We walked through the pine woods at the back of their property. Past her profile, the sunlight glimmered in thin wavering strips on the reddish floor of the scented woods, and at the top of a tree one bird trilled and another answered. With her large, handsome, slightly hooked nose, she too seemed birdlike. She had tiny diamond studs in her ears, and I wondered if my father had given them to her, just as years ago he had given my mother the emerald ring. Now the ring was gone. It had disappeared along with their marriage, my happy childhood, my brother’s sanity. I thought of my brother, and my feelings were so complex: anger and fear and anxiety and a terrible sadness, for the person he had been, the person we all had lost, whom, very likely, we would never see again.
When we got back to the house, I saw that my father’s Buick was parked between my Volvo and her pick-up. I followed her into the house. My father, looking tall, thinner and unfamiliar, came out of the strewn bedroom, smiling and carefully pulling the door shut behind him, as if I were a stranger before whom he had to keep up certain proprieties. He had on a yellow Lacoste cardigan.
“Hello!” he boomed, in his new false voice. My mother was right. He greeted everyone now as if they were dopey or deaf. His wife went to him and kissed his cheek. He put an arm around her shoulder, meanwhile smiling apologetically at me. His two gals! That’s what he used to call my mother and me.
“What do you think of the house?” he asked.
“Very nice,” I said politely.
“The yard needs some work,” he said.
“So does the house,” Dolores said. She slipped her arm around his waist and they turned to face me, two against one.
We went, again, into the living room. Dolores got drinks—bourbon for him, wine for me.
“How’s Skip?” my father asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Busy.”
“I’ll bet,” he said. “But isn’t it great that he’s starting out with such a bang? You kids plan to say in that commune?”
I said, “It isn’t really a commune, Daddy. It’s just a bunch of people living together.”
“Mmm,” he said.
We sipped our drinks. Dolores had taken up a tennis racquet cover to needlepoint (for which she wore a pair of blue-framed glasses halfway down her nose). My father cleared his throat. “And how’s your mother?” he asked.
Here it was, the heart of the heart of the matter. I said, “I guess you know how she is.”
He didn’t say anything. Behind his thick lenses, his pupils had a constricted look, squeezed into pinpoints of light, and his open face, with its big jaw and wide bones, was rigid and clenched.
I said, “We’ve been talking about John.”
“And?”
“She’s worried about what happens after she dies.” He didn’t comment. I went on. “She asked me to take care of John. Take him in.” A flicker of relief danced around my father’s eyes. Dolores went on needlepointing. She must have just taken it up. She looked clumsy at it, stabbing the needle at the canvas, yanking it through. Her work lacked rhythm.
“And?” my father said.
“I told her I’d do it, but I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t,” he said sharply.
“Then who is to do it?” I asked helplessly. Round and round. We always came back to the same question. “Do you have a suggestion? A plan?”
“No. Only that he can’t live here.”
“He’s your son. You’re putting it all one me.”
“You don’t have to accept it.”
“Oh sure, sure I don’t. Mom’s too sick, and you’re a newly-wed”—I said it sneeringly, Dolores looked up—“and I don’t have to accept it. Only Mom’s right, you know. If he goes on the street, he’ll die.”
“If he goes on the street, they’ll put him back in Greystone.”
“He’ll keep getting out of Greystone and going back on the street. I don’t want to take care of him, either, Dad. This terrifies me. I’m a newlywed, too. But we’re his family. I am, and Mom is, and you are.”
He clamped his jaw shut and thrust it out at me. His brown eyes looked small and mean.
I said doggedly, “She wants to put him in a clinic that’s running a special program.”
He snorted. “He’s been in a hundred programs.”
“This one’s different. It’s a Dr. Small in a Queens hospital. He’s doing a lot of work with schizophrenic patients. The emphasis is different—it’s on medication. He’s studying brain chemistry.” My voice had begun to break. “I was wondering if you could contribute?”
