by David Payne
Is this the beginning of scholarship, of erudition? If so, scholarship is painful. Erudition’s painful. What other subject did I ever have, though? So though I don’t like what I’m learning, though the information’s grim and I feel shamed and can’t see how it’s helping, I keep going because the house is burning and I’m out of other options, and if I quit, what then? And because once upon a time beneath the elms and maples, I set out asking Who Am I, for me the overwhelming question, and I’m getting some real insight finally and the insight’s awful, but I must still want to know it because I consent to learn and my consent is that I keep on going every Wednesday for what will be seven and a half years eventually. And already in the early going somewhere way down deep the tectonic plates have started shifting by subduction, only on the surface I can’t feel them.
So Stacy and I live avoidantly together. She wants to stay home with the children till they finish kindergarten, we have the fight—Fucking bullshit! Who are you? etc.—I cave, she makes the house and children her world, I retreat into my writing, flipping in my underwater kingdom, spending longer and longer hours and coming out only when exhaustion makes me. Exhausted, I drink for the thirty-minute lift it gives me, and then I wake up and pour my vodka on the rosebush. I go to therapy and on my way home I stop and buy another blue-cap.
Then Will, our son, finishes kindergarten and, true to her word, eleven years after our wedding, Stacy gets a job and this devoutly wished for consummation changes nothing. She leaves the house at 8 A.M. and returns at 7 and puts the mail down on the stack and leaves her supper dishes on the table with the children’s. And I publish my brother-murder novel, my fifth, and my dream atonement does nothing to change my real life and the real lives of my wife and children. And I begin to think that maybe change is just another bill of goods they sell you, whoever “they” are.
And under this enchantment, as briars grow up around the tower, five and a half years pass and on July 22, 2006, Will’s sixth birthday, in the Hampton Inn in Pawleys Island, the voice speaks up inside me—six years since I last heard it in the meadow—and says, It’s time to write about George A., and I write it on a half sheet of foolscap with a hotel pen and date it.
V
2006
. . . that search proceeded not from the course of my thoughts—it was even directly contrary to them—but from the heart. It was a feeling of fear, orphanage, isolation in a strange land, and a hope of help from someone.
—A Confession, Tolstoy
12
September 10, 2006. George A.’s birthday. This morning at 8 A.M. I poured my vodka on the rosebush, time fifteen, give or take a couple. Today’s the day, I wrote, there is no other day but this. Will I succeed? I guess by six o’clock the verdict will be in. And here I sign my name in blood upon this contract with my children and the future.
Oh, I felt so brave then. Now it’s 4 P.M. and something in me’s sinking.
Walking up the path to Stacy’s mother’s house in Chapel Hill to fetch the children, I’m thinking of the vodka like a bad old friend I might have broken off with prematurely.
Inside, I find the children in the playroom, Grace involved in some animal rescue scenario with her Littlest Pet Shop figurines. Recently, Stacy found a packed Princess Barbie suitcase under her bed, and Grace confessed her wish “to run away to the Indian Village.”
–Hey, guys, I say.
She looks up, unsmiling.
–Hey, Daddy.
–Hey, Dad, Will says in a low voice that borders on a growl, only duller; he never takes his eyes off the TV. In his bright cartoon, he’s at the Indian Village, too, and I see instantly that getting him to do what I don’t want to do—come back to this world—is going to involve a fight, the same one I promised myself this morning, when I was fresh, that I was going to fight again today, and win, for him and for his sister. That was hours ago, though, before fatigue set in, and now I’m thinking more and more about the blue-capped regiments of Burnett’s ranked like soldiers on the shelves and telling myself, Breathe, motherfucker.
–Let’s pack it up, dudes, it’s time to roll.
–Da-ad! Now the whine. Can’t we just wait till this is finished?
–No, we’ve got to go. I have to get dinner started. Aren’t you hungry?
–Da-ad! You never let me do anything! Can I watch TV at home?
And I’m already at the boil again.
