The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (27 page)

“. . . and your father had left for the day, or maybe he was out with the horses? I don’t know. Anyway he wasn’t around. So we were here in the kitchen, Scott and me, and I think maybe I’d packed him a lunch for the road—maybe that was it: I’d packed him lunch! Anyway he wanted to thank me for the lunch. I don’t know. Anyway you guys: he took my face in his hands and he
kissed
me.”

She stared at the memory, freshly aghast.

Poor Scott. Briefly, briefly, as a boy on the verge of manhood, he’d been so handsome and promising that the sequel must have seemed a dream; behind the acne and brain damage and bewildering alienation, he was a golden boy still. Probably he thought he’d given his poor old stepmom the thrill of her life. One thing was certain: at that moment he’d loved her and was sorry for ever thinking ill of her—she’d packed his lunch!—and wanted to convey this in some meaningful way. Probably, too, he was drunk and/or high.

As Scott’s only brother—a person who shared his sense of humor and some of his darker tendencies too—I considered explaining as much to Sandra, for what it was worth. Instead I said, “Welcome to the club.”

“. . . No!”

I nodded. “Tongue and all.”

Sandra and Mary were speechless, but Kelli only wagged her head and looked more worldly than ever.

“Scott’s not going to make it in this life,” she sighed. But she was smiling too. The implication was that perhaps he’d fare better in the
next
life. At the time, oddly enough, it was a comforting and not implausible thought.

I LISTENED GRUDGINGLY
whenever my mother shared news of Scott. Her obsession with the subject was exasperating. She missed Scott and wanted to talk about him, simple as that—to speculate about his motives, to retrace our steps to the exact point when everything went blooey.

At the time his life was either picaresque or tragic, depending on how you look at it. After that last Christmas en famille, Scott got out of jail with the help of an old gay friend of my mother, Roger, the man who used to tell me about his 160 IQ. Roger was now a lonely sexagenarian living in Hawaii (where he and Scott had renewed their acquaintance while Scott was in the marines). As a purely philanthropic gesture—so my mother was given to understand—Roger flew my brother to the islands and gave him a place to stay.

“Isn’t that great?” said my mother. “He’s thousands of miles away! And he
loves
Hawaii! Maybe he’ll . . .”

I guess it was maybe three weeks later that Scott beat the shit out of poor old Roger, who’d made the mistake of insisting that Scott not drink another beer, since they’d agreed to hold the line at a six-pack a day or something. But one night Scott took a seventh or eighth or twentieth out of the fridge; Roger picked up the phone and threatened to call the cops, whereupon Scott wrested the phone away and used it to cudgel his benefactor senseless.

Scott was homeless after that, but the Hawaiian climate was gentle and for a while he did all right. He slept in parks and churches, ate at shelters, and used his VA pension for liquor and drugs. I suspect he stole quite a lot too, and then Marlies would send him a little something from time to time, whenever Scott would call her to announce he was ready to turn over a new leaf.

“He’s taking classes,” she told me one night. “Isn’t that great? He’s enrolled at the University of Hawaii!”

Toward the end of her life, Oma from Vinita was cheerfully senile, and would go on and on about all the wonderful things she’d done in her ninety-plus years. For example, she was under the impression that she’d ridden with Bob Hope (or Elizabeth Taylor or Marlon Brando) in a hot-air balloon over the Atlantic. Why not? “Wow,” I’d say, patting her desiccated hand, “you’ve had an incredible life, Oma.” But I rather doubt that Oma, even there at the end, would have believed that Scott was enrolled at the University of Hawaii.

“Scott’s not enrolled at the University of Hawaii,” I said. “Scott will
never
be enrolled at the University of Hawaii.”

Pause. “How do you know?” my mother asked, with genuine curiosity, as if I were privy to some special intelligence.

I didn’t know what to say. I’d said it all a thousand, thousand times. One tried to be kind. “Mom, just call the registrar’s office. They’ll tell you. Or don’t. It doesn’t really matter, I guess.”

“But how do you
know
. . . ?”

For the next few weeks I considered calling the University of Hawaii myself and putting the matter triumphantly to rest, but then I forgot about it, and finally Scott spared us any further curiosity by getting arrested and going back to prison. He assured my mother it was a travesty of justice and asked her to contact the ACLU on his behalf.

