17 “I’ll tell you what the problem was,” he says, lifting his hand from my knee
and motioning for me to come closer. And I do. I want to hear. The next word
could be his last.
18 “I wanted to be a great man,” he whispers.
19 “Really?” I say, as if this comes as some sort of surprise to me.
20 “Really,” he says. His words come slow and weak but steady and strong in
feeling and thought. “Can you believe it? I thought it was my destiny. A big fish
in a big pond—that’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted from day one. I
started small. For a long time I worked for other people. Then I started my own
business. I got these molds and I made candles in the basement. That business
failed. I sold baby’s breath to floral shops. That failed. Finally, though, I got into
import/export and everything took off. I had dinner with a prime minister once,
William. A prime minister! Can you imagine, this boy from Ashland having
dinner in the same room with a—. There’s not a continent I haven’t set foot on.
Not one. There are seven of them, right? I’m starting to forget which ones I . . .
never mind. Now all that seems so unimportant, you know? I mean, I don’t even
know what a great man is anymore—the, uh, prerequisites. Do you, William?”
21 “Do I what?”
22 “Know,” he says. “Know what makes a man great.”
23 I think about this for a long time, secretly hoping he forgets he ever asked
the question. His mind has a way of wandering, but something in the way he
looks at me says he’s not forgetting anything now, he’s holding on tight to that
thought, and he’s waiting for my answer. I don’t know what makes a man great.
I’ve never thought about it before. But at a time like this “I don’t know” just
won’t do. This is an occasion one rises to, and so I make myself as light as
possible and wait for a lift.
24 “I think,” I say after a while, waiting for the right words to come, “that if a
man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be
considered great.”
25 For this is the only power I have, to bestow upon my father the mantle of
greatness, a thing he sought in the wider world, but one that, in a surprise turn
of events, was here at home all along.
26 “Ah,” he says, “those parameters,” he says, stumbling over the word, all of
a sudden seeming slightly woozy. “Never thought about it in those terms,
exactly. Now that we are, though, thinking about it like that, I mean, in this
case,” he says, “in this very specific case, mine—”
27 “Yeah,” I say. “You are hereby and forever after my father, Edward Bloom,
a Very Great Man. So help you Fred.”
28 And in lieu of a sword I touch him once, gently, on the shoulder.
English II
Page 28