Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,260

up and drove him back to school in Boston. That summer we got a room together in the East Village. In September, he dropped out of Berklee and came with me to New Haven.”

Yale. I remember Alicia saying she thought she had seen Jack.

“For a while it was okay. We’d go to concerts and movies, and I would borrow books for him from the library. I bought him a guitar,” she says. “I guess he got bored or restless, so he started to go down to the city. At first he would stay with this bass player on Fourteenth Street and Avenue A—they formed a new band—but soon he started disappearing for days at a time. His family tried an intervention, but it was excruciating for him. All of them in Elizabeth’s living room on First and Seventy-seventh with a therapist and these pickled kitchen cabinets. He couldn’t get over the cabinets, like why anyone would go to all that trouble.

“The family apologized; but he felt they’d just been coached to assume blame. He said they hadn’t genuinely changed, they’d just replaced their own authoritarian ideas with someone else’s authoritarian ideas. He said they were only motivated by AIDS and the homosexual connotations they’d have had to face if ever he’d contracted it.

“According to his family, Jack sabotaged the whole thing,” Jewel says. “If only they could have seen how upset he was. He just kept saying, They’re programmed, they’re programmed. His mother especially. I think he’d been wishing she’d been shocked into feeling some effect. I didn’t know what to do. I called. I wrote letters. I went to see Elizabeth.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She shrugs. “They wanted him to go to this rehab place in Minnesota, but he refused, so they cut him off. They asked us to do the same. I objected because I knew it would drive him further into the hands of the wrong people.

“Last time I saw him was Christmas, six months ago. I had a sweater for him. He didn’t want the sweater; he wanted a hundred dollars. I said I couldn’t do that, and I didn’t have a hundred dollars. He was like, Fine, forget it. And that was it. A month ago, I got a call about the guitar. He’d sold it. My number in Connecticut was scratched onto the back, and the guy Jack sold it to had been arrested. The cops figured it had been stolen.”

I hand her a new tissue; she’s used her last. People keep coming by to kiss me and say hi, or just pat my shoulder.

“He never called you, did he?” she asks, her sad soul swimming. “No, I don’t suppose he would have.” She looks to her lap. “There was a book. He carried it everywhere. When he slept, I would read it. Songs, poems, pressed flowers. Letters to you, from you. Do you know the book?”

“Yes,” I say, “I do.”

There is a murmur of activity in front. “I’d better get back to my family,” Jewel says. “I just wanted to—to say, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry to me. I betrayed him. You never betrayed him.”

“No, Eveline, you didn’t betray him. You treated him like he was a normal, healthy man. You didn’t let it descend to pity or need. When you couldn’t be honest, you walked away. He loved you all the more for it.”

Father Michael McQuail of Braintree, Massachusetts, begins the eulogy by admitting that he has never met Jack, that he has come as a favor to his friend Cecilia Hanover, Jack’s maternal grandmother, who is too infirm to have traveled from Boston to attend the service.

“Although I am a priest,” he says, gently bending the microphone out of range, then stepping away from the podium altogether, “I have not been invited to speak in a religious capacity.”

He stands before us in a sort of informal traveling priest outfit—black slacks and a short sleeved black shirt and a handsome stainless steel watch. His arms are tanned and healthy. I heard him talking earlier to Reverend Olcott about running—their other mutual interest. Father McQuail runs in the Boston Marathon every year.

“I understand that Jack was a plain-speaking boy, and I’m a plain-speaking man, so I won’t bother to carry on about a life unnecessarily lost or precious gifts wasted. I will just say that what this individual did to himself and to his family and friends was a transgression of the worst kind. First of all, drug trafficking and drug use are illegal, and the