The accident happened a few months after he’d moved his family to Louisville. The bypass siphoned away the few jobs left in Jessup County and anyway, who could work among these people who suspected his ambition, who’d seen him fail? Six months after the move and he had yet to find a job. The economy in Louisville was in terrible shape but in any case Joe Ray refused to work in retail, where he would encounter wholesale buyers, all of whom he knew, and maybe even a familiar customer the other side of the tape measure. To keep a roof over their heads Catherine went to work as a legal secretary at a firm owned by a friend of her father. Within two months she received a promotion.
Each day Joe Ray drove her to work, dropped the kids at school or day care, sat at home and had—yes, he acknowledged it (though not to Catherine)—a few carefully paced drinks. Then he picked everyone up at the end of the day.
Why did he drink? He asked himself this question with the first drink of each day, and each time he gave himself this answer: Because he was weak.
But everybody was weak—he’d learned this from the Baltimore Catechism and had since seen plenty of evidence to support it. After all, not everybody drank. There must be more to his drinking than just weakness.
Was it possible, ever, to bridge the chasm between himself and the women of his life—Rose Ella, Catherine, his sisters, between himself and any woman, every woman whom he liked and wanted desperately to like him in return? That was why he drank. Drinking was the only time when he felt close to women, in touch, let in on their big secret that during his sober hours he felt only as a hopeless mystery. Looking up at Rose Ella’s face the time she pulled him off the barbecue coals—the pain of the burn he’d felt not at all, he was too drunk. What he felt, what he remembered was the clarity of things. His man’s layers of self-deception and vanity were dispensed with, at least until he sobered up the next day to find his neck swathed in bandages. The world expressed itself in frank and declarative sentences: Are you all right. Does it hurt. I love you.
That last he was almost certain Rose Ella had said to him, as they hustled him into a car to go to the hospital. This he saw as a tragedy: It was one of the few encounters of his life he would like to have remembered precisely, but he knew booze too well to trust his memory of specific facts or words or gestures. As for asking Rose Ella if she’d said what he remembered her saying—that was as impossible as the thought of quitting drinking.
Assuming she said it—Joe Ray assumed that she’d said it—it carried a load of irony. He knew perfectly well how women felt about him when he was drunk—you didn’t have to be Dr. Freud to read it in their faces. But still he drank—it was worth it to have those edges buffed and softened, to get that mystery monkey off his back.
The day of the accident he’d spent working the crossword puzzle, watching the news, reading the paper, drinking three whiskies before he went as usual to pick up the boys. He was on his way to pick up Catherine, he was thinking about where on earth he would find a job, he was thinking about providing for his children when he ran the red light. His lightweight sedan was no match for the hulk of a station wagon (Country Squire, early ’70s) that struck them. Even so his car demonstrated the triumph of foreign engineering—Joe Ray, who had his seat belt fastened (more evidence that he was sober) was not so much as bruised or sore the next day from an adrenaline rush.
Which was why, when he thought about it later, he hadn’t immediately checked on the boys. If he himself was unscratched, how could they have been hurt? Instead he’d leapt from the car. “I’m sorry, sorry, my fault, I didn’t see it, didn’t see the light,” he cried to the other driver, a frowzy woman in faded, too-tight jeans, a loud print blouse, and a close-fitting hat. Who wore a hat, in 1981? He couldn’t help but notice clothes even now, even as she was saying, “Don’t call the police for God’s sake, no police, this rattletrap isn’t worth what it costs to insure,” and he was still stunned by his luck in getting off so easy when he realized that the boys, contrary to his explicit command and their longtime training, had unfastened their seat belts (maybe they’d never fastened them? Had he remembered to check?), that a rear door had popped open, that Sean was silent while Michael was just plain not there, his absence an immediate and accusing presence.
Sean, the younger, would be all right, after a few days of hospital supervision and some nightmares. Michael, the eleven-year-old, no. He had been thrown from the car, struck his head, unconscious, blood, bleeding, ambulance, hospital, emergency room, no visitors, waiting.
