Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Lainey, there are lots of options to play out before that happens. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “But unless he does something, he’s going to get drafted. Mack, surely you can’t imagine fighting in this horrible, immoral war.”

  “There are a lot of other people doing it, Mom,” he said; but at the same time David was saying, more loudly, “There are a lot of options to play out, Lainey.” And apparently reassured, she nodded. She didn’t seem to have heard what Mack had said.

  Two days later, Mack got a job at Kroch’s & Brentano’s. It was just for the holidays, wrapping and preparing gift books to be mailed. The pay was minimum wage, but Mack didn’t care. He didn’t have to be at work until four—the store was open until nine each weeknight up to Christmas—and he could wear whatever he wanted because he wasn’t on the floor. And he liked the big store, the smell of the books, its quiet.

  After work he often stayed downtown for a while, wandering among the expensive shops, looking over the lavish display windows, the twinkling amber lights. Everywhere, Christmas carols were piped in, and sometimes you could catch people humming or singing them under their breath as they hurried around. Mack felt a pleasant sense of isolation from it all: this was life as other people lived it. He, he was on another track.

  At some point he’d head back to Hyde Park on the IC. Occasionally he’d take his mother’s car late at night and go out again—to Jimmy’s or to Rob’s apartment or to hear Soletski’s band, which played every now and then in some seedy joint for a cut of the door money. Sometimes he’d stay on with the band after they closed a place, or move with them to a party in someone’s apartment. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs. The female singer, Irene, and one or two of the musicians were occasionally shooting heroin, and everyone else smoked dope and drank constantly. There were times when Mack fell into a stuporous sleep in some strange bed and woke still slightly drugged in the early morning hours. He often had to drive around for five or ten minutes in his mother’s car before he figured out where he was, which direction to head in to get home.

  Sometimes he felt a kind of revulsion at his life, and then he did something with Nina. Once he took her to see King of Hearts, and she seemed wildly excited by its vision of life—the loonies in charge. And when the people he’d gone to high school with, his classmates, began drifting home for Christmas vacation and Mack suddenly had his choice of parties to go to almost every night, he took Nina to a few of those too.

  One was at Jennifer Furman’s house. Late in the party, he noticed a guy he’d hardly known back then talking to Nina. Her head was lifted to listen, her long dark hair fell like a luxuriant shawl over her back and shoulders. She was wearing a lot of makeup these days, and it made her look older. He had thought when she came down the front stairs that night that she looked old enough to be someone he was dating. Across the room now she laughed suddenly, and her face, which in repose seemed full of sorrow, leapt to girlish life.

  On the way home, she thanked him for bringing her along. “It’s wonderful to get away from all the people who think that you’re just … a certain kind of person,” she said.

  They drove in silence for a while. Nina was smoking. She never did at home, and Mack wasn’t sure whether his parents knew about it. She tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. Finally she said, “What’s going to happen, Mack?”

  He looked over at her. “What do you mean?”

  “With you. Are you going to Canada?”

  “I dunno.” He smiled. “Is that what you’d do?”

  Her look over was careful, thoughtful. “I’m not sure. ’Cause you couldn’t come back, after all.”

  “That’s the argument, all right. For me not to go, I mean.”

  She inhaled, and watched the cloud of smoke she blew back out. Then she turned to him and said, “But why don’t you just go back to school? It can’t be so bad.” She made a face. “It can’t be as bad as it is every single day for me.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” she said. She shrugged. “Or maybe not. I am Miss Mysterioso. A veddy veddy unusual personne.” She pulled a veil of her hair across her nose, hiding the lower part of her face. Then she threw it back. “Wondered about by thousands,” she said.

  “Loved by none,” he said.

  She laughed. “So true.” She leaned forward and stubbed her cigarette out. “I can tell you exactly what it’s going to say under my picture next year. Want to know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Still Waters Run Deep.”

  He laughed, and then there was a moment’s silence.

  Then she said, “I don’t understand it, really. Just because I’m sort of … shy, I guess. But it’s like I’ve got this infectious disease or something.” Suddenly she arched her fingers so they looked like claws and leaned toward him. “I touch you, and you die.”

  “Oh, please, please, Miss Mysterioso. Don’t don’t touch me.” He swerved the wheel hard, and the car rocked sideways.

  She shrieked and laughed. They settled back.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s not that much longer.”

  “Except it’s forever. It seems forever.”

  “I know.”

  She leaned back and sighed dramatically. Behind her, the plain of the Midway stretched flat and black. “But why don’t you?” she asked. “Go back, I mean.”

  “Because I’m tired of that. Of just consenting to my life. I hated school. I wasn’t learning anything. I felt completely false, and after a while I just stopped anyway.” He shrugged. “Besides, I withdrew officially. Dad made me.”

  “He made you?” Her voice was incredulous.

  “He made me choose. Supposedly so he could get his money back. Actually”—Mack grinned—“because he was so fucking pissed he couldn’t see straight.”

  “I didn’t know that. God, what was he thinking of? I can’t believe he did that! Doesn’t he know what’ll happen?”

  “Well, as I said, it’ll happen anyway.”

