I sighed, recognizing one of the most maddening of our family traits. We had a habit, a technique—a gift, really—for disappearing at critical times, vanishing in anger. The absence was obvious, the anger invisible. The object was to make one’s anger a mystery. It was our roundabout way of being difficult, plotting our own disappearance. Being missed, being gone, being needed were conspicuous ways of being unhelpful, if not antagonistic.
The strong suggestion of hostility that fueled this withdrawal was unspoken. We slipped away quietly rather than slamming the door. Vanishing was a statement. The statement was: I don’t like you anymore. “Passive aggressive” were words I did not hear until many years later; in our case it was more like “absent aggressive.” We did not flee; we dropped from view. Being away was a reply, a final answer, because no one is more maddening than the person who remains silent.
My almost forty years of traveling the world as a writer, keeping apart from Mother and the family, was an example of this behavior. They were the years of my being a householder, a creator, of my active imagination, of my making my life. Mother didn’t figure in those productive years except as a negative influence, someone who disapproved. They were the years of my books, of stability and happiness. They did not in the least resemble the years of my growing up or my latter years with Mother—the family years when, no matter our ages, we were children.
Now there was a tangle of us around Mother, who broadcast incessant updates from about what each of us was doing at any particular time—what we had told her, offhand remarks, heartaches, hopes, and often disinformation. Mother had whatever breaking news there was, and she controlled the flow of information. Anyone’s disappearance was sharply noticed, as in a folk society where the absent are suspected of eavesdropping from their vantage point in the twilight zone—where no one goes away and the dead are more present and more reassuring than the living, as Angela was to Mother.
Absence could also be figurative, theoretical, a cast of mind. At any given time, some of us would not be on speaking terms, yet still we would show up and pretend to be civil. But disappearing was something else. In vanishing we made ourselves invisible, enigmatic, unreadable, and yet conspicuous, like a foul odor that hung in the void where the absent person had been.
The process was seldom theoretical, seldom the vagrant mood. Mostly it was a physical act, and sometimes it was extreme. The others had their own ways of disappearing. Fred made regular trips to China and India. It was business, but also deliberate enigma. He said he wanted to help us, but he couldn’t: “The thing is, I’m in China.” Gilbert was often in Europe, or Yemen or Bahrain. Hubby vanished into New Hampshire on medical trips, but also to buy tax-free lumber and appliances.
As a child I absented myself by going for hikes. I joined the Boy Scouts in order to be licensed for such disappearances, the hikes becoming overnighters and finally weekend camping trips. When Mother attempted to claw me back, I protested, “I gotta go. I’m qualifying for a merit badge.” And she relented, because the Boy Scouts kept you out of trouble. But in the Scouts I learned to swear, I had my first serious fistfight, and I witnessed my first instance of racial discrimination: at Camp Fellsland, a black scout from another troop, called a nigger by a white scout, punched the boy in the face, bloodying his nose, and was sent home for fighting. As a Boy Scout I carried a hunting knife, I built fires, and at the age of thirteen, I swapped my BB gun for my first lethal rifle, a Mossberg .22. My friends owned pistols and rifles. We were the nonathletes, the bookworms, the nerds, the undersized kids, and with a scattering of effeminate boys we called percies. All of us needed to get away. We were geeks with guns.
This wish to get out of the house, a quest for privacy and anonymity, established a pattern in my life, making me a traveler. It wasn’t accidental that I had lived for years in Africa, and years more in Britain. I feared being overwhelmed by my family, and if I had been successful in my choices, I would have stayed away; I would have left after Father’s funeral. But I lived near Mother, and what I had always feared would happen to me was happening, for we were all at home now, children again, and I was so alone that my years of travel seemed idyllic, for being isolated at home was the severest sort of exile.
Franny’s and Rose’s disappearances took the form of lame excuses and complex silences. Mother knew where they were, though, and could rouse them whenever she pleased.
Mother’s own silences were preceded by her pained announcement, “I have a splitting headache.”
