Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  The only place he’d really felt comfortable was at Randall’s institution. He’d visited his brother three or four times in October and November, but the last time he went he’d told a staff person to fuck off when she said he needed to leave, that it was time for Randall’s gym class. The institute had written to his parents, told them he “romanticized” his brother, that his visits were disturbing to Randall and the other residents, and that for the time being, he wasn’t welcome.

  The weeks had worn on, he’d stopped going to classes, seen fewer and fewer friends. Late one night a couple of days before the Thanksgiving break, Mack had walked into Somerville. He made his way through the ugly treeless streets to one of the parks he’d worked in the summer before. Alone, under the glaring night spotlight in the cold, he sat on one of the sagging swings and thought of the kids he’d known—Al Inguagiatto, Ray Diglio, Mike Carney. They had all talked about their fate—about the draft, Vietnam—with a kind of careless bravado. If it happened, it happened. If you bought it, you bought it. At least you weren’t working for Earl’s Auto Repair the rest of your life, for Somerville Lumber.

  Probably not all of them had gone—they joked that Ray might get 4-F on account of his acne—but Mack remembered the casual excitement in their voices as they talked about their chances. “At least something will be happening,” Mike had said.

  Now Mack thought maybe that was the moment he’d made his choice—to be like them, to stand in for them, for others like them. For Randall.

  And it had been wrong, the wrong choice. It had done no one any good, had rescued no one, changed nothing. Some of them were surely dead. Or damaged. Randall was gone now. And his own life felt alien and strange to him, like a long, pointless dream he was forced to live slowly through.

  He lay on the bed and watched the fat, cottony clouds move with infinitesimal slowness behind the high spire of the Catholic church. His chest felt as though someone were pressing heavily on it. “Oh, God, Randall,” he whispered into the still, close air. “What do I do now?”

  The service was oddly intimate, David thought. Four or five staff people came from Randall’s residence, but aside from that and one other of Lainey’s brothers—Pete—the immediate family were the only people in the tiny church.

  Paul didn’t wear a robe; Lainey had asked him not to. He stood in front of them dressed just as they were and offered them all the ancient comforts. Near the end of the service he read the passage from Luke: “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.” Lainey’s breath caught. David could hear that she was beginning to weep, and he put his arm around her.

  Paul looked up and was silent for a moment, as though waiting for inspiration. Then he began to speak of Randall. He said that Randall had lived always in a state of childhood, a state of grace, as it were. That he’d escaped time, lived untouched by the struggles that dominated our lives—the struggles of choice, of will, of love and hate. “He was free, in some sense,” Paul said, “of human experience, which the rest of us must suffer, endure, and try to learn from. And part of what those of you gathered here have had to learn from is the experience of Randall himself.” He looked directly at Lainey. “It’s hard to say you wouldn’t have wished him different; in all honesty, you probably would have. But because he was the way he was, you are all different; your lives have taken turns they otherwise wouldn’t have taken. And you’ve grown and changed. It has sometimes hurt you, and been costly, but it has made you what you are.” Now he looked across the pews at all of them. “Randall is in you, forever and ever. In who you have become. He is, he will always be, your child. Even those of you who were children with him have passed into adulthood, while he stayed, in every fundamental way, the same. He is your child too.” He stopped for a moment and opened the heavy Bible to the bookmark. “Let us remember the words of Our Lord from the gospel of Mark: ‘“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.’”

  Paul bowed his head. The organ began slowly to play. Farther down the pew, Mack’s body shook helplessly, his hands rose to his face. David pulled out his handkerchief and passed it down. He knew he wouldn’t be able to cry. Not here. Not in front of all the others.

  Now Lainey and her brothers had gone for a walk on the beach. Mack was somewhere upstairs, behind a closed door. David was lying down in the living room. He’d thought he might take a quick nap, but he found himself instead listening to his daughters through the open window above the couch. They were outside, on the porch. They’d started to compare stories about where they’d been, what they’d been doing, when he’d called with the news; and David realized, abruptly, that they would remember that moment a long time, that Randall would join Kennedy or Martin Luther King in that phenomenon: you’d never forget where you were, what you were doing, when you heard about his death.

  Mary and Sarah had both been in the shower, and Sarah in particular found this coincidence astonishing. “Isn’t it, like, so weird? Just so totally bizarre?”

  “Please,” Liddie said. “Next you’ll be comparing what stage in your menstrual cycle you’re in.”

  Someone must have gestured somehow—Sarah gave Liddie the finger?—because there was a beat of silence, and then they all laughed.

  “Well, where were you, Lid?” Sarah asked.

  “Not in the shower.”

  “But where?”

  “Actually I was just coming back from a rehearsal, a session with one of the soloists in this chorus I’m supposed to be directing—ought to be directing even as we speak.” Her voice warmed to her story. “And I was coming up onto the porch of this boardinghouse where I’m staying through the festival—such a very glamorous life!—and I could hear the phone start, and I knew. Actually I did know. That it was for me. And that it was bad news. And when I came into the hall, sure enough, here was the lady, the boardinghouse lady, you know, in one of those flowery bosomy dresses you can’t believe they even make anymore. And she was holding the earpiece and just turning to me. And she said, ‘Oh, Miss Eberhardt, it’s your father.’ And I thought, Oh, God, it’s Mother. And I took the phone, and she went discreetly into the living room. And listened to every single word I said, I’m quite sure.”

