Back to the Rectory

Isaw​ the end of it then, I mean the end of it as it was, as my mother told the story of my father’s sudden deafness. The turn towards the deer in the snow, two pairs of black eyes, the earplugs falling out soundlessly, the shot – then the line on his hearing chart falling off a cliff at a thousand decibels.

It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the rectory seemed to have grown smaller, darker, dingier. The Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian; my father locked in a corner of silence, not seeming to see us. He shot out his own hearing? we gasped. Yes. With a high-powered rig like the one that kid in Pennsylvania used to send the bullet whistling past Trump’s ear.

I had felt what was going to happen in October 2024, coming down through Connemara, driving through one rainbow after another, drinking hot water and honey for a smoky throat. A swell of dread. I had left my lucky bracelet on the windowsill of the ferry keeper’s cottage in Doolin. And something else: they had stopped calling the Republicans weird. Harris’s numbers haven’t moved, I thought. They should have moved.

It was Super Bowl Sunday and I was tucked into bed upstairs with the lights off. I was watching Season Six of the X-Files. By this point, the show had moved to LA. The sun was almost pink, going down behind Mulder’s ear. Two men together in a car being swept by searchlights. This was the episode in which Bryan Cranston plays a man tormented by a piercing hum that will make his head explode unless he drives west as fast as possible. Cranston was the actor my co-writer, Heidi Schreck, had picked to play my father in our planned adaptation of my book about him, Priestdaddy. Possibly for tighty-whitie reasons. An actor’s actor, a four-dimensional presence. Knives of blue light on his face, a nervy impulse, a cimarron energy.

‘Mr Mulder could you,’ Cranston says, ‘go a little faster. Please.’

The episode seemed unbelievably powerful, some speedometer clicking higher and higher, until I realised it was half-time in the game playing downstairs and Kendrick Lamar was rapping, crouched on the hood of a car. The whole stadium exploding, some unison in the outside world.

IT’S HIGH ART, my husband, Jason, called up the stairs. IT’S THE STORY OF HIS LIFE. I ran down to catch the tail end of it. It was a sort of assassination in musical form. We had returned from Kansas with what I can only conjecture was a new variant of Covid; as always, when I had it, I saw and heard things that weren’t there. Me, feverish, as the players filtered back onto the field: Tight end, what does they do? Jason, feverish: Be big catch.

Experience seemed heightened and the past very close, all episodes playing at the same time. Don’t you get waves of nostalgia when you have it? I asked. Don’t you want to be back there? In my childhood? he said, aghast. No, never.

The first thing that happened when we entered the rectory: my father’s little dog, Sparky, whirled like a dervish at my feet and exploded from every orifice. Oh my God, I said, and dropped to my knees to clean up, as my father stood over me benevolently in his underwear, pointing out the spots I had missed. This was what was hard to get into the adaptation, a form of pustulent comedy, ready to go off at any moment. My father explaining fondly that sometimes Sparky ate birds’ heads in the frozen backyard.

Now I saw it all through a person, as Heidi had. The tighty-whities were what had unlocked it for her. Cranston – Walter White in Breaking Bad – standing with his legs spread against that desert background, his head full of chemical equations. To write for someone’s capabilities, or even just a little beyond them. He would be perfect, Heidi said. It would be transcendent. It would be the role of a lifetime.

WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT DOING? That’s a fun question to ask now. A ringing in the ears, even outside the ears. Oh Lord, I should have known it – we were talking about the Hum. Everything you’d read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the X-Files would eventually cover. Was that show bad for us? For our minds? Maybe nine straight years of FEMA LIES ABOUT THE HANTAVIRUS was not good, in retrospect.

Just nothing here, my father said, showing my husband his chart, where the line suddenly dropped off. And he could not hear women’s voices at all.

A strange brave torch is being passed in the car. A kind of relay is being run. Two actors locked in a crystal sphere together, driving west. The actor in the front seat is tired, it’s been raining on him for the last six years. The actor in the back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are keeping the ball alive.

All music falling away, and the Hum. My father could no longer hear confessions. Could no longer stand as the god of the room, holding forth, certain that everyone was listening. That bullet still just whistling, hanging suspended in the air.

It was stupid, he said sadly. He had ruined his lungs in a similar fashion, shaping and sanding guitar bodies out of exotic wood without a respirator. There is some other reality where none of this ever happened and he’s still out in the garage making stained glass windows as I sit on a bench against the wall breathing the smell of lead solder. The unsquareable idea, that that would have been his virtuous life, rather than this one.

‘A man can’t help what he’s born to …’ Cranston and Duchovny are talking about capabilities, what you do with your length and what you set out to do.

‘We’ll figure this out.’

‘You’d better figure quick. We’re running out of west.’

So long, Cranston is saying from the back seat of the car, just before his head dutifully explodes. Score-keeper, deduct one life.

