by Sands Hall
As the lights faded to final black, there was little applause. The audience filed out, somber. Kate and I remained in our seats. Finally she said, “The other day Oak told me, ‘I am Beatrice.’ He said, ‘Except she’s braver than I am. She does what I don’t dare to do.’”
“What’s that mean?” I stared at the set, bald and sad in the house lights, at the ugly nest of chains and blankets under the stairs, at the stairs themselves, which mounted to that terrible Heaven. “What does he mean? Kill his father?”
“Maybe,” Kate said. “In a larger way? Maybe a sort of ‘if you meet the Buddha on the path, kill him’? You know, in order to move on or something?”
I tried to take this in. Dad could be distant, self-involved, angry, but he was unrecognizable in the character my brother had put on that stage. Maybe it was about the theater company. Or Mary? Was there a message about a kind of “incest”—that we were all too close? But what, what, was the source of the terrible anger that surged through the script?
Kate put a hand on my arm. “Let’s go get a beer.”
In the old stable that the previous summer we’d hosed out and transformed into the company’s own Blue Moon Café, I sat with Kate at a piano, singing songs that went unheard in the opening-night hubbub. Mary, who’d come up from Manhattan for the opening, sat beside Oak. She’d recently discovered she was pregnant and was managing to neither drink nor smoke, though the room was full of people doing both.
Suddenly, in the midst of the noisy hubbub, my brother’s large, matted head of hair rose up. He stumbled from the table, turning over a chair. “I’m gunning for you, man!” he shouted. “It’s you I’m gunning for!”
He wasn’t talking to anyone in the room. He was deeply, disturbingly drunk, a person not in his body.
In the sudden silence, someone laughed. No one else did.
Oak could hardly stand. He propped himself against a table, one leg splayed out like an actor playing a cripple. He pointed at empty space. “You! Gunning for you!”
Bodies surged around him. Mary tried to talk him down. I moved toward him. He waved all of us away, violently. “Enough arms! I’ve had enough arms!”
I ran and ran and then walked, far out on a dirt road under the twinkling Lexington stars, wiping at my eyes, feeling absurdly theatrical yet utterly real.
Why that strange, violent depiction of a family? Was it our family—our father? Or was Oak talking about God? But what kind of God was that? And what did it mean that Oak drank so much? Why all the anger? What was happening?
the next morning, Sunday, a small group of us gathered on the bank of the slow-moving Schoharie. Oak plunged into the creek and came out again, shaking his long hair in a shimmering snake of sunlight and water. Squatting on the riverbank, he talked about how he loved hangovers. General laughter, largely uncomfortable. I watched as he discussed with a stage manager the best way to repair a broken prop, and, with a friend helping with a state grant, the objectives of the company. Upriver, the dark metal bridge cast its shadow across the twinkling water.
Around noon, as the actors began to gear up for the Sunday matinee of Beatrice, I caught a ride back to Manhattan. I was due at CBS studios at 6:00 the next morning.
Sometime after midnight, my phone rang. I fumbled across the room to pick it up.
“Your brother’s had an accident,” someone said, urgently. “You need to go tell Mary. This isn’t news she should hear over the phone.”
“Pardon?”
“Oak’s in an ambulance. He’s on the way to Albany General. Someone’s got to tell Mary. She and Oak appear to have had a fight this afternoon, before she headed back to Manhattan, and we don’t think she should just get a phone call. Go. As fast as you can.”
I ran. Down my stairs, up First Avenue. The buzzer of their apartment building didn’t work. I called Mary from the telephone booth on the corner.
It was 1:00 in the morning. But Mary picked up immediately, as if she was waiting by the phone. “What’s happened,” she said. There was no question mark.
She buzzed me in. I ran up the stairs. I told her what I knew. She searched for and found a pack of cigarettes and began to make phone calls. From her end of these conversations, as she lit one cigarette from the glowing butt of another, I began to put together what must have happened.