  After a little silence, Nina said, “I was working in the darkroom. And the appalling thing is, I went right back to work.”

  “Well, I can understand that, Neenee,” Sarah said. “I mean, he’d been gone so long. I hadn’t even seen him in years. In a way, he was already dead for me.” After a moment’s silence, she said anxiously, “Don’t you think we all feel that way?”

  “Certainly I do,” Mary said. “I mean, I was saying to Nina, I was about twelve or thirteen maybe when he left.”

  “See, I don’t think he left,” Nina said.

  “What are we speaking of?” Liddie asked.

  There was a pause, and David imagined them in their chairs, all the pretty women. All clearly from the same family, except perhaps Liddie. She’d cropped her hair short and lightened it, he thought. She was very blond, very glamorous now, in a brittle way. It had shocked him, seeing her this time.

  His body had tensed on the couch, and he realized he was waiting for Nina’s answer.

  Finally it came. “I don’t know. Just, if anyone had asked me about our family—where we all were and so forth—I might have said there was one still at home. By which I mean,” she said pointedly, as though someone had made a face indicating protest, or incomprehension, “that psychologically he was still there. Among them. That he was always the one who needed them, needed their protection. The one who had to be arranged for, even a thousand miles away.” In the silence that fell, David could hear the gulls beyond them, and the steady noise of the surf. “Don’t you think Mother and Daddy must have been worried sick about who’d be in charge of him when they died?” she asked. Then she said, “He never
left.”

  “And now he has,” Mary said dramatically, after a moment.

  “It’s so weird, when you think of it,” Sarah said. “Because there’s actually a room for every other person in the family to come home to but him, but he’s the only one who … well … like Nina says, stayed. Psychologically anyway.”

  “And now we get to watch chapter two,” Liddie said. “After the longest chapter one in history.”

  “What do you mean?” Mary asked.

  “What comes next. What they do next.”

  “You think it’ll change things?”

  “God,” Nina said. “I feel it’ll change things even for me. That something’s finally, finally ended in my past.”

  “Too late for me,” Liddie said. “For better or for worse, I hurled myself out of the nest long ago. And look at me now.”

  “What? You like what you’re doing.”

  “I adore it, actually. But it’s a far cry, that’s all I’m saying, from what I once thought I’d be doing.”

  “So? I’m a salesgirl, for Christ’s sake,” Sarah said.

  “You’re twenty-something. And you’re a fiddling salesgirl.”

  “Yeah, but the band will never make me any money.”

  “Well, you’re wise, my precious, if you know that now.”

  Someone stood up—David heard the chair scrape, then the other chairs. Sarah said, “Cripes, I should find Mack. We need to get going.”

  David stood up quickly, too, and went into the kitchen. He could hear them talking, laughing, dispersing through the house, their footsteps moving across the living room, up the stairs, spreading them in their various directions.

  They’d leave soon, all except Mary, who was returning to Chicago with him and Lainey tomorrow. Liddie would go back to prepare for the festival. Sarah and Nina would return to their marginal lives, Mack to his in Vermont. And he and Lainey would be alone with it finally, just as Nina had said. And alone with each other.

  At almost every step of the way so far, he’d felt distant from her, and guilty on account of that distance. He’d known first—he’d been the one the residence could reach. Lainey was downtown for the afternoon, at classes at the Art Institute and then shopping.

  And so he’d canceled his appointments, he’d gone home to the empty house. For a moment now, remembering it, he thought of what Sarah had said, about how Randall didn’t have a room there anymore. Because the first thing David had done when he got home was to go upstairs, to go and stand in the doorway of Nina’s room, the room that had been Randall’s, hoping to be able to find something to feel for his son. The room was strange, the walls half papered, half painted with a forest scene Lainey had invented after Nina and Mack wrecked it. But it called up nothing of Randall, only the anguish David had felt over each of them during their adolescence.

  He’d gone to his study then and started to make the calls. Liddie had an answering machine on, directing him to a number in western Massachusetts, and he reached her there just as she came in. Her voice was frightened, but it eased when he told her the news. She moved directly into practical considerations. It would be a little tough, she said, but she’d get there, wherever they decided the service would be.

  Mack was speechless. David had done all the talking, assuring him he’d get back to him with details of the service. In the background he could hear the wail of country music playing.

  It was Nina’s voice that had made him feel something, the instant swell of sympathy in her tone. He had been afraid he’d weep on the line, and he presented all the information quickly, dryly; but he wanted to stay on with her, to hear that warm, sorrowful voice.

  He’d had to wait for five or ten minutes to compose himself before he called Mary. The two youngest girls were sweet, concerned, but by then what David had to say was nearly routine for him.

