The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (15 page)

One day she brightly approached me there in the pool. “Blake? Could you come here a minute?”

She had a job for me. There was a little sward on the side of the house where Sandra envisaged a brick path. Would I mind building it?—in other words (understood but naturally unspoken): Would I mind getting off my dead ass for once and making a little contribution around here?

Why, not at all!
In
two days
I accomplished the following: filled the bed of a pickup truck with sufficient bricks and concrete to build a twenty-foot brick path as specified, lugged the lot of it around to the side of the house, dug a uniform curving brick-deep ditch (marked off with sticks and string) where indicated, mixed the concrete, laid a three-foot-long pattern of bricks, and presented my work for inspection to Sandra, who (rightly) found it a ghastly botch and advised me to start over with sand rather than concrete; on the second day, then, I broke up the bricks with a sledgehammer, bought many bags of sand (and more bricks), lugged them to the worksite, and started over in a similar, but
much
neater, sand-based pattern. Sandra liked it. Indeed, she was quite pleasantly startled—or rather (human nature being what it is) a bit nettled, perhaps, to find her worst expectations so lavishly disappointed.

But I soon endeavored to make it up to her. For a couple of days I continued work on the path, but less and less, laying a few more feet of bricks that third day, maybe a foot or so the fourth, and finally letting day after day pass without so much as a glance in its direction. It was only July, after all: what was the hurry? I had the summer before me. If I’d continued to work at my initial speed, I would have finished in a week, tops, whereupon Sandra would have doubtless found some other project to keep me occupied and out of her pool, where I seemed determined to languish as a kind of Hogarthian portrait of indolence . . . though I didn’t see it that way. On the contrary! I on my raft, reading a book, was nothing less than an Epicurean ideal—a well-contented mind and body—and it wasn’t
my
fault that Sandra needed to be so
busy busy busy
every single waking moment.

Was it a matter of conscious rebellion on my part? I doubt it. Probably I was just lazy and self-involved and didn’t really see the effect I was having on Sandra, or at any rate thought that if she had a problem with a young man attending to an ambitious reading/tanning program during his summer vacation, well, she needed to get over it. But Sandra took the situation
very
hard, and our relations never quite recovered. One day in mid-August or so, I was sitting in a breakfast nook whose window fronted my abortive brick path, when I noticed Sandra directing her main factotum, an affable Brit named Ivor, to finish the damn thing already. (Ivor had worked at the Oklahoma City Zoo when I was a kid, and he and Marlies were chums; because she loved animals he’d occasionally given her prairie dogs, chinchillas, sparrow hawks, and the like. He was a small pot-bellied man with a ruddy bearded face that hardly ever frowned. Sandra had appropriated him after he was downsized at the zoo and my mother moved away to Norman.) I hurried outside in my bathrobe.

“Wait wait wait—! What’s this?”

“What do you
think
, Blake?” Sandra stood there with her arms tightly folded. She looked at me with a kind of vague, wondering, thin-lipped smile—perhaps her most hostile expression. “How long were you planning to leave this
ditch
in my yard?”

I pointed out that the summer wasn’t over yet, and she told me that either I finish the path—
today
—or Ivor would. The latter stood crouching over the path, hanging fire, sheepishly turning a brick over and over in his hands.

I took the brick out of Ivor’s hands and got to work, and I suppose three or four hours later I was done. Just like that. And it looked nice, too; it’s there to this day. But of course it was too late for that to matter, and I couldn’t help feeling a little rueful about how easy it would have been just to finish the job in a timely manner and remain in Sandra’s good graces. But part of me, plainly, didn’t want that. Part of me was taking a stand. The principle in question went something like this: she could purge me from the family by removing most evidence of my existence from her house, but she could not persuade me that there was anything inherently wrong about spending my summer reading in a pool.

From that day forward, whatever her niceness otherwise, Sandra said terrible things behind my back to whosoever would listen—her children, friends, neighbors, Burck’s law partners, even our longtime maid, Katherine Jones, who doted on me and couldn’t understand why I was determined to cross a nice person like Sandra, who in her best Lady Bountiful fashion had taken her to see
The Color Purple
. Quite simply I combined everything Sandra disliked in a human being, and was a rival for her husband’s affection besides.

