Apologize, Apologize! (3 page)

“That’s one of his many phony excuses,” Pop said, examining his nails. “The reality is, Collie, your grandfather hates everyone. In my case, he holds me in particular contempt because I’m poor, I’m Catholic, and I refuse to mind my place. The worst crime you can commit in this life is being broke, and God help you if you don’t dress the part. Always dress well, Collie, it drives the Four Hundred mad.”

Ma laughed, a pealing sort of ringing bell sound I’d come to dread. “Please, Charlie, your personal vanities are nothing more than a symptom of moral vacuity. They are not any sort of challenge to established social order,” Ma said, opening the door to Pop’s elaborately endowed closet, bespoke suits of every color on irresistible display.

In Pop’s view, clothes absolutely made the man—the sight of a baseball cap and a sport jacket made him apoplectic. “The windbreaker crowd,” he’d mutter, erecting a bridge of contempt between himself and anyone in a sweatshirt. If Pop had been born a woman, he would have walked around the house fully accessorized, struggling down the laneway to pick up the mail in nylons and high heels.

He shot me a merry conspiratorial glance, inviting me to join in on the joke. I smiled nervously—if Ma was a seismic rumble with occasional release of acidic gases, then Pop was a full-scale volcanic eruption. Everything was funny to Pop until he lost his temper for reasons apparent only to him, and that’s when the sky opened up and the wind blew round him in brilliant shades of magenta, the world erupted and lava flowed in the streets, and everyone started running for their lives.

“Tell me again why we hate Granddad?” I asked.   

“It’s a sin to hate. We don’t hate anyone in this family,” Pop said, taking a serious tone.

“Oh, yes, we do!” Ma said, practically producing sparks as she pulled on her blue jeans beneath her nightgown. “We despise your grandfather because he represents all that’s wrong with this world. He cares for nothing and no one. He despises the poor and denigrates the helpless. He thinks that poverty is a character defect—all that matters to him is accumulating wealth and power and setting himself up as some sort of pasha to be worshipped and obeyed.”

I could feel the pulverizing effects of my mother’s personal radioactivity as she stared me down. I averted my gaze and pulled the blankets up around my chest.

“You can’t hide from me, Collie. I know that you like him.”

“No, I don’t,” I said defensively while Pop looked mildly embarrassed, as if some unpleasant family secret were about to be revealed.

“You can’t fool me,” Ma said, triumphant expression on her face, her voice crackling with bitterness. “You think he’s so wonderful, then why don’t you go live with him? I’ll pack your bags and put you out the door myself. I’m sick of your betrayals.”

It was a familiar threat. I glanced over at the corner of my parents’ room, days of clothing heaped high as a small mountain range, two little dogs curled up on its summit, Ma agonizing over the laundry—how to do it, when to do it, why do it at all—the way international think tanks dwell on questions of war and peace.

“It’s nice there, at Granddad’s house, I mean,” I said, finally daring to look at her. “It’s quiet. I like the way the sheets smell.”

“That figures,” Ma sneered. “You’re so typical, Collie. I can hardly believe you’re my son. You want everything tied together in a nice, neat little potpourri package. Well, the world is a filthy, stinking place. I’m so sorry if I don’t conform to your narrow idea of what a mother should be, cooking and cleaning and pressing your sheets and starching your shirt collars. Life is not a goddamn dance recital!”

“Well, it’s not a bunch of dirty socks, either,” I said as Ma’s face contorted into a fixed expression of silent rage. She stared at me. Ma was always giving me the stare, aiming her eyes at me like loaded weapons.

“Charlie,” she said finally, “are you going to allow him to speak to me that way?”

“Don’t talk back to your mother,” Pop said, not paying attention, his eyes drooping, fingers tapping out some tune on his bare chest that only he could hear.

“Get your suitcase, Collie, you’re going to your grandfather’s. Make it fast,” Ma ordered, bouncing from the bedroom without a backward glance and banging down the stairs, big dogs and little dogs, their nails clicking against the hardwood, bounding forward to greet her.

