The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (22 page)

ONCE, YEARS BEFORE
all this, when Scott and I were drinking together—his life had just turned to shit for the umpteenth time—he got sort of a gloating look and said:

“Ma will never give up on me.”

In this respect he was more prescient than I. After he’d smashed up the rental car and given himself brain damage, after his dildos and crack stems and sundry erotica had been discovered, I actually believed my mother when she told me she was
through
with that asshole, he could
rot
in the hospital, etc. About a month later, though, he was living with her.

“
What could I do?
” she said in a frenzied way when I upbraided her. “He looks so emaciated! His skin is gray! He’ll
die
if I don’t help him!”

“Let him die!”

“Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”

“
Let him die
. Better him than you!”

But she wouldn’t let him die. It helped Scott’s cause that she was particularly vulnerable at the time: after fifteen years under the same roof, Dave the boyfriend had just moved out; he was a lot younger than she and wanted a proper wife and kids; besides, they were driving each other crazy. But Marlies wasn’t ready to be alone yet, and after a fashion she still loved Dave, a decent guy whose eagerness to leave had shaken her badly. So I suppose Scott performed a service of sorts—namely he managed to persuade her (at least temporarily) that there were worse things than being alone.

Indeed, she was so traumatized by Scott’s presence that she later claimed to have no memory of his stay, though I remember what she told me at the time. Nothing very dramatic happened. Scott convalesced on the couch, quietly, and barely seemed to notice our mother. He never went anywhere because there was nowhere to go. A big supply of pain pills and whatever else obviated the one errand he was liable to run. He got up only to go to the bathroom, and seemed content to lie there forever as long as certain needs were met.

Marlies couldn’t take it. Scott seemed a waxen embodiment of everything that had gone wrong in her life. After a week or so, she asked him to leave.

“Why?” he asked, vaguely hurt.

“You’re just too depressing, Scott.”

“Why?”

“Go to the hospital! You need help!”

“There’s nothing wrong with
me
.”

But finally he left. As long as his things were in my mother’s storage shed, and she provided his only permanent address and therefore received his mail (unpaid bills, the usual magazines, his monthly VA check, and free motivational tapes and assorted literature with titles like “15 Minutes That Will Change Your Life!”), he knew he had plenty of reasons for returning.

One day he showed up asking for money. He needed a hundred bucks to tide him over for the rest of the month, and since he already owed Marlies a great deal of money and seemed to accept that she wouldn’t give him more until he’d made some effort to lessen his debt, he offered to write her a postdated check. He mentioned with a kind of pride that he was cutting corners by living out of his car, the newly painted BMW; in fact the hundred dollars was needed for minor repairs. It was an old car.

He spoke in a kind of rapid monotone, as though he’d rehearsed the spiel a thousand times and was eager to get it over with. His eyes seemed to stare past my mother to the money and whatever he wanted to buy with it. She knew he wasn’t leaving without a hundred dollars, and the main thing was to make him leave. She’d have to get cash at an ATM, she said, and suggested he wait, have a snack, but he preferred to follow her in his car.

From my mother’s place in the country to the nearest ATM was maybe ten miles, and never once was Scott more than a few feet from my mother’s bumper. The roar of his stereo made it all the more menacing, like being overtaken by a tsunami. At stoplights my mother shook her fist at Scott in the rearview mirror, mouthed obscenities, appealed to his belief in a benevolent deity, but each time she was met with the same blankly determined stare. Finally they arrived at the ATM. My mother got the money, parked, and bustled over to where my brother sat in his BMW.

“Are you out of your
mind
? Are you trying to get us
killed
?”

Scott pondered this. “I guess I’m just a crazy motherfucker,” he said.

“
Look at yourself!
” She reached into his car and adjusted the rearview mirror; Scott obliged her by staring at himself, cocking his head with old fondness. “You need help! Go to the VA!”

He lowered his eyes and sighed. “You’re right. I will.”

“You can’t go
on
like this!”

“I know. You’re right.”

She gave him the money. “Promise?”