Many years later, I observed Sandra at an engagement party for her daughter. She’d run into one of Kelli’s old flames, an amiable jock named Don, who’d gone to fat but was still handsome, still the sort of regular guy who means what he says and says what he means. With him, I noticed, Sandra was perfectly at ease. She laid a hand on his shoulder and they sat chatting for a long time; the change in Sandra was like Amanda Wingfield’s at the end of
The Glass Menagerie
: “Now that we cannot hear [her] speech,” the stage directions read, “her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty.” Watching Sandra with Don, I was sorry I’d been such a disappointment to her; toward them both, indeed, I felt something of Tonio Kröger’s secret love for the “blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace,” and I realized too that I’d never quite be accepted by them, try as I might—terrified the while of washing up with the ugly, the abandoned, the mad of the world . . . bearing in mind that my only brother, after all, was Scott.

I ONLY HAVE
a few fleeting impressions of Scott from the mid-eighties, though we didn’t entirely lose touch. I saw him over the holidays, or got the odd letter. Soon after our fight in the parking lot, he lost his job at the restaurant and couldn’t find another for a long while. The word was out. In the meantime he sponged off our mother and pursued an interest in petty larceny. When hungry he’d sometimes skulk around the suburbs until he found a backyard barbecue in progress; timing, he told me, was everything. He liked his meat at least medium rare, so he’d have to wait three or four minutes after the steaks or chickens or burgers were flipped, before bolting out of nowhere and fleeing with his dinner impaled on a stick. More serious burglaries had an ulterior motive—that is, Scott liked being in other people’s houses: he was curious to see how they lived, what sort of pictures they hung on their walls, what their family photos revealed (was there a daughter?). He’d sneak into a given house around 2:00
A.M.,
and if there weren’t any immediate alarums, he’d often stay most of the night. He also liked stealing from hospitals—pharmaceuticals, of course, but also mundane supplies such as bandages and surgical tubing. Marlies still has a wholesaler’s box of petroleum jelly that he gave her once for her birthday: “This stuff really works,” he remarked, “and keeps forever.” For a while he was able to curb his thievery after he won a $20,000 settlement from a punk rock club, where the bouncer had broken his jaw in what Scott’s lawyer insisted was an act of unwarranted aggression. The money, however, was squandered on vices that left him somewhat worse for wear.

I CAN’T REMEMBER
how I first learned of Scott’s religious conversion, but he’d taken to attending raucous services at the Crossroads Church, a place roughly the size of an NBA basketball arena. Scott liked that sort of thing and saw the humor in it too. Jimmy Swaggart became a great personal hero of his, all the more so when it came to light that the great televangelist liked to beat off in the presence of prostitutes. Aptly, perhaps, the person who turned Scott on to Swaggart, and hence religion, was none other than good old Uncle Ronny, who used to take such a childlike delight in naughty jokes (“There’s no
fuck
in strawberry”). By then many of my mother’s gay crowd were casualties of the AIDS epidemic, and Ronny had accepted God into his heart as a tribute to his own deliverance. Both he and my brother were able to reconcile a heartfelt faith with a lifestyle that remained dubious at best. Swaggart had proven that one could be born again and still stray from the path of righteousness on occasion.

I was relieved to find that Scott seemed, at first, disinclined to proselytize. For a year or so, his only sign of piety was the little cross-and-heart emblem with which he signed letters, always, from that point on. Then one bright chilly day around Christmas we were walking downtown to meet our father for lunch when Scott came to a dramatic stop on the sidewalk and shook me a little too roughly by the shoulders. He was beaming. He said we needed to “save” our father.

“You think he needs saving?” I asked.

“Well
yeah
, Zwieb. Otherwise he’s going to hell.”

I wasn’t offended. I could see Scott was absolutely in earnest, and besides I was finished being offended by him, at least on the subject of our father.

“I have to disagree,” I said. “If there’s a hell, I really doubt Papa is going there. You know? I just can’t picture it.”

“
If
there’s a hell . . . ?”

“Right. If.”

“Aren’t you a Catholic, Zwieb?”

He said this in a puzzled way, with perhaps the vaguest hint of distaste—the distaste of an evangelical Protestant for the Whore of Babylon—but mostly puzzled, since he’d clearly assumed I’d be an ally in this respect. Alas, my brief dabbling in religion was a thing of the past, and I told him so. Scott looked a little hurt, a little worried for me.

