I was never hit, or rarely enough that it seemed like never. To be sure, I felt my father’s scalding temper in other ways. One incident that sticks out in my mind took place when I was twelve, on a Sunday morning before we left for church. It was my responsibility to come downstairs when dressed, so that neither my father nor my mother would have to come fetch me. I had put on one of Chris’s old suits and was sitting on my bed, my back against the wall, rubbing my itchy thigh and daydreaming. I have a tendency to get lost in thought, and I must have kept them waiting too long, for the door was kicked open and my father stepped in, sweating and bunched. He glanced at my hand, absentmindedly scratching at my leg, and said, “Oh, are we uncomfortable?”
I started to sit up, and then to raise my arms as he came at me. He pushed them away and grabbed handfuls of jacket and shirtfront and raised me up off the bed, shaking me, shouting at me from six inches away, asking did I want to sit here all day picking my ass or did I want to come down and join my mother and him who bought me that suit and every other damn thing I had in the world after all they’d been waiting for me for only fifteen goddamned minutes and call him a jackass if this wasn’t the last time he’d tolerate it, let me go ahead and try it again, just one more time, I’d have another thing coming.
I can still feel his spittle on my face.
Frankly, though, this kind of stuff was peanuts compared to what my brother endured.
With one exception, no bones were ever broken. (That was an accident: chasing after Chris, my father slipped on the steps, jamming his thumb into the wall and giving himself a hairline fracture.) The real trauma, of course, was emotional. As Chris entered his teens, his moods worsened, leading to more and more fighting, which in turn led to worse moods, and so on, a truly vicious circle. Adolescence is hard enough as it is; add to it everything that we had going on at home, and my brother’s slide into depression seems a fait accompli.
The trouble compounded toward the end of his junior year, when he split up with his girlfriend. She was a year older, headed off to college, too much distance—all perfectly natural for that age. Chris took it hard, though. Much of the goodness in his life came from her, and when that went away, the change that overtook him was awful to behold, more so for its insidiousness. He stopped going out with friends. He quit the soccer team. He began cutting class to get high, alone, and the inevitable suspension when he got caught brought a new round of screaming matches, epithets, ultimata. I loved my brother, worshipped him, and seeing him disintegrate terrified me. Though far too young to understand what he needed, I did try to help in my own small ways. Which turned out to be not very helpful at all: he would respond to my meek solicitations by swearing at me and slamming his door. As the months wore on, and he grew more gaunt and peevish, I kept waiting for someone to do something, to recognize the problem and fix it. But who? Not my mother, who stood wringing her hands. And surely not my father, who kept telling me—not in words, but with his actions—to take notes, make sure that he never had to do the same to me.
In the past, Chris had spent his summers mowing lawns in Clay-hill, the neighborhood over the river where our town’s few rich families lived. The girl who’d dumped him lived in one of those houses, and so that year, the summer of 1987, he stayed up in his room, listening to The Cure, floating downstairs in a narcotic haze at midday, stretching out on the couch to channel-surf. He had lost so much weight by then that my mother had begun to fear that he had cancer. In a rare show of initiative, she dragged him to our pediatrician, who took one look at Chris, concluded that he had Crohn’s disease, and promptly put him on steroids.
The drugs restored some of the fullness to his body. They also increased his irritability. He broke out horribly, and was too embarrassed to go back to school in the fall. Instead he tooled around town on his bike, shoplifting and taking out car windows with his air gun. In November the cops brought him home in handcuffs. I remember him telling me that he’d asked to be taken to jail rather than go home.
All this had happened gradually, over years, and I can’t say it got noticeably worse that winter. In fact, I believe the pendulum might have been swinging back toward center, due in large part to the intercession of our priest, Father Fred. Chris and I each had a longstanding friendship with him, having both served as altar boys, and when he got wind of what was happening, he began dropping by to get Chris out of the house. He took him bowling, took him to the movies, made every effort to draw my brother back out, so that by February, Chris had started to sound almost like himself again. My mother was so grateful that she went out and bought Father Fred a watch. He told her to return it and put the money toward a family therapist. Either he wasn’t forceful enough or she ignored him, taking Chris’s improved mood as proof that the problem was solved.
