The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (2 page)

My grandfather Frank was the local postmaster for twenty-five years. He’d served his country in both world wars, never missed a Rotary Club meeting, and (according to his obituary in the
Vinita Daily Journal
) could “cuss out his best bird dog then pet him as he would a child.” A man’s man, in short. When he first heard that his son had married a German, he was furious:

“I go over there to kill the bastards, and he marries one!”

Marlies was fretful, then, at the prospect of meeting this man for the first time (his remark had reached her somehow), and she asked her husband to suggest some of his favorite foods. But Burck was no help; his family, never mind their cuisine, had apparently made little impression on him, as if he’d grown up in a series of foster homes. So finally she chose something simple but tasty from the
Better Homes and Gardens
cookbook—corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes—and the man’s heart was won. Or so she reductively tells it. The main thing, perhaps, was that Frank enjoyed having a comely young woman in his life, and a refreshingly eccentric one at that: far from scolding him for his drinking, she’d join him on the screened porch and match him snort for snort.

OKLAHOMA CITY WAS
hardly a marvel of cosmopolitanism, though there were bits of wistful striving in that direction. My family moved to a neighborhood called the Village (no “Green”), whose street names—Manchester, Stratford, Sheffield, et al.—evoked the provincial charm of the Mother Country, as did a number of incongruous little motifs like wishing wells, Cotswold roofing, diamond-shaped casement windows, and the like. These seemed the remnant of some romantic, postwar builder, whom I imagine being shoved aside by moneymen who said, “Let’s just get these fuckers
built
.”

To my mother, even the bleakest species of Eisenhower-era, tract-house suburb—and the Village was that—meant comfort and efficiency
tout court
. It didn’t faze her that they could only afford one car, for my father’s use. When she’d go shopping at nearby Casady Square—a jolly promenade, the high point of her day—she’d fill my brother’s stroller with grocery bags until only his stalwart little head stuck out. (Casady Square was a tableau out of Edward Hopper, its ugliness all the more stark in the dusty amber sunlight of Oklahoma: groceries, dry-cleaning, drugs, shoe repair—the bare necessities, as if life were a purely pragmatic interval between birth and eternity.) And her neighbors were so kind! The elderly couple next door gave her a ham on moving day; a minister invited her to join his church. Such decency, she decided, was at least somewhat indigenous to Oklahoma, and partly for that reason she never left.

EVERYTHING WAS BETTER
by the time I came along. Marlies was resigned to motherhood, Burck was making a name for himself in the AG’s office, and Scott seemed to want a little brother. We were a study in contrast. As a baby I rarely cried or fussed, which delighted my mother, who’d kiss the little button between my legs and watch me chortle and kick. But I think she actually preferred my brother: in my normalcy I was a bit insipid; Scott had a peculiar kind of gravitas. Indeed he seems conscious of that quality in all our photos from early childhood, as he stares at his drooling brother with a sort of wise passivity. His face in repose had become solemnly handsome.

My mother finally went back to Germany in 1966, when I was three years old, for her brother Richard’s wedding; she took Scott along and left me in Vinita with Oma (whom we called “Oma from Vinita” to distinguish her from Marlies’s mother, “Oma from Germany”). My father had work to do and stayed in Oklahoma City. He visited every other weekend or so, but it was a three-hour drive to Vinita. Scott and Marlies bonded, abidingly, during that trip abroad. They crossed on the
Nieuw Amsterdam
, and Marlies was laid low by a bad case of strep throat. As she would tell it and tell it over the years, Scott took care of her: he’d sit by her bunk and play with Ralphie or his bear or both, but as soon as she needed something he’d bolt to his feet and get it; other times he’d just watch her with large attentive eyes. My German grandparents were enchanted with him. There’s a photo of the four standing on the gangplank, and Scott seems almost a parody of the well-behaved Little Man—dressed in a navy blazer and clip-on necktie, far too serious to smile; in another gangplank photo he clutches his Teddy as if it were an orphan he’d saved from drowning.

Meanwhile I was an unremitting misery to my grandmother in Vinita, and she emphatically told my mother as much. I’d thrown tantrums and broken some beloved tchotchkes. Evidently I didn’t like being farmed out to Vinita, though of course I can’t remember a thing about it.

