Marijuana. Cocaine. LSD. They are just names to me. Or even reliable ol’ alcohol. What else would set loose Cage’s illness? Manic depression. It seems to me the culture of rock and roll music has accounted more than anything else for the moral decline of American society, distracted our children from the serious business of life. When I was growing up, kids didn’t blow their minds on drugs and stay out all night listening to music that impairs their eardrums. In the Great Depression everyone was working hard to get by, better themselves, make something out of their lives. Nowadays kids have it too easy. All they’re interested in is excitement.
Harper came along nine years after Nick. He was the only one we planned. Margaret badly wanted one more child. He would be perfect, the one with whom she would apply everything that she had learned from raising the first two. She wouldn’t make the same mistakes. But Harper turned out to be an angry child.
Across the link Malachi, who looks as old as Methuselah, comes out of a barn on a riding mower, which calls up the image of an old Negro on a mule in Arkansas in the thirties. Every Tuesday, Malachi’s and my paths intersect on the eighteenth fairway. Malachi waves and turns along in the same direction, yelling above the engine noise, “Mo’nin’, Bishop.”
“Morning, Mal. Another scorcher.”
“It gets any hotter than yesaday, they gonna have get me some special inshunce for sunstroke, yes suh. Don’t sees how you stan’ to run.”
“Got to suffer a little to stay healthy.”
“I know Jesus promised eternal life. Looks to me like you’s aiming to have it right here on earth.”
“Hell, I ain’t that old, Malachi.”
“Nah suh, but you ain’t that young neitherway be out here at the crack o’ dawn every mo’nin’.”
Reaching the iron fence, I say, “Good morning to you, sir.”
“Always a pleasure talking to you, suh.” Malachi grins and turns the mower in the opposite direction.
I remember that today is a diocesan executive committee meeting with the Integrity chapter. Those fellows. They are growing so adversarial one day they’ll split the entire Episcopal church. The Great Gay Schism. They are never satisified with our attempts to accommodate them pastorally. That’s what I find so frustrating. I empathize with the plea of the homosexually oriented person that they have been excluded from the life of the church and I have tried to make them a part of the Body of Christ, to incorporate them into the community. Regardless of what I do, it’s not enough. They want to make everything a legal issue. This year it’s blessing same-sex unions, which diametrically opposes the teachings of the church on holy matrimony. I don’t know what to do except to liturgically recognize fidelity practiced between same sexes. But you cannot call it marriage. Hell, it ain’t marriage. And what will they want next year?
I wish I was hiking alone along a high, cool ridgetop, deep in the Appalachians.
I
n late August the Magic Hour comes earlier and doesn’t last as long. Late in the day, up high on a ladder on the side of an old shingled two-story, I watch gulls wheel and shriek over the shore. I look across the water at the gray horizon as if I can see Cage locked up in the asylum. The more I think about it, the more Cage’s crack-up scares me. Can I suddenly go crazy? Can I change into a conniving, charming con man? For all I know I’m carrying the bipolar time bomb.
I still feel terrible about telling the police where they could find Cage. When Dad was up here in July, he told me that I did the right thing, that there was no way to know that the judge would throw him into that hellhole. Mama has been up three or four times over the summer. She is a stoic. Each time, she’s come back from Bridgewater shaken up by the scary place and more determined that we will get him out soon. She despises the lawyer in Bridgewater. “He is a coarse man, well acquainted with the system and clever. But, my land, is he coarse. He is not a gentleman. Never forget you are a gentleman, Harper. Manners are morals.” I scrape peeling paint under the eaves and think about that. It seems erroneous to me; a perfectly mannered man could be a crook. Manners are exterior forms, habits of good behavior, at best an awareness and consideration of others. But are they morals? Yes, if fine manners means thinking of others before yourself, then it is a moral imperative. Like love thy neighbor. Mama expects me to be a Christian gentleman.
It would have been good manners for me to have gone to Bridgewater with her but I used work as an excuse because I was ashamed to see Cage, since I felt like I had put him there. I keep making up my mind to go to the mainland on the next visiting day, then wussing out.
