Sam and I have followed her into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call, I hadn’t expected to be here.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me. Have you seen Mother?”
“Nope, came here first.”
I’m noticing how easily I begin to slide into the lingo of my childhood. Nope, done come here first, sis.
“Sam, where’s little Charlie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go find him. His uncle’s here.”
“I don’t wanna,” says Sam.
I notice that I’d neglected to remove the price tag from the baseball cap.
“You heard me, Sam. Don’t start with me now.”
“But I got stuff to do.”
I’m thinking, Maybe there is something wrong with the boy. “Hey, Bonnie, don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t you want to see your eldest nephew?”
“Of course I want to see little Charlie. I just don’t want to cause Sam any problem. I mean, if he’s got things to do.”
“He doesn’t have a darned thing to do. They both got the day off from school for Easter holiday and neither one of them knows what to do with themself.”
“I do,” protests Sam.
Bonnie Jean says, “And here’s five dollars. When you find him tell him to bring us a quart of Neapolitan.”
Sam lets the screen door fly back with a hard slap into its frame, as a final protest of sorts.
“He’s a good boy,” says Bonnie Jean. “He’s just at an age.”
“I know about that.”
Bonnie Jean allows a moment to gather, like a storm cloud, and I interpret it to mean, No, you don’t know, Brice, you don’t know the child. It passes, and she says, “What’re you doing here, then?”
“What am I doing here.”
My sister looks at the ceiling and says, “Is there an echo in this room?”
I force a laugh. “Well, it’s a question easier asked than answered. To tell you the truth, I’m not completely sure why I’m here.”
“Has somebody died I don’t know about?”
“Oh stop, Bonnie.”
“It took Daddy’s funeral to get you here last time.”
“Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got a family of my own and a practice that keeps me hard at it. It’s not like you ever come out to visit us.”
“You know what? Let’s don’t start, Brice.”
“Good idea.”
“You want coffee?”
“Only if you’ve already got some made.”
Bonnie Jean has turned her back on me and stands at the sink drawing water into a kettle. “First time my big brother comes to visit me in how many years has it been now? Daddy died when Sam was four.”
My god, what an obstinate attorney my sister would have been. “That makes him fourteen,” I say, a little incredulous—the child behaved as if he were half his age.
“He’ll be fourteen in July.”
I say, “July ninth, right?”—not wanting to miss the opportunity of displaying to Bonnie Jean that I retained at least some bits of her family history. Not that my mnemonic isn’t ridiculous and shameful. I can remember the month and day though not the year of my youngest nephew’s birth only because it struck me as memorable that he was a week shy of the anniversary of the Trinity test and I recall how chagrined my sister had been at his early arrival, having told everyone throughout the course of her pregnancy that her second child was going to be born on the same day as the shot at Alamogordo. When he arrived a week shy of Bonnie’s goal, I made some crack about her having a short fuse, and it would prove to be another of the various things Bonnie held and holds against me.
“—which means it’s a good decade since last you honored us.”
She isn’t going to make anything easy for me. The cups come down from the cupboard. She asks me if I still take my coffee black, maybe as a way of showing me she can remember details, too.
I still do, I tell her.
She goes about her business of making our coffee, removes some cookies from a jar I recognize, poor vile Sambo whose smile has been chipped with time, and arranges them on a painted plate. She is waiting for me to answer her earlier question now.
“Bonnie, you remember Kip, don’t you?”
“Don’t tell me he’s died again and you’ve come to bury him?”
“I thought we were going to try not to argue.”
“We’re not arguing,” as she hands me my coffee.
“Well, your joke isn’t very funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
“I got a letter from Kip a few days ago, and I’ve come to meet him.” There, I think, I cannot be more straightforward than that.
Bonnie Jean, sitting across the kitchen table, gives me a confused look. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“But I mean he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“What makes you think he’s dead? We don’t know that.”
“Well, what does it say?”
“It says to meet him in Chimayó.”
“And you just up and come because you got some letter in the mail says you should?”
“Funny you’d say that. That’s just what Jessica said.”
Jessica was yet another contentious subject my sister and I best avoid, I remember suddenly. Jessica is, from Bonnie Jean’s remove, one of the causes of my distance from the family—that is, her family and our mother—and represents to her the beginnings of my downfall, my embrace of New York, my infatuation with the false gods of contemporary culture, my loss of the innocence and dignity that are the birthrights of my Western heritage. The one time Bonnie Jean and Jessica met, indeed it was ten years back on the occasion of my father’s funeral, there was such defensiveness coming from my sister—as I saw it—that I abandoned any hope of the two of them ever becoming very friendly. Jessica, for her part, recognized in her sister-in-law the insurmountable prejudice of rural toward urban, despite the fact that her upbringing was every bit as small-town as Bonnie Jean’s, and early on concluded that any ambition to change her mind was energy wasted.
