Remember This

The young woman—young, though nearly forty—stood with her head bent slightly toward the window of McNally Jackson bookstore on Prince Street. She had stopped mid-stride, was on her way somewhere—was, in fact, late—and to see her father’s image in a bookstore window was not anymore such a new thing. This particular book had been out three or four months, and had become prominent enough that to catch it as she’d just done—his face on the cover, his peculiar, slightly hostile smile—was not so unusual, even in a city as emptied of bookstores as New York had lately become. Still, she never lost the startled feeling she felt now. It was as if her footsteps were drawn toward it by a complex loyalty of their own.

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Two weeks before, they’d sat around a table, celebrating, at a restaurant not far from here. Celebrating what? There was almost too much. He was about to turn seventy, his book had lately reached the middle rungs of the nonfiction bestseller list, he was leaving for Haiti on what he termed a “do-gooder mission.” A group from his church in western Massachusetts was going to the post-earthquake island to rebuild the roof of a parish deep in what he called “the Haitian bush.” (“Though from what I’m told, there is no more Haitian bush.”) “Something mildly noble,” he called it, flush with self-mocking irony, on his third or fourth glass of one of the higher priced selections on the restaurant’s wine list. Then he had embarrassed her, deliberately. “Do you know who I am?” he’d asked their waitress, the actress or NYU student or budding first novelist who had made the mistake of treating him as though he were a man she should know. The question, though tossed with a humorous spin to the waitress, was actually directed at her, his daughter, Miranda, as though her wish to simply be present, celebrating him, sitting between her mother and her cousin and surrogate brother, Philip, was something he felt the need to complicate. They’d shared a moment, eye to eye, while the waitress understood the question begged no response. He had had to register for his daughter’s benefit, even at the risk of the kind of embarrassment (“teasing,” he would have called it, “fond teasing”) he had lain on her from adolescence onward, that he took none of his new fame seriously. That she must see this about him. That she must, above all—the essential part of their bond—see him.

The image of his face on the cover of the book took up the entirety of the available space, shared only with the words How to Be This Age, and his name, Henry Rando. It had been a kind of publisher’s folly, thinking that a book of this type would sell, and then, miraculously, it had. Henry had been as astonished as anyone to learn that somewhere deep in the culture, underneath the appetite for style wars, for the dreary memoirs and novels of lost empires and washed-ashore refugees, the endless slop and wash of the political moment, lay a desire, on the part of thousands of readers, to learn how to be seventy? Six brief chapters, thirty pages each. Love. Sex (or what is left of it). Friendship. Community Service and Political Engagement. Solitude. A pause, and then, God. Here’s how to do it. Here’s how to face the abyss cut into existence by all that has been neglected during the incomplete years of youth and middle age. Here’s how to broach the loss of will, of power, of force. You can buy this book and slip it in your pocket. It was that small. Twenty-five dollars. Outrageous, yet not really. At another celebratory lunch, this time with his publisher, Henry had been told, “It’s your face that did it, I think. On the cover. You look like you’re putting one over on us in a way that makes us want to be part of the scam.”

Now here it was, once again, on Prince Street, the face with its subtle tease. Henry himself had said, at the celebratory dinner, that if a movie were ever made of his life, he could only be played by Michael Gambon. Miranda had of course gotten the reference (in the course of a lifetime together, Henry had made sure that his daughter was well-versed in showbiz lore), but Philip, left behind as usual, had needed to be offered a list of Gambon’s credits (Professor Dumbledore in the later Harry Potter movies was all he really needed), after which they agreed that Henry was perhaps right. The high insistent forehead topped with sparse gray hair, the heavy-lidded, almost reptilian eyes, jowls overstuffed with vague dissatisfaction—the suggestion, in the entire posed visage, that a better time was to be found elsewhere, somewhere to be sought after immediately, right now. Come with me. Henry had taken that gaze, that invitational, hips-forward stride, his imposing ex-boxer’s body in good, soft, earth-toned clothes, out onto Houston Street after the heavy meal and found, right away, an incident into which to thrust himself. An altercation outside a taxicab, in which the driver was seen to be punching a man who was attempting to leave the cab. In the pause between the second and third punches, Henry had run forward, grabbed the injured man, jabbed the cabdriver in the chest to restrain him. Henry forced the man behind him and shouted to the driver, “Enough!” And then, “Now go. What does he owe you?” This angry young man, handsome and volatile and wearing a white shirt that shimmered in the humid night, accepted the wad of cash Henry handed him, got back in his cab, and drove off. Henry walked the injured man to a bench under the bus shelter, gazing toward his huddled, frightened family with an ironic “Observe my heroism” look. For all the irony, his daughter knew there was a genuine impulse at work here. Her father sought out such encounters to offset what he referred to, both in conversation with her and in his book, as “our infernal softness, our generational retreat from anything resembling engagement.” Hence Haiti, which he publicly hoped would be dangerous.

“You’re crazy,” Philip said, all street smarts and handsome reserve. “You could have gotten killed.”

“Where are the rest of your glasses?” Henry asked the man, whose glasses, half of them anyway, lay broken over the bridge of the man’s bloodied nose.

