The Funnies (35 page)

It was well after dark when Pierce got home. I heard the car pull in, then his footsteps across the driveway gravel and the grass. The studio door was wide open, but he knocked on it as if it were shut. “Tim?”

“Hey,” I said, looking up. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the middle distance, a sign I was too tired to be working.

He stepped in. He was dressed in a T-shirt of mine and a pair of shorts cut off from our father's pants, and he hugged himself against the cool of the night. “I'm back.”

“No kidding?”

He smiled. “Huh huh huh.”

“How's the lady?”

“Gilly's cool. We picked cranberries. She's a real green thumb.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“Tim,” he said. “I was wondering if, if you thought about what I suggested. About Mom.”

I put my pen down. “Actually, yes. Actually I went to New York and talked to Rose about it.”

He flinched as if I'd taken a swing at him. “You talked to Rose?”

“I think she thinks it's the way to go. I tried to convince her to come down a day a week. To help.”

He snorted. “Yeah. Right. She won't get near me.”

“I don't know that I understand that.”

“She doesn't like thinking other people's problems are as bad as hers.” He looked out the door now, as if the answer to this riddle was hiding in the yard somewhere. It reminded me strongly of Rose, the way she was looking out the window when I left her.

“I think it's a go,” I said. “I think we should bring her home.”

“You do?” His eyes were pleading, as if he thought I might still change my mind.

“Yeah. We'll manage.”

I could see the relief washing over him. He passed a hand over his face. “Oh, man, yeah. Yeah, we'll manage okay.” He shook his head. “I really miss her, man.”

“You know she'll probably never come back, I mean all the way back.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “She'll know she's home.”

* * *

But it was not as easy as we thought. We had expected to walk in there and roll her out in a wheelchair. A few phone calls proved this impracticable, if not impossible: the fund my father had established to provide for her was difficult to crack. Pierce called Uncle Mal and told him what we wanted, and he said he would get on it. “He's really glad,” Pierce told me. “He thinks we're doing the right thing.”

Meanwhile, my mother herself grew blurrier and more confused, though her physical health remained stable. I began visiting her more often, trying to get used to the idea of having her around, but it was hard; like a baby, she had difficulty making her needs known, and the subtleties of expression left in place of her voice were beyond me. Several times during the next week, a nurse scolded me for not noticing when she was thirsty or had to be brought to the bathroom, and I was consumed with shame.

The nurses didn't want us to take her away. They seemed to consider our ineptitude a sign of carelessness, and our plan to bring her home a selfish scheme to alleviate our own guilt. None of this was spoken. Maybe it was all in my frenzied imagination. But it was on my mind, and it gave me a lot of food for thought when I noticed what could have been a glimmer of recognition in her eyes, or a sensible sentence that may or may not have been directed at me. I brought Susan in twice. The first time, my mother cooed and fussed over her as if she were a newborn, much to Susan's embarrassment. The second time she cursed at her like a shock jock. We didn't talk so much, Susan and I, about these visits or about how they played into our relationship. It seemed too soon. Susan did get along well with Pierce, though, and one Saturday morning in Mixville the two of them woke before me and made a stack of pancakes together. I was astonished. Pierce didn't even like conversations with other people, let alone complex activities like cooking.

For what it was worth, I felt increasingly like Susan was someone I could be with, even as my doubts about myself were escalating. I held myself back from her, and sensing this, she did the same. What were my motives, with my mother, with Susan, with the Family Funnies? Why was I doing what I was doing? These were the things I overworked myself in order not to think about, in order not to talk to Susan about. I realized this was a stopgap measure, and that something would have to give, but I didn't know which something, and when it would give. So I drew, and waited.

The Monday night before I was to meet with Ray Burn, Pierce and I drove down to Trenton to meet with Mal about Mom's move. I was not thinking about our mother, only about reworking several cartoons after the meeting, and I found myself uncharacteristically silent for the entire trip. We bought sandwiches at a deli downtown and brought one to Mal, and we ate at the same boardroom table where our father's will was read. Mal looked sloppy and haggard, and I wondered about his private life, if he had lady friends or friends of any kind. He had never married.

