A Permanent Member of the Family (2 page)

 

H
E DRIVES THROUGH THE TOWN
of Saranac Lake, looping via Route 3 gradually north toward Plattsburgh, where he spends the rest of the morning into the afternoon hanging out at the Champlain Centre mall like a bored teenager. With the gym bag locked in the pickup in the parking lot and the money uncounted, unexamined—for all he knows it could be three pounds of one-dollar bills, although more likely it's tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds, like the others—he roams through the tool department at Sears and drifts on to the food court, where he eats Chinese food, and then goes to a 2:00 
P.M
. screening of
Lincoln,
which he likes in spite of being surprised that Abraham Lincoln had such a high, squeaky voice. While he's watching the movie, the temperature outside rises into the mid-thirties and the falling snow dwindles and finally stops. It's almost 5:00
P.M
. when he comes blinking out of the multiplex and decides it's safe now to drive back to Au Sable Forks.

The six-lane Northway is puddled with salted snowmelt and slush. In Keeseville, still ten miles from home, he exits from the turnpike on the wide, sweeping off-ramp to Route 9N. Keeseville is where his two younger sons and their families live and is not so damned far from Au Sable Forks that they couldn't drop by to visit once a month if they wanted to, he thinks, and in order to power the truck through the curve, Connie guns it. The quarter ton of bagged gravel in the truck bed has shifted the weight of the vehicle from the front tires to the rear, and the centrifugal pull of the turn causes the rear tires to lose their grip on the pavement and slip sideways to the left. Connie automatically flips the steering wheel to the left, the direction of the slide, but the rear end whipsaws back to the right, putting the truck into a slow 180-degree spin, back to front, until he's facing the way he's come and the truck is sliding sideways and downhill toward the off-ramp guardrail at about forty miles an hour.

 

I
T'S ONLY A CONCUSSION
and a busted collarbone, Jack explains to his father. But the collarbone broke in two places and as a result is in three separate pieces. “They called in one of the sports docs from Lake Placid, guy who works on ski accidents all the time. He operated and put pins in it, but given your age and bone loss, he doesn't think the pins'll hold if you get hit in that area again. He said you'll have to protect your right side like it's made of glass.”

“How long was I out?” Connie asks. He's just realized that Chip and Buzz are in the room, standing somewhere behind Jack. He's woozy and confused about where he is exactly, although he can tell it's a hospital room. He's in a bed with an IV stuck in his arm and an empty bed next to his and a chair in the corner and a window with the curtain pulled back. It's dark outside.

“You were out when I got to the truck, which was no more than ten minutes after the accident, I'd guess. A citizen with a cell phone in a car right behind you saw the truck go over and called 911. I happened to be driving north on 87 just below the exit. You came to in the ambulance, but they knocked you out when you went in for surgery. You don't remember the ambulance and all that?”

“Last thing I remember is the truck going into a slide. Hello, boys,” he says to Chip and Buzz. “Sorry to bring you out like this.” They look worried, brows furrowed, unsmiling, both in uniform, Buzz in his Dannemora prison guard's uniform and Chip in his Plattsburgh police officer blues. All three of his sons wear uniforms well. He likes that. “Hope you didn't have to leave work for this.”

Chip says that he was on duty, but since that had him here in Plattsburgh, it was no big deal to come right over to the hospital, and Buzz says that he was just getting home when Jack called, so it was no big deal for him, either, to drive back to Plattsburgh. “Edie sends her love,” Buzz adds.

“Yeah, Joan sends love, too, Dad,” Chip says.

Connie asks about his truck. He has just remembered the gym bag.

Jack says, “Totaled. Northway Sunoco came over and towed it out. You really put it all the way off the ramp and into the woods. Thicket of small birches stopped you. Good thing it wasn't a full-grown tree or you'd have gone through the windshield. You weren't wearing a seat belt. Where were you coming from?”

“Plattsburgh. The movies at Champlain mall. I wanted to see that movie about Abraham Lincoln everybody's talking about.”

All four men are silent for a moment, as if each is lost in his own thoughts. Finally Chip says, “Dad, we've got to ask you a couple of tough questions.” Jack and Buzz nod in agreement.

Connie's heart is racing. He knows what's coming.

Chip says, “It's about the money in the bag.”

“What bag?”

