The Burgess Boys

  “But you were scared?”

  Zach nodded. He looked scared again.

  “Were they mean to you? Threaten you?”

  Zach shrugged. “I was just scared. I was really, really scared. I didn’t even know there was a place like that here.”

  “It’s called a jail. They’re everywhere. Was anyone else in there with you?”

  “Some man’s voice kept screaming swearwords. I mean, like crazy. But I couldn’t see him. And the guards would shout at him, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ ”

  “Did they hurt him?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?” In Jim’s voice was the fierce timbre of protection that Bob had heard when they walked away from the rally earlier and the punk kid called Bob a fat idiot. He saw in Zach’s face the surprise, the small instinctive motion of yearning as he absorbed it: This man would kill on his behalf. Jim, Bob realized, was the father everyone wanted.

  Bob stood up and walked in a big circle around the room. What he felt seemed unbearable, and he did not know what he felt. After a few moments he stopped walking and said to Zach, “Your Uncle Jim will take care of you. That’s what he does.”

  Zach looked from one uncle to the other. “But you take care of me, too, Uncle Bob,” he finally said.

  “Ah, Zach, you’re a mensch. You really are.” Bob reached over and rubbed the kid’s head. “All I did was come up and get your mother mad at me.”

  “Mom gets mad a lot, don’t take it personal. Anyways, when they let me go from that jail cell and I saw you standing there with Mom, I was, like, totally the happiest ever. What’s a mensch?”

  “A good guy.”

  Jim said, “You were so happy to see Bob you got your grinning face plastered all over the papers.”

  “Jesus, Jim. It’s over.”

  “Can we watch TV?” Zach asked.

  Jim tossed Zach the remote control. “You’re going to have to get a job. So I want you to be thinking about what that will be. And then you’re going to take some courses, study hard, do well, and enroll in Central Maine Community College here. Work toward something. That’s how it’s done. You belong to society, you give to society.”

  Zach looked down, and Bob said, “There’s time to find a job, get straightened out. Right now, make yourself comfortable. You’re in a hotel so pretend it’s vacation. Pretend there’s a beach outside and not the smelly river that’s actually there.”

  “The river doesn’t smell anymore, you retard.” Jim was hanging up his coat. “They cleaned it up. You didn’t notice? You’re so seventies. Jesus.”

  “If you’re so up-to-date,” Bob answered, “you’d know the word ‘retard’ isn’t used anymore. Susan used it too, when I first came up here. Man. I feel like I’m the only one of us who left grade school, moved into the twenty-first century.”

  “Gag me,” Jim said.

  Zach fell asleep watching TV, and the soft sound of his snoring came through the open door to the other room, where Jim and Bob now sat on opposite beds. “Let Susan enjoy her relief that this is over. We can tell her later what her son was up to. I told Charlie Tibbetts about it, and it doesn’t matter anyway, his defense is that Zach didn’t commit a crime,” Jim said. “The law says he would have to know the room was a mosque, and that pork was offensive to Muslims.”

  “I don’t know if that’s gonna fly. If Zach didn’t know it was offensive to Muslims, then why didn’t he toss a chicken’s head?”

  “Which is why you aren’t his defense lawyer. Or anyone’s defense lawyer.” Jim stood up, put his keys and phone on the bureau. “Because when he went out to visit a friend who had a slaughterhouse, they only had the heads of pigs. They didn’t have other heads. Would you leave this to Charlie? Jesus, Bob. You wear me out. No wonder you shit your pants every time you went to court. Of course you switched to appeals. So you could digest your baby food.”

  Bob sat back, looked for the wine bottle. “What’s your problem?” he said quietly. “You did such a good job today.” There was a small amount of wine left, and he poured it into a glass.

  “My problem is you. You’re my problem. Why don’t you just let Charlie Tibbetts worry about this?” Jim said. “I got him, you know. You didn’t. So leave it alone.”

  “No one said he wasn’t good. I was just trying to understand the defense.” A silence sat in the room that felt so momentarily present and pulsating Bob didn’t dare disturb it by raising his glass.

