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Chapter One
My fishing life did not begin in childhood, as it does with most people. It began with my father's death, although I didn't realize it at the time. I was too busy trying to deal with the mess I had made of my old life.
I was in London with Nicky when the call came about Dad. Nicky and I were still getting used to the difference in time, and it seemed as if we had just put our heads down to sleep, when we were roused by our host at 6 A.M. I staggered out to the hall to hear my sister Kappy's voice.
"Billy," she said through tears, "I know you just got there. But you have got to come home...."
I had brought my ten-year-old son to London as a gesture—of what exactly, I did not really know. I was crashing around in the dark. I had just left Nicky's mother, and the only thing I knew for certain was that I had to tell my little boy, in some dramatic way short of hiring a skywriter, that I still loved him, and I was not about to dump him too. Samantha, his three-year-old sister, I figured, was still too young to understand.
Nicky and I had spent the day bouncing from the Tower of London to Harrods to the museums on Exhibition Road. We must have looked like father and son on holiday. But even cursory inspection would have shown that our euphoria was fueled by desperation. At some level we knew if we could just keep filling up on museums, we would not have to face the fear and emptiness we felt.
It was a difficult time for everyone, but especially for Nick, who had had his own recent brush with mortality. Someweeks earlier, Nicky had been swiped by a speeding motorist as he stepped off the curb in front of our house in New Jersey to cross for the school bus. I was on the third floor, trying to write. I had no view of the street. But I heard the tires. I'll never forget the way every other concern in my life ceased to exist—my dying marriage, my dying career (the book I'd spent six years on had just been published to general indifference)—the way my entire being strung tight as a wire toward the street. Finally, I heard Molly cry out below: "God, it's Nicky!"
I took the stairs two and three at a time and was already raving when I went through the front door. I careered out into the yard, past the big silver beech, looking for someone, anyone at all, to hit. "Hey, take it easy! It wasn't us," said two husky young men—painters working in the neighborhood—who dodged my charge as they came up the walk.
Then: "He's okay. Really, your boy is okay."
I looked over at the curb, where Nicky was lying in his mother's lap. He was scared but not seriously hurt—he had a gash over his left eye—and he was sobbing with his whole body. The driver of the school bus was on one side of Molly; behind him, the entire shipment of kids pressed up against the windows. On the other side, carefully picking his way toward me, was the guy who had hit my son. Hardly the archfiend I had hoped for, he was a slight Asian man with what looked like a stenciled-on mustache.
"Please," he implored, "I don't see the boy. The bus don't put on the lights. Please, I also have son."
Still marinating in anger about Nicky, about my toilet of a life, I ignored the poor guy.
Fuck him, I remember thinking. Let him twist.
When I finished talking long distance with my sister, I went back to the bedroom and got in with Nick. I put my arms around him and pulled him close. I told him that his grandfather, whom he called Deggie, had had a heart attack while fishing and just sat back on the bank and expired.
I started to mouth the sentiment that would become a mantra with my parents' friends—that Dad's death could not have been better scripted by the movies, that he died with his boots on, doing the thing he loved best.
But Nicky cut right through the B.S.
"Was Deggie all alone?" Nicky asked.
"I don't know," I said. Then, with a shudder: "Yes, I think he was. I think you always are."
* * *
A few days later, there was a memorial service on the long green lawn that swept past my parents' house in western New Jersey. A large, rambling clapboard and fieldstone affair, the house had been an eighteenth-century inn. It banked on a hill and looked out on four woodsy acres that melted into a forest. Deer often came down to drink in the pond and chew on the ornamental evergreens.
I spoke at the service. I alluded to the problems my father and I had when I was a kid. Mostly I spoke about how I had come to appreciate him, and about how different he was from my mother (or Get, as I had called her since I was a teen). Where Ger was wind and fire, Dad was the earth itself; he was someone who had to be unearthed, for his riches did not lie on the surface. I spoke about how he was someone you spent an evening with in a quiet corner at a party or went on walks with. How he knew the names of trees, recognized animal tracks in the dirt or snow, could think like a fish. How he was also a reader, someone who got hold of a book and did not let go until he drained it. And Lord help you if you were "flowery," about the worst thing he would say about a writer or, for that matter, about a person....
Afterward, I hid in the kitchen and got into the scotch. I felt as though I had exposed myself—and, in the process, had not told the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway. My eulogy suggested that I had reached some kind of peace with my father, and I knew that I hadn't.
I didn't want to talk to anyone. But I must have ended up conversing with a dozen people who bothered to hunt me down. Most of these were clients. My father had spent the last twenty-five years of his life restoring antique furniture, and person after person wanted to tell me how he had made them a table out of beat-up old boards or had turned their mutilated bureau into an objet of museum quality.