Ma was a total hypocrite when it came to her old man, offering me up to him on a regular basis in the same way that primitive tribes would try to ensure good times by feeding virgins into the village volcano to appease the local gods. I used to spend most school holidays at Cassowary and went there at least one or two weekends a month, and Ma was right, I did like it there. My dark secret—I guarded my love for Cassowary as if it were a cache of dirty magazines under my mattress.

My grandfather was a tall man and a long road, formal and austere, but when you’re surrounded on all sides by clashing cymbals and blowing horns, it’s nice to occasionally find yourself with an oboe. Cool, cavernous, and resonant as a concert hall, Cassowary was a place where I could sit in peace and listen to the music of my own thoughts, free from the aural warscape of home, where I used to sneak off and climb on the roof of the stable to try to obtain some relief.

I’d sit with my arms wrapped around my legs, my forehead pressed against my knees, ocean breeze skimming the top of my head, and I’d empty out my brain, pour out the contents in one smooth flush as effortlessly as if I were tipping over a basin of water. Not thinking can bring its own pleasures, but it could cost you your life if Ma suspected even for a second that your insides weren’t rumbling away like the neighboring Atlantic on a stormy day.

Cassowary presented its own difficulties, but at least they were peacetime challenges. And unlike Ma, who could go from love to hate to indifference before brushing her teeth in the morning, the Falcon was consistent in the ways he was impossible to get along with. Still, I suspected that he liked me, though perhaps not very much, liked me in a vague, unloving sort of way—for one thing, we both shared a deep and abiding devotion to Cassowary. It was a quiet bond between us that even he understood and welcomed.

Ma made it pretty clear that the only reason the Falcon took notice of me was to annoy her, while Pop figured he was out to manipulate and subdue the magnificent Flanagan spirit, “spattering paint on the
Mona Lisa,
” he called it. In their combined view, Bingo was a tiger, primeval and exotic, a beautiful savage hovering way beyond the Falcon’s corrupting influence, while I was a less glamorous, more pliable species—something that liked to dig, an armadillo, maybe, something that could be housebroken.

Uncle Tom had various theories as to why the Falcon demonstrated an interest in me; one had to do with his bird preoccupation.

“Let’s see: Life gave you wings, but you can’t fly. What kind of a bird is built for running?” He stared at me. “Did you know that the ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain? Hmmn . . . Your grandfather told me when you were born, he thought you had tiny eyes. Well, say, that’s not good. He had you pegged as an imbecile from the get-go.”

Who knows? I had enough trouble trying to understand my own crazy feelings, let alone achieve any real insight into what my grandfather thought. Why did the Falcon persist in involving himself with people who appeared to hold him in contempt? Maybe it was simply the desire for connection, the yearning for family, that drove him, and he couldn’t overcome the outlandish tics of personality that prevented him from achieving his explicit longings.

One thing is certain. It was easier for him to declare his intention to take over the world than it was for him to ask me to join him on his morning ride before breakfast, though he never enjoyed riding alone. 

And then there was Ma’s epic distaste for both of us that forged an unspoken, if creaky, alliance. Being mutually despised wasn’t much, but it was something, and it had the good effect of making me think that maybe Ma was the one with the problem.

No matter how anyone looked at it, I wasn’t exactly Ma’s cup of tea. Her distaste for me constituted a kind of psychic birthmark, a port wine stain that resisted fading. On the few occasions that she felt constrained to give me a hug, it was less a soft show of maternal tenderness and more a memorable lesson in force physics, like tripping and falling face-first onto an ice rink, her affection wounding as a cold, blunt object.

In the first hours and days after my birth, she tried to convince everyone that I was suffering from Down syndrome and needed to be institutionalized, pointing to my vaguely almond-shaped eyes as proof, the baffled doctors concluding she was suffering from a hormonal balance. Ma never would say die—all the time I was growing up, she continued to refer to the “Oriental cast” of my eyes as evidence there was something wrong with me.

Pop used to argue with her, armed with his own hyperbolic skill set: “Anais! The boy’s a genius. Look at his school marks! Right off the charts—and what about his language skills? He was only two years old and it was like talking to Sean O’Casey. If he’s an idiot, then he’s an idiot savant.”

“Well, you’ve got the idiot part right anyway,” said Uncle Tom, not bothering to look over at me but continuing to whisk a bowl of pancake batter.