  “I don’t want to come up here again,” Jim finally said. He sat back down on the bed, looking at the rug.

  “Then don’t.” Now Bob drank, and in a moment he added, “You know, an hour ago I thought you were the greatest guy in the world. But man, you are difficult. I saw Pam recently and she wondered if the Packer trial had turned you into a prick or if you were always a prick.”

  Jim glanced up. “Pam wondered that?” His mouth moved in a small smile. “Pamela. The restless and the rich.” He suddenly grinned at Bob, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands hanging down. “It’s funny how people turn out, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have predicted Pam would be someone always going after what she doesn’t have. But when you think about it, it’s been there all along. They say people are always telling you who they are. And I guess she was. She didn’t like her childhood, so she took yours. Then she got to New York and looked around and saw people had kids and she’d better get some too, and while she was at it she’d better get some money as well, because New York has a lot of that too.”

  Bob shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Pam always wanted kids. We always wanted kids. I thought you liked Pam.”

  “I do like Pam. I used to think it was funny how she loved looking at those parasites under a microscope, and then one day I realized she’s kind of a parasite herself. Not in a bad way.”

  “Not in a bad way?”

  Jim waved a hand dismissively. “Well, think about it. Yeah—not in a bad way. But she started practically living with us when you were both still kids. She needed a home so she fed on ours. She needed a nice husband so she fed on you. Then she needed a daddy to have some kids with and so she’s over there on Park Avenue feeding off that. She gets what she needs, is what I’m saying. Not everyone does.”

  “Jim. Jesus. What are you talking about? You married someone rich yourself.”

  Jim ignored this. “Did she happen to tell you about her little meeting with me after you guys called it quits?”

  “Cut it out, Jim.”

  Jim shrugged. “There’s lots of stuff I know about Pam I bet you don’t know.”

  “I said cut it out.”

  “She was drunk. She drinks too much. You both do. But nothing happened, don’t worry. I bumped into her in Midtown after work, oh this was years ago, we went to the Harvard Club for a drink. I thought, well, she’s been in the family for years, I owe her that. And after a few drinks, during which she made some rather poor choices in her confessional judgment, she mentioned how attractive she’d always found me. Kind of coming on to me, which I thought was not very classy.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Bob, trying to stand, found his chair falling backward with his large body in it. The sound of it seemed very loud, and he felt the wine spill on his neck, and it was this sensation that was strangely clear to him: liquid running over the side of his neck while he moved one leg in the air. A light went on.

  Zach’s voice came from the doorway. “You guys, what’s happening?”

  “Nothing, kiddo.” Bob’s heart was beating hard.

  “We were roughhousing, like when we were kids.” Jim held out his hand and helped Bob up. “Just fooling around with my brother. Nothing like a brother.”

  “I heard someone shout,” Zach said.

  “You were dreaming,” Jim answered, putting his hand on Zach’s shoulders and steering him back into the other room. “That happens in hotel room
s, people have bad dreams.”

  The next morning Jim was talkative as they drove away from Shirley Falls. “See that?” he asked. They were about to get on the highway. Bob looked to where Jim pointed and saw a prefab building and a large parking lot with yellow buses. “Catholic churches are emptying out, have been for years, and these fundy churches are big-time. They go around in those buses scooping up any old person who can’t get to church. They love their Jesus, they do.”

  Bob did not answer. He was trying to figure out how drunk he’d been last night. He had not felt drunk, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t. Maybe what he thought he’d heard was not what he’d heard. Also, he kept picturing Susan this morning, standing on the porch waving as they pulled away, but Zach had bent his head down and gone back inside, and Bob kept picturing that too.

