by Liam Durcan
Brendan stood and went over their mother, bending to give her a quick kiss on the cheek. He looked up at the nursing assistant.
“Thanks,” he said to her. “We can take her back.”
“I’d like you to stay, Ramona,” their mother said, reaching around with her right hand to clasp the younger woman’s hand, which lay on her shoulder. Brendan tented his eyebrows and looked at the woman.
“I can stay,” Ramona said. “I’ll just be over in the corner reading if you need me, Helen.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Happy birthday, Mom.” Brendan said, and put a bouquet of flowers in her lap.
Brendan motioned for Martin to stand up, but Martin was staring at his mother across the little glass table that separated them. Brendan took a step over to his brother and hooked a middle and index finger under Martin’s arm, drawing him to his feet and shepherding him closer. “Mom, I brought someone with me.”
“Hi, Mom,” Martin said.
“Hello,” replied his mother in a tone of polite neutrality, as though greeting an acquaintance in a movie line.
“It’s me,” Martin said, and moved closer. “It’s me, Martin.”
“Oh, Martin. Do you live here now?”
“In Detroit? No. I’m still in Montreal. But Brendan was coming, so I thought I’d come for once.” Martin leaned over to kiss her cheek but instead felt himself pulling away from the distinct ridges of her ear. “I was in an accident.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Are you okay now?” He heard her voice, which sounded raspier and softer than he remembered. The slightest hint of Glasgow still there, at the back of the throat, hanging on. There was nothing to say about her face except that he could not recognize his mother. What have I done for my mother, he asked himself, other than run? He moved closer. He closed his eyes and reached out for her hand.
“Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying, Mom. It’s just easier with my eyes closed.”
“That doesn’t sound very promising.”
“No, I’m getting better.”
“Your brother told me about the trouble you were in.”
“I was in the hospital, but I’m out now.” He looked around for Brendan and found him standing over them. “But today is about you. Happy birthday”. She reached over, the heel of her hand skidding up against his forearm until it found the crook of the elbow. Her thumb and forefinger pinched a small ridge of material.
“Thank you for the flowers. It was so nice to see Sharon again.”
“Sharon?” Martin asked.
“She was just here,” his mother said, and Brendan nodded.
“Okay,” Martin said. “And the girls send their love, too.”
“These are nice flowers. Did you get them at Fensters’? Fensters’ on Highland always had the best flowers. Orchids, the most delicate things. But orchids have no smell, and these smell wonderful.” She brought the flowers closer to her and then buried her entire face in the bouquet. It was an indiscriminate and childlike gesture, as though smell were not enough to fully understand flowers. She lifted her head, and Brendan could not be sure he didn’t see a form of rapture on her face. “Oh, a bouquet from Fensters’. You know I would tease your father that the one disadvantage to always being on holiday during the week of my birthday was that I never got a bouquet from Fensters’.”
“I don’t think Fensters’ is around anymore,” Martin said, looking at a shrugging Brendan.
“That’s right,” their mother replied. “They took that from us.”
“I don’t understand,” Brendan said.
“The blacks. They took everything from us.” Brendan cleared his throat and cast a glance at Ramona, who didn’t look up from her magazine. “You’re father worked so hard, and they burned it down.”
Brendan was up now, a hand on both sides of the wheelchair frame, staring down at her. “Mom, come on. We had a good life, Mom. Whatever happened . . .”
“I remember what happened.”
“Then you know that Dad rebuilt the business. And it was better than ever.”
“They burned us down.”
“Lots of black businesses were burned out, too.”
“Does that make it better?”
“No.”
“Fensters’ burned down too. They never reopened.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“We should talk about Fensters’,” she said, her voice rising in pitch, enough to get Ramona and even the people behind the desk to glance over. “We should talk about Fallon’s Electrical.”
“Mom, come on.”
“Don’t ‘come on’ me. Do you know what it did to your father?” Their mother leaned forward, the flowers almost falling out of her lap. Brendan put out an arm to catch her should she pitch forward. “He was never the same.”
“Mom . . .”
“It made him give up on Detroit.”
“Mom, we left Highland Park years before the riots.”
“We kept the store there.”
“But we left. We left.”
“Would you stop saying that!”
Brendan sat back in the chair and put his hand to his forehead. “I don’t know where . . .”
Martin turned to the other two, sensing the novel energy of a family argument without him at the center. He stroked his mother’s shoulder.
“Mom, it’s okay.”
Now their mother fixed on Martin’s face. “He’s like that. Vietnam.” Martin smiled and nodded, understanding.
“Why is it that every problem I have ever had is Vietnam’s fault?” Brendan said from his chair.
“Well, something about you changed when you came back.”
Brendan was up now, pointing at Martin like a television lawyer.
“Something about him changed and he never even fucking went.”
Their mother grimaced at the language before turning to Martin, “And then there was the marriage. . . .”
“The marriage, the marriage. Okay, I admit it, I made a mistake. But there were some people who got divorced in the seventies who didn’t go to Vietnam.”
