Thank You for the Music (4 page)

Early in life, he'd become an expert at breaking commandments. Susan Harkins (famous in Twayne, Nebraska, for being half Jewish) became pregnant when the two of them were sixteen; they'd married. When the child was two months old they'd given him up for adoption to an older couple in town. (Through the years he'd tried unsuccessfully to track that son down, then given up.) Tim and Susan Harkins divorced after two years, when Tim was nineteen, and the young ex-wife ran away with a vagabond, leaving Tim to settle into his role as black sheep. He'd had a yearlong affair with Peg Cassidy, a petite married woman twice his age. He'd stolen her husband's money and taken her away for a week to Niagara Falls. He'd been arrested. His mother had disowned him for a year and said he was a wild Indian like his father's father, which he told her was a compliment.

But none of this memory could he take seriously; rather he enjoyed superimposing his own face on the body of a black sheep, then placing the sheep on a train. The sheep with his own face would be framed in the window as the train slid out of Nebraska into a sea of stars, Willie Nelson singing “This Land Is Your Land,” his Cherokee ancestors nurturing earth in their graves.

“You could even drive,” the pastor said. His voice was beginning to fade. Was he on a cell phone? The pastor wouldn't have a cell phone, would he? “It's not that far. If Rachel still hates flying. . . .”

“Well, listen, I don't know about any travel, I mean after September eleventh, Rachel is actually getting agoraphobic.” (The lie slipped out before he could stop it and now he was ashamed.)

The pastor had indeed invited them for a week, was saying they'd be the guests of honor. Why did so many things come true exactly the way you'd imagined? And why could you still be such a fool at age sixty-two? He stood outside with the phone now, letting the snow hit his face.

He said, “Hey, listen, John, we'll be there, we wouldn't miss it for the world.”

And heard the pastor sigh with gratitude. “You've always been there, Tim,” he said. “I hope Maria can come too, though I'd understand if she couldn't. I'll just be glad to have you beside me that day. I'm a little conflicted about this retirement—”

“So don't do it!” Tim chimed in. “You're still young.”

His brother laughed. “Not that conflicted. I'm ready, and Claire and I are excited about moving. Did I mention we're moving to New Mexico?”

“New Mexico!” Tim felt his face grow warm; he bent and scooped up some snow. Why did his brother have to retire to his wife's favorite place on earth? Such mean coincidence always made Tim believe in God.

“. . . and there's a lot of Spanish-speaking people there so Claire and I are taking Spanish—have been all year.”

“Great. Great. I'm really happy for you. It's just great.”

“Yeah, well, thanks, Tim. I have to admit I get a little teary when I think about it all.”

Tim was quiet. He didn't know what to say. Feelings charged out of his heart like wildebeest down a cliff. Feelings built of memories that showed up only in his dreams and were usually forgotten, but now, with clarity that kept him still, he saw John at fourteen with black hair against the hay in the barn where they'd wrestled, where he'd bitten John so hard he'd tasted blood.

And you didn't say a word about it. You were fifteen. You were down on the ground, looking up at me, shocked at having seen my rage. Under the shock was interest, and the beginning of compassion, since you were from the start a spectacularly evolved soul, brother John, and you'd already had your first religious experience by then, the one where you stood out in a field under the millions of Nebraska stars, and felt the pulse of the universe as the very voice of God saying in a language translatable only in that moment, “You are loved.”

Did I ever tell you I had a very similar experience, only God said to me, in a language I could translate any moment of the day, “You are a loser”?

“Well, John,” he said now, “I can understand getting teary. I mean, this has been your whole life.”

“Yeah. It has, hasn't it.”

A pause.

“So, Tim, you think Maria will come?”

“God knows.”

“Yeah. I understand. So. How's everything going?”

“Fine. We're healthy. Busy. In fact, I should go, John. I need to get some firewood for tonight.”

Tim had always spoken in shorthand to his brother about his own life. What was that urge to protect the details of his life from his brother's knowing? As if his brother could somehow take his life away from him just by knowing about it.

Rachel was thrilled. “I miss them! This will be wonderful. And I can give Claire that pot I made her, finally. Maybe even Maria will fly in for this.”