–Get your shoes and socks, I say with forced deliberateness. Put them on. Pick up your backpack, and come with me right now. This is the third time I’ve asked already, and if I have to ask again, there won’t be any dessert tonight.
Another mistake—using food as reward or punishment! Too late, though, it’s already escaped my lips.
–Fine!
Grace’s dour eyes observe this before straying toward the window, where it’s getting darker by the minute.
And there’s the ABC store, my Indian Village of preference, looming in the windshield, dead ahead. If I pull in it’ll be bad, I know it will, but how much worse, really, than on those fourteen previous occasions? Shame and shame alone makes me clutch the wheel tighter and step on the gas. It’s thinning, but there’s air enough to make it past. For the moment.
–Take your lunch boxes out of your backpacks and hang them up, I say when we get home. Why don’t you go jump on the trampoline.
Grace complies. Will drops his on the floor with a loud clunk.
–Can I watch cartoons?
His face is now the mask of tragedy.
–Open your backpack now, I say. Not five minutes from now. Give me your lunch box, now.
–Fine!
He stomps out the back door, and I watch his departure with relief, thinking that his name was like a prophecy, that he scares me on occasion.
I make stir-fry, and while the rice cooks, I go to check my email in my office.
My screen saver, a slide show of happy family photos—the children at the Eno and at Four Roses in the summer—gives way when I move my mouse. Exploit . . . to make use of selfishly or unethically. The word that I looked up this morning, waiting right there where I left it.
–What was it that Margaret said?
–I don’t know what you thought I was supposed to do, David. Kick him out on the street? Let him become a homeless person?
To me, however, the issue was suicide, not homelessness. At the root of all her actions toward George A. was a mother’s desperate plea: Please don’t kill yourself, I can’t stand it if you do, I will do anything, anything. And that was what she did: everything.
And I recall his car wreck and the dark aura that surrounded him the next night in her kitchen, and the sneer that said or seemed to me to say, You disapprove? You don’t think I should be doing this? Fuck it, watch me go. And when I asked him if he’d tried to kill himself, he answered, Yes, without the slightest hesitation, and then he grinned that devastating grin, and sipped his beer and his eyes—those warm, black eyes like Margaret’s—became disconsolate.
That was the ugly heart of it, and what I think my mother fears is that I’ll speak the secret: that George A. held her—and, by extension, all of us—hostage with that threat: Take care of me, or else I’ll kill myself, and it’ll hurt you worse than it hurts me.
What was Margaret to do? Was she to say to George A., “If that’s your choice, then go ahead?” She couldn’t. Did not speaking keep him in this world for nine years longer than he would have had without her? I don’t know the answer. I just know that no one ever spoke the truth, and not speaking it kept them in the woods, the witch’s forest. By not speaking, they denied each other and themselves the only chance they had to exit.
And I never spoke it either, though I knew. I was complicit. If I had, would it have made a difference? I don’t know, and now I never will. Instead, I ran away to Vermont and left them to slug it out between themselves.
In her broken heart, Margaret carries the memory of George A. as the wounded child for whom she made a sacrifice, and whatever else, I do know the sacrifice was hers, not mine—the thousand times she cleaned the kitchen after him and scrubbed the toilet bowl he used, the nights she spent frowning in a pool of lamplight as the smoke from George A.’s Winstons and the laugh track drifted from the back room. Margaret wants to carry all that to her grave the way George A. carried it to his, and let it molder away to dust and be, after her death, as if it never was.
Bad! Wrong! Selfish! The old voice, on its constant loop, is going strong inside me.
I want a drink. If Stacy were home, I’d leave the children and be at the liquor store right now. In fact, perhaps I could go anyway. It’s only a ten-minute trip. The children are in the backyard on the trampoline, laughing and shouting contentedly. Chances are they’ll still be laughing and shouting ten minutes from now—ten, at most—when I come back with my Burnett’s. I doubt they’ll even notice I was gone. Chances are no predator will snatch them, no pedophile will take their little wrists and pull them into his car, and they won’t kick and scream and weep and call my name the way I’ve told them to and get no answer because Daddy’s in the checkout line at the Indian Village, checking out on them and on reality. What are the chances of any of this happening? Very, very slim. Can I risk it? Yes, I think I can. Disapprove? Fuck it, watch me go . . .
