The Burgess Boys

  Bob shrugged happily.

  “Like what would he do?”

  “Whatever I ate, he wanted to eat the same thing. ‘Tomato soup,’ he’d say, when Mom asked what he wanted for lunch. Then he’d see I had vegetable soup, and he’d say, ‘No, that’s what I want.’ Whatever I wore, he wanted to wear the same thing. Wherever I went, he wanted to go too.”

  “Wow. How terrible.” Pam was being sarcastic, but it was one pebble thrown against a thick windshield; Jim was impermeable.

  Those years that Jim was in law school he came back frequently to visit his mother. All three kids, Pam saw, were loyal to their mother. Both Susan and Bob worked in the dining hall at school, but they would swap shifts with people and hitch rides with anyone headed down the turnpike to Shirley Falls. This was touching to Pam, and made her feel guilty about her long absences from her own home, but the Burgess home is where she went whenever Bob, and Susan too, decided they should be there. Susan had not yet met Steve, and Jim had not met Helen, so Pam, looking back on it, felt that not only was she in love with Bob, but that she was almost his sibling as well; for those were the years when they became her family. The prickliness of Susan softened. Often they all played Scrabble at the kitchen table, or just talked, squished together in the living room. Sometimes the four of them went bowling and came back to tell Barbara how Bob almost beat Jim. “But he didn’t,” Jim said. “Never has and never will.” One freezing cold Saturday, Pam and Susan carefully ironed their long hair, laying it on the ironing board in the glassed-in porch of the little house, and Barbara yelled at both of them that they could have burned the house down. While the Burgesses seemed to have no knowledge of, or interest in, food (there were meals of scrambled hamburger covered with an unmelted sheet of orange cheese, or a tuna casserole made with canned soup, or a chicken roasted without any spices, not even salt), Pam discovered that they loved baked goods, and so she made banana bread and sugar cookies, and sometimes Susan stood in the small kitchen and helped her, and whatever was baked was eaten hungrily, and this touched Pam as well—as though these kids had been starved all their lives for sweetness. Barbara was not sweet, but Pam appreciated a fundamental decency in her that all three kids, for all their differences, seemed to share.

  Jim talked about his law classes while Bobby leaned forward and asked questions. Jim was drawn to criminal law from the beginning, and he and Bob spoke about the rules of evidence, the hearsay exceptions, the procedural aspects of trying a case, the role of punishment in society. Pam had already established her own interest in science and she saw society as one large organism working with its million, billion cells heaving itself alive. Criminality was a mutation that interested Pam, and she joined tentatively in these discussions. Jim was never condescending to her, as he could be to Bob or Susan; his sparing her always surprised her. There was a strange combination of arrogance and earnestness in Jim that often surprised her. Years later, during the Wally Packer trial, when Pam read an interview about Jim quoting a Harvard classmate as saying that Jim Burgess “had kept himself removed, always seemed unknowable,” she understood then what she had not fully understood those years before—that Jim must have felt an outsider at Harvard, and that he returned to Shirley Falls because something compelled him to, not just his mother, to whom he was attentive and caring, but perhaps a familiarity of accents and chipped plates and bedroom doors too warped to close. He did not mention any girlfriends during those law school years. But one day, because his grades were perfect and his skills already sharp, he spoke of landing a job at the Manhattan DA’s office. He would get trial experience and bring it back to Maine.

  “Ouch,” Pam said. The Korean woman, massaging Pam’s calf muscle, looked up at Pam with apology, spoke a word Pam did not understand. “Sorry,” Pam said, waving her hand quickly. “But too hard.” A shudder of nostalgia moved through her, and she had to close her eyes against the pale sheet of what could only be boredom that moved toward her. Was it merely youth and new love that had made Shirley Falls seem to Pam a place of miracles? Would she never have that yearning and high-pitched excitement again? Did age and experience just mute you?

