The Scientists: A Family Romance - Hardcover

Roth, Marco

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374210284 ISBN 13: 9780374210281

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Synopsis

A frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoir

With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician―from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like "De-oxy ribonucleic acid," or recite a French poem―Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s.

What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J.R. Ackerley, The Scientists grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.

About this title

About the Author:

Marco Roth was raised amid the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side. After studying comparative literature at Columbia and Yale, he helped found the magazine n+1, in 2004. Recipient of the 2011 Shattuck prize for literary criticism, he lives in Philadelphia. The Scientists is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
 

The couch where my father died was also the couch where he taught me to read. I might as well start there: my alphas and his omega joined by a piece of furniture. It was a white sofa bed, pushed up against a wall the color of late summer nights. The room was supposed to be the apartment’s dining room, but served more as my father’s library. Sitting on the couch you faced two twelve-foot-tall bookcases, crammed to the top, with a third just like them on the right. The books both beckoned and frightened. Some of them were forbidden, placed high up on the top tier, after my mother once caught me leafing through a three-volume German history of the Second World War and its trove of Nazi photographs: glorious flamethrowers, the parade of tanks, the piles of corpses like so many broken dolls. Other books I didn’t want to see at all. The cover of something called Freddy’s Book showed a horned, hairy, and goat-footed man, hanging in a thicket of thorns.
“’Tis the eye of childhood that fears the painted devil,” my father quoted at me, when I asked him to move it or turn the spine around. So the book stayed there, an object of dread, to admonish and terrify me until I grew brave enough to take it and read. It turned out to be a fairy tale about a misshapen but very human monster, a sort of Frankenstein’s creature, who learned, in the somewhat happy end, to live with his deformities.
It wasn’t a completely comfortable couch. The raised stitches on the cushion covers and armrests made it look hand-knit, but they left lines on bare flesh. I used to pick at the knots of fabric whenever bored or anxious during our weekend lessons. “Don’t destroy it,” my father said. English came first. The primer of choice, or at least the one I remember first actually being able to read, was called Nobody Listens to Andrew. The illustrations were Dick-and-Jane-like, a crew-cut boy in knickerbockers, girls in frocks with bows and neatly parted hair. The story, however, was not. Because nobody did listen to Andrew. He was just a boy with a busy family, a father who read the newspaper and smoked a pipe, older siblings, and in the end, maybe, Andrew ran away for an afternoon, or hid out in the treehouse in the backyard, or perhaps there was a bear lurking and he tried to warn everyone, but no one listened, turning it into an inverted version of the boy who cried wolf, a parable for a more responsive generation of parents. I never knew where my father found the book or why he’d picked it out. It didn’t make much sense to me. I was an only child and everyone seemed to be listening to me all the time.
These first lessons were followed quickly by French, the seventeenth-century fabulist La Fontaine, “La Cigale ayant chanté tout l’été,” we read together. Then I’d recite the tale of the ant and the grasshopper back at him, four lines at a time. That was classical education: “Repetition is the mother of memory,” my father quoted again, as I stumbled over the lines at first. I kept up, eager to please, waiting to catch him in a secret smile of approval. Repetition may have been the mother, but my memory had a very visible father. Sometimes I was attentive, other times, leaning back, I’d run an imaginary rat through the maze of interconnected honeycomb moldings on the ceiling. Staring down, I’d idly trace the arabesques of the Persian rug with my toe.
When my wandering attention finally convinced him no further progress was possible, my father released me to entertain myself. I skipped off across the dining room along the carpet’s red rhomboid medallions, making myself go back to the beginning if I missed a step, then jumped from peacock to antelope along the hallway’s animal carpet until I reached the open arch leading to the enormous rectangle my parents called “the living room,” although we really used it as a music room. It was barely furnished: a small seating area with a couch and glass coffee table at one end and the piano and stereo system at the other. The far wall was a bank of six windows looking out onto Central Park.