He stared at me, and then gradually his face softened, became more melancholy. He sighed. “Elizabeth,” he said gently, “I have very little money. We’ve done our best for John, and the truth is, we’re broke.”
“I know it,” I said. “I know you’ve tried.”
“At some point you have to say, ‘That’s it.’ We have to live, too.”
“I know.”
He shook his head and looked glumly out of the window. I thought, watching his face, he’s gotten old. He had never looked old to me before. Now I saw the loose reddish folds of skin under his jaw and how his eyebrows stood up in white tufts. I thought of the years he’d taken care of all of us, those golden suburban childhood years, the house, the food, the clothes, the tennis lessons, the skates, the saddles, the cars and schools and college tuitions. And all of it, this huge investment in us, had ended in debt and loans and mortgages, and a son who could not live with us, could not live alone, who would need years of medical care—care no one could afford.
He said, “I’ll do what I can.”
I nodded.
They saw me to the back door. It was almost dusk. I turned the key in the car’s ignition as the screen door snapped shut. The kitchen light went on. The sky in back of the house was a clear aqua blue with thin inky streamers of clouds. Later, it might rain.
I drove home with the radio on. Watergate and Vietnam. The oil cartel. I stopped at The Dix Mills Inn for a hamburger and a glass of wine. The girl at the bar was talking about Sonny. “What happened?” I asked.
“She tried suicide,” the girl said. “They pumped her out at Stanton Hospital. When she came to and saw she wasn’t dead, she cried and cried.”
“But why did she do it?” I asked.
“Ever meet her daughter?” the girl asked, ironically.
“No.”
She lifted her forefinger to her temple and tapped two times.
2.
“My brother?” Shauna said the next night after dinner. It had been Leonard’s turn to cook. He’d advanced from spaghetti with meat sauce to pasta primavera. And then there were strawberries for dessert—our own strawberries, smaller and later than those we bought at the local market, tart, juicy, delicious. “Which brother? I have two, my older brother and my younger brother, the baby. I’m not really close to either one. My older brother—he’s a prick, that’s all. We used to call him The Colonel. My dad was The General. I always thought my brother was sort of a traitor. Who was that famous traitor in World War II?”
“Mata Hari?” Sal asked.
“That was World War I,” Leonard said. “There was Lord Ha-ha, the one who used to broadcast to our troops from Berlin. He was Irish.”
“No doubt,” Shauna said drily.
“Quisling,” Wayne said. “She means Quisling.”
“Yeah,” Shauna said, “that’s the one. I always thought our brother was a traitor to us, us kids. Always spying on us and telling. Looking out for Number One, you know?”
“What does he do now?” May asked. “I mean, for a job.”
“He works on Wall Street,” Shauna said glumly.
Everyone laughed.
“How about your sisters?” I asked.
“They’re both married,” Shauna droned, “they both have kids. You know, the usual. I wasn’t really close to any of them because I was different. I was rebellious and wanted more. I wanted to be independent. It’s funny how my mother helped me
. She never said anything out loud, but she did what she could. Only she was so gutless. I hated the way she was so meek around my father. You heard from your brother, Leonard?”
“What’s that?” Leonard asked, raising his head. He was sitting with his arms folded on the table and his shoulders hunched, so that his long neck came out of his tee-shirt looking stretched. “My brother? No, I haven’t heard anything.”
“It’s quiet tonight.” Sal said. “Just the frogs, a few birds, a couple of crickets. No yelling. Maybe good old Dan isn’t home.”
“Funny how that carries,” May said. “All the way from the Knackers to here.”
“If he beats up Erroll one more time, I’m going to report him,” Shauna said.
“Who to?” Sal asked. “Erroll’s not a kid, so who you gonna report it to?”
“The state police?” May said.
“The state police!” Alice said scornfully. “They’d beat you up first. I hate the fuzz, man. They’re all alike. Anybody that wants to be a cop, he’s got something a little wrong with him.”
“Her brother’s a cop,” Shauna said.
