Everybody Loves You (16 page)

The dog gently investigates the sea, sniffing at the waves. Toby's father, my brother Ned, cannot be far away. He is always walking the dog, possibly to see what stir he can inspire with his fame.

Possibly.

This is a sophisticated beach, the cream of Boston hip (if there be such a thing). He would be in no danger from autograph crazies. But people would surely recognize him—“as seen on television,” the ultimate American credential—and buzz like wasps in a pancake house.

I see my brother in the distance, walking slowly around the curl of a dune, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, the long-thighed light brown kind you only see on straight men, brothers and fathers.

Tober noses up to Toby, who stares at him for a bit, then gives him a push.

“You aren't very nice to your pet,” I venture.

“He comes around too much. And he snapped at the doorman. They bought a muzzle for him. But you know what? I hid it in my toy chest. Sometimes I wear it in my room. Tober isn't really mine, anyway. He only likes my father.”

My brother is almost upon us now.

“Hey, Tober,” I call out. “Here, Tobes.”

Tober looks at me, starts over, halts. It's not always easy to know what you're supposed to do in this family.

Toby eyes the beast with disgust. “Make him nap,” he says.

And Ned arrives.

“How are you coming, my friend?” my brother asks me. He doesn't act like a newscaster, but like a man who might know a few.

“I'm doing just fine.”

“Good man. Toby, did you remember to put water in Tober's dish this morning?”

This means Toby didn't, but the boy has unconcernedly returned to his sand tower. “He didn't look thirsty.”

“I hate to think that a poor dumb animal is going without water because a little boy was too lazy to bother with him.”

Toby and I glance at the dog, quietly settled on his haunches, looking far out to sea. A handsome, suave animal, not the kind to dance on your leg or suddenly begin howling when company comes, like a certain dog I know.

“He was naughty yesterday,” says Toby. “So I'm not giving him water for a month.”

Toby's father kneels to reason with his son. “Toby,” he begins, “you can't punish a living creature by depriving it of food.”

Toby looks down, but resolutely. “You took my allowance away,” he says.

“That's just money.”

“I was going to buy candy with it. Candy is food.”

Toby's father grasps Toby's little child's shoulders and tells him, in the voice that tolerantly introduces those irritating responsible opinions of the opposing viewpoint, “Listen here, Toby, have I ever deprived you of nourishment? Have you ever gone hungry?”

“Yes.”

“No, you haven't.”

“Last week,” Toby insists, “you didn't take me to the puppet play.”

“That was nearly six months ago, first off, and second, if you remember, you weren't taken to the puppet show because you got chocolate all over the television.”

Patricide.

“Toby,” he goes on, “look at me when I talk to you.”

My family is made of those who demand to be looked at when they talk to you and those who look away when they hear. My brother started as a looker away; now he has to be looked at. No wonder he became a newscaster. An entire city must look at him when he talks. I visualize his television audience sitting before their sets in high chairs, wearing bibs discolored by strained prunes. Their faces are sad as they are reproached and reasoned with.

“Hey,” I put in. “Why don't you tell Toby about the time I pushed you off the roof?”

My brother ignores this; Toby looks up.

“I think you'd better take Tober up to the house,” my brother goes on, “and see if—”

“What roof? Our roof? Did he push you off that high?”

“Toby—”

Toby looks at me. “When did you push him? Was I there?”

“No. But I was thinking of you at the time.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” my brother asks me. “We were kids then.”

“I knew you'd have a child someday. I did it for him.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“He broke his arm,” I tell Toby. “I broke your father's arm. He had to wear a cast for a month, and they threw him off the football team.” I ask my brother, “Remember?”

“All right now, Toby, you march straight up to the house and assume some responsiblity for Tober. He's your dog.”

Toby claps his hands like a pasha, and Tober meticulously gets to his feet, capping the motion with an elegant stretch of his spine, from rigid neck to apologetic haunches. With half this finesse, Bauhaus would be almost acceptable.

“Tober, come here!” Toby screams. “You mental case!”

