The Funnies

  Finally I came to the riverbank. There was no development here, just the overgrown backyard to the mill, and a lonely line of phone poles stretching into the distance. The mill was dark and silent, but lights and sounds reached me from the Pennsylvania side: another mill there had been gutted and turned into condos, and I could see the orange glow from a barbecue fire and hear the music and voices of a party.

  Both mills used to run all night, when I was a kid. I sat in the grass, remembering. And then I got another memory, of fishing in this exact spot, with my father, who wasn’t actually fishing but sitting in a folding beach chair with a bottle and a sketchbook. I didn’t know how to fish and didn’t like it anyway, but my father had bought me the rod and reel because he wanted to do something nice for me, or maybe with me, and so I went along. I sat in the weeds, the pointed ends of grasses working their way into my shorts, and flung worm after worm into the toxic, pulp-thick water, and my father fell asleep.

  It wasn’t much fun. I remembered wishing I had brought my baseball card price guide, which I had spent the morning in bed reading. But now it seemed that it must have been the best day of my life, and I was full of regret for not having appreciated it at the time.

  twenty-eight

  On Saturday morning, after Pierce had left for the Pines, I sat by the phone waiting for the courage to call Susan. Repeatedly it didn’t come. I had slept badly and now, as if under the influence of a hundred cups of coffee, my hands were trembling like belt sanders. I had to keep wiping them on my pants.

  I decided to try reverse psychology and made myself some actual coffee. It calmed me some, but in place of my nervousness came strange, shapeless sorrow, which bore down on my head and chest like the onset of a cold. I moved around the house with my mug, trying to soothe the painful spots, but they were difficult to find, and slippery once caught. It struck me that my parents themselves were elusive like that, even when they were alive and whole, as well as now, in memory. If I put my mind to it, it was easy to recall the occasional ugly scene, but mostly, when I thought of them, I thought of archetypes, of cartoons: my mother in her threadbare terry-cloth bathrobe with a drink in her hand, her face bent into a half-lidded, skeptical sneer; my father as a drawing of himself, with the slump, the empty eyeglasses, the cigar. There were no artifacts around the house I could use to prick myself with, nothing either of them had been attached to. There were no family traditions I could feel the loss of. What I did feel was a general and shifting sadness. It was not like a tumor that could be excised or a cut that could heal. It was more like a mildly toxic gas I couldn’t stop breathing, and, with every breath, producing more of.

  Why, I wondered, did they have any children, let alone five? Were we their inconvenient remedy to the empty space between them? Did they think they could reach each other over a bridge of kids? It gave me pause to consider that my purpose in life might only have been to shore up a doomed marriage, which in any case was now over. A dire and oversimplified notion, but my present pinnacle of self-negation had not been arrived at by the sober contemplation of life’s complexity.

  I got a bus to New York. Once there I would walk somewhere, and probably I would call or visit Susan and make a fool of myself. I began to regret these acts as if I had already performed them. That’s when I remembered Rose and Andrew, and decided that now, with our mother growing increasingly dependent and senile, the time had come to make amends with them. I would call them when I got to the city, and if refused spend the day going to art galleries and drinking iced coffee. Satisfied, I bought a paperback at the station, a murder mystery, to read on the bus, and made a mental pact to enjoy myself no matter the circumstances.

  And for the duration of the trip, I did. If I didn’t exactly leave my anxieties at home, I at least was able to set them aside. It was like they were bulky bags filled with pack-ratted garbage, which I could leave in the adjacent seat, lumpy and worn and distantly reassuring, until I found a suitable place to dump them.

  * * *

  Rose wasn’t listed in the Manhattan phone book, but Andrew was, and it was Andrew I got over the phone from Port Authority. He didn’t seem to know who I was for a moment.

  “Tim?” he said.

  “Your brother-in-law Tim.”

  “Oh! Tim! Well how’s it going?” I liked this about Andrew, his perfect pleasure at hearing from anyone surprising, no matter who it was. It was contagious.