I was aware that my parents found Scott more interesting, but it didn’t bother me much. I took the long view, finding insidious ways to assert my own specialness. For one thing I affected to be a great reader and would bother my mother about ordering books from the catalogs we got at school; I loved the way these books smelled when I first cracked them open, but that was about it. My parents hinted, for my pains, that I was the smart one—or maybe that was just a sop they tossed me. My mother simply laughed when I brought
Dead Souls
home from the bookmobile in second grade. In general I was on the lookout for ways to capitalize on my brother’s failings. If he wouldn’t eat a certain food, say, I’d make a point of gorging myself on it. Also I’d use words that I knew would aggravate him: “Don’t quarrel” . . . “I implore you” . . . “How uncouth.”

For the most part, though, I liked my brother and he liked me. As we got older he’d let me play football with him and his friends, a privilege for which I was willing to take any amount of punishment. I cherished their good opinion. “Bronko Nagurski” my brother called me, after the legendary fullback: I’d butt heads with his bigger, helmeted friends and make them cry. I had a very hard head. The downside was that my brother took to proving how tough I was; for years he’d hide behind trees and hedges and hit me out of nowhere with bone-rattling tackles, and I’d just have to take it. I’d hear those last rapid footfalls just before impact—too late.

One day Scott and I were standing in front of the bathroom mirror when he stepped back, sighed, and said, “Don’t you wish you were this handsome?” I considered him there in the mirror. “You
are
better-looking,” I conceded. He was; there was no use denying it. My brother, happy that I knew it too, magnanimously claimed to be joking. I in turn was pleased with my own modesty, and something else: a sense that my brother wouldn’t always be the golden boy. In his preening I detected a little protesting-too-much, an inkling that his luck was running out even then, at least in comparison with his hard-headed brother.

ONE TURNING POINT
was a trip to Germany we took as a family in 1972, when I was nine and my brother twelve. My father chose me to accompany him to Stuttgart, where he wanted to visit his old army base and other haunts. (While at Westminster College in Missouri he’d run out of money and had to enlist for two years.) Marlies, who didn’t want to go to Stuttgart, had urged him to take Scott instead of me; she thought Burck and I were both bumblers and together we’d be doubly so. Scott had been the responsible one ever since that precocious sojourn on the
Nieuw Amsterdam
, and the idea was that my monoglot father would get in some kind of trouble if he traveled without Scott’s assistance. Burck was still in his thirties then, already a top antitrust lawyer in Oklahoma, a formidable man, and thus he decided to take me and to hell with my mother’s advice.

On the train he taught me how to play chess, and later that night our taxi took us to a sinister neighborhood and dropped us at a hotel that turned out to be closed. My father stood pondering the Gothic letters on the locked door—“
Geschlossen
? . . . Oh! Wait!”—but the cab was gone and we couldn’t find another. Four or five trains came and went, my father pounding the door of each, shouting at the passengers inside, but
whoosh whoosh whoosh
. . . until finally he discovered the big metal button one had to push to make the doors spring open. At his army base the next day we were accosted by MPs—the flag was at half-mast, I remember, because Truman had died the day before—and escorted to the CO’s office, where we were reproached for wandering onto the base without clearance. I sat there in my little woolen parka, my feet kicking above the floor, amazed that my father had gotten us in trouble. That night he put me to bed and went out on the town alone. I panicked: I’d had my first-ever cup of coffee with dinner, my heart was pounding, and I was all but certain I’d never see my father again—he’d get lost and disappear, board the wrong train to nowhere, and what would become of me? When he finally returned I burst into tears, and he sat on the bed and hugged me to his chest.

From that point on, I was closer to my father than Scott was, and no doubt about it; we were a comfort to each other, all the more so over time.

FOR A WHILE
my brother seemed to work harder for my parents’ attention. He’d conduct elaborate surveys on random topics—carry a clipboard to the grocery store and jot down, say, tar and nicotine levels of various cigarette brands, though he didn’t smoke and was, if anything, proud of the fact that our mother wolfed her Salems all the way down to the filter. There was also a dog food survey, though I don’t think we had a dog at the time. A given survey would go on for months. When Scott pursued his researches in Vinita (“What kind of cigarette is that?” he’d inquire of some old lady. “Can I see the pack?”), my grandmother would sheepishly joke about it, which did nothing to dampen his weird enthusiasm.