  “But when it happens, then what?” He didn’t answer, and after a moment she said decisively, “I think you should be a CO.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. I knew a guy. Well, I didn’t actually know him. I read this article about him. And he was a CO, and now he’s doing some work in a hospital somewhere. A mental hospital.”

  “Well, it’s a possibility. Too bad I haven’t been to church in years. That do help with CO.”

  She was watching him. “What are the other possibilities?”

  “Well, I could render unto Caesar.”

  “You mean go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But your life isn’t Caesar’s! Or the army’s. Or whatever.”

  “It is as much as anyone’s is. Is anyone’s?”

  “Well, some people want to go.”

  “Huh. I wonder if that could be true.” He downshifted and turned the steering wheel. The car nosed onto Harper Avenue. “But of course, Dad will offer to fix it too. There’s that way out. Go to shrink and be pronounced crazy. Be cured of the army by being found nuts.”

  “Dad does have that way.”

  He looked sharply at her. He remembered abruptly all he had wanted to do for Nina once, all he had wanted to show her. He’d been so caught up in the events of his own life that he hadn’t thought of her in what felt like years. He hadn’t considered who she was, or was becoming. Until this moment. He noticed now that the fingers that had held the cigarette were ripped, chewed around the nails. He knew she seemed lonely, she almost never went out. And he saw now that her way of being pretty—dark, sober, handsome really—was not something that would be useful to her in high school. He felt a sweep of concerned tenderness for her suddenly. He wanted to help her, to touch her—to reach beyond himself—and this unsummoned sensation was so welcome, such a relief, like shedding an imprisoning garment, that he wasn’t able to speak for a moment.

  But just as he had gotten control of himself, just as he was about to sa
y something to her, Nina reached over and rested her scabbed fingers on his arm. “I want you to know, Mack,” she said softly, “that I’d do anything I could to help you.”

  He parked the car and turned off the engine. He looked at her tender, pretty face in the dark for a moment, and then he laughed out loud.

  Mack had to work on Christmas Eve. Customers kept arriving up until the moment the doors closed. Many of them bought eight or ten books, all to be wrapped separately. The tables had been out on the floor for four days, and Mack worked frantically, yanking the expensive paper, the multicolored ribbons, off their large spools. But there wasn’t the feeling of impatience, of being rushed, that had hummed through the store for the last several days; the customers had a pleasant air of resignation about them. Mack commented on it to one of the last people waiting in line, a black man in an elegant camel-hair coat. “We all know we’ve been bad,” the man said. “We’re not out to prove anything.”

  The cleaning crews were already descending by the time Mack had finished picking up the mess around his table. And when he stepped outside, the streets were nearly empty, in sharp contrast to the sense of urgent bustle when he’d come in to work at four.

  The night was cold and clear, and Mack’s ears burned as he walked to the IC. Even the train was nearly empty—a few late workers, like himself heading home, and, in his car, two weary-looking women with shopping bags packed tightly around them as though propping their bodies up. He got off at Fifty-seventh and walked the length of the wooden platform, looking down at the lighted town houses below him on one side, at the dark park on the other. His footsteps on the boards were the only sound. In the viaduct under the tracks too, his solitary scuff echoed in the empty space.

  No one was home, but he’d expected this. He had warned his mother that he’d probably be late, and she’d said they would go on to the Christmas Eve service. He could join them there if he got back in time. He saw that the keys to his father’s car were on the hook in the front hall as an invitation.

  His coat still on, the collar turned up, he went into the living room and sat down on the couch. The lights on the tree were plugged in, but otherwise the room was dark. The bubblers made the walls shimmer with underwater motion. Under the tree, the presents were heaped—a smaller pile in recent years, so many ancient relatives had died. Liddie had been due to arrive home this afternoon after Mack left for work, and he could tell she must have added hers—dotting the top of the slope, there were numerous packages wrapped in the equivalent of tie-dyed tissue. And scattered here and there among them all, glamorously wrapped, were Mack’s presents too, books, bought with his employee discount.

  He got up and went over to the tree. He knelt by the presents. He looked through them, squinting at the tags, opening the little folded cards taped on the various odd wrappings. Every possible family permutation was there. It was like one of those sociograms he’d failed to study this fall: Sarah to Liddie, Liddie to Nina, Nina to him (a square flat package, a record), and so on. He was touched, abruptly, with a sense of the crisscrossing, weblike love that held the rest of his family together. And ashamed of how careless he’d been in his own selections.

  He went back to the kitchen. It was just ten. He must have barely missed them. Standing in the silent room, he could hear the minute hand click, move. He decided abruptly that he’d go, he’d join them. Hurrying now, he went back to the front hall and lifted the keys from the hook. He pulled the door hard after him to lock it.

  The seat in his father’s car was icy under his ass and legs, and Mack shuddered and hunched over the steering wheel as he drove through the lifeless streets. Everywhere, there was this silence. Everywhere, lighted trees in the windows, and no people. A wild desolation seized him. He turned on the radio, fiddled with the knob until he got a talk show, relaxed into the sound of the impassioned, argumentative voices.

