The Burgess Boys

  “I know. He told me.” But she felt a ridiculous stab of jealousy. “Before you switched to appeals, Bobby, when you were doing courtroom defense work down there, did you like your clients?”

  “Like them? Sure, some. A lot of them were dirtbags. And of course they’re all guilty, but—”

  “What do you mean, they’re all guilty?”

  “Well, they’re guilty of something, Susie. By the time they’ve come up through the system. Not always the first charge, so you do what you can to get it reduced. You know.”

  “Did you ever defend a rapist?”

  Bob didn’t answer right away, and Susan realized he’d probably been asked this question many times. She pictured him at cocktail parties in New York (she didn’t know what a cocktail party in New York could look like, so the image was vague and movieish), a skinny pretty woman asking him this same question confrontationally. On the phone Bob said, “I did.”

  “Was he guilty?”

  “I never asked. But he was convicted and I wasn’t sorry.”

  “You weren’t sorry?” Susan felt tears inexplicably fill her eyes. She felt the way she had felt for years when she was premenstrual. Crazy.

  “He got a fair trial.” Bob sounded patient and tired, and that was how Steve used to sound with her.

  Susan looked around the store in a kind of panic, untethered. Zach was guilty. He could have a fair trial and go to jail for a year. And it was going to cost a lot of money before they were through. And nobody—maybe Bobby, a little—would care.

  Bob was saying, “You need intestines of steel for courtroom work. Those of us in appeals here, we’re … Well, let’s just say Jim has insides made of steel.”

  “Bobby, I’m hanging up.”

  A group of Somali women had entered the store. In long draping cloaks, everything covered except their faces, they momentarily seemed to Susan to be one entity, a large foreign assault presenting itself to her, a blurry arrangement of dark reds and blues and green head coverings, a splotch of lively peach color; no arms, or even hands, to be seen. But there were the murmurings and sounds of different voices and then the subsequent separating off of one, an elderly woman, short and lame, seating herself in the corner chair, and this clarified to Susan’s eye what seemed to be the situation: which was that the youngest one, tall and bright-faced and (to Susan) surprisingly beautiful in a way that seemed almost American, with her dark eyes and high cheekbones, was holding forth a pair of glasses, broken at the hinge, and asking, in poor English, to have them fixed.

  Beside the tall young girl stood a darker-faced woman, large and boxy in her robe, her face immobile, watchful, unreadable. She was holding plastic bags through which Susan could see cleaning materials.

  Susan picked up the glasses. “Did you purchase these here?” Directing her question to the young girl, whose beauty felt aggressive to Susan. The tall girl turned to the boxy woman; they spoke back and forth quickly.

  “Hey?” asked the girl, whose peach-colored headscarf seemed flamboyant, amazing.

  “Did you purchase these here?” Susan repeated. She knew they had not, these were drugstore glasses she held in her hand.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the girl, and repeated her request to have them fixed.

  “Okay,” said Susan. Her hands were not steady as she worked the tiny screw. “One minute,” she said, and took them in the back room, though it was store policy not to leave the front unattended. When she returned, the women were as she had left them; only the young one seemed to have the energy of youth, touching the frames that were arranged in a stand by the cash register. Susan put the glasses on the counter and pushed them forward. A commotion from the boxy woman made Susan look to her, and she was amazed to see a child’s foot exposed as the woman pulled her arm back to reach beneath her robe. The woman bent to put down, then pick up, the bags of cleaning materials, and another bulge on the other side of her was made visible; she had been standing here with two children strapped to her. Silent children. As silent as their mother.

  “Do you want to try any of those on?” Susan asked. The tall young girl continued touching the frames without removing them from the stand. None of the women were looking at Susan. They were in the store, but they were far away.

  “These are fixed now.” Susan’s voice sounded too loud to her. “No charge.”

  The young girl reached beneath her robe, and Susan—as though all her fear had waited for this moment—had the sudden thought the girl was going to draw a gun on her. It was a small purse. “No,” said Susan, shaking her head. “Free.”