He nodded like a little boy about to cry. She kissed his cheek—too sallow even to support pimples—and asked him to call her later.

A couple of weeks later he called her from the county jail. I never got the story straight, but what happened went something like this: the police found Scott sleeping in his car outside a crack house; there were drugs in the car, etc. Things might have gone better if Scott had seen fit to cooperate with the police, but I gather he resisted, strenuously, and was eventually sentenced to five years in prison. Somewhere in there his postdated check to my mother bounced.

SHORTLY AFTER SCOTT’S
arrest my mother had sent me his mug shot: he looked like a surly pillar of oatmeal, a scraggly beard thrown in for whimsical effect. I wanted nothing to do with that person ever again, though I wished him no ill. I was glad to know he’d get three squares a day and be kept out of mischief, more or less.

And really, even if he weren’t in prison, I would have still been inclined to phase him out of my life. At thirty-two I was finally getting my shit together, a process expedited when I met my future wife, Mary, then an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. She was home on one of those weird trimester holidays, and had rollerbladed to the school where I taught to pick up her little sister’s homework assignments. This was during my planning period, so I had time to flirt with her—
quite
taken with this tall, sweaty, self-possessed young woman who was the older sister of Emma, a sweet but rather farouche thirteen-year-old who’d just broken her leg. In Mary I sensed a slight, kindred shyness, and I was touched by the thought of Emma growing up (as indeed she would) to become the same sort of charming, carefully composed person. I made a mental note to ask the older sister out on a date if I ever saw her again, and by one of those flukes that serve to remind one that the cosmos isn’t entirely malign, I did: at a gallery opening maybe four months later. We were both glad to see each other. Chatting, Mary mentioned that she was a teacher’s aide at a public school in Chicago—part of her work scholarship at the university—and also helped a teacher friend at an elementary school in the French Quarter. Casting about, I invited her to guest-teach one of my gifted classes, after which I took her out for drinks, and we went on from there.

I’ll never forget the day I knew, for certain, that this was the one person I absolutely needed in my life. We were in the Quarter and Mary suggested a quick visit to the second-grade classroom at McDonogh 15 where she occasionally helped out. Her reception there was something to see: all twenty or so kids, in unison, rose screeching to their feet and flung themselves at Mary as though she were covered in honey or dollar bills. The uproar continued for two or three minutes—Mary, struggling to keep her feet, was buffeted around like a bell buoy in a rough sea—until the teacher, Bonnie, demanded the kids desist already so they could get on with their lesson. She was otherwise undismayed; Mary’s goodness, apparently, always had that effect. Kids and dogs know.

The following summer Mary spent most nights at my apartment, and I came to realize the extent to which my drinking had been a matter of simple, lonely boredom. At any rate Mary didn’t drink much, and for her sake I dispensed with all but a single nightly martini. It was strange to feel good in the morning again; it occurred to me that for almost ten years I’d taken for granted a kind of incidental crapulence. Also it was good not to feel like such an impostor. Nowadays when people said nice things about me as a teacher and so on, I felt less of an urge to laugh. And how nice, how companionable it was to cook a meal in my kitchen, looking up now and then to see the back of Mary’s head as she lay reading on my couch. This was how one lived.

EVERY MONTH OR
so I’d get a letter from Scott. He never wrote of his immediate circumstances, except to repeat the phrase “I hate this fucking place” every few paragraphs. I got the impression the letters were scribbled in the midst of a bottomless ennui, and might have been scribbled to anybody. I’d scan the pages for any sign of a personal reference, any hint of shared history, but other than the odd snide remark about Burck or Sandra, there was nothing but random chatter about magazines, starlets, sports, Jesus, and various cars he coveted (the new Porsche Boxster was a special favorite). And hyphens: always the envelope bulged with newspaper clippings marked up with deleted or inserted hyphens, which Scott thought were subject to a veritable pandemic of misuse. He was immune to remonstrance on this point. Perhaps he thought it called attention to his acumen as a copy-editor, one of the few creditable aspects of his life prior to prison.