Floyd was the most efficient at absenting himself. Whenever he was present he was restlessly conspicuous, demanding to be seen, requiring answers. “I am talking to you! You heard what I said. Do I lisp?” But at the wrong word, a misjudged opinion, a hint of criticism, anything that smacked of disagreement, or a secret that had been kept from him, he was gone. And he was capable of staying away for a long time, reappearing when you least expected him. But that could be months. Years. Whenever I saw a shag or a loon near the shore, spooked by a noise and diving, not emerging for a long time and never in that same place, holding its breath and fleeing, I thought of Floyd.
No one in the family admitted to telling Floyd about my engagement, which was not an engagement—yet someone had. And Floyd was offended. His reasoning ran this way: if I had truly been his friend, I would have told him everything. But I hadn’t. I had held crucial things back, and much worse, I had confided my love affair to others in the family. It proved I was closer to them than to him. I had rejected him. His response was to reject me.
Sometimes a family disappearance implied, Look for me—find me—if you really care.
Floyd’s absences were seldom that sort. This one was a total eclipse. He did not want to be found or spoken to or importuned. He might not have objected to visits from the other members of the family, but it was clear that he wanted me to stay away.
From talking to him nearly every day, I now did not talk to him at all. More weeks went by. A month, two months. I persisted but got nowhere.
I wanted to tell him that I understood the problem. I had not told him about Missy, what she had meant to me. I had not mentioned the commitment ring—I knew he would have laughed at the word, for even I found it fatuous. Well, whom had I told? Only Mother. But Floyd expected me to confide in him. He felt we were close, we were allies, we mocked the others. By telling Mother—he must have known that she was the source of the story—I was being disloyal to him.
Of course I would have told him, but there was so little to tell. What Mother had reported was mostly fiction—or supposition, or embroidery. Though she must have mentioned engagement and marriage, I had no such plans.
I had lost Missy, lost Floyd, lost Mother too, who was still telling the family I had abused her. I was alone, and I strongly suspected the others would have been giddy at the news I had been rejected. Bad news was always welcome; it made their lives seem so much richer.
I needed a friend. As a smiling cynic who had shared many of my misfortunes, Floyd would have been just the friend I needed. As children, we had been the greatest allies, and so, of course, he was capable of being my worst enemy: it was a family lesson I had learned early. He could be fiercer than anyone. But I also knew that in his rejection of me he would be more dependent on the others for support.
Floyd was that pivotal figure in any big family, the fearsome unblinking child whom everyone wants to placate and befriend. He is dangerous—feared for his moods and his wicked satire, for his eccentric intelligence, for being reckless and unpredictable. He is fretful, has no loyalties. He is the most impatient, the hungriest. He will listen to your earnest plea and then turn on you. He was the one who, as a child, tore his pants swinging on a branch, screaming, “Ungawa! Tarmangani! I’m Tarzan of the Apes!”—and afterward cut his toe because he was barefoot. He sliced the flesh at the base of his thumb and said, “I’m going to get lockjaw!” The one with dirty hands, wild hair, a smudge on his cheek, a crooked smile.
“Your brother?
??s a crazy bastard,” my friends would say, and they meant it as high praise.
I earned his admiration one day when I told him that I’d gotten the gasoline for my motorbike (it was one I’d salvaged; I was fifteen) by siphoning it from the gas tank of a car parked at the Falmouth Hospital. He liked the deed for its absurdity—all that trouble and stealth and risk to save ten cents.
“Yeah,” he said, imagining the clumsy villainy of my kneeling beside a stranger’s car, pushing a rubber hose into the gas tank, and sucking on it. “That’s wild.”
We were law-abiding, with delinquent exceptions, our successes in making a zip gun (a stolen car antenna taped to a wooden handle, with rubber bands fixed to an improvised firing pin), or hot-wiring a car, or the simplest revenge of all—jamming a potato into an exhaust pipe or sugar into a fuel tank to disable a vehicle. Our mastering these wayward talents we regarded as more heroic than excelling in school, because living in Mother Land had turned us into outlaws.