  “Okay?” the girl asked, her large eyes looking quickly over Susan’s face.

  “Okay.” Susan held up both her hands.

  The girl slipped the fixed glasses into her purse. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.”

  There was commotion once more as they spoke in their language, hard and brisk to Susan’s ear. The babies stirred beneath the mother’s robe, and the old woman stood up slowly. As they moved toward the door, Susan realized that the old woman was not old. How she knew this she couldn’t have said, but the woman’s face had a fatigue so deep it seemed to have cleaned away whatever it was in a face that gave it life; her face, as she walked slowly without a glance at Susan, had left on it only a deep and haunting apathy.

  From the doorway of the store Susan watched them walk slowly through the mall. Don’t make fun of them, she thought with alarm, because she saw two teenage girls stare at them as they went past. At the same time the absolute foreignness of these draped women gave Susan an inner shuddering sigh. She wished they had never heard of Shirley Falls, and it scared her to think they might never go away.

  3

  A wonderful thing about New York—if you have the means—is that if you don’t feel like preparing food, finding a fork, washing a plate, you certainly don’t have to. And if you live alone and don’t want to be alone you don’t have to be either. Bob often walked to the Ninth Street Bar and Grille, where he sat on a stool, drank beer, ate a cheeseburger, and spoke with the bartender or to a reddish-haired man who had lost his wife in a bicycle accident the year before, and sometimes this man spoke to Bob with tears in his eyes, or they might laugh about something, or the man might wave one hand and Bob understood that it was a night the man had to be left alone. An osmosis of understanding extended among the regulars; people revealed only what they wanted to and it was not much. Conversation was about political scandals, or sports, or sometimes—fleetingly—the deeply personal: Bob knew the details of the wife’s freak bicycle accident, but did not know the name of the reddish-haired widower. The fact that Sarah had not accompanied Bob to the place in months was never mentioned. The place was what it intended to be: safe.

  Tonight the bar was almost full, though the bartender nodded toward one empty stool and Bob squeezed himself between two other customers. The reddish-haired man was farther away and nodded in greeting by way of the huge mirror they faced. A large television screen in the corner was silently showing the news, and Bob, waiting for his beer to be drawn, glanced up and felt a jolt at the sight of Gerry O’Hare’s face, broad, expressionless, next to the grinning photo shot of Zachary. The words at the bottom of the TV went by too fast for Bob to read, but he caught “hoping,” “isolated incident,” and then “looking,” “white supremacy group.”

  “Crazy world,” said an older man seated next to Bob, his face aimed toward the television as well. “Everyone’s gone nuts.”

  “Hey, knucklehead,” a voice called, and Bob turned and saw his brother and Helen. They had just entered the place and Helen was seating herself at one of the little tables by the window. Even in the low lighting Bob could see their tans. He got off his stool and went over to them.

  “Did you see what was just on TV?” He pointed. “How are you guys? When did you get back? Did you have a nice time?”

  “We had a lovely time, Bobby.” Helen was opening her menu. “What’s good here?”

  “Everything’s good here
.”

  “You trust the fish?”

  “I do, yeah.”

  “I’m sticking with a burger.” Helen closed her menu, shivered, and rubbed her hands together. “I’ve been freezing ever since we got back.”

  Bob pulled up a chair and sat down. “I’m not staying, don’t worry.”

  “Good,” said Jim. “I’m trying to take my wife out to dinner.”

  Bob thought their tans looked strange, off-season like this. He said, “Zach was just on TV.”

  “Yeah, shit.” Jim shrugged. “But this Charlie Tibbetts, he’s terrific, Bob. Did you see what he did?” Jim opened his menu, glanced at it a few moments, then closed it. “Charlie sailed right in after that stupid press conference O’Hare gave, demanded a gag order and a change in the bail conditions. First he says his client’s being prosecuted aggressively and unfairly, that no other misdemeanor’s ever been given a press conference, but his greatest line—because the bail conditions say Zach has to stay away from any Somali person—the greatest line, Charlie says to the judge, what was it Helen? He says, ‘The bail commissioner made the unfortunate and naïve assumption that all Somalis dress, look, and act alike.’ Fabulous. How are you planning to get our car back?”

