The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  “Where is your mom, Max?” Mrs. Beamish asked, sitting down on the couch beside me.

  “I don’t know. She went with Dad and Puck to the office.”

  “Your father’s office?”

  “Yes.”

  “O Lord,” she whispered. “O Jesus.” Mr. Beamish quickly crossed the room and turned off the television set. He sat down on the other side of me and put an arm around my shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, now, don’t worry,” he murmured with little pats. “They’re saying on the news that a lot of people got out in time.”

  Mrs. Beamish went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of milk for me. I took a few sips and left it aside. Later she brought sandwiches on a plate, which none of us felt like eating. Mr. Beamish answered the constantly ringing phone, and explained the situation to callers, telling what he knew.

  Shortly after noon my grandfather phoned again, to say that he would be delayed. The tunnels and bridges into New York had been closed. He was going to drive farther north to the bridge at Tappan Zee, cross the river there if he could, and double back to Queens and then enter Brooklyn from the east.

  There was a third phone call from him around two in the afternoon.

  “No, sir, James and Sarah haven’t called,” I heard Mr. Beamish say. “There could be any kind of reason for that. Maybe they’re just fine, and it’s the overloaded lines or they can’t get access to a phone.”

  A silence. I listened to the clock ticking too loudly on the kitchen wall.

  “Uh-huh, it was more than an hour and a half between the plane hitting the north tower and when it went down. There was time for plenty of people to get out.”

  Another silence as he nodded and nodded, listening intently to my grandfather.

  “We have to hope,” he said at last.

  More silence.

  “The boy is hurting, but he knows you’re coming.”

  Later, Mr. Beamish got up and crossed the room to the television set, intending to turn it back on. His wife stopped him with a look.

  “It’s broken,” I said, and began to wail.

  The towers, the world, my family, my life were broken, and nothing would ever put them back together again.

  Mrs. Beamish sat down beside me and drew me to herself, holding me tightly. And we were still in that position when my Maryland grandparents walked into the room hours later.

  During the next few days, I slept no more than an hour or two at a time, curled in the fetal position. I wet the bed. The images I had seen on the television played again and again in my mind, and in half sleep I saw my father and mother and little brother plummeting through fire, holding hands as they fell, and smashing on the sidewalk below. I woke up screaming. Later we would learn that they perished inside the tower during its collapse. When it fell they may already have been dead from fire and smoke. They had not jumped. It made no difference to me when I heard the truth, because my mind had conflated the mixture of reality and hallucination into a single memory, imprinting in me an image that would always represent the way they had died.

  There was no funeral, because there were no bodies—only ashes, my parents’ and brother’s ashes mingled with those of thousands of other people. Ashes in my mouth, ashes in my waking mind, ashes in my dreams. There was a memorial Mass in my grandparents’ church in Maryland, standing room only. Throughout the ceremony I sat and stood and knelt between the two pillars of my father’s parents, conscious that the bottom had dropped away beneath my feet, and yet aware that I was held up by their sure hands. I felt panic at moments, but mostly I was numb, watching it all as if I were seeing through a thick glass. I did not consider what they were feeling, to have lost a son, a beloved daughter-in-law, and a grandson. They were strong; I was demolished. I wanted to hide, but wave after wave of sympathy would not let me.

  My Maryland grandparents were now my legal guardians and thus were first in line to take me in. My dad’s several brothers and sisters made offers, but they and their families lived in other parts of the country, in the Midwest and the Deep South. I had met my cousins over the years, at family reunions and weddings, but I didn’t know them well. In the end, the choice was mine. I decided to live with my grandparents.

  On the mantel of their fireplace sat a photograph of a young man in a sailboat. His hair whipped about in a high wind, his hand was firmly on the tiller, his eyes turned to look with a powerful, bursting love at whoever had taken the photograph.

