The Burgess Boys

  “Sorry I haven’t been around for a while,” Bob said, and Helen said, “I understand. You have a life.”

  “Slob-dog. You’ve brought our long-lost sister, how’s it going, Susan?” Jim entered the room, tall, very trim. He clapped Bob on the shoulder, gave Susan a quick hug. “You like the city?” he asked her.

  Helen said, “Susan, you look terrified.”

  Susan, asking right away to use the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub and cried. They had no idea. The problem wasn’t the city, which she hated, and which seemed slightly ridiculous, like a crowded state fair that went on for acres, the field poured with concrete, the rides underground instead of above it; it all seemed vaguely tawdry, the urine-smelling steps down to the subway, the litter skittering along the curbs, the smeared droppings of pigeons sliding down the statues, the gold-sprayed girl who stood in the park. No, it was not the city that terrified Susan. It was her brothers.

  Who were they? How could they live this way? They were not the Bob and Jim from her childhood. Bob, in what was essentially a hotel, his front door nothing more than an opening off a carpeted hallway that hid other people’s rooms. And a uniformed guard in the lobby who was there to keep homeless people from stumbling in, and to push the revolving door. It was an awful way to live, not really human. Bob asking if she didn’t love the view of the river. What did she care about a river so far below that it seemed viewed through an airplane window? And then, strangest of all, for Bob to raise the silently-promised-never-to-talk-about-it fact of their father’s accident in such a place, to raise it at all! Susan was disoriented, physically faint from the assault of this.

  Her brothers, even after they had moved from Shirley Falls, were still her brothers. But not now. What Susan was experiencing now, as she blew her nose on toilet paper, was some tilting of the universe. She was utterly alone, attached only to a son who no longer needed her. Look at this house she was in (splashing water on her face, opening the bathroom door to step out), where Jim had raised three children, had dinner parties (Susan imagined this as she walked back to the living room), where he had big family Christmases, where he roamed on weekend mornings in his pajamas, tossing newspapers onto the coffee table, where he had watched television countless nights with his children and wife, here in this house that was no home at all. It was a large piece of furniture. A high-ceilinged museum. And dark. Who would live in a place so dark, the wood carved and fancy, the light fixtures like old antiques? Who would live like that?

  They were speaking to her, Helen gesturing for her to come upstairs, a tour, Helen was saying, fun to see other people’s houses, the dressing room, Helen was saying, she was the only woman in the city whose husband had more clothes than his wife, and they went past rows of suits, like a department store had set itself up, there was a window, as though the clothes needed a view, and a wall that was all one mirror, huge and high. Susan was forced to see herself: the pale-faced woman with the gray hair, her black slacks baggy. But Helen, in the mirror, looked small, compact, neat as a pin, wearing a fitted knit dress and tights, how did she know to dress that way?

  Yes, the universe tilted. It was frightening to have the safety of the self give way. To have no father, mother, husband, brothers, and her son not—

  “Susan.” Helen’s voice seemed sharp. “Do you need something to drink?”

  In the back garden Susan and Bob sat next to each other on the wrought-iron bench, each holding a glass of club soda. Helen perched on the edge of a garden chair, her legs crossed, holding her own large glass of wine filled almost to the top. “Jim, sit,” she said, because her husband was wandering about, bending to squint at the hosta plants or the shoots of the lilies—he had never cared about anything in the garden—or leaning against the support beam to the deck, or even once going back into the house and coming out empty-handed.

  Helen was not sure she had ever been so angry, though of course she must have been. But right now, right here, something was really, really wrong, and all Helen knew was that no one was helping, it was completely—somehow, among four adults—completely up to her to keep this social moment afloat. It was easy to blame Susan, and Helen did. The recessive quality of her posture, the shapeless turtleneck, pilled toward the bottom it was of such poor quality—all this depressed Helen, and there were the quivers of pity that ran through her, too—it fizzed her up inside, she was dizzy with this many-threaded rage. “Jim, would you sit,” she said again. He looked at her quizzically, as though the sharpness of her tone startled him.