  When he was through on the telephone, he’d sat for a few moments in his study. Then he got up and walked methodically through all his children’s rooms. Though he felt a kind of repulsion as he did it, he forced himself to think of the loss of each of them, trying to increase his sorrow for Randall. In Liddie’s room he sat and remembered the night he and Lainey had decided to send Randall away, the night he’d known he was going to come back if she consented to it. He lay down on Liddie’s bed, staring at the ceiling, and thought not so much of Randall himself as of everything Randall had cost him and brought to him, all the years between that first frightened vision of him as ill in the Fourth of July parade and the empty, excruciating visits with him in Connecticut.

  Had he loved him, ever? There were moments, he recalled, moments of love so stabbing and selfless, when Randall would lift his face in pleasure at something simple David had done for him, would smile ecstatically. At those times, David felt that the love he bore for his other children was tainted—by their will, their demands, by his expectations of them to change and grow, to reward his love in some way. That it was only Randall, pure soul, pure need, who called up what in some sense might be defined as pure love.

  But he remembered, too, his own rage—when Randall soiled himself, when he woke the household in the night, when he dispassionately destroyed something: curtains, furniture, dishes. Once he’d stood in the pantry squealing and wincing with pleasure as he dropped glass after glass from the shelf to the floor. He’d nearly finished by the time David got to him.

  He heard the door opening and sat up quickly. Lainey’s voice was pitched to reach him in his study, and he called back that he’d be down in a minute. He heard a rustle and thump as she dropped packages and her purse on the bench. Then she went to the kitchen. He’d gone into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, toweled it, looked carefully at himself in the mirror. There was no sign, none, of whatever he felt of grief, and he was aware of a familiar tug of dislike for all that was self-contained, dry, as he thought of it, in himself.

  He came slowly down the stairs. She’d turned the radio on—he could hear it from the second landing—and she was pulling pots out. They struck each other with metal song. He felt almost dizzy, moving back toward the kitchen. He didn’t know what he would say. He wished he didn’t have to be the one. He stepped into the room and stood for a moment watching her before she looked up. Her face froze; she stilled completely. “What?” she said. “What?”

  And somehow he said it, just his name, then that he was dead. Her arms fell and she dropped the pot, it clattered across the floor. A helpless low cry escaped her. He went to her, he held her, felt the way her sorrow shook her body even before she began to weep. He felt weak. He pulled a chair out with one hand and guided her onto his lap as he sat down. He held her close for a long time before she began to ask him questions, before he had to tell her about the car, about the train that had wailed in the distance and the cry of pleasure Randall had made before he let go of his partner’s hand and began to run across the street. And it wasn’t until then, until that moment of recounting this detail for the first time, that he let himself remember Randall in the yard, crowing happily, his head swinging toward the clatter of the IC or the heavy rumble of the freight cars. It wasn’t until then that he cried too.

  By late afternoon everyone had gone. He and Lainey and Mary sat down to an odd meal of leftovers and talked peacefully among themselves.

  Lainey said, “Maybe the next time we all get together, it’ll be something to celebrate. A wedding. Or a baby.”

  “We had a wedding already,” he pointed out. “And it wasn’t much to celebrate.”

  “Maybe Nina will marry this guy,” Mary said.

  “What makes you say so?” Lainey asked.

  Mary shrugged. “She just seems to feel safe with him. He’s not like her famous rat series. He sounds nice. She really does seem tempted.”

  “Did she say all that?”

  “More or less. But I could tell too. I can always tell about Nina.”

  They spoke idly, with long pauses between remarks. It was easy, like dozens of meals they’d sh
ared with Mary in Chicago when she came over or they met her at a restaurant. Surely their sunniest child, she seemed uncomplicated and serene in the way she moved through life, in the genuine affection she bore for all of them. David remembered his nickname for her and the other little girls: “the unexpected blessings.” How true that seemed now.

  While Lainey went upstairs with her coffee to collect bedding and clean, David and Mary did the dishes. He had a sudden sense of how like Lainey she was physically. The other girls were all thinner, more like him. Mary was big, broad as well as tall. Not heavy, just strong, the way Lainey had been as a young woman. Moving back and forth beside his daughter, he remembered those comfortable evenings with Lainey early in their marriage, before they knew about Randall, when the ease between them as they did their chores had seemed deep and complete and erotic.

  Even Mary’s frown was the same, the little curved line between the dark eyebrows. “How do you think Mother’s doing?” she asked abruptly.

  Mack had asked him this too, and Liddie. It was as though Lainey were the only one they expected to suffer because of Randall’s death, as though David were somehow an impartial observer. I loved him, he wanted to say. I loved him too.

  “About as well as you could expect. It’ll take her a while, I think.”

  Mary nodded.

  Just before they left the kitchen, Mary picked up the square white box that sat on the shelf over the table.

  “What’s this?” she asked, and gave it a slight shake.

  “It’s Randall’s ashes.”

  “Oh! God. Sorry,” she said. Her face was frightened. “It’s just …”

  “No, it doesn’t look likely,” David agreed. He had thought, when the cheerful funeral director handed it over, that the white cube looked like the endless stream of corsage boxes that had sat in their refrigerator on Harper during the girls’ high school years, holding wilting baby roses, flattened gardenias, the odd shriveled orchid for weeks after the event; until Retta, usually, insisted whatever girl it belonged to face facts: it was gone.