The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  He wasn’t badly hurt. Ours was a largeish one-story house whose eaves were maybe eight feet off the ground. I found the little bicycle crumpled at the edge of the pool, its front wheel wanly spinning, while my brother sputtered “Fuck, my knee!” (laughing) and splashed around a bit before losing his balance and slipping underwater.

  “What’re you, fucking six years old?” I yelled, when he came to the surface again. “What’ve you been taking?”

  “Justa few beers . . .” Plaintive.

  My friend Matt waved me inside. He seemed reluctant to speak. For maybe five minutes we just stood at the sliding door watching my brother, who was trying to mount a Styrofoam raft with a singular lack of success. Twenty or so times he jumped on belly-first, only to slip off the side or capsize, hugging the thing for dear life; then he tried hiking a leg over, both legs, both sides, many times . . . Plainly Scott lacked the coordination to board that raft—he fell fifty times, a hundred, it wasn’t going to happen—but he seemed to find meaning in the effort per se. The raft was his thing. At some point I changed clothes and rejoined Matt at the sliding door. Scott was still at it. He reminded me of a trick-riding clown I’d seen at the Vinita rodeo.

  Finally Matt spoke: Scott, he said, had been shooting heroin in the bathroom. How did Matt know? Well, because Scott had offered him some.

  “And what did you say?” I asked.

  “I said no. I told him thanks, but no.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He told me not to worry about needles. He said he’d, you know, do it for me.”

  I thanked Matt and asked him to leave. Then I went outside and sat on a chaise longue by the pool. Scott had towed the raft to some steps in the shallow end, where he hoped to mount it in a sitting position; he stood on the top step and eyed that slab of Styrofoam as if it were a stabled bull.

  “Having trouble?” I asked.

  He spotted me there on the patio and broke into an ecstatic grin. We might have just encountered each other on the streets of a foreign city: What a surprise! Wie geht’s, old man? . . .

  “So now you’re a junkie too?”

  The smile wavered as he parsed this; then he looked plaintive again. “Whassa matter?” He looked at me with infinite self-pity: Why did I have to ruin everything? If he was happy, why couldn’t I be happy too?

  I went inside and phoned our mother. I explained the situation. At first she didn’t believe me about the heroin, but when I told her what Matt had said (she knew Matt) and reminded her of what Burck and I had seen that day at the Earl Hotel, she believed it. She advised me to keep him there. I said it wouldn’t be easy. I told her about the motorcycle and the Cheap Trick concert; moreover I had a dinner engagement with an old family friend, the fat chef/magician at the Grand Boulevard Restaurant, Scott’s former employer.

  “Well, cancel it!” said my mother.

  I said he’d be here any minute, that he’d made a reservation at an excellent restaurant, and really I had no intention of missing a good meal for the sake of some junkie asshole who shoots up around my friends. I said as much while glaring directly into the misty eyes of the junkie in question, who’d tottered into the doorway with a look of dim foreboding. He stood there in his wet underwear, dripping on the floor.

  “Whosa?” he asked.

  “It’s our mother,” I said. “You want to talk to her?”

  I held out the phone, which squawked “Scott? Goddamn it! What’ve you been . . .”

  A number of complicated attitudes seemed to play on Scott’s face: there was the haunted look of a little boy caught; there was jaded impatience with Marlies’s browbeating; there was not a little humor. All this blended at last into a look of nonchalant denial. He shook his head at the phone with a bleary frown, then on second thought muttered “Justa few beers” and fell back against the dining-room table, folding his arms as if his staggering were natural.

  “Well, there you have it,” I said.

  “Keep him there,” said my mother. “And call me back.”

  I hung up and asked Scott to give me the keys to his motorcycle. He looked stricken, amused, incredulous: Why?

  “You know why. Don’t give me that shit. Matt told me all about it. Give me the fucking keys!”

  He shook his head.

  “Scott,” I said, “listen carefully. You’re in no condition to ride a motorcycle. You can hardly stand up. Feel free to spend the night here, but you’re not going to any goddamn Cheap Trick concert.”

