He broke off and put his face in his hands. I reached over and put my hand again on his arm. This time he did not pull away.
‘Of course I called his mother as soon as I heard the news from the hospital. And I told you her response. “He’s lost now forever.”’
‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t want to believe that. But . . .’
Silence.
‘If you have to run up to the hospital now . . .’ I said.
‘My son is back in solitary confinement. Which means no visitors. The resident psychiatrist told me that they would be keeping him isolated until they felt he was stabilized. The last time this happened, it was eight weeks before we could see him. The only reason I told you earlier I had to run was because I didn’t think I could face recounting all this to you. And you’ve been so kind, so patient, so . . .’
The waiter was back at the table, all smiles. Richard withdrew his arm from my grasp.
‘So . . . any thoughts about brunch?’ the waiter asked.
‘We still need a few minutes,’ I said, and the waiter headed elsewhere. As soon as he was out of earshot I whispered to Richard:
‘Please go if you need to.’
‘Where would I go to? Where? ’ he asked. ‘But if, after hearing all this, you want to run off . . .’
‘Now why would I want to do that?’
‘You sure about that?’
‘I’m sure about that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For telling me about your son.’
‘Even though it’s a terrible story?’
‘Especially because it’s a terrible story.’
Silence. Then Richard said:
‘There are moments in life when one really needs a second drink.’
To which I could only reply:
‘Good idea.’
Three
WE DRANK THE second round of bloody marys. We ate the omelets that we ordered. We didn’t mention the subject of Richard’s son again during the course of the brunch. I would have continued the conversation about Billy, as there was so much I wanted to ask Richard about – especially when it came to finding a legal way through this nightmare story. Surely there’s a way of exploring other forms of treatment for him. Though he’d had violent episodes, he had not actually broken any laws – which had to mean there was some way for him to be in a form of managed care that was not state-sanctioned incarceration. And (this was the mother in me talking) surely heaven and earth could still be moved to rescue this boy from such an ongoing horror show.
But Richard had spent serious money on a lawyer. Unlike his wife he was not giving up hope. Though Muriel really did sound unable to cope with Billy’s monstrous illness, I knew it was wrong to judge her reportedly distanced reaction to her son’s mental collapse. That’s the thing about other people’s tragedies. You can stand on the sidelines and make all sorts of pronouncements about how they should be handled. But in doing so you forget an essential truth: there is no appropriate way to react to the worst that life can throw at you. To attempt to impose your own so-called ‘game plan’ on a nightmare that you yourself aren’t living is the height of heinous arrogance. That’s why we find other people’s tragedies so compulsive: because they so terrify us; because we all privately live with the knowledge that, at any moment, the entire trajectory of our lives can be upended by the most terrible and unforeseen forces.
But getting us off the subject of his son and onto my own children, he now got me talking about Sally and her considerable adolescent heartaches.
‘Maybe this Brad guy dumping her will make her consider looking beyond status when it comes to choosing the next boyfriend,’ he said. ‘But let me ask you something. Is Brad’s father Ted Bingham, the lawyer fellow?’
‘Sometimes the world is just too small.’
‘Especially when it comes to Maine.’
‘And yes, his dad is indeed Damariscotta’s big-cheese lawyer – though I might have just uttered an oxymoron.’
Richard smiled, then added:
‘Of course, had you said, “Damariscotta’s big-headed lawyer”, you might have stood accused of uttering a tautology.’
‘Well, Ted Bingham has the reputation of being both big-headed and very grand fromage. Don’t tell me you insure him?’
‘Hardly. He works with Phil Malloy, who has basically cornered the Damariscotta insurance market.’
‘Tell me about it. Phil insures our home and cars.’
‘That’s Maine. And the reason I know Ted Bingham is because his wife was at school with Muriel in Lewiston.’
‘That’s Maine again – and, of course, I’ve met the famous Julie Bingham.’
‘Hard to believe she ever grew up—’
‘—somewhere other than Palm Beach,’ I said.
‘Or the Hamptons.’
‘Or Park Avenue.’
‘Still, that big place they have on the coast by Pemaquid Point—’
‘—is my dream location,’ I said. ‘And I now feel so tacky for being so catty about Julie.’
‘But she is one of those people who invites cattiness.’
‘I’m afraid I know all about that. Sally actually once heard Julie on the phone with a friend, telling her: “Now I think Brad’s girlfriend is a cutey . . . but it’s a shame her parents are struggling.”’
‘And you worry about being catty about her. Sometimes people deserve cattiness. Especially when they look down their long noses at everyone else. And I’m certain that your daughter saw right through Julie’s noblesse oblige act.’
‘If only Sally understood what noblesse oblige was. She’s so bright and so intuitively smart. But she underestimates her own intelligence, and is so bound up in the superficial . . . even though I’m sure that, privately, she sees that this pursuit of the shallow is an empty one.’
‘Then she’ll hopefully move away from it all once Young Mr Bingham goes off to his Ivy League college.’
