The Burgess Boys (26 page)

“Eighth grade,” Zach answered. “You and Dad let me go to that party at the Tafts one night. Everyone was drinking like mad. Out in the woods. I thought whiskey was like beer or something, and I just drank it down. And then I puked.”

“Oh, honey,” said Susan. She reached across the table and rubbed her son’s hand.

Zachary looked at his glass. “Each time one of those photographers clicked his camera I felt like I’d been shot. I mean with a bullet. Click. I hated it. It’s why I spilled the water.” He looked at Bob. “Did I screw up real bad?”

“You did not screw up,” Bob said. “The woman was a pinhead. It’s over. Forget it. It’s done.”

The sun was low now, and it sent a pale blade of light through the kitchen window that fell briefly across the table, then the floor. It was not bad, sitting there with his sister and nephew, drinking wine.

“So, Uncle Bob, do you, like, have a crush on that woman minister or something?”

“A crush?”

“Yeah. ’Cause it kind of seems like you do.” Zach raised his eyebrows in a questioning expression. “I don’t know if old people get crushes or not.”

“Well, they do. Do I have one on Margaret Estaver? No.”

“You’re lying.” Zachary suddenly grinned at him. “Never mind.” He drank more wine. “I just wanted to come home. The whole time I was in there I kept thinking, I want to go home.”

“Well, now you’re home,” Susan said.

4

There were Saturday evenings, like this one, when Pam, with her congenial husband, stepped off an elevator into the foyer of an apartment where globes of yellow light and fabulous shadows played throughout the rooms beyond, when leaning to kiss the cheeks of people she barely knew, taking a glass of champagne from a tray held forward, stepping farther and seeing the paintings lit upon walls of dark olive or deep red, a long table set with crystal, and turning to look down upon an avenue that stretched triumphantly right to the horizon, a jubilance of red tail-lights merging as they moved away, then turning back to the women wearing their silver and gold necklaces down the fronts of their black dresses, standing in their wonderful well-fitting shoes—Pam would think, as she did now, This is what I wanted.

What she meant, exactly, she could not have said. It was simply a truth that clamped down on her with gentle snugness, and gone, gone, gone were those needling thoughts that she was living the wrong life. She was calm with a completeness that seemed almost transcendent, this moment that spread before her with the assuredness of itself. Certainly nothing in her past—the long bike rides on the farm roads of her childhood, the hours spent in the cozy local library, the creaking-floored dormitory in Orono, the tiny home of the Burgess family, not even the excitement of Shirley Falls that had seemed the start of adult life, or the apartment she had shared with Bob in Greenwich Village, though she had liked that apartment very much, the noise on the streets at all hours, the comedy clubs and jazz clubs they had gone to—nothing had indicated to her that she would want this and get this, right here, this particular kind of loveliness so gracefully and astonishingly taken for granted by the people who spoke to her with nodding heads. The host was saying that he and his wife had bought the bowl in Vietnam, eight years ago. “Oh, did you love it?” Pam asked. “Did you love Vietnam?”

“Oh, we did,” said the wife, stepping closer to Pam, and including those around her as she swept them with her gaze. “We did love it. We loved it to death. And honestly, I’d been the one who hadn’t wanted to go.”

“It wasn’t, you know, creepy?” Pam had met, a few times, the woman asking this question. She was married to a famous newsman, and her Southern accent, Pam had noted before, increased as she drank. Her clothes—as was the case tonight, she wore a high-collared white buttoned blouse—were not stylish, but rather seemed worn in order to retain the ladylike Southern primness and good manners instilled in her years ago. Pam felt a tenderness toward her, at the recalcitrance she displayed in moving away from her buttoned-up past.

“Oh, no, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful country,” the hostess said. “You’d never know—well, you know. You just wouldn’t know those awful things went on there.”

