Elegies for the Brokenhearted

“In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not
Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr
, but
my fellow sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de misères
. This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Elegy for
Mike Beaudry

Elegy for
Elwood LePoer

Elegy for
Carson Washington

Elegy for
James Butler

Elegy for
Margaret Murphy Collins Francis Adams Witherspoon

Acknowledgments

(1952–1989)

E
very family had one and you were ours: the chump, the slouch, the drunk, the bum, the forever-newly-employed (garbageman, fry cook, orderly, delivery truck driver) and the forever-newly-unemployed (
I didn't need that shit,
you'd say), the chain-smoking fuckup with the muscle car, an acorn-brown 442 Cutlass Supreme named Michelle, the love of your life (
Let's see what this baby can do,
you'd say, all six of us cousins piled in the back, and how we screamed when you rolled down the windows and
put Michelle's pedal to the metal
on Route 20, how we flew past those strip joints, those 24-hour diners, those squalid motels and scrap metal yards, behind which, in a sunken valley, our neighborhood of two-bedroom cinderblock houses sulked and cowered), the bachelor uncle with the bloodshot eyes and five-day beard come late to holiday dinners, rumpled shirt and jeans, breath like gasoline—Michael Timothy Beaudry, for a time you were ours.

The seventies: Nixon and Carter, culture and counterculture, two roads diverged in a wood. You were twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty, and all that time it always seemed you were fresh out of boyhood, it seemed your proper life—as a schoolteacher or a fireman, as a husband and father, as an upstanding, tax-paying citizen—would begin directly. Although, what was the point? You had a bad heart, a weak valve that threatened to kill you at any moment, as it had your mother when you were only three. Off-limits to you was a host of activities (including, conveniently, service in the armed forces) and you made a sport of engaging in them in front of your sisters. With their hands on their hips they watched you chase us around the backyard, toss us high in the air and catch us, watched you play football with their husbands and boyfriends, watched you drink and smoke and smoke and drink. All that was wrong with you they blamed on your heart. Your drinking, your drugs, your debts and your gambling, your sleeping around (the way you'd take a girl out for a week or so, fuck her in Michelle's backseat and then break her heart…You'd get yours, though, your sisters always told you, one of these days a girl would get to you and the grief of losing her would kill you, just you wait, they said, those three long-haired witches, those bitches, and how they were right), the way you could never keep an apartment for long, how you always came knocking at ungodly hours, standing on the front steps with your whole life stuffed in a duffel bag, how you went in an endless circle between Lily, Ellen, Margaret, from couch to couch to couch—all of this they blamed on that weak valve. “His heart, his heart, his heart!” they said, meaning much more than that, meaning you might have been better in ten thousand ways, meaning, if only.

In later years, though, after you'd left home for good without word of your whereabouts, your sisters spent their holidays sitting on those Mike-grooved couches, eating their slices of pie, drinking their coffee, smoking their Virginia Slims, reading aloud to each other their horoscopes from the newspaper just as they had done every night at the dinner table as kids—Pisces, Aries, Cancer, and then, for the hell of it, your Capricorn (
TODAY YOU MAY WANT TO TAKE SOME TIME AWAY FROM YOUR BUSY WORK SCHEDULE TO SPEND WITH YOUR FAMILY
!)—in later years on every one of those dreary holiday afternoons they sat turning you over in their minds, they craned their heads toward the window whenever a car passed, and they decided they weren't quite sure it was your heart, after all, that had ruined you, decided you would have turned out the same regardless, in those days they often said: “It's not like there's blood between us.”

 

