Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Oh, but, honey, it does. He’ll be so hurt.” His mother pulled out a chair and sat opposite him. She was holding a saucepan. “Is there anything we can do?” She. was still frowning, and Mack wanted to tell her not to, he didn’t want to see her face like that.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll just explain it to him. I’ll apologize.”

  “No, I mean, can’t we? Maybe I could call.” She looked at the wall, thinking. Several postcard reproductions of famous paintings and the old photos of Freud and Kennedy looked back. “Or you?”

  “Me,” he repeated. Too slow. Concentrate.

  “Yes. Oh, come on, Mack. Think! There has to be a solution.”

  “Mom,” he said, and he noticed how her face changed in response to that; it softened and lifted to him. “Mom,” he said again. More of same; then a pinch of irritation.

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

  “Darling, are you being deliberately obtuse? Daddy—must—come—to graduation. Clear? Now, shall I call school and say you made a mistake? I’m perfectly willing to. Shall I, or would you rather?” Her forehead corrugated in worry. “I certainly don’t want to embarrass you.”

  “No,” he said. Then he said, “I thought he wouldn’t come.”

  Suddenly he felt tearful. He felt a sense of betrayed loyalty. “I thought you … I was trying …” He couldn’t talk; he felt a nameless grief.

  His mother looked stricken. She set the saucepan down between them and reached for his hands. But Mack didn’t want her to touch him. He leaned back in his chair. He was focusing on the yard, on the rectangle of sunlit air, on the motion of leaves.

  His mother’s arms were stretched across the table now, in her reach for him. “This is my fault,” she said. “You poor children are all just caught in this, and now we see …” Abruptly she sat up and buried her face in her hands. Mack watched her, soberly. “Ah!” she cried in irritation. She lifted her head, wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Lord! What self-indulgence,” she said. She smiled sheepishly. “We’ve had enough of that. And you’re right. Of course you were right to do what you did, under the circumstances. Oh, boo hoo,” she said, and sniffed. “Have you a Kleenex, kind sir?”

  “Mmm, no.”

  She got up, tore off a paper towel, and blew her nose, noisily. Then she spotted the saucepan on the table and picked it up. “This was for peas, if memory serves. Let me get this stuff going.” She went to the sink and ran water into the saucepan. Mack was breathing evenly, thinking of the clean air going into his lungs, thinking of it as pure bubbles in his veins, thinking how he was not stoned. Thinking clearly? he asked himself, the voice that checked up. You bet, he answered. “Look,” he said loudly over the running water. “I’ll get an extra ticket. I’ll go to the business office tomorrow.” Done. Good.

  She turned. She whacked a box of frozen vegetables on the edge of the porcelain sink. “I’ll bet they just give you a hard time, honey.” She whacked again. “Nope,” she said decisively. “I’m going to call. It’s only right. It’s me who’s confused you all. Me and Dad. We should make these arrangements, because we caused the problems. When I think …” She tore the box open, sprinkled the glittering, crystallized pellets of green into the water. Peas, he thought. Then she crumpled the box and leaned with her back against the sink, looking down at what she held in her hands as if it were her hopes, her dreams, for all their lives. “What a unholy mess we made of it.” Her voice was vibrating with sorrow. “I don’t know how to say how sorry I am. There should be some … ceremony, some ritual for this.” She turned away from him, she looked out the back door. A train rocketed by, and they both froze, suspended in the noise. When it was gone, she spoke again, more softly. “In church, during the general confession, I always think of you children, of the great wrong done you. A kind of futility to confessing that to God, though, I guess.”

  She looked over at him, smiled gently. “Perhaps at some point your father and I should line you all up and say our mea culpas to you.”

  There was a moment’s silence. An abrupt clear vision of the scene she suggested came to Mack, with Randall robed as some kind of idiot pope or holy emperor, presiding over the ceremony.

  “Hardly imaginable,” she said suddenly.

  “Cause of Randall?” he asked after a moment.