“The guy is a total moron, plus, he enjoys beating up on people.”
“Where does he live?” I asked.
“Outside of Trenton,” Alice said.
“Somebody’s got to be a cop,” Sal said.
“Why?” Everybody asked in a chorus. And then we laughed.
“Don’t you have a couple of brothers?” May asked Sal.
“One,” Sal said. “He’s older than me, married, works in construction. My sister Pat and I used to be pretty close. My mother always worked, right? So after school Pat watched me until my mother got home. Pat’s divorced, but I still hang out with my ex-brother-in-law. He’s a good guy. Never could hold onto a job, though. He wasn’t lazy, just too easy goin’. ‘Mañana,’ Pat used to call him. Pat, she has a tendency to shape everybody up.”
“Funny how Mañana always marries Pronto,” Leonard said.
“I’ll say,” Alice said, sending a sneer down the table toward him. She had on a white maternity top with red cross-stitched smocking just above the breasts so that the blouse puffed out over her abdomen. Her stomach sat in front of her placidly, like a nicely wrapped gift. Leonard didn’t take up on what she’d said, but the rims of his large ears turned red and his frown deepened.
“My brother and I get along very well,” Wayne said, somewhat smugly. We’d met Wayne’s brother. He looked a lot like Wayne with a bush of fuzzy blonde hair, bright blue eyes, glasses. He was a history professor at some midwestern college. He’d arrived for Wayne’s birthday with a big cardboard box of stuff—Wayne’s parents were selling their house. So here came the hockey skates, tennis racquets, Wayne’s college paperbacks, and a tuxedo with a black satin cummerbund. Wayne put it on for his birthday dinner. “Twenty-nine,” he said, and shook his head. “Alexander the Great was dead at my age.”
We’d met May’s sister, too. Her name was Julia. She’d come up with her boyfriend a couple of times. They brought sleeping bags and slept in the summer parlor. Julia was a biology major at Cornell, with a special interest in aquatic life. I’d liked talking to her. It reminded me of how much I’d loved science in high school. I’d won a science prize at graduation. Why had I majored in English? I guess for a while I’d thought of going to law school.
“How’s your brother doing?” Sal asked me.
I raised my head. “John? Oh, I don’t really know. He’s being transferred to a clinic now. It’s a special program, at a hospital in Queens.”
“You think they’re going to help him?”
“I have no idea.”
“Was he always like that?” Alice asked.
“Like what?” I asked coldly. Alice and I had a truce, too, but it was only a truce. Underneath we disliked each other as much as ever.
“You know,” she said, and with her forefinger made the usual circular motion at her temple. There was something so insolent in the way she did it. I couldn’t remember ever disliking anyone as much as Alice and the intensity of this feeling gave me a whole different perspective on life. I now knew how it felt to want to physically assault someone. I imagined giving her stinging slaps, or punching my fists deep into her flesh. Now when we went to weekend movies, instead of cringing and covering my eyes, I watched the sadistic fight scenes with moronic satisfaction, popping Milk Duds and smiling throughout. I said, struggling to control my temper, “He has a mental illness. No, he didn’t always have it. He got sick at the end of his sophomore year in college.”
“He must have been awfully smart,” May said soothingly. “Didn’t you say he went to Princeton?”
“He still is smart,” I said, “but he’s sick. When he gets better he’ll be smart again.”
“Maybe it’s something in your family,” Alice said.
I turned my head away. I was trying to ignore her, but she went on in her taunting voice, “What was he like before? Was he a loner? Was he moody?”
“Why Alice,” I said, “you’ve been reading again! Isn’t that the standard newspaper description? As it happens, John wasn’t a loner and he wasn’t moody. He was funny and kind. He’s a talented person. He speaks four languages and plays three instruments.”
“Did you two get along?” May asked. “I mean, were you close?”
I turned and looked at May, who seemed tired. She half lay upon the table, with her head in her hand and her dark eyes shining with empathy. There was some part of May that was always giving and responding and I wondered if this constant nurturance didn’t exhaust her.
