Affliction

THIS IS THE STORY of my older brother's strange criminal behavior and his disappearance. No one urged me to reveal these things; no one asked me not to. We who loved him simply no longer speak of Wade, not among ourselves and not with anyone else, either. It is almost as if he never existed, or as if he were a member of some other family or from some other place and we barely knew him and never had occasion to speak of him. So that by telling his story like this, as his brother, I am separating myself from the family and from all those who ever loved him.

In numerous ways I am separated from them anyhow, for while each of us is ashamed of Wade and burdened with anger—my sister, her husband and kids, Wade's ex-wife and his daughter, his fiancée and a few friends—the others are ashamed
and burdened in ways that I am not. They are dismayed by their shame, astonished by it, as they should be (he is one of them, after all, and they are good people, in spite of everything); and they are confused by their anger. Which is perhaps why they have not asked me to keep silent. I myself am neither dismayed nor confused: like Wade, I have been ashamed and angry practically since birth and am accustomed to holding both those skewed relations to the world: it makes me, among those who loved him, uniquely qualified to tell his story.

Even so, I know how the others think. They are secretly hoping that they have got Wade's story wrong and that I can somehow get it right or at least get it said in such a way that we will all be released from our shame and anger and can speak lovingly again of our brother, husband, father, lover, old friend, around the supper table or in the car on a long drive or in bed late at night, wondering where the poor man is now, before we fall asleep.

That will not happen. Nevertheless, I tell it for them, for the others as much as for myself. They want, through the telling, to regain him; I want only to be rid of him. His story is my ghost life, and I want to exorcise it.

As for forgiveness: it must be spoken of, I suppose, but who among us can hope to proffer it? Even I, at this considerable distance from the crimes and the pain, cannot forgive him. It is the nature of forgiveness that when you forgive someone, you no longer have to protect yourself from him, and for the rest of our lives we will have to protect ourselves from Wade. Regardless, it is too late now for forgiveness to do him any good. Wade Whitehouse is gone. And I believe that we will never see him again.

 

Everything of importance—that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story—occurred during a single deer-hunting season in a small town, a village, located in a dark forested valley in upstate New Hampshire, where Wade was born and raised and so was I, and where most of the White-house family has lived for five generations. Think of a village in a medieval German folktale. Think of a cluster of old and new but mostly old houses and shops and a river running through and hillside meadows and tall trees. The town is named Lawford, and it is one hundred fifty miles north of where I live now.

Wade was forty-one that fall and in bad shape—everyone in town knew it but was not particularly upset by it. In a village, you see people's crises come and go, and you learn to wait them out: most people do not change, especially seen
from up close; they just grow more elaborate.

Consequently, everyone who knew Wade was waiting out his gloom, his heavy drinking, his dumb belligerence. His crisis was his character in sharp relief. Even I, down south in the suburbs of Boston, was waiting him out. It was easy for me. I am ten years younger than Wade, and I abandoned the family and the town of Lawford when I graduated high school—escaped from them, actually, though it sometimes feels like abandoned. I went to college, the first in the family to do that, and became a high school teacher and a man of meticulous routine. For many years, I regarded Wade as a gloomy, alcoholic and stupidly belligerent man, like our father, but now he had gotten into his forties without killing himself or anyone else, and I expected that he would, like our father, get into his fifties, sixties and maybe seventies the same way, so I did not worry about Wade.

Though he visited me twice that fall and called me on the telephone often and at great length, several times a week and usually late at night, after he had been drinking for hours and had sent everyone near him scurrying for safety, I was not moved much one way or the other. I listened passively to his rambling tirades against his ex-wife, Lillian, and his mournful declarations of love for his daughter, Jill, and his threats to inflict serious bodily harm on many of the people who lived and worked with him, people whom, as the town police officer, he was sworn to protect. Preoccupied with the details of my own life, I listened to him as if he were a boring soap opera on TV and I was too busy or distracted by the details of my own life to get up and change the channel.