“Why?”

The answer, I suppose, was that my “faith” had been a pretty empty business to begin with, little more than a half-baked juvenile idealism that had lapsed for good my junior year in college, assisted by a girlfriend who preferred to stay in bed and have sex on Sunday mornings.

“It just, I don’t know, it passed. I mean, for one thing, the whole idea of
hell
is ridiculous to me. Why would our father, for example, a good man who’s worked hard all his life to support a family”—this a bit pointedly—“go to hell?”

“Because he’s not saved!” Scott said with cheerful conviction.

We debated the point a little further, then abruptly (running late) Scott changed the subject somewhat.

“I think he was pretty shocked to hear about it.”

“Hear about what?”

“My being
saved
. I mean if
I
can be saved,
any
one can!”

“You may have a point there,” I said.

My brother laughed. “Exactly! I think he’s ready to receive Jesus, Zwieb. I think I really made him think about things.”

Scott didn’t mention Jesus during lunch at the Petroleum Club that day except obliquely, when he said a hasty good-bye as we got up to leave. He had to go home and watch Swaggart, he explained, with an anxious glance at his watch.

Later my father and I sat chatting in his office, and I mentioned Scott’s plan to “save” him.

“How do you think you’ll respond to that?” I asked.

My father doffed his glasses and sat rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Like a cobra’s been thrown at my feet,” he said, with a quick wincing grin.

“He thinks you’re pretty ‘shocked’ about the whole thing.”

“No.” He put his glasses back on. “I just assume his life got so bad there was nothing else to cling to.”

AND STILL MY
brother’s life remained bleak in spite of his faith, and once again our family began to dread the sight and sound of him. There was always some petty disaster, some fresh grotesquerie—as when he complained to Sandra of “black shit.” By then she’d taken to screening my father’s calls (including the ones from me, if I made the mistake of calling him at home), and once, in the midst of Scott’s flustered insistence that she let him speak to his “own
father
, goddammit,” he mentioned that his shit was turning black. Poor Sandra hung up in a panic.

Finally he stopped calling. Though Scott would always believe we owed him love and patience no matter what, he must have known he wasn’t wanted, and his pleas for attention only made it worse. For a year or so, all but our mother stopped hearing from him—though she heard plenty: a torrent of grief and grievance that almost drowned her capacity to respond in kind. Whenever possible she’d enlist old friends to bear part of the burden, people who tried to minister to Scott as the darling boy they’d once known—hence a photo of Walid from that desert era: his back to the camera, he stands in my mother’s kitchen and clutches Scott’s hand. The latter looks stricken but receptive. What was Walid saying?

BY MY SENIOR
year at Tulane I was spending less and less time at the fraternity house. I’d come to accept that I didn’t much like the majority of my brethren, and vice versa, and I’d had enough of sitting around the steps sipping beer and talking shit and shouting flirtatious abuse at the passing “talent” en route to the Josephine Louise dormitory on the Newcomb campus across Broadway. Two things occupied the better part of my time: an honors thesis on Walker Percy that I worked at pretty diligently, especially that second semester when deadlines loomed, and a tortured involvement with a quirky, troubled, and quite lovely girlfriend named Kate, from West Virginia, who shared my social exile to some extent. The year before, as a freshman, she’d pledged Pi Beta Phi but failed to make grades, and didn’t really belong there anyway, so now she was all the more dependent on me and the odd boy she’d dally with on the side. We had terrible fights, the like of which I’ve never repeated with anyone. I don’t think I could if I tried. I used it all up—the passion or heat or what you will, the incredulous shock one feels on first learning that others are just as corrupt as oneself. Suffice it to say, Kate and I had some good times too: when she wasn’t screaming at me (after exhaustive provocation) in her Appalachian Betty Boop voice—
“Acehoe!”
(asshole)—she’d watch TV and needlepoint an elaborate SAE fraternity crest, suitable for framing, in a droll attempt to be the kind of girlfriend she thought I wanted (even as I became less and less the person who wanted that sort of thing), or, on weekends, we’d buy magazines and comics and whiskey and spend the night tippling in the big claw-foot tub I had in my Garden District apartment.