Weekend afternoons, two or three times a year, the room filled with a group of Chinese, Chileans, Poles, Italians, the random Yugoslav, and Jews from New York’s five boroughs, my father’s favored colleagues from the hematology and epidemiology divisions of various New York hospitals. I was put in charge of opening our front door to the arriving guests, who included elderly couples with Middle European accents from around the neighborhood, the shaggy poet who lived in the apartment across the hall, my mother’s musician friends. They sat on the rented chairs I’d sometimes help unfold and listen to a string quartet run through the program they would play at Lincoln Center the following week, or a recital of a Schubert song cycle, or, once, a brass quintet my father had discovered busking outside in the park. Their trumpets shook the windows and left our ears ringing.
I looked for my mother’s curls bobbing up behind the pianist’s shoulder as she turned pages, then I searched the rows, trying to catch a cue as to how the music was going by reading the faces around me. If someone met my stare, I’d shyly switch to where my father sat on the edge of a black armchair, trying to meet his eyes, gray behind his oversized black-framed glasses. He hunched forward, his chin cupped in his palm during particularly complicated passages, the lines on his broad forehead creasing, his broad lips pulsing gently, as if he were keeping himself from humming along. He was overweight in those days, a pudge of stomach visible when I caught sight of him in profile as he greeted guests, his upper arms rolled with what I now recognize as fat instead of muscle. I no doubt thought of him as bigger than he actually was. Although a couple of inches shorter than his father’s six feet two, when he stood up at the end of the concert to thank the musicians and invite everyone for hors d’oeuvres he seemed, for that moment, to command the room. The rare moment when he stood next to my mother at the end of the evening, in the entrance foyer, as they saw our guests to the door, he seemed even taller. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder.
When no one was around, the living room was a lost continent, an America I could enter only by swimming across an expanse of open parquet until I’d reached a small kilim at the center. In quieter moods, I would lie on one of the rugs reading D’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths or, absurdly—as it seems now—the Signet Classics editions of Shakespeare’s history plays my father gave me after he’d taken me to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V at the old Thalia movie theater on Ninety-fifth Street. The seats at the Thalia sloped upward, the front row higher than the back row, in a way that forced your eyes to the top of the screen. I remember the battle scenes, the knights hoisted onto their horses by cranes, the whooshing flights of English arrows, and not much else. I cannot now tell what possible good it did me to lie there, warmed by the sun streaming over the trees, reading Shakespeare uncomprehendingly, making sure to ignore the notes. I lingered over the mysterious list called “Dramatis Personae.” When I got further, I read mostly for the plot. I had perverse rooting interests, an odd sympathy for the murderous Richard III. Iambic pentameters did not come flowing out of my mouth. I was about eight or nine.
I’d lie on the carpet underneath my mother’s Steinway B. It was a warm place. If my mother came in to play a Scarlatti sonata, for instance, or the accompaniment for a Schubert song, I’d listen while feeling the vibrations of chords and the thump of pedals push through me. Cadences and phrases flowed and mingled somehow with the patterns of the carpets. My father had brought most of them back from Iran and Lebanon when he’d traveled there in the early 1960s, but I ignored their provenance. They were as eternal to me as meadows, and they were my meadows. Peacefully, I’d continue to draw out, in the weavings, what I was sure must be the music I couldn’t yet read, according to some secret law of association now beyond recall.
My father wandered through and sat on a sofa at the opposite end of the room underneath a giant oak-framed mirror that doubled the space. I’d watch him and my mother’s reflection as she managed her small hands and petite frame around the keyboard’s widest intervals with only the rarest flaw. “She plays beautifully, your mother,” he’d say to me, rarely complimenting her directly. This way of mediating kindness through me confirmed my sense that I was the center of our family life. Of course he could simply have been performing an object lesson in kindness, telling me how much my mother needed to be praised. She did need to be praised and she did play beautifully, although no longer professionally, and then no longer even semiprofessionally, and then, gradually, hardly at all.
Who was to say if all this was good or bad? I was the definition of “precocious,” which probably pleased my parents, but nobody feels precocious at that age. The mixed shame and pride of standing out only comes later. When I learned to recite “The Crow and the Fox,” in French, or repeated a joke in a Yiddish accent to family guests, or sat straight, with my hands folded at concerts, in imitation of the grown-ups I observed around me, it was because I could do these things, make a game out of them. I also knew my father would be ashamed of me if I didn’t do them. I grew used to an imperfect understanding, a shadow of meaning that fell across the pages as I turned them, incomprehensible directions, a sense of an always wider world simultaneously close to my grasp and beyond it.
I hid myself in the ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0374210284
• ISBN 13: 9780374210281
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208