“I'm glad you're excited. I don't feel like traveling.”

They were in the car in the dark, on the way to the Hot Spot, where they'd get hot fudge sundaes and coffee and read the paper. It had stopped snowing. Rachel smelled like rose-petal lotion. She wore a bright scarf around her head. She was still, at fifty-six, too often the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.

“You used to love to travel.”

“But September eleventh. You said yourself—”

“I'm over it.”

“That was quick.”

She reached over and let her hand cup his kneecap. “Should I call Maria?” she said.

“I don't know.” He drove with caution that made him feel elderly. Then he entertained a dark, familiar thought: that his whole life was a charade, that the deepest truth of his life would be revealed once again, in Pittsburgh, and that all this living as a good guy in upstate New York with his beloved wife and woodwork was like an exercise. The flimsiest, least challenged parts of himself could thrive here, and he could fool himself into thinking it was all right. That he had recovered himself. That he was solidly loved, and loving.

“I'll call Maria,” he said.

“You will? Great.” Maria had broken Rachel's heart long ago, in her earliest drug-addict days. It would never be healed. But Rachel had a lively, passionate mind that knew how to thrive like an indestructibly vibrant kite darting and rising above the darkest sea. Lately she had fallen in love (again) with Kierkegaard. She referred to him as Soren, like she might go have a cup of coffee with him if he wasn't dead. Tim envied her natural enthusiasm, and sometimes let himself be swept along in its current, such as last year when she became a bird fanatic. They'd gone to every marsh on the east coast. He'd spent five hundred bucks on binoculars. He'd wept seeing a blue heron up close.

He watched Rachel pack. “Do you need to pack so much?”

She looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She laughed in the lamplight. She stepped up and kissed him, her silver earrings dangling. “This terrorism stuff is making you sweetly annoying. You're like an anxious pup at my heels. Why don't you go have a beer or something? Listen to Sonny Boy Williamson. He'll cheer you up. Or try calling Maria again! She's a whole different brand of terrorism.”

He felt dismissed, stung by her anxious pup remark, but his dignity was a ship that sailed him wordlessly out of the room.

He did have a beer, and listened to Keith Jarret's haunting
Köln Concert,
so as not to be cheered up, and called his daughter. On her answering machine he left this message: “Hey there, it's your dad. Your uncle John would love to see you at his retirement party. I'll pay for the ticket if you want to come. Okay, let me know, and I'll—”

Maria picked up the phone. “Timothy?” She'd taken to calling him this fairly recently.

“That's me, kiddo,” he said. He was impersonating a father now.

“I'd love to come see Uncle John's retirement party.”

“You sound strange today.”

She laughed. She dropped the phone, still laughing. Finally she was back. “I'm tripping my ass off.”

He said nothing. He held the phone tightly. And then, from deep in his chest, a familiar sorrow rose in him that left him speechless. “Okay,” he finally said. And he hung up.

He hadn't the heart to tell Rachel about the call when she hauled out the bulging plaid suitcase, frayed from so many years of use.

“I'm excited!” she said.

When a child knocked on their door selling candy for school, Tim went with her to see the child; he liked when random kids appeared at the door. This little girl was unsmiling and homely. “Would you like to buy a candy bar to help support East Hills school?” she said in a monotone. Her nose was running. Tim wanted to pull her into the house, wanted to sit her down and discover how she endured her life. “Aren't you cold out here?” he said. “No,” mumbled the girl, and her blue eyes darted to the side. The sleeves of her coat were too short and he saw the impossible fragility of her bluish wrists.

“Are you sure? It feels cold to me.”

She shook her head.

“If you were cold, you could come in a while and have something warm to drink by the fire.”

The girl looked frightened now.
What kind of world do you think this is, mister?

“I know, I know, you need to move on to the next house and make some money.” He took a ten-dollar bill from his pocket. “Here. Give me a candy bar.”

The girl handed him one, and began rifling through a stack of ones. “You get nine dollars change.”

“Keep it.”

A sly smile came to her lips, and she looked down. “Thanks.” She turned and walked away.

Rachel shut the door and looked at him. “You liked her.”

