The Burgess Boys (18 page)

Because this was America. People had the right to convene, and it was better for Shirley Falls to give them a permit, more control could be exerted that way. The permit gave them permission to gather in the Civic Center, which was on the outskirts of town and not near the park. Charlie told Susan this no longer had much to do with Zach. Zach had been charged with a misdemeanor, period, the rest of it would quiet down.

It didn’t quiet down. Day after day the newspapers printed editorials from the outraged liberals of Maine, and from conservatives too, who wrote measured suggestions that the Somalis were expected, like every other person lucky enough to live here, to get jobs and training and pay their taxes. And then a letter would be published saying that all working Somalis
were
paying their taxes, and our country was based on the freedom to practice whatever religion was chosen, and so on and so forth. But the sense of purpose was heightened by the knowledge that the rally would be competing with the white supremacy group; a full-court press was on.

A team of civil rights units was sent into the schools. The purpose of the rally was explained. The Constitution of the United States was explained. Attempts were made to explain the history of the Somali troubles. Congregations in all the local churches were asked to help out. The two fundamentalist churches did not respond, but the rest did; there was a growing sense of umbrage: No one told Maine people how to live or what to think; the idea that Shirley Falls was somehow a place to recruit bigots was reprehensible. Colleges and universities got involved, civic organizations, senior citizen groups, all sorts of people seemed to be saying the Somalis could damn well live there just like other groups had before them, the French from Canada, the Irish before that.

What was being written on the Internet was another matter altogether, and Gerry O’Hare perspired as he faced his computer screen, scrolling through various websites. He had never in his life met anyone who said the Holocaust was a beautiful time in history, that ovens should be installed in Shirley Falls and the Somalis escorted in. It made him feel that he knew nothing about the world after all. He had been too young to go to Vietnam, though of course he knew men who had gone and he saw the results; some were right now living down there near the Somalis by the river, unable to keep a job, they were so nerved up. But it’s not as though Gerry O’Hare hadn’t seen things: children who had spent nights locked inside a doghouse, or had scars from parents who’d held their little hands to a stove, women whose hair had been ripped out by furious spouses, a gay homeless man lit on fire and thrown into the river a few years ago. These things had been hard to see. But it was new, what he saw on the Internet, the cool statements of superiority so deeply believed in, that anyone not white should, as one person had written, “be exterminated as easily as we do rats.” Gerry didn’t share with his wife the things he read. “Cowards,” he did say. “You can be anonymous, that’s what’s the trouble with the Internet.” Each night now Gerry took a sleeping pill. He understood: It was his watch this was happening on. He owed his citizens safety and this meant foreseeing the unforeseeable. The state police were brought in, other police departments in the state were tapped for their services, the plastic shields and sticks came out of storage, training in crowd control went on.

And Zachary Olson came through the back door of his home one morning and began to sob. “Mommy,” he cried to Susan, who was getting ready to leave for work. “They fired me! I walked in and they said they fired me, I don’t have a job.” And he bent and hugged his mother as though he had been given the sentence of death.

“They don’t have to tell him why,” Jim said when Susan called. “No employer if they know what they’re doing ever tells the person why. Bob and I will be there soon.”

9

With November came the wind, blowing in spurts of fury, and the air in New York turned chilly but not cold. Helen worked in her back garden, planting her tulip and crocus bulbs. Her irritation with the world had dampened into a cushion of soft melancholy that went with her everywhere. Afternoons, she would sweep the front stoop of its leaves, talking to the neighbors who passed by. There was the gay man, precise and pleasant, the tall and stately Asian doctor, the beastly woman who worked for the city and whose hair was too blond, the couple a few doors down expecting their first baby, and of course Deborah-Who-Does and Debra-Who-Doesn’t. Helen took time to speak to all of these people. It steadied her, because this had been the time of day her children would amble home from school, the sound of Larry’s key in the grated gate.