It would pass, I felt, with the pain of his divorce from Lillian and of her remarriage and departure from town with Jill in tow. Six more months, I felt, would do it. That would put him three full years beyond the divorce, two years beyond Lillian's move south to Concord, and well into springtime: snowmelt running off the hills, the lakes breaking free of ice, daylight lingering into evening. Maybe he will fall in love with someone else, I thought. There was a woman he said he slept with now and again, a local woman named Margie Fogg, and for the most part he spoke fondly of her. If nothing else, I thought, Jill will eventually grow up. Children often force parents to grow up by first growing up themselves. Though I am childless and unmarried, I know this.

 

Then one night something changed, and from then on my relation to Wade's story was different from what it had been before, since childhood. That night willed detachment got replaced by—what?—sympathy? More than sympathy, I think, and less. Empathy. A dangerous feeling, to both parties.

I mark it by the change I heard in Wade's tone of voice during a phone call he made to me a night or two after Halloween. It may have been the first or second of November by then. He was in the middle of one of his garrulous complaints, and I heard something that I had not heard there before, and for an instant I wondered if I had misperceived my brother all along. Perhaps I had misjudged him, and he was not so predictable after all; perhaps his character and this crisis were not one thing, were instead quite distinct from one another, or the nature of the crisis was such that it would soon make them distinct; perhaps my brother was as real as I, a man whose character was as I understood my own: process, flux, change. This was a new thought to me and not an altogether welcome one. And I did not know where it came from, unless it was from the simple accumulated weight of familiarity; for, without my being aware of it, a subtle balance had shifted, as if in my sleep, so that suddenly I was no longer distantly monitoring my brother's confused painful life but was instead practically living it. And I despised Wade's life. Let me say it again. I despised Wade's life. I fled the family and the town of Lawford when I was little more than a boy to avoid having to live that life. That is only one of the differences between Wade and me, but it is a huge difference.

Wade was making the ex-husband's complaint about the ex-wife's infinite capacity for cruelty—the result of some minor humiliation a night or two before. I had not quite got it but had not asked for clarification, either—when suddenly I heard a shift in his tone of voice, a change of register and pitch, little enough to notice ordinarily, but for some reason enough to sit me up straight in my chair to listen to him closely, to gather my wandering attention, and instead of regarding his life as merely a minor part of mine, I saw the man in his own context for a change. It was as if the story he was telling were enlarging and clarifying my story: the chronic toothache he had complained of earlier in the conversation, though worse
and significantly different from my periodic headaches, suddenly became a troublesome echo, and his financial difficulties, though described practically in another language than mine, rhymed anxiously with mine, and his ongoing troubles with women, parents, friends and enemies, grotesquely reversed versions of my troubles, gave mine painful articulation.

He had been describing the events of Halloween Eve, and he began to speak of the weather that night, colder even than usual, well below freezing, colder than a witch's tit, he said, that first cold night when you know winter's a-coming in and there is nothing you can do about it and once again it is too goddamned late to head south. You just put your head down, bub, and you accept it.

The change, the shift, may well have been in me, of course, not Wade. He used the same words he always used, the same clichés and oddly reflective expressions; he affected the same weary stoicism he has affected since adolescence; he sounded, to all intents and purposes, the same as always—yet I heard him differently. One minute his story did not matter to me; the next minute it mattered in every way. One minute my mind and eyes were focused on the television screen in front of me, a Boston Celtics game with the sound turned off, and then suddenly I was visualizing Lawford Center on Halloween Eve.

