They were a block away from the building Ed had grown up in. He might have driven a few thousand times to the BQE from where they were standing.
“It’s not far,” he said. “It’s only a few blocks.”
She cut Ed off and gave Margie the directions. She waited until Margie was out of earshot.
“You don’t know where the BQE is?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s right around here.”
She looked at Connell huddling by the car waiting to go, then back at Ed, and she was overcome by the difference in age between father and son. Ed looked more like a contemporary of his mother’s than a husband to her. His shoulders hunched forward and his face was scored with new wrinkles, as if the trauma of his mother’s dying had aged him. She knew she would have to play nursemaid to him eventually, but she wanted to hold that off as long as possible.
That night, although they were in mourning, and although Phil and Linda were in the guest bedroom, Eileen got on top of Ed, leaning close to him as she moved back and forth. Afterward, she lay wondering how long he’d be able to perform in bed. The thought of the loss of consort kept her awake most of the night, and it was only toward morning that she realized it wasn’t the idea of physical loneliness that had been bothering her but an incipient awareness that she herself was going to die someday.
• • •
She kept a log of the first times he failed to do things. It was like a diary of a child’s development in reverse. Certain failures correctly augured great changes in his mental powers. Others were false alarms, momentary hiccups.
02/19/94: Couldn’t find the BQE after Cora’s funeral. Losing his sense of direction.
At Karen Coakley’s wedding, she turned her back on Ed to get a plate of hors d’oeuvres. When she next spotted him, he had joined a group arranged along the far wall for a picture with the official photographer. It was the groom’s family, and she didn’t recognize any of them, and yet Ed was smiling gamely among their number, as if he’d watched them all grow up. He was ruining the photo by his presence. When the photographer was finished, she whisked him away with a quick, pitiless jerk, hoping no one had noticed him, though there was nothing she could do about Karen and her husband seeing him there when they examined the matte prints.
A provocative beauty emerged from the group, looking flustered. “I got felt up,” Eileen heard her say indignantly. “This man put his hand on my ass.”
“Who?” the boyfriend asked. “Point him out.”
The girl motioned in Ed’s direction. The boyfriend, packed like a sausage into his suit, started punching his palm in a manner both absurdly unoriginal and genuinely frightening. Eileen shifted instinctively in front of Ed, holding up her hand to halt their advance like a crossing guard protecting a child.
“It’s not what you think,” she said as calmly as she could. “It’s not what you think at all.”
04/16/94: Grab-ass at Karen’s wedding. Be there when he meets people. Stay by his side at parties. That time he held onto Susan’s breast when saying good-bye? No accident.
They were invited to a party in Chelsea at the home of the chief of staff. They parked several blocks away and walked, soaking up the energy of a Manhattan evening. Ed had on a beautiful suit, she an expensive dress she’d bought a year ago and hadn’t had occasion to put on. She was enjoying wearing it. It fit a little snugly, with all the stress she’d been under lately, but it still framed her shape nicely.
She didn’t notice until she was a few paces ahead of him that Ed had fallen back like a recalcitrant dog on a walk.
“What is it?” She went back and tried to pull him along. “What’s going on?”
“You go without me.”
“This is absurd,” she said. “We’re a block away.”
“I’ve never met these people.”
“So what? They’re nice people.”
He shook his head.
“You’re going, Ed. I RSVP’d. I can’t mess around here. This guy, the chief of staff, he didn’t bring me in. He’s younger. I need to make a good showing tonight. I need you to rise to the occasion. Okay? I need to make it to ten years.”
“They’ll never know the real me,” he said.
It hadn’t occurred to her that Ed might think this way, but then they hadn’t spent much time around people who didn’t know him before.
“Half of you is better than ninety percent of people with a whole brain,” she said, and was surprised to find she believed it. “Even now, you’re funnier and smarter than most of those people in that room will be. Don’t forget who you are. Stick by me and they won’t notice a thing.”
He was at her elbow all night and no one was the wiser. The good thing about parties was that no conversation had to go that deep. If Ed didn’t answer a question right away, it fell back to the questioner. He only seemed more interesting the more time he took to answer. She held the plate and gave him only one-bite morsels. The dim lighting, the noise, and the crowd all helped. In his suit, Ed cut a dashing figure. He gave her an advantage with the chief, who talked with him for a long time about the research he’d done.
When they reached the street on departure, Ed was shaking so much that he could have been having a seizure. She saw that he must have exerted superhuman will to keep it together for her.
For several days, he seemed drained, and not long after, his conversation began to suffer.
05/20/94: Slurred speech after Chelsea shindig.
A few months after Frank had his stroke, they met Ruth and Frank at the Metropolitan Museum. Frank was in a wheelchair.
They’d only been there a few minutes when Ruth insisted she needed a break from her husband. Eileen understood; Ruth had Frank to herself round-the-clock now. They told Ed and Frank to wait at a bench and slipped away to a costume exhibit. Even though she was thoroughly utilitarian in her attire—a powder-blue cardigan was an extravagance for her—Ruth performed delighted astonishment at the beauty of the elaborate dresses. Eileen’s gaze lingered on the cascading folds of finger-thick fabric, which seemed almost big enough for a person to hide away in.