Following the ill-attended and badly received Sunday matinee, Mary had left for Manhattan—she had work the next day—and Oak went across the river to the Lexington Hotel, where he sat at the bar and drank boilermakers with a man who was visiting a friend that weekend. On the way back to the theater, he fell off the bridge.
Or slipped off the bridge.
Or jumped off the bridge.
Somehow he went off the bridge, landing on his head on the sharp rocks below. It began to rain. An emergency vehicle arrived. Lifted on a stretcher, he was taken to a local doctor’s office, where a nurse said, “Shit, another DOA.” Oak might have looked dead on arrival, and it’s possible his heart did stop during that time, but the attending physician, Dr. Bock, who knew him, shoved a tracheotomy in his throat, shouting, “Don’t you die on me, don’t you dare fucking die!”
They loaded him into an ambulance. A member of the company, a friend from Irvine days, Bruce Bouchard, climbed in. The doors slammed. Sirens screaming, they raced through the rainy night to Albany.
Which was where he was now, in something called Intensive Care.
To me, Intensive Care was yellow lotion in a bottle. But Mary, a doctor’s daughter, knew exactly what the term meant.
Voice trembling, she asked whoever was on the other end of the line, “Is he going to . . . live?”
I shook my head at the absurdity of that question. There was no way it was that serious! This was my brother! He survived, he always survived. It was just a matter of a Band-Aid! It would be like that time he almost fell down the Rockpile, or leapt into the tent spread across the lake in Europe, or landed on that stone bench at Andover. A lot of blood, maybe. Head wounds bleed! But he would be, as he’d always been, very silly, and very lucky.
Mary made more phone calls—surely one of them was to my parents—and packed a bag. I stood with her as she hailed a taxi. I waved her off and stalked the blocks to my apartment and up the five flights of stairs. As I walked in, my alarm was ringing: 3:30 a.m.
I tried to follow my workday ritual, lighting a candle and meditating. My body shook. My eyes were hot and dry. Was my brother going to die? Folding forward over my cross-legged position, I put my forehead to the floor. Please don’t let him die.
I opened my eyes. For a long moment I kept brow pressed to rug, watching candlelight flicker against its woof and warp.
I took a breath. I had to get going. I had to get to work.
And what was that work? A soap opera.
But I could not not show up. These were the days when many soaps were filmed live. Video was still rarely used. Thousands of dollars and dozens of people’s time would be wasted if I were not there, the entire production machine thrown into havoc. This had been made clear to me when I signed the contract.
Forehead against the floor, I argued with that logic. And then I got to my feet.
In a grand piece of irony, the scene we shot that day was one in which my character, Maya, finds out that her sister has drowned in a scuba diving accident.
“Don’t cry, Maya,” said the man playing my fiancé. But I could do no crying.
“Don’t cry,” he said again, a little worried.
I put my face in my hands and shook my shoulders. It was all I could do.
I didn’t have scenes to shoot the following day. I headed to Albany. As I found my way to the Intensive Care Unit, I ran into Mary.
“He’s doing really well!” she said.
I smiled back, hugely cheered. Of course! This was my brother!
But walking into the
ICU, what I saw was a bed filled with a massive dark thing, a cubist painting that took long moments to form into discernable parts.
The head two and a half times its normal size. The face bloated, unrecognizable. Forehead wrapped in a blood-spotted bandage, the bandage angled in a way that made it look pirate-like, jaunty. Two Santa Rosa plums bulging out of what must be eye sockets. Protruding from his throat, which was thick as a bull’s, was a tube, the skin around it bloated and bloody—it had clearly been jammed in there. Down his bare chest, from clavicle to pelvis, a bandage four inches wide seeped blood. Tangles of transparent tubing surrounded him. Tubes attached to bottles that hung from metal trees dripped something clear and viscous into his veins. Tubes running from his body, attached to every limb, to his chest, to his head, were filled with a mottled pink and gray that inched along and made me think of brain matter. A tube connected to his penis was red with blood, mixed with something as yellow as that sauterne he’d been drinking—had it been just the day before? A machine to one side of his bed, which reminded me of something used backstage to make the sound of wind, clacked and whooshed, expanding a collapsed lung.