Moving into the dining room, escorted to her seat—far away from her husband because the rules required mixing (she wiggled her fingers to him from across the long table)—Pam suddenly remembered that it was Jim Burgess who had said to her years ago, when she and Bobby first spoke of moving here, “New York will kill you, Pam.” She had never forgiven Jim for that. He had failed to see her appetite, her adaptability, her desire—perpetual—for change. New York had been very different back then, of course, and of course she and Bob did not have much money. But Pam’s determination was almost always stronger than her disappointments, and even when that first apartment, so tiny that they had to wash the dishes in the bathtub, had lost its initial charm, and the subways were really frightening, Pam had still ridden them; the screeching of them as they pulled into their stations she had taken in stride.

The man next to her said that his name was Dick. “Dick,” Pam said, and immediately thought it sounded as though she had implied something. “How nice to meet you,” she said. He nodded once, with exaggerated politeness, and asked how she was. Pam was—in fact—on her way to being drunk. Because she did not eat as she used to, because she was getting older, which affected metabolism, she could no longer drink as much as she once had. Her desire to explain this to Dick made her understand that she was on her way to being drunk, perhaps already there, and so she merely smiled at him. He asked her, politely, and this time without the camouflage of exaggeration, if she worked outside the home, and she explained about her part-time job, and how she used to work in a lab, and that perhaps she didn’t seem like a scientist, people had said that to her, that she didn’t seem like a scientist, whatever that meant, and she thought if she didn’t seem like a scientist it’s because she was
not
a scientist, but she had been an
assistant
to a scientist, to a parasitologist—

Dick was a psychiatrist. He gave a pleasant raise of his eyebrows and placed his napkin into his lap. “Hey, by all means,” Pam said. “Let it rip. Analyze me all you want. Doesn’t bother me a bit.”

She waved again at her husband, who was sitting down toward the end of the long table next to the what’s-her-name woman from the South in her white buttoned-up blouse, while Dick was saying he didn’t analyze people per se, but rather their desires. He was a consultant to marketing firms. “Really?” Pam asked. Another night this might have caused Pam to suddenly lurch toward that dreadful thought: I am living the wrong life. Another night she might have asked this Dick if he had taken the Hippocratic Oath, she might have asked pointedly if he was using his skills as a physician to help people
consume
, but the evening was a lovely one, and she thought certain aspects could just stay away, as though there were only so many times her cells could rise up in outrage and this would not be one of them; she didn’t, she realized, care at all what Dick did for a career, and when he turned to speak to the person on his other side, Pam looked around the table and imagined the sex lives (or not) of some of these people. She thought she captured the surreptitious glance given from one jowly man to a thick-waisted woman who returned to him a steady private gaze, and she found it thrilling that no matter what people looked like they still had a desire to undress and cling to each other—the pull of biology that had long outworn its use, for these women were past the time of childbearing.… Yes, Pam, halfway through her slippery salad, had already drunk too much.

“Wait, what?” she said, putting her fork down, because someone farther down the table had said something about a pig’s head going through a mosque in a small Maine town.

The person, a man Pam had not met before, repeated this to her. “Yes, I heard about that,” Pam said. She picked up her fork; she would not claim Zachary. But the back of her scalp flared in warmth as though she were in danger.

“A fairly aggressive thing to do,” the man said. “They had a civil rights hearing, there was a piece in the paper.”

“I went to camp in Maine,” Dick said, and his voice felt too close, as though he was speaking right into her ear.

“They had a civil rights hearing?” Pam asked. “Was he found guilty?”

“He was, yes.”

“What does that mean?” Pam asked. “Is he going to jail?” She remembered how Bob said Zach was crying alone in his room. Anxiety flashed through her: Bob had not come to her Christmas party. “What month is this?” she asked.

The hostess laughed. “I get like that too, Pamela. Sometimes I can’t even remember the
year
. It’s February.”

“He only goes to jail if he violates the sanctions,” the man said. “Essentially the sanctions are just to stay away from the mosque and not trouble the Somali community. It seemed to me the state was choosing to send a message.”

“Maine’s a funny place,” someone else mused. “You never know which way it’s going.”