Pop ignored him. “And let’s not forget he’s left-handed. Everyone knows that being left-handed denotes incipient genius.”

“Well, if that’s the case, then Princeton better start recruiting from the Arctic Circle,” Uncle Tom said. “Show me a polar bear that isn’t left-handed.”

As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to understand why Ma hated me, figuring the reasons were psychologically complex, mostly beyond my grasp, and maybe even a bit flattering. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized my greatest sin was that I looked like my grandfather.

Right from the start the resemblance was apparent, and it only increased over time. I was like a living portrait of the Falcon through the seven ages of man. Still am. Tall and narrow—Pop called us “the matchstick men” on account of our long limbs—I inherited the Falcon’s wide cheekbones (he could have passed for a Russian model), full lips (he could have passed for an Italian porn star), curly black hair (same again), mortician’s pallor, dark blue eyes, and permanently clenched jaw. Bingo took great pleasure in pointing out that I even inherited the Falcon’s girlish ankles.

The Falcon kept an Old English mastiff called Cromwell, his habitual companion. When one Cromwell died, he was immediately replaced with another, which he also named Cromwell. The Cromwells represented the only living creatures to which he showed affection, feeding each one a constant stream of shortbread cookies and carrying on long, complex conversations with them alone in the library when he thought no one was listening.

I once overheard him asking a Cromwell what time he’d like to eat, which seemed a very lonely question to ask a dog. I slipped away, not wanting to hear any more.

I was ten years old and staying with my grandfather for a weekend when one of the Cromwells died suddenly of a heart attack. I came down the long, winding stairs to the hallway, where he lay on the black-and-white floor tile surrounded by my grandfather and various members of the household staff.

When I realized what had happened, I quietly began to cry. My grandfather, in his indigo housecoat, silver hair falling over his forehead, turned sharply at the first sound of my sniffling.

“Oh, Lord,” he said. “I suppose this is what we have to look forward to for the rest of the visit.”

Feeling embarrassed and ashamed, I wiped my tears and watched as Cromwell the fifth or sixth, I’d lost track, was wrapped in a white cotton sheet by two of the housemaids and carried off by the cook and the groom to be buried on the grounds of the estate, a secret location only the Falcon knew.

Bingo and I spent many days looking to no avail for the Cromwells’ burial grounds. I suspected the Falcon paid frequent visits, but I never had the heart to follow him.

Even now I have no idea where the Cromwell collective lies buried, nor do I look any longer. Like my grandfather, it represents a mystery I’m content to leave unsolved.

Later that night, I awoke to the sound of pacing on the floor beneath me. I got up and crept partway down the stairs, stopping and concealing myself in the darkness in the curve of the banister railings. My grandfather was at the end of the hallway in front of his bedroom, pacing back and forth, back and forth, illuminated by the light from the moon as it shone through the windows in the landing. He was wearing his dressing gown and plain black slippers; he was rubbing his hands and crying.

I sat in the shadows for a long time, feeling almost paralyzed with the cold, my feet achingly exposed, until he went into his bedroom and shut the door. I waited for a moment, and then I did the same. It was my first indication that there was more to the Falcon than he was prepared to reveal to a ten-year-old boy. 

Two days later the new Cromwell arrived, a three-month-old British import, an identical fawn-colored match to all his predecessors.

The Falcon greeted him indifferently. The next morning, I saw him offer the new Cromwell a shortbread cookie, and as the puppy wagged his tail and took up his place alongside him in the library, the door closing behind them, shutting me out, I heard the Falcon ask his opinion about the condition of the walls.

“I’ve no interest in changing the color, but I think maybe the room needs a fresh coat of paint. What do you think, Cromwell?”

CHAPTER THREE

B
INGO DIED TWICE BEFORE HE WAS NINETEEN. THE FIRST TIME HE
was five years old, pale as the moon and small for his age, “no bigger than a beer bottle,” as Uncle Tom would say. Bing coughed when he laughed, he was always coughing, sand and grit in his voice, scratchy as Pop’s old record collection. It was spring 1969, the air blowing cold and dry. All it took was a sudden shift in temperature and Bing would be in trouble.