The top of my head rose and hit the ceiling. The room tilted. As I reached toward the bed to steady myself, the tube snapped out of his throat. A terrible rattling filled the room. A nurse rushed in. As she worked to reconnect the tube to the hole in his throat, I realized he was breathing through that tube, it was the only thing giving him oxygen.
I locked my eyes on yet another machine that stood beside the bed, in which green lights blinked and flashed, occasionally flickering a terrifying red.
The nurse turned, ready to tell me something. She took one look at my face and pulled me into the hallway, sat me in a chair, and with a deft, gentle hand, pressed my face between my knees.
“Breathe,” she said.
please, please, please don’t take his mind
The man who shared Oak’s room in the ICU was in a bed designed to rotate so he wouldn’t get bedsores. He’d been in a car accident and was completely paralyzed. But his brain had not been injured. In the other bed was sturdy Oak, whose body, except for his smashed head, suffered little permanent damage.
I think about that man in the ICU being turned on an apparatus that held him like a chicken on a spit, all the while knowing what had happened to him. It’s hard to imagine that knowledge. How you go on breathing.
Oak did not know what happened, or the extent of the damage, for a long time.
Neither did I.
mother flew east on a red-eye. She had a brief layover at JFK before the flight to Albany, and wanting to surprise her, I scrambled across town, predawn, to catch a subway to the airport. Waiting for her plane, I gazed about at the sprawl of humanity readying themselves for the next step on their journeys, stunned, as I was all those days, that life could just go on. At the same time, I could not believe anything had actually happened. Any day, Oak would clamber over the deck railing, displaying the double-stitched binding on his shirt that had kept him from falling. He would surge out of the lake, out of the mass of golden canvas that enshrouded him. He would be just fine.
Mother was gratifyingly delighted to see me. As we sipped terrible airport coffee, I was glad for the grace of small talk. Until those hours in the ICU waiting room, I’d never grasped how essential the chat is that gets us through the moments until it’s time for “big talk.” The woman whose daughter was undergoing a kidney transplant listing every step of a recipe for meatballs; the man whose wife was dying of leukemia describing the antics of their poodle, Boo; the deep, head-shaking discussions of weather. All of us glad to be distracted, for a few moments, from what was going on with our loved ones in rooms full of ticking machines down the hall.
“Your father,” Mom said, her face a terrible pale gray.
It was time for big talk.
“He said if Tad did it on purpose, he’s no son of his.”
“Mom! It wasn’t on purpose! Tad—Oak—would never do that!” But I understood: Tad had failed. Even if it was an accident. Halls didn’t have accidents. The fall was a metaphor—the real reason was lodged in there somewhere.
“After Mary called with the news,” she said, “I went out onto the deck.”
I imagined the huge shoulders of Granite Chief hunched up against a sky full of stars, and Mother standing on the redwood deck, staring up at that sparkling brilliance, thinking of her injured son, three time zones and three thousand miles away.
“And I said, I cried, to whatever the hell it is that isn’t up there, I said, ‘Take his body, but please, please, please don’t take his mind.’”
I walked her to the gate. As she waved one last time before disappearing down the gangway, I thought of her screaming at a god she didn’t believe in—a god who, if he existed, was such a bastard—screaming in massive pleading fury, Please don’t take his mind!
That night, she called from a hotel near the hospital. When Tad had heard her voice, she told me, and especially when she took his hand, tears seeped out of eyes still so swollen and bruised that he could not open them.
“This seems to be important,” she told me. “It means he’s remembering, that somewhere in there his brain is working.”
Of course it’s working, I thought. He’s just had a really bad fall.