Bipolar. Manic-depressive. I thought Cage was simply being selfish and partying too much, that he’d gone over the deep end. Dr. Lamb told Mom and me that he was self-medicating. After her first visit to Bridgewater, Mom insisted on seeing him again, scheduled an appointment. He wasn’t apologetic about his recommendation to send Cage for an evaluation. He said, Cage had shown a capacity for violence; the legal system required his evaluation. I felt like punching him in the nose. Mom responded, I hope you have the capacity to appreciate the damage that you’ve inflicted on my son and experience some feeling of regret, though you have the look of a psychiatrist who has exorcised guilt from his vocabulary of emotion. I was impressed. Lamb was silent at that one.
Looking back at Cage’s life, you wonder if the illness was there all along. The fits of anger. The wild escapades. The depressions in college and grad school. Was what had appeared to be normal adolescent turmoil really the slow arrival of his madness? “When they figure out the right drug to control manic depression, to allow them the manic energy without the psychosis, the bipolars will rule the world. They are often very bright,” an orthopedic surgeon from Charleston told me one day while I was painting his house. It’s easier to talk to southerners. I told him I was thinking of staying through December, maybe longer, and he said I could look after his huge place right on the bluff, looking out at the ocean, until next June.
Sylvia’s Saab comes down the street. She slows down and waves. She’s started running with some guy from Rhode Island, another hard-partying trustafarian. I don’t run into her much. I raise a paintbrush and start to come down the ladder. She rolls on by.
I’m thinking of staying because I’m not sure what I want to major in, what I want to be. Hanging out in a fraternity house with a bunch of drunks getting fucked up and chasing trim has lost its appeal. I’ve been seeing a therapist, a guy named Jack, since a couple of weeks after Cage went into Bridgewater. Jack says my not wanting to go back to college stems from an adjustment disorder. He’s trying to adjust me. I think the long silences of painting houses are more valuable than the fifty minutes a week with him at a dollar a minute. He did introduce me to the tool of stepping out of myself and drawing back from my family, watching all of us interact as if I was watching a play. But he doesn’t have much else to teach. I’m getting more out of a book on Gestalt therapy. I need to take some time off and think about what I want to do.
Mom and Dad are against it. The unspoken subtext is: Look what happened to Cage when he took time off from college. With their oldest son in the loony bin, their middle son dead, their youngest son appearing to drop out of college, they’re fairly freaked out. So I tell them that I’ll pay my own way, including the sixty percent of the therapy not covered by the church medical insurance. Mom guessed right away that there’s a girl involved.
I’m falling in love. Savanna heard about Cage long before she met me. He was famous across the island. Even now in late August they’re still talking about the sermon at St. Paul’s and the yard of boat wrecks and his arrest. The boatbuilder who bought Cage’s sloop for three grand, twice what Cage had paid for it, said the work Cage had done was first-class. I used the money to pay off the Slades’ account at Coffin’s Marine. There’s a consensus across the island that Cage got shafted by the doctor, the judge, and the prosecutor. Cage is remembered fondly, especially after Mom rode all over the island apologizing to everyone and covering the rubber checks—enough to send me to Tulane for a semester.
Mom hasn’t met Savanna. She was in Boston or the Vineyard when Mom was around. Mom doesn’t know that she moved into my attic. She goes to Wellesley, just a ferry ride away, studies political science, wants to be a lawyer, like half the people I know. I started therapy because of her. She’s very pragmatic. “You’ve got to do it, Harper,” she told me about dawn the night I met her. We stayed up talking all night, not even drinking much, just talking. “Your family is obviously dysfunctional. Everyone’s is. It’s too bad there’s not a Jungian analyst on the island. I had a great one in Atlanta.”