  “Oh, it’s going!” I said. “Doing lots of drawing!”

  We talked about that for a while, as if we were sitting across from one another in a restaurant. He asked questions and I answered them. I had forgotten how nice it was to be on the less burdensome end of a conversation, so long had I been talking mostly to Pierce and Brad Wurster, and it made me feel uncharacteristically glib, a far cry from the dolt I’d been at the cartoonists’ conference.

  “So Andrew,” I said finally. “I’m in New York.”

  “New York! No kidding!”

  “Yeah…I was sort of hoping we could get together. You and me and Lindy.”

  “Rose, you mean.”

  If I’d made that slip to Rose personally, I would have been listening to a dial tone now. “Jeez, right, Rose,” I said.

  “Uh, well, she’s not in…” He was stalling, and was bad at it. I pounced.

  “Look, I’ll just come over, what do you say? Because my bus just got here, and I’ve gotta do something in New York all day.”

  “Oh, sure, all right…”

  “I’ll just come right over, okay?”

  “Yeah, come over. Come on over.”

  I took a cab uptown. Andrew and Rose lived on 110th Street, in what I’d heard her refer to as “a decent building,” in a tone that encompassed both condemnation and compliment. It looked like any other to me, large, grim and slightly foreboding. A tired, filthy man wearing a ball cap sat at its base, surrounded by garbage. But the neighborhood in general was clean, and people walked along the street, talking and laughing. I found their number on the mailboxes, took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and knocked on a freshly painted green door with a sprig of dried eucalyptus hanging over the eyehole. I heard steps, and Andrew appeared.

  He looked exuberantly comfortable: baggy wrinkled shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of wool socks in the early stages of falling off. He grinned. “Hey!” he said, as if again surprised, and embraced me. I hugged back, stunned myself. He smelled like old-growth pine forest. Behind him brilliant light filled the room, doubling itself on the polished floor.

  He let me go. “She’s not home yet. Come on in.”

  I did. It was a spectacular loft apartment. I was filled with envy. The windows were enormous, consuming most of the back wall, and all the furniture, the decor, was chosen to acknowledge and defer to the light: the bookshelves were wooden planks set in rough iron frames that let the light stream through; a hardwood table standing on thin legs was surrounded by metal-tube chairs with vinyl seats. There was glass everywhere, translucent dishes and food stored in decanters. The whole thing had the look of long planning, of fulfilled desires: they had the place they wanted. I considered this an accomplishment, simply knowing what they wanted.

  “Wow,” I said. “Did you put all this together?”

  “Rose, mostly.”

  “I didn’t know she was such an…aesthete.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “I mean that respectfully,” I said. And I did. Perhaps my greatest failing as an artist had been that I had no confidence in my own aesthetic judgment. My pieces all looked like I expected them to; it was my expectation that always proved inadequate.

  “I thought you did. Do you want to sit down? Can I get you something? Juice, maybe?”

  “Yes on all counts.”

  I sat on a lumpy tan sofa and Andrew brought me a tall orange juice, which the light claimed before I could lay a lip on it. It tasted like good air.

  “So,” he said, taking one of the metal chairs. “You haven’t told me what brought
you here.”

  I shrugged. “A sort of inner mumbling.”

  He nodded solemnly, as if this made sense. “How’s your brother?”

  “Better,” I said. “I think. He doesn’t seem…taken in by his worries so much lately. Not to say they don’t bother him.”

  “No.”

  “But our mother…”

  “She’s not good.” He was sitting on his chair backwards, his legs manfully spread, his face deeply focused on the conversation. Andrew was a listener, which I supposed was what Rose needed.

  “Yeah,” I said. Then, delicately, “So Rose has been going down there?”

  “Once a week, really early in the morning, when she thinks none of you will be there.” He gulped his juice, finishing off the entire half-glass in the process.

  I was floored by the sheer physical presence of him, the sense of him in the apartment. He was less a man in his castle than a physicist in his lab. He gave me a look.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know that whatever you say is going to piss her off.”

