The Burgess Boys (36 page)

And there was more.

“It will be in the papers,” Adriana said calmly.

“We can try and keep that from happening.”

“Probably it will happen. You’re too big, too famous, this law firm.”

“Are you ready to have this in the papers?” he asked. “We have to do what’s right, and you may be correct, it may get into the papers, which means you, things about you, will be in the papers. You’re ready for that?”

She looked down at her high heels, her legs stretched out before her. She wore no stockings, he saw. It would be too hot, of course. But her legs were perfect, without veins or splotches, just smooth shins neither tanned nor too white. Her high heels were brown and toeless. He felt nauseated.

“Have you spoken about this to anyone? Gone to a lawyer?” He touched his mouth with the paper napkin that had come with his water.

“Not yet. I wrote the complaint myself.”

Alan nodded. “May I ask you to hold off for one more day before mentioning this to anyone? You and I will talk tomorrow.”

She sipped from her bottle of water. “Okay,” she said.

Jim and Helen were staying at the condo they rented in Montauk. Alan called Dorothy, then he called Jim, then he went to Penn Station and took a train out to Montauk. When he stepped out onto the platform, Jim was there to meet him, and the air was briny and they drove to the beach, where the waves came in lazily and without stopping.

“Go,” said Rhoda, waving her hand from where she sat on the couch. “Your famous brother can’t be bothered to return your call? Go out there and show up at his door.”

For years, during his marriage, Bob and Pam had joined Jim and Helen for a week at their place in Montauk each summer. Pam riding a boogie board, shrieking with laughter, Helen lathering her kids with lotion, Jim running three miles down the beach, expecting praise when he got back, and getting it, then jumping into the waves.… After Pam left, Bob continued his visits there, going deep-sea fishing with Jim and Larry (poor Larry, always so seasick), then sitting on the balcony in the evening with his drink. Those summer days were a constant in a world that was inconstant. The wide ocean and sand were very different from the Maine coastline, harshly rocked and seaweed-laden, where their grandmother had taken them, potato chips warm from the car ride, the thermos of ice water, the dry peanut butter sandwiches; in Montauk, pleasure was embraced. “Look at the Burgess boys,” Helen would say, bringing out a tray of cheese and crackers and cold shrimp. “Free, free, free at last.”

Now, for the first time, Jim had not called, or Helen, with the usual checking of dates. “Go, and meet a nice girl,” Rhoda said.

“Rhoda’s right,” Murray counseled from his chair. “New York’s terrible in the summer. All the old people sitting on benches in the park. They look like melting candles. The sidewalks smell like garbage.”

“I like it here,” said Bob.

“Of course you do.” Murray nodded. “In all of New York City, you are living on the best floor.”

“Go,” Rhoda said again. “He’s your brother. Bring me back a shell.”

Bob left messages on Jim’s phone. Also Helen’s. He heard from neither of them. The last time Bob said, “Come on, call. I don’t even know if you’re alive.” But of course they were alive. He’d have heard from someone if they were not. And so he understood that after years of opening their home and family to him, he was no longer wanted.

A few times he went with friends to the Berkshires, once to Cape Cod. But his heart was contracted with sorrow, and it took effort to have it not show. The last day he was on the Cape he saw Jim, and his whole body seemed to tingle with the suddenness of happiness. The chiseled features, the mirrored sunglasses: In front of the post office, there he was, his arms crossed, reading a sign painted on a restaurant.
Hey!
, Bob almost yelped, happiness flying from him, before the man uncrossed his arms, wiped his face—and it was not Jim at all, but a muscular man with a tattoo of a serpent crawling up his calf.

When he did see his brother, he passed him without knowing it at first. This was in front of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. Bob was to meet a woman for lunch, a blind date set up by a friend; she worked at the library. The day was very hot, and Bob squinted behind his sunglasses. He would have missed Jim altogether if not for the lingering image in his mind’s eye that the man he had just passed, wearing a baseball hat and mirrored sunglasses, had looked away with furtiveness. Bob turned and called, “Jim!” The man walked faster, and Bob ran to catch up, pedestrians moving aside. Shrunken-looking inside his suit jacket, Jim said nothing. He stood motionless, his face beneath the baseball cap still except for a twitching of his jaw.

“Jimmy—” Bob faltered. “Jimmy, are you sick?” He took his own sunglasses off, but could not see his brother’s eyes behind his mirrored lenses. The chiseled aspect of Jim’s face became prominent only when he lifted his chin, Jimlike, with defiance.

“No. I’m not.”

“What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

Jim looked toward the sky, and then behind him, and then toward Bob again. “I was trying to have a nice time in Montauk this year. With my wife.” In recalling this moment over the next months, Bob thought that his brother had not looked at him once; the conversation that followed was short and Bob would not be able to recall any of it except for the pleadingness of his own voice, and then the final lines delivered by Jim, whose lips were thin and almost blue, his words slow, deliberate, not loud. “Bob, I have to be really straight here. You have always made me crazy. I’m tired of you, Bob. I am so fucking tired of you. Of your Bobness. I am so— Bob, I just want you gone. Jesus, please go.”