She taught me how to sail a Laser. Sometimes at sunset we cast into the surf on an isolated beach. One week we read
The Moviegoer
and the next
The Last Gentleman
. I like Walker Percy. He’s funny and captures the upper-class South in the sixties but I don’t buy his theism. Savanna believes in God. We lie on the sand under blankets, half naked. We didn’t make the two-back beast, as Cage would say, until after a month of hanging together constantly. She’s slender, like a ballerina. She has dark skin and short dark hair and barely comes to my shoulder. The first time we made love I thought I was going to hurt her. She just seemed so small. She had slept with two other boys. But once she decides, she’s into it all the way. After the long gentle warm-up of soft kisses, half-clothed bodies entwined, tender caresses, tentative wandering hands, we fucked like alley cats. She leaves marks. It’s the first great sex of my life, the first without awkwardness. I get a double bed that takes up most of the attic. We live on that bed.
So I’m going to weather the family storm on Nantucket, ponder the future and the past, try to find a path.
1969
“N
ick. Wake up.” Cage nudged his shoulder. “Sompin’s in the corner.”
“Huh?” Nick yawned and squinted in the darkness at the bedroom ceiling. He rolled over and hid his head under the pillow.
“Nick,” Cage whispered. “It’s floating.”
Nick kicked his legs under the sheets but they were not long enough to hit his brother on the other side of the big four-post bed.
“Nick.” Cage’s voice was trembling more now. “It . . . it’s . . . it’s an old wo-woman. She’s
floating
.”
Aunt Benda, Nick thought, coming awake with a start. By instinct he lay perfectly still like an orphaned cub in tall grass. Before he went to bed Granddad Cage had told them that he’d heard Aunt Benda in the attic the night before they had arrived. Even in the daylight when Nick was in the upstairs of the old house he felt Aunt Benda watching him from the corners where the walls met the ceiling.
“Nick. She’s get . . . get . . . getting close.”
What do you do? Granddad had never said what to do. How do you make a ghost go away? Nick’s heart was racing. He couldn’t bring himself to turn over and look at Aunt Benda. He pictured her in a white nightgown, shriveled like his great-grandmother, with long gray hair, holding a candle. He wanted to cry out for his mother but she wasn’t in the house. The other upstairs bedrooms were empty.
“Nick,” Cage said in a whispered shout, “she’s on the bed! Aaah! Aaah!”
“Mama!” Nick yelled, pushing himself up on his arms. “Granddad!” He jerked around to look but there was only darkness.
“She’s gone,” Cage said. “I thought she was going to kill me.”
Nick was panting, squeezing the sheets in his fists, his eyes wide, listening to the crickets outside in the night. The curtains billowed in a breeze and faint moonlight.
“Aunt Benda?”
“Yeah,” Cage whispered. “What’s that? Hear sompin?”
The floorboards squeaked on the staircase down the hall. Footsteps getting closer, the creaking louder. Someone was coming up the stairs.
“She’s coming back.” Cage pulled the covers over his head.
Nick couldn’t make himself move. His heart pounded louder, seemed to rise up in his throat as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs and came slowly down the hall. He started sobbing. He heard the knob turning and saw the door swing open. He thought God would protect him from the ghost but where was God now? He didn’t want to see Aunt Benda. He squeezed his eyes.
“You boys okay? One of you had a bad dream?”
Nick heard Granddad Cage’s voice and opened his eyes. The room was bright from the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Granddad walked toward the bed and stopped by the fireplace in front of a portrait of his father, a gray-haired man with a stern face in black old-timey clothes who seemed to look out at them from the world of ghosts, an unhappy place where Nick never wanted to go. “Poppy,” he said, leaping out of bed. “Cage saw Aunt Benda. Here in the room. She almost got him.”
His grandfather raised him off the ground and clutched him to his chest. His breathing slowed as he felt his grandfather’s hand smoothing his hair, smelled the reassuring fragrance of Old Spice. Granddad set him down and looked him in the eye. “Nick, Cage was just trying to scare you.” He pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of a pressed khaki shirt and wiped his tears. “I reckon there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“But you said you saw Aunt Benda,” Nick said.
“I was just having a little fun,” Granddad said. “Cage has taken this too far.”
Already in a T-shirt and shorts, Cage was putting on a pair of worn-out sneakers without socks. He looked up when his grandfather said his name. “Cage Malone, don’t you ever let me catch you scaring your little brother again. I’ll give you the first real hidin’ of your young life.”