“Not so loud,” my brother directs. “Go on up, now.”

“Keep watch on my sand tower,” Toby warns us. “Don't let the other people come and wreck it.”

“There are no other people,” my brother tells him—one of those apparently aimless statements, mere punctuation from the sound of them, that, on the contrary, burst from the heart. Who but a fifteen-year-old runaway would get so much out of the statement “There are no other people”?

As Toby and the dog proceed up the beach back to the house, I appear engrossed in my work. I am writing gibberish in order to look inaccessible; a useless defense against a man who remembers what you were like when you were eight.

“Ellen says you brought her a present,” my brother offers. No one is inaccessible to a newsman. Impenetrable, maybe: but approachable, absolutely.

“I got both of you a present.”

“A mayonnaise jar, was it? Sounds very handy.”

“It doesn't just hold mayonnaise. It helps make it. The recipe is printed on the glass. Bloomingdale's.”

“She really likes you, you know.”

Out come the weapons. We estimate our worth in the quality of the people who like us—as witness the hearty bantering that goes on on news shows between the features and the commercial breaks. A Boston friend taped some of my brother's programs for me, and on one of them it seems to me—it
seems
—as if the other newspeople turn their backs on him and cut him out of their banter, leaving him to shift his papers and chuckle at imaginary colleagues out of camera range.

“Toby says you aren't going to give us dinner,” I say as my brother kicks shells and pebbles down at the waterline. “He heard you and Ellen quarreling.”

“Toby's doing a very awkward time nowadays. You shouldn't encourage him. It's hard enough to keep him in line without you telling him stories about brothers throwing each other off roofs.”

“Why not? You did it to me and I did it to you. It was the great moment of my childhood. I wanted to share it with him.”

My brother works his way onto the crest of the tide flat, kicking gusts of sand as he travels. “You know how easily he gets stirred up,” he goes on.

“It's funny how cool you were as a child, and how high-strung Toby is. I wouldn't think it would run in your family.”

“He's just a kid so far.” My brother is kicking up whole wads of sand now, aimlessly, business on his mind. “What'll you do with that writing piece when it's done? Does it go in
The New Yorker?
”

“Why are you stamping around in the sand like that?”

He shrugged. “High spirits. Why even ask?”

“Because you've even kicked Toby's sand tower to bits.”

My brother sees what he has done.

“I'd hate to be in your sneakers when Toby gets back and sees what you did,” I exult. “He takes his beach sports very seriously.”

“So do you.”

I have to laugh at that. “I envy Toby his enthusiasms,” I say. “He gets such a thrill out of everything, whether he loves them or despises them. He
feels.
Were we ever like that? Puppet plays and candy?”

“I wasn't,” my brother says.

“How come you ran away from us?” I suddenly ask. “Do you expect Toby to run away from you?”

He is speechless.

Barking and shouting from across the dunes signal the return of Toby and Tober. They race down to us like a circus on a four-a-day booking. Toby is heading for the water, but his father catches him as he passes, pulls him up, and tosses him into the air as easily as if he were confetti. Toby says, “Daddy!” with delight as he comes down; only this, but this is enough.

I pet the panting dog.

“Toby,” says the newscaster. “Listen to bad news. I wrecked your sand castle. Accidentally. I was kicking at the sand without thinking. I'm sorry.”

Openmouthed, Toby turns to me.

“I didn't do it,” I warn him.

“What if you get a spanking now?” Toby asks, turning to his father, looking up to find him, taking hold of his hand. “Or no dinner?”

“We don't punish anyone for accidents, Toby,” his father lectures. “You know that.”

“Yes,” Toby agrees. “I have to go finger-paint.”

“Okay.” His father turns to me. “Okay, my friend?” Why do I have to render an opinion? My brother slaps Toby's behind lightly and the child runs up the beach, Tober dragging decorously after him.

Okay,
he says. Look, don't waste a smile on me—but my brother does, a television smile suited to a quaint human-interest feature, perhaps a convention of street-food aficionados in south Boston. “See you at dinner,” he says.

