The Burgess Boys (14 page)

“Jim, why don’t you let your brother enjoy his evening, and we’ll enjoy ours, and you two can figure that out later?” Helen turned to the waiter. “The pinot noir, please.”

“How is Zach?” Bob asked. “Susan’s called me a few times, but she’s always vague about how Zach is.”

“Who knows how Zach is. He doesn’t have to appear for the arraignment, which isn’t till November third. Charlie filed a not-guilty plea, had the whole thing moved to Superior Court, and asked for a jury trial. He’s good.”

“I know. I’ve talked to him.” Bob paused, then said, “Zach cries alone in his room.”

“Oh God,” said Helen.

“How do you know?” Jim looked at his brother.

“The old lady upstairs told me. Susan’s tenant. She says she’s heard Zach crying in his room.”

Jim’s face changed, his eyes seemed smaller.

“She could be wrong,” Bob said. “She seems a little wacky.”

“Of course she could be wrong,” Helen said. “Jim, what are you having to eat?”

“I’ll go get the car,” Bob said. “I’ll fly up and drive it back. How soon do you need it?”

“Soon as you have time, which would be always. Nice how Legal Aid has that strong union. Five weeks vacation, and it’s not like anyone there works hard to begin with.”

“That’s not true, Jim. Some really good people work there.” Bob spoke quietly.

“The bartender’s waving at you. Go drink your beer.” Jim’s voice was dismissive.

Bob returned to the bar and understood that his evening was spoiled. He was a knucklehead, even Helen was mad at him. He had gone up to Maine and done nothing except respond like an idiot, panic, and leave their car up there. He thought of the gracious big-boned Elaine, sitting in her office with the fig tree, explaining so patiently the replication of the response to traumatic events, the masochistic tendencies he had because he felt he needed to be punished for a childhood act of innocence. In the mirror he saw the reddish-haired man watching him, and when he caught his eye the man nodded at him. What Bob understood in that brief glance was the unspoken recognition of another guilty person—the reddish-haired man had bought his wife the bike, suggested the ride that morning. Bob nodded back, and drank his beer.

Pam sat at her favorite Upper East Side salon watching the head of a Korean woman bent over her feet, worrying as she always did that the utensils had not been sterilized properly, because once you got a nail fungus you almost never got rid of it, and the girl, Mia, whom Pam preferred, was not in today; this one, scrubbing gently at Pam’s toes, spoke no English. There had been miming, and Pam asking too loudly, “Clean? Yes?,” pointing to the metal box, before she finally relaxed and settled into her thoughts, which she had been having for days now, about her past life with the Burgess family.

At the start, she had not liked Susan. But this was because they were young—children, no older than the sons of Pam’s friends who had just left for college—and Susan’s unrelenting disdain for Bob had been taken personally by Pam. It was back at a time in her life when Pam wanted everyone to like everyone. (She especially wanted everyone to like her.) It was also at a time when people on the Orono campus of the University of Maine would speak a greeting when they passed someone on the walkways that wound around the buildings and beneath the trees, even if the people did not know each other. Though many students did know Bob, and this was because of his friendliness and also because some had known Jim, who was gone by then but had been president of the student government and was one of the university’s very few graduates ever to get into Harvard Law School—let alone receive a full scholarship to go there—which heightened his renown. Awareness of the Burgess boys was as common as the oaks and maple trees the students walked under, holding their books. (A few elms remaining, too; sick, though, with their top leaves wilting.) Being with Bob and his loping easiness was the safest Pam had ever felt, and an enthusiasm for college life—for life, period—opened and unfolded within her. This exuberance was insulted each time Susan pretended not to see them, when she walked around to a different doorway, should they be headed into the student union at the same time. Thin, Susan was, back then, and pretty, turning her face away. Or in Fogler Library, Susan was capable of walking right past Bob and not even glancing at him. “Hey, Suse,” Bob would say. Nothing. Nothing! Pam was appalled. It did not seem to bother Bob. “She’s always been that way.”