  “Your mother took that snapshot out on Chesapeake Bay,” my grandmother explained. “Your dad loved her so much, Max, so much,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  Grandma Dorothy soon came to visit, traveling by Greyhound all the way from Vermont. She was mourning terribly and looked unwell, her skin yellow gray. She brought me a gift, a scarf she had made for the coming winter, hand-carded wool, her own dye, her own knitting.

  “Did you know that before you were born, Max, your mom used to write plays for the Little Theater we were involved in then, in Stowe?”

  I did know it, because from kindergarten onward my mother had written plays for my school concerts, and the background stories of her life were plentiful. But I shook my head, No, I didn’t know, because I instinctively understood that Grandma needed to give me something of my missing mother, to make her present somehow.

  “Yes, and that’s where she met your dad. They were playing the lovebirds in Our Town, and it wasn’t long before the acting became the real thing.”

  At night, I could hear her in the guest room, trying to suppress the sound of her crying. She hugged me too often, squeezed me too hard, dropped tears on me, forcing me to tighten my body in self-defense, and once to struggle out of her embrace. She did not stay long.

  “How is Grandpa?” I asked during the car ride to the bus station.

  “He is feeling very sad, Max,” Grandma replied, delicately, precisely, with her habitual compassion.

  At the station the three grieving grandparents and the single orphan all hugged each other.

  “Come and see us soon,” Grandma said as she stepped up into the bus. Though there were plenty of empty seats on the side of the aisle that was closer to us, she found one on the opposite side. It puzzled me that she didn’t choose a seat with a window view of the three of us standing on the concrete ready to wave good-bye. As the bus drew away, all we could see was her silhouette, hunched over, enclosed within her loss.

  8

  The end of the world as I knew it

  In early November, two months after the catastrophe, Granddad Davies and I drove up to Vermont in his 1975 ruby-red Ford station wagon, a gas-guzzler in near-mint condition. He had been busy during the previous month, beginning legal work on my behalf, a bureaucratic complexity that he did not discuss with me. He had also closed up the house in Bedford-Stuyvesant and listed it with a real estate agent.

  We stopped at my family home on the way north. I dropped in to see the Beamishes and cried in their arms, though I had fully intended not to. I asked them to say hi from me to their grandson Jeffer in North Carolina, and I jotted down on a piece of paper my new address in Maryland.

  “He could visit me there,” I said.

  Granddad and I walked together from room to room in the empty house, saying nothing, both of us afraid of our emotions, both of us focused on memories in our minds. He unlocked the garage, where the furniture was stored until it could be sold, nothing with highly personal meaning other than an armless “nursing rocker” that had belonged to his great-grandmother. This and a few cardboard boxes we loaded into the back of the station wagon.

  There were dustings of snow on the hilltops of northern Massachusetts and southern Vermont, heavier falls as the route took us higher into the Appalachians, though the valley bottoms remained green. Wherever deciduous forests dominated the landscape, they were leafless gray washes with touches of the last purple oak and yellow beech. The sky was deep blue.

  I did not know what to expect as we drove through
Tadd’s Ford and along the fork to my grandparents’ place. I did not break into cheers at the first sight of the great sorrel horse. It was the first time I had ever come here without my parents. The smoke rising from the chimney of the old white house lifted my spirits, however, and the reunion with Ben and Dorothy was moving, if somewhat awkward. Grandma cried, and Grandpa grew teary, though silent and holding himself back. He initiated a hug, which I appreciated, though it seemed different from the hugs he had given me throughout my childhood. It was brief, tentative, lacking a smile or eye contact. He cast a contemptuous look at the huge station wagon, but made no comment.

