back.

~~~

Perhaps the most thoughtful thing my father ever did was to die in the late spring, when the school year was about to wrap up. It was my tenth year coaching the Arcadia Upper School girls’ varsity softball team, and while my teams had never won more than they’d lost, sometimes it was close. A couple of years before, the girls had posted an almost-respectable 13-14 record. Arcadia had a strong academic standing, as well as a certain reputation in the performing arts, but athletics were an afterthought. Coaching was an assumed duty of the faculty at the school, and as the newest hire a decade before, I’d been assigned to the bottom-feeding softball team no one else wanted. That was fine with me. There were no expectations, which was where I did my best work. There was a certain pleasure to spending time outdoors in the mid-Atlantic spring, those beautiful cerulean weeks between misty winter and sweltering summer. It reminded me forcefully of my own flirtations with baseball, a long time ago when possibilities were still a thing. While the girls weren’t quite winners they rarely failed to try, and I respected that. Trying and failing was the main reason I didn’t really try, so to see these privileged young women doing it again and again was a source of bemused awe for me.

Our season-ending game that spring was the last thing I had to do before attending to my father’s passing. The executor was handling most things, but I did have to be present at the reading of his will and I had to check in on my poor mom. She had loved the old man, with the unexamined, uncomplicated reverence of youthful infatuation. Having never lived together, never grown old together, she had never cultivated the garden of minor annoyances characteristic of long relationships, grinding unbridled passion down to a companionable mutual tolerance.

The Spartans of Arcadia uneventfully dropped that last game of our uneventful season. I don’t recall the score, but it wasn’t close. In the school’s minibus on the way back to campus I sat behind our driver, thinking vaguely of strikeouts with runners on third base and the blisteringly good writing of my dead father. My fingers itched to hold a pen, to scrawl some rich lines about the undying nature of youth, the cyclic reinvention of spring on basepaths, sport for the sake of itself. Instead I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the dark window. Even if I write it, who would care?

Despite the hefty tuition at Arcadia, the minibus wasn’t some ritzy charter deal with cushy captain’s chairs and TV screens hanging from the ceiling. It looked like a school bus that had never gotten past puberty, the sawed-off runt of the scholastic transportation family. It wasn’t even the traditional yellow, but white with rakishly angled blue and yellow stripes down the side and green vinyl bench seats. “It handles like butter,” the driver said one time, “butter that rattles when it tickles sixty on the speedometer.” Even well-endowed private schools have their food chains, and we were not at the top. We weren’t even at the middle.

“Mister Coach Kendall?” Odette Kieffer was one of my favorites. Teachers, like parents, will tell you that they don’t have favorites, but that’s pretty much bullshit. Of course we have favorites. Odette was a decent player, scrappy and tough at second base, the kind of student who excelled in the classroom because her penmanship was decipherable, and her answers were inoffensively sufficient. Unimaginative, workmanlike, good enough. Polite, well-spoken with the lilt of continental French as her first language, second clarinet in the school band. Pretty, in that way that most seventeen-year-old girls are pretty; smooth and lean and still unbroken. Odette would go far. It helped that her mother was a diplomat from Belgium or Andorra or someplace and had all the money. I think she was really my favorite because she had coined the “Mister Coach Kendall” that grew into common usage among the girls who had me in the classroom and on the softball field. How do you not like that?

“Hey.” I sort of wanted to be left alone, to set aside the oppressive weight of being an adult and drown in my own unsettled thoughts, but Odette sidled next to me on the green vinyl bench in her silky warm-ups. She was almost as tall as I was, and the eye black she liked to put on before games had started to streak down her cheekbones, making her look like a KISS groupie from a generation even earlier than mine. It was dark, passing headlights suffusing the minibus interior with brief, intermittent flashes of illumination. I realized I was very tired.

“I wanted to say that I am sorry about your father.” Secrets are notoriously scarce in the insular societies of independent schools, which is why I so resolutely guarded my father’s identity, even now. Especially now. I felt a gentle, warm pressure on my right hand where it rested on the cool vinyl. Odette had put her hand on mine. It was as smooth as you might expect. I remembered then that her mother was the ambassador to the United States from Luxembourg. I taught literature, not geography. I didn’t know where the fuck Luxembourg was. But I knew where they sent you if you messed around with underage girls, and I wanted no part of it. Even so, looking down at her young hand on mine, I was briefly paralyzed. Oh, if I were seventeen myself. But I wasn’t. I was forty-three, rudderless, dissipated, sated on the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t evil. I wasn’t a corruptor of youth. I wasn’t a Florida Congressman, for God’s sake. I reached across my body with my left hand, placing it on top of hers, and looked Odette in the eye.

“Thanks,” I said, a bit huskier than I intended, and then took my hands away. Slowly, not unkindly. “Odette, you’re one of the good ones.” It sounded stupider in my mouth than it had in my head. She looked back at me, those big brown heifer eyes, Disney character eyes, full of innocence and expectation and hurt, and I felt small. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her. No, I thought, the last thing I wanted was to be hurt myself. But damaging a fawn like Odette was pretty low on my list. She looked back at me, unsure whether to be offended or confused before deciding on gently rebuffed, God love her.

“Mister Coach Kendall,” she said, “I just wanted you to know you aren’t alone.”

“Thanks, kid.” I put a gentle emphasis on that second word. Odette smiled at me, and melted back into the amorphous potentialities of the girls behind me. Bullet dodged, limp-wristed virtue confirmed, I stared out the window for the remainder of the ride. No matter what Odette said, or what Dr. Collingwood said, I was alone.

That night I jacked off vigorously, thinking of Odette.

“Masturbation,” my father had once written to me in one of his letters, “is the last vestige of privacy and fantasy. Marilyn Monroe, Daisy Duck, Nancy Reagan, Mother Teresa. Fuck them all. At once. Nobody ever needs to know.”

I slept like a dreamless rock.

