“Yeah. Enough gas there to fly a balloon around the world. Fly him to the moon.”
“Forget the gas, Bill, and concentrate on his mind. Tell me what the hell we’re going to do about that?” It was a week after the second operation and our initial optimism had worn off.
Bill shook his head and rocked back and forth against the window. His body seemed to move in sections; he had the characteristic Hayward build, tall and thin. But while Father had always carried himself with military erectness, Bill, who had actually been in the military, slouched.
“It’s all so ill-defined,” he said, peering at me intently over his steel-rimmed glasses. Bill was the only person I knew capable of throwing me looks that were in no way dissipated by the space of a room between us.
“There’s no sense of reality,” he went on, “because most of the intelligence we’re getting here is filtered through Pamela, and that’s whatever they’re laying on her. Pure doctors’ rhetoric. Propaganda. As I said before, who knows who’s in charge of what around here? I mean, at some point you’re still under a surgeon’s care, and at some point the other doctor takes over, and then the head of the hospital wanders in for a look and issues a bulletin. We’re staggering around in this no man’s land in the middle of a pitched battle and our side is losing. I feel shell-shocked. No leadership, I tell you.”
Once Bill got going, he could talk for hours. Monologues.
“We could set up a counter-offensive, but—” He sighed. “I think it’s too late.”
“What do you mean by that?” But I knew what he meant.
He sighed again. “Well, you know.”
“Sort of.”
He was wearing a dark suit and tie—his hospital outfit—with cowboy boots. He usually wore cowboy boots. More comfortable, he said, with superior soles for striking matches on. As a concession to Pamela, he’d had the worn tooled leather polished.
“I guess it’s not all fair to blame doctors, really.” His eyes, behind the glasses, flashed blue fire. “It’s what they’re getting paid—a bundle—for. Lucrative way to make a living. Christ, no wonder they don’t want to boogie in here and say, ‘This is a total fucking failure—go home, folks, we screwed up this time.’ ”
“Horrible, isn’t it? What do people with no money do?”
Bill began to pace up and down past the row of jars hanging upside down by Father’s bed. “Well, these cats honestly don’t think they’re lying. They have different priorities from us, that’s all.”
There was a long silence. Father was snoring. His chest rose and fell with an irregular rhythm.
Bill moved back to his window, one boot in front of the other: heel, toe, heel, toe. “It’s really quite simple,” he said at last, turning to look at me. “A young hot-shot surgeon did this relatively experimental operation. The dude wants very badly not to go wrong—in the sense that if he does, Father could die. And Father’s not exactly a nobody, either. Bad publicity.”
He rubbed his back vigorously along the sharp juncture where the window and wall met.
“Do you want me to scratch your back?”
He smiled. “Doesn’t sound all bad.”
“Well, come over here. I’m too lazy to get up.”
Bill came over and presented his back to me, blocking my view of Father. My chair was at the foot of the bed. Bill grasped the iron footboard and leaned back into my fingernails.
“Ah. God, that feels good,” he groaned. “Over to the left and up. Feels like I’ve been bitten by a bedbug. Guess that’s not too likely at the River Club, though, huh?” Bill didn’t care for the Beekman and had moved over to the River Club because of the dining room there. He liked the view, at breakfast, of the boats on the East River.
“Just nerves,” I said, trying to scratch through his jacket.
His back twitched disjointedly like a cat’s.
“I really hate his stomach scene,” he murmured, looking down at Father. “This could turn out to be the doc’s first failure. That’s the thing, you see. His whole objective is to keep Father alive. Ours …” He lapsed into silence again.
“To let him die?”
“Um. There’s clearly so much brain damage.” He straightened up and walked around to the side of the bed.
“Pop,” he whispered, gently taking Father’s hand. Father’s hands were rather small-boned and slender. Mother had told us we were lucky to have inherited them from him, an opinion that had always pleased him enough to quote. Now his hand seemed like a child’s in Bill’s. He slept on.