‘That is my great hope. But as you well know, when it comes to children, you can never really shield them from danger or themselves.’
‘That still doesn’t lessen the sense of guilt that accompanies being a parent . . .’
‘True. But even if I keep telling you that Billy’s bipolar condition has no connection whatsoever to anything you’ve done as a father – and, in fact, from what you’ve reported, you’ve been the parent who has always been there for him . . .’
‘Yes, I will still feel guilty about this until the day he’s allowed out of that hell hole. Even then I’ll still remain guilty about the horror he’s been through.’
‘Does parental guilt ever cease?’
‘Do you really want me to answer that question?’
‘Hardly. Because after all that happened with my son Ben . . .’
That’s when I told him about my son’s amazing promise as a painter, the subsequent breakdown after that spoiled little rich girl dropped him, and how he’d already been in one major exhibition and . . .
‘So Ben’s going to be the next Cy Twombly.’
Again I found myself looking at Richard with considerable surprise.
‘You know your modern painters,’ I said.
‘I saw that big 2009 retrospective of his at the Art Institute of Chicago. Actually invented a reason to go to Chicago on business in order to catch the exhibition. Funny thing is – my dad, conservative ex-Marine that he was – still had a thing about art. Only his taste ran towards Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, which is still pretty good taste. Dad always had a secret hankering to be a painter. Had a little studio in his garage. Tried his hand at seascapes. He wasn’t bad. Gave a few away to some family members. Even had a gallery in Boston take a few of the Maine coastal studies he did. But they never sold. Dad being Dad he decided that this was a sign they were no damn good. Even though my mother – who was some class of a saint – and his brother Roy tol
d him otherwise. One night, after another of his big bouts of drinking – the guy could really put away cheap Scotch – he staggered out to the garage and burned all his paintings. Just like that. Dumped around two dozen canvases outside on the lawn, doused them with kerosene, lit a match. Whoosh. My mother found him sitting by the fire, looking sloshed, tears running down his face, so sad and furious with the world . . . but especially with himself. Because he knew he was burning all sense of hope and possibility, and a life beyond the one he had created for himself. There I was – a child of fourteen – watching this all from my bedroom window, telling myself I’d never live a life I disliked . . .’
‘And your father never painted again?’
Richard shook his head.
‘And yet he then ripped several strips off you when you dared to publish a short story.’
‘Well, the guy was such a total hard case.’
‘Or just jealous. My dad had a father like that. He saw that his son was a brilliant mathematician – and had teachers and college guidance counselors encouraging him to apply to everywhere from Harvard to MIT, just like your Billy. Only my dad’s father was not a good father like you. Instead he was quietly enraged by his son’s brilliance and worked assiduously at subverting his progress. Insisted he turn down a full scholarship at MIT because he needed him to work in the family hardware store every weekend. Dad went along with this – agreeing to U Maine and returning every weekend to Waterville to put in a full Saturday at my grandfather’s shop. Can you imagine forcing a gifted young man to do that . . .’
‘Actually I can.’
‘Oh God, listen to me talking before thinking. I am so, so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. The truth doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s just there. Right in my face. And the thing is, even though my father also played undermining games with me – and I was no way as brilliant as your father . . .’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not? It’s the truth.’
‘But that short story . . .’
‘A short story, written thirty years ago . . .’
‘And one published a few months ago.’
‘You remembered that?’
‘Well, you did tell me about it yesterday.’
‘It’s just a small thing . . .’
‘I actually Googled it this morning. And read it. And guess what? It’s very good.’
‘Seriously?’
‘A man looks back on a childhood friend who was allegedly swept off the rocks at Prout’s Neck . . . but who the friend knows was being investigated for fraud at the accountancy firm where he’s a partner. Very Anthony Trollope.’
‘Now you’re being far too extravagant.’
‘But you must have read The Way We Live Now – because the whole theme of personal and social corruption is—’
‘I am hardly an Anthony Trollope. And a small Portland accountancy firm isn’t exactly a great City brokerage house in London.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Trollope was looking at the way money is the ongoing human obsession. And the fact that he used the grand canvas of London at the height of Victorian power—’
‘And you use a small New England city in the middle of a recession to highlight the same concerns about the way we all are in thrall to money, and how, like it or not, it always defines us.’
Richard looked at me with something approaching bemusement – and clearly found himself incapable of articulating anything.
‘You seem speechless,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s not every day I get compared to one of the great masters of the nineteenth-century novel. And though I’m flattered . . .’
‘I know, I know – you don’t deserve it. It’s just a two-thousand-word scribble in a minor magazine. And your father was right about your writing all along. Happy now?’
He reached for his drink and finished it.
‘No one has ever been so encouraging about my writing before.’
‘Did your wife read the story?’
‘She said it was “readable, but depressing”.’
‘Well, the story really grabs you from the outset. But the apparent suicide at the end is incredibly disturbing. Still, I loved the moral ambiguity behind all that. It’s like that line from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” – “Between the motion and the act . . .”’