For the first year or so of his sentence Scott had been in a minimum-security facility. He was even allowed to teach some sort of literacy course, since it didn’t go unnoticed that he read a lot (magazines and library books relating to his lawsuit) and had a way with words. More often than not, though, his glibness got him into trouble: it was hard to say who hated him more, the guards or the inmates; in any case he got a lot of write-ups, and finally someone set his hair on fire while he was sleeping. After that he was transferred to the medium-security prison where my mother and I paid him a visit.

It was a grim place. We stood in a little holding cage outside the walls while we were identified with a video camera; then, after a thorough frisking, we were conducted to a dingy cafeteria where inmates met their families on visiting days. Marlies had packed an elaborate lunch, and we filled the empty minutes opening various Tupperware containers and filling our plates just so. Then we sat in the flyblown heat and waited. Finally he showed up with a mass of other inmates who dispersed themselves among tables of loved ones.

Scott gave me a rough hug, pressing my head against his bony muscular chest. “
Zwiiieeeb
, look at you!” he said, surveying me at arm’s length. “My God, I think he’s almost pretty as me!”

Sitting down to our food, my mother remarked of Scott (as though he were absent or deaf), “I don’t think he’s so pretty anymore. What do you think?”

Her tone implied that the point was at least debatable and it was up to me to resolve it one way or the other. I looked at Scott—chewing, undismayed, awaiting my verdict for better or worse.

“He looks okay to me,” I said. “All things considered.”

“See?” said Scott. “Forever young.”

He went on eating in his old way of endless fastidious nibbling, sometimes removing a piece of masticated fat to a side plate. My mother clucked and fussed at him the way
her
mother (whom she now resembled almost to a nicety) had done years before in Germany, so I imagine. I noticed Scott was balding around the temples and getting thin on top too, or perhaps that was where he’d been set on fire. The middle of his forehead was scored with jagged little creases that I thought at first were acne scars, until Scott told me they were from head-butts.

After lunch we were herded outside, where we could sit at picnic tables or wander the lawn. Somehow we got hold of a half-inflated football and chucked it around a bit, talking about the Cowboys and Redskins. Then we joined our mother at one of the shaded tables. She watched our conversation in an abstracted way, as though she were trying to picture us as children. For a while Scott talked of nothing but his lawsuit—in that half-joking, deadly serious way of his—then abruptly dropped the subject and focused on me. He wanted to know every detail of my life, or as many as I could provide in the half hour left to us: How did I meet my girlfriend? Did we sleep together on the first date? How much did I make as a teacher? Was it hard to get certified? What kind of car was I driving?

Then it was time to go.

“Well, Zwieb—”

“Well—”

And he gathered me into his arms, whacking my back a bit too hard as he let go. He didn’t let go of my mother for a long time; he’d started crying and didn’t want others to see. Finally he wiped his eyes against her shoulder, one and then the other, and whispered good-bye with a little gasp. On the other side of the locking Plexiglas door we turned one more time to wave at my brother, who managed a jaunty smile as he stood bobbing slightly on the balls of his feet.

I TRIED HARDER
to stay in touch with Scott after that. It pleased me to imagine him reading my letters and bursting into elaborate wheezy laughter from time to time. I sent him a few books too, until I learned that these were all confiscated pending his release. I wanted to make his life a little more bearable. I figured he’d keep getting write-ups from guards and beatings from prisoners, until it became clear that he was unwell and belonged in a mental hospital. I figured such a process was automatic for the obvious head cases. Also there was this: Scott wasn’t HIV positive, apparently, but he did have hepatitis C, and would almost surely perish from liver failure if he ever got out of prison and started drinking again. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned, since I still believed that Scott was better off dead, though a comfortable nuthouse would do just as well.

For a while my mother seemed to agree with me, but then she returned to certain insidious phrases about his being a good marine and so on.

“Forget about the marines,” I’d tell her. “He’s not in the marines anymore.”

“If Scott didn’t drink so much—”

“He’d be a
sober
lunatic, the way he is now. He keeps sending me piles of clippings with the hyphens corrected! I tell him to stop and he only sends more! What do you call
that
?”