He became extravagantly neat. My mother helped him turn his bedroom into a cool seventies “pad” (think Greg’s attic retreat in
The Brady Bunch
), complete with beaded curtains around the bed and so forth. Scott was so pleased with the effect that he took to sleeping on the floor rather than mussing his beads and remaking the bed.

Objects were arranged around the room with a kind of cryptic symmetry, and if I happened to pick something up and put it down somewhere else he was liable to hit me. His record collection was carefully alphabetized, and I was forbidden to use his turntable because I sometimes forgot to clean his records (or I cleaned them “wrong”) with the plush little tool he placed in plain view for that purpose. He was lavishly fond of a fat white hamster named Algernon, whose Habitrail palace was disassembled each week and scrubbed with Pine-Sol. Scott had human friends too (they also failed to clean his records properly), but he still spent a lot of time alone in his room, his “pad,” communing with Algernon.

One night in the paneled room at Oma’s house he confided that he lived in two separate dimensions. The present one I knew. In the other he had a different and far more appreciative family, and no little brother. He described the whole setup in detail. The main conceit was that this other family was more or less opposite to the one we shared: blond like him (my parents and I were dark-haired), inclined to take him along when they traveled (as opposed to ditching him in Vinita), wholly devoted to him, in fact. He became a bit tearful as he told it, as a sense of what he was missing in the here and now came over him. I started crying a little too. Already I felt as though we were about to say good-bye to each other forever.

Around the age of thirteen he became more and more arrogant. I think it was John Lennon, one of his heroes, who inspired him to flash a two-fingered peace sign (sneering) in almost every photo from that era, and “middle-class” was his favorite epithet—meaning the dull herd, etc.—an anathema he applied to the whole doltish world. His smile was an occasional simper of amused superiority. He was right about everything even when he wasn’t. Once he corrected my use of the word “haberdasher”—he said it was a place to buy hats. I replied that one could get more than hats at a haberdasher, and the dictionary seemed to bear me out on that. My brother called the dictionary “a piece of shit” (his language was foul and getting fouler, another aspect of his rebellious persona), then slunk off to his room and slammed the door. One day he grabbed me by my shirtfront and yanked me into a punch that left half my face bruised and swollen. He’d always pushed me around a lot and blindsided me with those tackles out of nowhere, but this was different, and Burck was furious. Though he rarely spanked us, he gave my brother a smart lash with his belt, then let me decide whether Scott should get more of the same. I shook my head, but I had to think about it first.

Even as a boy I knew Scott’s arrogance was pathetic, and in a secret way I was the more arrogant one, because I really believed in my essential superiority (at least where Scott was concerned). And lest there be any doubt, my father had pretty much told me so, though I wonder if that’s what he intended at the time. During our frequent chess games I’d mention all the vicious things Scott had said about me and done to me, until one night my father remarked, “He’s just jealous,” and went on to say some nice things about my intellect and the like. Again, this was probably just a sop, though I was glad to have it. I could hardly wait to throw it in my brother’s face.

I didn’t wait long.

The year before, we’d moved to the country near the town of Edmond, about a half-hour drive via the expressway from downtown Oklahoma City. Burck had received his first six-figure fee after he’d successfully prosecuted an asphalt price-fixing cabal in a widely publicized trial. (Noting that my young father had opposed a team of wily, more experienced lawyers, the
Daily Oklahoman
called it a “David and Goliath” story: “But in the end people might have wondered: Who was David and who was Goliath?”) Because of her lifelong love of Karl May, the fanciful German chronicler of the American West (Old Shatterhand et al.), Marlies had wanted a place in the country where she could keep Arabian horses and immerse herself in animal husbandry and whatnot. Thus my father bought eight acres of land in one of several rustic subdivisions north of the city, Deer Creek Estates, and built one of those blocky “modern” monstrosities that were all the rage in the seventies but still pretty daring in Deer Creek: a white-brick two-story with chocolate-colored trim, three balconies, a high slanted roof on one end, and a lot of shag carpeting and Peter Max wallpaper on the inside. My parents were enormously proud of the place, and why not? Just over a decade had passed since Hayden Hall.