But after weekends and holidays spent at the Burgess home in Shirley Falls, where Pam’s future mother-in-law, Barbara, greeted her in what Pam understood was a welcoming manner (mostly conveyed by making sardonic jokes at others’ expense and glancing at Pam with a granite-faced inclusion), Pam began to feel sorry for Susan. This was surprising to Pam, perhaps her first understanding of the prismatic quality of viewing people. She felt she had been seeing only the front of Susan and had missed entirely the large white light of motherly disapproval that shone behind her. It was Susan who was most often the recipient of her mother’s so-called jokes, it was Susan who set the table silently while her mother said to Bob, who had made the dean’s list and Susan had not, “Oh, Bobby, of course you did, I always knew you were smart.” It was Susan who was wearing her long hair parted in the middle “like some foolish flower-child hippie,” it was Susan, with her slender waist and straight hips, who was told that someday she would, like all women, turn Crisco: fat in the can.

Pam’s own mother had never been scornful of her, but she did seem uncertain of her parental duties and carried them out from a distance, as though Pam—a girl who spent hours of her youth reading in the local library, and gazing at magazine ads hinting at lives lived
out there
—had still required too much from her. Pam’s father, quiet and receding, seemed even less qualified to escort his daughter through the ordinary obstacles of growth. It was to escape this arid atmosphere that Pam spent most of her holidays at the Burgess home, that small yellow house on a hill not far from the center of town. The house was smaller than the one Pam had grown up in, though not much smaller. But the rugs were worn, and the dishes were cracked, and the bathroom had tiles missing; these things had troubled her. Again, that sense of discovery: Her boyfriend and his family were poor. Pam’s father had his own small stationery supply business and her mother gave piano lessons. But their house in western Massachusetts was always fresh-looking, and out by farmland, safe and open; Pam had never thought once about it. When she saw the Burgess home with its discolored linoleum floor curling up in the corners, the window casings that were so old and warped they were stuffed in the winter with newspaper, the one bathroom whose toilet was lined with a rust-colored stain, and the shower curtain so faded she was not sure if it had once been pink or red—she thought of the family in her hometown who were the only really
poor
family she had known: They had rusted cars all over their lawn, the kids showed up at school dirty, and Pam was taken aback: Who was this Burgess boy she had fallen for? Was he like
that
? On the campus in Orono he had seemed no different from anyone else, wearing the same blue jeans every day—but lots of kids back then wore the same jeans every day—his dorm room messy and, his half, sparse—but lots of boys’ dorm rooms were messy and sparse. Except Bob was more
there
than other boys, more easygoing; she had not known that he and his unpleasant sister came from this.

It did not last long, that reaction. Bob brought with him into every room what it was that made him Bob. And so the house became—quickly—one of comfort. At night she could hear his easy voice speaking quietly to his mother, for they often stayed up late, mother and son, talking. She heard them many times say the word “Jim,” as though his presence remained in the house, the way his presence lingered on the Orono campus.

“Jim-this, Jim-that” is what Pam intended to say when she finally met him. He was sitting at the kitchen table on a Friday afternoon in November when it was already dark outside, and he seemed too large for the house, slouched back on the chair, his arms crossed. Pam only said, “Hello.” He stood up and shook her hand, and with his free hand pushed at Bob’s chest. “Slob-dog, how are you,” he said, and Bob said, “Harvard man, you’re home!”

Pam’s first feeling was relief that she was not attracted to her boyfriend’s older brother, because she saw that many girls probably were. He was too conventionally handsome for her taste, his dark hair, perfect jaw; but also, he was hard. Pam saw this and it frightened her. No one else seemed to see it. When Jim teased Bob (as sharply as Barbara would tease Susan), Bob laughed, and received it. “When we were kids,” Jim told Pam that first night, “this guy”—nodding toward Bob—“drove me nuts. Nuts. Hell, you still drive me nuts.”