But the one I will always remember was the younger brother of one of Dad's childhood friends, a man I hardly knew and had not seen for decades.
"Do you fish?" he asked me.
"A little," I said. "No, not really."
He seemed surprised, disappointed.
"Well," he said, "I'm going to tell you this anyway, because it might mean something to you some day." He paused and looked at me intently. "Your father was a nymph fisherman. He was closer to nature than the rest of us."
A couple of weeks after the cremation, my mother, my nephew, and I took on the barn. A red prefabricated metal structure, the barn sat above my parents' house and was the hub of Dad's business. It was a big step up from the old chicken coops where he used to operate and probably would have kept on operating if they hadn't burned down.
That Sunday we arrived after the fire had been put out. I will never forget the mess: the tangle of wood and metal smoldering on the wet concrete floor; the volunteer firemen in their slickers, still buzzing with excitement; my father, his eyes dull with despair, foraging in the slop for tools that had survived the blaze and could somehow still be used.
It was my mother, as always, who fetched my father from the ashes—and now, six years later, she was trying to do the same for herself. The trick, she knew, was to stay busy. Tackle the barn. Sort through the sea of tables and chairs, bureaus and bedsteads. Cull the unfinished pieces that belonged to customers and ferry them back home.
I had braced myself for an ordeal. But the whole business proved to be surprisingly painless. There were no tears or tirades. Quite the opposite. My mother was her usual incandescent self. If anything, she was turned up a notch, almost giddy with grief.
"He's been working on this for days," she said gayly, caressing a battered highboy—using, I could not help but notice, a verb tense that allowed my father a future.
For weeks we circled the wagons around her.
My mother tried to put up a brave front, but she was too mercurial to sustain it. She was okay at work, which she went back to almost right away. The hard part was coming home. She'd sit in the driveway, with her little black poodle, unable to get out of the car. My sister Kappy would find her there an hour later, waiting for Dad to come down from his barn and greet her, as he had each night of their lives.
The gestural, ritual cocoon of life was torn, and there was no thread to mend it. My mother had never spent a night alone in her life and she was not about to start now. My two sisters, Sam, Nicky, and I and a host of relations took turns sleeping in the adjoining bed. But even our rotating guard failed to make her feel safe. We had locks installed on both sets of doors leading to my mother's bedroom. But they offered her little comfort. It was somewhat like stretching a grate across an abyss: she might not fall in, but she could still look down into it.
Over the next few months, my family went through the familiar stages of grief, cycling back and forth along the axis of denial and despair. Eventually, though, it hit—and lingered—on a stage that I suspect will not be found in most of the handbooks on dealing with such a loss.
We had each, it turned out, been haunted by the same dark thought—that my father had not died as the men at his fishing club said he did. That he did not simply feel pain in his chest, lie back on the nearest bank, and go gentle into the night. Our fear was that he had drowned. No one dared express this, out of concern for the others. No one, that is, but my irrepressible mother. Each night in her dreams, she saw Dad lying face down in a swimming pool, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard.
Gradually, mercifully, Ger's dreams were recolorized and my father experienced a sea change into something rich and strange. He became, I gathered, a kind of familiar spirit, easily dialed up and always willing to help my mother realize some elusive end. At one point, he was working at fixing up my sister Melissa with one of my childhood buddies, who was still gimpy from divorce.
I was incredulous, but kept my mouth shut.
A good thing, too, because Ger's dreams quickly infected everyone. Soon everyone was seeing my father and not just when they tucked in at night. It was as if my entire family had been been abducted by Gabriel García Márquez. Kappy saw Dad one afternoon jogging down from his barn. He was wearing the heavy brown canvas coat that he worked in during the winter, never mind that the temperature was well into the eighties. Melissa saw him in the kitchen, his arm wrapped around Ger.
Meanwhile, up in the barn, the fey Puerto Rican floral designer who'd just encamped felt compelled to paint a fully-armed angel on the door to hold my father at bay. Milagro, his buxom female assistant, complained that Dad was "getting fresh. He keep untying my shoe."
Mostly, I was amused, until Huey, the young lady from work I had been pursuing, seemed to join the chorus. Huey and I were in Montreal, where I was playing in a hockey tournament with some other bozos with little hair and less sense. Huey mentioned that she'd lit a candle for Dad that morning at the cathedral. It stopped me in my tracks.
"Why?" I asked, unaccountably annoyed.
"To wish him well," she said.
"What do you mean 'to wish him well'?" I snapped. "He's dead. Don't you people realize that?"
