Fast forward for six months, it is my first visit to Cal's new place of abode. I dreaded it and had committed myself to see him in his habitat with regularity. Larry told me about the infamous gathering of the brothers and the wife. They all realized that it was not fair for Mary Lou to have to bear the burden of looking after Cal. The brothers could step up to help with his care but it would be better for all, if he were in a good well lighted place as Michael put it.
My last thought about it still lingered in my psyche, "They really aren't so bad, food, companionship and somebody to make sure that he doesn't do something stupid," Michael had tried to reassure me.
"I hear you" as he could tell that I was less than convinced. And, he let me know it. We always thought he'd be great in politics if he could get past telling the truth and always saying what was on his mind. "This is the best for Cal. And you might as well get use to it. You're not around. I'm not even here that often and Mary Lou has to live with the constant anxiety. She's waited almost a year. So," he said, fixing me right in the eyes, "get over it." I felt twelve again.
My older brother was fifteen years my senior and more like an Uncle in many ways than a brother. He was the patriarch of the family since our parents passed from this life to the next. I paid attention and even if I disagreed which I did on this, I surely wouldn't voice it. "OK," I said with resignation and planned on my first long excruciating trek to the Baskins Home.
The Baskins Home was a new brick looking building with giant columns in front and had been made to look like a private home. The receptionist looked up and a big smile covered her face, she recognized me but I didn't her: "Andy, I know you don't remember me."
I paused, smiling and then said, "I do", I said, not having a clue.
She finally said, "Marjorie, you know, Marge. I was two classes behind you."
"Oh. Sure. How are you?"
"Fine, guess you came to see your brother. He's doing really well."
She stood and regretfully, she looked like she'd not missed many meals. I resolved in a second that I was going to quit even thinking negative things about people; I was not anybody's judge. I smiled and she instinctively hugged me and suddenly, I remembered her.
"Marge," she had not been a girlfriend but it seems that I had known her in the Biblical way. I was a little embarrassed. Maybe I should apologize, I thought. I wish I could remember more. I should be the one who ought to be in here.
"It is so good to see you, been a long time."
"Yes, it has. I've gained some weight."
Oh, no sweat was the notion I wanted to convey. I tried to give an air of comfortableness. She looked like she wanted to say something but didn't.
I thought about telling her that if I had ever hurt her, please forgive me. This little act of contrition had been performed by me before in my hometown. Growing up, I was so "bad." It was just being a testosterone machine with a libido ruling me, and I felt bad about it and always harbored the need to apologize. I did make a conscience effort once at the "I'm sorry" fountain. It was at a class reunion when I made the rounds. To a person my old girlfriends said, "Oh, forget it. We were all just kids." Whether they meant it or not, I couldn't tell but it felt good to be a little unburdened.
Maybe I should say the "I'm sorry" to Marge.
"Your brother is doing well", she said as though trying to convince herself. Then she lowered her voice where I could hardly hear, "I don't know what he's doing here. He no more has dementia than I do."
The room was spacious with two fairly large beds with a large bathroom completing the living quarters. It still had that new look to it, cheap furniture trying to look homey. Not bad. A rather large black man sat in a wheelchair watching TV. "Excuse me, I am looking for Cal Wallace." I wanted to say, "I must be in the wrong room."
"Oh, Mister Cal has gone down the hall to the telephone. He must have noticed I glanced at the one sitting on the bedside table. "Mister Cal, he don't like to use this one all the time." He paused for a moment and smiled, "making those overseas calls he says can be tricky. You must be Mister Jerry." I smiled and put out my hand, notching a note on the brain about overseas calls.
Inwardly I was smiling as I could hardly believe this set-up. Here Cal has a black roommate. It was almost the family joke that the man hated blacks. It wasn't really so and we knew it. Quite the contrary, for the weirdest reason, his biggest buddies were always African Americans. He claimed it was a philosophy which none of us even believed. We joked for years that he would not even watch TV if there was a black on it. "Don't watch much TV, do you, Cal" would be the refrain. And, how many times had he quoted that older myth with maybe some truth in it: the North and this meant anywhere not where he was, loves the black man as a race but hates him as an individual but the South, and that was mostly anywhere he was; the South loves him as an individual and hates him as a race. "Who believed this but a bunch of racists?" I always thought without ever commenting.
It was inconsequential anyway. "My name is Henry," the affable black man said. Instantaneously, I reminded myself in my head, not a black man, a man.
"That Mister Cal, he know how to tell some stories-one right after another. He a good man. Don't know why he's in here." He spoke of it like a prison. And, it wasn't. Cal could come and go. At first he was in the locked unit but was only there a day. There was a little resistance from Mary Lou, I had heard, on being "let out" as Cal called it but it melted away. I didn't know what to make of it all.
"Hey Andrew, Cal put me in a bear hug. How the hell are you my little brother?" I looked at Cal incredulously. He looked great. Freshly shaved, white hair combed back, immaculate like it use to be. I be damn, I was taken aback. "Fine Cal, you sure look as fit as a fiddle."
"What is that? I've always wondered. What in the hell is 'fit as a fiddle', " we all laughed. "I see you met my main man, Henry." He laughed again as he sat on the side of the bed.
"The next time you see Henry, he's going to be down to a hundred and thirty pounds." Cal patted him. "You know what our big brother says?"
"Yes, I know." Michael was fond of saying that heavy people were just shy of a bale of cotton." Henry was.
"How do you like this place?", I ventured.
"Oh man, this is the greatest, better than the Army, three hots and a cot." He slapped Henry on the back.
"No, seriously, you like it?"
"Yeah, what's not to like? I'm just kind of getting the lay of the land."
What did he mean? Did I want to dive in too far or just tread softly?