“Why didn’t you wake us?” my mother screamed at me, standing next to Bingo’s bed in her nightgown, teeth chattering uncontrollably, her body shaking so much that she was a blur, coming at me in waves of hysteria as I squinted against the sudden sharp injection of light.

Bingo, lying on his back, struggling to speak, reached out for Ma, but her focus for the moment was on me.

“For Christ’s sake, Anais, it’s not Collie’s fault,” Pop said, grabbing her by the shoulders. The words were hardly out of his mouth when she lashed out, wound up, and slapped his face.
Whack!
I marveled at her speed; there was no palpable distinction between cause and effect. 

He didn’t miss a beat, but shoved her against the dresser, her head wobbling like one of those dashboard ornaments. Way to go, Pop! She rebounded, took another swing at him, he ducked, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit her back, and I was right!

I was only six years old, I should have been horrified, but I was thrilled. Ma forever accused me of leaping to my feet, the mattress a trampoline, and clapping my hands in glee when Pop struck back.
Wham!
Right across the kisser, it was the joyous sound of a hundred angels getting their wings.

“It’s therapeutic! It’s therapy!” he shouted, trying to explain why he had my mother in a headlock. “It’s medicinal, Anais. I’m sorry, Collie, but your mother’s gone right off her nut!”

“Jesus, what’s all the fuss about?” Tom wandered in, wearing boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, his gray hair standing upright as quills, the familiar smell of booze trailing him like one of Ma’s wiener dogs. Eyes rheumy and face muscles slack, he was trying in vain to impersonate alertness. His eyebrows rode up his forehead like a couple of struggling elevators.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Ma wailed, throwing her head so far back that it was practically sitting on her shoulders. She’d broken away from Pop and stood in the middle of the room, seeming to generate her own spotlight, her legs spread apart and arms thrown skyward in a pose so dramatic, I felt convinced the hand of God was going to break through the ceiling like some sort of cosmic crane operator and spirit her off, Ma’s unbearable intensity finally propelling her into another dimension.

“Someone call an ambulance!” Pop hollered as if he were in the midst of a crowded dance floor.

“Daddy! Daddy, where are you? Help me. My baby! I want my father.” Ma just kept shrieking, her feet planted, arms pinned to her sides, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide as a cavern, calling for the Falcon, a scenario that had me, young as I was, completely flummoxed, since she was popularly known to hate his guts.

Tom, weirdly calm and self-involved, nudged me and bent over, whispering, “Oh, listen to that. The proof we’ve been wanting all this time. I told you, Noodle, the Female B is father-fixated. It’s love-hate—that’s what makes the world go round. What did I tell you?”

By now, Bingo was quietly smothering, making only the weakest croaking and squeaking sounds in a last-ditch effort to attract some meaningful attention.

“What about Bingo?” I asked finally, fully awake and mildly exhilarated, standing up in the middle of my bed. “Who’s going to save Bingo?”

I pointed over to his bed, where Bingo was lying on his back, still and staring, one hand resting on his chest, the other hand at his throat, the mechanical sound of his breathing whirring and clicking.

All three of them stopped and stared at me until Ma let out the biggest scream I’d ever heard.

“Jesus, she’s gone Crazy Horse on us!” Uncle Tom said in amazement, scratching his cheek, his fingers noisily scraping stubble.

Fortunately, I remembered that Ma’s cousin George was visiting. A mild, quiet-spoken veterinarian, he was as ordinary as a crew cut, but that night he was our only hope. Jumping to the floor and running from the room, I shouted his name as I ran along the hallway.

“Help! George, help!” I banged on his door, turned the knob, swung into the room, and flipped on the bedroom light.

“What the hell?” he said, instantly alarmed, popping up to a sitting position, squinting, hand at his forehead, struggling to understand what was happening.

“It’s Bingo. He can’t breathe. Help me. Please.” I dragged him by the hand, rushing him toward the room I shared with Bing.

“Good God!” he said, pushing through the dumbstruck audience of Ma and Pop and Uncle Tom, all of them looking down into the bed as Bingo, ribs shuddering, struggled for air, hissing and whistling like a steam kettle. 