I go back to writing my story. Bits of the day flip into the text, a field expedient. Bits of every day; it makes people nervous. “You snitched!” a bag lady cried at me once, on Park Avenue.

“No, I didn't,” I said; but I was thinking of some story.

“You told how I made a commotion with a cigarillo in the no-smoking section of the Carnegie Cinema show!”

“Never.”

“No?”

“No,” I repeated.

She shrugged, looked away, and coughed. “So what happens next?”

On the beach, next is always a meal. You pay out a certain number of minutes and then comes food, the four of us at table, all eyes aimed at some imagined central point of contact. But I ask you: Who imagines? Who directs the aim? When we gather at the board, I babble, dispersing the attacks. I am like a bag lady in the scattered energy of my references. I speak of Louise Brooks, of
The Egoist,
of Schubert's song cycles. They nod. They ask Intelligent Questions. They feel they must encourage me, my sister-in-law because anyone she is related to becomes wonderful by rules of love loyalty, and my brother because it is not entirely useless, in his line of work, to be connected to a writer, even a brutally honest one. Still, he'll never quite be able to see me as anything but an infant rebel, reckless, bold for his years, but ultimately ineffectual. He treats me as someone who may have to be soothed, even humored, perhaps disarmed, at any moment.

This only exacerbates my defiance, of course. From the moment I enter the house my brother lives in—to my sister-in-law's welcoming half-smile, as warm as one blanket too many on a surprisingly balmy November night—I am at war.

My brother cuts greens for his Caesar salad, which, for some reason, is genuinely cordon bleu. But then Ned was always a stickler for High Style in everything he did. I hear, from secure sources, that back in Boston notables of the local great world stare over his shoulder as he prepares it. Oh, it looks simple. Who can't make a salad? They can't—not like his salad, anyway. Theirs is correct; his is superb. They come back again and again to watch him and he pays them no heed. He acts as if no one should be able to do what he does.

From Toby's room comes the festive din of the Walt Disney versions of
Snow White, Pinocchio,
and
Alice in Wonderland,
on a tape I made for him last year. Occasionally, Toby sings along. I idly glance in at the door. Toby and Tober are sitting on the floor, engrossed in the act of listening; both of them are wearing cowboy hats and neckerchiefs.

When I return to the kitchen, my sister-in-law hands me a glass of white wine. I take it outside to watch the sun burn red over the water. I try to think of my latest story and all this real life. How inconvenient that work merges with truth. I was planning to model myself on Evelyn Waugh, not Thomas Mann. Yet even Waugh turned Mann in the end. Writers have a hundred dodges but a thousand revelations. Every so often, some of my friends ask pettishly why I never write about them. “But I do,” I respond, as nicely as possible.

Then they grow uneasy.

Amazingly enough, I enjoy these summer visits up here, so far off my proper turf. I like the break it makes in my city rhythm, the sense the place gives me of owing nothing to everybody—professionally, of course. If only I owed nothing to absolutely anyone socially, emotionally, and historically, I would be white clean free.

A family forms around me as I sit on the deck. Something licks the back of my hand: Tober, a relief from the incessantly dilating Bauhaus. My sister-in-law joins us. A breeze animates the scene. Now Toby is here, querulously asking about the parentage of Donald Duck's three nephews. He knows they have none, but he wants to see what he will be told. His father comes out, balancing his hand on Toby's head as the twilight deepens.

I do not need to look at them to know how it appears. She is gazing upon my brother and he is gazing down at the boy and the boy is gazing at all of us, one after the other. For a moment, I luxuriate in the sentimentality of knowing that, whatever else happens, he will be raised in love. How terrifyingly important that is. Then I feel manipulated by this frenzy of feeling and swear to avenge the dishonor by styling all three of them as villains in my most scabrous stories.

My brother takes my wineglass to refill it, and Toby sits next to me, holding a juice drink poured to resemble a cocktail. “Now you could tell me more,” says Toby, “about when you pushed my father off the roof.”