‘“. . . falls the shadow”.’
As he finished my sentence, finished the quote that I was quoting, I found myself looking up at Richard and thinking: This man is full of surprises. Perhaps the most surprising thing is the fact that I find him so . . . ‘compelling’ is the right word. And when he took those rather shapeless steel-rimmed spectacles off for a moment to rub his eyes I suddenly saw that, if you took away the dull golfing clothes and the actuarial inspector eyewear, there was a not unattractive man seated opposite me, and one whose initial grayness had now shaded into something warmer. I could also see, as he finished that T.S. Eliot quote, that he was regarding me in a different way now; that he too had discerned that the landscape between us was changing. Part of me was trying to tell myself: This is a pleasant, interesting lunch, no more. The other part of me – the person who always wondered why she imposed so many frontiers on her life – knew otherwise.
‘Have you always worn glasses?’ I asked.
‘They’re pretty damn awful, aren’t they?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘I’m saying that. I let Muriel choose them for me around eight years ago. I knew from the outset they were a mistake. She told me they looked businesslike, serious. Which are synonyms for dull.’
‘Why did you buy them then?’
‘Good question.’
‘Maybe a little too direct,’ I said, noting his discomfort. ‘Didn’t mean to be so blunt. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’ve often asked myself the same thing. I suppose I was raised in a family where the women always chose the clothes for the men, and where I wasn’t interested in style or things like that.’
‘But the truth is, you do have a sense of style . . .’
He tugged at his zip-up jacket.
‘This is hardly “style”. I don’t even play golf.’
‘But you certainly understand visual style, citing Cy Twombly and John Singer Sargent. And when it comes to the world of books, of language . . .’
‘I often tell myself I dress like an insurance man.’
‘Then stop. Change.’
‘Change. One of the most loaded words in the language.’
‘And one of the easiest, if one can only accept the tenets of change. “I don’t like the eyeglasses I’m wearing, so I’ll change them.”’
‘But that might cause some eyebrows to be raised.’
‘And are those disapproving eyebrows that important to you?’
‘They have been. Change. A tricky business.’
‘Especially when it comes to eyeglasses.’
‘I promised myself a leather jacket last year.’
‘What happened?’
‘Tried one on in one of those outlets down in Freeport. Muriel said I looked like a middle-aged man having an identity crisis.’
‘Is she often so warm and praising?’
‘You really are direct.’
‘Not normally.’
‘Then why now?’
‘I just feel like being direct.’
‘Do you buy your husband his clothes?’
‘Do I dress him? The answer is, no. I’ve tried to encourage him to think about clothes, but he’s just not interested.’
‘So he dresses like . . .’
‘A man who doesn’t care how he dresses. You will be amused to hear, however, that I did buy him a leather jacket last year for his birthday. One of those reproduction aviator jackets. He approved.’
‘Well, you clearly have taste. And you clearly know how to dress. As soon as you walked in, I thought, you really belong in Paris. Not that I know much about Paris, except for what
I’ve read and seen.’
‘Maybe you should find a way to get there.’
‘Have you ever been?’
‘Quebec City is the closest I’ve ever come to France.’
‘Yeah, I did one trip to New Brunswick to see a client who had some business in Maine. That was thirteen years ago, before you had to have a passport to travel to Canada. Strange, isn’t it, not having a passport?’
‘Get one then.’
‘Do you have one?’
‘Oh, yes. And it sits in a desk drawer at home, ignored, unused, unloved.’
‘Use it then.’
‘I’d like to. But . . .’
‘I know – life.’
The waiter showed up, asking us if we’d like coffee. I glanced at my watch. It was a bit after two-thirty.
‘Am I keeping you?’ I asked.
‘Not at all. And you?’
‘No plans whatsoever.’
‘Coffee then?’
‘Fine.’
The waiter disappeared.
‘I wish ninety minutes would always evaporate so quickly,’ I said.
‘So do I. But in your work, boredom can’t be a big problem. Every day a new set of patients. A new set of potential personal dramas, hopes, fears, all that big stuff.’
‘You make the radiography unit of a small Maine hospital sound like a Russian novel.’
‘Isn’t it? Like you said about my “small” story, the universal problems are always universal, no matter how minor the setting. And you must run into distressing stories all the time.’
‘What I see are dark masses and irregular-shaped growths and ominous shadows. It’s the radiographer who decides what they all mean.’
‘But you must know immediately if . . .’
‘If it’s the beginning of the end? Yes, I’m afraid that’s one of the clinical fringe benefits of my trade – the ability, after almost two decades of looking at the bad stuff, to visually ascertain far too quickly whether it’s Stage One, Two, Three or Four. As such I’m usually privy to this news before the radiologist. Thankfully there are very strict rules about technologists never informing a patient whether the prognosis is bad or not – though, if pressed and the news is good, I’ve developed a code which most patients understand and which gives them a sense that there is no cause for concern. And our radiologist, Dr Harrild, will only talk to a patient if he has discerned that the all-clear can be sounded.’
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