I looked on expectantly. It was the first time I’d seen George without his black-rimmed glasses, and where once he’d seemed bland and concave, now he seemed positively inflated with dynamism—the only thing missing was the cape. He didn’t hesitate for a second, picked Bingo up, cradled him against his chest, and issued calm instructions. His voice was as steady as a piston. He said, “Let’s get him to the hospital for emergency treatment,” and clearing a swath, he headed outside—I sat back in my bed, stunned to encounter an adult capable of decisive action—Ma and Pop following behind him, shrieking orders at each other.

I watched from my window as they climbed into George’s car and took off, George holding Bingo close, Pop driving wildly, and Ma screaming into the night.

“Is Bingo going to die?” I asked Uncle Tom, who’d been rendered almost sober by the night’s events. He rolled his eyes in exasperation as he slid next to me on the bed.    

“I thought you were smart. That’s just about the dumbest question anyone has ever asked in the history of the world since the beginning of time. Now, if you’re so intelligent, spell ‘Mississippi.’ You can’t, can you?” he said, complaining all the while about having to sleep with me, even though it was his idea, not mine.

“At your age! Say, it’s nothing short of a national disgrace. When I was your age, I was the financial mainstay of the family, selling newspapers in the predawn hours on the corner of Newcastle and Abbey. How old are you, anyway?”

“I’m six,” I said.

“Six! I had no idea. I thought you were five. Six! Why, I was a corporal in the army by the time I was six and thriving on a steady diet of boiled Spanish onions and raw shrimp. So, what about it? Let’s hear you try to spell your mother’s middle name, Termagant.”

“T-e-r-m-a-g-a . . .”

Uncle Tom covered his eyes with his hands, pretending to beat on his forehead with clenched fists. “Haven’t I had enough to contend with tonight? I don’t have time for your nonsense. This is why no one with any sense likes children. They haven’t a thought for anyone but themselves. Mangle the English language on your own time for your teacher. At least she’s paid to pretend she’s interested. Good night and good riddance,” Uncle Tom said, gathering his pillow into a ball, shifting onto his side, his back in my face.

“Aren’t you going to get under the covers?” I asked him.

“And have you infect me with some intestinal parasite or ear mites? Your father picked up fleas from your mother on their honeymoon. . . .”

“He did not.” I giggled—the idea of my mother suffering from a plague of vermin had definite appeal.

Then I remembered. “T-e-r-m-a-g-a-n-t,” I spelled aloud, gazing at the back of his head, stubbornly finishing my assignment, though Uncle Tom pretended not to listen.

The spelling bee was a classic device Tom used to shut me up. But I was reading by the time I was four, and I was a pretty good speller, which frustrated him no end. Eventually, he resorted to making up words to stump me.

“Spell ‘auntiefrankensteinestablishmentitarianism,’” he said, his voice full of sarcasm.

He was prepared for me to get it right, which I often did.

“Wrong,” he said, carrying on with his housework, avoiding my eyes. “The first part is spelled ‘auntie,’ not ‘anti.’ Even the village idiot knows that.”

“It’s not a real word.”

“Oh yes, it is. I wouldn’t expect you to know with your limited intelligence and lack of sophistication.”

“What’s it mean, then?”

“It refers to the sweeping powers possessed by a catastrophically ugly female relative.”

“Use it in a sentence.”

“My sister, your maiden aunt Brigid Flanagan, is a classic example of the terrifying phenomenon known as auntiefrankensteinestablishmentitarianism, whereby children, at seeing her hideous visage, instantly turn into turnips. That’s why they’re known as turnips, by the by, just one more thing about which you’re abysmally ignorant.”

“Uncle Tom . . .” I crawled onto my knees and touched him on the shoulder. “Why can’t Bingo breathe?”

“I don’t know. Maybe someone like you put a pillow over his face. Now that I think of it, I don’t much like the malignant shape of your head, and you’ve got the shifty eyes of a murderer.”

“I do not,” I said, unaffected by Tom’s accusations, which were as regular as rain. All the time I was growing up and anytime there was a homicide anywhere in New England, he used to demand that I produce an alibi or he’d threaten to turn me in.