Bob shrugged happily.

“Like what would he do?”

“Whatever I ate, he wanted to eat the same thing. ‘Tomato soup,’ he’d say, when Mom asked what he wanted for lunch. Then he’d see I had vegetable soup, and he’d say, ‘No, that’s what I want.’ Whatever I wore, he wanted to wear the same thing. Wherever I went, he wanted to go too.”

“Wow. How terrible.” Pam was being sarcastic, but it was one pebble thrown against a thick windshield; Jim was impermeable.

Those years that Jim was in law school he came back frequently to visit his mother. All three kids, Pam saw, were loyal to their mother. Both Susan and Bob worked in the dining hall at school, but they would swap shifts with people and hitch rides with anyone headed down the turnpike to Shirley Falls. This was touching to Pam, and made her feel guilty about her long absences from her own home, but the Burgess home is where she went whenever Bob, and Susan too, decided they should be there. Susan had not yet met Steve, and Jim had not met Helen, so Pam, looking back on it, felt that not only was she in love with Bob, but that she was almost his sibling as well; for those were the years when they became her family. The prickliness of Susan softened. Often they all played Scrabble at the kitchen table, or just talked, squished together in the living room. Sometimes the four of them went bowling and came back to tell Barbara how Bob almost beat Jim. “But he didn’t,” Jim said. “Never has and never will.” One freezing cold Saturday, Pam and Susan carefully ironed their long hair, laying it on the ironing board in the glassed-in porch of the little house, and Barbara yelled at both of them that they could have burned the house down. While the Burgesses seemed to have no knowledge of, or interest in, food (there were meals of scrambled hamburger covered with an unmelted sheet of orange cheese, or a tuna casserole made with canned soup, or a chicken roasted without any spices, not even salt), Pam discovered that they loved baked goods, and so she made banana bread and sugar cookies, and sometimes Susan stood in the small kitchen and helped her, and whatever was baked was eaten hungrily, and this touched Pam as well—as though these kids had been starved all their lives for sweetness. Barbara was not sweet, but Pam appreciated a fundamental decency in her that all three kids, for all their differences, seemed to share.

Jim talked about his law classes while Bobby leaned forward and asked questions. Jim was drawn to criminal law from the beginning, and he and Bob spoke about the rules of evidence, the hearsay exceptions, the procedural aspects of trying a case, the role of punishment in society. Pam had already established her own interest in science and she saw society as one large organism working with its million, billion cells heaving itself alive. Criminality was a mutation that interested Pam, and she joined tentatively in these discussions. Jim was never condescending to her, as he could be to Bob or Susan; his sparing her always surprised her. There was a strange combination of arrogance and earnestness in Jim that often surprised her. Years later, during the Wally Packer trial, when Pam read an interview about Jim quoting a Harvard classmate as saying that Jim Burgess “had kept himself removed, always seemed unknowable,” she understood then what she had not fully understood those years before—that Jim must have felt an outsider at Harvard, and that he returned to Shirley Falls because something compelled him to, not just his mother, to whom he was attentive and caring, but perhaps a familiarity of accents and chipped plates and bedroom doors too warped to close. He did not mention any girlfriends during those law school years. But one day, because his grades were perfect and his skills already sharp, he spoke of landing a job at the Manhattan DA’s office. He would get trial experience and bring it back to Maine.

“Ouch,” Pam said. The Korean woman, massaging Pam’s calf muscle, looked up at Pam with apology, spoke a word Pam did not understand. “Sorry,” Pam said, waving her hand quickly. “But too hard.” A shudder of nostalgia moved through her, and she had to close her eyes against the pale sheet of what could only be boredom that moved toward her. Was it merely youth and new love that had made Shirley Falls seem to Pam a place of miracles? Would she never have that yearning and high-pitched excitement again? Did age and experience just
mute
you?