Waiting, this is what Joe Ray thought.
It might have happened to anyone. And this was true—the route was still new to him, another few months and driving it would have been intuitive, this would never have happened at all. There had been many accidents at that same corner—a small rise concealed oncoming cars, neighborhood growth had outpaced the intersection’s ability to handle the late-afternoon traffic. He’d had only three drinks all afternoon, one as part of a large lunch; he was sober, so obviously sober that the police (who did come) never suggested a sobriety test. It wasn’t his problem that the other driver was too poor to insure her car. Someone who would drive a car without insurance was likely to drive irresponsibly. Maybe he hadn’t run the light at all.
Waiting that first afternoon for Catherine to arrive at the hospital, he thought these things, cursed himself for thinking them, dwelt on them all the more. To think about anything else was to think about the unthinkable—what was happening, what was going to happen to Michael? To his horror he found himself wanting a drink—he looked down to see his fingers curling as if forming themselves around a glass. If he’d had a knife he would have cut them off. He transformed their curling into a circle made of thumbs and forefingers, a dial at which he stared, a clock with hands that he could turn back to a time when this hadn’t happened and he might have stayed home, he might have drunk himself so far under the table that driving wouldn’t have been an option. Or maybe he could have confessed that morning to Catherine and gone to an AA meeting and he would have been there instead of on the road.
When Catherine arrived in the waiting room, this is what he told her:
The frowzy woman had been driving without insurance. The last time he’d seen the light it was green, though it had all happened so fast he couldn’t of course be absolutely certain of all the details. By hedging this point he hoped to lend verisimilitude to his story—the judicious heart, making allowance for its own fallibility.
“It could have happened to anyone,” Catherine said. “Don’t think about it anymore. Think about the future. Think about Michael’s getting well.”
Rose Ella, who drove straight to the hospital from Jessup County, was not so generous. Once alone with her son she came straight to the point. “You’ll forgive my asking, Joe Ray.”
“Mother, I wasn’t drinking.” He thought of what this small lie entailed. The universe was filled with mysteries—the greatest scientists admitted it. Who was to say that there was no celestial scale balancing the son’s life against the father’s virtue? Joe Ray turned from his mother to face the wall—a cheerful floral pattern; he’d have preferred the nubbled vomit brown of the hospital where Sean and Michael had been born. “I had a highball at noon,” he said. “That’s all, Mother, I swear to God that’s all.”
“Merciful Jesus in heaven,” Rose Ella said, and fell silent. Then she stood. “Your son did nothing to deserve this, and you never did anything to deserve it either, except this tiny little thing, and that was to have those drinks and then go out and drive your sons on the open road. But you’re old enough to know that this is not a forgiving world. I won’t say anything else. I won’t ask anything else. What you tell Catherine is your business and you know I mean what I say. But you had better think about talking to the Lord, because there’s not much anybody else who’s going to listen.”
Tom Hardin stayed away. Once or twice Rose Ella apologized for him—Tom Hardin was getting close to retirement and working hard, wanting to leave hi
s job with everything set and ready to go for whoever took his place. Joe Ray waved off these excuses. He was his father’s son—he knew why Tom Hardin stayed away. In the face of matters of such enormity Tom Hardin would be wordless, frozen into silence, his only course of action either tears (out of the question) or a violent outburst.
Michael did not improve. Waiting alone while Catherine sneaked cigarettes in the parking lot (a disgusting habit—Joe Ray himself wouldn’t be caught dead smoking, but for the sake of domestic tranquility he went along with the fiction that Catherine had quit), Joe Ray stared at the floor and made promises. If Michael survived he would never touch another drink. If Michael survived healthy he would contribute time, money, to—someone, somewhere. Across their marriage and at Catherine’s insistence, for the benefit of giving an example to the boys Joe Ray had attended mass, but he had never prayed even when early in their marriage they’d gotten on their knees as a family with rosaries in hand. Often as not he rested his forehead in his hands and fell asleep. He felt stupid praying now—as if he’d ignored a casual acquaintance for years only to call him up and ask a favor. A big favor. But he did it, he got on his knees right there in the waiting room, all that fifties stuff. Under such circumstances, what resort was there but superstition?