  “You probably wonder how I know that,” Jim went on, merging onto the highway. “You learn all sorts of things reading the Shirley Falls Journal online. Okay, be that way.” He added, “So I told Susan this morning, when she was outside with the dog, that Zach might have done this to impress his father. Didn’t mention the girlfriend. Just that Steve had emailed Zach some vaguely negative things about the Somalis. And you know what she said? She said, ‘Huh.’ ”

  “That’s what she said?” Bob looked out the window. After a while he said, “Well, I’m worried about Zach. Susan told me he’d soiled himself in the cell that day. That’s probably why he didn’t come down for dinner when I was up here. He was totally humiliated. He didn’t even tell you yesterday when you were asking what happened to him there.”

  “When did she tell you that? She didn’t tell me that.”

  “This morning, in the kitchen. When you were on the phone and Zach had taken his stuff upstairs.”

  “I’ve done everything I can,” Jim finally said. “Everything to do with this family depresses me profoundly. All I want is to get back to New York.”

  “You’ll get back to New York. Just like what you said about Pam, some people get what they need.”

  “I was a dickwad. Let it go.”

  “I can’t just let it go. Jimmy, did she really come on to you?”

  Jim exhaled through his teeth. “Oh, Christ, who knows? Pam’s kind of crazy.”

  “Who knows? You know. You said it.”

  “I just told you—I was being a dickwad.” Jim paused. “Exaggerating, okay?”

  They drove in silence after that. They drove beneath a gray November sky. The bare trees stood naked and skinny as they passed them. The pine trees seemed skinny too, apologetic, tired. They drove by trucks, they drove by beat-up cars with passengers sucking on cigarettes. They drove by fields that were brownish gray. They drove beneath underpasses that spelled out the names of the roads above them: Anglewood Road, Three Rod Road, Saco Pass. They drove over the bridge into New Hampshire, and then into Massachusetts. It wasn’t until traffic came to a halt outside of Worcester that Jim spoke. “What is this shit? Man, what’s going on?”

  “That,” said Bob, nodding to an ambulance coming in the other direction. There was another ambulance, and two police cars, and then Jim said nothing. Neither brother turned his head when they finally passed the accident. It was their bond, and had always been that way. Their wives had learned this silently, Jim’s kids, too. It was a respect thing, Bob had told Elaine in her office, and she had nodded knowingly.

  When they were almost on the other side of Worcester, Jim said, “I was a shit last night.”

  “You were.” Bob could see in the side mirror the large brick mills receding.

  “It messes with my head, going up there. It doesn’t mess with your head as bad, because you were Mom’s favorite. I’m not whining about that, it’s just true.”

  Bob thought about this. “It’s not like she didn’t like you.”

  “Yeah, she liked me.”

  “She loved you.”

  “Yeah, she loved me.”

  “Jimmy, you were like a hero or something. You were good at everything. You never gave her a minute of grief. Of course she loved you. Susie—Mom didn’t like her so much. Loved her, but didn’t like her.”

  “I know.” Jim let out a big sigh. “Poor Susie. I didn’t like her either.” He looked in the side mirror, pulled out to pass a car. “I still don’t.”

  Bob pictured his sister’s cold house, the anxious dog, Susan’s plain face. “Oy,” he said.

  “I know you want a cigarette,” Jim said. “If you can wait till we stop for food, that would be good. Helen will smell it for months. But if you can’t wait, open a window.”

  “I’ll wait.” This unexpected kindness Jim flicked toward him made Bob garrulous. “When I was up there before, Susan got mad at me for saying ‘Oy.’ She said I wasn’t Jewish. I didn’t bother telling her Jews know about sorrow. They know about everything. And they have these great words for it. Tsuris. We have tsuris, Jimmy. I do, anyway.”

  Jim said, “Susie used to be pretty, do you remember that? Christ, if you’re a woman and you stay in Maine you’re really at risk. Helen says it’s about products. Skin cream. She says Maine women think it’s indulgent to use products, so by the time they’re forty their faces look like men. It’s a credible theory, I guess.”

  “Mom never let Susan feel pretty. Look, I’m not a parent, but you are. Why wouldn’t a mother like her own kid? At least say ‘Oh you look nice’ once in a while?”