Pierce was picking up the slack for me, throwing himself into these meetings like his life depended on it, and before his sandwich was even gone he convinced Mal to get out his papers and begin going over our options. The two of them bent over the documents, nodding, speaking in low tones as if I were asleep and they didn't want to wake me.

It was then that I noticed, from across the table, the similar way their ears stuck out, pointed at the back and strangely facile, like a cat's. I remembered watching Pierce wiggle his ears when we were kids, and being frustrated with myself because I couldn't do it. And their thin heads of hair: Mal's yellow-white at the roots, more brittle-looking, but both whorled off at the right, around a little bald spot. For almost a full minute I looked at this curious symmetry without judgment, contemplating it as I might a yin-yang or a Rorschach blot, and then I remembered Rose's cryptic pronouncements and the pieces fell into place. I must have made a sound because both of them looked up.

“Tim?” Mal said. “What is it?”

I swallowed the bite of sandwich that had been sitting, half-chewed, in my mouth the whole time. “Nothing,” I said.

* * *

We were halfway home in the car when I said, “He's your father, isn't he.”

Pierce didn't turn to me. After a while he said, “I've always wondered if you knew and just never said anything.”

“I just figured it out.”

“Just now?”

I nodded. “You have the same ears. And something Rose said. I didn't know what she was talking about at the time.”

“Well, now you know.” He sounded angry.

“Have you always known?”

“No. Mom told me when I was something like ten. She was drunk.” He leaned against the passenger window, and it fogged up where his breath met it. “I don't know why she told me. Mad at Dad, I guess.”

I considered this, and his plan for bringing her home, and marveled for a moment at the power of his forgiveness, the way it sustained him. I said, “Does Mal know you know?”

“Yeah.”

Trying to reassemble our childhood from this new perspective would be futile, like unlearning a language. I gave up before I even started. “I suppose I'm the last one to find out.”

“Rose says she knew when I was born, and suspected it even before. I told Bitty. I don't think Bobby knows. He wouldn't want to, anyway.” I signaled and turned onto Route 29. “I don't suppose you'll be hating me too, now, will you?” He said this with studied nonchalance, as if he'd been practicing it for years, but I could tell he was truly scared.

I said, “Of course not.”

“Rose hates me, you know that. And Bitty…”

“Bitty doesn't hate you,” I said.

“She doesn't think she does,” he said. “But she does. She hasn't said boo to me since I told her. I remember we were sitting in my bedroom and I told her, and she walked out. I thought she'd tell Dad I knew, but she didn't. She just stopped…sistering.”

“I don't think Bitty or Rose hates you. Especially Bitty.”

“With all due respect, Tim, I don't think you actually know.”

“I'm sorry,” I said after a while.

“Me too.”

Getting home was like coming to an entirely new house. I saw my father, in an inkstained oxford shirt, cracking his knuckles at dinner, offering Uncle Mal another helping. I saw Pierce opening the gifts Mal gave him, always better than the ones he gave the rest of us. I saw my mother hugging Mal at the door. All of it brand new.

“I should go to the studio,” I said.

Pierce's lips pressed themselves together. “I should go in the house.”

I opened my arms and he stepped into them, and we held each other there in the driveway. He pulled away, crying. “It would have been better if it was Mal,” he said. “With us.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Pierce shook his head. “Definitely.” And he went inside.

I couldn't decide what to wear to my meeting with Ray Burn. It was Wednesday morning, and I had canceled my cartooning class with Wurster, in exchange for a promise to draw all day when I got back from New York. I didn't tell him that Susan had gotten the afternoon off, faking a chronic illness and its attendant doctor's visit, and that we planned to spend the day together.

Considering my previous wrangles with discipline, I went out to the studio every afternoon with surprising ease. I'd had to drag myself to work in the old days. It wasn't that I was having more fun (though I'll admit there is greater satisfaction in drawing competently than in drawing badly); it was simply that the more work I did, the more I wanted to do. I was turning into a junkie.