She can be foolish, my mother.
April Fools’, 1988, a Friday afternoon. I was a few weeks shy of turning eleven. A freak snowstorm had shut everything down, keeping me home from school and trapping my father inside all day, where he paced, brooded, and drank. My brother and I sat watching sitcoms until four o’clock, when my father yelled for Chris to come help him shovel out the driveway. To my surprise, Chris said nothing, just got up, got dressed, and followed him outside. As the front door closed, and came the drum of their boots on the porch, I realized, with the painful slap of revelation, that the two of them were fundamentally alike—and fundamentally different from me, both of them embodying a vigorous masculinity that I lacked. I wouldn’t have put it like that at that age, of course; I didn’t understand it in words. I simply grasped, all at once, that they were two and I was one and it was these unseen tethers and gaps that made life so difficult. I understood, too, why my father never picked on me: I couldn’t take it. I was soft. I was a sissy. They both knew how to mark territory and how to defend it. I did not.
Within minutes they began arguing. I heard it and went to the window to spy. Snow was flying everywhere like bloodspatter, the violence of their work a none-too-subtle stand-in for what they wanted to do to each other. By the time they came in for supper, things had gotten pretty heated up: my father flogging Chris for having no future, being a bum, being disrespectful, etc., and Chris making snide comments about my father’s waistline, his blackened fingernails, etc. My mother tried to change the subject to the Easter charity auction, for which Father Fred still needed volunteers. Maybe Chris wanted to help out?
“Fuck him,” said my brother.
Normally he would have scooted his chair back in advance of this remark. That night he either forgot or had decided to hold his ground. He hardly had enough time to smirk before my father lunged across the table, belting him in the jaw hard enough to put him halfway into the living room.
“Up,” said my father.
“No,” said my mother.
“Up, you little shitbird.”
“No. Ronald, no.”
Chris screamed at the both of them. Fuck them; fuck them both. “Fuck you, too,” he yelled at me, though I had done nothing but sit there and watch. Perhaps he saw my silence as complicity. If he expected me to take his side, he was deluded; I had no intention of getting smacked.
My father reached down and yanked, and instantly Chris was up on his feet, and with an astonishing display of brute strength my father wordlessly hauled him up the stairs, my brother writhing and screaming that my father had dislocated his arm. Over and over again my mother moaned. She hadn’t moved at all, tears running down her chin and into her scalloped potatoes. I moved to the foot of the stairs and saw on the landing my father shoving Chris into his room, then going to the hallway closet and pulling out a small suitcase, which he threw against Chris’s closed door.
I can’t imagine that he really meant to kick my brother out. It was eight P.M. and freezing. Although it occurs to me that this might be a problem of mine: I didn’t believe Yasmina capable of it, either.
Alone in my own bedroom, lying on the floor, I listened to more yelling, cursing, flesh in conta
ct with flesh and wood. Through the wall, the squeak of Chris’s dresser. Around ten P.M. I heard footsteps headed downstairs and, a minute later, the truck starting up in the driveway.
We had two cars. My mother drove a 1974 Chrysler Town and Country station wagon, scab-brown with faux-wood paneling. My father owned a series of pickups, Chevys and Fords. The one Chris took that night was four years old, already bearing a hundred thousand miles. It was scratched and dented, salt-scarred and flaking, its GEIST PLUMBING CO. logo no longer legible, although I liked to trace my finger over the spot where my surname had been.
From my window I saw headlamps paint the front of the garage, briefly revealing the crooked, netless hoop where Chris and I shot around in more clement weather. Tires spun on snow, and as he backed out, I caught a glimpse of his arm, the one he’d claimed was dislocated, hanging from the driver’s-side window, a cigarette dangling between two fingers.