  “Well, that too,” she said, and laughed. “But I was thinking more of Dad.” She lit a match and held it to the burner as she turned on the gas. “Dad’s not big on mea culpas.”

  “Uh,” he said, “Yeah. I don’t suppose he”—he felt a pang of confusion—“I don’t suppose he knows that kind of Latin,” he said slowly.

  “Ah!” she cried out in amusement. “Precisely!” she said. She kicked up the lid to the trash bin and dropped the waxed white box in. “Can you get the gang roused?” she asked. “Dinner in maybe ten minutes?”

  Mack got up, watched her a moment more in her endless traipse, and then went to find his sisters and brother.

  It was about a week later that his father, at the house to pick up the three girls, asked to speak to Mack for a moment. They went outside onto the front steps while the girls yelled back and forth inside, getting ready. His father was taking them to the Fifty-seventh Street Art Fair. He told Mack that he’d be more than willing, if Mack wanted him to, to intervene with his mother so that Randall wouldn’t have to come to graduation.

  Mack looked over at him, sitting at the other end of the wide stair. His pale, unreadable eyes were focused intensely on Mack.

  “Why wouldn’t I want Randall there?”

  “I’m not saying you necessarily wouldn’t. It’s just that he can be difficult; we all know that. And I think it should be your choice. Your mother tends to assume it’s never a question.”

  Mack had an impulse to laugh, but he didn’t. He stood up and stretched. Inside, Mary was yelling at Retta: “If I have to wear that, I’m not going to go.”

  “I dunno,” Mack said. “I think I’d prefer it if the whole family was there.”

  “Well, that’s fine too,” said his father. “That’s a generous choice. But if you should change your mind, let me know.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” Mack said flatly, and turned to go in. “Everybody’s coming.”

  “Oh, good glory!” his mother said.

  Nina looked up quickly. “What?”

  They were all at breakfast except Liddie, who’d gotten in late the night before, and Randall, who’d eaten earlier with Bob and was now in the backyard, swinging. Lainey was still in her bathrobe, and she’d been sitting at the table with them, smoking luxuriantly, deeply, while she drank a second or third cup of coffee. Now she set the cup down. “I’d forgotten Randall.”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve got tickets for everyone,” Mack said.

  “No, what he’s wearing,” she answered in irritation. “Oh, good Lord.” She stabbed the cigarette out.

  “He can wear what he’s got on,” Mack said. “What does it matter?” Randall was wearing a school outfit, chinos and a shirt.

  “I don’t want him wearing what he’s got on. I want him to look like everyone else.” This was their mother at her worst. Her voice was strident, she was ready to be angry at anyone who crossed her. The girls had all stopped eating. They fell silent, fearful.

  “Just don’t do this, Mom,” Mack said quietly. “I can’t stand it when you do this.”

  “Do what?” she said. Then she caught herself. “And don’t you dare speak to me that way.”

  “Mom, this is my graduation. I don’t want you having hysterics and wrecking it. I’m sick of your having hysterics, okay? Just don’t do it.” His own voice had risen. The fearful faces swung to him now—his mother’s too—and he checked himself. “Just tell me. I’d like to know, what is the big deal? What do you want him to be wearing?”

  “I want him to wear a suit, just like everyone else.”

  “Fine, he’l
l wear a suit.”

  “He doesn’t have a suit,” she shrilled.

  “He can wear my suit, okay? I now have two summer suits, got it? He can wear my old suit. I will wear the suit I got for graduation, and he can wear my old suit. God!”

  There was silence in the room. From outside they could hear the rhythmic squeal of the rusty swing.

  “Do you think it will fit him?” Lainey asked.

  “Pretty well, I think. Well enough.”

  Silence. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what gets into me.”

  “Well. Just don’t get like that.” Mack went to the counter and turned on the radio. He leaned toward it, his back to the room. The disc jockey’s voice was rapid, ebullient, giving the weather. “Seventies in the city,” he chanted. “Sixties in the suburbs. Ring-a-ding, cha cha cha.” Behind him, his mother was speaking to Sarah, was asking her to go up and tell Bob he’d have to dress Randall again. Mack bent over the radio and shut his eyes. He began to wish he had some marijuana to get him through this day.

