Oh, Dad. I never even “interviewed” you.

Would you, asked, have answered me?

I will go on record. I still don’t exactly know why you were so strict with your young son. Did you fear that my emotions, my drama, would cut me off from seeming serious enough to be, say, anybody’s dad? That’s not true, Pop. I’ve several friends and children.

I sometimes miss you, Sir.

* See Appendix.

* The New York Times, March 18, 1986.

AFTER AFTER
The Company of Spirits

I can never write any sort of story unless it contains one character for whom I feel physical desire.

—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Introduction to Collected Stories

Naming of Parts

It is here, to be observed, that after the funerals became so many that people could not toll the bell, mourn or weep, or wear black for one another, as they did before, no, nor so much as make coffins for those that died, so, after a while, the fury of the infection appeared to be so increased, that, in short, they shut up no houses at all…. All the remedies had been used till then were found fruitless, and that the plague spread itself with an irresistible fury; so that, as the fire the succeeding year spread itself and burnt with such violence that the citizens in despair gave over their endeavors to extinguish it, so in the plague it came at last to such violence, that the people sat still looking at one another, and seemed quite abandoned to despair. Whole streets seemed to be desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their inhabitants: doors were left open, windows stood shattering with the wind in empty houses, for want of people to shut them. People began to give up themselves to their fears, and to think that all regulations and methods were in vain, and that there was nothing to be hoped for but a universal desolation. And it was even in the height of this general despair that it pleased God to stay his hand, and to slack the fury of the contagion in such a manner as was even surprising, like its beginning, and demonstrated it to be his own particular hand.

still use the one book for recording my friends’ whereabouts. I’m averse to a Rolodex or computer screens for my own pal-tracking function. Books somehow appeal to me. Blame my love of the antique. I must now purchase new address ledgers at those serious office supply shops that rest between the solemnity of medicinal suppliers and the useful good cheer of hardcore hardware stores.

“I am merely Society’s secretary,” Balzac’s fake modesty proclaims. But all address bookkeepers become novelists of sorts, charting entrances, chronicling exits. Divorces register; incoming newborns warrant the listing of full names. Wars and epidemics only heighten the hindsight drama of the role-call. This is the DNA “material” of life and, incidentally, of narrative art.