Helen leaned over and whispered to Martin, “I liked your Rita the best.” Martin smiled, choosing not to correct her.
“Do you know what happened to me in Vietnam? Do you? I was actually okay. I know that might not fit with what you think must have happened, but there it is. I was happy. I got up in the morning and worked. . . .”
Martin snorted. “Worked?”
“I fought; okay, I fought. People shot at me. I shot back. But the people I was with, I would have died for them.” He turned to Martin, “I wouldn’t expect you to know anything about that.”
“Well, if that’s all it takes, maybe I’ll just napalm another culture to give myself a sense of community.” Brendan got up from his chair and walked away. Martin saw Ramona, the nursing assistant, look up again, no doubt familiar with the cadences of little spats and wondering if now was one of those moments to rescue her ward from the loving embrace of family. She paused, watching Martin and his mother. Weighing things, probably.
“Why couldn’t your brother be more like you?” His mother said, and Martin looked over his right shoulder for Brendan but found no one. He tried to refocus on his mother. “I knew he’d do something like this,” she said, whispering and leaning forward so that their foreheads almost touched.
“Like what? “Martin asked.
“Hurt himself.”
Martin held her hand in his. He tried to look into her eyes to see if she knew whom she was talking to. He felt the cuff of her cardigan, the soft wool, which seemed more knowable than the fog of meaning around her.
“Why do you think he’d do that?” Martin asked.
“He could never live down disappointment.”
“Who are you talking about, Mom?”
“Your brother.”
“Which one of us?”
She paused and shook her hand in front of her face, as though shooing a
persistent fly. “Oh, you’re the same.”
“We’re different.”
“People imagine they’re different. I understand.”
“I’m Martin, Mom.”
His mother said nothing. The angles of her mouth pulled down and then up, into some sort of expression whose meaning Martin wished he knew, an expression he felt he should know. But, watching her, he realized he didn’t know what this expression meant. This small clue to her inside world would disappear and he would forget about it, forget about this moment and his perplexity regarding it. He’d simply never know. Ramona was already at his shoulder, bending over to release the brakes on his mother’s chair. She knew.
Chapter 22
“You ready to go?” Martin asked his brother, who rose from the bench he’d been sitting on outside the entrance to the Château. It had taken Martin a good ten minutes to find his way out of the building, and although the pavements were still wet, he’d emerged into a sunny afternoon.
“Yeah,” Brendan replied.
“You should go easy on her.”
“What?”
“On Mom. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Look. I just don’t like that kind of talk.”
“You mean about the riots? She’s demented, for Christ’s sake. She thought Sharon visited her this morning. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“And in front of that assistant—”
“Who, Ramona? Ramona didn‘t give a shit about what Mom said. Ramona understands.”
“I don’t care what Ramona thinks.”
“Then why are you upset? Is it the Vietnam stuff? She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t even know whom she’s talking to.”
“She knows.”
She doesn’t know, Martin told himself as he heard Brendan’s phone begin to ring. His brother answered it with an urgency of someone expecting a call. The deflation in his voice after an expectant “Hello” told Martin it wasn’t the person Brendan had hoped for.
Martin walked along ahead, trying to remember the details of Brendan’s car, stopping at each car he touched and deciding if this was the one. Nothing was familiar enough to commit to. Only the insides of Brendan’s car existed. She had no idea whom she was talking to, Martin repeated as he kept walking. She is demented. She thought Sharon had visited, for Christ’s sake. He stopped because his legs suddenly felt weak, a sensation that came upon him so quickly that he thought he would fall, and he held out his right hand to brace himself against the nearest car. From somewhere behind him he heard Brendan’s voice, the cadence of a phone call. Speech and silence, a rally with words against some satellite in space. He felt himself breathing hard, his temples damp, and then his heart announced itself with a bailiff-quality knock against his breastbone. His mother knew everything. She knew. Martin stood motionless between cars, lost in what felt like an abyss, and was unable to move. How could she know? It didn’t matter that she didn’t know whom she was talking to; she knew whom she was talking about. Intuition, a mothering instinct, Scot’s cynicism—he wanted to curse whatever primeval program it was that survived, thrived even, in his mother’s brain when everything else of human value was shutting down. He leaned over the car he had stopped at, trying to catch his breath.
He listened for his brother. Brendan’s part of the conversation was reduced to monosyllables—“yes, sure, not really”—something being proposed to him, or a favor being asked. “Sure, don’t worry. I know where it is.” Something being agreed to. “Bye.” He heard the sound of a phone being snapped shut.
“Where’s the car?” he asked, fairly certain he couldn’t go any farther.
“You’re standing next to it,” replied Brendan.
The car moved into traffic and accelerated in a way that indicated to Martin that they were on an expressway. He put the visit with his mother out of his mind and turned his head to the window. He wanted to see Detroit again. Darkened towers and empty streets, all of it perfect. A pilgrimage to ground zero, with its cindered shrines and vague memories of what you used to believe in. Of what you were.