  He had to park about a block away from the church. As he approached it, walking, he could hear the singing from within. Appropriate: “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” He smiled and felt eager in spite of himself. And when he opened the door, the music, the hundreds of voices, embraced him as viscerally as heat.

  He stood behind the last row of pews, trying to spot his family; but the congregation was standing too, a wall with their backs to him, and he realized there was no possibility of finding anyone. Singing himself as he walked forward, he moved up the side aisle, looking for any empty space. He finally found one about two thirds of the way up. When he stepped into the pew, the woman standing next to him turned and handed him the hymnal she’d been singing from, then moved closer to the man on her other side to share his. Mack finished out the carol with the rest, then bowed his head as the minister intoned a welcoming prayer.

  When everyone had sat down, Mack saw that his family was only about four pews ahead of him. Mary was leaning to whisper something to Sarah, and they made faces at each other. His father’s head turned in profile, surveyed the church, and turned back again. Was that a search for Mack? Impossible to know.

  Mack thought of all the Sundays he’d sat in this church with his family, almost always without his father. His absence was reasonable enough—he was the one who stayed home with Randall. But it fed Mack’s sense of perplexity about just what, if any, his father’s religious convictions were. About a year ago, Mack had read The Future of an Illusion for a course, and he was sure it held the answer, that this must be it. But when he’d tried to talk to his father about it, David was dismissive. He’d said something brusquely about his not necessarily believing every idea of Freud’s just because he was a psychiatrist.

  His mother’s feelings, on the other hand, were transparent, always had been. She’d appeared in the parish hall every Sunday of his youth, waiting for them as they trooped down from Sunday school. They would follow her into church, like imprinted goslings, Mack thought. He remembered her hopeful face before church, her rapt attention during the service, taking in the message, which would seem to lift her, change her, until the next crisis—someone’s temper tantrum, an act of destruction by Randall—brought her around again to hysterics, to slaps, then remorse for her own weakness. Sometimes in church, though, he would hear that odd dull click in her throat and, without turning his head, know that she was weeping in quiet joy. Her head even now was unswervingly fixed in the direction of the chancel. Mack followed the track her gaze must be taking. The chancel was gaudy with color—white and red poinsettia, the lush green of their leaves.

  The minister was reading about God having set Jesus above the angels, his voice imitating God’s, pronouncing richly, “Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.” Mack stared up at him. He was a young man with long sideburns and wire-rimmed glasses. He was new since Mack had gone to college. Lainey had pointedly mentioned his work with draft resisters several times to Mack.

  When the minister was finished, he turned and walked back to his thronelike chair. There was coughing, stirring. The organ began with the last two lines of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” and the congregation rose, began lustily. They did all the verses, and Mack’s throat was dry and aching slightly when he sat down. He was grateful for the long prayer the minister launched himself into, but he didn’t listen hard. He was thinking about his family with a tender feeling, like regret. Then the children’s choir performed several pieces. After they’d sat down, the minister came forward again and began to read: “In the beginning was the Word,” he intoned majestically. “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Mack knew this passage by heart—he’d had to learn it for Sunday school, and it had always intrigued and puzzled him. He was startled, then, when it changed suddenly, when, in the middle, there were several lines he’d forgotten utterly, not about Jesus but about John: “There was sent a man from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.” That was it; then it moved right back to the lines Mack remembered: that Jesus
was the Light, that he made us sons of God if we believed. The minister wound it up: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

  During the next hymn and the short homily, Mack kept thinking about those strange lines—old John the human being, stuck right into the middle of the Bible’s strangest passage about Christ. It pleased Mack, and touched him.

  As the mihister pronounced the benediction, Mack felt suddenly that he needed to cling to this feeling, that he didn’t want to talk to anyone, not yet. He tried to thread his way quickly toward the side doors, but the cheerful throng, shaking hands, greeting one another, slowed him. He knew if he looked hard at the wrong face, it would open in recognition and welcome, so he kept his eyes cast down as he slid around people, murmuring apologies. Just as he was about to step outside, he turned to see if his family had noticed him. Through the crowd his eyes met Nina’s; recognition animated her face, but he raised his finger to his lips and turned into the dark night.

  He felt he was holding on to something, something he thought of as solitary and pure in himself. He drove out to the lake and headed south. He drove around for a long time, through the ghetto, into South Shore. There were bars and restaurants open, he saw, but he didn’t want that either. He didn’t know what he wanted; he didn’t know where to go to find it.

  At a stoplight under the el, a black man knocked on his window. It frightened Mack. He tried not to look at the man. But the man called to Mack: “Mister. Mister.” He was drunk, slurring the word. “Merry Christmas,” he shouted on the other side of the glass. “Mer-ry Christmas, mister.” Mack got his wallet out. He didn’t have much. A five and some ones. He rolled his window down and gave the man the money. The cold air, and the rich, horrible stink of the man’s breath washed into the car. “God bless you,” the man said earnestly. He was gripping the edge of the window. “You’re a good man.” Mack noticed that his fingers poked through the worn tips of his gloves. “You’re a good man, mister.”