The Burgess Boys (10 page)

In the car he sat, his mouth warm from coffee. White powder from the doughnuts fell onto his coat and smeared into white streaks as he brushed at it. Backing up, the cup in its holder by the gearshift, he became aware of a sound, and there was a small, slow-moving pocket of time before Bob understood that what he heard was human screaming. He turned the car off; it lurched.

He seemed to fumble forever with the door before he could climb out.

A woman wearing a long red robe and a gauzy scarf covering her head and most of her face stood behind the car, crying out at him in a language he didn’t understand. Her arms flew up and down, and then she reached and struck his car with her hand. Bob moved toward her and she waved both arms. All of this, for Bob, seemed to happen slowly and in silence. He saw that behind the woman stood another woman, dressed the same way though in darker colors, and he saw her mouth moving, shouting at him, he saw her long and yellow teeth.

“Are you okay?” Bob was yelling this. The women were yelling. For Bob came the sudden sense that he could not breathe, and he tried to indicate this with his hands moving in front of his chest. And now the clerk from the store was there, taking hold of the first woman’s hand, speaking to her in the language Bob didn’t understand, and only then did Bob realize the clerk must be Somali. The clerk turned to Bob and said, “You were trying to run the car over her. Go away from us, crazy man!”

“I wasn’t,” said Bob. “Did I hit her?” He was gasping. “The hospital is—” He pointed.

The women spoke among themselves, rapid, foreign sounds.

The clerk said, “She’s not going to the hospital. Go away.”

“I can’t go away,” Bob said, helplessly. “I have to go to the police and report this.”

The clerk raised her voice. “Why the police? They are your friends?”

“If I hit the woman—”

“You didn’t hit her. You tried to hit her. Go away.”

“But it’s an accident. What’s her name?” He went to the car to find something to write on. By the time he was stepping back out of the car the two women in the long robes and long headscarves were running down the street.

The clerk was back inside the store. “Leave,” she yelled through the glass door.

“I didn’t see her.” He raised his shoulders and turned out his palms.

A bolt was turned. “Leave!” she said.

Very slowly Bob drove back to Susan’s. He heard the shower running. When Susan came downstairs she was in her bathrobe, rubbing a towel over her hair. Bob said, still feeling breathless, watching Susan stare at him, “Ah, so listen. We have to call Jim.”

7

Helen sat on the patio of their hotel room holding a cup of coffee. From down below came the sound of the fountain as it splashed; honeysuckle vines covered each patio she could see. Helen stretched her bare feet into a patch of sun and wiggled her toes. Breakfast at the Lemon Drop had been canceled. Alan had phoned earlier to say that Dorothy was choosing to spend the morning resting in her room, Helen should not take offense. Helen did not take offense. She ordered breakfast to be brought up, and ate her fruit and yogurt and roll with a clarity to her gladness. Jim was only going to play nine holes, he would not be gone long. They could be together then; Helen felt the sweet compression of desire waiting within her.

“Thank you so much,” she said to the polite man who answered when she called to say her breakfast tray could be removed. She took her straw bag and went down to the lobby, stopping in the gift shop to buy a gossip magazine, the kind she used to read with her girls, cuddled together on the couch looking at the gowns of the movie stars. “Oh, I like that one!” Emily would say, pointing, and Margot would sigh, “But look—that one’s reeeeally nice.” Helen also bought a women’s magazine because on its cover was an article headline “The Joys of Empty Nesting.” “Thank you so much,” she said to the woman behind the counter, and wandered out through the pathway between flowering trees and rock gardens to the beach, to stick her ankles into the sun.

Looking each other in the eye, the article counseled, that was important in aging relationships. Write a sexy email. Give compliments. Grumpiness is contagious. Helen closed her eyes behind her sunglasses and let her thoughts glide over to the Wally Packer days. What Helen had never told anyone was that those months had taught her what it must feel like to be the First Lady. One had to be ready for a camera click at any moment. One was building an image always. Helen had understood this. She had been excellent at the job. That some in their circle in West Hartford had become cool to her did not bother Helen. With her entire soul she believed in Jim’s defense of Wally, and in Wally’s right to have that defense. Any photo taken of her—she and Jim in a restaurant, at the airport, stepping from a cab—had, she felt, hit the right note each time, in her variety of tailored suits, cocktail dresses, casual slacks. What easily could have been called a circus was given gravitas by the dignity of Jim and Helen Burgess. Helen felt it then, and she believed it now, remembering.