~~~

There was no celebrity funeral for my father, no public service providing an open-air opportunity for the famous and famous-adjacent to pay homage to the dead icon, to fold themselves into black silk and wax personal about how the writing of Isaiah Moss changed their lives. “He wouldn’t have wanted that,” my mother said, which was ridiculous. Of course he would have wanted that. He would have wanted the world to grind to a halt with the hair-pulling and garment-rending of our collective grief, for us to cut our scalps with sharpened conch shells and wail like Polynesian widows. His passing trended on Twitter, of course, and it was there the attention-seeking glitterati could be found by his virtual graveside. #MossMemories, that sort of thing, stories of how his books changed the world. There were also the obligatory full-page obituaries in the Times and the Guardian and other papers of repute, a cover of Newsweek, notice taken by the grave men who read the news at night. The man himself had been cremated as per his instructions, his well-used body incinerated and deposited ash-first into a cheap metal urn. There was no granite headstone marking his life, no permanent final resting place. The earthiest of men wanted no earthly repose. His will was specific on a few key points, and this was one. “I never once ate a worm,” it read. “I see no reason that they should get to eat me. Whatever I might have been is in my books. I need no other memorial. You can find me in those pages, as alive as I ever was.” You could almost hear him pause before adding “Buy your own copies. Libraries are literary whorehouses.”

His ashes were to be consigned to the waters of Franklin Lake in northern New Hampshire, where my father had owned a small cabin and done the bulk of his writing. He had died there, carried off by a simultaneous cardiac arrest and stroke, his heart and brain quitting in unison as if by mutual agreement. The cabin was also the extent of my inheritance. His spacious and seldom-used Upper East Side apartment in New York was to be sold, the proceeds packaged into a trust benefitting the Korean War Memorial in D.C. The rights and royalties for the published 24 Moss works of Isaiah Moss, valued in the hundreds of millions, were bequeathed in perpetuity to the same memorial. A bunch of dead statues got a fortune. I got a cottage.

Turns out the old man did have a sentimental side. Just not for me.