Jack says, “The EMT guys gave me the bag, Dad, the gym bag, when they pulled you out of the truck. I didn't open it till after you were in surgery. I wasn't prying. I opened it in case there was a bottle in it that might've broke or something. Although I don't think you were drinking,” he adds.

“No, I wasn't! Not a drop all day! It was the snow and ice on the road that did it.”

Chip says, “We need to know where you got the money, Dad. There's a lot of it. Thousands of dollars.”

Buzz says, “And we need to know why you were carrying your forty-five.”

“It's not illegal,” Connie says to him. “Not yet, anyhow.”

Jack says, “But the gun and the money, they're connected, aren't they, Dad? I've been putting two and two together, you know. Connecting the dots, like they say. For instance, wondering where you got the money for those hearing aids that Medicaid wouldn't pay for.”

“I'm doing okay money-wise. I had some savings, you know.”

Buzz says, “I know what goes on inside prison, Dad. It's worse than anything you can imagine. I don't want you there. But you're looking at hard time. Armed robbery. You'll be there the rest of your goddam life. What the Christ were you thinking?”

Of the three Buzz is the only one who looks sad. Jack's face and Chip's show no emotion, not even curiosity, but that's because they're trained police officers. Connie says, “I don't know what you guys are talking about.”

Buzz says, “Dad, what the hell do you want us to do? What do you think we should do? What's the right thing here, Dad?”

“You don't have to do anything. As an American citizen I can carry my service pistol if I want, and I can carry my money around in cash in a goddam gym bag if I want. Who can trust the goddam banks these days anyhow?”

Jack says, “It's not your money! It belongs to the Adirondack Bank branch in Lake Placid that was robbed this morning. Robbed by a guy in a ski mask and a Carhartt jacket with a gym bag that had a note in it that said, ‘Fill with cash, owner armed.' The note's still in the bottom of the bag, Dad. Under the money. I checked.”

“You checked? So you were snooping? Invading my privacy?”

Buzz says, “Jesus Christ, Dad, make sense! There's two of us standing here who can arrest you! Is that what you want? To be arrested by your own sons? And make the third your prison guard?”

Connie looks across the room at the window and through the glass into the darkness beyond. He wonders if it's late at night or very early in the morning. He says, “Sounds funny when you put it that way. Like I wanted it to happen.”

But it's not what he wanted to happen. When his sons were little boys and their mother abandoned them all so she could go off to live with an artist in a hippie commune in New Mexico, Connie held it together with discipline and devotion to duty. All by himself, he held the fort and took perfect fatherly care of his sons. And after they graduated high school he paid for Jack to go to college at Paul Smith's and for Buzz at Plattsburgh State for those two years when he wanted to be a radiologist. He paid for Chip's Hawaiian honeymoon with Joan. He even took care of them when they were in their early thirties by taking out a second mortgage and home equity loan, borrowing against his trailer and the land in Elizabethtown he inherited from his father, so his sons could buy their first houses. He wanted to take impeccable care of his sons, and he did. And after the boys grew up and no longer needed him to take care of them, he planned on continuing to hold the family together by being able to take impeccable care of himself. That was the long-range plan. They would still be a family, the four of them, and he would still be the father, the head of the household, because you're never an ex-father, any more than you're an ex-Marine.

But the way things turned out, he can't take care of himself. How can he explain this to his sons without them thinking he's pathetic and weak and stupid? First the real estate market tanked, and neither the trailer nor the land his father left him was worth as much as he owed on them, so even if he wanted to, he couldn't sell the properties for enough to pay off the loans and move into a government-subsidized room or studio apartment in town. Who'd buy his trailer and land anyhow? He'd still owe the banks tens of thousands of dollars and would have to go on making the monthly payments. Then he lost his job at Ray's Auction House. Without it he could no longer make the payments to the banks, and when he missed two consecutive months, the banks' lawyers threatened to seize his trailer and the land. He was about to become an ex-father.

“How late is it?” he asks.

Jack says, “Late. Quarter of three.”

“What do you want us to do, Dad?” Buzz says again.

Connie asks them what they've done with the money, and Jack says it's still in the gym bag, which he put on the shelf in the closet of the hospital room, where they hung his clothes and coat.

“What about my service pistol? Where's it at?” A man's gun is not to be disturbed, especially when the man is your father and a former Marine.

