“Well you can va fanculo yourself all night. I’m glad you’re keeping your fat ass in Europe and I’m only sorry you came home to take advantage of my hospitality.”
“You, Tee, and I are staying with Dad,” Dupree explained. “We’ll have our old rooms. Be good to take a trip down memory lane to the place we were tortured as children.”
“Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo,” my father mocked. “You kids don’t know what a bad childhood’s like. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes during the Depression.”
Dupree and I both repeated the last sentence at the same time and with the exact didactic intonation of our father.
“Depression must’ve been hell,” said Tee.
“Gets worse every year,” Dupree said. “No one survived the son of a bitch. America was wiped out except a few strong men like Dad. His pussy sons wouldn’t’ve lasted a day.”
Dupree eased the car through Dolphin Street, which cut through the two blocks of downtown. The shapes of the stores were characteristic of the town’s distinction. Each store was different, but seen together, they gave the street an undisclosed unity, the look of some perfectly lit marina with a full consignment of interesting yachts tied up at night. I always wondered how a town so pretty could produce people so mean.
“Why didn’t Mom keep the house?” I asked Dupree. “I never thought she’d give that house up in a million years.”
“Your mother makes the whore of Babylon look pure as the wind-driven snow.” A voice came from the backseat—he was keeping up his end of the conversation. “I surrendered my seed to Delilah after she bestowed upon me the kiss of Judas.”
“He goes biblical when he discusses Mom,” Dallas explained. “Thinks it puts him on a high moral plain.”
“But the house,” I persisted. “I think she loved it more than she loved us.”
“Way she explained it was this,” said Dupree. “The house was so full of bad memories for her that an exorcist wouldn’t do her any good.”
“It’s a house full of beautiful memories. Beautiful memories,” Father wailed sadly.
“What’s a beautiful memory, Dupree?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Heard of ’em. Just never had one.”
My brothers and I laughed, but the laughter had a cutting and bitter edge. Dupree reached across the seat past Dallas and squeezed my hand. That secret gesture was his welcome home. He was assuring me that I could always find rescue in the country of brothers. The friendship of my brothers burned in a soft fire and my absence had not quite made the fire go out.
The house where we were born was lit by the last light of day and the tide was high in the river as Dupree pulled the car into the driveway. Looking at the house was like looking at a secret part of myself, a place that revealed the scars and craters from the dark side of the soul, the side where suffering and agony and hurt too great to bear lumber off to lick their wounds. It was also adjacent to where Shyla had lived.
“Help me out of this damn car,” our father shouted.
Dupree and I helped him out of the car and through the garden, repeating once more the scene we had been part of hundreds of times in our childhoods. It had helped mark those childhoods and I was sure it had gone a long way to damage what lives we had made for ourselves as adults.
“You know,” Dupree said, “I wouldn’t mind if Dad was a drunk, if he wasn’t so mean.”
“Can’t have everything,” I said.
“See why I live in Columbia?” Dupree asked.
“Any questions about Rome?”
“Not a one. Always made sense to me.”
“I’m tired of this shit,” our father said. “I’m gonna whip both your asses.”
“There’s four of us, Dad,” Tee reminded him.
“Face it, Pop. You’re old and weak and over the hill. We’re all in our prime and we don’t like you very much.”
“I set him up in practice, Lord,” the judge wailed at Dallas. “I handed him a million-dollar law firm.”
“My clients buy track shoes after they meet Dad,” Dallas said to us. “That’s how fast they want to get away from our firm.”
“God, it’s good to be home,” I said. “The old homeplace. Family albums. Home-cooked meals. Church picnics. Sly old Dad doing magic tricks for the grandkids.”
“I don’t have to take this shit.”
“Yeah you do, Dad,” I said. “You can’t walk without our help. And yes. Thanks. Think nothing of it. A pleasure to be of service. Don’t mention it.”
“Thanks for nothing, losers,” my father said.