Floyd was the worst tease, the cruelest mocker, sometimes shuffling behind Mother and shadowing her, hovering and aping her movements. When she turned to confront him, he would cry out, “I am Sacajawea, the Bird Woman!” He was merciless in his imitations, a comedian, with a comedian’s inevitable darkness.
He had been the butt of so many jokes himself, the object of so much scorn—for his bedwetting, his temper, his academic achievements, his poems, his chair at Harvard; he was that most dangerous of men, the one with nothing to lose. He had experienced a childhood of rejection, and in adulthood he took his revenge as a rejecter. Cross him, doubt him, lecture him, take him too lightly—trifle with him in any way—and he would try to destroy you, in a poison-pen letter, in a poem written to curse you, like a form of literary voodoo, or in one of his comic turns, directing all his humor and intelligence on the object of his scorn, with the intention of encouraging the whole family to howl that person down. In a family of evaders, he was a confronter.
Many of his characterizations were from the literature he taught. He would twist his lips at Fred and say, “Let us bid welcome to Eugene Wrayburn,” or lock his eyes on Franny and her husband, Marvin, and hail them as the Veneerings. Rose was Miss Piggy, Gilbert was Filbert or Gerald Emerald, Hubby was Giant Haystacks, I was Plastic Man, Mother was Queen Lear or “Addie Bundren, cursing from her catafalque!” I will not allow a three-hundred-pound puff adder to interfere with me, he wrote to a neighbor of his who was sensitive about her weight. You have all the virtues of a dog except fidelity, he snapped to Hubby’s wife, Moneen, and when the poor woman sent Floyd a Christmas present as a peace offering he returned it to her unopened, with the scrawl, You can’t be a policeman and also a thief.
Seeking his friendship, because he was such a terrible enemy, meant propitiating him. We all brought him presents of candy and fruit, books he might like, items for his various collections. He collected ice cream scoops, cast-iron mechanical banks, literature on vampires, Coca-Cola memorabilia, signed baseballs, anything related to Marilyn Monroe, antique flintlock rifles, exotic postcards, ivory netsukes—and much else. The right present might soothe him.
At times, he teased one of us when Mother was present. “I’ll take the strut out of you,” he sneered, pretending to flex a whip. The butt of his joke might be Hubby—his weight, his wobble, his seriousness about tools and his peculiar relish for naming them, a spokeshave, a ball-peen hammer, a socket wrench, a shim. And although Hubby might be squinting in shame, Mother would be laughing, covering her mouth, her shoulders shaking, feasting on this while screeching, “God forgive me!”
And out of the corner of his eye, Floyd knew he had succeeded, as Mother breathlessly gulped in mirth, enjoying the spectacle of the quarreling boys that gave her pleasure and power.
“He walks like this,” he would say of someone well known, and would do the walk, flinging his feet out, stiff-legged, striding, pigeon-toed. He did Franny’s foot-dragging and Marvin’s flat-footed tramping and swiveling shoulders, throwing his weight back and forth. He did Hubby’s shuffle, Gilbert’s sidling, Fred’s purposeful gait with working elbows. He did Mother’s hunched-over round-shouldered tread, “like a constipated geisha or a bird on a beach.”
After Floyd stopped speaking to me, I still got visits from Franny and Rose. They brought me the usual presents of fruit and candy, and one day a scented candle. I saw them and always thought of how Floyd satirized them: “Franny looks like Ethel Rosenberg. Rose’s eyes are George Matesky’s—remember him? The Mad Bomber?”
“Are you all right?” my sisters asked.
They were fishing, hoping for news of my marriage. I had decided to conceal my failure. I did not say that I had finished writing a novel and it would soon be published. I hoped for good sales, so that I would have a ticket out of here. Mentioning it, even hoping for its success, seemed unlucky, so I quietly waited for a miracle.
“Floyd won’t speak to me,” I said.
“You know how he is,” Franny said, and made a face.
“He’s nutso,” Rose said. She really did have the Mad Bomber’s eyes. “If Bingo came home with someone like him, I’d freak out.”