Pasty-faced, with a head of hair like iron filings laid atop a potato, the man was nearly crying. “Thank you,” he said. They all waited for something more from him, some declaration of who he was, while Henry went out into the street, stopped traffic, to find and retrieve the broken eyepiece. To Miranda, viewing him, there was, despite the foolishness of the action, something in Henry to grudgingly admire. Or more, to wonder at. Some banked ambition to own and dominate the city. To stop traffic by the sheer force of his presence. To do good. It was terrible to admire him. It only encouraged him.

“Here,” Henry said, handing the man the broken piece. “Now we don’t need to know what that was about, but are you all right?”

“I think so.” The man stood. He would wander off somewhere. A bar? A dim apartment? Fights in the city, the casual violence: it was something Miranda had seen more in her childhood, when they had lived on the Upper West Side before gentrification, when there were muggings and break-ins and a lost, dusty, banana-smelling feel to the city, when their neighborhood had seemed more Caribbean than white—Comidas Chinas y Criollas on every corner—and her father had bestrode it like a colossus. It had only seemed that way, of course. She had been then the thing she sometimes worried she had never fully graduated from being: a daughter.

On Prince Street, she shook the thought off, regarding once more the familiar image of her father before turning away from it, late, on her way to the same Upper West Side where she had lived until the age of twelve, though morphed into unrecognizability now. She was on her way to see a man seeking to guard his own artist-mother’s image as much as Miranda, in her ambivalent way, in these stoppages of hers, was looking out for Henry. As if to say to the wave of tourists in SoHo, the Asian and the blond girls with their bags from Sephora, their sunglasses and their constantly attended phones: Observe this. Regard this. My father. It was silly. She partly hated it. Still, she felt it, all that was at every instant of time waiting to be sucked under, the human as well as the physical essence of the city preparing to be buried by a wave, by sand, by the architecture of commerce. She picked up her tote bag, heavy with notes, and carried on.

But not before indulging one more memory. Under the bus stop cover, after the injured man had walked away, they had taken turns chastising Henry. “Daddy,” was what Miranda said, sounding younger than she felt. Her mother had only stared at Henry. Her mother’s eyes could make it seem like she were shaking her head when her head was in fact perfectly still. “Henry,” she’d said, her sultry, low-slung actress’s voice. “You utter fool.” There had been fear and enormous affection in it, those two things at once, and it had briefly separated the two older people from the two younger. To be with these two was to watch them perform for one another, as they were doing now. Lily the chastising, half-admiring spouse, Henry the brave man. Something not entirely real in it, and within the moment, the old sense Miranda had that their marriage consisted of an ongoing sizing up of one another. Forty years in, it was as if they had still not quite made up their minds about each other.

They’d said goodbye to Philip, sent him off to his five-thousand-dollar-a-month one-bedroom, themselves gotten a cab. In spite of the new money coming in from the book, Henry always insisted, on these trips into New York, on staying with Miranda in her apartment on St. Felix Street in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. It was not convenient, for her anyway, to have them sleep on the foldout couch in what passed for a living room, but Henry, frugal as always in small ways, insisted. They were rising above the city, onto the Brooklyn Bridge, when Miranda’s mind slipped away. Sitting between her parents, she looked out to the dark lights at the mouth of the river, the parties going on in dockside restaurants, the lights forming a Rubik’s cube in the supposedly shuttered Wall Street high-rises. Who owned the city, precisely, right now? What force, or combination of forces, held it? She thought of all the young men who worked in these buildings, drawing huge salaries, and then coming home, late on a Saturday night like this one, to video games and online gambling, and porn. The enormous, brightly lit solitude that New York, in its brassy early twenty-first-century iteration, had come to nourish and cocoon.

Her parents were in the midst of one of their habitual, mildly bickering conversations.

“That was when you insisted on leaving me to go off and do John Gabriel Borkman,” Henry was saying.

“I never appeared in John Gabriel Borkman. Furthermore, you know it.”

“Some Ibsen.” “All right, then.”

As they fought, or not really fought, Henry’s hand caressed Miranda’s knee. His ancient gesture with her, nothing “inappropriate” in it, to use the overused word, a touch that implied, that asked for, connection. Though I’m bickering with your mother, I have not left you. You are, as always, my witness, my audience. You’ve been chosen for this. She did not mind, or minded only a little. Let them bicker for my amusement. Above her, the lights of the great bridge, the enormous cably netting, the suspension, the delicate tension.

On Atlantic, that former receiving station that had become the center of the universe, courtesy of a man named Jay-Z, her father abruptly asked the cabbie to pull over to the curb. What had he seen? What was it he needed to get out for? When the cab was stopped, Henry forced open the door and vomited into the gutter. Nearby, the evening crowd barely noticed. One or two offered grimaces. Henry took his time, then reached back toward Lily, who offered him her own handkerchief, which he used to wipe his mouth. He apologized silently, while Lily retreated into her corner. “Oh God, Henry.” It was for Miranda to ask, “Are you all right?”

She touched his neck, clammy and wet and exuding something—the stockpiling of the evening, the drinking and overspending at the restaurant, the forced charm and self-imposed self-mockery, the feigned heroism of stopping a fight on Houston Street. The performative requirements of her father’s life were becoming too much for him. Lily would be there when he fell, but Lily would insist she not shoulder the burden alone. Miranda would always be called on.

“Dad. Are you all right?” she asked again.

“Perhaps,” he said, wiping his mouth with the handkerchief, “perhaps lamb shanks and Barolo wasn’t the wisest idea in the world.”

His hand on her knee this time gripped a little harder.

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From Remember This by Anthony Giardina. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025.