I was reminded of the worst dream I could remember ever having had. I was six years old, and in the twenty-seven years since then nothing had equaled it in terms of sheer terror. Every night for weeks afterward, Emily had had to sit by my bed until I dropped off to sleep; it was in the days when my dreams were apt to recur.
I dreamed that one day an indescribably horrible monster rampaged through Brentwood, killing everyone in sight. Bridget, Bill, and I, forewarned by its dreadful roar, were able to save ourselves by hiding behind the blue sofas in The Barn. However, when we crept out in the silent aftermath, we found Emily, Elsa and Otto, and George Stearns gathered on the gravel driveway, weeping. The monster had killed Mother and Father. Then, abruptly, I was with my friends in the school cafeteria. With destruction all around us, the Red Cross had arrived and were passing out supplies and hot lunches. The food was extraordinarily delicious. It was a sort of fried chicken, succulent and delicate, quite unlike anything I had ever seen or tasted. While I was chewing on the bones, my teacher stopped by the table where we were all eating.
“Brooke,” she said. “We’ve given you the wrong lunch. Let me take it back and get you another.”
“Oh,” I answered, “I’m so hungry and it tastes so good.”
“But Brooke, dear, what you are eating,” she pointed out, “are your father’s hands.”
I had awakened screaming and screaming. Emily said she’d never heard such a sound. It was strange, too, because I’d never heard of cannibalism. It wasn’t until I’d grown up that the dream was interpreted as being a result of the spanking that Father, against his will and at Mother’s insistence, had given me that summer in St. Malo.
Father’s hand was so emaciated that when Bill held it up, light from the bed-table lamp passed through it, giving it the unearthly glow of a Georges de La Tour painting.
“Look,” he said. “You can see the silhouette of the bones. Look how transparent his flesh is. Amazing.”
He laid Father’s hand back on the sheet and bent over to kiss his forehead.
Bill is wonderful, I mused. My kid brother. Who would have thought? Miraculous. Thank God he’s here or I couldn’t possibly get through another day of this torture. Crazy Bill. He really is still crazy but nobody knows that any more except me—and maybe a few other well-chosen people—because most of the time he acts saner than anyone else for miles around. Just sometimes … Of course, it had occurred to me that the reason I knew that Bill was crazy was because I was secretly crazy myself.
“Sometimes,” I said out loud, “I don’t know, I don’t know. Do we want him to die? What we don’t want is for him to go on living like this, but—”
“It’s a bummer, no doubt about it.” As Bill moved down the line-up of suspended glass jars, he tapped each one experimentally with his fingernails. The room tinkled with varying tones. “But, Brooke, he is dying. Face it. He can’t possibly go on like this. When you come in here every morning and rap with him and there’s no change, or he’s worse—yes, worse. I remember when I first got here. At least he was coherent for a while, and then he kind of slipped into the—weirdness. Did I tell you what he said when he first saw me?” Bill came and sat beside me in the other armchair at the foot of the bed.
“Go on.” I was learning more about Bill in these afternoons at the hospital than in our entire adult life. There was a strange urgency to our conversations, as if somehow we had been given a second chance to catch up with each oth
er—but if we messed it up this time …
“Well, when I got into New York I went over to the apartment at the Beekman. And I was dealing with a beard, remember? A full-on beard, which Pamela had never seen before. It completely freaked her out.” He threw back his head and laughed.
“I wondered what had happened to the beard.”
“Well, she made me go to the barber, Father’s barber at the St. Regis. What a hassle. She said if Father saw me in that condition, he might have a serious setback. Wouldn’t do him any good to get him mad, irritate him. She felt my hair was a little long, too, so I put it in a ponytail and told her I would dialogue with Father full-face only, so he’d never see it.” (He laughed some more, his zany laugh, which always made me giggle.) “And we came over here. To the hospital.”
“Well, at least you still have your mustache.”
Bill stroked it fondly.