He wondered if the Dime Building was still there, or the Ford. He had walked past these buildings countless times as a child, on a sojourn downtown with his hand in his mother’s, Brendan on the other side. Both of the buildings—neoclassical monuments to Detroit’s might—were Burnham’s work, something he’d realized only years after he’d left Detroit and become interested in architecture. And yet he was certain he could remember walking past them and thinking about Burnham. This seemed certain and yet he realized it was impossible.
Maybe the Dime still stood; after all, Detroit had yet to knock down all its old buildings, perhaps pacing itself for the next fifty years of inevitable decline and still seeing some value in the small burst of civic celebrity that accompanied public demolitions. They’d begun tearing things down when he still lived here, and from a distance he’d followed the chain of events associated with every building doomed to destruction: the initial outrage always neatly balanced by the chamber of commerce’s call for renewal of the downtown, the injunctions from historical societies, the hearings (accompanied by the ebb and flow of public outrage, the realpolitik of money and influence and exhaustion at the process). Then came the countdown. Once you got to the countdown, the anxiety seemed to ease. And everyone but the most hard-core preservationists would agree that bringing down the buildings—abandoned, given over to vandals and people like Norah’s “urban explorers”—felt therapeutic, almost cathartic. People seemed to enjoy watching Detroit die, piece by piece, in clouds of dust after the initial dynamite blast. Micro immolations of a place whose success they’d never really believed, perhaps even begrudged.
He adjusted the car seat, reclining it until it gave that mechanical groan that told him he had reached its limits. He told himself that he’d never wanted to be in a place more than in Detroit at that very minute. Detroit for its lost promise. Detroit for its amnesia. Detroit was his town, hollow-cored and ignored, a simulation site for a neutron bomb. His only regret was never having built something here, something as big and vulgar and Ozymandian as a goddamn consulate. Detroit deserved it as much as he did. He closed his eyes and tried to listen to the engine of the car, but, not being a product of the Motor City, it coursed on in smug and efficient silence. But Detroit was in him now, even without the accompanying machine roar, infusing him with a spirit that no chamber of commerce could understand. He loved Detroit, not just because it gave him his origins but because at certain times in a person’s life, a city comes to embody one’s mood perfectly. Paris in the springtime, Rio during Carnival, Detroit when your mother’s just intimated she always knew you’d try to kill yourself.
The car came to a stop and Brendan turned off the engine. Martin squinted in the midafternoon light, wondering where the reassurances of car-park darkness were.
“Are we at the hotel?”
“No.”
“Where are we?”
“The Central Station.”
Martin tilted his head and looked at the building. “You know it’s closed, right?”
“I know.
“So why are we here?”
“Apparently, we can get in around the back.”
Martin laughed. “Around the back? It’s all back.”
“Norah told me. She’s here.”
“Where?
“Inside. She called me as we were leaving the Château.”
“Inside that? Oh, this is one of those expedition things. . . .” He felt Brendan nod.
“She said she’d meet us inside.”
“What does she want?”
“She just told me where she was.”
Martin sat motionless, “You’re crazy to go in there. It’s abandoned and condemned and it’s probably like the Waldorf for crackheads inside.”
“I think you should come”
“It’s dangerous. You don’t . . .”
“Your daughter’s inside.
Are you coming?”
“You’d go in there?”
“I want to go in, yeah.”
“Why?”
“I want to see the inside of that building. I’d like to see Norah again. You should go in.”
“I can’t.”
“Tell yourself that it’s just a fascinating building, a historic building, that’s all.”
“No, you don’t understand.”
“I understand.” Martin heard the sound of the car door opening. “I understand perfectly. I don’t think you understand; your children will walk away from you.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“That’s what this is about.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because that’s what everything is about. They will walk away from you.”
“That’s their choice.”
“Stop making their choice so easy.”
“I think you’re projecting.” The car door closed in response. Martin struggled to undo the seat belt before pushing the door open. “You know this car is going to get stolen if you leave it here; you know that, right?” He scanned the area that Brendan seemed to have walked into—scrub overgrowth and a crumbling curbside—but could not locate him.
“I don’t care,” said Brendan, from what sounded like twenty feet away. Martin turned to face the sound and found him.
Martin slammed the door closed. “I’m not going to wait here for the carjacking, okay?”
“I didn’t ask you to wait. I asked you to come with me.”
“This is nuts.”
“I don’t care about the car.”
“But we’ll have to walk home.” Martin stepped over something the size of a cinder block or a small carcass. “This is serious. The car will be gone.”
“Then we’ll walk, okay? Come on, we’re late,” Brendan said, and stopped walking, waiting as Martin caught up to him.
“You can’t be late for a building like this—”
“Do you remember being in it?”
“Not much. I remember the waiting room. Lots of light, big space.”
“She said at the southeast corner there would be an opening in the fence.”
“Just keep an eye out for cops. I don’t want to get arrested,” Martin said as he stumbled on the uneven terrain. He kept his hands stretched out on either side to help him balance. Brendan stopped suddenly, and Martin, walking behind and paying attention to the ground under him, ran into his back.