What my wife says about one of only 8 family pics of me

The only picture of R. F. Laird and his dad still in existence.

What my wife says... 

“This photo is a story in several respects. A small picture of a big dining room at Thanksgiving in the WASP realm. Chandelier overhead, not visible. Father trying to smile, barely visible. Son not mouthing off but not content with dad either. So not smiling. Pretty sure he was working on Parade of Volumes at the time. He was still both “Jake and Colin” then. You know. The Reckless Twenties.

“Maybe this is what White Privilege looks like. I’m biased. Dad was handsome enough but I never liked him. Robert is beautiful though. No honest woman can deny it. He got into (and escaped from) Harvard on his brains. He got through Harvard on his looks and charm without going to class. The girls went for him but he always thought he was too young for them. He was. Spent a whole weekend with a Mount Holyoke goddess without laying a hand on her. He was waiting for her to make the first move. Child boy. She thought he was too hot to desire her and Dear-Johned him. While admitting he was the most charming, gorgeous, and unobtainable guy she’d ever met. Too much overhead for her to overcome. He was crushed. Sometimes at parties in the Harvard dorms, girls under the influence would fixate on him, convinced he was Bowie or some other sleekly androgynous rock god, though mostly Bowie. They were doing hard drugs. Friends rescued him.

“I know you don’t understand. They sent him away too young. He can’t tell you. They sent him to boarding school at 13. He got into Harvard when he was sixteen. He was elected president of a Harvard Final Club when he was just 18. This is the pinnacle of Harvard social attainment. The Phoenix SK Club, utterly envied and misrepresented by Zuckerberg, who never got in.  It was also the smartest Harvard Club, valedictorians, Rhodes and Marshall Scholars, eminent artists, composers of Hasty Pudding musicals, and they thought Robert was a charismatic Fitzgerald wannabe when all the time he was the man watching them all fail. But at some level he was the best of them and they knew it. They became CFOs. He became R. F. Laird, author of the best book of the last half of the 20th century.

“He graduated from college when he was 19, the same year his older sister graduated from Vassar. Imagine the complications. His parents failed him. I inherited him as a proofreader at a nuclear engineering firm. Guess what. He was the best one. And... He really was as beautiful and young as he looks in this picture and the smartest guy you ever met. Dorian Gray times ten. 

 

He was lovely but remote. For me it was love at first sight. For him too. 

“I lost track of him in his twenties. Did he stop being beautiful? Wrong question. He changed. Transformed. I fell in love with an unexpected naïf. What I found later on my doorstep was a kind of mythic wounded warrior, an archetype of extreme broken risk-taking who had dared everything, won everything, and lost everything, all in a multi-national Fortune 100 throw of the dice, like Kipling’s exemplary ‘If’ man. 

“He had lost not his beauty but his innocence, and worse, almost all his sense of mercy. Though not his faith. I had met a Galahad in youth. In maturity he had become a cold gunfighter who still believed in God. The poetry of his child nature had become the polemics of a scarred, prematurely old man. “Only Jake, and gutted rage, and a darkness to die in.” He was no longer a sacrificial Christ figure, not Billy Budd but Ahab, and somehow a grim archangel of justice rather than mercy.

He became something else. A frightening intellect and poet.

“What do you do? I threw a net over him and married him. Not the kid I first fell for who could have lit up my life, but the leaner, meaner one who finally needed me to mend his bleeding wings and help him fly again toward heaven. His light is no longer pure, but he has flown a million miles since innocence, endured dangers and enmities I cannot wholly comprehend, and yet somewhere within, the boy I loved remains alive, inside a crust of scarification and nightmare memories I am not allowed to share. I know he loves me. And on my best days I still love him. Our 15th wedding anniversary is two weeks from now. He’s promised me a crystal paper clip in honor of the occasion. I forbade him to do anything more.

“Thinking most of you don’t know his equal or how you’d live up to it. Right now he’s trying to fly away again. Away from you and even from me. He has plans, worlds upon worlds of plans, but the one he thinks will complete his earthly duty is called Death of the Republic, which you can find here:

Death of the Republic.

“He can do more. He can live again. But that’s more a hope than a promise. Help me pray for him.”

What she says.

**********

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.