Within a year the stately Asian doctor would be dead from a heart attack, the gay man would lose a parent, the expectant couple would have their baby and move to a more affordable neighborhood, but all this hadn’t happened yet. The changes that were coming in Helen’s own life hadn’t happened yet (although she thought they had, Larry leaving her to go to college, thrusting her into the biggest change since her children had been born), and so she swept her front stoop and chatted and went inside and spoke to Ana about going home early, and then the house was hers until Jim came home. She would remember those late afternoons the same way she remembered how, when her children were small, she would linger in the living room for a few moments alone on Christmas Eve, watching the tree with its lights and its presents, feeling so excited and peaceful that tears filled her eyes, and then those Christmases were gone: the children no longer small, Emily perhaps not even coming home this year, going to her boyfriend’s family instead—no, it was astonishing to think those Christmases were gone.

But here was her home, with Jim. She walked through it after Ana left, the family room with the original old light fixtures, the mahogany trim gleaming when the afternoon sun slid through the upstairs parlor, the bedroom with the deck through the French doors. The bittersweet that grew along the railing now had orange nutlike berries showing through the curled and cracked encasings, and the vines were brown and lovely where the leaves had fallen off. Later, she would remember how Jim came through the door some evenings that autumn and showed an extra layer of largeheartedness toward her, sometimes throwing his arms around her right out of the blue and saying, “Hellie, you are so good. I love you.” It made the ache from her silent home more bearable. It made her feel graceful again. And yet—at times—there seemed a neediness to Jim she felt she’d not noticed before. “Hellie, you’ll never leave me, right?” Or: “You’ll love me no matter what, right?”

“You silly thing,” she’d answer. But there was a visceral recoiling in her when he was like that, and she was privately appalled at herself. A loving wife was loving; that’s who she’d always been. He spoke frequently of the Wally Packer trial, repeating to her—as though she hadn’t been there—his greatest moments. “Single-handedly I crushed that DA. Folded him up. He never saw it coming.” It wasn’t the fun kind of reminiscing they had done in the past. But how could she be sure? The emptiness of her big house, as the days grew shorter, disoriented her.

“I need a job,” she said at breakfast one morning.

“That’s a good idea.” Jim did not seem startled by the remark, and this mildly offended Helen.

“Well, it’s not that easy,” she said.

“How so?”

“Because a hundred years ago when I was—briefly, it’s true—a successful accountant, everything wasn’t computerized. I’d be lost in that world now.”

“You could go back to school,” Jim said.

Helen drank her coffee, put it down. She looked around the kitchen. “Let’s go walk in the park before you leave for work. We never do that.”

Walking, Helen’s heart lightened; she took Jim’s hand. With her other hand she waved to people from the neighborhood who’d come out early to run their dogs. They all waved back, some calling out a greeting. You have a friendly way, Jim had told her over the years, people are always glad to see you. And this made Helen think of her women friends who used to gather weekly in the kitchen of Victoria Cummings for a glass of wine on Wednesday afternoons: Oh, Helen, you’ve come! Calling out to her, some clapping their hands at the sight of her. Hey, girls, Helen’s here! The Kitchen Cabinet, they called it, two hours of gossip and laughing, and now that poor Victoria was having such a mess in her marriage she’d stopped hosting it, and Helen decided that when she got back to the house she’d telephone each of the women and say that the Kitchen Cabinet would meet at her house instead. Helen was surprised she hadn’t thought of this sooner; the world was righted now, women friends cast their own color of sunshine. That funny old lady from exercise class could come too. You lie on the mat, she had said to Helen the first day, and then you pray to God you get up. Over the hill was the wide swath of brown grass and the deep brown of the tree trunks, the glassy surface of the pond they passed. The building tops seen along the edge of the park appeared different from this angle, stately and old. Helen said, “It’s like we’re in Europe, that’s what it looks like. Let’s go to Europe this spring. Alone.”

Jim nodded absently.

“Are you worried about the weekend?” Helen asked, wifely once more.

“No. It will be fine.”

When they returned to their house—Helen having just greeted the too-blond woman walking by with her briefcase—the telephone was ringing. She heard Jim speaking evenly, and then he hung up and yelled, “Shit, shit, shit!” She stood in the living room and waited. “The schmuck lost his job and Susan’s surprised. Why
wouldn’t
they fire him? Some journalist was probably nosing around and Walmart just had it. Christ, I don’t want to go up there.”

