The Burgess Boys

  You may answer the question, Mr. Olson.

  Charlie asked again, How did you feel when you found out it was Ramadan?

  “I felt bad. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  The judge said to Charlie, Move it along, counselor, we’ve covered this before.

  You weren’t aware of the regulations regarding mad cow disease specifying particular preparations of slaughter for any animal with a spine?

  “I didn’t know anything about that. I didn’t know a pig didn’t have a spine that went up to its head.”

  Objection. Diane Dodge almost shrieked the word, and the judge nodded.

  And what did you think you might do with the pig’s head once you took it?

  “I thought it might be funny for Halloween. On a front stoop or something.”

  Your Honor! This is material being repeated! As though its ostensible veracity will increase with each telling. Diane Dodge stood with a look of such sneering ridicule on her face that, had Bob been the judge, he would have cited her for contempt. For surely she was contemptuous.

  But the judge agreed with her, and finally Zachary was allowed to leave the stand. His cheeks were bright red as he sat at the table next to Charlie.

  Recess was called while the judge considered his ruling. Again Bob glanced at Margaret Estaver, again there was a small nod. Bob went with Zachary and Susan and Charlie Tibbetts to sit in a small room off the courtroom. They stayed absolutely silent until Susan asked Zach if he needed anything, and Zachary looked at the ground and shook his head. They returned to the courtroom when an officer rapped on the door.

  The judge asked Zachary Olson to stand. Zach rose, his cheeks red as ripe tomatoes, sweat sliding in drops down the side of his face. The judge said he was guilty of the civil rights violation, that he had committed a threat of violence that violated the First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and should he not abide by the injunction, prohibiting him from going within two miles of the mosque, except to see his lawyer, and having no contact with the Somali community, he faced a five-thousand-dollar fine and up to a year in jail. At this point the judge removed his glasses and looked blandly (and therefore almost cruelly) at Zach, and said, “Mr. Olson, in this state right now there are two hundred such orders in effect. There are six people who have violated them. And they are—all—in jail.” The judge pointed a finger at Zach, his head thrust forward. “So the next time I see you in this courtroom, young man, you’d better bring your toothbrush. It’s the only thing you’ll need. Adjourned.”

  Zach turned to look for his mother. The alarm in his eyes rippled through Bob, who would remember it forever.

  And so would Abdikarim.

  In the hallway Margaret Estaver stood off to one side. Bob touched Zach’s shoulder and said, “I’ll see you back at the house.”

  They rode through the streets of Shirley Falls, and finally Bob spoke. “The decision was already written, before any of the testimony was heard. You know that’s true. That Diane Dodge just beat up on him.”

  “She did,” Margaret agreed. They were riding along the river, the empty old mills to their right. The sky was a light gray above the empty parking lots.

  “She was enjoying it,” Bob said. “She loved it.” When Margaret didn’t respond to this he glanced at her, and she returned the look with a concerned face. “You can see what a sad guy Zach is,” Bob added. He moved his feet around two empty soda cans, a wrinkled paper bag. She had apologized earlier for the untidiness of her car.

  “He’s a heartbreaker.” Margaret turned the wheel and drove up past the community college. She said, “I don’t know if Charlie told you. About Jim.”

  “Jim? My brother? What about him?”

  “It seems he hurt things. I know he came up here wanting to help. But he spoke so well he made Dick Hartley feel like a fool, and worse—he didn’t stick around.”

  “Jim never sticks around.”

  “Well.” Margaret said the word with a sigh. “In Maine you stick around.” Her hair, pulled up messily, had strands that hid part of her face. She said, “The governor spoke after him, if you recall, and it was taken as a sign of disrespect—I’m just telling you what I heard—that Jim walked away right as the governor got ready to speak.” Margaret slowed for a stop sign. “And of course,” she added in a lower voice, “the governor didn’t speak so well.”

  “Nobody’s going to speak as well as Jim, it’s what he does.”

  “I could see that. I’m just saying there was some fallout in Augusta. I know someone in the AG’s office up there, and apparently Dick Hartley stewed about this for weeks, and then gave Diane the go-ahead as soon as they felt they could prove the bias part. Jim called Diane himself, is that right? It only made her angrier, of course. I think that’s part of what you heard today.”