  “I don’t exactly know what I have to say,” I admitted. “I sort of came by accident.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “There are no accidents.” And as if on cue the door opened.

  Rose swept in carrying a paper bag. “They were out of the everythings, so I got a couple onions and some salts…oh.”

  We gaped at one another across the dazzling floor. I smiled, or tried to. Rose didn’t. She was much taller than she looked elsewhere, and I marveled at the poise and dignity she managed standing there, perfectly flummoxed at my presence. “Hi,” I said.

  “Well.” She set the bag down on the kitchen table. Andrew reached greedily into it and pulled out a thick bagel. “We were just going to have a little brunch.”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “Do you want a bagel, Tim?” Andrew asked me, and Rose’s contemptuous restraint gave way to resignation and she pulled up a chair.

  “We have onion and salt,” she said.

  “I heard. Can I have a salt?”

  She handed me the bagel. They bit right into theirs, without applying cream cheese or anything else, so I did the same. We ate. Halfway through his bagel, Andrew seemed to deflate. He got up. “Okay, well, I’m out for a walk,” he said. He snatched the keys from the table and hustled out the door, cracking his knuckles. Rose and I finished eating, then she crossed her legs at the thigh and folded her hands over her knee, as if praying for me to leave.

  “So,” she said.

  “So!”

  “You want to talk about Mom?” she said. I nodded, relinquishing all hope of some pleasant conversation before we got down to brass tacks. I had come here to postpone groveling to Susan, but falling to my knees and begging for forgiveness seemed a refreshing diversion from the present situation. Rose came to the sofa and sat at the other end, as far from me as possible. It was the most affection she’d ever shown me.

  “We can’t have her here,” she said. She was facing the windows as if speaking through them out into the city, to Andrew. “We talked about it, but really, we‘re so high up, and the elevator is unreliable, and this neighborhood…I know you’re thinking, she’s so selfish, they could move downstairs or out to the suburbs, but Tim, and I know you’re going to think I’m a shit but so be it, I’ve come so far. I’ve made the life for myself I wanted, and it was hard. I don’t think you can understand that.”

  “Rose…”

  She turned to me finally, a brazen, tearful flash in her eyes, and tugged spastically on her earlobe. “I think she ought to be at home. In Riverbank.”

  “Mixville,” I said.

  “What?”

  “At FunnyFest. They changed the name.”

  Her mouth hung open a moment, and then she coughed out a single, near-hysterical laugh, and began to cry. She covered her face. I moved to comfort her but couldn’t reach, and I feared that moving farther would make her get up, and then I would leave and we would never have this conversation. So I said, “I think you’re right. Pierce wants her at home, actually. I didn’t tell him yes right away myself, and he got mad at me, but really he’s right.”

  She produced a kleenex and honked into it, then crushed it in her fist. She looked up. “You’re going to do that? Bring her home?”

  “I think when I get the strip, this fall. I just can’t do it before then.”

  “Right, of course.”

  “If you feel bad about it, help us. Come down and take care of her.” Rose blinked, peering into this future with what looked like real apprehension. “Andrew said you come down every week anyway,” I said. “It’ll be like that. Just stay all day or something. I’m sure Bitty will do a day too.”

  “And Bobby?”

  “Bobby’s against it. But he’ll come around.”

  “Maybe not.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe not. And Pierce and I will always be there. At least for now.”

  She looked down at her hands, passing the kleenex back and forth like a juggler. “It’s hard for me to be with Pierce. I have bad memories of…that time.”

  “He’s a good person,” I said. “He’s the best of us.”

  She snorted. “He’s not one of us.”

  “He is,” I said. “He’s got different problems is all.”

  Her eyes met mine. They were as deep and alien as bullet holes. I got the impression she wanted to say something, but she never opened her mouth, just stared at me until I had to turn away.

  “Get over it, Rose,” I said, suddenly angry.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shaking her head. “You never trusted him, Tim. And then had your trust betrayed. By the time you came along, he’d already ruined everything.”