A YEAR AFTER
Scott’s arrest, I was married in Scotland—the Isle of Mull, to be exact, populated almost entirely by sheep, whose company we preferred for that sort of thing. Mary looked lovely as we took our vows; there were rose petals on the coverlet back at our seventeenth-century inn amid the heathery hills of Dervaig. After a week of blessed isolation, we met my father and Sandra in London, where as luck would have it an International Bar Association conference was in progress. There were a few awkward moments—Sandra felt strongly that my wife should
not
have kept her name—but the worst seemed behind us.

So we went home and pleasantly took up our lives. I resumed trying to write, and my wife entered a prestigious doctoral program. We began to talk about kids. When, rarely, a cloud scudded into my purview, I had only to remind myself that Scott was in prison and the sun would shine again, more or less.

THEN SUDDENLY
(though in fact three years had passed) he wasn’t. During an otherwise happy Christmas, my mother was contacted by a shyster Scott had hired. The man could get Scott out of prison, he explained, if we could arrange for him to leave Hawaii. Scott, of course, was eager to come home again.

“Well, that’s easy,” I told my mother. “Just don’t pay for his plane ticket.”

“But it’s his money!” she said. “How do you think he hired the lawyer?”

As it happened Scott’s financial affairs were in good order, thanks to Marlies, who’d arranged for his monthly VA checks to be deposited into a high-interest savings account. Quite a bundle had piled up over the years, and what could my mother do now but fork it over? We quarreled hideously about it, and I invoked my old threat to wash my hands of them both. My mother’s position, as ever, was that
somebody
had to help Scott or he’d lose hope altogether. My position was that losing hope was
good
in Scott’s case; losing hope was
sensible
. But Marlies saw herself as the last buffer between a hopeless, desperate, possibly homicidal Scott and the rest of us—me, Mary, Burck, even Sandra. At length she confided that, indeed, Scott had often indulged in reveries of harming us: we’d betrayed and abandoned him, after all, and besides we were nonbelievers—his was the Sword of Righteousness and so forth.

“Why don’t you notify the fucking authorities?” I asked her. “Call the warden in Hawaii and
say
he’s making these threats, for Christ’s sake! We don’t need
you
as a buffer! We need iron bars! We need the Pacific Ocean!”

But we needn’t have worried. The Scott who left prison in January 2003 was pretty much incapable of harming anyone but himself, and this he did promptly. The day after his release he fell from a third-floor storage compartment, bouncing off another compartment on his way down and, flailing to halt his fall, ripping large strips of skin off both arms. I daresay the process of sifting those pathetic belongings of his—the mad clothing, old magazines, dead letters, hospital supplies, crates of dusty audiotapes and whatnot—had been a melancholy business, and doubtless he’d gotten plastered in the process. Hence the fall.

In Oklahoma City, bandaged like a mummy, he took a room at a motel in a seedy patch of neighborhood off Classen Circle:
19 DOLLARS A DAY
, said the sign outside.
W
EE
KLY RATES AVAILABLE
. Our dear old high school was visible in the distance, like Gray’s Eton where ignorance is bliss. Here he spent almost ten thousand dollars in less than a month. His girlfriend Maryam called my mother and blubbered in that nebulous accent of hers, “He is smoking the
crack
all the time! He is trying to get
me
to smoke the crack!” Scott had apparently managed to segregate his crack-and-hustling life from his church-and-Maryam life over the years, but now the two blurred, and it must have been disconcerting for all concerned. At the motel Maryam found Scott with all sorts of derelict characters; Scott showed up for Sunday services at the Crossroads in a state of nattering lunacy. When, however, my mother arranged to meet Scott for lunch, she stopped by his motel room and saw nothing amiss but a few chaste beers on ice in the bathroom sink. Scott looked a bit gray in the face, a bit banged up, but otherwise seemed in decent fettle.

“Oh, that goddamn Maryam,” she told me afterward. “Scott’s fine! Well, not
fine
, but I’ve seen him worse.”