A few days after the accident he woke to find Catherine gone. Her clothes, which usually she left scattered about for him to clean up, were hung neatly in the closet. But her black pumps were gone, and her dark skirt. When he called the office she said, “Well, at a time like this we can’t risk losing our health insurance,” and of course she was right.
That was the first day he pulled out the bottles. Anything that contained alcohol he placed around the house so that all day he was never out of sight of liquor, until just before Catherine came home. Then he replaced the bottles in the liquor cabinet, but any old way—in case Catherine checked, he wanted her to think he was still drinking. If she discovered he’d given it up, she’d have one more bit of evidence that he was guilty.
On the bathroom vanity he set a bottle of Irish whiskey—his favorite—then arranged the mirrors so that they reflected it again and again. Each time he went to the bathroom (he went often; he was drinking too much coffee now that he wouldn’t allow himself alcohol) he contemplated this diminishing infinitude of temptation. And still his struggle was not great enough. The penance did not begin to fit the crime.
And so he called the frowzy, hatted woman, whose number he still had on the scrap of envelope where she’d scribbled it after the accident. He called her up, not at all sure why except that—well, maybe she would admit something. He would buy her a drink, then another. She would be flattered at his attentions. “It was as much my fault as yours,” he imagined her saying after a couple of martinis. “My mechanic told me ages ago to fix my brakes and I just haven’t found the money to get it done.”
That afternoon at the hospital, Michael spoke for the first time since the accident. His eyes opened, he looked straight at Joe Ray and said, “Mother.” Then his eyes closed.
“Michael,” Joe Ray said. “This is your dad.” But his son’s eyes stayed shut—those eyes that were inherited—Joe Ray’s eyes, impossibly wide-set (like Joe Ray, he would always have trouble using binoculars) and blue. Put a hand over Michael’s eyes—Joe Ray did it now—and he was Catherine’s son. But take the hand away, and there was no mistaking those eyes. Joe Ray left his hand in place until Catherine arrived from work.
“A little bit of good news,” she said as she entered. “They’ve given me a raise.”
“Michael spoke today,” Joe Ray said. “The doctor thinks that’s a good sign. Evidence there’s no brain damage.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked for you,” Joe Ray said. “I told him you were off at the office.”
Sitting at a local bar, waiting for the driver of the other car, Joe Ray looked at his watch. Why not stand her up? Because he’d made an appointment—he had a duty to honor that, and he believed in duty. Besides, he’d been responsible. It had been his fault.
Except that he hadn’t been responsible—at least, not entirely so. He checked his watch again. If she was so much as a minute late, he was out of there—but then she arrived.
Her name was Flora MacKenzie. She was unemployed, she too had two boys, about the same age as Joe Ray’s. “I’ll never forget walking around the car and seeing your son—” She shivered.
Why was he listening to this? “Nice hat,” he said, and it was a nice hat, a tight-fitting cloche of real felt, though he would never have matched it with that loud blouse. If he’d have advised such a hat at all.
“Thanks. Four bucks on Canal Street.”
“Oh, yeah? Is that a boutique?”
And so it went from there. They talked about New York, where she’d been a model. “Oh, I know it’s hard to imagine now,” she said. “It might have been hard to imagine then. But since when have talent and ambition gone hand in hand?” She talked about her career (ads in Redbook, McCall’s), the expense of living in New York with two children, her move back to Louisville, where she’d been raised as the oldest daughter of an autoworker’s ten kids; her divorce. Talking about this and that, and they weren’t talking about the accident. And then as Joe Ray was paying for their drinks (her martinis, his soda water), thinking he might yet make it out the door, she laid a hand on his arm. “Look, I just want you to know I’m sorry. Two kids and a totaled car—your rates will go through the roof. And your son—that’s too big to talk about. You just hold it in your heart and hope.”