  “Justa few beers” was the best he could muster—or rather he couldn’t be bothered: that inane little mantra was good enough, it seemed, for the likes of me. He stood there with his arms folded, weaving slightly, mouth agape with infantile defiance.

  At this point I snapped and did something violent, resulting in a softball-sized hole in the expensive, upholstered wallpaper Sandra had picked out in the course of redecorating the dining room. They had to cover this hole with a picture for some months. I simply can’t remember how I did it. Did I throw something? Did I use my fist? Such was the extremity of that moment—such was my blinding rage toward the vacuous, fucked-up face of my incorrigibly fucked-up brother—that I lapsed into a kind of fugue state.

  But I was instantly sobered by the hole in the wall, as well as by the sound of knocking on the door. Chef had arrived.

  “Hold on!” I yelled. I looked at Scott. He was pondering the hole and looking vaguely hurt about things, as though he’d been spanked on his birthday.

  “Scott,” I said, “promise me you won’t go to that concert tonight.”

  He sniveled that the tickets had cost him twenty bucks, that he’d been looking forward to it for months, and (it went without saying) he had so little to look forward to. I handed over the thirteen or so dollars in my wallet; if he promised to stay home, I said, I’d give him the seven later. Did he promise?

  After a pause (knock knock knock), he nodded. I patted his shoulder and started to go.

  “You’re leaving . . . ?”

  “Yep.”

  Scott wagged his head. That was not part of the deal as he saw it.

  “Who’re you . . . ?”

  “Chef.”

  He took a deep breath. “Fat—fuck. No talent . . . faggot.”

  “Scott, I’ll see you later,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  “. . . Can I come?”

  “No.”

  At the door I squeezed past our friend Chef.

  “What’s the hurry, you little shit?” he said, then turned around and faced Scott there in the doorway. They hadn’t seen each other in years, not since the man had finally fired Scott. My brother stood glaring in a way that was meant to be menacing, but most of his strength was spent on the mere standing, so that he couldn’t quite focus his menace. He was still there, and still glaring, when we pulled out of the driveway.

  “God,” Chef sighed a block or so later. He shook his head, his breath whistling in his beard. “God, I wish I hadn’t seen that.”

  During dinner I remembered to call Marlies back. I excused myself and found a pay phone.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  I told her.

  “You left Scott alone?” This in a neutral voice my mother used when she was beyond vexation.

  “What else could I do? He wouldn’t give me his keys.”

  She sighed. “You know where he is now?”

  “He’s not at the house?”

  “He’s in jail.”

  And then she proceeded to explain what I surely already knew—had known, indeed, when I left my brother alone at the door: namely, that he had promptly endeavored to ride his motorcycle to the Cheap Trick concert, and had naturally been arrested for driving while intoxicated, without a license, and whatever else. I remember being impressed that he’d almost made it all the way to the Myriad Convention Center downtown, where the concert took place. Another block or so and all might have been well—in which case, no doubt, he would have reprised the “Justa f
ew beers” mantra for my benefit.

  BECAUSE OF PRIOR drug-related offenses, Scott was sentenced to a state rehab facility in Norman, a grimly generic redbrick asylum called Griffin Memorial. My father visited him in August (after he and Sandra returned from Europe) and later mailed me a photo Sandra had taken: there was Burck in a summer suit and Panama hat, a rather formal hand on his son’s shoulder, the latter looking very institutional with his buzz cut and scowl.

  I’d been back at college for a couple of weeks when my father phoned to say, in a tired voice, that Scott was hopeless.

  The night before, he and Sandra and Marlies had attended their first and only family session at the rehab facility. There were many families at these sessions, many patients, and the process went something like this: patients were each given a chance to speak without interruption, the idea being that they should confront their parents about particular things the parents had done to contribute to their children’s maladjustment; then the parents were given a chance to respond, again without interruption. Finally the floor was thrown open to general feedback. At all times one was enjoined to be as “objective” as possible, while avoiding any hint of opprobrious language: “It makes me sad when you call me ‘worthless’ . . .”