W
hat was blood? Your father, Michael Beaudry Sr., widower, had married my grandmother, Virginia Mayhew née Beauvier, a widow with three girls, husband dead of cancer, and everyone had simply become, on legal documents and in restaurants, “the Beaudrys, party of six.” After that awkward first year—silence in the car, silence at the dinner table—things changed and it was difficult to remember what life had been like before. You became family. Your room simply became “Michael's room,” not “the room Michael stole from Lily when his father married our mother, and now we have to sleep three in a room while he, a prince, has a room to himself.” Soon enough you were a typical brother, someone who ate more than his fair share of the mashed potatoes, someone who was allowed to wander around downtown afternoons unsupervised, someone who did not have to come home and put supper on, someone whose occasional chores (raking, putting out the trash) were a far cry from the day-in, day-out bitch of keeping up the household. Like any brother you were not regarded by your sisters as an official member of the opposite sex. They did not care if you saw them with their hair in curlers, with toothpaste dabbed on their pimples. They did not care if you listened to their conversations about Dave Duncan and Jess Landry and Mike Murphy, the boys they loved. You were subjected to the kinds of abuse and bribery carried out exclusively on brothers. In the afternoons your sisters stole your record player and installed it in their bedroom, took your favorite singers (how you loved to sing! James Brown, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones) off the turntable and replaced them with Elvis, Bobby Darin, Doris Day. In the evenings when you opened your bedroom window to smoke a cigarette they ratted you out—Mom! Michael's smoking again!—or came barging into your room demanding to be given a cigarette, too.

This had been my mother's tact. She was your age. You were the babies of the family, born two months apart, in the same grade at school and in many of the same classes. You copied her homework, slightly altered the wording of her book reports and turned them in as your own. She borrowed money from you (Saturday mornings you worked at a butcher shop, packing) but failed to return it. In your bedroom, the two of you stood shoulder to shoulder, blowing smoke out the window into the frigid New England air. Your window looked out on a high hill, atop which sat the state's mental hospital, a neo-Gothic castle, teeming with turrets and crockets, with a spooky clock tower at its center whose tolling woke you hourly from sleep, and you waited, you and my mother, to be freed, just like the madmen you imagined were staring back at you, you waited and waited and spoke of nothing but escape. My mother thought of California, you of New York. The minute you graduated high school you would be gone. A duffel bag, a bus, a highway.
Gone.
The two of you standing there surveying that dark neighborhood of narrow, close-built houses, the two of you standing there talking of escape, your breath fogging and mingling, the two of you standing there hatching plans that would fail and fail and fail—wasn't this blood?

You were an uncle to us—each of your sisters with two kids apiece, all girls. You were well-schooled in the standard avuncular maneuvers: the tickling of ribs, the artful belch, the plucking of noses from faces, the revolting turning inside-out of eyelids. Every Labor Day you drove us up to Hampton Beach and swung us around in the surf (
washing machine,
you called it), bought us ice cream and T-shirts (oh, the smell of that shop, those iron-on transfers, plastic melting onto cotton). You had the most T-shirts of anyone I ever knew, shirts featuring the faces of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, one featuring Mick Jagger's lascivious tongue. Over the years all of those shirts grew leprous, peeled away until it was no longer possible to tell what they had once been, unless you had known from the start, unless you had been there to see things fall apart little by little, day by day, unless you were family.

Once, because someone must have thought such things made for happy childhoods, you dressed as Santa on Christmas Eve. Which house was it that year? All those houses and apartments, all those divorces and foreclosures and second marriages, all those exes and steps, I can't remember. In any case you made an entrance, kicked open the front door:
Ho, ho!
you said, and you stood for a moment shaking your belly like a goddamned bowlful of jelly.
Sorry to use the door but the chimney was on the fritz!
You spoke in the booming sneer of W. C. Fields. This was how you imagined Santa would talk, a man beleaguered by his duties, a man sick-up-to-here with kids and with no refuge but sarcasm.

Someone, one of my aunt's husbands or boyfriends, asked you, “How's it going, Santa?” and what Santa said, what you said, was:
I'm fucking busy and vice versa.

After a few beers you settled on the couch, pulled each one of us onto your knee.
Tell Santa what you want,
you said. You were a poor choice for the role, young and trim, drunk and stoned, and we were not fooled. Your black hair curled out from underneath your cap, your suit was too short in the sleeve and leg, the muddied cuffs of your jeans stuck out. Your gray eyes, your sweeping black eyebrows, the famous bump on your nose from the time you drunkenly walked into a sliding glass door, all of these features were unmistakably yours. Not to mention your voice. When you were only five a virus had scarred your vocal cords and ever after you'd spoken in the voice of a person gone hoarse from coughing, a voice wheezy and forced, ever after you'd sounded like a football coach making desperate pleas from the sideline, and there was no mistaking it. No, we were not fooled, not for a moment did we fail to recognize you. Nonetheless my sister and our cousins sat on your knee naming their hearts' desires. When it was my turn I only pulled at your beard, which was made of cotton balls and secured to your head with elastic, which could be pulled forward and snapped back in place, again and again.