“It's in the bag with the money,” Buzz says.

“So nobody else knows about this yet, except for you three?”

Jack says, “That's right.”

Connie says, “Then nobody has to do anything about this tonight, right? It's late. You boys go get some sleep, and tomorrow the three of you sit down together and decide what you want to do. It's your decision, not mine. I know that whatever you do, boys, it'll be the right thing. It's what I raised you to do.”

They seem relieved and exhale almost in unison, as if all three have been holding their breath. Buzz reaches down and tousles the old man's thin, sandy gray hair, as if ruffling the fur of a favorite dog. He says, “Okay. Sounds like a plan, Dad.”

“Yeah,” Chip says. “Sounds like a plan.”

Jack nods agreement. He's the first out the door, and the others quickly follow. They catch up to him in the hallway, and the three walk side by side in silence to the elevator. They remain silent in the elevator and down two floors and all the way out to the parking lot. They stop beside Jack's cruiser for a second and look back and up at the large square window of their father's room. A nurse draws the blind closed, and the light in the room goes out.

Jack opens the door on the driver's side and gets in. “You want to meet for breakfast and figure out what's next?”

“Where?” Chip asks. “I've got the noon-to-nine shift, so breakfast is good.”

“M & M in Au Sable Forks at eight? The old man's favorite breakfast joint.”

“I can make it okay,” Buzz says, “but I have to be on the road to Dannemora by nine.”

Chip says, “I guess we already know what's next, don't we?”

Buzz says, “His pistol, is it loaded?”

“I didn't check,” Jack says, getting out of the car. Buzz is already walking very fast back toward the hospital entrance, and Chip is running to catch up, when from their father's room on the second floor they hear the gunshot.

A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY

I'm not sure I want to tell this story on myself, not now, some thirty-five years after it happened. But it has more or less become a family legend and consequently has been much revised and, if I may say, since I'm not merely a witness to the crime but its presumed perpetrator, much distorted as well. It has been told around by people who are virtual strangers, people who heard it from one of my daughters, or my son-in-law or my granddaughter, all of whom enjoy telling it because it paints the old man, that's me, in a somewhat humiliating light. Apparently, humbling the old man still gives pleasure, and not just to people who know him personally.

My main impulse here is merely to set the record straight, even if it does in a vague way reflect badly on me. Not on my character so much as on my ability to anticipate bad things and thus on my ability to have protected my children when they were very young from those bad things. I'm also trying to reclaim the story, to take it back and make it mine again. If that sounds selfish of me, remember that for thirty-five years it has belonged to everyone else.

It was the winter following the summer I separated from Louise, the woman who for fourteen turbulent years had been my wife. It took place in a shabbily quaint village in southern New Hampshire where I was teaching literature at a small liberal arts college. The divorce had not yet kicked in, but the separation was complete, an irreversible fact of life—my life and Louise's and the lives of our three girls, Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha, who were six, nine and thirteen years old. My oldest daughter, Vickie, from my first marriage, was then eighteen and living with me, having run away from her mother and stepfather's home in North Carolina. She was enrolled as a freshman at the college where I taught and was temporarily housed in a studio apartment I built for her above the garage. All of us were fissioned atoms spun off nuclear families, seeking new, recombinant nuclei.

I had left Louise in August and bought a small abandoned house with an attached garage, a quarter of a mile away, which felt and looked like the gatehouse to Louise's much larger, elaborately groomed Victorian manse on the hill. Following my departure, her social life, always more intense and open-ended than mine, continued unabated and even intensified, as if for years my presence had acted as a party killer. On weekends especially, cars rumbled back and forth along the unpaved lane between my cottage and her house at all hours of the day and night. Some of the cars I recognized as belonging to our formerly shared friends; some of them were new to me and bore out-of-state plates.

We were each financially independent of the other, she through a sizable trust set up by her grandparents, I by virtue of my teaching position. There was, therefore, no alimony for our lawyers to fight for or against. Since our one jointly owned asset of consequence, that rather grandiose Victorian manse, had been purchased with her family's money, I signed my half of it over to her without argument. It had always seemed pretentiously bourgeois to me, a bit of an embarrassment, frankly, and I was glad to be rid of it.