“Well, what about the incident with the boiling water last summer . . . the attempt on your brother’s life . . .”

I lay back down beside him, the back of my head flat against the pillow. “I never did that, Uncle Tom. . . .”

“So you say—that’s what they all say.”

“Uncle Tom, you know I didn’t do that.”

“Maybe I’m just covering for you so you don’t wind up in the penitentiary with all the other desperadoes. Now for heaven’s sake let me alone—and remember, I sleep with one eye open.”

I rolled away from Uncle Tom, putting distance between us, so far from him that my face was pressed against the wall, the plaster cool against the bare soles of my feet as they climbed up along the window frame.

“You’re not funny,” I said.

“All right, Noodle.” Uncle Tom lifted his head and looked over his shoulder in my direction. “I’m only teasing.”

I wasn’t talking. I didn’t want Uncle Tom to know I was crying.

Outside the window, an owl called.

“Parliament’s in session,” Uncle Tom said. I didn’t respond.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said suddenly. “Fine, have it your way. I’ll get under the covers.”

Soon he was snoring away, but I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid that Bingo would die and Ma would tell the police that I had killed him. It wouldn’t be the first time. Ma was having one of her famous political gatherings. It was a bright afternoon the previous year, in June, and Bingo and I were put in charge of the dogs. With everyone talking, gesturing, making points, conversation coming at us from all directions like pockets of small-arms fire, the dogs quickly got out of hand. Giving up on trying to control them, Bingo and I went into the kitchen, where Ma was making tea. I watched as she poured boiling water into several mugs, and then, interjecting loudly, she rushed to rejoin a gathering of three or four people at the end of the room.

I caught sight of one of the missing puppies and bent down to call him over, and at the same time I was looking around for something to eat, when there came this long gasp and a crack, something shattered and then quiet, then a little kid’s sharp scream, then a fulsome silence, all of it seeming to happen at once—and then all hell broke loose, and Bingo was crying in explosive spurts the uncontrollable way that he did when something was really wrong.

Steam rose from his bare arm, scalded a deep red color and soaked. The skin seemed to melt and then bubble up into a transparent bag that filled with fluid. One of Ma’s guests was a doctor, who took a quick look and volunteered to go with her to the hospital since Pop was officially nowhere to be found.

Ma gathered up her stuff and was so unhinged that she was filling up her arms with crazy things,
The New York Times
, a loaf of bread, a tea towel, until she spotted me over by the window seat, and then she was all focus as she swooped down, grabbed me by the shoulders, and shouted in my face.

“What did you do? What did you do?”

“Nothing. I did nothing,” I said, shrinking into the corner, the hushed murmuring of all those strangers hovering like smoke, settling in like guilt.

“You poured that boiling water on your little brother, didn’t you? He couldn’t have reached it on his own. What did you do?” She shook me so hard that I couldn’t answer.

Uncle Tom appeared and started arguing with Ma.

“Say, you let him alone. I saw the whole thing from the doorway. Bingo climbed up on the stool, and before I could stop him he reached up and pulled the cup off the counter. He lost his balance. Collie wasn’t anywhere near him.”

“No . . .” Ma spat out her words and releasing her grip on me stood up straight as Bingo wailed in the background. “Impossible. You’re lying, sticking up for him when he doesn’t deserve it. I set those cups back far enough from the edge of the counter so nothing like that could have happened. If that’s what you saw, then Collie deliberately moved them.”

“I suppose he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, too,” Uncle Tom said. “You’ve got a screw loose, lady. You should be ashamed of yourself, accusing Collie to cover up your own carelessness.” 

“For God’s sake, I haven’t time to fight with you, Tom Flanagan,” Ma said, pausing once again to bend down, her face next to mine, so close that her hair fell against my cheek. I can still smell the woodsy fragrance of her shampoo.

“This isn’t over. I’ll never forgive you for what you did today to your little brother. Never!”

She told everyone at the hospital what I’d done, and someone, a man in a suit, came to speak to me and Bingo—Ma told me it was the police and to expect a long sentence—and I never knew the outcome of his visit. I was too scared to ask. When I didn’t go to jail, I figured it was an oversight.