Dupree and I began to maneuver the judge into the house. Waterford is still one of those American towns where doors are locked only by the friendless or the paranoid. The two of us performed a flawless pas de deux as we pivoted in the doorway and brought the judge into the entrance hallway without once having brushed the doorjamb. It is a small skill perfected by the sons of drunkards, one of many learned by girls and boys whose parents live out their lives feeding rivers of gin or bourbon to the interior seas of their addiction.
But our father balked at going up the stairs, so we walked him into the living room in a clumsy finishing gait that made us look like contestants in a three-legged race. We laid him down softly and he was asleep before we brought his feet up under a pillow and removed his shoes.
“There,” said Dupree. “Wasn’t that fun? God, that McCall family knows how to have a good time.”
I looked at my father and a sudden pity came over me. What a sullen voyage fathering had been for this complicated and overbearing man.
“I hate to say this,” Dallas said, “but after that, I need a drink. Go on into the den and I’ll make us one.”
In the den, I looked over the library and felt that slight pleasure I always felt when I realized my parents were so broadly read. I moved my hands along the worn set of Tolstoy and thought again about the irony of a father who loved Tolstoy but could not quite bring himself to love his own family.
I smelled the books and in so smelling realized that I was breathing the smell of myself, the familiar incense of the past coming to me in an envelope of aromas: woodsmoke, law books, floor wax, sea air and a thousand other lesser scents that went into the making of this strange wine of air and memory.
Behind the desk were all the family photographs, beautifully framed in long chronologically ordered rows. The first photo was of me as a baby, blond and sweet. My parents were so handsome that they looked like the children of royalty sworn to secrecy. They shone with a radiant health. Dad hard and muscled and home from the war; Mama’s generous beauty as voluptuous and lush as a field of flowers in the rain. I wondered about the joy they must have taken in each other’s bodies, the fires and passions that must have lit the way to my conception.
The pictures, all of them, broke my heart. In photographs, like most children, we always smiled and our parents were laughing. All the images that hung on the wall spoke a fluid, happy language of a comely man and woman who had produced a line of light-haired children sleek as otters, shining with vigor, robust and green and hard to hold back. “What a lovely, wonderful family we all were,” I said to myself as I studied the photographs that framed the flood tide of egregious lying.
In one photograph, there was a picture of me standing in the background, not smiling. I looked at it and tried to fathom what I had been thinking. It was taken the week I had gone to the hospital because my father had broken my nose. I had told the doctor it had happened at football practice and had cried when the doctor reset it. My father had hit me again on the way home for crying.
Who wouldn’t have loved to have a boy like me? I thought as I studied the shy boy I once was. And I was handsome. Why didn’t anyone ever think to tell me that?
Dupree walked into the den and handed me a gin and tonic. “You look awful. Jet lag getting you?”
“I’m exhausted, but I don’t think I could sleep if I tried. I need to talk to Leah, but it’s too late, she’s asleep.”
r /> “Got any pictures?”
“Yep.” I handed an envelope to Dupree, and my other two brothers came in and looked over his shoulders.
They took their time looking at the photographs of this niece they did not know. They smiled and laughed as they perused each one carefully.
“She’s the spitting image of Shyla,” Dupree said. “But she’s got Mom’s eyes. I know some women who’d kill to have Mom’s eyes.”
“A magic kid, Dupree. Nothing I’m doing. I’m just keeping out of the way.”
“You look at Shyla’s house when we came in?” Tee asked.
“No, I don’t plan to look at that house ever again in my life. Of course, all that could change in the next thirty seconds.”
“You’ve already got problems building over there,” Dallas said. “Ruth Fox called my office yesterday to see when you were getting in. We heard about Martha tracking you down in Rome.”
“A lot of people included me in their travel plans this spring.”
“Ruth wants to see you badly. She’s suffered more than anyone since Shyla died,” Dallas said.
“I didn’t know there was a sweepstakes,” I answered.
“She’s a wonderful woman, Jack. I hope you haven’t forgotten that,” Dallas said.