And the excitement! Helen flexed her ankles. The late nights spent talking with Jim once the kids had gone to bed. Going over what had happened in the courtroom that day. He asked her opinion. She gave it. They were partners, they were in collusion. People said it must be a stress on the marriage, a trial like that, and Jim and Helen had to be careful not to burst into laughter, not to let it show: just the opposite; oh, it was just the opposite. Helen stretched, opened her eyes. She was his one and only. How many times had he whispered this over the last thirty years? She gathered her things and wandered back toward their room. Beside the croquet lawn, water fell gently over a little pile of rocks in a stream. A couple—the woman wearing a long white skirt and a pale blue blouse—was playing croquet, and there was the quiet
thwack
as a ball moved across the green. Along with the tumbling tropical blossoms, the blue sky seemed to whisper to the guests moving about, Now be happy. Be happy, be happy. Helen thought: Thank you, I will.

She heard him before she entered the room. “You’re a fucking mental case, Bob!” Her husband was repeating this over and over. “You’re a fucking mental case! An incompetent fucking mental case!” She slipped the key into the door and said, “Jim, stop.”

Standing by the bed, he turned to her with a face bright red; he waved a hand downward as though he would have hit her had she been closer. “You’re a fucking mental case, Bob! An incompetent mental case!” Dark patches of sweat unevenly patterned his blue golf shirt, and drops of sweat ran down his face. He yelled again into the phone.

Helen sat across from the bowl of lemons. Her mouth—like that—was dry. She watched her husband throw the phone onto the bed, and he kept yelling: “A mental case! Oh my God, Bob is a fucking mental case!” A scrap of a memory hurtled across her mind: Bob telling about his neighbor who screamed the same thing over and over to his wife. You’re driving me fucking crazy, isn’t that what he said? Before he was taken away in handcuffs. And she was married to a man like that.

A queer calmness descended on her. She thought, There is a bowl of lemons right in front of me, and yet the idea that it is a bowl of lemons cannot seem to make it into my mind. And her mind answered back: What do you want me to do, Helen? Stay calm, she told her mind.

Jim was punching a fist into his palm. He walked round and round in circles while Helen sat without moving. Finally he said, “Do you want to know what happened?”

Helen said, “I want you never to scream like that again. Is what I want. And if you do I will walk out of here and fly myself back to New York.”

He sat down on the bed and wiped his face with the bottom of his shirt. In a tight, precise voice, he told her that Bob had almost run over a Somali woman. That Bob had caused Zach’s smiling face to be plastered on the front page of the newspaper. That Bob had not even
talked
with Zach. That Bob refused to get into a car again, that he was going to fly back to New York and leave their car in Maine, and when Jim asked, How is the car supposed to get back?, Bob said, I don’t know, but I’m not driving it, I’m not getting behind a wheel again, and I’m flying home tonight, this Charlie Tibbetts will have to do his job without me. “Bob is,” Jim said, quietly, “a fucking mental case.”

“He is,” Helen said, “someone who was traumatized at the age of four. I am really surprised, and really put off, that you can’t figure out why he would not want to get behind the wheel of a car right now.” She added, “But it was incredibly stupid of him to run over a Somalian woman.”

“Somali.”

“What?”

“Somali. Not Somalian.”

Helen leaned forward. “You’re correcting me in the middle of this?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Jim closed his eyes briefly, opened them; it seemed a dismissive gesture. “Bob’s screwed everything up, and if we have to go up there to help out, it’s best if you know what they’re called.”

“I’m not going up there.”

“I want you to go with me.”