Only when I turn my head, there’s Will, my squeaky little wheel whose name was like a prophecy, standing just outside the doorway, “sneaking up on me” the way he likes to do, trying to sniff out what Daddy’s doing here that’s so very interesting that it keeps me from him by the hour.
–What? I say, expecting the usual reply, the usual whine, the usual mask of tragedy. I’m ready to get into it with him, to do our thing, begin the beguine, dance the pas de deux with him again, and twenty years from now—if I haven’t drunk myself to death—we should be in the same place, pretty much, where Margaret and George A. ended.
–Can I watch TV?
Why not, I think, why the fuck not, you watch TV, I’ll have a drink, and Grace can head out for the Indian Village—maybe she’ll run into Mommy.
–Will, I say instead, come here a sec.
He approaches with a doubtful look, and I sit him on my knee.
–You keep asking me to watch TV, I keep saying no, and you ask again, and I get mad and lose my temper, and you get your feelings hurt and cry, and we both end up feeling bad—what do we need to do to stop this? Do you have any thoughts? Because I’ll be honest, I’m fresh out of ideas.
–Maybe if you stopped commanding me . . .?
He doesn’t have to search for this. It’s right there, and he says it with a curious emphasis, putting a question mark on the end, and turning both hands up and out, like a pair of catfish flopping on his cane-pole wrists.
–Commanding you . . . You mean . . .?
–I mean, like, do this, do that! If you said, ‘Would you mind taking your lunch box out of your backpack, please?’ instead of ‘Take your lunch box out now!’
Impressed by his clarity and vehemence, I consider.
–Okay, I say. I think I could manage that. Let’s try. Could you go up and have your bath now—please—and then come down for supper?
–Okay, Daddy!
And he’s gone, before I can say, Huh? or What!, following through with a bright compliance I simply don’t believe. Is this a trick? What just happened?
On the heels of this success, I open the back door and, in the gloaming, call to Grace.
–Sweetie, time to come inside. If you could head upstairs and have your bath, I’d appreciate it. Please.
–Okay, Dad!
And there she goes, the Indian princess, so close I feel the ripple of her slipstream.
I don’t know what to make of it. Is saying “pretty please” the secret of the universe, the one I’ve somehow missed?
Inside, the timer’s beeping for the rice. I start to heed, but the cardinal, the male that lives nearby in Cedar Lane, sets off a trill. He’s somewhere close, and when I turn, I see him on the shed, perched above the rusty saw that hangs, a grim memento of Vermont, twining with the rosebush.
I’m struck by something in the scene: the last light pooling on the shed’s tin roof, my children laughing as the cardinal sings above the New Dawn climber on its trellis. Six years ago, after George A. died, a sympathetic neighbor offered me the rosebush, red or white according to my preference, and I chose the white one. This morning—was it today? it was—I saw my footprints, stamped to green in the dew-silvered lawn, smoking there, or appearing to, as the day warmed up. It looked as if some infernal thing had passed this way, and I remember thinking that something in me but not of me, wiser than “I” am, led me here like a somnambulist—to what end, though?
“Maybe if you stopped commanding me . . .?” Will’s question comes back, and it strikes me that it’s not and never was about the gumballs or the television. When I tell him and his sister no and no again, I’m pressing Record, dictating the voice message that will one day play on its constant loop inside them, saying, Bad! Wrong! Selfish! I think it’s exploitative is the same message in a different package. And maybe they, like me, will have to drink or work or eat or put a needle in their veins to stop it.
And I think once more of the hedge that rioted along the chain-link fence outside the Pine State Creamery on Granite Street in Henderson, of Mother’s Day Sundays in my childhood and the boutonnieres we wore at Holy Innocents . . . a red rose if your mother was still living, a white one if she wasn’t.