  “Jim, why don’t you let your brother enjoy his evening, and we’ll enjoy ours, and you two can figure that out later?” Helen turned to the waiter. “The pinot noir, please.”

  “How is Zach?” Bob asked. “Susan’s called me a few times, but she’s always vague about how Zach is.”

  “Who knows how Zach is. He doesn’t have to appear for the arraignment, which isn’t till November third. Charlie filed a not-guilty plea, had the whole thing moved to Superior Court, and asked for a jury trial. He’s good.”

  “I know. I’ve talked to him.” Bob paused, then said, “Zach cries alone in his room.”

  “Oh God,” said Helen.

  “How do you know?” Jim looked at his brother.

  “The old lady upstairs told me. Susan’s tenant. She says she’s heard Zach crying in his room.”

  Jim’s face changed, his eyes seemed smaller.

  “She could be wrong,” Bob said. “She seems a little wacky.”

  “Of course she could be wrong,” Helen said. “Jim, what are you having to eat?”

  “I’ll go get the car,” Bob said. “I’ll fly up and drive it back. How soon do you need it?”

  “Soon as you have time, which would be always. Nice how Legal Aid has that strong union. Five weeks vacation, and it’s not like anyone there works hard to begin with.”

  “That’s not true, Jim. Some really good people work there.” Bob spoke quietly.

  “The bartender’s waving at you. Go drink your beer.” Jim’s voice was dismissive.

  Bob returned to the bar and understood that his evening was spoiled. He was a knucklehead, even Helen was mad at him. He had gone up to Maine and done nothing except respond like an idiot, panic, and leave their car up there. He thought of the gracious big-boned Elaine, sitting in her office with the fig tree, explaining so patiently the replication of the response to traumatic events, the masochistic tendencies he had because he felt he needed to be punished for a childhood act of innocence. In the mirror he saw the reddish-haired man watching him, and when he caught his eye the man nodded at him. What Bob understood in that brief glance was the unspoken recognition of another guilty person—the reddish-haired man had bought his wife the bike, suggested the ride that morning. Bob nodded back, and drank his beer.

  Pam sat at her favorite Upper East Side salon watching the head of a Korean woman bent over her feet, worrying as she always did that the utensils had not been sterilized properly, because once you got a nail fungus you almost never got rid of it, and the girl, Mia, whom Pam preferred, was not in today; this one, scrubbing gently at Pam’s toes, spoke no English. There had been miming, and Pam asking too loudly, “Clean? Yes?,” pointing to the metal box, before she finally relaxed and settled into her thoughts, which she had been having for days now, about her past life with the Burgess family.

  At the start, she had not liked Susan. But this was because they were young—children, no older than the sons of Pam’s friends who had just left for college—and Susan’s unrelenting disdain for Bob had been taken personally by Pam. It was back at a time in her life when Pam wanted everyone to like everyone. (She especially wanted everyone to like her.) It was also at a time when people on the Orono campus of the University of Maine would speak a greeting when they passed someone on the walkways that wound around the buildings and beneath the trees, even if the people did not know each other. Though many students did know Bob, and this was because of his friendliness and also because some had known Jim, who was gone by then but had been president of the student government and was one of the university’s very few graduates ever to get into Harvard Law School—let alone receive a full scholarship to go there—which heightened his renown. Awareness of the Burgess boys was as common as the oaks and maple trees the students walked under, holding their books. (A few elms remaining, too; sick, though, with their top leaves wilting.) Being with Bob and his loping easiness was the safest Pam had ever felt, and an enthusiasm for college life—for life, period—opened and unfolded within her. This exuberance was insulted each time Susan pretended not to see them, when she walked around to a different doorway, should they be headed into the student union at the same time. Thin, Susan was, back then, and pretty, turning her face away. Or in Fogler Library, Susan was capable of walking right past Bob and not even glancing at him. “Hey, Suse,” Bob would say. Nothing. Nothing! Pam was appalled. It did not seem to bother Bob. “She’s always been that way.”