Regarding the children, the plan was that my ex-wife, as I was already thinking of her, and I would practice “joint custody,” a Solomonic solution to the rending of family fabric. At the time, the late 1970s, this was seen as a progressive, although mostly untried, way of doling out parental responsibilities in a divorce. Three and a half days a week the girls would reside with me and Vickie, and three and a half days a week with their mother. They would alternate three nights at my house one week with four nights the next, so that for every fourteen nights they would have slept seven at the home of each parent. Half their clothing and personal possessions would be at my place, where I had carved two tiny, low-ceilinged bedrooms out of the attic, and half would be at their mother's, where each child had her own large, high-windowed bedroom and walk-in closet. It was an easy, safe stroll between the two houses, and on transitional days, the school bus could pick them up in the morning at one parent's house and drop them off that afternoon at the other. We agreed to handle the holidays and vacations on an ad hoc basis—postponing the problem, in other words.

That left only the cat, a large black Maine coon named Scooter, and the family dog, a white part-poodle mutt we'd rescued from the pound twelve years earlier when I was in graduate school. A neutered female unaccountably named Sarge, she was an adult dog of indeterminate age when we got her and was now very old. She was arthritic, half blind and partially deaf. And devoted to everyone in the family. We were her pack.

Louise and I agreed that Scooter and Sarge, unlike our daughters, could not adapt to joint custody and therefore would have to live full-time in one place or the other. I made a preemptive bid for Sarge, who was viewed as belonging not to either parent, but to the three girls, who were very protective of her, as if she were a mentally and physically challenged sibling. Despite her frailty, she was the perfect family dog: sweetly placid, utterly dependent and demonstrably grateful for any form of human kindness.

Scooter, on the other hand, was a loner and often out all night prowling the neighborhood for sex. We had neglected to castrate him until he was nearly three, and evidently he still thought he was obliged to endure mortal combat with other male cats for the sexual favors of females, even though he was no longer capable of enjoying those favors. He had long been regarded by Louise and the girls and by Scooter himself as my cat, probably because I was an early riser and fed him when he showed up at the back door at dawn looking like a boxer who needed a good cut man. And though neither of us overtly acknowledged it, he and I were the only males in the family. He ended up at my gatehouse down the lane not because I particularly wanted him there, but more or less by default.

In keeping with the principle of dividing custodial responsibilities equally between ex-husband and ex-wife, since the ex-husband had been claimed by the cat, it was decided that the dog would stay at the home of the ex-wife. She insisted on it. There was no discussion or negotiation. I balked at first, but then backed off. Keeping Sarge at her house was an important point of pride for Louise, the one small tilt in her favor in an otherwise equitable division of property, personal possessions and domestic responsibility. It was a small victory over me in a potentially much more destructive contest that we were both determined to avoid, and I didn't mind handing it to her. Choose your battles, I reminded myself. Also, claiming Sarge as her own was a not-so-subtle, though probably unconscious way for Louise to claim our daughters as more hers than mine. I didn't mind giving that to her, either, as long as I knew it was an illusion. It made me feel more magnanimous and wise than I really was.

Back then there were many differences between me and Louise as to reality and illusion, truth and falsity, and a frequent confusion of the causes of the breakdown of the marriage with the symptoms of an already broken marriage. But I'd rather not go into them here, because this story is not concerned with those differences and that confusion, which now these many years later have dwindled to irrelevance. Besides, both Louise and I have been happily remarried to new spouses for decades, and our children are practically middle-aged and have children of their own. One daughter is herself twice divorced. Like her dad.

At first the arrangement went as smoothly as Louise and I had hoped. The girls, bless their hearts, once the initial shock of the separation wore off, seemed to embrace the metronomic movement back and forth between their old familiar family home, now owned and operated solely by their mother, and the new, rough-hewn home operated by their father. With a swing set and slide from Sears, I turned the backyard into a suburban playground. It was a mild autumn with a long Indian summer, I recall, and I pitched a surplus army tent among the maples by the brook and let the girls grill hot dogs and toast marshmallows and sleep out there in sleeping bags on warm nights when there was no school the next day. Back in June, when I knew I'd soon be parenting and housekeeping on my own, I had scheduled my fall term classes and conferences for early in the day so that I could be home waiting for the girls when they stepped down from the bus. With Vickie living over the garage—although only sleeping there irregularly, as she now had a boyfriend at school who had his own apartment in town—my place that fall was like an after-school summer camp for girls.

