The Burgess Boys

  “Can he return here?” he asked the minister.

  “He can, of course. And he should, before the misdemeanor trial. Otherwise he’ll be in more trouble. He’s supposed to be here,” Margaret said, seeing the confusion on the man’s face, “when the court date arrives.”

  “Explain, please,” Abdikarim said. After listening, he said, “And what would happen to make those charges gone, same as the federal charges?”

  “The federal charges were never brought, so they didn’t have to be dismissed. What it would take for the district attorney to drop the misdemeanor charge, I don’t know if that can happen.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Otherwise, Abdikarim spent the days in his café, or on the sidewalk in front of it, talking with the group of Somali men who gathered there. As the weather became warmer they could stand outside longer; they preferred to be outside. There was fighting in Mogadishu, and it was all the men talked of. A family who had been in Shirley Falls for two years—exhausted with homesickness—had packed their things and returned to Mogadishu in February. Recently no word had come from them, and now what was feared was learned to be true: They had been killed in the fighting. The other week, when the insurgents had fired at the government, and also at the presidential palace and the Ministry of Defense, where the Ethiopians were based, the Ethiopians had fired in return—wildly, savagely, and without discrimination—killing more than a thousand people, even their animals. News of this came through cell phones, and news came through the Internet, which could be checked in the Shirley Falls town library, and it came through the daily broadcasts from the shortwave radio station 89.8 FM from Garowe, the capital of Puntland. The men spoke worriedly of something else: The United States was supporting Ethiopia. The president, the CIA—weren’t they involved? They had to be. Claiming Somalia was harboring terrorists. Islam was a religion of peace, and the men on the sidewalk in front of Abdikarim’s café were defensive and ashamed.

  Abdikarim listened, and felt what the men felt. But he thought he might be getting senile, because tucked now in his heart was something private, and if it was not hope, it was close enough to be hope’s brother. His country was ill, having a seizure. Those who should be helping were treacherous, underhanded. But in the years to come, and he understood he would not live to see it, his country would again be strong and good. “Understand this fact,” he said to the men. “Somalia was the last African country to get the Internet, but in seven years its access has the highest growth and also we have the cheapest cell phone calling rates. Look at this street, if you want proof of the intelligence of Somalis.” He thrust out his arm, indicating the new businesses that had sprung up during the winter here in Shirley Falls. A translation service, two more cafés, a store that sold phone cards, a place for classes in English.

  But the men turned away. They wanted to go home. Abdikarim understood that very well. It’s just that he could not seem to stop what felt to be an opening in his soul as the horizon itself stayed open those extra moments each day.

  3

  Pam’s life was ruled by so many appointments and errands and parties and playdates that she did not, as she told her friend Janice, have time to think. But now she was having insomnia, which gave her lots of time to think, and it was driving her insane. Hormones, Janice told her. Get your hormone level checked and take some. But Pam had already taken a frightening amount of hormones in order to conceive her boys. She was well aware of the risks she’d incurred; she would not be adding more. So she lay awake at night and at times there was a curious peacefulness to this, the darkness warm as though the deep violet duvet held its color unseen, wrapping around Pam some soothing aspect of her youth, as her mind wandered over a life that felt puzzlingly long; she experienced a quiet surprise that so many lifetimes could be fit into one. She couldn’t name them so much as feel them, the soccer field of her high school in autumn, her first boyfriend’s thin torso, the innocence unbelievable to her now, and the sexual innocence in some ways being the smallest part of innocence, there was no way to name the slender, true, and piercing hopes of a young girl in a rural town of Massachusetts so long ago—and then Orono and the campus and Shirley Falls and Bob, and Bob, and Bob, the first infidelity (there it was, all innocence gone, the fearsome freedom of adulthood, to enter the complications of all that!) and then a new marriage and her boys. Her boys. Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world—this violet duvet and her slightly snoring husband. Sometimes, to help herself make sense of this, she would picture meeting the boyfriend from high school now—at a diner near her mother’s nursing home, perhaps, leaning across the counter, his eyes quiet with curiosity—and telling him. Well, this, and this, and this have happened. It would not be accurate as told. She thought nothing could be told and be accurate. Feeble words dropped earnestly and haphazardly over the large stretched-out fabric of a life with all its knots and bumps— What words would she use to spread her experience before him? That he would have his own experience did not interest her as much, she was aware of that. Horribly—but freely, because she was alone in her violet darkness—she saw that it was not another’s experience she wanted to touch and turn and mold and devour, it was her own.

  Her mind grew weary, ran down.

  Then she would try not to picture her skeletal mother in the nursing home, the clouded confused eyes, unknowing, as Pam thought, Mom, Mom. Or, turning over, tugging the duvet, she tried not to picture those two (young) mothers at school who were never pleasant when she chatted with them, waiting on the sidewalk for the last bell to ring, and why was that? What did they have against her?

  And so on.