  According to three out of four witnesses to whom I was privy, my brother was easily the most obnoxious patient, the most bitter and self-absorbed and serenely immune to contradiction of any kind. Sobriety did not agree with him. He pointed out that all his doctors were assholes and oafs, ditto his fellow patients (who hated his guts); the only people in the place whom he exempted were a few orderlies and janitors.

  As for his family, well, when Scott got to that part, he fixed a baleful look on my father, mother, and Sandra in turn, then in a calm “objective” voice (his satirical concession to the prevailing etiquette) recited his grievances—to wit, that he’d been persecuted on a routine basis almost from infancy. He went on at some length about this.

  While my brother spoke, a number of patients violated protocol with catcalls of motherfucker and boohoo! and kiss my ass. When it was over they erupted with a roar of hatred that lingered almost a full minute. At first Scott winced a little, then he smirked.

  Burck sat there staring at him. Finally, after the insults had subsided into a fraught silence, he took a deep breath and spoke:

  “I don’t know who you are.”

  Scott shifted comfortably in his chair and waited for the rest, but abruptly my father put his hat back on and walked out. Sandra and Marlies looked at each other and followed.

  Scott caught up with them in the parking lot, trotting alongside, in front, around them, yelling, “Where the fuck’re you going? I’m your son, goddammit! I’m your son!” At some point he grabbed my mother’s coat sleeve—or yanked her around by the arm, depending on who tells it—demanding that she, at least, stay.

  “And I’ll never forgive myself,” my father told me over the phone, “but then I hit him.”

  If indeed my brother had gotten in their faces and hollered abuse, if indeed he’d violently accosted my mother, then of course he deserved whatever he got. But Scott would always insist that he’d simply grabbed our mother’s sleeve and tried to hang on, that he couldn’t believe that they (she in particular) would simply turn their backs on him, leave him in such a place—perhaps forever, or so it seemed at the time—and he further insisted that he’d simply lost heart when our father had punched him in the face “for no reason.” But Sandra claims that Scott actually shoved Burck and was ready to fight; with a kind of bashful pride, she tells of how she jumped on Scott’s back and pummeled him over the head with a heavy coin-filled purse until he backed off, staggering, and they were able to complete their getaway.

  “He’s hopeless,” my father sighed.

  “Absolutely,” I said. After a pause I saw fit to add, “Your only regret should be that you didn’t come to that conclusion years ago.”

  “I don’t know . . . sometimes—” But he didn’t finish. “So how’re your classes? You are taking classes, I hope.”

  I WAS TAKING classes, but mostly I was immersed in the inanity of fraternity life. I’d returned early that fall for rush week, and my days were a pleasant round of beery, earnest meetings and parties into the night. One of my two roommates was a guy named Jay whose family owned Pontchartrain Beach amusement park; since we hadn’t found an apartment yet, the three of us lived that first month in the Lakeview home of Jay’s parents, almost a half-hour drive from campus. I ruined a couple of neckties by passing out on their wet lawn—this after somehow driving back from whatever wingding had transpired the night before. One morning I was woken there on the grass by the family retainer, a crabby old black woman named Oralea, who prodded me with her foot; when she saw I was awake, she hobbled back into the house without a word. Breakfast was waiting.

  It was after a particularly festive day that my father called and told me that Family Night at the rehab center had gone poorly. My roommates and I had just found an Uptown duplex apartment, and that morning we’d driven golf carts around the amusement park after loading up cases of free liquor from the Bali Hai Club, where patrons went to soak while their kiddies rode rides; the liquor filled an entire closet in our new apartment. Later we went back to Jay’s house in Lakeview and laughed away the afternoon playing pool, drinking, and listening to Jay’s jukebox. Then the phone rang and, after a bit of cordial banter, Jay mouthed “your dad” and handed it over. Burck asked how I was doing, and seemed to have all the time in the world to listen while I gave him a somewhat expurgated account of my days.