  Because it was in Shirley Falls that Pam had felt first the thrills of adulthood. If college life had brought her into the world of many people and thoughts and facts—which she loved, loving facts—it was Shirley Falls that held the magic of a foreign city, and Pam, on her visits there, had felt dizzily, ecstatically catapulted into being a grown-up. This appeared in the casual act of going by herself (while Bob helped clean his mother’s gutters) to a family-owned bakery on Annett Avenue and drinking coffee at a table, the plump women serving her with a wonderful nonchalance, the windows dressed with ruffled pulled-back curtains, the air sweet with the smell of cinnamon, and men in suits walking along the sidewalk on their way to the courthouse or an office, women in dresses heading who knew where, but looking serious about it. Pam could have been in a magazine ad from her childhood library, a smiling young woman drinking coffee, right in the midst of life.

  Sometimes, when Bob was studying or playing basketball with Jim at the old high school parking lot, Pam climbed the hill that rose on the edge of the small city, and she would look down over the spires of the cathedral, the river that was lined with the brick mills, the bridge that spanned its foaming water, and sometimes when she climbed back down she would wander into the shops on Gratham Street. Peck’s had closed by then, but there were two other department stores in town, and Pam felt a quiet hush of excitement when she strolled through them, touching the dresses, pushing the hangers apart on their metal racks. She’d squirt herself with perfume at the makeup counters, and when Barbara commented, “You smell all Frenchie,” Pam said, “Oh, Barbara, I just took a walk through the department store!”

  “I guess you did.”

  The alliance with Barbara was an easy one. Pam understood she had the advantage Susan could not have, which was to share no blood with this woman, and this allowed Pam to go places Susan did not, like the Blue Goose, where a glass of beer was thirty cents and the jukebox played so loud the tables vibrated with the deep strains of Wally Packer and his band singing, Take this burden from me, the burden of my love … Pam swaying next to Bob, her hand on his knee.

  To celebrate the end of finals, or a birthday, or Pam and Bob making the dean’s list, they would—all of them—go to Antonio’s, the spaghetti cafeteria off Annett Avenue that presented huge platefuls of spaghetti, the order taken by the man who ran the place, who went by the name of Tiny and was obese. When he died after gastric bypass surgery Pam felt terrible, they all did.

  During summer Barbara let Pam live in the house. Pam had a job waitressing while Bob worked in the paper factory and Susan worked in the hospital as an assistant in the business office. Pam and Susan shared the room that Jim and Bob had shared growing up, and Bob took Susan’s room, Jim sleeping on the couch whenever he came home. “It’s nice to have the house full,” Barbara said, and for Pam, who had no siblings, those weeks and weekends and summertimes in the Burgess home became something she later understood as having an inexpressibly deep importance and perhaps, too, undermining her marriage to Bob in the years to come. Because she could never stop feeling that Bob was her brother. She had taken his past—his terrible secret, which was never mentioned by anyone else—and benefited from the fact that Bob was their mother’s favorite, and as she was the girl he chose to love, Barbara loved her as well. Pam wondered if Barbara, to save herself from the rage she would have felt at Bob after the accident that left her a widow, had decided instead to love Bob the best. In any event, Bob and his past and his present became Pam’s past and present, and she loved all that surrounded him, even his sister, who still could not seem to abide Bob, but was friendly enough to Pam.

  The Burgesses—the Burgess boys, especially—had their annual town rituals, and Pam went with them to Moxie Day parades with the motley crowd of people that wore bright orange to celebrate the drink that made its identity Maine?
??St. Joseph’s Church had on its billboard: Jesus is our savior, Moxie is our flavor—a drink so bitter that Pam could not stand it, no Burgess could stand it except for Barbara; they would clap at the little floats that went by, the car carrying the local girl crowned “Miss Moxie.” These girls more often than not seemed to show up years later in the paper having come to some bad end, either beaten by a husband or robbed by a drug addict, or arrested for some petty crime. But on the day they rode through the streets of Shirley Falls, waving while their ribbon sashes rippled in the breeze, they were applauded by the Burgess boys, even Jim took it seriously, clapping, and Susan would shrug her shoulders, because her mother had long ago not allowed her to compete for such a title.

