Blood Ties (30 page)

“I never thought I hated him. I never had much to do with him. He's a short-tempered, self-righteous SOB.”

“And if I asked him, what would he say about you? What is it he thinks you are?”

I didn't say anything at all, and the silence sank in again, spread itself between us. A truck rumbled by on the street below, but that was far away. I didn't know if Scott had left or not. “I don't want to talk about it,” I said.

“In all the years I've known you, you've never talked about it,” she said. “Now I need to know.”

“Why? What the hell do you mean, you need to know?”

She walked through the room, ran water into the kettle, put it on the stove. I realized with a shock that I didn't want her to do that. I wanted her out, didn't want her staying, in my room, in my place; and this was the first time for that.

“In Chinatown, when I was a kid,” she said, “a boiler blew up in the basement of a building. Three people were killed and the building was so damaged they had to tear it down. The super blamed himself for the rest of his life.” She turned to look at me. “It had been acting strangely, steam leaks here and there, and he'd been repairing it now and then. But it turned out those were just small problems. He never saw the real one, and the pressure just kept building until it exploded.”

I stared at her, then shrugged out of my jacket, dropped it on the couch. “That analogy lacks your usual subtlety.” I drew a cigarette from the pack, threw the pack on the desk.

Lydia risked a smile. “Truth is a poor substitute for fiction.”

“And what are you, the super?”

The smile faded away. “I just don't want to wonder for the rest of my life if there was something I could have done.”

“You think I'm in danger of blowing up?”

She considered me. “I think you punched out that guy Barboni at Hamlin's yesterday when you didn't have to. I wasn't there when you fought with Al Macpherson, so I can't really say about that. But I'm watching you smoke more and drink more over the last two days than I've seen, and drive too fast, and I think you would have beaten your brother-in-law into pulp if I hadn't been here.”

“You don't think he deserved it?”

“He probably did. That's not the point. The point is, it isn't like you.”

“Isn't like me,” I said. “Maybe it is. Maybe you don't know.”

“I want to know.”

The kettle started to whistle. Lydia opened my cabinet, took out a tin of her tea. She reached for a mug, rooted around in a drawer and found the strainer.

I guessed that meant she was staying.

I moved around the counter into the kitchen myself. Lydia stepped aside so I could reach into one of the cabinets for a glass. I dropped in some ice, poured Maker's Mark, went and sat on the couch. That lasted five seconds. I stood, crossed the room, stared out the big front window. Scott was gone, but that wasn't why I was there.

In the glass of the window I saw Lydia's reflection as she sat. Generally, she liked the big chair, but if she chose that now her back would be to me. Because mine was already to her, she sat where I usually did, on the couch, her face turned toward me. Steam rose from her tea. She held the mug in both hands, as though she were cold. I was cold. I sipped from my bourbon; it did nothing to warm me.

“Until I was nine, we lived in Louisville,” I said. “With my father's folks. In the house where he was born.” I drew on my cigarette; Lydia didn't speak, and her reflection didn't move. “I remember my grandfather as a big, strong man who taught me to fish, had just started taking me hunting when we left. My grandmother taught me to play the piano. Louisville was a great place for a kid and Helen and I were both pretty happy.” I spoke quickly, trying to get past the images of the white house, the broad, shady porch, the black walnut tree waving its branches in the front yard.

“My grandfather had a temper,” I said, “mostly directed at my father. We didn't feel it too much, the kids. He was careful about that. My father had one, too, but we didn't really feel that either, because my grandfather kept my father on a short leash. His house, he said, his rules. Too short: Something had to give, and eventually my father got fed up and took us away. He was an army quartermaster, working out of Cincinnati. He was some sort of efficiency expert and the army wanted to send him around the world to teach whatever it was he did to quartermasters on other bases.”

I stopped, watched the traffic on the street below.

“What was it he did?” Lydia asked quietly.

“I don't know. It bored me and I never paid attention.” A station wagon, looking lost in place and time, drifted unsurely down the block. “My mother hadn't wanted the foreign postings because she thought it would be hard on Helen and me, but he finally just said the hell with it, we're going.” I had more to drink. “When we left, things started to get bad.”

I waited for Lydia to ask what that meant, but she didn't. The wait got long. It occurred to me it wasn't Lydia I was waiting for. “It seemed he'd always hit my mother,” I said. “Knocked her around. We didn't know that, Helen and I, but now we saw it. And now he started to hit us.”

Lydia said, “Your grandfather had been stopping him?”

“I don't think it was from altruism. I think we were the prizes in a contest: Who will the kids like better? Kindly sweet grandpa or grumpy old dad? I think he beat my father when he was a kid.”

“And now? . . .”

“And now dad was free to pound on us any time he wanted.” I drank more bourbon, felt nothing. “I was big even as a kid and in the years we were away I grew fast; by the time I was twelve I was bigger than my mother. Helen was seven when we left and anyway she's small, like my mother was. It wasn't all the time; it wasn't even all that often. But when he came home all pissed off about something he'd start in on the first person he saw. It was better if it was me.”

“You mean, he liked it better?”

“I mean, it was better for everyone.”

My cigarette had burned down to the filter. I looked at it, crushed it in the ashtray.

“We finally came back to the U.S. when I was fifteen because my mother couldn't take it anymore.”

“Couldn't take the beatings?”

I shook my head. “Me. I kept getting in trouble wherever we went, worse and worse. I was arrested in the Philippines, in jail overnight even though I was an army brat, and in Amsterdam after that. I was a punk. I was uncontrollable.”

“Because of your father?”

I shrugged. “My mother thought it would be better here. She told my father she was taking Helen and me and moving to New York, to Brooklyn, where she was from and where her brother lived.”

“Your uncle Dave.”