  Reading was the best thing to do when her mind became this way, and so she clicked on her tiny book light and started the book about Somalia that had been mentioned at that splendid dinner party where the Southern woman lost it. At first the book was dull, but then it picked up and Pam became horrified. It was incredible, all she didn’t know about lives so utterly different from her own. Her plan was to call Bob about it in the morning, but it was that morning when she found out that her job at the hospital was getting phased out, and then Pam had a run of real panic.

  Somehow—and it probably had to do with long-ago fantasies—she took hold of the idea that she would become a nurse. So for a few weeks Pam looked into nursing courses, picturing herself filling syringes and taking blood and holding some old woman’s bruised arm in an emergency room, having doctors glance at her respectfully; she saw herself (and maybe she’d finally look into Botox) speaking to young parents who were frightened out of their wits, like those mothers at school who weren’t nice to her. She imagined herself striding through the swinging doors of an operating room, authoritative in all her gestures. (She wished nurses were still required to wear white uniforms and caps instead of the frumpish things they wore these days, all kinds of silly sneakers were allowed, and always those baggy pants.) She pictured herself administering blood transfusions, holding a clipboard, lining up a row of meds.

  I can’t think of anything worse, Janice told her. Nurses work like mad, on their feet for twelve hours. What if you made a mistake?

  Stupidly, that hadn’t occurred to her. Of course she would make a mistake. Except surely people with less intelligence than she were nurses, she saw them all the time at the hospital, gum-snapping, heavy-lidded—ah, but with the confidence of youth. No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

  But really, what it came down to after those silly weeks of worry—and there was no way around this, even if she went to school part-time—was that she would miss her boys. She would miss helping with their homework (though it always bored her to death), she’d miss staying home with them when they were sick, or had a snow day, and she’d have to study du
ring their holidays. Also, unlike her former sister-in-law, Helen, Pam had trouble keeping help, which she would need a lot of if she tried to do the nursing thing. She went through babysitters and housekeepers at a stunning rate. She was apt to be overfriendly, and then was disappointed when they took advantage of her. She fired them with little notice, handing them money and shaking her head when they took umbrage at this surprise. No, it was not going to work. As consolation, she had her hair cut in a new way, and then was not pleased with the angle at which it now fell across her forehead.

  She called Bob at his office and explained her dilemma. “I don’t know, Bob. Maybe I didn’t even really want to be a nurse. Maybe I just wanted to study the stuff. Anatomy. Like when I was in college.”

  There was a long silence and then he said, “Pam, I don’t have a lot to say. Take an anatomy class if you want.”

  “Wait, Bobby. Are you mad at me?” Pam had honestly missed the possibility of this. For years she had called Bob whenever she wanted, he always treated her decently and listened patiently; she had come to expect nothing else. She said, “You know, you never came over at Christmas, which hurt the boys’ feelings, and it’s been just ages since I’ve seen you. And I guess now that I think about it, when I’ve called, well, I’ll be honest, you’ve been curt. Are you back with Sarah? I know she didn’t like me.”

  “I’m not back with Sarah, no.”

  “Then what’s the story? What did I do?”

  “I’m just busy, Pam. A lot of stuff going on.”

  “At least tell me this. Is Zachary still with this father? What happened with the charges?”

  “The U.S. attorney never went ahead with it.”

  “Wow. So he ran away for nothing.”

  “I don’t know that living with his father is nothing.”

  “Okay, that’s true. How’s Susan?”

  “She’s Susan.”

  “Bob, I wanted to tell you about that book I was going to read by that Somali woman. Because now I’ve read it, or most of it, and it’s kind of disturbing.”

  “Tell me about the book, Pam. Then I have a meeting in a few minutes. We’ve got a young lawyer here who needs some guidance.”

  “Okay, okay. I have stuff to do too. But the writer is very specific about how in Somalia to be a woman is pretty insane. You have a child out of wedlock and your life is over. I mean, over. You can just die in the street. No one will care. And that other stuff, good God, they take these five-year-olds, and they cut it right off, Bob, then sew it up. The girls can barely pee. Get this: They’re taught if they hear a girl peeing too hard they get to make fun of that girl.”

  “Pam, this makes me sick.”

  “Me too! I mean, you want to respect their way of life, but how can you respect that? There’s controversy in the medical community, of course, because some of these women like to be sewn up again after they have a baby and Western doctors aren’t so keen on doing that. Honestly, Bob. It’s a little crazy. The woman who wrote the book—I can’t pronounce her name—there’s a death threat against her, no surprise, for telling the truth. Why aren’t you saying anything?”

  “Because, first of all, Pam, when did you get like this? I thought you were concerned about them, their parasites, their trauma—”

  “I am—”

  “No, you’re not. That book is the right wing’s dream. Do you not get that? Do you read the paper at all anymore? And second of all, I saw some of these so-called crazy people in the courtroom at Zach’s hearing. And guess what, Pam? They’re not crazy. They’re exhausted. And partly they’re exhausted by people like you reading about the most inflammatory aspects of their culture in some book club, and then getting to hate them for it, because deep down that’s what we ignorant, weenie Americans, ever since the towers went down, really want to do. Have permission to hate them.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Pam spat out. “I can’t believe it. You Burgess boys. Defense attorneys for the whole crappy world.”