—In a way, I can’t say that I blame her, Jessica told me after the reception at Bonnie’s house. To your sister I’m nine-tenths of the reason you stay on in New York, and am a feminist to boot. A sinner and a slicker, and what’s more I’m convinced she sees me as some kind of bigamist. Engaged to Kip—whom I’d bet you anything she carried a torch for when you all were growing up—and then, horrors, married to you, her troublesome but somehow perfect brother. I can see why she doesn’t have any patience for the likes of me.
It was a doubly sad occasion, that funeral. Burying my father, and burying any undeveloped hopes my subconscious might have entertained about becoming somehow his replacement, and fulfilling the role he’d assumed in his last years of bridging the gaps—chasms they were, grand canyons—that had opened up in the geography of our family. Seeing Mother and Bonnie Jean together and seeing big Charlie, honest and hardworking Charles, my sister’s man, and seeing too the differences between us all, my admiration for my father as paterfamilias was confirmed. He managed things I knew I couldn’t. He enjoyed the diversities among those in his brood. Dad always liked Jessica, could talk with her for hours on the telephone about nothing in particular, about what was in the newspapers or what was for dinner, and often did. He also loved his daughter, and was blind to her eccentricities. My own flaws, of which there have always been many, none of which he failed to note, were forgiven as well. If he was trying to make up for lost time those final years, trying to make up to us children whatever he failed to do as a father when we were much younger and he was married to his science, I think he managed to do so. A part of my anger never abated, really, nor did my sense that his work was steeped in vice. But just like there are supposed to be many rooms in heaven’s mansion, so there are many rooms in the shanty heart of any given mortal. Toward the end, some room in mine was furnished with real respect for my father.
“Well,” Bonnie says. “Jessica isn’t wrong all the time.” And, unexpectedly, my sister offers me the most genuine smile I think I have ever seen from her.
Soon enough both her boys have come into the house with the ice cream, which we take out of its frozen paper box and cut with a butcher knife in slabs, in an old-fashioned way, so that each slice has a bar of chocolate and vanilla and strawberry. We eat, and then little Charlie gets his baseball cap, which turns out to be a bit small. And then it is time for me to begin to think about walking to the cottage where my mother lives. I don’t know why I feel a sense of relief and even solace here—can that much reconciliation come from one smile?—but I do. My sister has made for herself a decent life, and in that there is much to be admired. She asks me if I want her to telephone Mom to let her know I’m about to show up at her doorstep.
“No,” I say. “I want it to be a surprise.”
“Well, let’s hope you don’t give her a heart attack.”
“I stand warned,” I say.
—Tell me your worst trait, said Jessica one night. The three of us had taken the train down to the Village, and were sitting on a bench in Washington Square. Crisp evening, not cold, and overhead the stars tried to twinkle through the haze and diffused lights of the city, but only the most luminous ones succeeded. Constellations—Orion, the bear, the dippers—existed in memory or imagination. We were huddled together near the park fountain, which had water in the basin. A dog with a bandana around its neck waded there, quietly. It seemed to be ownerless, but didn’t appear lost. Jess’s question was directed at Kip. I remember thinking, Where does she come up with this stuff? and then listened for Kip’s reply.
—That’s a pretty strange request.
The dog climbed the long steps out of the basin, shook itself, and tramped away opposite us.
Jessica said, —Why do you think it’s strange?
—Well. Most people want to know what someone’s best trait is, not their worst.
—Since when am I most people?
I laughed, crossed my arms, looked upward again.
Quiet for a moment. Then, Kip said, —What’s my worst trait? I tell you what. I’ll tell you what’s my worst trait if you tell me what yours is.
—Fair enough.
—Brice too, for that matter.
My gaze came back down, —You can leave me out of it.
—No, no, said Kip. —Brice has got to play too or I’m not answering.
—Brice doesn’t have any bad traits, do you, Brice?
—No, it’s not that, said Kip. —It’s that he’s got so many bad traits he wouldn’t know where to begin figuring out which one’s his worst. Isn’t that right, Brice?
I leaned toward Jess and whispered just loud enough so that Kip could hear, —If he won’t tell you, I’ll give you the goods on him.
—You in or not, Brice?
—I don’t care, I said.
—All right then. My worst trait. The truth?
—Of course the truth, said Jessica.
—All right then. He thought for a moment. —I suppose my worst trait is that too many things interest me, so I tend to get a bit scattered.
Jessica demurred. —That’s it? That’s your worst trait? She looked at me and I shook my head and shrugged. —Come on, you can do better than that.
—Well, I mean that’s what can cause me to do things I’d rather not do, if you know what I mean.
—I don’t. What do you mean?
—Brice, help me here, Kip laughed, a little hollowly.
—No way, I said.
—There’s a good example of his worst trait, said Kip.
—Don’t change the subject. Brice will get his turn. You still haven’t answered.
—I did answer, though.
—What does this terrible fascination with too many things cause you to do that you’d rather not do? You haven’t answered that.
—Well, I think that sometimes I scatter myself because maybe I’m afraid to concentrate on just one thing. And maybe that happens because I’m afraid that if I concentrate on one thing only, it’d be like putting all the eggs in one basket, or something like that.