  My grandfathers had met only once or twice since my parents’ wedding. On some primitive level I knew that they were not comfortable with each other and strained to maintain the courtesies. They had made fundamentally different lives for their families, and while both had been military men in their younger years, this bond was fragile. Ben had suffered something hard and bad, which had never been explained to me, and I now recalled my father’s words about my mother’s father not recovering from a war he had played a part in. Granddad, by contrast, had retired from the U.S. Navy as a well-loved, much-admired ship’s captain. He was unfailingly kind by nature, a listening person with several close friends who were humorous, reflective men like himself, ever concerned with others and never self-preoccupied. Everyone in the older generation called him Robbie, an affectionate diminutive bestowed on him, without loss of respect, by his wife Helen and his peers. For some years during my father’s childhood, Granddad had been a visiting lecturer at Canada’s Royal Military College. Like my father, he was a hockey man—hence the Toronto Maple Leafs sweater my father had worn in the photo. He had university degrees and read heavy books. He was a patriot of a certain thoughtful kind, loved the sea and sports, and above all, his family. He was strong, my Maryland grandfather, but never mean.

  After a supper dominated by amicable clichés, and a somewhat-guarded discussion about the new war on terror, the men went into the parlor for a glass of whiskey. I stayed to wash dishes with my grandmother. She looked worse than ever. After carefully piling her antique plates into the cupboard, I filled the woodbox with a few armloads of birch while she sat down on the chair by the stove and picked up her knitting basket.

  “Remember the time I fell through the ice, Grandma?”

  “How can I forget!” she said with a smile, then peered intently at her project, counting stitches.

  “Are they treating you all right down there, Max?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered truthfully, wondering if she would have preferred me to live with her and Ben.

  “I go to a new school,” I added by way of detail.

  “Is it a good place?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Any new friends?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, nodding, though it was not true. I still saw airplanes crashing into the towers several times a day, and I didn’t want to talk about it to the other kids my age. Somehow I knew that my childhood had ended, while theirs continued onward seamlessly.

  “Do they make you go to church?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said glumly, “they do.”

  “And how is that working out? Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  And I didn’t, because it was simply what my new family did, though I sat numbly through their services week after week, staring at the alien decorations, the crucifixes, the various sufferings on the walls, while towers fell and fell and fell in my mind.

  “How is Grandpa?” I asked her.

  “He’s not doing very well, Max. He’s drinking again, far too much for his health. And the. . .”

  “And the cannabis crop?” I asked.

  She looked up at me sharply.

  “There’s no crop. He doesn’t do that anymore—grow it, I mean. But he spends a lot of time smoking in the cabin by the pond. It makes him sicker and sicker, but he can’t stop himself.”

  Stunned by her candidness, I had no idea how to respond.

  “He loses his temper without it,” said Grandma with a weighted sigh. “It might be better to give him some elbow room, Max. Stay back a pace or two and stick by your Granddad Davies while you’re here.”

  This did not make any sense to me, but I told her I would.

  “He says hard things, you see. Things he doesn’t really mean. He’s hurting and angry at life. Angry at the way things have gone in his life.”

  I nodded, yearning to change the subject.

  “We brought you some of Mom’s stuff,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s very nice,” she answered distractedly.

  I went into the parlor, where I found Granddad bringing the last of the cardboard boxes in from the car. He had set them in a pile by Grandpa’s armchair and was explaining what they contained.

  “Half of her photos are for you and Dorothy, but I thought Max should have a selection to remember her by.

  “And this is her little computer, one of the earlier models. She bought it so she could compose her plays on it. It’s a lot easier to edit with one of these machines. There must be three or four dozen plays here. I was also wondering if you’d like to have her old Underwood typewriter. Anyway, I brought it along for you.”

  “We have a typewriter,” said Grandpa, refilling his glass.

  “And a box of her letters to Jamie from their summer theater days. I hope it’s all right, I kept back a few for Max.”

  “Fine by me.”

  And so it went. Before long, my eyes were drooping. I stood and said good night to the men and went upstairs to the bedroom where Puck and I had always slept. I pushed the rocking horse and listened to it squeak. I undressed and crawled under the quilt. Lying in the dark, listening to the drone of my grandfathers’ voices in the room below, I tried to remember the best things about Puck. I wanted to cry. But at the moment I was capable of neither and fell right asleep.