I HAVE VIVID DREAMS, and at that age, I kept a journal, writing everything down before I got up to brush my teeth. My entry for that night is blank. I never made it to morning, waking sweaty and disoriented to the sound of a shriek from the kitchen below.
I followed two male voices—my father’s, and another, somber and unfamiliar—down to the living room. From there I could see into the kitchen, where stood a lanky man in green outerwear, a wool cap pulled down over his ears, his thumbs hooked through his belt loops in a poor attempt at nonchalance. He glanced at me. My father then leaned back into the doorway. Taking this as a sign of invitation, I started forward, stopping short when he ordered me back to bed. I had already come close enough to see my mother slumped at the breakfast table, her robe open like the prelude to a vivisection, nightgown sagging to reveal most of her left breast. She seemed not to notice me.
“Go,” barked my father.
Upstairs I tried to listen through the vents, to no avail. Around six A.M. the sky began to wash pale, and I went down to the kitchen to find the man and my parents replaced by my mother’s best friend Rita. She put me in a chair and served me bacon and eggs. Three cups of coffee were still sitting out on the counter. It was obvious that Rita was trying not to cry, so I decided to take it easy on her and not say anything. Once I’d eaten, she moved the dishes to the sink and told me to go watch television. There was nothing of interest on—I never did like Saturday-morning cartoons—and I had to settle for a Twilight Zone marathon, which was what I was still watching, nine hours later, when my parents returned from identifying my brother’s body.
4
An eerie stillness then descended on our house. There was no more name-calling, no upended platters of green beans. Nevertheless, one would be hard-pressed to describe the atmosphere as peaceful. It was, to the contrary, extraordinarily tense, not because we expected another terrible turn of events but because the future seemed absolutely blank, holding no promise at all. We startled easily; we felt restless and unable to concentrate. Conversation faltered at the gate. My grades suffered, and I was reprimanded for repeated tardiness. Waking in the middle of the night, I would come downstairs for a glass of water and find my father sitting surrounded by crushed beer cans flickering like dull blue embers in the light of the muted TV I would stand there, waiting for him to acknowledge me. Only once did he do anything more than nod, offering me a swig. It tasted like mildew; I gagged; he told me to go rinse my mouth out.
The change in my mother was even more profound. She stopped cooking, and for two months we ate donated casseroles. She abandoned her sewing circle. She neglected her garden; come springtime, where there had once been strawberries and tulips, the earth raised nothing but weeds. At times she looked catatonic. Migraines kept her in bed long past the start of school—hence my tardiness. Eventually Rita started coming by to pick me up on her way to work.
I changed, too. I had already figured out that I was different from the rest of my family, but how those differences would add up to a personality was, until then, still very much an open question. When Chris died, I began to answer it.
I had taught myself to read right around my fourth birthday. We had nothing on the shelves at home—come to think of it, we didn’t have any dedicated bookcases, just places to stash disused crockery—and so I lived at the local library, becoming staff pet, volunteering there after school, pushing a cart up and down the aisles, restoring order. It has become cliché to say that knowledge is power, but as a young boy I came to understand the irruptive force of even a single new idea, not least with respect to one’s self-image. I began to feel superior to my family, and contemptuous of them, developing a vocabulary and habits of speech that would’ve been odd anywhere, at any time, let alone there and then. My brother used to refer to me as “the Alien,” and that pretty much summed up how everyone felt, including me. It wasn’t people per se I had a problem with—I was friendly, if a bit shy—but these specific people, my immediate family, who valued the physical over the intellectual, the blatant over the oblique. I looked at the chaos around me and concluded that it was the result not of evil but of stupidity. Drinking yourself into a frenzy was stupid. Getting into fights over nothing was stupid, too. Resorting to violence when you ran out of logic was stupid, and so was spending your day moving around heavy objects, or rooting for a bunch of gorillas in uniforms, or believing that life held no higher purpose than the acquisition of a riding lawn mower. Stupid, all of it. My contempt soon became pity; pity, bewilderment. There had to be something better out there. There had to be a world grander than the one enclosed by Highway 77 and a muddy, unfishable river. I could see that, and I was a child. Why couldn’t anyone else see it, too? But they couldn’t, and since I had no hope of making them understand, I had to get away, or else risk becoming one of them.