  “Let me get a beer.” He went back inside the house.

  Staring up at the small green plums that hung on the branches above her, Helen said, “Look at all the plums. Last year there weren’t so many, but that’s how it is with fruit trees, every other year they’re abundant. The squirrels will be happy, plum-stuffed Park Slope squirrels.”

  The Burgess twins gazed at her blankly from the bench. Bob sipped his club soda politely, his eyebrows raised in a look of passivity. Susan sipped from her own glass, then looked slightly away from Helen, as though her face were saying, I’m not here, Helen, and I hate your big house and your stupid patch of backyard you call a garden, I think it’s all vulgar, your big dressing room upstairs, your big grill out here, I hate it all, you rich Connecticut-born consumer, materialist of the modern world.

  Helen, feeling this was contained in the face of her sister-in-law, thought the word Rube, and then felt very tired deep down inside herself. She did not want to think that, or be that way, and she thought it was awful such a word came to her, and no sooner did she think that than to her horror she thought the word Nigger, which had sometimes happened to her before, Nigger, nigger, as though her mind had Tourette’s syndrome and these terrible things went uncontrollably through it.

  “Do you eat them?” Bob asked.

  Behind Helen the door opened, and Jim appeared with a bottle of beer. He pulled up a lawn chair. “The squirrels?” he said to Bob. “We grill them,” nodding toward the grill.

  “The plums. Do you eat the plums.”

  “They’re too bitter,” Helen answered, thinking, It is not my responsibility to make them comfortable. But of course it was. “You’ve lost weight,” she said to Bob.

  He nodded. “I’m not drinking these days. Much.”

  “Why aren’t you drinking?” Helen heard the accusatory tone in her voice, saw Bob glance at Jim.

  “You guys are tan,” Susan said.

  “They’re always tan,” Bob said, and Helen hated both of them.

  “We were in Arizona visiting Larry, I thought you knew,” Helen answered.

  Susan turned her gaze away again, and Helen found this most deplorable of all, not to even ask about her nephew just because the woman’s own son was a disappointment, had run off from living with her.

  “How is Larry?” Bob asked.

  “He’s lovely.” Helen took a large swallow of her wine, felt it go straight to her head, and then there was simultaneously the sound of glass breaking and a phone ringing a tinny ring and Susan standing up saying, “Oh no, oh no, I’m sorry.”

  Susan’s cell phone had gone off, and apparently this had startled her to the point of dropping her glass, and while she rummaged through her bag, finding the phone—bizarrely handing it straight to Jim, who had stood and gone to her—Helen said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get that cleaned up,” thinking how broken glass would now be wedged in tiny pieces throughout the brick pattern of the walkway, and how the gardener, who came weekly this time of year, would be annoyed.

  “Charlie Tibbetts,” Jim said. “Susan’s right here. Wait, she’s saying you should just talk to me.” Jim walked around the garden, the phone clapped to his ear, nodding, “Yuh, yuh, I hear you,” and waved one hand through the air like a conductor leading an orchestra. He finally snapped Susan’s phone shut, returned it to her, and said, “That’s it, folks. It’s over. Zach’s a free man. The charges have been filed.”

  A silence fell. Jim sat bac
k down, drank from his bottle of beer, tilting his head way back.

  “What do you mean, ‘filed’?” Helen was the one to finally ask.

  “It means they’re stuck away. If Zach is good, they disappear altogether. The case lost its sizzle. This actually happens all the time, and was what Charlie was hoping for. Except in this case there was political fallout, of course. But the Somali community, the elders, whoever it is they asked, said they’d be okay with it getting filed.” Jim shrugged. “Who knows.”

  Susan said, “But now he’ll never come home,” and Helen, who had assumed she’d hear an uttering of happiness from Susan, heard the anguish in her voice and saw immediately how this might be the case—the boy would never come home.

  “Oh, Susan,” Helen murmured, and she rose and went to her sister-in-law, rubbing her back gently.

  The brothers sat. Bob kept glancing at Jim, but Jim did not look back.