  Bob looked out his window at the small houses they were passing, Christmas wreaths still hanging on many doors. “Were there editorials about this in the Shirley Falls Journal? Jim reads that online.”

  “No, this was all internal, I think. And the reality is—well, you saw those men testify, Mohamed and Abdikarim. It was a really distressing thing for them to go through. I know you know all that. But this decision today may nudge the U.S. Attorney’s Office along. Some folks in the Somali community are still pushing for them to take action.”

  “Jesus.” Bob gave a small groan. Then he said quietly, “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For saying ‘Jesus.’ ”

  “Oh God. You’re serious.” Margaret looked over at him, rolled her eyes. She made another turn, heading back toward town. “Gerry O’Hare didn’t want the AG’s office going ahead, he didn’t want what happened today. I guess he’s known Susan from way back. His feeling’s been: Enough. But—” Margaret gave a small shrug. “You’ve got people like Rick Huddleston at the Office of Racial Anti-Defamation, who doesn’t ever want it to drop. And honestly, if it wasn’t Zachary, I wouldn’t want it dropped.”

  “But it is Zachary.” He could not get over the feeling that he had known her a long time.

  “Yes, it is.” After a moment, Margaret added, “Oy,” with a sigh.

  “Did you say ‘Oy’?”

  “I did. One of my husbands was Jewish. I picked up some expressions. He was very expressive.”

  They drove past the high school, its playing fields covered with snow. A signboard spelled out GO HORNETS BEAT DRAGONS. “Have you had a lot of husbands?” he asked.

  “Two. My first I met in college in Boston, the Jewish one. We’re still friends, he’s pretty great. Then I came home to Maine and I married a man up here, and that ended quickly. Two divorces by the age of fifty. I imagine it affects my credibility.”

  “You think so? I don’t think so. If you’re a movie star you’re just getting started with two.”

  “I’m not a movie star.” She pulled into Susan’s driveway. Her smile was clear and playful and faintly sad. “Nice to see you, Bob Burgess. Call if there’s anything I can do.”

  To his surprise Susan and Zach were at the kitchen table as though they’d been waiting for him. “We were hoping you’d brought something to drink,” Susan said. In her navy blue dress, she appeared grown up, in charge.

  “In my duffel bag. Did you look? I got whiskey and wine on my way from the airport.”

  “That’s what I figured,” his sister said. “But we don’t go pawing through people’s private belongings in this house. I’d like a little wine. Zachary said he’d like some too.”

  Bob poured the wine into water glasses. “Sure you wouldn’t like whiskey, Zach? You’ve had kind of a rough day.”

  “I think whiskey might make me sick,” Zach said. “Once I got sick on whiskey.”

  “When?” said Susan. “When in the world did that happen?”

  “Eighth grade,” Zach answered. “You and Dad let me go to that party at the Tafts one night. Everyone was drinking like mad. Out in the woods. I thought whiskey was like beer or something,
and I just drank it down. And then I puked.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Susan. She reached across the table and rubbed her son’s hand.

  Zachary looked at his glass. “Each time one of those photographers clicked his camera I felt like I’d been shot. I mean with a bullet. Click. I hated it. It’s why I spilled the water.” He looked at Bob. “Did I screw up real bad?”

  “You did not screw up,” Bob said. “The woman was a pinhead. It’s over. Forget it. It’s done.”

  The sun was low now, and it sent a pale blade of light through the kitchen window that fell briefly across the table, then the floor. It was not bad, sitting there with his sister and nephew, drinking wine.

  “So, Uncle Bob, do you, like, have a crush on that woman minister or something?”

  “A crush?”

  “Yeah. ’Cause it kind of seems like you do.” Zach raised his eyebrows in a questioning expression. “I don’t know if old people get crushes or not.”

  “Well, they do. Do I have one on Margaret Estaver? No.”

  “You’re lying.” Zachary suddenly grinned at him. “Never mind.” He drank more wine. “I just wanted to come home. The whole time I was in there I kept thinking, I want to go home.”

  “Well, now you’re home,” Susan said.