If all this was true before Chris died, it became much more so after. Like many philosophers, I started out as a mystic, and like so many mystics, I ran first to the Church. I’m embarrassed to think of it now, although I take some comfort in counting myself among the ranks of luminaries who have flirted with zealotry, religious or otherwise. Until the age of sixteen, when I ceased to believe in God, I was a stalwart at Mass, the ace of my CCD class. In these pursuits I was encouraged by my mother, herself weepingly devout. She considered my dropping by the rectory to hang out with Father Fred a welcome alternative to smoking dope on the auditorium roof.
These days a close, closed-door friendship between a priest and a young boy would be cause for alarm. Justifiably. But in our case it was innocent. Father Fred was (is) simply a decent man, and I credit him for keeping me sane.
He was young, not much older than my father, and despite having been born in our town, he’d gotten out, earning a BA from Columbia, an M.Div. from Yale, and ordination in Rome. Speaker of four languages (English, French, Latin, Italian), reader of two more (German, Spanish), music aficionado (he kept a mandolin on the wall of his office)—he was far too cosmopolitan for our little backwater, and as a teenager, I couldn’t fathom why he’d ever returned.
“Eventually, life circles around. And when you arrive again at the starting point, it looks different, because you see it through the lens of accumulated wisdom. This is where I belong, Joseph. God was wise enough to put me here in the first place. In my ignorance, it took me fifteen years to grasp His intent.”
Unlike my parents, who called me Joey, Father Fred never referred to me by anything other than my full name, and it was thanks to him that I began to think of myself that way: as a complete person, rather than a childish summary of myself. With the onset of adolescence, the alienation I’d always felt from my family began to boil over into a more general hatred of humanity. I condemned everyone around me for sins real and imagined: their narrow goals; their lack of imagination; the false piety of their grief, girls who’d barely known Chris hugging one another and sobbing extravagantly at assembly. I was the prototypical Angry Young Man, my age-appropriate inner turmoil exacerbated by having endured something unspeakable. I was desperate for someone to take me seriou
sly, and Father Fred was that person.
When I reread what I have written, I realize that it might make me sound overly clinical, even cold. This I consider an occupational hazard. People misjudge philosophers when they think us dispassionate. I was and am full of emotion. But I also believe that those emotions find their best expression in language, and that language ought not to be waved around like a loaded gun. Think. Deliberate. Examine. Question. Embrace ideas, and believe that they matter at least as much as possessions, for knowledge has value far beyond its instrumental use. Live awake, and you will have had a better life than the sleepwalker.
It was Father Fred who taught me these things. Through him I came to appreciate the thrill of rational dialogue, learning that even those who disagree can find wisdom in each other’s positions. Argument could create, rather than destroy; it did not have to be loud or end in tears. He took the white light of my hostility and passed it through the prism of reason, separating my emotions, giving them vector and function. Most of all, he never condescended to me, never gave pat answers or tried to put a rosy spin on what was, to me, obviously a miserable, vain farce of an existence.
The Greeks, Avicenna, Descartes, Kant—he showed me how to read them and reach my own conclusions. Together we spent afternoons listening to Anita O’Day LPs and locked in discussion, all the old questions, the ones that have always driven philosophy: What is real? What can we know? And how ought we to act? No matter how many times we had hashed over a subject, there were always new angles to consider, always more to read. He coached me on my college applications, wrote me a letter of recommendation, and lobbied my parents to roll over the money from Chris’s educational fund into mine, enabling me to aim higher than State. When I got into Harvard, he was the first person I called.
The Executor Page 3