“Look,” said the thick-waisted woman who had gazed steadily at the jowly man. The woman wiped her mouth carefully with her large white napkin, and people had to wait politely to see what she would say. She said, “I agree it was an aggressive act on the part of the young man. But the country is scared.” She put both fists down quietly on the table and looked one way, then the other. “Just this morning I was walking along the river by Gracie Mansion and there were New York City helicopters and patrol boats circling and I thought, Dear God, I suppose any minute we could be hit again.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” someone said.

“Of course it is. The best thing to do is forget about it and live your life.” A man sitting down by the Southern what’s-her-name said this with a tone of disgust.

“How people react to a crisis has always fascinated me,” Dick said.

But Pam was pulled away now from the foolish splendor of the evening; the dark presence of Zachary—oh, Zachary, so skinny and dark-eyed, such a sad sweet child he had been!—his presence had come into the room, unfelt by all but her, of course; she was his
aunt
. And she sat there denying him. Her husband would say nothing, she knew this; a glance in his direction showed him to be chatting to his seatmate. She was alone among these people, and the Burgess family expanded before her. “Oh,” she almost said out loud, remembering going up to visit Zach when he was newly born, the oddest-looking baby she’d ever seen. And poor Susan, a quiet wreck—he wouldn’t nurse, or something. Pam and Bobby had stopped visiting so much after a while, it was just too depressing, Pam said, and even Bobby agreed. Helen really agreed. Pam watched her salad plate get taken away, replaced by a dish of mushroom risotto. “Thank you,” she said, for she always thanked servers. Years back, when she had first entered this life through her new marriage, she had arrived at a party like this one and shaken the hand of the man who opened the door. “I’m Pam Carlson,” she said, and he looked faintly put out with her, and asked if he could take her coat. That was the butler, her friend Janice said. Pam had told Bobby about that. He’d been wonderful, of course, his halfhearted shrug.

“I’m reading an amazing book by a Somali woman,” someone was saying now, and Pam said, “Hey, I’d like to read it.” To hear her own voice helped push Zachary’s presence from her. But oh, here came the sadness—she placed her hand over her wineglass to refuse more wine—her previous life, twenty years with the Burgess family, you couldn’t live a life for such a long time and think it would just disappear! (She had thought you could.) It wasn’t just Zach, it was Bob, his kind and open face, the blue eyes, the deep smile lines that sprang around them. Until the day she died, Bob would be her home—and how awful, she had not known! She did not turn to look at her current husband now, it would not matter if she looked at him or not, at such moments as this one he was not really any more familiar to her than anyone else in this room, all slipping away from her with the ease of vast indifference, because they were hardly real and meant almost nothing to her at all, there was only the deep metallic magnet of the presence of Zachary and Bob—and Jim and Helen, all of them. The Burgess boys, the Burgesses! Her mind filled with the image of little Zachary at Sturbridge Village, his cousins calling to him to come do this, come do that, and the poor little dark-haired creature looking like he just didn’t know how to have fun, and Pam had wondered that day if he was autistic, although apparently they’d had him tested for everything, Pam, already knowing that day in Sturbridge that she would leave Bob, though he did not know and he held her hand as they walked the kids to the snack bar, it made her heart ache horribly to recall— She turned her head. From down at the end of the table the man who had been contemptuous about the threat of terror was saying, “I’m not going to vote for a woman president. The country’s not ready for that, and I’m not ready for that.”

And the Southern what’s-her-name woman, her face bright red, said suddenly and amazingly, “Well, then fuck yew, just fuck yew!” She banged her fork down on her plate, and a fabulous silence fell over the room.

In the taxi, Pam said, “Oh, wasn’t that
fun
?” She would call her friend Janice first thing in the morning. “Do you think her husband was embarrassed? Who cares, it was wonderful!” She clapped her hands and added, “Bob didn’t come to our Christmas party this year, I wonder what’s up with that.” But she no longer felt sadness about it, the pressure of sorrow that had overtaken her at the table, the longing for all the Burgess kids, and the sense of the irreplaceable familiarity of her old life—that had passed the way a cramping of a stomach muscle passes, and the absence of its pain was glorious. Pam looked out the window and held her husband’s hand.