The one unanticipated complication arose when Sarge trotted arthritically along behind the girls as best she could whenever they came from their mother's house to mine. This in itself was not a problem, except that, when the girls returned to their mother's at the end of their three or four scheduled nights with me, Sarge refused to follow. She stayed with me and Scooter. Her preference was clear, although her reasons were not. She even resisted being leashed and went limp like an antiwar demonstrator arrested for trespass and could not be made to stand and walk.

Within an hour of the girls' departure, Louise would telephone and insist that I drive the dog “home,” as she put it. “Sarge lives with me,” she said. “Me and the girls.”

Custody of Sarge was a victory over Louise that I had not sought. I had never thought of her as “my” dog, but as the family dog, by which I meant belonging to the children. I tried explaining that it appeared to be Sarge's decision to stay with me and assured her that I had done nothing to coerce the dog into staying and nothing to hinder her in any way from following the girls up the lane when they left. Quite the opposite.

But Louise would have none of it. “Just bring the damn dog back. Now,” she said and hung up. Her voice and her distinctive Virginia Tidewater accent echo in my ears these many years later.

I was driving a Ford station wagon then, and because of her arthritis poor old Sarge couldn't get into the back on her own, so I had to lift her up carefully and lay her in, and when I arrived at Louise's house, I had to open the tailgate and scoop the dog up in my arms and set her down on the driveway like an offering—a peace offering, I suppose, though it felt more like a propitiation.

This happened every week. Despite all Louise's efforts to keep Sarge a permanent resident of her house, the dog always managed to slip out, arriving at my door just behind the girls, or else she came down the lane, increasingly, on her own, even when the girls were in their mother's custody. So it wasn't Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha that the dog was following, it was me. I began to see that in her canine mind I was her pack leader, and since I had moved to a new den, so had she. If she didn't follow me there, she'd be without a leader and a proper den.

There was nothing that Louise and I could do to show Sarge how wrong she was. She wasn't wrong, of course; she was a dog. Finally, after about a month, Louise gave up, although she never announced her capitulation. Simply, there came a time when my ex-wife no longer called me with orders to deliver our family dog to her doorstep.

Everyone—me, Sarge, the girls, I think even Louise—was relieved. We all knew on some level that a major battle, one with a likelihood of causing considerable collateral damage, had been narrowly avoided. Yet, despite my relief, I felt a buzzing, low-grade anxiety about having gained sole custody of Sarge. I wasn't aware of it then, but looking back now I see that Sarge, as long as she was neither exclusively mine nor Louise's, functioned in our newly disassembled family as the last remaining link to our preseparation, prelapsarian past, to a time of relative innocence, when all of us, but especially the girls, still believed in the permanence of our family unit, our pack.

If Sarge had only agreed to traipse up and down the lane behind the girls, if she had agreed to accept joint custody, then my having left my wife could have been seen by all of us as an eccentric, impulsive, possibly even temporary, sleeping arrangement, and for the girls it could have been a bit like going on a continuous series of neighborhood camping trips with Dad. I would not have felt quite so guilty, and Louise would not have been so hurt and angry. The whole abandonment issue would have been ameliorated somewhat. The children would not have been so traumatized; their lives, as they see them today, would not have been permanently disfigured, and neither Louise nor I might have gone looking so quickly for replacement spouses.

That's a lot of weight to put on a family dog, I know. We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, and to provide one's unfocused anger with a proper target, one looks for someone to blame.

No one blamed Sarge, of course, for rejecting joint custody and thereby breaking up our family. Not consciously, anyhow. In fact, back then, at the beginning of the breakup of the family, none of us knew how much we depended on Sarge to preserve our ignorance of the fragility, the very impermanence, of the family. None of us knew that she was helping us postpone our anger and need for blame—blame for the separation and divorce, for the destruction of the family unit, for our lost innocence.

Whenever the girls stepped down from the school bus for their three or four nights' stay at my house, they were clearly, profoundly comforted to see Sarge, her wide grin, her wet black eyes glazed by cataracts, her floppy tail and slipshod, slanted, arthritic gait as she trailed them from the bus stop to the house. Wherever the girls settled in the yard or the house, as long as she didn't have to climb the narrow attic stairs to be with them, Sarge lay watchfully beside them, as if guarding them from a danger whose existence Louise and I had not yet acknowledged.