Ihad returned,​ marvelling, to the Thompson room at Harvard’s Barker Centre with its statue of Winged Time. I had taken the same picture under the bust of John Harvard as I had on my last visit. I had seen William James’s house, had imagined Elif Batuman scampering around campus, gathering material for The Idiot. I had refused, out of pure perversion, to see the Glass Flowers, had gone to visit the Chinese jades instead, and Gaston Lachaise’s Woman Bending Backwards. Cambridge was beginning to thaw, to exhale blue spring. Letters were being signed, lawsuits brought, protests planned; a Tufts student would be taken off the street by plain-clothes policemen the night of my event.

But you must see the Glass Flowers, everyone said. If you do nothing else you must see the Glass Flowers. Two men in a room, making permanent petals, thirst along long green stems, more than four thousand perfect glass models over fifty years – competition in the realm of the purely decorative, the lifelike.

I was being interviewed by Tara Menon, a Harvard professor I had met five years earlier. We agreed, before the event, to deface my Wikipedia entry and say I was a supporter of Manchester United. This was the sort of thing that was funny to me now. She asked about my parents. You see them very fully even though you never get at their interiority. Yes, I agreed. I don’t understand them, or why they do anything they do. But you can get at character just by writing down exactly what someone is saying. What is that thing your mother says? Tara began. I picked it up almost immediately: OH YEAH! her mother screamed in her OH YEAH! voice.

My father took Jason on a tour of his studio, one room of the decommissioned school. It’s so strange, my husband said later, that his guitars should be so beautiful, as if he were intended to do something else, with his hands, in the realm of beauty. Who, with a working passport, chooses to leave the realm of beauty? A craftsman who wants to be that shooter in the snow. I shouldn’t have – but I asked if he had recorded anything recently. He looked at me, his eyes big, and said it was so difficult, that he was still working on a song about my niece who had died. He couldn’t finish it.

What does it mean to lay down a gift – a voice, a guitar, a shaping hand? Or to turn your gaze away from that thing that is your material?

All your books are shaped by illness, aren’t they? Tara asked. Even in Priestdaddy, having to move back into the rectory because of your husband’s eye condition. You’re quite right, I said, after a moment. But to realise that would have been to realise that my life had been shaped by it too.

The lecture room was almost hilarious in the dangers it presented: fluorescent lights and a wall of vertical lines at the back. You learn how not to look at things directly. I recognised what I was doing as something my father does in his quieter moments: resting in his pain. All that boisterous talk, all those big laughs, and then he sinks into a chair against the wall and shakes hands with it in a kind of truce. The peace of it, the reality. I was explaining how he fell down a submarine hatch when he was in the navy and his bones never knitted right again. He had become the body of pain, which is as highly mapped, with all of its rises and falls, its sunlit and darkened areas, as the body in love.

Can you imagine him in that place? I asked. Alone in the middle of the ocean, falling and falling, then that crack in himself, between the future and the past. I had failed to imagine him, I said, realising that it was true.

I felt one outstretched finger towards him, such pity for his lost upper range. In adapting Priestdaddy, Heidi and I had considered humorous hunting scenes. For a while it was my father’s dream to kill feral hogs from a helicopter; we pictured him shooting my brother, PJ, who had been drafted into this venture by mistake. Some chaos. The lesson I learned in that house: what was going to happen.

The flag wasn’t even the saddest thing. That was the LET’S GO BRANDON mug in the cabinet. A grown man, now a great-grandfather, who watches YouTube videos where talking penises DEMOLISH Taylor Swift ‘whenever she manages to make it on the charts’. A wall of weird masculinity supplements behind him and a carnivore dog.

You may want to lay off the coffee, we told him gently, when he described how his hands shook when he was trying to install the guitar pickup. On the mornings I have metalsmithing class, I drink green tea, I said. That’s a very good suggestion, Bit, he said eagerly. He no longer took insulin, believing he had cured his diabetes, and would soon end up in hospital in full ketoacidosis, with a blockage in the left branch bundle of his heart – and still describing himself to the doctors and nurses as a self-taught nutritionist. I knew he would try out the tea for a week and then decide it was oestrogenic.

At my age you need all the testosterone you can get, he said. Does he know there is a time when he won’t have ANY testosterone? Jason asked on the drive home.

Is he entirely off the planet? Is he now George eating gold? I said, referring to my grandfather, who had revised his story towards the end of his life into something wondrous and strange – he was an astronaut married to his own daughter. He spent a large portion of his fortune on the supplements of the day, which the next generation understood to be useless, even laughable. In his mind he owned diamond mines, and oil wells and estates on the moon and eternal life.

My father was shaken, almost childishly chastened, to learn he had not cured himself – but this too would be temporary. They got him on that ribeye and olive oil drip? my brother Paul asked. The craziest part of him choosing death by animal proteins is how unsurprising it is. On the way home from the hospital, he would demand a detour to obtain tacos, and a well-thumbed book would appear in the living room called The Statin Disaster – and I would wonder, as I did in childhood, where he found these books, behind what revolving wall of what esoteric library.