"Hey, want to go for some chow, let's go over to Charlie's." We all knew Charlie's, Drive In, the premier barbeque spot of the town, maybe the nation, as Cal would say. "Henry, can I trust you to handle the chores here on the home front?"
"You can if you reward me with some barbeque and hush puppies."
"You got it, what about some sweet tea" elongating the "sweet," Cal said, affectionately squeezing Henry's shoulder.
I could not remember when I had seen him so ebullient, so full of himself, it was remarkable. Later on, when I was telling Michael, he sat in silence. Relating my experience was almost like not visiting the same person.
"Maybe you caught him on a good day?"
"Have you ever caught him on one of those?" I said.
"No, not really," Michael said with a kind of resignation. This was very painful for him. He was the oldest, the one responsible. All our lives he had tried to fix things for us when they went wrong. He couldn't fix Cal. "When I've been to see him, he's been pretty much like he was at VA. Almost catatonic."
Weird was my feeling, how could it be? Cal was his old self with me and a beloved brother gone South to everybody else. I tried to make peace with Mary Lou, mainly because Cal wanted me too. "Andy, keep in mind, that most people do the best they can. And, Mary Lou has. Don't blame her." It was a little like a counseling session but then he paused and put his arm around me, "It's going to be over soon and this works out for everybody."
Mary Lou and I didn't have much of a reconciliation, "I guess you understand what I mean now since your brother is at Baskin's." I was just before disputing the whole idea when I thought better and quickly changed the subject. It was one of those flash points when all of a sudden, there's an "I've got it" moment. My intuition told me that something was going on with Cal. I wasn't quite there but there was a mystery.
Cal's modus operandi of secrecy was simply the way it was. He wouldn't be where he was today probably if he hadn't been so secretive. I'm mainly thinking of the IRS. Still, there were other things. When I worked at his grocery store, he would disappear for long hours and return with no explanation. And, even when pressed, would blow it off, "Oh, I've been off reading the NY Times, doing some business, lost track of time. Did you need me?" The answer was no, not really and then we were on to something else. It was a pattern but I always wondered.
In those early days, it's hard to say about Cal and Mary Lou's relationship. As a sixteen year old with raging hormones, I could barely keep myself upright. I think it was pretty good. As I've said before, marriages always start out with such great promise and those early years seem to be good ones. At least that's the way it looked to me. There were kids, mutual sorts of things that couples did.
Life then was not what it is today, obviously, today marriages are more equal, two bread winners, not like the old days when the man goes out to earn the livelihood, so to speak. Things change, life changes.
It was about six weeks later when I went for my second visit to see the elusive brother. I called almost every day and got him about one out of five tries. True, the CIA couldn't locate him. "What gives, Henry?"
Long pause.
"What you mean, Mr. Andy?"
"Cal, he's never here? Is he out cattin around?" I said it as a joke.
The look on Henry's face and the slight curl to his lips all but knocked me over. I be damn, Cal is not here because he's seeing a woman. What is this? How can someone who has lost it be out chasing women.
I was still laughing as I exited the building. I know folks if they had been around would have thought I'd lost it myself. I hee hawed. I'll be damn was all I could say.
The day the divorce was final, the brothers gathered. It had been a hard road. Mary Lou had proven to be the big selfish B that most of us thought she was. There were hints but then we were biased and so nobody should pay much attention to us.
We expected a fight on the guardianship but it didn't happen once she knew how determined we were. And, we were. If anybody was going to have charge of our brother's affairs, it was us. Virtually, everything was going to her in the divorce anyway. Most of us objected but Cal insisted. Yes, insisted. We believed that he had money stashed, no, we knew it but in his present state, what good did it do?
The brothers witnessed Cal's return from the abyss almost immediately. He insisted we go for a kind of celebratory lunch at, of all places, Marlow's.
The road back to the old Cal that we knew and loved from some "play like" existence was not so much a road back as a road forward. And, it was immediate: laughing, talking, telling stories. It was as though he had been in a cocoon with everybody but me and suddenly he was liberated. For some reason which now was abundantly clear to me, Cal had acted just like one who had lost it: dementia, early Alzheimer's, whatever. Couldn't remember his name. I had witnessed it mostly with Mary Lou and early on when the brothers were around-in milliseconds, he would switch from being the Cal I had always known: smart, well read, opinionated, to not knowing his name. It had to be an act but why? Once it appeared that the divorce was going through with no hitches, he came out of the ether a little more with the brothers.
In a sense, you had to be a Southerner to get this. We have built into us a southerner gene. It is part of our DNA, the proper way that things are. There's always some schizophrenia of what it means to be a Southerner but overall, we are genteel, always saying the right things, polite to the max-a man stands up when a woman enters the room. The ever present, "bless their hearts"-the most inane gossip is acceptable if at the close of the tale, someone says, "bless their hearts." All is forgiven.
Politeness is the order of the day, never embarrassing talk, no public display of affection, proper, d?cor and above all, suffering or should I say, longsuffering especially in an unhappy marriage.
So, what is ever acceptable to get out of a marriage. If one or the other goes crazy, loses it. Hands down. How does this happen-"hardening of the arteries" as we would say. With this social stigma removed, it is proper for the spouse to put away the partner. He or she who has "lost it" doesn't know it anyway and so it's fine. In this case, Cal had lost it and it was OK for Mary Lou to put him away and divorce him. Afterall, she deserves a life. She still had time for another mate or in her case, maybe several. Plus, the brothers were very accepting of her dilemma. It was not her fault. Really, it was nobody's fault, happened all the time. The brothers supported her-a win win situation. Well, I'll be damn. Cal had set it up. I be damn. Glory hallelujah. God bless America.
We watched him walk to the gateway to his plane, which would take him to New York and then on to Italy. What a journey we've been on. He stopped, saluted and said, "Buon giorno, my brothers."
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