  On a warm day in July, Adriana Martic walked into Alan Anglin’s office and silently handed him papers, which he knew immediately from their size and font were a complaint. “What have we here?” he asked pleasantly, and nodded toward a chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Adri.”

  Adriana sat. After reading a moment, Alan glanced at her. Her long, streaky blond hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and her face was pale. She had always been a quiet young woman, and she was quiet now as she met his eyes. She did not look away.

  He read the complaint in its entirety. It was four pages long, and when Alan set it down on his desk he felt a moistness on his face in spite of the air-conditioned room. His first instinct was to get up and close the door, but the very nature of the complaint made this woman dangerous. She could have been sitting there quietly holding an automatic machine gun in her lap; to be alone with her would be like handing her another magazine of bullets. She was asking for one million dollars in damages.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Alan said, standing up. She stood as well, and he held forth his hand to indicate that she—being a woman—should step through the doorway first.

  Outside, the heat was blazing down on the Midtown sidewalk. People walked by wearing sunglasses and carrying briefcases. A homeless man was going through the garbage near the newsstand on the corner. He wore a winter coat, ripped at the pockets.

  “How can he wear such a thing in the heat?” Adriana spoke quietly.

  “He’s ill. Most likely schizophrenic, delusional. They get very cold. It’s one of the symptoms.”

  “I know what schizophrenic is,” Adriana said, with a touch of irritation to her voice. “But I didn’t know about the body temperature,” she added.

  He bought two bottles of water from the newsstand, and when she took the one he offered he noted that her fingernails were bitten to the quick; he felt, in a new way, the level of great danger. They sat on a bench in the shade. Around them men and women moved rapidly, in spite of the heat. One old woman walked slowly clutching a plastic shopping bag in her hand. “Why don’t you talk to me?” Alan said pleasantly, turning to Adriana.

  She talked. He saw that she was prepared, that she was frightened, although he was not sure if she was frightened of him or of not being believed. She had phone texts, voicemails, restaurant receipts, hotel receipts. Emails on a private account. Also emails on the firm’s account. She pulled from her large handbag a folder, looked through papers, then handed some to him.

  He felt the indecency of reading the panicked lines of a man he had known for years, loved almost as a brother, a man who had made the mistake of many men (though he would not have thought this of Jim, but it is often that way), cornered by Adriana’s taunting suggestions that she would contact his wife—Alan closed his eyes briefly at seeing the word “Helen,” then continued reading. Yes, there it was, a threat: You’d be foolish to do that, you’d throw your career right out the window, who do you think you’re dealing with here?

  And there was more.

  “It will be in the papers,” Adriana said calmly.

  “We can try and keep that from happening.”

  “Probably it will happen. You’re too big, too famous, this law firm.”

  “Are you ready to have this in the papers?” he asked. “We have to do what’s right, and you may be correct, it may get into the papers, which means you, things about you, will be in the papers. You’re ready for that?”

  She looked down at her high heels, her legs stretched out before her. She wore no stockings, he saw. It would be too hot, of course. But her legs were perfect, without veins or splotches, just smooth shins neither tanned nor too white. Her high heels were brown and toeless. He felt nauseated.

  “Have you spoken about this to anyone? Gone to a lawyer?” He touched his mouth with the paper napkin that had come with his water.

  “Not yet. I wrote the complaint myself.”

  Alan nodded. “May I ask you to hold off for one more day before mentioning this to anyone? You and I will talk tomorrow.”

  She sipped from her bottle of water. “Okay,” she said.

  Jim and Helen were staying at the condo they rented in Montauk. Alan called Dorothy, then he called Jim, then he went to Penn Station and took a train out to Montauk. When he stepped out onto the platform, Jim was there to meet him, and the air was briny and they drove to the beach, where the waves came in lazily and without stopping.

  “Go,” said Rhoda, waving her hand from where she sat on the couch. “Your famous brother can’t be bothered to return your call? Go out there and show up at his door.”