“He was conscious at first,” he went on, “and coherent. We talked for a minute and he said that his play was terrific. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him Idaho Transfer [after Easy Rider, Bill and Peter Fonda figured they were a winning combination and had produced and directed two more movies together], and he said that was a terrible title. Hated it. Then he asked me how come I wasn’t in uniform—was I on leave? I didn’t want to remind him I’d been out of the paratroopers for ten years. I could have walked in with a full beard and dark glasses and smoking a joint, and he wouldn’t have known. His vision thing wasn’t happening. He was laying back, looking awful with the bandages and shit. He asked me if I had a gun. I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ He said, ‘What kind of a gun is it?’ They seemed rather strange questions. And I said, ‘Well, it’s a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight special,’ and he said, ‘Oh, good.’ Bizarre fragmented dialogue like that.”
We were definitely flip sides of the same coin. I knew that much. I felt better whenever Bill’s life touched mine. I felt, when I saw him, as if I were coming home after a long journey. As unreliable as he might be (and was) where anyone else was concerned—as eccentric, as fundamentally off center as I knew him to be—at that moment, he was the only person left in the world with whom I would unequivocably trust my life. We sat side by side in the armchairs at Father’s feet, and I thought irreverently it was unfortunate Bill was my brother; if it weren’t for the taboos about incest, I would have married him. It wasn’t so much sexual attraction (although I’d never pursued this line of psychological investigation: the taboos were thicker than blood); it was much less complicated than that. We had a tacit understanding.
“I feel alone,” I said to him. “Do you ever feel alone? I mean alone? Way up high where the air is so thin and cold nothing much can live? And besides, my mind is going. I’m turning into a manic-depressive right here. Whenever I come into this room, it happens. Up and down. Up and down. Both at the same time. It makes me queasy.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s normal.”
Normal, I thought. It was cold in the room. A bracing climate. Freezing, actually. My skin hurt as if I were walking naked through a driving blizzard. Father’s body lay before us like the mound of a newly dug grave beneath fresh snow. All that white. All we could see of him, from where we sat, was his swollen belly looming toward us. A great white whale. Moby Dick beached.
Normal? There was definitely something in the air.
“Stop worrying about it,” said Bill. “Your senses are more acute than usual, that’s all. They’re probably more acute than the average citizen’s, anyway.” He paused. “You’re right. You are a manic-depressive.” He grinned at me. “Join the gang.” He went back to staring at Father’s feet beneath the ghostly bedclothes.
“By our standards,” he said without interrupting his contemplation, “most people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘depression,’ although it’s become fashionable to bandy around. But we had a superb education; our family wrote the textbook. We could probably give courses in it. Carry on the tradition. Those lows. Jesus, I think I know what Hell looks like. I’ve charted it, every square inch of it. I’ve been in states so bad I’ve been paralyzed with fear. Literally couldn’t get out of my bed for weeks. Totally wasted time. Pillow over my head. Really rank. No showers, no food, couldn’t talk, couldn’t read—couldn’t even concentrate on the TV. No relating to my life at all. Total stupor. Bad. I never want to go through that trip again. But you have to remember one thing: most people don’t spiral down as low as we have, but they sure don’t get up as high, either. No way. They mosey along on relatively level ground, a little happy, a little sad.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’d like that for a change. Sounds peaceful.”
“Boring,” said Bill. “Boring. You’d get sick of it. We’ve been exposed to too much. Overexposed. Once you’ve been there—those highs!—my God, they’re like Mount Everest. Hard to scale but worth it when you get to the top. Dizzy stuff.” Bill liked challenges. He was a mountain climber. He liked mountains, climbing up them and skiing down them. He’d been up and down the Amazon in a friend’s boat and over the Snake River rapids in a raft. He’d run guns down through Mexico and smuggled cocaine up from Bogotá. Lived off stolen credit cards. Lots of nefarious adventures. He’d wrangled horses, raced motorcycles, had sailed the seven seas.
“On the whole,” continued Bill, so softly that I thought for a moment he was talking to himself, “if I dropped dead tomorrow, and had that moment to look back and decide what more I wished I’d done in my life, it would be hard. I’ve done an awful lot of the things I’ve fantasized doing. I’ve led a pretty exciting life.”
He stood up and stretched. “Got to keep moving.”