  Bob’s new apartment was in a tall building with a doorman. He had never had a doorman before, or lived in such a large building, and he saw immediately it had been the right thing to do. The elevators were filled with children and strollers and dogs and old people, and men in suits, and women with briefcases, their hair damp in the mornings. It was like moving to a new city. He lived on the eighteenth floor, across the hall from an old couple, Rhoda and Murray, who welcomed him in with a drink the first week he was there. “We’ve got the best floor,” said Murray, who wore thick glasses and used a cane, which he waved about their living room. “I sleep till noon but Rhoda’s up every morning at six, grinding that coffee to wake the dead. You have children? You divorced? So what, Rhoda’s been divorced, I nabbed her thirty years ago, everyone’s divorced now.”

  “Forget it,” Rhoda said, about not having kids. She filled his wineglass (the first wine he’d had in weeks). “My kids are a pain in the butt. I love them, they drive me nuts. All I have are these cashews, who knows how old.”

  “Sit down, Rhoda. He can eat the cashews and be grateful.” Murray had settled into a large chair, his cane placed carefully on the floor beside him. He lifted his own wineglass in Bob’s direction.

  Rhoda collapsed into the sofa. “Have you met the couple down at the end? One of the little boys has that, what’s it called, come on,” snapping her fingers, “well, whatever affects the growth of his spine. The mother’s a saint, has a wonderful husband. Burgess? Are you related to Jim Burgess? Really? Oh, what a trial that was! Guilty, that son of a bitch, but what a trial, we loved watching that trial.”

  Back in his apartment, he called Jim.

  “I know you moved,” Jim said.

  “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew. I walked by your place and there were curtains in the window, it actually looked habitable, so I knew you’d taken off. I got an investigator in our office to find out where you’d gone. And how come you still have an unlisted number? Every time you called our landline and it came up PRIVATE we knew it was you. What’s that about?”

  It was about not being a Burgess. Back in the Wally Packer days, Pam had said she was sick of getting calls asking if they were related to Jim Burgess. “It’s the way I want it,” Bob said now.

  “You’ve hurt Helen’s feelings. You never call. And you moved without a word. You’ll have to tell her you were a mess about some woman, that’s what I told her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”

  Silence. Then: “What truth? I don’t know the truth of why you moved, slob-dog.”

  “Because you upset me, Jim. Jesus. Did you tell her about that?”

  “Not yet.” Jim sighed through the phone. “Christ. Listen, have you spoken with Susan recently? She sounds very lonely.”

  “Of course she’s lonely. I’m going to invite her down here.”

  “You are? Susan’s never been to New York in her whole life. Well, look, have fun with that. We’re going to Arizona to see Larry.”

  “Then I’ll wait until you get back.” Bob hung up. The idea that his brother had tracked him down—so momentarily and achingly sweet in its surprise—had been taken away by Jim’s tone. Bob sat on his couch and gazed out the window at the view of the river, and he could see small sailboats moving now, a larger boat behind them. He had no memory of life without Jim being the brightness of its center.

  4

  Mrs. Drinkwater lingered by the door of Susan’s bedroom, where Susan stood with her hands on her hips. “Come in,” Susan said. “I can’t seem to think.”

  Mrs. Drinkwater sat down on Susan’s bed. “In the past, I believe they wore a lot of black in New York. I don’t know if that’s still true.”

  “Black?”

  “Used to. It’s a hundred years since I worked at Peck’s, but sometimes a woman came in wanting a black dress, and naturally I supposed it was for a funeral and I’d try and be tactful, but it would turn out she was going to New York. That happened a few times.”
/>
  Susan picked up an unframed photo that was lying flat on her bedside table. “He’s gained weight,” she said, handing it to the old lady, “in just two months,” and Mrs. Drinkwater said, “My word.”

  It took her a moment to realize it was Zachary. He was standing at a kitchen counter, almost smiling at the camera. His hair was longer and fell across his forehead. “He looks—” Mrs. Drinkwater stopped herself.

  “Normal?” Susan asked. She sat down on the other side of the bed, took the photo back and gazed at it. “That’s what I thought when I looked at it. I thought, Holy moley, my son looks normal.” She added, “It came in today’s mail.”

  “He looks awful good,” Mrs. Drinkwater admitted. “Is he happy, then?”

  Susan put the photo back on her bed stand. “Seems to be. His father’s girlfriend lives with them. She’s a nurse, and maybe a good cook, I don’t know. But Zach likes her. She’s got kids of her own about his age, I guess they live nearby. They all do things together.” Susan looked up at the ceiling. “It’s good.” She pinched her nose and blinked. Then she looked around the room, her hands in her lap. Finally she said, “I didn’t know you worked at Peck’s.”

  “For twenty years. I loved it.”

  “I’d better go feed the dog.” But Susan stayed sitting on the bed.

  Mrs. Drinkwater stood. “I’ll do it. And I’ll scramble a few eggs for supper, how about that?”