Part of my high, of course, was a boost in self-regard: I was beginning, at last, to feel like a cartoonist. Cartooning was making me into a visual thinker, my drawing into a sort of emotive shorthand. I was developing a taste for the self-contained. Oddly, this change didn't seem to come entirely from my lessons with Wurster or the cartoons I studied: it was more like these things helped to uncover what was already true, but hidden, about my artistic sensibilities. I was establishing an aesthetic, something I'd never had before, even when I was trying to be an artist.

All the same, I bristled at the boundaries of my one square Family Funnies panel, and even more at the raw materials available to me inside it: not my family, not even anything remotely close to me, but a coterie of cutout shills employed to deliver flimsy one-liners. I'd been trying to think of the strip as a kind of self-limitation, like a fugue or a sonnet, but even Beethoven or Keats could not have made art out of the Family Funnies.

The irony was all too obvious: not until I had given up art for a career in schlock did I begin to feel like an artist.

My one white oxford shirt had an ink stain on the right arm, but I decided I could wear my blue blazer on top, and avoid taking it off during the interview. I put on a pair of khaki pants and polished some old wing tips I'd salvaged from my father's closet before the big clean-out.

“Looking good,” Pierce told me when I came out to the kitchen. He was leaning over the coffee maker, watching fresh coffee drip into the pot. Over the past week he'd been much less gloomy than usual, and often was up and out of his room before I left the house. He had a jittery, anticipatory air about him, as if there was something up his sleeve. I let his statement take a few turns around my head, ran it through the sarcasm detector.

“Really?” I said.

He stood up. “Well, for you.”

“Hmm. What are you up to today?”

He shrugged. “Not much,” he said, but went on to explain that Mal was picking him up over his lunch hour, and the two of them were going to go see Mom. I was having some trouble getting used to the new genetic circumstances. Knowing now what had been hidden in plain sight for so long, I could see how Rose might stretch her already-strong biases against Pierce into a tacit exclusion of him from the family. But still I looked at Pierce and saw, at first impression, not a piece of Mal or a piece of my mother but a piece of myself. “We're going to try and get her used to the idea of coming here. You know, talk about the neighborhood and the house and all.”

“Do you think it's going to get through?”

He shrugged. “I dunno,” he said, and I could see that the question offended him more than a little.

I gassed up the Caddy and stopped at the Jersey Devil, a coffee shop and bakery in Titusville. It was a little out of the way, but I had a theory: I figured if I drank coffee in the car and had a pastry to soak some of it up, I wouldn't have to pee until I was well into the Burn Syndicate's building on West 57th. And I needed some kind of distraction on the way to the city, a drive of geometrically increasing intensity that began with shaded country roads and derelict barns and ended with traffic jams and squeegee men.

The shop was mostly empty. A grizzled maniac type hunkered over a steaming cup at the only occupied table, and a pretty girl in denim overalls was talking to the clerk. The clerk looked familiar. He had small round glasses, a fluffy head of curly hair and a large, assertive goatee. He was also dusted with flour. It took a moment, but it came to me: without the flour, he looked just like Leon Trotsky. The girl was saying, in a seductive, sugary voice, “I'm really looking forward to reading your manifesto.”

“Helpya?” he asked me brightly. The girl turned and offered a vacant, half-lidded smile, and I felt like I'd just interrupted a sexual act.

I ordered and he gave me my food in a paper sack before turning back to the girl. I had to pull myself out the door, so desperately did I want to stay and hang out with these kids. I was halfway to New York before I sorted out this feeling: it was jealousy, the kind I sometimes got when I caught a glimpse of people doing exactly what they wanted.

* * *

The Burn Syndicate occupied the nineteenth floor of a building that, beyond all probability, I had been in before. There was an art gallery on the fourth floor I had once had a piece in. This was probably the high point of my career as an installation artist. The show was called “Garbage, Garbage, Garbage,” and the piece I'd shown was, by necessity, only a small chunk of a larger work. It consisted of a metal trash can lid with rotten things hanging off the bottom of it, and was called “Detritus, Risen.” The show went on for three days before the gallery was shut down due to fire code violations.