  For years, during his marriage, Bob and Pam had joined Jim and Helen for a week at their place in Montauk each summer. Pam riding a boogie board, shrieking with laughter, Helen lathering her kids with lotion, Jim running three miles down the beach, expecting praise when he got back, and getting it, then jumping into the waves.… After Pam left, Bob continued his visits there, going deep-sea fishing with Jim and Larry (poor Larry, always so seasick), then sitting on the balcony in the evening with his drink. Those summer days were a constant in a world that was inconstant. The wide ocean and sand were very different from the Maine coastline, harshly rocked and seaweed-laden, where their grandmother had taken them, potato chips warm from the car ride, the thermos of ice water, the dry peanut butter sandwiches; in Montauk, pleasure was embraced. “Look at the Burgess boys,” Helen would say, bringing out a tray of cheese and crackers and cold shrimp. “Free, free, free at last.”

  Now, for the first time, Jim had not called, or Helen, with the usual checking of dates. “Go, and meet a nice girl,” Rhoda said.

  “Rhoda’s right,” Murray counseled from his chair. “New York’s terrible in the summer. All the old people sitting on benches in the park. They look like melting candles. The sidewalks smell like garbage.”

  “I like it here,” said Bob.

  “Of course you do.” Murray nodded. “In all of New York City, you are living on the best floor.”

  “Go,” Rhoda said again. “He’s your brother. Bring me back a shell.”

  Bob left messages on Jim’s phone. Also Helen’s. He heard from neither of them. The last time Bob said, “Come on, call. I don’t even know if you’re alive.” But of course they were alive. He’d have heard from someone if they were not. And so he understood that after years of opening their home and family to him, he was no longer wanted.

  A few times he went with friends to the Berkshires, once to Cape Cod. But his heart was contracted with sorrow, and it took effort to have it not show. The last day he was on the Cape he saw Jim, and his whole body seemed to tingle with the suddenness of happiness. The chiseled features, the mirrored sunglasses: In front of the post office, there he was, his arms crossed, reading a sign painted on a restaurant. Hey!, Bob almost yelped, happiness flying from him, before the man uncrossed his arms, wiped his face—and it was not Jim at all, but a muscular man with a tattoo of a serpent crawling up his calf.

  When he did see his brother, he passed him without knowing it at first. This was in
front of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. Bob was to meet a woman for lunch, a blind date set up by a friend; she worked at the library. The day was very hot, and Bob squinted behind his sunglasses. He would have missed Jim altogether if not for the lingering image in his mind’s eye that the man he had just passed, wearing a baseball hat and mirrored sunglasses, had looked away with furtiveness. Bob turned and called, “Jim!” The man walked faster, and Bob ran to catch up, pedestrians moving aside. Shrunken-looking inside his suit jacket, Jim said nothing. He stood motionless, his face beneath the baseball cap still except for a twitching of his jaw.

  “Jimmy—” Bob faltered. “Jimmy, are you sick?” He took his own sunglasses off, but could not see his brother’s eyes behind his mirrored lenses. The chiseled aspect of Jim’s face became prominent only when he lifted his chin, Jimlike, with defiance.

  “No. I’m not.”

  “What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

  Jim looked toward the sky, and then behind him, and then toward Bob again. “I was trying to have a nice time in Montauk this year. With my wife.” In recalling this moment over the next months, Bob thought that his brother had not looked at him once; the conversation that followed was short and Bob would not be able to recall any of it except for the pleadingness of his own voice, and then the final lines delivered by Jim, whose lips were thin and almost blue, his words slow, deliberate, not loud. “Bob, I have to be really straight here. You have always made me crazy. I’m tired of you, Bob. I am so fucking tired of you. Of your Bobness. I am so— Bob, I just want you gone. Jesus, please go.”

  In that remarkable way people sometimes have, Bob was able to step into a coffee shop away from the noise of the street and call the woman he was to have lunch with. He spoke calmly, politely: Something had suddenly come up at work, he was terribly sorry, he would call later to reschedule.

  After that he wandered the hot streets blindly, his shirt soaked through with sweat, stopping sometimes to sit on a step, smoking, smoking, smoking.