  Granddad and I spent the next morning visiting with Grandma in the kitchen, drinking tea and nibbling her date squares, listening to her stories about my mother. Grandpa was nowhere to be seen, and my grandmother had no idea where he had gone off to. At one point I wandered into the brewery hoping to find him, and was surprised to see no one working in the building, though the vats were fermenting their beer as they should.

  Deciding to have a look at the pond, I went around behind the house and through the saplings into the small field beyond. And there I found Grandpa just coming out of his cabin with a cigarette clenched in his lips. He was hunched over and stumbling, carrying a cardboard box. He did not at first see me.

  He took my mother’s computer out of the box and placed it on a chopping block beside the woodpile. He lifted an axe in both hands and swung it down hard on the top of the computer, which bounced and cracked. I yelped with surprise, but he did not hear me as he smashed it again and again. Enraged, snarling, gritting his teeth on ugly words, he picked up the pieces and hurled them into the middle of the pond. His chest and belly heaving, he pulled a long black bottle from his trouser pocket, put it to his mouth, and clamped his teeth on the cork, which he popped out and spat onto the ground. Tilting his head back, he gulped down the bottle’s contents. When it was empty, he lifted his arm to throw it into the pond.

  “Grandpa,” I called nervously, “it’s almost lunchtime. Would you like to come in and have lunch with us?”

  He stared at me, scowling, not replying, his body weaving a little. Staggering over to me, he shoved the beer bottle into my hands.

  “Here,” he growled, “cash it in for a two-cent refund.”

  I was frightened by his mood but glad to receive the bottle. On its label was a sorrel horse.

  His mouth twisted bitterly, his eyes snapping with hatred.

  “You killed them, you little parasite!” he seethed.

  Now my fear became terror and I backed away from him.

  “Get out!” he bellowed. “Go back to your nice safe life, you little accident!”

/>   I turned and ran to the house.

  Bursting into the kitchen, I stammered incoherently.

  “Grandpa’s m-m-mad,” I said, bursting into tears. “He y-y-yelled at me. He t-t-told me to g-g-get out.”

  Stricken, Grandma got up from her chair and came to me with outstretched arms. Granddad rose to his feet, his lips tightening.

  “What happened, Max?” he asked.

  “He told me to g-go. He said I k-k-killed Mom and Dad.”

  “What!” Grandma cried. “Oh, nonsense, nonsense, Max. He didn’t mean it.”

  Without a word, Granddad went outside through the kitchen door, his pace slow and deliberate, his face as quiet as a grave. I had rarely seen this before—once, when he heard a neighbor beating his wife and went over to stop it. And another time when his Irish setter died and he buried it in his backyard. And lastly when he went up to read from scripture during the memorial Mass for my family.

  Ten minutes later he was back, just as slow, just as determined.

  “You didn’t hurt him, Robbie,” Grandma pleaded.

  “No, I didn’t hurt him, Dorothy. I said a few things he’ll have to ponder, maybe have to live with the rest of his life. But I didn’t lay a hand on him. He went off into the woods when I was finished.” Granddad turned to me. “Okay, Max, let’s get our gear together and push off. Homeward bound, lad. Hop to it.”

  Out in the yard, we made a messy disjointed farewell with Grandma. Granddad hugged her a long time and she clung to him. He kissed her forehead. We drove down the lane waving good-bye, my head out the window, watching her wave back until we rounded a corner of the fork and were gone from her eyes. It was the last time I ever saw her.

  Grandma Franklin died of cancer the following spring. Ben died the year after that. By then, the brewery had closed down, neglected and finally bankrupt. I never learned what caused my grandfather’s death, or perhaps Granddad Davies chose not to tell me. In any event, he died as a long-term guest in a commune of young people trying to live close to nature, a category that included the cannabis plant. Hard drugs were looked down upon by these sensitive, creative people, who on the whole meant well and had some good ideas about gardening and self-sufficiency (I was later to learn), but their attachment to certain altered states of consciousness induced by their chosen natural ingredients tended to cripple their dreams. What most of them were really looking for was a stable family and community, a human birthright that was natural enough but declining in our world.