Which is not difficult for me to do: in the fifteen years since I last spent a Halloween there, which is to say, since I was in high school, the place has not changed much. In fifty years it has not changed much. But visualizing the place, going there in memory or imagination, is not something I care to do. I studiously avoid it. I have to be almost tricked into it or conjured. Lawford is one of those towns that people leave, not one that people come back to. And to make matters worse, to make it even more difficult to return to, even if you
wanted
to go back—which of course
no one
who has left the town in this half century wants to do—those who remain behind cling stubbornly as barnacles to the bits and shards of social rites that once invested their lives with meaning: they love bridal showers, weddings, birthdays, funerals, seasonal and national holidays, even election days. Halloween, as well. A ridiculous holiday, and for whom, for what? It has absolutely no connection to modern life.

But Lawford has no connection to modern life, either.
There is a kind of willed conservatism that helps a remnant people cope with having been abandoned by several generations of the most talented and attractive of its children. Left behind, the remnant feels inadequate, insufficient, foolish and inept—everyone with brains and ambition, it seems, everyone with the ability to live in the larger world, has gone away. So that with the family, with the community as a whole, no longer able to unify and organize a people and provide them with a worthy identity, the half-forgotten misremembered ceremonies of ancient days become all the more crucial to observe. As in: Halloween. The rites affirm a people's existence, but falsely. And it is this very falsity that most offends those of us who have left. We know better than anyone, precisely because we have fled in such numbers, that those who refused or were unable to leave no longer exist as a family, a tribe, a community. They are no longer a people—if they ever were one. It is why we left in the first place and why we are so reluctant to return, even to visit, and especially on holidays. Oh, how we hate going home for the holidays! It is why we have to be coerced into it by guilt, or tricked, if not by ourselves, then by the wider, sentimental culture. I teach history; I think about these things.

Wade rambled on, half drunk, as usual, calling from his wind-battered trailer by the lake up there in Lawford, and I envisioned the town he was talking about, the people he alluded to, the hills and valleys, the forests and streams he passed in his car on his way home every night and out again in the morning to work, the diner where he stopped for breakfast, the well-drilling company he worked for, the town hall where his part-time police chief's office was located: I visualized the setting for my brother's life as it had been a night or two before, when the events he was describing to me had taken place.

The air was dry, and the sky clear as black glass, with belts and swatches of stars all over and in the southeast a crescent moon grinning. I remember those cold fall nights, with the smell of oncoming snow in the air. On the side of the hill, between the spruce woods climbing the eastern ridge of the valley and the long yellow meadow that slopes toward the river at the bottom, a bony thicket of birches clings like a brief porous interval. The river below is narrow, rock-strewn, noisy, with a forested moraine on the farther bank and a two-lane
road running north and south along the near. This is the town I grew up in.

There is a row of large, mostly white houses that face the road from the east. Vehicles following pale wedges of light roamed north and south along the road. Some of them pulled in and parked at the center of town, where there are three steepled churches, a two-story wood-frame town hall and an open square and a ball field; others stopped in front of one or another house in the settlement; while short strings of small dark figures raveled and unraveled along the shoulders of the road and entered and departed from the same houses visited by the cars.

Imagine with me that on this Halloween Eve up along the ridge east of the settlement it was still and silent and very dark. The wind was down, as if gathering for a storm, and from the houses below not even a watchdog's bark floated this far. The moon had just slipped behind the spruce-topped black ridge. Suddenly out of the thicket of birches a small gang of boys, five or six short shadowy figures, emerged running from the woods. Their breath trailed behind them in white streaks, and they darted like a pack of feral dogs downhill over the crumbly ground of the meadow, then sneaked across the scoured backyard of a neat white Cape Cod house with barn and sheds attached at the far side, where, as if at last sighting their prey, the boys dashed around the corner of the barn toward the front.

They wore knit caps and brightly colored jackets and were ten or twelve years old. Twenty years before, I might have been among them, or ten years before that, Wade himself. Indian file, they slipped along the side of the house that faced Main Street, ducking under windows and around a single Scotch pine. At the edge of the porch, they gathered into a group and ran straight to the front steps and seized two large lighted jack-o'-lanterns that had been posted there.