When they returned to the bench, their husbands were gone. Eileen felt panicked, but a hunch led her to the main gallery, where she saw Ed standing, hands on the wheelchair handles, in front of his favorite painting, David’s Death of Socrates. Between him and Frank they barely had a whole working body.
She and Ruth walked up silently behind them.
“This one in the middle is Socrates,” Ed was saying. Eileen and Ruth looked at each other. “And this man with his hand on his knee. I forget his name.” She wanted to say “Crito,” as she’d heard him say before, but she kept quiet. “And the man at the end. I forget his name too.” Plato, she thought. “You know the story?” Frank was nodding along. “They’re making him take the cup.” Frank’s head was nodding like a piston. “They’re afraid of the influence he’s had on people.” She was amazed at how much of this he remembered. Ed wheeled Frank closer to the painting, and she felt the guard’s eyes on them.
“Look at his finger pointing up,” Ed said. “He’s saying, ‘I know there’s more after this.’ The cup is filled with . . . with . . .” Ed grappled for the word. Frank started to say it but couldn’t get it out. He stammered a couple of syllables.
“Hemlock,” Ruth said tersely, but not without emotion, as she took the handles of Frank’s wheelchair and began the march out of the room.
6/11/94: Went to Met. Ed forgot Crito, Plato, hemlock.
He was haunting her in the kitchen. She could tell he wanted to feel useful. She told him to chop a turnip. She had her back to him cooking and heard a lot of noise. When she turned he had lodged half the turnip on the knife and was banging both of them, turnip and knife together, on the cutting board. Connell, who had been sitting at the table looking through philosophy books for quotes for the upcoming debate season, leaped up and seized the knife.
“Give me that!” he said. “Jesus! What the hell
are you doing?”
She pulled Connell into the dining room. “I will smack your face,” she said, “if I ever see you talk to your father like that again. I don’t care how old you are.”
Ed sulked in front of the television until he went up to bed—at three thirty in the afternoon.
08/03/94: Bedtime today broke the 4:00 barrier.
60
His father stood bowlegged before the coffee machine, looking at once like a baby with a load in his pants and an old gunslinger who had walked through the desert and been struck by lightning. He was wearing a tie but it was backwards, the thin part in front of the thick part.
He shook the filter out what seemed like a hundred times, smoothed it against the swing-hinged filter holder, righting and rerighting with animal vigor what was already in place. Connell watched uneasily. His father worked as though everything depended on this, looking the way he used to look when sanding edges or sawing boards. He’d crumpled the filter, so it didn’t fit properly. Connell took a new one out of the box and put it in. He took the tie off him and retied it on himself while his father laughed meekly and looked at the floor.
When his mother came home, Connell went down to the car to help with the groceries, his father following closely behind. He could see his mother evaluating the bags she handed to his father. She made sure he only had cans, lunchmeats, and boxes, nothing that would roll too far away or break.
His mother pulled out a box of Ritz and opened it before the bags were even unpacked.
Connell tore open a bag of potato chips. “I can’t stop eating lately,” he said to his mother. Both their mouths were full.
“Don’t catch my disease,” his mother said. “I eat to fill the void.”
It occurred to Connell that the void was the house itself. It was too big, too empty; he could imagine eating himself into obesity in it.
• • •
He needed to go far away for college. The farther he went, the harder it would be to come back. The cost of plane tickets would be too high to make flying home a regular possibility.
He went through the list of colleges he and his mother had come up with together: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Williams, Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown, along with a couple of local safeties, Drew and Fordham. Every school on the list was less than five hours away. He decided he wouldn’t apply to any of them except the safeties. He made a new list: Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Stanford, Rice. Nothing small or that she hadn’t heard of or whose virtues he’d have to explain. Nothing, in short, that she wouldn’t pay for. He was going to force her hand. She’d never let him go to either of the safeties if he got into one of the better, farther-flung schools, even if the safety gave him scholarship money, which there was a chance they would: he had the grades, the SAT scores, and he had finished third in the state in Lincoln-Douglas debate. She would rather pay full freight and put a Notre Dame sticker on the car. She had explained how she was going to pay for his schooling: something about borrowing against the equity they had in the house and taking out private loans. All he knew was she’d told him she was going to make it so that he wouldn’t have to worry about paying the loans back. And if it didn’t work out, he would put the Drew sticker on the car himself—because what right did she have to be disappointed in him for going to Drew, when she’d only gone to St. John’s?
He felt like he could see the whole world, clearly, all at once. He was going to leave everything behind. He was about to be born again, but this time complete with all the defenses he would ever need. He would invent the world as he went along. He would pass through a thousand years in the blink of an eye.
61
Connell ran to catch the last train out of Grand Central, the one-thirty, but it was pulling out as he arrived at the platform. He sighed and kicked the big metal newspaper recycling bin. He had already seen that when you lived in the suburbs and you missed the last train, you entered a netherworld, a night town. It was going to be a long time until the five-thirty train.