  4

  There were Saturday evenings, like this one, when Pam, with her congenial husband, stepped off an elevator into the foyer of an apartment where globes of yellow light and fabulous shadows played throughout the rooms beyond, when leaning to kiss the cheeks of people she barely knew, taking a glass of champagne from a tray held forward, stepping farther and seeing the paintings lit upon walls of dark olive or deep red, a long table set with crystal, and turning to look down upon an avenue that stretched triumphantly right to the horizon, a jubilance of red tail-lights merging as they moved away, then turning back to the women wearing their silver and gold necklaces down the fronts of their black dresses, standing in their wonderful well-fitting shoes—Pam would think, as she did now, This is what I wanted.

  What she meant, exactly, she could not have said. It was simply a truth that clamped down on her with gentle snugness, and gone, gone, gone were those needling thoughts that she was living the wrong life. She was calm with a completeness that seemed almost transcendent, this moment that spread before her with the assuredness of itself. Certainly nothing in her past—the long bike rides on the farm roads of her childhood, the hours spent in the cozy local library, the creaking-floored dormitory in Orono, the tiny home of the Burgess family, not even the excitement of Shirley Falls that had seemed the start of adult life, or the apartment she had shared with Bob in Greenwich Village, though she had liked that apartment very much, the noise on the streets at all hours, the comedy clubs and jazz clubs they had gone to—nothing had indicated to her that she would want this and get this, right here, this particular kind of loveliness so gracefully and astonishingly taken for granted by the people who spoke to her with nodding heads. The host was saying that he and his wife had bought the bowl in Vietnam, eight years ago. “Oh, did you love it?” Pam asked. “Did you love Vietnam?”

  “Oh, we did,” said the wife, stepping closer to Pam, and including those around her as she swept them with her gaze. “We did love it. We loved it to death. And honestly, I’d been the one who hadn’t wanted to go.”

  “It wasn’t, you know, creepy?” Pam had met, a few times, the woman asking this question. She was married to a famous newsman, and her Southern accent, Pam had noted before, increased as she drank. Her clothes—as was the case tonight, she wore a high-collared white buttoned blouse—were not stylish, but rather seemed worn in order to retain the ladylike Southern primness and good manners instilled in her years ago. Pam felt a tenderness toward her, at the recalcitrance she displayed in moving away from her buttoned-up past.

  “Oh, no, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful country,” the hostess said. “You’d never know—well, you know. You just wouldn’t know those awful things went on there.”

  Moving into the dining room, escorted to her seat—far away from her husband because the rules required mixing (she wiggled her fingers to him from across the long table)—Pam suddenly remembered that it was Jim Burgess who had said to her years ago, when she and Bobby first spoke of moving here, “New York will kill you, Pam.” She had never forgiven Jim for that. He had failed to see her appetite, her adaptability, her desire—perpetual—for change. New York had been very different back then, of course, and of course she and Bob did not have much money. But Pam’s determination was almost always stronger than her disappointments, and even when that first apartment, so tiny that they had to wash the dishes in the bathtub, had lost its initial charm, and the subways were really frightening, Pam had still ridden them; the screeching of them as they pulled into their stations she had taken in stride.

  The man next to her said that his name was Dick. “Dick,” Pam said, and immediately thought it sounded as though she had implied something. “How nice to meet you,” she said. He nodded once, with exaggerated politeness, and asked how she was. Pam was—in fact—on her way to being drunk. Because she did not eat as she used to, because she was getting older, which affected metabolism, she could no longer drink as much as she once had. Her desire to explain this to Dick made her understand that she was on her way to being drunk, perhaps already there, and so she merely smiled at him. He asked her, politely, and this time without the camouflage of exaggeration, if she worked outside the home, and she explained about her part-time job, and how she used to work in a lab, and that perhaps she didn’t seem like a scientist, people had said that to her, that she didn’t seem like a scientist, whatever that meant, and she thought if she didn’t seem like a scientist it’s because she was not a scientist, but she had been an assistant to a scientist, to a parasitologist—

  Dick was a psychiatrist. He gave a pleasant raise of his eyebrows and placed his napkin into his lap. “Hey, by all means,” Pam said. “Let it rip. Analyze me all you want. Doesn’t bother me a bit.”