“Well, my rates might not go through the roof, if it comes to that.”
“Then your insurance company is nicer than mine is. Or was, back when I had insurance.”
“It depends,” Joe Ray said carefully. “If I tell my insurance company I wasn’t at fault then everything gets a lot more complicated.”
“Well. Whatever it takes to make you feel good,” she said coldly, and stood to go.
Joe Ray took her hand in his. “It made me feel good to have somebody to talk to about it,” he said, and like Catherine, like all the women he knew, she couldn’t reject an appeal so direct.
“You buy the drinks,” she said. “I’ll provide an open ear. It’s not like we’ve got somewhere to be from nine to five.”
“Oh, I’m just between jobs,” Joe Ray said, and then saw her to her car, the same old blocky station wagon with flecks of paint from his car on its dented bumper.
That night he dreamt:
He is talking with a woman who has no features that he recognizes but who is from and of the city—he hears this in her uninflected voice, he sees it in her smart, dressed-for-success clothes. She is a vegetarian—a new concept to Joe Ray—and she has just denigrated suburban men, husbands and sons, who pick up their hunting guns each November to go play at what she calls Caveman in the Hills.
Suddenly Joe Ray is trembling with rage. He seizes her shoulders. “My family survived on the meat we shot each fall,” he says. His voice shakes—tears of outrage and self-pity course down his cheeks. He is ashamed of this maudlin performance but he has one thought only—to make this woman feel bad about her silly generalizations. “Don’t talk to me about living off vegetables,” he says. “We had a two-acre garden and if it failed, if there was too much or too little rain or sun or whatever, then we went hungry for a year. Now you city folks eat broccoli flown in from California on a gas-guzzling jet and then lecture me about killing deer.” He chokes on his words—he is unable to continue, and in his fury at his inarticulateness he slams the woman against the wall with such force that he jolts himself awake.
Joe Ray looked at his hands—they trembled still. Craziness—maybe from cutting off the booze? He didn’t even care much for hunting; he went mostly because he saw it as a family obligation to Tom Hardin. Yet the anger, the violence in his hands had been absolutely real, against a woman whose face he couldn’t even recall.
Over the next few days Michael imp
roved a little. He opened his eyes, he looked around the room, he seemed to understand where he was and what had happened. The first time this happened Joe Ray relayed the news to Catherine; then he called Flora MacKenzie.
They met that afternoon and every weekday following, between afternoon and evening intensive-care visiting hours. By spoken agreement they talked about anything but the accident. Each meeting began with Flora asking, “How’s your son?” to which Joe Ray gave a noncommital reply. Then it was on to some other, brighter subject.
She had a model’s wardrobe, an endless array of materials in colors and styles that she put together in some implausible way that somehow worked. Most of them she’d bought from the poor box—no one in the clothes biz was about to get rich from her.
He felt guilty at enjoying these afternoon meetings with Flora but he did enjoy them; he told her as much the fourth or fifth time they got together. She took his hand. “Look. Torturing yourself is not going to help your son get better. You’re doing what you can. Your wife is doing what she can.” After this he placed his hand where it invited being taken, though some not-so-secret voice still spoke of a connection between this unseemly frivolity and his son’s fate.
They talked about clothes. “You are what you wear,” Joe Ray said. “Clothes make the woman as much as the man.”
“In Louisville that doesn’t give you room to make much,” she said. “I have the greatest double-breasted white suit that I picked up for ten bucks in some secondhand store down by the river. Ivory buttons—must have been made in the thirties.”
“Double-breasted suits are coming right back,” Joe Ray said generously. “But white is a problem for—full-figured women.”
“I wore it one time, long enough for some guy stopped at a traffic light to douse me with a cup of beer and call me a dyke.”
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