I nodded. “She said he could come or not but she was going. It was the only time, the only thing she ever did to stand up to him.”

“She never tried to get him to stop hitting you?”

“She said if we behaved better, Helen and I, it wouldn't happen. She said he never hit anybody, including her, who hadn't set him off. She was always so helpless, so goddamn helpless.”

Lydia waited; when I didn't go on she said, “You came to New York? . . .”

“We were here two months before he managed to resign his commission, but he stayed with the army as a civilian employee, a sort of consultant. He got himself posted out of Amsterdam to Fort Dix, close enough to Brooklyn to commute.” I looked at Lydia in the window glass, insubstantial, a pale outline in the dark. “It was good, those months. I liked my new school and I got to know Dave. He'd been down to visit us in Louisville a few times but my father never liked him so he didn't come often, and of course I hadn't seen him since we left. You know I'm named after him?”

“I thought you must be; I mean, I knew that was your real first name. But you don't use it.”

“That was the deal. My mother could name me after him, but they wouldn't use it. William was my grandfather's name. The one in Louisville, my father's father.”

I looked into the dark again. Lydia prompted, “And after your father came?”

“Then it was just like before.” I sipped at my bourbon. “The difference was, I had had a few months without him. And I was almost as big as he was by then. I started fighting back. I could never beat him, but I knew someday I would. I could feel it, coming closer.”

I looked into the glass at Lydia, caught her eyes. They seemed liquid, as bottomless as the night, and I looked away.

“One night Helen stayed out way past curfew. She was as wild as I was by then; we'd both realized it was pointless to try to be good. My father wanted to know where she was and didn't believe I didn't know. He beat the shit out of me.

“It wasn't any different from any other time. But in the middle of the night I woke up and found Helen sitting by my bed. She asked what had happened and I said, nothing in particular. She asked, Was it about her? More and more those days it was, but I told her no. She said it wouldn't be, anymore. She said she promised. I didn't know what that meant, but I was tired and hurting and all I wanted to do was sleep.”

I finished the bourbon. I crossed the room, got more ice and the bottle, all the time not looking at Lydia. She sipped her tea and didn't speak. It must be cold by now, her tea, I thought. I walked back to the window, talked to the night.

“I don't have very clear memories of the next few days. My father pulling me out of bed, pounding the hell out of me, screaming, ‘Where is she? Where is she?' My mother in the doorway, crying. An ambulance, I remember the siren. Dave leaning over me. I woke up in the hospital. Helen had run away, left a note saying she couldn't take living there anymore. My father thought I knew about it, the way he always thought. He cracked my skull. He almost killed me.”

I drank, went on. “I was there for weeks. He'd racked me up pretty bad, not just the fractured skull. Dave came every day. He told the hospital not to let my father up unless I wanted to see him. I didn't want to see him and I didn't want to see my mother, either. Dave tried to talk me out of that but I meant it, so she didn't come. They tried to find Helen, but she was gone.”

My head hurt now, maybe from the fight with Scott, though I couldn't remember him connecting.

“One day, sometime in that first week, I overheard a doctor who'd just examined me saying to a nurse that if I'd been some bum on the street and not the guy's son my father would be in jail by now. I thought about that all day, and when Dave came I asked him if it was true. He said, if the bum swore out a complaint there'd have been an investigation, and if they could prove who did it, the guy who was guilty would go to jail, yes. He was very careful, talking about it. I asked if I could swear out a complaint.

“In the end that's what happened. It was a little more complicated, because I was underage, and in those days this kind of thing was swept under the rug as much as possible. But I wouldn't give it up and eventually they arrested my father and charged him with assault.

“See, I was thinking that if my father went to jail, maybe Helen would come home.

“And maybe then it could be like it was those first few months in Brooklyn, when he wasn't there.”

I finished the bourbon, wondering when this stuff had stopped working for me. I stood at the window, silent so long that Lydia must have wondered if I was going to go on. But she said nothing, legs folded under her, empty mug on the table now.

“It backfired,” I said. “They held off the trial until I could testify. Dave had spent a lot of time talking it out with me, making sure I wanted to do this, and when he was sure, he and his cop buddies rounded up witnesses, my teachers and coaches and other kids at school, the paramedics who'd been on the ambulance, the doctors. Helen's teachers, too, from times I hadn't been home or hadn't been what my father wanted.

“It could have gone either way, especially if my father had seemed sorry, had said he was crazy with worry over Helen, something like that. He didn't. He wouldn't let his lawyer do any of that; he just told the court I was an arrogant son of a bitch, a delinquent and I'd always been one. He asked just what the hell he was supposed to do, a father with a son like me?

“The prosecutor put his witnesses on the stand, one by one, and last he called me. I didn't look at my father. Or at my mother. She sat behind him and held his hand. I told my story, answered the DA's questions and my father's lawyer's questions. I didn't remember afterwards anything anyone had asked me. Dave told me I'd done well.”

I put the glass and the bottle down, shoved my hands into my pockets. “He got three years.”

I don't know how long the silence was then, but finally Lydia spoke. “What do you mean then,” she asked softly, “that it backfired?”

“Helen,” I said. “Helen never came home. She knew what was happening. She was keeping in touch with some of her friends and they told her. One night, near the end of the trial, she called me. I was living at Dave's by then; I moved in with him right out of the hospital. Helen said I had to stop, I couldn't send my own father to jail. I told her he'd almost killed me and if he'd found her that night he might have killed her. She said still, it wasn't right. I said I had to do it and I wanted her to come home. She hung up. She was crying.”

I stopped, watched the darkness outside. Cars drove down the street, someone walked up the block. They meant nothing to me. That was it. That was as far as I could go. I thought, good, now Lydia knows, now she knows it all. Now she'll leave, get the hell out of here, leave me the hell alone. I stood where I was and waited for that.