“We got along fine,” I said. “I was the quiet one, he was the funny one. We agreed on most things, though, movies, songs, things like that. Getting along wasn’t the problem, if that’s what you’re thinking. Family dynamics wasn’t the problem. I mean, in my opinion, that’s all horseshit, all that stuff they print in magazines, and the stuff the therapists and analysts grind out.”
My voice had gotten louder. Everyone else sat silently, looking down at the table or at their fingernails. Wayne’s face was pink; he was steadfastly staring at his knees and his arms were tightly folded across his chest. Shauna said practically, “It’s a shame when that happens, when somebody so talented and smart gets sick. It’s a shame with anyone. Maybe he’ll get better. I’ve seen it happen.”
I said sarcastically, “At Greystone?”
“Even at Greystone,” Shauna said.
“What’s the matter with Greystone?” Wayne asked.
I said, “Where to start? Okay, let’s start at getting the patient in. He has to be considered homicidal or suicidal. Consequently, one winter, my brother who was very ill but not homicidal lived in the woods. When we found him he’d lost forty pounds. He had lice and frostbite. He had to have a toe amputated.”
I glanced down the table and saw Leonard staring at me with such a stark pitying glance that I jumped up and the side of my hand flew against my water glass. Water leaped up like a geyser and fell, of course, on Alice’s belly, making a big wet splotch down her front.
“Well shit,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, “sorry.” I left the room and went outside. The sun was setting in a puddle of melted orange. Birds were trilling and a couple of frogs had commenced to strum. I took the path to the Knackers’ Farm and walked until I could clearly see the ugly shit-yellow house. The paddock was empty. They’d gotten rid of their horses. The house looked empty, too. It was all unnaturally still. No doubt Coral and Dan were down at The Rainbow’s End getting tanked. No doubt Erroll was locked in his room.
We all worried about Erroll. He came to work only once in a while and his face was often bruised. He kept the sleeves of his dark green work shirt buttoned at the wrists instead of rolled up on his arms. Every time he came, we asked him how things were, and was he all right; but he never answered. I thought we ought to call someone. Who? If we got the police it might make it worse for Erroll. Some of them were drinking buddies of Dan’s.
They’d tell Dan and then he’d really beat him up good.
I walked back to the house. Skip’s car was just coming down the road so I waited for him. He got out with his jacket over his arm. “Hey, babe,” he said. We kissed and walked toward the house with our arms around each other. I was glad to see him. The session with Alice and May had left me feeling lonely and tired. Skip pressed my hip. “Everything okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Dinner was a gas. We sat around bulling about our siblings.”
“Oh yeah? Did you mention my sister?”
“No,” I said.
“Thank God,” he said, and grinned. He had a plastic shopping bag hanging from his hand, hidden by his sports coat.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“For you,” he said. We stopped, I dug into the bag. Leather strips and braid. “A bridle?” I said. “No fooling. Well, what got into you?” We kissed again, and then, ourselves braided together, went on to the house. A bridle! I thought. It made me smile. It was sweet of him, really.
While Skip ate dinner, I stood at the window looking out. They sky was full of stars and in the darkness around the house there were thousands of fireflies, and it seemed the house was silently moving through a space littered with comets and shooting stars.
I heard Alice laugh sharply in the next room and then someone turned up the radio. It was the Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb.” Skip came up in back of me, put his arms around me and laid his chin on the top of my head. I said, “I’m really happy.”
He hummed into my hair, “bum-bum-bum bum, bum …” and then whispered, teasing, “‘under my thumb …’”
3.
My mother called the next night but she sounded so frail that I was alarmed and decided to drive down early the next morning. When I pulled into her shady little street I saw a police car parked in the driveway, and when I got out of my car, a policeman who had been standing at the side entrance of the house came over. “Hi, Liz,” he said. I must have looked stupified. He said, with a wounded air, “Don’t you remember me? George Brady, we went to grammar school together.”
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