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By Root 398 0

tooth is missing, fell out a few months earlier, and I can’t stop staring at it. It’s hard not to stare at a single jaggedy front tooth; it looks like it’s protruding outward when it doesn’t have another tooth next to it. It’s jarring and upsetting. I have my usual mix of feelings when I see him: he’s utterly delightful and likable, and he’s frustrating. I am trying to figure out how I can help, does he need a social worker now, can my sisters and I pay for his expenses ourselves. My sisters are hurt mostly because his “project” still seems more important to him than their kids. As time goes on, his need to triumph becomes the only way he thinks he can redeem himself or make things right in our eyes. But as time goes on what we want more and more is a father and a grandfather. And the more he focuses on Fitzgerald the less he focuses on us and our children and the angrier Eleanor and Katharine get. I suppose they feel that he doesn’t suffer for his art, they do. Their kids do. Maybe as the only one who writes, I’m more terrified for myself, and now for my son. I think, I’m next. I have just fixed two of my own teeth, albeit they were in the back so no one could see, but I was missing two teeth not six months ago. And I wonder if anyone has coined the term “writers’ teeth.”

He just talks through all of my thoughts, forging ahead, he’s on the abortion, he’s on the book, his tooth doesn’t even come up. He could care less. As it has always been, his life bothers other people, not him. Hudson is psyched to see his grandpa despite his Dickensian appearance. My dad isn’t sure whether he should pick his grandson up or shake his hand. He is affectionate, there is no doubt about that, but not necessarily at ease. He can be awkward with his grandkids, shaking hands with kids who are a little young for it. He’s always saying to me and Eleanor and Katharine things like “Never been any damn good with babies.” Which is weird when you are one of his babies.

Nick understands that my biggest fear is that I will become my dad. That I’ll be a broke writer-mom with some hideous growth sprouting up from my shoulder, a second head but with no eyes or features, just a head that I brush off in conversation when people bring it up or suggest perhaps seeing a doctor, eager to get back to talking about my latest profile for The New Yorker. I think about Crazy Kate and Dagwood, and then my dad and then me, three generations of us, and I look at Hudson eating his chocolate in a cup and think how much Hudson seems like a writer’s name.

I recently reread the piece of my father’s from Harper’s magazine called “Prufrock with a Baedecker,” about St. Louis. In it he claims that St. Louisans are forever trying to recapture a past that he believes was never what they thought it was. “Old cities, like old families, obviously shabby, presumptively genteel, sustain themselves on dreams of vanished grandeur and it may be better to leave such dreams intact.” It’s a really good piece. The guy can write. I ask him, Do you believe dreams should be left intact? Of course I’m talking about my mother. Of course I’m talking about the fantasies, the dreams, the myths, the delusions, the denial around my mother’s alcoholism. Maybe asking, Has it all been worth it? He says he doesn’t anymore, that he never did, that he and Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s at the time, agreed that portraying a city in three or four thousand words was impossible and it was just one way to end the piece. “No,” he says, “the truth should be told. The truth is not just for the young, and particularly in writing, the truth is everything.

“My God, people think fiction is a bunch of made-up flourishes, fanciful play. Fiction can do more than nonfiction, because it is the truth along with the artfulness and craft. If it’s not the truth, it simply doesn’t work, it won’t fly, and the reader will know in an instant, well, this writer simply doesn’t know the layout of this town or how a summer night might feel in a certain part of Montana, whatever it is. Fiction allows you to get as close as you