And what would you like, Little Mary Murphy?
you said. I said nothing, just looked at you.
Nothing?
you said.
Howsabout one of those diamonds your sister wants?
I pulled at your beard, pulled it right off your face. You grabbed my jaw, brought my face right up to yours.
Be a doll,
you said in your regular voice,
and get Santa a beer.

By the time you left you were lit, as it were, like the Christmas tree.
Ho, ho!
you said.
Ho fucking ho!
Like Nixon you gave us a sweeping two-armed wave, then out you went stumbling into the snow. No one thought to stop you. We were a family of bad citizens. Drunk drivers and tax evaders, people who parked in handicapped spaces and failed to return shopping carts to their collection stands. In traffic jams we sped up the breakdown lane, then weaseled our way out of tickets by crying. For special occasions we bought new clothes and wore them with the tags tucked in, then returned them to Filene's Basement. We wrote bad checks and faked our ages for discount admission to movies, we ate from other people's plates. And so it was, silent night, holy night, out you went stumbling through the snow.

Wasn't this blood? You were more blood to us than our own fathers. All six of us cousins had fathers who had run off, these two words said so often together they became one: runoff, runoff, runoff. All six of us—Ginny and Little Ellen belonging to Lily; Carrie and Little Lily belonging to Ellen; Malinda and me belonging to Margaret—had fathers and stepfathers and second stepfathers, the beautiful Beaudry girls having, it was widely known, a penchant for marriage and an even greater penchant for divorce, the beautiful Beaudry girls being, it was said, difficult to live without but impossible, in the end, to live with. My mother was the favorite and worst of them, with five husbands. Malinda and I were born of her two-year marriage to Michael Murphy, high school sweetheart and union plumber, Sagittarius, blackout alcoholic. Next she married another Michael, the Devoted and Long-suffering Michael Collins, high school history teacher and model-ship enthusiast, Libra. Her third marriage, to a large-appliance salesman named Bud Francis, Cancer, lasted eight months and was sometimes forgotten about altogether. Her fourth marriage, to the mechanic Walter Adams, Libra, twenty years her senior and black (how fiercely this word was whispered amongst our family:
BLACK
!
BLACK
!
BLACK
!), produced one child, Felice Shirley Adams, who lived, blue and squirming, for less than a day. Finally she married the Reverend Les Witherspoon, a preacher she'd seen on cable television raging about the end of the world, a Scorpio if she'd ever seen one. Later in life I would try to explain these things to boyfriends, the Who's Who of the Beaudry/Murphys, all of those exes and steps and halves, those firsts and seconds and thirds, those relations once and twice removed, but no one could keep up. “How many Mikes are we talking about here?” said one. “Four? Five? It's like Faulkner threw up.”

 

O
ctober 1980, a chill in the air, and we'd just moved—my mother, Malinda and me—out of Michael Collins's middle-class house and into the first-floor apartment of a brick fourplex. I was eight, Malinda ten. We were still young enough to go along with what our mother told us: that our new apartment was a palace, a coveted slice of real estate in a fashionable neighborhood, that things were looking up, that we couldn't help but be happy here, that soon Michael Collins would hardly miss us and that we would hardly miss him, that we had been family for a time, true, but not the kind of family that lasted forever, not blood.

Narrow but long, with glossy hardwood floors, the new apartment had the feel of a bowling alley. There we were, Malinda and me, running through the living room and kitchen and then launching ourselves down the long hallway toward the bedrooms, sliding in our socks, this was what we were doing when you came knocking. We raced each other to the door—who could it be?—and found you standing there, returned to us like a biblical character. “What a surprise!” we said. But of course it wasn't, of course we were always waiting for you.

Guess who died?
you said, and stepped inside. This was your favorite game. When you showed up after a long absence this was how we caught up, saying
guess who, guess who, guess who,
like it was some kind of game show:
Guess who moved away? Guess who got married or divorced, fired or promoted, arrested, hospitalized, deported? Guess who disappeared without a trace? Guess who got cancer? Guess who got knocked up? Guess who's dating a Puerto Rican? Guess who's gay?