In that remarkable way people sometimes have, Bob was able to step into a coffee shop away from the noise of the street and call the woman he was to have lunch with. He spoke calmly, politely: Something had suddenly come up at work, he was terribly sorry, he would call later to reschedule.

After that he wandered the hot streets blindly, his shirt soaked through with sweat, stopping sometimes to sit on a step, smoking, smoking, smoking.

7

By the middle of August, in spite of the heat, the tops of a few maple trees had already turned orange. One could be seen across the street from where Susan and Mrs. Drinkwater were sitting in lawn chairs on the back porch. There was no breeze, and a faint mulchy smell of earth hung in the humid air. The old lady had rolled her stockings down to her ankles, and she sat with her skinny pale legs slightly apart, her dress hitched up past her knees. “Funny how when you’re a kid, the heat doesn’t seem to bother a bit.” Mrs. Drinkwater fanned herself with a magazine.

Susan said that was true, and sipped from her glass of iced tea. Since her trip to New York—since finding out Zachary’s charges were filed—Susan had spoken to her son once a week on the telephone. Each time there was the same afterglow of happiness at the sound of his deep, full voice, and then a seizing sadness set in. It was over—the frantic worry after his arrest, the buildup to the demonstration (it seemed so long ago), the catastrophic thought that Zach might go to prison—it was over. Her mind could not get hold of this. She said, picking up the water-beaded glass by her feet, “Zach’s working in a hospital. Volunteering.”

“My word.” Mrs. Drinkwater pushed up her eyeglasses with the back of her hand.

“Not bedpans. He’s stocking storage closets with bandages, things like that. I guess.”

“But he’s with people.”

“He is.”

From down the street came the sound of a lawn mower starting up. When the sound diminished, as if the mower had gone behind a house, Susan added, “I spoke with Steve today for the first time in years. I told him I was sorry about all the ways I’d been a bad wife. He was awful nice.” As she feared would happen, a tear sprang to her eye, slipped out. She wiped it with her wrist.

“That’s wonderful, dear. That he was nice.” Mrs. Drinkwater removed her glasses and cleaned them with a tissue. “Regrets are no fun. Not at all.”

The release of the tear loosened Susan’s sadness, and she said, “But
you
can’t have regrets about being a bad wife? Sounds to me like you were the perfect wife. You gave up your family for him.”

Mrs. Drinkwater nodded just slightly. “Regrets about my girls. I was a good wife. I think I loved Carl more than my girls and I don’t think that’s natural. I think they felt lonely. Angry.” The old lady slipped her glasses back on and was silent for a while, gazing toward the grass. She said, “It’s not uncommon, dear, to have one child turn out with difficulties. But to have
two
children turn out that way.”

From the shady soil beneath the Norway maple, the dog whimpered in a dream. Her tail thumped once and then she slept peacefully again.

Susan held her cool glass against her neck for a moment. She said, “The Somalians think you should have a dozen children. That’s what I heard. They feel sorry for you if you only have two kids.” She added, “So having just one must be bizarre, like giving birth to a goat.”

“I always thought the point of the Catholic Church was to keep turning out little Catholics. Maybe the Somalians want to keep turning out Somalians.” Mrs. Drinkwater turned her huge glasses toward Susan. “But neither of my girls had children, and it makes me feel very bad.” She cupped her hand to her cheek. “Both of them not wanting to be a mother. My word.”

Susan gazed down at the toe of her sneaker. She still wore the flat simple sneakers of her youth. She said kindly, “I think there is no perfect way to live,” glancing up at the old lady. “If they don’t have children, they don’t have children.”

“No,” Mrs. Drinkwater agreed, “there’s no perfect way to live.”

Susan said, musingly, “When I was in New York, it went through my mind, maybe this is how the Somalians feel. I’m sure it’s not, well, maybe a little. But coming here where everything’s completely confusing. I didn’t know how to use a subway, and everyone was rushing past, because
they
knew. All the things people take for granted, because they’re used to it. I felt confused every minute. It wasn’t nice, I’ll tell you.”

Mrs. Drinkwater cocked her head, birdlike.

“My brothers seemed the strangest of all,” Susan added. “Maybe when Somalian family members make it over here, the family that’s been here awhile—maybe they seem strange too.” Susan scratched her ankle. “It’s just something I thought.”

Steve had said he was more to blame than she was. You’re a decent, hardworking person, he’d said. Zach is crazy about you.

Mrs. Drinkwater said, “I wish things never changed from the old days.” She looked at Susan. “I just had a memory of Peck’s.”

“Tell me the memory of Peck’s.” Susan sipped from her glass of iced tea, not listening. She had seldom gone into Peck’s. The boys got their school clothes there, but her own clothes were made by her mother. Susan, standing on a chair in the kitchen for the hem to be done. “Stand
still
,” her mother would say. “For
God’s
sake.”