was gone. Jake saw me puff up a bit – like I said, the woman was striking – and she had picked me to ask the time of. I was seventeen. Jake said "Easy Tiger. All she wanted was the time. And you look like the sort of decent guy who would give it to her without making her fish in your pants for a pocket watch." Seeing my wounded look, he added, "Sometimes the decent guys get the beautiful girls; it just takes them a little longer. This isn't the movies." The next day I received a package. A pocket watch and a note: "A more generous uncle, in a different century, would have sent you the girl." The stewardess had that British knack of serving without being the least bit servile. "Going home for the Holidays, Yank?" My drinking had made her familiar. It was curious. "No. A funeral." "So sorry." "Yeah. Me too." "Someone close?" "My favorite uncle. Taught me all the manly arts. Cards, pool, playing the horses, drinking, smoking." She patted my arm. The wine, and the drone of the flight, made me sleepy. I dozed. This is how Jake died: slowly, with frequent bouts of hope, from pancreatic cancer. There was nothing particularly meaningful about Jake dying from this, rather than living, or dying in some other fashion. The nurses adored him; it was like the debs all over again. He was witty to the very end, for them. To Mother, he said, in a lucid moment of despair, "Do you believe this shit?" He was referring to the accouterments of the final stage of his illness – the Levine tube, the catheter, the IV. ******** In the end, it was the Halston. You knew it would be. It fit poorly on his wasted body. We closed the casket. For Jake's sake, and for ours. He would not have wanted to be seen that way. He looked pathetic in it. But not everything that looks ridiculous is wrong. Father commissioned a portrait of the Tylers crewing their eight. It is, when you get down to it, a portrait of Jake. He isn't in it; his spot is empty; his oar is shipped. The painter has softened May somewhat; you have to look very hard to see the disfigurement. Her face is shaded by a baseball cap, her black hair spraying out the back. Mother has given it pride of place: it hangs over the mantel in the library.
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