  By the end of that school year, our duplex apartment had come to resemble the den of latchkey urchins whose guardians have fled for good. Jay could always provide fresh glasses from the Bali Hai Club, and we’d simply grab a clean one out of a new box as needed and leave the dirty ones, hundreds of them, to grow into furry little skylines of mold along every counter. The garbage was nudged out the door maybe once a month, and during the last couple of weeks it got so bad that I hated to leave my bedroom, lest I spot the gray blur of a startled mouse in the hall. I learned the extent to which life can become weirdly habitual. After final exams, we went to the Bahamas with a fraternity brother whose family kept a condo on Windermere Island; after a week of card-playing, gin-drinking boredom, of flaccid male nakedness on a sun-splashed terrace, we flew back to Miami and drove twenty hours to that forsaken duplex, whose open door released a miasma that put one in mind of a mass grave. And yet it must have smelled similar the week before, if only we’d had the faculties to notice. Then on my way back to Oklahoma—a journey I began as quickly as I could gather my tainted things—I was stopped for speeding in Denton, Texas, and jailed when it was discovered that my car was actually owned by one Gayle Mackenroth, who proved to be Jay’s grandmother; he and I had swapped vehicles one day on a drunken whim without bothering to transfer titles. And finally, while waiting to explain all this to a judge, my hands began to swell and turn a kind of blotchy magenta. In despair by then, I assumed this was syphilis or dropsy or some other manifestation of a Dorian Gray–like moral rot. It was, in fact, the result of too much sun.

  WHEN SCOTT GOT out of rehab that fall, my father decided to give him another chance, this time on the condition that he see a psychiatrist of Burck’s choosing. Scott consented. The psychiatrist was a man of some local renown, a family friend named Dr. Hauber, a pudgy-faced Frans Hals figure who used to have giggly chats in German with my mother.

  Dr. Hauber told my father that Scott was under the impression he’d been cruelly beaten as a child. Burck, I suppose, endeavored to disabuse the man, and ultimately Hauber declared—wrongly, I think—that Scott was a paranoid schizophrenic. Dr. Hauber’s verdict, along with certain other events, helped validate my father’s previous opinion that Scott was hopeless, and by the following summer he was back in the outer darkness again.

  “When a child is young,” Burck explained one night (perhaps he was relating Hauber’s a
nalogy), “you can catch him if he falls. Then he gets a little older and falls from a higher place. Maybe you can still catch him. But finally he’s a full-grown adult and falls off the top of a building—then you have to decide: either get out of the way or be crushed.”

  I thought of Scott dangling from that flagpole at the top of Fifty Penn Place, and no wonder he seemed unimpressed by my own madcappery. For him there was no Bali Hai Club, no larky sojourns on Windermere Island. Though his apartment was tidier than mine, Scott’s life belonged to a different, far grimmer plane of reality, as I was reminded during a summer lunch at that restaurant where he still worked, though demoted to busboy. It was our first meeting in almost a year; Marlies had insisted I see Scott and pave the way, if possible, to reconciliation between him and Burck. Also I confess to a certain morbid curiosity.

  Something about the waiter’s manner, when he told me Scott was in the downstairs dining room, let me know I was in for a bad time; the man seemed pained by a stomachache he didn’t care to discuss. “Scott—” he began, then grimaced and pointed downstairs. He disappeared into the kitchen. I went downstairs. I was halfway there when I spotted Scott from the landing. He was sitting at a corner table, writing a letter with an emphatic, wounded look, his face flushed with beer and what appeared to be incipient tears. I considered bolting, but finally went over and said hello.

  He didn’t look up. He kept writing until he came to a stop, then capped his gold-plated fountain pen—a gift from Burck when Scott had graduated from Drahn—and put the letter aside.

  “Who’re you writing?”

  “Ma,” he said. “I was just telling her that if you didn’t show up—”

  “Why wouldn’t I show up?”

  “You’re late.”

  I looked at my watch. “Five minutes?”

  “We said noon.”

  “No, Scott, I’m pretty sure we said twelve thirty.”

  “Noon.”