Helen felt a huge, sudden envy of the couple playing croquet, the woman’s long white skirt rising in the breeze. She pictured herself in this room a few hours earlier, waiting for Jim, waiting for the way he would look at her—

He did not look at her. He looked toward the window, and in his profile she saw the light catch the blue of his eye. A slackness invaded his face. “Do you know what Bob said to me when I got an acquittal for Wally?” He turned to Helen briefly, then looked back out the window. “He said, ‘Jim, that was great. You did a great job. But you took the guy’s fate from him.’ ”

Sunlight sat flatly in the room. Helen looked at the bowl of lemons, at the magazines the chambermaid had fanned out on the table. She looked at her husband, who was leaning forward now on the edge of the bed, and saw the crumpled moistness of his golf shirt. She was about to say, reaching her arm toward him, Oh, honey, let’s try and relax, let’s try and still have a good time while we’re here. But when he turned to her, such different contortions seem to grip him that she thought if she passed this man on the sidewalk she might not have known it was Jim. She dropped her arm.

Jim stood up. “He said that to me, Helen.” His face, unnatural-looking and imploring, gazed at her. He crossed his arms then, his hands touching his opposite shoulders, their private sign language of many years—and Helen either could not, or would not (she never knew which), but she did not stand and go to him.

8

It was absolutely true: Bob was useless. He sat on Susan’s couch without moving. “You’ve always been useless,” Susan had shouted before she drove off. The poor dog came and shoved her long nose under Bob’s knee. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and the dog lay down at his feet. His watch said it was midmorning. He made his way carefully to the back porch, where he sat on the steps and smoked. His legs would not stop shaking. A gust of wind sent the yellow leaves of the Norway maple to the ground and then toward the porch. Bob put his cigarette out on the moving leaves, scraped them with his foot while his leg shook, then lit another cigarette. A car slowed by the driveway and pulled in.

The car was small and not new, and low to the ground. The woman behind the wheel seemed tall, and when she opened the door she had to give herself a good hoist to get out. She was about Bob’s age and had glasses slipping down her nose. Her hair, different shades of dark blond, was messily pulled back with a clip, and her coat was full and kind of a tweedy black-and-white. She had a familiarity to her that Bob sometimes felt when he saw people from Maine.

“Hi,” she said. She pushed her glasses up her nose as she walked toward him. “I’m Margaret Estaver. Are you Zachary’s uncle? No, no, don’t stand up.” To his surprise she sat down on the step next to him.

He put out his cigarette and offered his hand. She shook it, though it was awkward, seated as they were beside each other. “Are you a friend of Susan’s?” he asked.

“I’d like to be. I’m the Unitarian minister. Margaret Estaver,” she added again.

“Susan’s at work.”

Margaret Estaver nodded as though she had thought that might be true. “Well, I imagine she doesn’t want to see me anyway, but I thought—I thought I’d just come on over. She’s probably pretty upset.”

“Yuh. She is.” Bob was reaching for another cigarette. “Do you mind—I’m sorry—”

She waved a hand. “I used to smoke.”

He lit the cigarette, drew his knees up, and put his elbows on them so she wouldn’t see that his legs were shaking. He blew the smoke away from her.

“It came to me very clearly this morning,” Margaret Estaver said. “I should extend myself to Zachary and his mother.”

He looked at her, squinting. Her face had a liveliness to it. “Well, I’ve messed things up more,” he confessed. “A Somali woman thinks I tried to run her over.”

“I heard.”

“You did? Already?” Fear roared through him again. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I really didn’t.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“I called the police to report it. I spoke to a cop I went to high school with, not Gerry O’Hare, I went to school with him too, but Tom Levesque; he was on duty down at the station when I called. He said not to worry about it.” (In fact Tom Levesque had said the Somalis were whackjobs. “Forget it,” Tom said. “They’re jumpy as shit. Forget it.”)

Margaret Estaver stretched her feet out, crossed them at the ankle. She wore backless clogs, dark blue, her socks were dark green. The image settled on Bob’s eye quietly as he heard her say, “The woman said you didn’t hit her, just that you tried. She’s not filing charges, so that’s the end of it. A lot of people in the Somali community are distrustful of authorities, as you can imagine. And of course they’re feeling pretty sensitive right now.”

Bob’s legs were still shaking. Even his hand was shaking as he put the cigarette to his mouth.

Margaret’s voice continued. “I heard Susan’s been raising Zachary alone for a few years. My mother raised me alone, and it’s not fun, I know that.” She added, “A lot of the Somali women are raising their children without fathers, too. But they tend to have a lot more than one child, and they tend to have sisters or aunts. Susan seems very alone.”