She told me that Mary was handling things very well, although being very stern. “Maybe she thinks I plan to take him home, but I’d never do that. He’s her husband. She’s his wife. And as your father and I learned, that first year of our marriage . . .”
She related, again, what she’d told us often: how those difficult first months of marriage, when neither of them had family to which they were willing to turn, had played a huge part in forging their powerful partnership.
“So you’ll not find me in the role of clichéd mother-in-law!” she said. “But it’s all so awful. I need to call your father. He wants me to come home.”
“But you just got there,” I said, stunned.
She stayed a day and a half in Albany. She returned to Manhattan, came to CBS studios with me, to lunch with Dad’s agent. That night she talked on the phone with Dad for over an hour. At dawn, we caught the subway back out to JFK, where I waved her into the plane that would take her home to her husband.
“I don’t want to be in Mary’s way,” she said when I protested. “And your father needs me.”
“But Tad needs you!”
She was adamant. Her son had a wife. She had a husband.
mary clearly felt the same. She pretty much banished Oak’s friends—not telling them when he’d been moved from one room to another, not even when he was moved from Albany to Boston’s Massachusetts General. My affection for her had some time before morphed to a terrified admiration, and I understood why she was furious, anguished, murderous: In addition to the horror of what was unfolding in her married life (and she was far clearer, much earlier than I, about the ramifications of the accident), she was pregnant. But the spikiness seemed aimed at me, personally.
Part of this may have been that Oak knew early memories: that I was his sister. His mother’s voice. Even friends from the Irvine years: Michael VanLandingham, Bruce Bouchard. But the pregnant woman who spent every day and night by his side? Who was she?
So perhaps I should not have been surprised when, one morning, Mary and her mother banished me.
By this time I’d spent several Thanksgivings and Christmases with Mary’s family. I adored her mother. More than once she and I’d talked late into the night about her beloved Catholicism. Without apology, she spoke of God and of her religion, including that she held a blasphemous view: that heaven was here on earth.
“Why is that blasphemous?” I asked.
“Because my church teaches that we are all sinners. We must endure the travail of life, walking upright in the eyes of God, and if we manage to step correctly thr
ough our days and nights, maybe we’ll make it into heaven.” She smiled. “Whereas I think Jesus is saying that it’s all right here, right now. This is heaven. It’s a matter of seeing that’s so. And that takes faith.”
This corroborated feelings I sometimes had, when I glimpsed God, or maybe what I meant was transcendence, in golden light spilling onto a brick wall, when I was bent over my guitar with a new set of lyrics coming clear, sharing laughter with friends around a table.
So I trusted Mary’s mother. I believed in her goodness. I guess that’s why, sitting in her kitchen, when she said she had something she needed to say to me, I listened.
She told me that I wasn’t good for my brother. That I was, in fact, bad for him.
Mary had cracked the kitchen door so she could hold her cigarette outside. She was extremely thin, except for the dome of her pregnancy.
“So,” Mary’s mother said, “as you want the best for Oak, you need to not visit him.”
“What do you mean, not visit him?!”
“We also noticed that after your mother visited he was upset—”
“She’s his mother! He probably wanted to go home!”
“Everyone needs to leave him alone. The theater company too. To get better.”
I was on my feet, holding onto the back of a chair. “He doesn’t know what’s happened. He doesn’t know where he is. Maybe even who he is. He needs people he knows.”
Mary pulled the cigarette inside to take a drag, then pressed a cheek to the doorjamb to blow the smoke outside.
“He knows who I am!” I said. “He needs someone there that he remembers!”
This was exactly the wrong thing to say. They were aware of it too. He did not recognize Mary. I think he assumed she was a nurse.
“You’ll do what’s best for your brother.”
“There’s no way I’m not going to visit him!” But my voice shook.
I have a vague memory of hitchhiking after this. Rather than catching a ride with Mary to Boston, I must have put out a thumb. I caught the next train to New York, where I was due to shoot the soap the next morning. En route, I did not visit my brother.