A week or so later Scott called her to say he was broke, utterly broke. “I don’t know,” he said over and over, in the same woebegone way he’d told my father, twenty-five years before, that he’d dropped out of NYU after less than a single semester. “I don’t know, Ma.” He wanted to live with her again. Turn over a new leaf. When she refused, he sighed but offered little argument; in that case, he said, he wanted to come over and pick up his stereo, his last valuable possession, which he’d left behind that day the cops had removed him from the premises. Marlies forbade him to come anywhere near her house, but arranged for her ex-boyfriend Dave to bring it to Scott’s motel.

“What did he look like?” I asked Dave a few months later.

Dave groped for words. He’d always been fond of Scott and vice versa. Finally he just shook his head and said, “I left there feeling very fortunate.”

Scott had decided to become a preacher. For those who wonder where preachers come from, it might be interesting to know that there are actually training camps where one spends a month or so studying the Bible, practicing declamatory gestures, and perhaps learning a few financial rudiments—or so I imagine. Whatever the case, one emerges with a diploma, an official man of the cloth, all for a fee of five hundred dollars. Such anyway was the camp Scott planned to attend—and so far so good: he got almost eight hundred dollars for his elaborate stereo system and called our mother in a jubilant mood. He’d report to camp on Friday, he said, and within a month he’d be a bona fide fisher of men. Already he deplored the sinner he’d been in days gone by, to say nothing of his atheist mother and his whole atheist family—bound for the pit.

By Friday his money was gone. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he told Maryam, begging her to buy him a bottle of gin and take him to a movie, any movie, anything to get outside of himself. She did as he asked; it would have been cruel to refuse; besides, she loved him. In the movie theater Scott drank the whole bottle of gin and commenced a kind of weepy muttering, so that people around him changed their seats or left the show altogether. A total stranger could see that Scott was drowning, drowned.

On Saturday, a day late, Maryam dropped him off at preacher camp. She’d decided to loan him the five hundred dollars; she prayed God would intervene and make Scott a preacher after all—then, perhaps, they could be married. On Monday he was either asked to leave or took it upon himself to abscond with Maryam’s money. Anyway, he disappeared for a bit.

I got the news from Marlies, who blustered against that
worthless miserable sonofabitch
and vowed never to trust him again. A few days later Burck called: “Any news of your brother?” he asked, with the usual wincing hesitation, and I told him the whole story—the preacher camp, the hocked stereo, the gin bottle, on and on. I told it for laughs, but my father didn’t laugh: Scott had yet to become a remote figure of fun in his eyes. When I mentioned the part about the moviegoers recoiling from poor old boozy Scott, my father seemed to stifle a gasp, as if he’d been knifed.

Scott resurfaced on Valentine’s Day, when he gave our mother a call. The moment she heard his voice she let loose a typhoon of abuse, until finally, her anathemas exhausted, she waited for the usual ingenious rebuttal. But there was none. Silence.

“. . . Scott? You there?”

He breathed. He was there.

At last she said, “Well, anyway, it’s Valentine’s Day. C’mon, I’ll take you to lunch.”

They met on a street corner near a place where my mother liked to get dim sum. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but Scott was homeless again and wearing what remained of his wardrobe in layers. This created an impression of bulk. Once they sat in a booth, though, my mother got a good look at her son, or what was left of him—the bony face that even she could no longer wish back to health. Its sallowness bespoke a failing liver, and the eyes leaked weary tears, one after the other, catching in a grayish beard and plopping wearily, at length, onto his plate. One after the other. Scott pushed his food around and wept.

For once my mother was at a loss. “Scott,” she said, “you need
help
.”

He nodded, then buried his face in a napkin and tried to pull himself together. He let out a shuddery sigh
—shew-ew-ew
—blew his nose into the napkin, and said, hardly a whisper, “I know, Ma.”

She offered to take him to a hospital, but he only shook his head. After a dull pause, again and again, she’d repeat some variation of the remark “You need
help
” and Scott would wispily agree. The upshot of the lunch was that she found him an apartment and paid the first month’s rent.

That afternoon she called me.

“He needs money!” she said. “He needs to eat! He’s dying! He can’t pay the heating bill!”

On and on. I listened, amazed. “Where will this end?” I asked her.

“I don’t
know
! We can’t just let him
die
!”

But I detected, or thought I detected, a very faint inquisitive turn at the end of that statement—as in: “or can we?”—as though she were seeking permission or at least canvassing my viewpoint.