“The last time I saw her was in court. She testified that I’d been an unfit husband to her daughter and an unfit father to Leah.”
“Go out on the veranda and look over at her house,” Dupree said.
I rose heavily, more fatigued than I knew I could be and still be awake. I walked through the familiar rooms of this lovely but neglected house and out the front door between the pure white columns that symbolized both the elegance and simplicity that was known in South Carolina as the Waterford Style. It was dark now and I looked out toward the river and the starry sky rinsed with the tin enamel light of a flickered, early moon. Then I turned and walked to the other side of the veranda and looked toward the large house contiguous to the vast grounds where I had spent my childhood years. When she was a girl, I had spotted her beauty before the ripening had begun and had studied the house where such mystical transformations were taking place while stars and Waterford slept. I had recognized Shyla’s loveliness long before we felt any stirrings in our bloodstreams toward each other. I glimpsed Shyla’s mother on the second-story veranda, Ruth Fox still slim as a flame, as she stood watch, dressed in a white robe. She was standing in the exact spot where Shyla used to stand throwing me kisses that had once sweetened the whole world for me.
Ruth waved to me, a gesture of sadness and silence.
I nodded. All I could manage was a nod and I thought it would kill me.
Chapter Eleven
From the smoke of a dream too dark to remember, I woke in the bedroom with my boyhood locked in a fixed position around me as a timber-laden barge sounded its horn on the river, trying vainly to rouse the sleeping bridge tender. I had grown up encircled by rivers. A river could not make a sound without seeming to call out my name. In darkness I rose fearing for my mother’s life, carrying that fever within me, as natural as hunger now. I listened and heard other sounds in the house as my brothers began to stir in the same bedrooms that had remained untouched since the day we marched out to encounter our own lives. The movement of brothers made a delicate, sustaining noise in this newly resurrected household. I smelled the coffee brewing as I shaved and Dupree fed me and Tee a good breakfast before we drove to the hospital to renew our vigil.
When we entered the waiting room again, Dallas was already there trying to start up a conversation with a very groggy and unforthcoming John Hardin.
“No change,” Dallas said as we walked in and staked out our own territory around the room. John Hardin’s face was so guarded when he looked at me that he reminded me of a secret ballot. Tee went up to him and put his arm around his shoulder and said, “You all right, bro? You should’ve been with us last night … it was a powwow among the brothers. It was something. We were so funny that the lions couldn’t sleep.”
“I wasn’t invited,” John Hardin said, slapping his brother’s hand and throwing it off his shoulder. “Get your hands off the merchandise. I know all of you think I’m a homo because I’m not married.”
“No we don’t,” Dallas said. “We think you’re smart.”
“We don’t care what you are, bro,” Tee said. “We just wish you felt more comfortable being around us.”
“Careful what you ask Santa for,” Dupree warned.
“Dupree isn’t happy unless he sees me in a straitjacket,” John Hardin said, eyeing his brother with wariness. “That always gives him a cheap thrill. Right, Dupree?”
“I’d rather watch Johnny Carson,” Dupree said.
“Hush, bro,” Tee admonished Dupree.
“Dupree sees John Hardin in difficult situations that none of us know about, Tee,” Dallas said. “He’s gotta be there at show time.”
“What’s show time?” I asked.
“You’ll find out if he doesn’t go ahead and get his shot,” said Dupree, thumbing through the morning sports section. As Dupree said this, I thought that he was an anomaly to me; part of Dupree seemed as tightly wound as a watch and another part as if some coolant kept the main engine of his psyche from overheating. The tension between him and John Hardin hung like a power line between us.
“You treat me like I’m still the baby of the family,” said John Hardin.
“You’ll always be my baby brother,” Dupree said to the newspaper.
“See, it’s all unfair,” John Hardin said, as if he were tasting pure lemon juice. He fought to articulate his feelings. “I can’t grow up in your eyes. Because I have these spells, these problems, you never can believe I actually’ve grown up. When I get crazy, it’s got nothing to do with being young. It’s all its own thing. It’s outside of me. It does what it does and takes me along with it. Does that make sense?”