  She waved again at her husband, who was sitting down toward the end of the long table next to the what’s-her-name woman from the South in her white buttoned-up blouse, while Dick was saying he didn’t analyze people per se, but rather their desires. He was a consultant to marketing firms. “Really?” Pam asked. Another night this might have caused Pam to suddenly lurch toward that dreadful thought: I am living the wrong life. Another night she might have asked this Dick if he had taken the Hippocratic Oath, she might have asked pointedly if he was using his skills as a physician to help people consume, but the evening was a lovely one, and she thought certain aspects could just stay away, as though there were only so many times her cells could rise up in outrage and this would not be one of them; she didn’t, she realized, care at all what Dick did for a career, and when he turned to speak to the person on his other side, Pam looked around the table and imagined the sex lives (or not) of some of these people. She thought she captured the surreptitious glance given from one jowly man to a thick-waisted woman who returned to him a steady private gaze, and she found it thrilling that no matter what people looked like they still had a desire to undress and cling to each other—the pull of biology that had long outworn its use, for these women were past the time of childbearing.… Yes, Pam, halfway through her slippery salad, had already drunk too much.

  “Wait, what?” she said, putting her fork down, because someone farther down the table had said something about a pig’s head going through a mosque in a small Maine town.

  The person, a man Pam had not met before, repeated this to her. “Yes, I heard about that,” Pam said. She picked up her fork; she would not claim Zachary. But the back of her scalp flared in warmth as though she were in danger.

  “A fairly aggressive thing to do,” the man said. “They had a civil rights hearing, there was a piece in the paper.”

  “I went to camp in Maine,” Dick said, and his voice felt too close, as though he was speaking right in
to her ear.

  “They had a civil rights hearing?” Pam asked. “Was he found guilty?”

  “He was, yes.”

  “What does that mean?” Pam asked. “Is he going to jail?” She remembered how Bob said Zach was crying alone in his room. Anxiety flashed through her: Bob had not come to her Christmas party. “What month is this?” she asked.

  The hostess laughed. “I get like that too, Pamela. Sometimes I can’t even remember the year. It’s February.”

  “He only goes to jail if he violates the sanctions,” the man said. “Essentially the sanctions are just to stay away from the mosque and not trouble the Somali community. It seemed to me the state was choosing to send a message.”

  “Maine’s a funny place,” someone else mused. “You never know which way it’s going.”

  “Look,” said the thick-waisted woman who had gazed steadily at the jowly man. The woman wiped her mouth carefully with her large white napkin, and people had to wait politely to see what she would say. She said, “I agree it was an aggressive act on the part of the young man. But the country is scared.” She put both fists down quietly on the table and looked one way, then the other. “Just this morning I was walking along the river by Gracie Mansion and there were New York City helicopters and patrol boats circling and I thought, Dear God, I suppose any minute we could be hit again.”

  “It’s only a matter of time,” someone said.

  “Of course it is. The best thing to do is forget about it and live your life.” A man sitting down by the Southern what’s-her-name said this with a tone of disgust.

  “How people react to a crisis has always fascinated me,” Dick said.

  But Pam was pulled away now from the foolish splendor of the evening; the dark presence of Zachary—oh, Zachary, so skinny and dark-eyed, such a sad sweet child he had been!—his presence had come into the room, unfelt by all but her, of course; she was his aunt. And she sat there denying him. Her husband would say nothing, she knew this; a glance in his direction showed him to be chatting to his seatmate. She was alone among these people, and the Burgess family expanded before her. “Oh,” she almost said out loud, remembering going up to visit Zach when he was newly born, the oddest-looking baby she’d ever seen. And poor Susan, a quiet wreck—he wouldn’t nurse, or something. Pam and Bobby had stopped visiting so much after a while, it was just too depressing, Pam said, and even Bobby agreed. Helen really agreed. Pam watched her salad plate get taken away, replaced by a dish of mushroom risotto. “Thank you,” she said, for she always thanked servers. Years back, when she had first entered this life through her new marriage, she had arrived at a party like this one and shaken the hand of the man who opened the door. “I’m Pam Carlson,” she said, and he looked faintly put out with her, and asked if he could take her coat. That was the butler, her friend Janice said. Pam had told Bobby about that. He’d been wonderful, of course, his halfhearted shrug.