  In July there was the Franco-American Festival, Bob’s favorite, and so Pam’s too: four nights of concerts in the park and everyone dancing and old mémés and their factory-worn husbands shimmying to the loud music of the C’est Si Bon band. Barbara never joined them, she had little to do with the French Canadians who worked in the mills where her husband had been a foreman, and she had no interest, either, in music or dancing or revelry. But the Burgess kids went, and Jim was drawn to the talk of labor strikes and unions organizing, and the nights of the festival he walked around speaking to many people; Pam could picture him still, listening with his head bent, an arm briefly clapping a shoulder in greeting, already showing signs of the politician he said he later wanted to be.

  The color Pam had chosen for her toenails was wrong. She could see that now, gazing down at them. It was autumn; why had she chosen something melon-colored? The Korean woman looked up at her, the tiny brush held above a toe. “It’s fine,” Pam said. “Thank you.”

  Barbara Burgess had been dead twenty years, Pam realized, watching her toes become a ghastly (“Frenchie”) color. She had not lived to see Jim famous, to see Bob divorced and childless, to see Susan divorced and her son so nutty. Or to see Pam sitting and getting her toenails painted orange in a city she had visited only once, when Jim worked for the Manhattan DA. How Barbara hated New York! Pam’s lips moved, remembering; she and Bobby had come to live here by then, and poor Barbara could barely leave their apartment. Pam had entertained her by making fun of Helen, who was recently married to Jim and was doing her best to please her new mother-in-law, offering to take her to the Metropolitan Museum, or to a matinee on Broadway, or to a special café in the Village. “What does he see in her?” Barbara had asked, lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling fan.

  “Normalcy.” Pam lay next to her, staring up as well.

  “She’s normal?”

  “Connecticut normal, I think.”

  “Wearing white loafers is Connecticut normal?”

  “Her loafers are beige.”

  The next year Jim moved with Helen to Maine, and Barbara had to get used to her; they lived an hour away, in Portland, so it was not so bad. Jim was an assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division and right away had a reputation for toughness and decency and always handled the press well. To family, he was open about his intentions of entering politics. He would run for the State Legislature, become the attorney general, eventually win the governorship. Everyone thought he could do it.

  Three years into this, Barbara became sick. Illness made her tenderhearted and she told Susan, “You’ve always been a good kid. All you kids were good.” Susan wept silently for weeks. Jim entered and left the hospital room without looking up. Bob was stunned, and his face often held the expression of a very young child. Remembering this, Pam had to wipe her nose. The strangest part of it was that a month after Barbara’s death, Jim and Helen and their new baby moved to a fancy house in West Hartford. Jim told Bob he never wanted to see Maine again.

  “Oh, thank you,” Pam said. The Korean woman was holding forth a tissue, her face expectant. “Thank you so much.” The woman nodded quickly, then wrapped a strip of cotton around Pam’s toes.