They encouraged me to dismiss him as a loon and a grudge bearer. I didn’t need much encouragement, for I was hurt, I was lonely, and there was no one in the family he had not offended.
“I should forget about him,” I said. “At least he’s not hanging around asking me for favors.”
“He really depended on you a lot,” Franny said.
“I used to loan him my car, my golf clubs, my shotgun. He still hasn’t given me back a rake he borrowed last year—not that I care. He can have it. Does he still have three cats?”
“One died.”
I laughed. “But he’s had more luck with cats than women.”
“Remember that girl he was going to take to the prom, and then he chickened out?” Rose said.
“He’s probably afraid of women, deep down,” Franny said. “He’s jealous of the fact that you’re getting married.”
I almost gave it away, but I said, “Who knows?” as enigmatically as I could, because all this talk of Floyd’s failure with women had cautioned me. Like Floyd, I’d had two wives, two divorces, a number of other relationships, and a few phantom engagements.
It did my morale good to disparage Floyd’s attempts at marriage, his divorces. “And no kids,” I said. “All these years he’s been shooting blanks.”
I needed affection. I could not tell anyone that my romance with Missy was over. Disclosing that would have meant I’d have nothing. My secret was sad, but at least it was my secret; it was something to hold on to. It gave me heart and a sort of unholy glee to talk about Floyd’s failure.
“The other kids always called him a crazy bastard.”
Now Franny was laughing, no longer looking like Ethel Rosenberg. She was nodding at Rose, who was laughing too, widening her Mad Bomber eyes.
The inevitable happened. Again, you probably saw it coming before I did. Floyd sent me an enraged letter, attacking me for talking about him and quoting verbatim everything I had told Franny and Rose. Loon! Dead cat! Grudge bearer! Crazy bastard!
Franny and Rose had reported what I had said about him, because he had told them everything I’d ever said about them. And so, without another word, they vanished from my life—out of anger, out of shame, out of fear. And I stopped hearing from anyone else in the family, except Mother, who said that everything was fine. I prayed for my novel to succeed. I needed to flee.
I still called Mother, but I was cautious about what I told her. Weather was the main topic, though with Mother one seldom needed to suggest a topic. As always, she talked, I listened. One day, in a good mood, she said, “I’m bushed. I’ve just come from the birthday party.”
“Whose birthday?”
“Floyd’s, and Jake’s—you know they share the same birthday. It was quite a spread. Everyone was there. Fred’s so extravagant. I wish he wouldn’t—it’s kind of a waste, really.” br />
Jake was Fred’s older boy. The one who, long ago, had become a family legend when he revealed that he had just eaten a Styrofoam cup. When he was questioned, he puked it onto the doubter’s shoes.
“I wasn’t invited.”
“It was just cake and ice cream,” Mother said, backpedaling. “I didn’t eat much.” She had suddenly become self-conscious, coughing in the way Floyd always mimicked, trying to swallow her mistake.
“I guess they didn’t want me there.”
“Of course they did.”
“If Floyd was there, it would have been awkward,” I said. “But didn’t you wonder where I was?”
“It was just a little get-together on Fred’s back porch. I’m sure you had more important things to do.”
I had nothing to do.
“Your lady love,” she said.
“Right. I forgot.”
After I hung up with Mother, I called Fred. I told him I was hurt. How could he have a party, just a few miles from my house, and invite everyone except me.
“I didn’t think you’d want to come,” he said.
He was too weak to admit that he had chosen Floyd over me. The whole family had been there, and Mother had the chair of honor at the head of the table, fed by her sons and daughters, queening it.
I soon discovered why I had been left out.
17
Good Sport
Floyd had dropped out of my life and reappeared among them, doing his imitations and his funny walks and screaming, “Who am I?” until someone guessed. Everyone was relieved. He was showing up again, making them laugh, like old times. They needed him, needed his complex friendship, especially needed his protection, the reassurance that he would not hurt them with his vicious wit. He was a cranky cat that they had declawed. In his absences and silences there had always been a cloud of menace. Now that they had him to themselves he was mocking on their behalf, rather than mocking them.