  But after weekends and holidays spent at the Burgess home in Shirley Falls, where Pam’s future mother-in-law, Barbara, greeted her in what Pam understood was a welcoming manner (mostly conveyed by making sardonic jokes at others’ expense and glancing at Pam with a granite-faced inclusion), Pam began to feel sorry for Susan. This was surprising to Pam, perhaps her first understanding of the prismatic quality of viewing people. She felt she had been seeing only the front of Susan and had missed entirely the large white light of motherly disapproval that shone behind her. It was Susan who was most often the recipient of her mother’s so-called jokes, it was Susan who set the table silently while her mother said to Bob, who had made the dean’s list and Susan had not, “Oh, Bobby, of course you did, I always knew you were smart.” It was Susan who was wearing her long hair parted in the middle “like some foolish flower-child hippie,” it was Susan, with her slender waist and straight hips, who was told that someday she would, like all women, turn Crisco: fat in the can.

  Pam’s own mother had never been scornful of her, but she did seem uncertain of her parental duties and carried them out from a distance, as though Pam—a girl who spent hours of her youth reading in the local library, and gazing at magazine ads hinting at lives lived out there—had still required too much from her. Pam’s father, quiet and receding, seemed even less qualified to escort his daughter through the ordinary obstacles of growth. It was to escape this arid atmosphere that Pam spent most of her holidays at the Burgess home, that small yellow house on a hill not far from the center of town. The house was smaller than the one Pam had grown up in, though not much smaller. But the rugs were worn, and the dishes were cracked, and the bathroom had tiles missing; these things had troubled her. Again, that sense of discovery: Her boyfriend and his family were poor. Pam’s father had his own small stationery supply business and her mother gave piano lessons. But their house in western Massachusetts was always fresh-looking, and out by farmland, safe and open; Pam had never thought once about it. When she saw the Burgess home with its discolored linoleum floor curling up in the corners, the window casings that were so old and warped they were stuffed in the winter with newspaper, the one bathroom whose toilet was lined with a rust-colored stain, and the shower curtain so faded she was not sure if it had once been pink or red—she thought of the family in her
hometown who were the only really poor family she had known: They had rusted cars all over their lawn, the kids showed up at school dirty, and Pam was taken aback: Who was this Burgess boy she had fallen for? Was he like that? On the campus in Orono he had seemed no different from anyone else, wearing the same blue jeans every day—but lots of kids back then wore the same jeans every day—his dorm room messy and, his half, sparse—but lots of boys’ dorm rooms were messy and sparse. Except Bob was more there than other boys, more easygoing; she had not known that he and his unpleasant sister came from this.

  It did not last long, that reaction. Bob brought with him into every room what it was that made him Bob. And so the house became—quickly—one of comfort. At night she could hear his easy voice speaking quietly to his mother, for they often stayed up late, mother and son, talking. She heard them many times say the word “Jim,” as though his presence remained in the house, the way his presence lingered on the Orono campus.

  “Jim-this, Jim-that” is what Pam intended to say when she finally met him. He was sitting at the kitchen table on a Friday afternoon in November when it was already dark outside, and he seemed too large for the house, slouched back on the chair, his arms crossed. Pam only said, “Hello.” He stood up and shook her hand, and with his free hand pushed at Bob’s chest. “Slob-dog, how are you,” he said, and Bob said, “Harvard man, you’re home!”

  Pam’s first feeling was relief that she was not attracted to her boyfriend’s older brother, because she saw that many girls probably were. He was too conventionally handsome for her taste, his dark hair, perfect jaw; but also, he was hard. Pam saw this and it frightened her. No one else seemed to see it. When Jim teased Bob (as sharply as Barbara would tease Susan), Bob laughed, and received it. “When we were kids,” Jim told Pam that first night, “this guy”—nodding toward Bob—“drove me nuts. Nuts. Hell, you still drive me nuts.”