“Nope,” Dupree said.
“Yeah. It does,” I said. “I know exactly what you’re saying.”
“Me too,” said Tee.
“It all makes sense until something bad happens, John Hardin,” Dallas said. “Then it’s hard to remember that you can’t help it.”
“Getting a shot’s the easiest thing in the world,” Dupree said. “Get a shot, nothing happens. Don’t get one, the race is on.”
Tee said, “He’s old enough to decide whether to get a shot or not.”
“Thanks, Tee,” John Hardin said. “I really appreciate that.”
“Tee’s never around when the flag goes up,” Dupree said.
“Tee’s right,” I said. “It’s up to John Hardin.”
“It’s easy to have theories when you live in Rome, Jack,” Dallas said.
After this exchange John Hardin separated himself from the rest of us and was smoking cigarettes nonstop as he watched the sparse river traffic pass by the hospital. He gave off an impenetrable aura of solitude and danger, though he listened to every word spoken in the room and processed the language through a filter that was haphazard, imperfect. Dallas explained the problem for me when we walked in the hospital garden. For John Hardin, the English language was an instrument of disharmony, bedlam, and obfuscation. Words spoken in innocence by one of his brothers could take on an aggravated significance in John Hardin’s mind. Every conversation with him had the possibility of turning wrong in an instant. He had a great many interests and was extremely well read, but the slightest change of emphasis or shift of intonation could disorient him and send him spinning wildly out of control. One had to cross an eerie demilitarized zone, heavily booby-trapped and bristling with observation points and eccentric, variable passwords to gain access to those stationary realms where John Hardin felt safe. His equilibrium was movable and adrift.
“Has anyone thought about Mom?” John Hardin asked, framed in smoke. “You talk about everything else. Does anyone know whether she’s going to live or die?”
“Dr. Pitts is with her now, John Ha
rdin,” Dupree said, rising and moving across the room toward his brother. “He’s conferring with the doctor.”
“He’s not our real father, you know,” our youngest brother continued. “If you look on my birth certificate you won’t find any mention at all of any Dr. James Pitts. How do we know he’s telling us the truth about Mom? He could be injecting her full of drugs. Killing her slowly so he can steal all our rightful inheritance.”
“Mom doesn’t have much,” Dallas said, approaching his brother cautiously. “Believe me, I’m the executor of her will.”
“There’s a lot that’s rightfully ours,” John Hardin said. “You guys may wash your hands of material things our mother spent her whole life working for. But I’m made of tougher fiber.”
“Fiber,” Dallas whispered. “He thinks he’s a throw rug.”
“Dr. Pitts likes us,” Tee said. “He won’t try to cheat us.”
“He’s got a burglar’s eyes,” John Hardin said. “He’s the type of guy who’s always looking at the second story of houses, hoping to see an unlocked window.”
“He’s got penetrating eyes,” Dallas said. “He’s a surgeon for God’s sake.”
“No, John Hardin’s right,” Tee said quickly. “There’s something wrong with the doc’s eyes.”
Tee’s irresolution made him sometimes both the ally and the enemy of both sides. It never occurred to Tee that vacillation was a form of taking sides that betrayed all parties.
Dallas began to move about the waiting room, jangling his keys in his pocket so loudly that all eyes turned suddenly on him. He had thought that by earning a law degree, marrying a woman from a good family, and conducting both his business and private affairs with restraint and dignity he would be spared the more baroque and unbridled excesses of his family’s behavior. His family embarrassed him and always had and he sought immunity from its extravagances and its lack of all caution or reserve. Dallas longed for dignity and thought that precious little to ask, especially when his mother was dying. But he knew if he brought it up or laid this request on the table, anything could happen. He knew that this group was capable of anything. In despair, he sat down next to me and said, “This isn’t a family. It’s a nation.”