  When he heard Retta arriving in the front hall, it seemed like more than he could stand. He turned quickly and went up the back stairs. In the second-floor hallway, a white motion caught his eye: Liddie in her nightgown, just awake, her hair matted and wild.

  “Mmm,” she said. Her voice was still fogged with sleep. “It’s the graduation boy.”

  “And it’s mayhem already.”

  “Well.” She scratched her hip through her nightgown. “It ain’t what Mother does best.”

  “I’ll say,” he said, and started up to his room. Far below, he could hear Randall begin to bellow. Closer, water started to run in Liddie’s tub. He shut his door and crossed to the window. Sun streamed in the angled dormer. Far across the wide tracks he could see the deep green of the treetops in Jackson Park. After that, the lake, he knew, and then the land on the other side, stretching all the way to the east coast, to where he was headed, to where he’d start his life all over, away from his crazy family. He sat down in the warm light and shut his eyes, let the sun relax and steady him. Randall’s shouting was nearer now; he was in his room, Mack could tell. After a while, he got up, moving slowly. He took out his old suit and one of his white shirts. In a quick impulse of love for Randall, he hooked the new tie he’d bought around the wire neck of the hanger. He carried everything down the attic stairs. Randall’s door was shut, he was yelling inside. Mack knocked and Bob called out for him to come in.

  Bob and Randall were sitting together on Randall’s mattress, Randall in front of Bob between the man’s legs. Bob’s arms were around Randall, pinning Randall’s arms against his own body so he couldn’t strike out. Bob was rocking their bodies together from side to side. Randall’s shouts were regular as breathing.

  Mack had held his brother just like this when Randall was smaller and angry about something, or terrified. He looked terrified now. His eyes moved wildly in his head, he tried to fling himself away from Bob, but he was caught in the even motion of Bob’s rocking. Mack could hear Bob humming between Randall’s shouts.

  Mack held up the clothes. “His stuff,” he said.

  Bob nodded, but he didn’t stop humming or rocking.

  Mack hooked the hanger over the end of one of Randall’s shelves and left the room, shutting the door behind him. Randall had never looked at him, never seemed aware of his presence.

  Mack dressed carefully. His new suit smelled of the plastic bag it had been hanging in. It was a beige one, and he wasn’t sure what socks were correct with it. It was the kind of question he would have asked his father at one time. In the end, since his shoes were dark, he wore dark socks. But he had only two ties besides the one he’d given Randall, and they both looked crummy with the suit. Then he remembered: when he’d taken the socks out of the sock drawer, he’d seen, tucked in the back, the tie he’d taken from his father’s apartment earlier in the spring. He opened the drawer again and pulled it out. It was slightly rumpled, but the color seemed all right with his suit. He put it on.

  He went downstairs, past the solemn poster of Che Guevara hanging in what had been his father’s study. In the kitchen, Retta was bent over, loading the dishwasher, a cigarette dangling from her mouth and her face squinted up in its smoke. She slitted her eyes to look at him and then slowly stood straight. She took her cigarette out of her mouth and rested her hands on her hips. She was wearing work clothes—what looked like a man’s worn flannel pajama top over a tight, pilled synthetic skirt. “Well, now, look at you,” she said, and smiled. “Baby, you are lookin handsome for graduation. Why you didn’t tell me you turned into a man? I might have had some use for you.” Retta often joked like this with him. Never in her real clothes, though. Only when she was costumed like this, like an old woman, a servant.

  Mack knew there was a kind of contempt for him in this distinction. But he still enjoyed the game. “It’s too late for you. Any second I’m going to start hanging out with college girls.”

  “Child, they won’t even know what to do with you.”

  “I’ll teach em.”

  Retta laughed. “That’s all right,” she said. “I believe you will.”

  “I’m splitting anyway, Retta. I’m supposed to be there at nine-thirty.”