“You can still say no,” Helen said.

“I can’t, though. It’s the goddamn
love
police.”

“So what? You don’t live there anymore, Jimmy.”

He didn’t answer.

Helen walked past him up the stairs. “Well, you do what you think is best.” But she felt again the anxiety that something was being taken from her. She called down the stairs, “Just tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” said Jim.

“Once more with feeling.” She peered down over the banister.

He was sitting on the bottom stairs with his head in his hands. “I love you,” he said.

10

The Burgess boys rode up the turnpike as twilight arrived. It arrived gently, the sky remaining a soft blue as the trees along either side of the unfolding pavement darkened. Then the sinking sun sent up a spread of lavender and yellow, and the horizon line seemed cracked open to give a peek at the heavens far beyond. Thin clouds became pink and stayed that way, until finally darkness emerged, almost complete. The brothers had spoken little once they pulled out of the airport in the rental car, Jim at the wheel, and for the last many minutes as the sun went down there had been silence between them. Bob was unutterably happy. He had not expected the feeling, which intensified it. He gazed out the window at the black stretches of evergreens, the granite boulders here and there. The landscape he had forgotten—and now remembered. The world was an old friend, and the darkness was like arms around him. When his brother spoke, Bob heard the words. Still he said, casually, “What did you say?”

“I said this is just unbelievably depressing.”

Bob waited, then said, “You mean the mess with Zachary?”

“Well, that,” said Jim, in a tone of disgust. “Of course. But I meant this … place. The bleakness.”

Bob stared out the window for some time. He finally said, “You’ll cheer up when we get to Susan’s. You’ll find it very cozy.”

Jim looked over at him. “You’re joking, right?”

“I keep forgetting,” Bob said. “You’re the only one in the family allowed to be sarcastic. You’ll find Susan’s house depressing. You’ll want to hang yourself before supper is over. Is my guess.” To fall so precipitously from this happiness almost gave him vertigo; it affected him physically. In the dark he closed his eyes, and when he opened them Jim was driving with one hand and gazing silently at the black turnpike ahead.

Zach was the one who opened the door. He said in his deep voice, “Uncle Bob, you’ve come back.” His arms made a gesture forward, then returned to his sides. Bob pulled his nephew to him, feeling the boy’s skinniness, and also the surprising body warmth of him. “Great to see you, Zachary Olson. May I present the honorable Uncle Jim.”

Zach did not move to Jim. He looked at him with his deep brown eyes and said softly, “I’ve really messed up.”

“Who doesn’t mess up? You tell me who doesn’t mess up,” Jim said. “Nice to see you.” He clapped the boy on his back.

Zach said, “You don’t.” He said this earnestly.

“True,” said Jim. “Very true. Susan, can you turn the heat up? Just for one hour.”

“That’s the first thing you have to say?” Susan asked, but there was an almost-jokiness to her voice, and she and Jim hugged lightly by leaning their shoulders forward. To Bob she nodded, and he nodded back.

And then they sat, the four of them in Susan’s kitchen, eating macaroni and cheese. Bob kept telling Susan it was delicious, helping himself to more. Keenly he felt the need for a drink and pictured the bottle of wine he had packed in his duffel bag, which remained in the car. He said, “So, Zach, you’re staying with us at the hotel tonight. You’ll stay there tomorrow while we’re at the demonstration.”

Zach looked at his mother, and she nodded. “I’ve never stayed in a hotel,” he said.

“Yes, you have,” said Susan. “You just don’t remember.”

“We’ve got adjoining rooms,” Bob said. “You’ll stay in mine and we can watch TV all night if you want. Your Uncle Jim needs his beauty sleep.”

“This is good, Susan.” Jim pushed back his plate. “Excellent.” They were polite, these three siblings who had not eaten together since their mother died. The air was pregnant with it, though, the waiting.

“The weather’s supposed to be good tomorrow. I was hoping it would pour,” Susan said.

“Me too,” Jim said.

“When was I in a hotel?” Zachary asked.