—So, your worst trait is that you’re afraid of failing, and so you hedge your bet? Like hedging your gambles by increasing your gambits.
—Aren’t you clever, said Kip.
—Another of his bad traits is he doesn’t like to be examined too closely, I offered, in the spirit of troublemaking.
—Look, I don’t have anything to hide. I happen to think that serving too many masters is a problem.
—You’re still holding out on us. What are some of the bad things you’re talking about? Bad things you do because you get scattered.
All three of us sat silent on the bench until the words, —He runs, came out of my mouth. Jessica was sitting between us, and Kip leaned forward and his wry smile became a mask that betrayed nothing I could interpret.
—And what is your worst trait, Brice? he asked.
—I think you already said it for me.
—Let me hear you say it.
—Why?
—Because I’d just like to know if you’re enough of a man to say it.
Jessica broke in, —Hey, that’s it, let’s stop—
—I’m not a traitor, I said.
—And I’m not a runner.
—I said let’s stop.
Jessica was on her feet.
—Wait a minute, Kip said.
She was walking away from us, without a word. We were both up and following her now.
—Jessica never told us her worst trait, I said as we caught up with her.
—I’ll tell you what my worst trait is, she said. —Hanging out with you two.
The time had arrived for me to agitate. It was a form of falling in love, my commitment. It was inevitable and necessary. My tongue and fist wanted to collaborate. Signing a petition against the war and arguing with Kip in the privacy of our apartment wasn’t enough. Dilettante radicalism seemed the worst kind of hypocrisy. There were moments when talking Vietnam with Jessica I felt like a fool. She agreed with me in principle but I felt I could see in her eyes the question, Who are you to have this information and these sentiments but not the conviction to do anything serious about them? The time had come to get off the fence and begin to walk into what was unknown territory. Safe for the time being from the draft because of my college deferment, it was my duty to go with others into the streets to bring this immoral business to an end so those who were stuck over there fighting for no good reason could come back home. I felt full of life and my commitment to activism was, for me, a rejection of death.
Posters on walls and bulletin boards were by 1965 becoming ubiquitous on campus and off. The riots of ’68 were already in the air; faint, perhaps, in light of what was to come, but there. Meetings were open to students, faculty, anyone who wanted to come. The gatherings at first were small and we began to know each other in stuffy basement classrooms under the dry humming white light of fluorescents or out under the plane trees off to the side of Low Library. We got together at noon at the sundial in the center of the quad, maybe just a few dozen of us, some members of the SDS, others just undergraduates interested in helping to organize, to build support. The talk was of war, deceit, the patterns of the military industrial complex, of pigs, genocide, and imperialism. Our demonstrations were small at first, but soon would grow.
Epstein had become one of the student leaders by then. I can still hear his voice, ardent and clear, —If they’re going to act like demons and traitors, it’s up to us to be the demons’ traitors.
—Right on, we cried, and our words echoed off the smooth facades of Dodge and Low and Hamilton and John Jay and the library, reminding me of the drum that echoed back at San Ildefonso when the Indians performed their corn dance. It had a holy quality.
—Demons’ traitors are demonstrators.
—That’s right, we shouted.
He must have been about
twenty, a year younger than I, though he looked much older, commanded more and more respect from those of us who were working in the movement. He had been arrested, it was said, a dozen times, which was a considerable record for those days, was one of the protesters with whom any personal association meant you were added to a secret list in Washington, became the subject of a closed file. He wielded real moral authority, to my eye. I admired his guerilla instincts and directness of approach, and even if he could be overbearing at times, Epstein was a likable, decent guy. He appeared to have no life distinct from the stratagems involved in bringing the war overseas to an end and condemning the establishment that deceived its people into fighting it. He spoke of little else, and managed to get enough work done to stay in school, but was often absent from class; the sole exception was that he was devoted to the university basketball team and sat in the bleachers with the SDS contingent—we radicals adopted the basketball team back then, and of all the jocks on campus the basketballers seemed to get along with us best. He wore the same tired jeans and black sweatshirt to every gathering and game. His deeply sunken and dark eyes bespoke the insomnia of an obsessive or a saint. When he found out that I’d grown up in Los Alamos his mind moved quickly to an idea.
—Is the place as spooky as it’s supposed to be? he asked me one afternoon.
—What place?
—You know, Los Alamos.
It is and isn’t, but I knew better than to say no. —Spooky enough, I said.
—A lot of that shit started here, you know. It was called the Manhattan Project because Fermi conducted his fission experiments right over there.
—I know, I said.
—You ever been in Pupin?
I hadn’t, and it was meaningful I hadn’t, since Pupin Hall was where my father must have spent most of his time back in the forties when he went to school here, when he first met Emilio Segrè, and saw his first cyclotron, which they used to generate high-energy protons. It was here his interest in chemical engineering was coupled with a fascination of physics, the combination of which would get him the job offer to go to the Hill.
—You got a minute?
We walked up from the quadrangle, along the brick pavement and to the north end of campus, where the physics building stood.
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