“Not bad for an old man of twenty-nine. Like what fantasies?”
Ping! went the glass jars as he passed. There was a slight gurgling aftermath as the pale fluids in them trembled.
“Oh, I think the fantasy of being reasonably successful in a fairly competitive business, making a lot of bread without having had a formal education. All kinds of possession fantasies, like being able to travel here and there, being able to do all the inane things you want—not feeling trapped because you can’t afford this or that. The ones you have when you’re a teen-ager, of where you want your life to go in terms of success or material trips. I’ve skated through most of those. I mean I’ve done it. Flashy cars. Being a rich bachelor, marriage, kids. Then the fantasies you have when you’re married, of being a bachelor again. Being in love. It hasn’t been all bad. Can’t really complain. I had the opportunity to make my own mistakes. Made every one.” I loved him dearly.
“But Bill,” I sighed. It was really snowing hard now; we would have trouble getting a taxi to the theatre that night.
As he’d said, he’d had more opportunities to do more things than most people. What he’d chosen to do with those opportunities—that was another matter altogether, a matter of some concern to everyone in his family except me. What was to Father, for instance, patently erratic, if not downright demented, behavior was to me Bill’s saving grace. Literally. He was always moving on. An aberrant knight. He was always disappearing without trace or warning. He was even hard to find when he was around. Once he’d been sighted, he was hard to keep in focus; he kept slipping over the horizon. And he never looked back. Then unexpectedly he’d reappear. “Heard from your no-good crackbrained brother,” Father would say with gruff affection. “Turned up again the other day like a bad penny.” As an escape artist, Bill ranked with Houdini. Father and I argued about it: Father insisted that Bill’s demonic elusiveness was a fatal flaw and I claimed it kept him alive.
“But, Bill, tell me which ones—the fantasies—you haven’t lived out.”
“I’m not going to tell you all of them. But they are almost all related to being outdoors. Never got to be a commercial airplane pilot—that was always one. Let’s see, what others do I have? Actually, what I’ve always wanted to own and be able to operate properly is a commercial tuna-fishing boat. I’ve always had a thing a
bout boats and working on them; fishermen—I don’t know—the ocean, independence, the whole thing, whatever it is. I’ve had that one for fifteen years. I still flash on it from time to time. The only thing that stops me is that I really wouldn’t know how to find a school of tuna.” And he laughed, carrying me with him. “But I still hang on.”
Father moved in his sleep. It was getting very dark. Bill turned on another light.
“Pop,” he said. “Are you okay?”
If I’d had to distill my feelings about Bill into a single image, it would have been rooted in the mythology I’d loved as a child. Jason and the Argonauts, Odysseus sailing on. And Hermes, with winged sandals, who was, from the day he was born, the shrewdest and most cunning of all.
Father opened his eyes and looked at us for a minute, then closed them again.
“Do you realize we’re going to be orphans?” Bill asked me, his hands clenching the iron footboard of Father’s bed. “That’ll be a new one.”
He’d read my mind.
“Aren’t we too old to be orphans?” Past the statute of limitations. But we still thought of ourselves as children. Bill’s question was interesting. Would we ever grow up? It didn’t seem likely, at the rate we were going. Hansel and Gretel without a father any more, just a stepmother. Ridiculous. Why was it that we—and all my friends, the ones I liked the most—had remained, at the core, children? Why did we all seem so much less mature than our parents—as we remembered them—had been at the same ages? Why, when our prime ambition as children had always been to grow up, were we now so protective and appreciative—in ourselves and each other—of our most childlike characteristics?
Maybe it was how we’d managed to survive. Protective coloration, like a permanent case of Bambi’s spots.
“How did we survive, anyway? How did we get this far? Don’t you ever wonder about that?”
Bill smiled ruefully. “Just lucky, I guess. The old whatchamacallit. Pioneer spirit. Staying power. We must have inherited something from the Colonel and Grandsarah, after all. In a renegade form, a mutation; may be troublesome to our public and even to our near and dear, God bless them, but—here we are. Fit as a fiddle.”
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