“It’s amazing to me,” Orion said slowly, “how my leadership becomes conditional, and my team becomes collective property, and Jonathan’s memory”—his voice broke—“even his memorial service becomes something you can use for your agenda, which is now and has always been solely about money.”
“This is not art we’re making here,” Aldwin shot back indignantly.
“This is my friend you’re talking about,” Orion said. “Don’t tell me what he would have wanted.”
“Orion,” Dave chided, “we loved him too.”
He would say this at the memorial service as well. Orion knew exactly what Dave would say that afternoon. We loved him. We all loved him. Oh, and Mel too. We all loved Mel too.
He was so angry, he didn’t want to go, but his father was on the program. Orion had lobbied hard for Lou to come down to read. What better voice for a memorial? Craggy, irreligious, oddly deep. And who but Lou might have anything to offer Emily? From childhood she had admired his work. Naturally Dave worried that the service would run too long, but Orion won him over, promising his father’s brief elegy “Where Are the Bees?”
Now, driving to South Station to meet the train, he hoped his father had canceled at the last minute. He had canceled readings before. He was old and shaky. A seventy-seven-year-old man descending from the mountains with his visionary cri de coeur. Jonathan deserved the tribute, but ISIS was hardly worth it.
Orion drove to Boston, and he was late, and Lou didn’t own a cell phone. Aggravated, Orion barely glanced at the white sailboats on the river, the dark choppy water, the deep-blue October sky. He arrived at the station to find his father slightly crumpled in a brown corduroy sports jacket, dark trousers, and his old fly-fishing hat. As soon as he saw Orion, pleasure lit up Lou’s dark eyes, and for an instant he was young again.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Never apologize, never explain,” said Lou.
“How are you?” Orion picked up his father’s flea-market briefcase, an old-fashioned doctor’s bag.
Lou shrugged. “I’m doing about as well as can be expected, given that Dick Cheney and the Bushies have ceded our government to a military-industrial complex which is bombing the Afghan people back to the Stone Age—as if that’s going to solve our problems.”
“Let me take that.” Lou’s bag was surprisingly heavy. “Do you want something to eat or drink?”
“I had a drink.” Lou laughed at Orion’s quick glance.
“Shmancy,” Lou said as Orion unlocked the BMW. He caressed the seat when he sat down. “What is this, leather?” He sniffed the upholstery.
“Do you want to rest?” Orion began driving back to Cambridge. “We have plenty of time. Do you want to take a nap?”
“Nah.”
“You have the poem?”
Lou gasped. “Oh, the poem!”
“Dad!”
“I’m kidding,” Lou said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Everything,” Orion muttered as an SUV cut him off.
“Drive to the river,” Lou told his son.
“What’s at the river? I’m going over the river. See? We’re driving to the bridge now.”
“Closer,” said Lou.
Orion parked on Memorial Drive, and he and Lou stepped out. “Watch the traffic, Dad. Careful!” Orion held Lou back as cars whizzed past, and then guided him across the road to the grassy bank.
“Hmm.” Lou approached the river and peered down into the murky water.
Orion had a sudden vision. His father in waders and a fly-fishing vest, the green canvas fisherman’s hat with a flip-down magnifying glass clipped to the brim. Orion had often watched Lou fishing waist-deep in rushing water. Whenever Orion was too short to stand, Lou would lift him onto a rock on the bank, and then Orion watched his dad casting, his lines floating beautifully, scribbling the surface with a delicately tied caddis or a little midge or mayfly. Sometimes a sleek otter would swim past, a stealthy creature, only its nose showing, its long body submerged, gliding just under the surface of the stream. Orion knew better than to shout this out. No talking and no splashing were the rules, but Orion kept still because Lou held him in suspense, casting and casting with no luck, and then suddenly a trout, bending his wand to water, tripping line with a zzzzzz. Splashing, leaping, a huge brown fish Lou wrestled with his hands and looked in the eye, before he let it go. This casting, this deft motion of the arm and wrist, this balancing in currents with legs apart, had always seemed to Orion the center of his father’s life, the source of his art.
When he was ten, Orion had to create a family coat of arms for school. With markers on poster board, he outlined a shield and then divided it on the diagonal. On one side of the divide he drew a pen, an apple, and a rose to represent his mother—the writer, teacher, gardener. On the other side, he drew a big-eyed fish for Lou. On the surface his parents were still together. They didn’t divorce for another three years, but Lou was already gone many weekends, and in summers, and odd times in between.
“Is there a motto for the Steiners?” Orion had asked his mother.
“‘Catch and release,’” Diane had told him, and Orion hadn’t heard the irony at all. The words sounded poetic and sportsmanlike, and he wrote them out in yellow marker, the color closest in the box to gold.
“You aren’t going to find much here,” Lou said. “Maybe a pike. Possibly a bass.”
“The Charles isn’t known for fishing,” Orion said.
They were standing close to the BU Boathouse, east of the place Orion and Sorel walked in the mornings. No one was rowing, the shells were all locked up inside. A lone rowboat floated gently, tethered to the dock.
Lou said, “Let’s take that boat out for a paddle.”
“Take the boat? We can’t take the boat.”
“Why not? We’ll bring it back,” Lou told him.
“But it’s not ours.”
“Oh, don’t be such a skirt.”
“I’m sorry,” Orion said, with some heat. “Not everyone can live like you. I wish I did, actually. I’d rather be a painter or a poet, and work for myself and do whatever the hell I wanted without dealing with people, and all their meetings and their games. You have no idea what it’s like to fight and play politics and—”
“Hold on, hold on,” Lou interrupted. “Let me disabuse you, kid. For sheer backstabbing and jealousy, the politics of poetry are second to none. I guarantee that, compared to poetry in America, anything you’ve experienced at ISIS is child’s play.”
“Yeah, right.” Orion kicked a tuft of grass. He did not see his father’s tender face. He did not realize that Lou had visions too, that he turned to Orion and saw the boy who asked questions like, “Is it true that if you eat enough poppy seeds you fall asleep?”
“Look, it turns out nothing is easy,” Lou murmured. “We’re all dodging bullets of one kind or another—death or disappointment. Whatcha gonna do?”
“You should have warned me earlier,” Orion said. “I would have lowered my expectations.”
Lou grinned. “True story. A woman and her lovely young daughter are sitting on the beach. An enormous wave comes crashing down and sweeps the daughter away.
“The mother is hysterical. Weeping, she stands at the water’s edge. If there’s a God in heaven, she screams, please bring back my child!
“Lo and behold the wave returns and washes up the lovely daughter, alive and well.
“Thank you, merciful God! the mother cries. Then she looks around her. She looks all around, and at last she calls up to heaven once more. She cries out, There was also a hat?”
They laughed together, and for a moment Orion felt like himself. He wished he could really talk to Lou, and tell him how he hated ISIS. He wished above all that he could tell him about Sorel.