Electricity is shooting down my arms and up my back again, and I see now why I’ve come here to the rosebush fifteen times and poured my vodka out and tried to end my bondage. It’s time to pluck the white rose now and wear it in remembrance—not just for Margaret but for Bill, and for Letty and Bill Sr., and the Roses, George A. and Mary, and those who came before them whose names are chiseled on the headstones—time to pin it to my lapel with a straight pin beaded with dark green, and wear it with respect and gratitude, as one day my children will for me and for their mother, remembering what we gave and also how we harmed them and tell the truth in love as I have tried to and spare us absolutely nothing and walk beyond us on their own adventures.
And now I hear their footsteps tumbling down the stairs and go to meet them. Above the kitchen door, the clock says 6:15.
I still want a drink, I feel the cinch, I’m short of breath, but I can breathe. I made it.
Epilogue
Since starting this, I’ve wondered what kind of final word or eulogy I could give George A., and what answer I could provide to the question I posed at the beginning of who my brother was and who we were together. I was afraid I couldn’t do it honestly or ably or write about him with the same passion and conviction I’m so clearly able to lavish on myself, and I half considered letting someone do it for me. At his funeral some folks he knew drove down from Rita’s, the bar he frequented after he moved back with Margaret. Sometimes I’d call and she’d tell me he was watching the Carolina game with friends out there or helping someone move into a new apartment. There’s a picture of George A. at New Year’s, sitting at the bar, wearing a gold crown made of paper sprayed with glitter and sipping a beer between two friends in baby-blue tuxedoes, each of whom has an arm around his shoulders and is mugging for the camera, as George A. hangs back with that sweet shy grin that also has some slyness. At his service in Henderson, a contingent of the Rita’s regulars, five or six of them, drove two and a half hours to pay their last respects to him at Holy Innocents before we laid him in the ground at Elmwood. They wrote their names in the guest book and some of them added hearts and smiley faces and I thought that maybe I could look them up, that if I flew down there and asked them maybe they could tell me who my brother was or ended up being. When I looked, though, there were f
irst names only, and somewhere along the way I gave up the notion of this project; in the intervening years—eight since I began this journey, eight since I got sober, as my children grew and my marriage ended—it came clear to me the way it is tonight that I didn’t need them or anyone to tell me.
George A. was someone who, after years of underlying tension with an older brother who made no secret of his disapproval, heard one day from our mother that I needed help and called and volunteered his services and didn’t even make me ask him, and in those eight days he never showed a trace of attitude or crookedness but seemed genuinely glad to see me and to have a chance to spend some time and to shed the old misunderstanding.
And George A. was also someone very sick and very desperate, who once drove his car off the highway coming to a cousin’s wedding, and though he didn’t kill himself—nothing in those final days or in the accident itself suggests it—still, he held us hostage with a threat he didn’t speak and didn’t have to; we all knew it, I knew, too, and failed to make allowances and must answer for it here in this accounting. I tried to hold him to the standard of our youth and judged him as the boy who ran beside me to the pier and might have beat me any given Sunday, and George A. was that boy for seventeen years, but for twenty-five he wasn’t.
For far more of his life, he was the big man with the Fuller Brush mustache and the tremor in his hands sitting on my porch in Wells the night before my wedding with the sky behind him and that big view to the Adirondacks, wave after wave of sun-tinged black-and-orange cloud, like a violent aureole around a stricken angel. That sky is not to be believed, like a Hollywood effect, and speaks to me of what he alone of all of us was up against. George A. seems at the border of a world that isn’t this world anymore and less and less resembles it, and we don’t know what it is, but we all know it’s approaching from the distance, and if this sky is any indication it’s beautiful and terrible. I failed to credit how long he stood alone under that sky with unmediated nature blazing all around him, how many times he fell and stood and staggered into base camp before the time he finally didn’t, and it was not the same for me and not my right to judge him. I lacked the imagination and generosity to accept the change in him because it cost too much to me and our whole family, and most of all to Margaret, our mother, through the price she paid she paid willingly and knowingly, who had broader shoulders than I did and more compassion finally.