“I liked her.”

“I like that you liked her.”

She smiled at him, an old desire flashing in her eyes, and kissed him on the mouth.

“I reached Maria,” he said, and Rachel stiffened and stepped back.

“And?”

He hesitated, torn between wanting to tear her excitement to shreds and wanting to protect her heart, always.

“She's not coming. Too busy.”

“How did she sound?”

“Fine. Not a word about the end-time.”

In the airport that morning it was initially a relief for Tim to see his brother looking old, and then sadness set in. John looked vulnerable, the broad forehead lined and the eyes sunken just a bit. In Tim's memory his brother always appeared in his prime. Seeing the inevitable age softened Tim, as it had before, and now the good will inside of his fear woke, his heart leapt forward, he embraced John and said, “It's good to see you.” Rachel and Claire talked all the way out of the airport. Tim saw how Rachel had hardly looked at John.
So much was his own sick creation.
Wasn't it and hadn't it always been? He walked beside his brother in the Pittsburgh airport and felt invigorated by the intensity and purity of his admiration. My brother, this man of integrity. He might be a Christian, but he's decent about it, and deep, and he's not a bigot.

Now they were sharing an old joke—its roots going all the way back to 1949—”I like your Binky Leanard shoes,” John said, and Tim broke out into laughter.

Behind them Rachel said, “God I love to see those two together!”

The first part of the retirement party was held in an old renovated theater, a charming old place where Gene Kelly had once danced. It sat across from the church in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. The pastor, with the help and support of his wife, had been at the helm of transforming the church; before they'd come it was a dying monolith serving mostly white, upper-middle-class people who drove in from the suburbs. Now the mammoth cathedral was ecumenical and alive with the full human spectrum.

This Pittsburgh church was so much more complex and of the world than his previous church—the tame Midwestern one that Tim privately mocked for being just that. Even Rachel had said the last church was too lily white for her tastes, and Tim was glad, since he liked anything in those days that protected him from imagining Rachel was in love with his brother. Even after the two of them—John and Rachel—had once stayed up all night talking, at least the next day driving home Rachel had said, “I was starting to go crazy there. It was just a little too clean-cut.”

“Yeah, well, that's John,” Tim had said. Which was ridiculous. That wasn't John at all.

This was more John. This place, this old theater where now they sat in the dark with over a hundred strangers and nieces and nephews and a handful of people they knew as John's friends, waiting for the retirement show to begin. John and Claire were seated up in the balcony; an old woman from the congregation had wanted to feed them pastries and champagne and had set up a little table there.

An old Beatles song began to play. “There are places I remember, all my life, though some have changed.” Rachel squeezed his arm. The slide show started. John as a baby, there in the backyard, sunlit, a curl on top of his head, and Rachel's hand flew up to cover her mouth. “Look at him,” she whispered, and her head bent to the side as if to get every possible angle. But the slide had already been replaced with John at age six, this one formal: his hair slicked down, little body in a suit, his smile radiant and his eyes already shining with purpose. “This kind of thing kills me,” Rachel said.

This surprised him. She was not a sentimental woman. He imagined she would resist this display were it not all about John.

And the Beatles played on, and now a shot of the lanky brothers, age nine or ten, their arms around each other, a horse behind them that Tim remembered had belonged to a fat blind man down the road. Rachel squealed at this one and squeezed Tim's hand. “Look at you, Tim!” But the picture for Tim evoked something close to nausea. (He had never forgiven himself for being that child, had never known forgiveness was necessary; because he'd for so long mocked himself in memory, he closed his eyes now, was relieved when the next slide came up and erased him.) Glad now to see the childhood part of the show was closing, and to look at John in high school, the valedictorian, of course, who back then had been able to include Jesus in his speech, the guy who all the girls loved but who'd been too busy reading his Calvin and Augustine and Saint John of the Cross, and besides he wanted to lose his virginity to whoever his wife would be, even though waiting was too much torture and he actually ended up all too humanly and admirably losing it in a car with Rita Pers, a shapely atheist transplant with a Brooklyn accent whose favorite expression was “Oh, come on, John, spare me!”