  “Pierce?” I said, stupidly.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Pierce was a drop in the bucket.”

  I was beginning to tire of this. “I can’t understand why you dislike Pierce so much,” I said. “It isn’t his fault he’s the way he is. Frankly, Rose, there’s a lot more of Dad in you than in Pierce.”

  “You can say that again.” She laughed, a sound like a dish breaking.

  Rose had always prided herself on being cryptic and secretive, claiming obscure insight into the family dramas that we could never possibly understand. As a teenager she kept a journal in code, and was so confident it couldn’t be cracked that she left the spiral notebook it was recorded in lying haphazardly around the house. She was right too: the hodgepodge of numbers and letters and mysterious symbols eluded Bobby and me, the only people who cared, and a thorough ransacking of her bedroom turned up no Rosetta stone. But there was a part of me that didn’t want the code cracked. I wanted to buy her schtick, to take comfort in the thought that someone, at least, knew what was going on.

  Now, of course, it was obvious she’d been every bit as addled as I was. I wondered if there really was a key to those journals, if perhaps they’d been as mysterious to her as to us: maybe writing in the journals was an elaborate kind of playacting, and at night in bed she scrutinized the meaningless signs with a flashlight, as if they held the solution to her misery. In that case, her game was meant to protect us, to take the pain of living in that house onto herself, and I had misjudged her.

  I stared at her and she, with her long face turned into the sun, must have felt me staring. How many layers of pretense and subterfuge was she made of? Was there a pure, unadulterated Rose underneath, or had she become the things she pretended to be? She was older than me by more than just the years between us.

  As if she had read my thoughts, she said, “You’re still just a kid.” And that seemed about right, until she turned to me and revealed the face she’d assembled to go along with the statement: a contemptuous smirk, her eyebrows arched in naked moral superiority, and the tiniest ghost of doubt concealed underneath, like a thief silhouetted behind a billowing curtain. She was trying to chase me out.

  It was hard to resist. I got up, setting my juice glass on the floor at my fe
et. “Funny how I’m the one taking the adult responsibilities around here,” I said, and started to leave.

  “Wait,” she said, in a voice almost too quiet to hear. I was nearly to the door by then. The room grew tense, as if polarized by our talk, and in the silence the air seemed to glow with its energy. “I’ll help. I’ll help take care of her.”

  I looked back: her body was shut tight, knees and hands together, turned toward the windows. I saw the bagel bag lying neglected on the table and I wanted another.

  “You mean it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “We can work out the details later.”

  I considered going to her, but I knew she didn’t want me to, and to be honest, I didn’t want to either. I said, more quietly than I had intended, “Thank you, Rose,” and walked out.

  * * *

  I didn’t feel like sorting out the mess the conversation was already becoming in my head, and so I tried to put my plan back on track: I walked with the intention of stopping myself every twenty blocks for one thing or another, an art gallery, a cup of coffee, lunch. The idea was to clear my head to make room for the work I’d have to start doing when I got home. Instead, every step seemed to shake loose another anxiety: the cartoon, Mom, money, my future. The coffee I bought tasted stale, and the art I looked at in the usual galleries seemed too aggressive, too eager to please, or offend, or prove something. I avoided inventing a destination, but all the same I wasn’t surprised when I found myself in SoHo, nosing around the galleries near Delicious Duck, hurrying past work that deserved perhaps a second look, to get myself back on the street. I studied passersby, letting them take on her shape for the smallest fraction of a second, letting my blood run thick and sludgy with longing. I made no mistake about the longing: it was for a sympathetic ear, for a sounding board. But of course there was more to it than that, and for that undefined more I kept myself from rushing to her building and ringing her from the desk.

  As it turned out I didn’t have to. I watched her walk into the restaurant from a block away. Once she was inside, I made a run for it, hoping to make it before she ordered, in the event that we might do it together. I found her huddled in the cavernous dim of the place, her sunglasses absently left on, buried in an ornate, finger-softened cardboard menu. She seemed to have trouble reading it.