He decided not to call to say he’d missed the train, even though his mother had told him to call no matter how late if he wasn’t coming home, because he felt too guilty to hear her voice. He had left that morning and hadn’t checked in all day. There wasn’t room in his mother’s overtaxed mind for her to enforce curfews and restrictions. She just counted on him not to get into trouble. He kept up his end of the deal, but he knew she wished he were around more. She had grown accustomed to his coming home late, but she hadn’t stopped feeling hurt by it. When he came in at half past two, after walking a silent path from the station, he sometimes heard her call to him quietly as he passed his parents’ room at the top of the stairs. Lately, though, she had learned to sleep through the night. Tonight he was going to take his chances that he’d get in before she awoke in the morning. It was easier to avoid conflict of any sort.
He walked across Forty-Second to the B, to head down to West Fourth. A girl he’d briefly dated had told him about a place on West Tenth called Smalls, where she’d stayed literally all night once. They let underaged kids stay as long as they didn’t try to order alcohol. It was a jazz club. He didn’t know anything about jazz, but it was better than sitting in a diner and having to fight to stay at a table.
He handed over the cover charge. The place wasn’t full. He sat at an empty table near the stage, under the lights, and ordered a Coke. The set was a mellow trumpet backed by drums, a piano, and a sax.
Faces in the crowd smiled warmly at him. The waitress didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t running up a bigger tab. When the trumpeter finished blowing a solo, the audience drizzled him with applause—a comforting pitter-patter, like a summer shower glancing off an air conditioner.
The crowd could have been anyone. He decided they were important people, decision makers. He imagined they were pleased to see a young person in their midst—that they endowed him in their minds with maturity and grace. He tried to look as keen as he could, though he didn’t understand the music. He performed the arousal of a true aficionado, twisting his face in agonized appreciation of a long-held note.
As the set wound down, the crowd dwindled. The performers seemed to relax. They nodded to people seated near him, spoke to a few. They took more time between numbers. He sensed that a different jazz was being cooked up, one that needed to marinate longer.
As four o’clock approached, people spread out on banquettes behind him. The players on the stage changed. His Coke glass kept getting refilled. The night felt full of possibility. Time was on his side; he could be anything he wanted.
His family, asleep at home, seemed a world away. He was ready to commit himself to the strivers, the lovers of life—these would be his new guides.
At five, the waitress began bringing out some trays of food. She left them on a long table by the front entrance. He watched a couple of people head over to them.
“Is this for us?” he asked the waitress.
“It’s for whoever.”
He’d never seen anything like it. First they let him stay all night. Now they were feeding him breakfast. It wasn’t anything special, but it was so strange and unexpected that it felt like a feast to him.
He piled his plate with rolls and butter, spooned out some eggs, and filled his cup with orange juice, looking forward to the little ritual of ceding his place in line, the brief exchange of shared enthusiasm, but the guy behind him just grabbed a roll and sat back down, and no one else followed. Connell hovered awkwardly, pretending to contemplate the spread, until he got self-conscious and walked back to his seat with his head down and ate a lonely meal.
• • •
When he walked in at seven, his mother was asleep at the kitchen table. Tins were piled up on the island; powdered sugar dotted the floor. He and his mother were supposed to have made Christmas cookies together that night. It was a little tradition they had. He’d gone out with his friends in the afternoon and never come home, so he’d forgotten all about i
t.
He counted the tins; she’d made as many as always. He lifted the wax paper in one and saw some cookies missing sprinkles, some misshapen ones.
She was hunched over the table, her head in her folded arms, looking as if her back would ache in the morning.
He shook her lightly. “Ma,” he said. “Go upstairs. Go to bed.”
It took a moment to rouse her. She rose slowly and began to head for the stairs. She stopped in the doorway, turned.
“I will never wait up for you again,” she said calmly, and his heart stopped for a moment. “I will never worry when you don’t call. I will never again worry about you. I promise. You are free.”
• • •
Connell drifted into his parents’ bathroom, the smell of Swedish meatballs giving way to lavender soap. It was Christmas Eve. The radio in the bedroom was tuned to the same Christmas station as the radio downstairs, as though his mother couldn’t be away from “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for long enough to change her clothes.
His father had applied the shaving cream in a grotesquely liberal dose. He picked up a blue plastic razor, one of those bulk-pack, single-blade jobs he insisted on using and with which even a dexterous man could injure himself. Connell watched him raise the torture implement to his face and begin to make groping stabs at his jaw. He had to leave before the carnage began.
He went downstairs. His mother was checking on the turkey in the oven.
“Your father has informed me that he doesn’t like Christmas, that he never has, that I go overboard, that things are out of control.” She doused the bird with a baster and the juice that escaped from the tray sizzled on the bottom of the oven in loud hisses. “Do things seem out of control to you?”
All around were trays of prepared foods, folded napkins, polished silver, washed crystal, proliferating decorations, cookies she’d baked alone, scores of gifts she’d bought and wrapped herself.
“Not on your end,” he said.
“I try to preserve niceties like Christmas because it’s going to be hard no matter what I do or don’t do. The mind needs to be tricked sometimes.”
We Are Not Ourselves Page 41