  The tree-lined streets of Park Slope had enough leaves swooping along their sidewalks that little children played in the rustling piles, holding up armfuls and letting them fly off in the wind while their patient mothers looked on. But Helen Burgess found herself irritated by people who stopped, or moved in such a rambling way that her own walking rhythm was disturbed. She found herself sighing in long lines at the bank, saying to the person in front of her, “Honestly, why don’t they have more people working the windows?” She stood in the express checkout lane at the grocery store counting the number of items of the customer before her, and had to really stop herself from saying, “You have fourteen items there, and the sign says ten.” Helen did not like to be this way, it was not who she thought of herself as being, and she traced it back in her mind and realized this: The day after they had returned from St. Kitts, Helen was alone, unpacking, when she suddenly flung a black ballet flat across the bedroom. “Damn you!” she said. She picked up a white linen blouse and could have ripped it in half. Then she sat on the bed and wept because she did not want to be a person who threw shoes or swore at people even if they weren’t around. Helen found anger unbecoming, and had taught her children to never hold a grudge and also not to let the sun go down on a disagreement. That Jim was often angry was mostly lost on Helen, partly because his anger was seldom directed at her and because it was her job to calm him down, and she did that job well. But his anger in the hotel room had distressed her. It was Susan she was swearing at as she unpacked, she realized, and the batty son, Zach. And Bobby as well. They had robbed her of a vacation. They had robbed her of a time of intimacy with her husband. That moment of finding her husband so unappealing had not faded as it should have, and this unsettled Helen, at the same time causing her to worry—to believe—he found her unappealing as well. Both aspects made her feel terrible. Old, she felt. And snappish. Which was unfair because that’s not who she was. Helen, in her heart, knew a happy marriage had a happy sex life (it was like having a special secret, just the two of them), and while she never would have discussed such a thing, what she’d read about the cleaning woman finding nipple clamps and other things had wiggled its way into her worries. She and Jim had never needed anything except each other. This is what Helen thought. But how did she know what other people did? Years ago, in West Hartford, there had been a man who took his little girls to the same nursery school Helen’s girls went to, and the man would sometimes look at her with a grim severity. She never spoke to him. At the time she felt he saw in her what she felt existed in her, which was an everglade of brutish sexuality. The everglade was far away, and being Helen she never went near it. It came to her now, at times, the realization that it was too late in her life for any of that to be discovered. And all of it was foolishness, because she would not trade her life for any other. But it did bother her—it really did—how in St. Kitts, Jim had become withdrawn, playing golf for hours, going to the gym. And now here she sat, back home on the edge of the empty nest that nobody except her seemed to worry about.

  The surprising thing about this feeling was that it didn’t go away. As the days passed, and she mailed the gifts to her kids—a T-shirt and cap to her son in Arizona with a warning to please wear the cap, he was not used to such sun, a sweater to Emily in Chicago, a pair of earrings to Margot in Michigan—as she paid the bills that had piled up, sorted out the winter clothes that had been in storage, her anger at the Burgesses would flower again. You took something from me, she would think. You did.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said one night to Jim. He had just told her that he might be asked to speak at the tolerance rally in Maine. “What in the world good would that do?”

  “What do you mean, what good would it do? The question is whether I want to, but if I did, obviously the presumption is that it would do good.” Jim ate his grapefruit without putting his napkin in his lap, and Helen saw that his feelings were hurt.

  “Thank you, Ana,” she said as the lamb chops were placed on the table. “We’re all set now. Would you dim the light on your way out?” Short,
sweet-faced Ana nodded once, touched the light panel, and left the room. Helen said, “This is the first I’ve heard of this crazy idea. Who hatched it up, and why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just found out today. I don’t know who hatched it up. The idea just appeared.”

  “Ideas don’t just appear.”

  “Yeah, they do. Charlie says my name comes up a lot in Shirley Falls—in a good way—and the people pulling this rally together thought it might help everyone feel cozy if I showed up and—without mentioning Zach, of course—said how proud I am of Shirley Falls.”

  “You hate Shirley Falls.”

  Jim said pleasantly, “You hate Shirley Falls.” When Helen didn’t respond to this, Jim added, “My nephew is in trouble.”

  “He got himself in trouble.”

  Jim picked up a lamb chop with both hands as though it was a cob of corn; he looked at her while eating. She glanced away and saw his reflection in the windowpane; it was dark by dinnertime now.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Helen continued. “But he did. You and Bob act like there’s a government conspiracy against him, and what I don’t understand is why he’s not expected to be held accountable.”

  Jim put his lamb chop down and said again, “He’s my nephew.”

  “Does that mean you’re going?”

  “Let’s talk about it later.”

  “Let’s talk about it now.”

  “Look, Helen.” Jim wiped at his mouth with the napkin. “The AG’s office is thinking about filing a civil rights violation against Zach.”

  “I know that, Jim. Do you think I’m deaf? Do you think I don’t listen to you? Do you think I don’t listen to Bob? It seems it’s all that’s talked about these days. Every night the phone rings: Help! The change in bail conditions was denied. Help! The motion for a gag order was denied. All procedural, no worries, yes, Zach will have to appear, get him a sports coat, blah, blah, blah.”