  “All right. Everyone else upstairs?”

  “Yeah. They’re all getting ready.”

  She was following him out the hallway to the front door. “That Randall,” she was saying. “He mad this morning.”

  “Well, they got him all dressed in the wrong clothes. Mom forgot.”

  “That’s no good. Everything got to be just so for him. Or else you gonna hear it.”

  He turned on the front steps, frowning up at her in the bright sunlight. “I think he’s okay now. I don’t hear him anymore, anyway.”

  “He be fine, honey.” Retta’s face was kind, suddenly. “You don’t be thinkin about him today. You just have fun. This your day.”

  *

  From the back row of folding chairs set up in the sanctuary, Mack looked out over the audience and blurred his eyes, letting the faces, the bright dresses and jackets, of all the parents and brothers and sisters move and swim into only color, a confused daubed palette stretched out endlessly before him. Denise Daniels was delivering the valedictory, talking about the responsibilities the graduates had to the world they were entering. Her voice, in spite of its rehearsed rhythms—passages you knew had been timed over and over—rang with sincerity. It occurred to Mack as she spoke that she meant it, that all the leaders whose speeches had rung through his high school years had meant it. He had always thought they were pretending, as he would have been pretending, speaking such words. He realized now, with a kind of shock, that they had the energy to be thinking of their lives as citizens, of their place in history, of ambition. It made him think of Annie. She’d been the one, finally, who wanted to split up. And what she’d told him was that he was too cool for her. That she felt foolish, square, around him because she was so crazy about the theater, about acting. He remembered that she’d been crying when she said she didn’t think she ought to go out with him anymore. “It’s just every time I’m being serious about something, you make a joke, you make me laugh. But I don’t want to laugh. I am serious. I’d like to be like you. But I’m not.” And then she said, “It’s just the way I am; I can’t help it.”

  He had felt sorry for her then, for the way she was. It wasn’t until he was walking home alone that he felt sorry for himself, that he realized how much he’d liked the way she was, the freedom to be serious, too, he’d sometimes felt with her. But the lights had been on at Al’s house, and he’d whistled outside and Al had come down. They’d smoked some dope, they’d listened to Jefferson Airplane for a while, and he’d felt better.

  “The world has changed for us since those safe childhood days,” Denise was saying. “Political assassination, wars in distant lands, all seem possible in our everyday lives. We’ve grown up with this. We understand this, in ways m
aybe that you, our parents and our teachers, do not.”

  Suddenly, in the upturned sea of still faces, he saw motion, a rhythmic sideways motion that had all the familiarity to him of his own breathing. He squinted and saw his brother. His mother was next to Randall; she had her arm around him. The motion was a comfortable one, no trouble yet.

  “Now is the moment for us,” Denise was saying, “when we step into the world, with all our ambitions and our hopes for changing that world, for shaping it to us and leaving forever our footprints on its surface. We answer that call, that challenge.” Randall’s rhythm seemed a little connected to Denise’s speech, as though she were singing to him. Mack let his eyes blur again, let the figure become part of the sea of color and form. But now he was aware, always, of the tick-tock of Randall’s body. He looked away, up to where the rose window’s pale radiance shone at the top of the far wall, to the medieval banners hanging in a row from the vaulted arches. But wherever he looked, that rhythm, that pulse, moved in the corner of his eye, nagged at him.

  “At this moment of change for us, we say to you, our parents, our teachers”—Denise looked back for a moment at where the faculty sat, and Mack saw that her face was full of frightened gravity—“we are ready, we ask what we can do, we take up the burden gladly.”

  She turned, and the applause exploded loudly through the vast, chilly chapel. Mack’s hands burned too, he felt unexpected tears stinging his eyes. Denise’s head stayed down until she’d gotten back to her place. Then, before sitting, she looked up and nodded in acknowledgment, once. The applause welled again, rolled over her, over them all, everyone about to begin a new life. And then it stilled abruptly as the school head, Mr. Karmel, rose to begin awarding the prizes and handing out diplomas.