  Jim waved a hand. “It had something to do with Susie being a girl. She got screwed because she was a girl.”

  “Helen loves your girls.”

  “Of course she does. She’s Helen. And it’s different in our generation. Haven’t you noticed—no, I guess you haven’t. But our generation, we’re like friends to our kids. Maybe it’s sick, maybe it isn’t, who knows. But it’s like we decided, well, we’re not doing that to our kids, we’re going to be friends with our kids. Honestly, Helen’s great. But Mom and Susan, that’s what happened back then. Next exit we’ll eat.”

  By the time they reached Connecticut it felt as though they were in a suburb of New York, and Shirley Falls was far behind. “Should we call Zach?” Bob asked, pulling out his cell phone.

  “Go ahead.” Jim spoke with indifference.

  Bob put his phone back into his pocket. Making the call required an effort he couldn’t muster. He asked Jim if he should drive for a while, and Jim shook his head and said no, he was good. Bob knew he would do this. Jim never let him drive. When they were kids and Jim got his license, he would make Bob ride in the backseat. Bob thought of this now and did not mention it; everything to do with Shirley Falls seemed far away, unreachable, and best left unreached.

  It was dark by the time they approached Manhattan, the lights of the city spread out beside them, the bridges twinkling with magnificence over the East River, the huge red Pepsi sign blinking from Long Island City. As they slowed to get onto the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, Bob could see the spire of the Municipal Building, and also the tall and crowded apartment buildings right there by the Drive, lights on in almost every window, and he felt homesick for it all, as though it no longer belonged to him but was a place where he had lived in the far past. Across the bridge, down Atlantic Avenue, there was the sense of going deep into some country that was both familiar and foreign, and the simultaneousness of these impressions jarred Bob; he was a child now, tired and querulous, and he wanted to be going home with Jim.

  “All right, knucklehead,” said his brother, pulling up in front of Bob’s apartment building. Jim kept his hands on the steering wheel, only raising four fingers in the gesture of a wave, and Bob took his bag from the back and got out. In front of his building he saw big squares of cut-up cardboard moving boxes near the recycling bin. Walking up the stairs Bob saw the bar of light beneath the door of what had recently been the emptied-out apartment of his old neighbors. Tonight he heard the lilting voices of a young couple, heard a baby cry.

  Book Three

  1

  For most of the ni
neteen years of Zachary’s life, Susan had done what parents do when their child turns out to be so different from what they’d imagined—which is to pretend, and pretend, with the wretchedness of hope, that he would be all right. Zach would grow into himself. He’d make friends and take part in life. Grow into it, grow out of it … Variations had played in Susan’s mind on sleepless nights. But her mind had also held the dark relentless beat of doubt: He was friendless, he was quiet, he was hesitant in all his actions, his schoolwork barely adequate. Tests showed an IQ above average, no discernible learning disorders—yet the package of Zachness added up to not quite right. And sometimes Susan’s melody of failure crescendoed with the unbearable knowledge: It was her fault.

  How could it not be her fault?

  At the university Susan had been drawn to classes in child development. Attachment theories, especially. Attachment to the mother appeared to be more important than attachment to the father, though of course that was important too. But the mother was the mirror the child was reflected in, and Susan had hoped for a girl. (She wanted three girls and then one son, who would be like Jim.) Her own mother had preferred the boys; Susan knew this as clearly as she knew the color red. Her daughters would be loved without narrowness. The house would be filled with chatter; they would be allowed makeup as Susan had not been; they would be allowed phone calls with boys, pajama parties, and clothes bought from stores.

  She miscarried. “You shouldn’t have told people,” her mother said. But Susan was showing, and in her second trimester how could she not have told people? “A girl,” the doctor said, because she asked. The first night, Steve held her. “I hope the next one’s a boy,” he said.

  They were not toys on a store shelf, one falling and breaking, the next coming home in one piece. No, she had lost her daughter! And she learned—freshly, scorchingly—of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn’t. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, “You’ll have another one.”