Tara wanted to talk about criticism. I found that was always what people wanted to ask about. I was thinking the whole time that THIS is what you should be doing, her husband said afterwards. What you should get to do.

What I had been describing in the interview was a kind of paradise of reading: whole uninterrupted mornings. An impossible life, I now understood, and one which I was still determined to live. We were defending our right to read into the past, to believe that people really lived in history. In short we were defending the right to move around in our own hours – to count, as Tara had done, how many characters appear in Jane Eyre (147).

At some point you have to stop talking to the interviewer and start talking to the room. Collecting faces, allowing silences, sending your listening into different corners. I realised the voice I was using was the one my father put on when he said Look and laid something out. Look, I remember him saying gently to a student, you can’t start down it. He meant the path of questioning the Bible. You can’t start down it because it will lead you somewhere: through, or up, or out.

When did he start to believe that? I wondered, eavesdropping from the kitchen. I still see him sprawled on the bed, in his characteristic position and his tighty-whities. Biblical literalism had never been a feature of my childhood. But now he had taken to describing Elon Musk as the smartest man alive and RFK Jr as his hero. Uh, does he know who his dad is? Jason asked.

Show me how you read, Tara said. Want a couch? somebody called from the audience and proceeded to drag one into the room with the help of two graduate students. I lay down, kicked up a leg and showed them the body of my father. Tara, lightning fast, passed me a book to prop between my legs. What we were doing was a kind of improv. Suddenly we were all so glad to be there. We were not reading the news. We were acknowledging that we no longer knew how to read it. But you had to keep the ball alive. Be big catch.

What is the purpose of criticism? a voice called from the middle of the room. And from the left quadrant: Is attention the same thing as love?’

Tara overestimated my reading, as people often do. She gestured to one essay: so much information arrayed there. No, I said, look. You can put things in an essay that you yourself do not know. There is a library all around you. You take a book off the shelf, find the fact or the sentence and put it where it fits. It never belonged to you, you never really had it. It comes from the library, it goes back to it. And it waits there for the next one who needs it.

Is it a reaction, is it a resolution, is it even protest – to insist on working slowly, go long on people of the past, though the minute is calling us to attention? The purpose of criticism: to read into people who have really existed, to raise the ceiling on your own intelligence. Are you doing it against something? And is it fair to say?

Really it’s choosing a lifetime of homework, I said. Did they ask you to write about the X-Files? someone piped up. No, I wanted to write about the X-Files.

The anxiety about genre is really an anxiety that history should have happened differently, that the realism of the 19th century should not have turned to the experiential writing of the world wars, that those wars should not have been fought by journalists who became novelists who became memoirists, that we should not have become a nation of analysands, that an overeducated class of women should not have been locked up in the suburbs in the 1950s on tranqs, that their successors should not have taken up the sharp fragmented reportage of the 1970s, and on and on.

Do we live in a describable time? New sentences have appeared on earth, not written by human beings. Metallic whiffs from texts, emails, articles. Then there was the decal situation on a truck I had seen recently, which seemed to summarise the clash of ideologies so characteristic of the present:

Before you can be strokin’ and cummin’
You better be ROCK HARD BITCH
Yin yang
Peeing calvin Peeing calvin
FUCKIN BITCH FUCKIN BITCH

People who talk to ChatGPT like a therapist say, almost uniformly, that it is because it is so encouraging, so full of love. What if parents or teachers had talked to them that way? Told them they could make art, music, movies. Apparently the em dash is the thing that gives it away, though the essay had that first.

A friend was reading to me one day from The Waves and I misheard a line as ‘the senses have wind.’ They did, they do. I saw it immediately: white manes and horses switching their sight from eye to eye as they high-stepped across the horizon. Breezes move in the senses, and mistrals, and sometimes the breath blows so cold that nothing can grow and you freeze in each green blade of grass. The visible world, and the world of sound, scent, taste, touch are perpetual only in their perpetual passing.

And the sixth gift too, prophecy.

In that snowdrift my father’s hearing was absolutely still. He was the only one on earth who couldn’t hear me. No, it doesn’t feel good to look back and see that your books were, apart from anything else you intended, predictions.

Did they leave already? my father cried to my mother on the fifth day of our visit. He wanted to explain why he wasn’t socialising. He wouldn’t admit it at first, my mother said, that he had done it to himself. Then he approached her, saying: I think you’re right. The shocking attention he now paid to our moving mouths. Is that the same thing as love.

I saw the end then, as it was. That turn towards the other living thing in the snow. Two pairs of black eyes. Recognition.

Hey, he said sadly. At least I got the deer.

Strangest set of points I’ve ever seen, the deer processor told my father, who believed, all alone now in the world, that he had won.