The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (28 page)

“Let him go,” I told her. “Let him go, Mom.”

But she couldn’t. “I can’t! Call your father!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what to do!”

And she burst into tears. So I called my father and explained this latest development. As he got older my father very rarely lost his temper, but a catharsis was long overdue where Scott was concerned.

“He’s forty-two years old! Tell him to walk off a tall building!”

I agreed, but pointed out that I lacked the moral authority or whatever to make my mother see it that way. Would he try? Burck sighed, calmed down: he would try. What was left of his love for my mother was little more than a rueful pang, but the very idea of this idle sickly wretch—his
son
—glomming onto an old woman was disgusting. It was disgusting.

SCOTT MUST HAVE
agreed, since he dropped out of sight again. He also seemed to agree with the whole tall-building motif. Around this time he took an elevator to the top of Fifty Penn Place—a sentimental journey of sorts, as this was the building where he used to dangle from the horizontal flagpole—only to find the rooftop door was locked nowadays, possibly because of his own antics twenty years before. I heard about this later from Scott’s friend Thomas, the musician/waiter, who’d since moved away from the city (leaving Scott all the more desolate). One day Scott had called Thomas and mentioned the fact that he was trying to kill himself but being thwarted by stupid shit like locked doors.

“Fifty Penn Place isn’t the only tall building in Oklahoma City,” Thomas pointed out.

“Yeah, but it’s the only one
nearby
,” said Scott. “I’d have to take a bus downtown, you know? Pay a buck. Fuck that.”

Surely such acedia was a matter of comic hyperbole. Thomas laughed. Scott laughed. It was a fun conversation. At one point Scott said something like “I’m a double felon and my fucking back hurts all the time. I look like shit. I’m totally unemployable. Nobody wants to see me anymore. What would you do if you were me, Thomas?”

“Talk about a rhetorical question!” his friend laughed. Then he hastened to add that he was
joking
, of course, and urged Scott to seek help at the VA.

Scott did not seek help, until one night he was arrested again. My mother called the station and learned he was charged with breaking and entering; also he’d spat on the arresting officers and gotten a good beating in the bargain.

SCOTT WENT OUT
with a certain bravado. The chastened ghost who’d pushed bits of dim sum around his plate on Valentine’s Day was, during the last weeks of his life, nowhere in evidence. As always my mother kept tabs on him at the county jail—a ghastly place—where he was, by all accounts, a real live wire: he talked back to guards and prisoners alike, was roundly pummeled, and finally was placed in solitary for his own safety.

To the end my mother believed that if only Scott could stop drinking and drugging, he’d become a productive citizen. She always made a point of saying so when she spoke to him on the phone.

“There’s nothing wrong with
me
,” Scott would reply, and one night he told her to go fetch a pen. Sulkily he began dictating a suicide note. The tender bits were all for Maryam; what he had to say to us, Burck and me, was loving but defiant: “I miss your pagan asses.”

“So I’m going to hell,” I said, when my mother told me as much. “Does this mean he’s finally going to kill himself, or what?”

My mother deplored my flippancy—
“Nuh!”
—adding that the note had actually been dictated a week or so earlier and Scott was still alive as far as she knew. So perhaps he’d changed his mind.

He hadn’t changed his mind. In fact he was waiting for an apt occasion—Good Friday, as it happened, though I’m not sure whether Scott identified more with the martyred Christ or the “good thief” Dismas (“today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”). In any case, just before midnight, he made a slipknot out of his sheets and strangled himself in bed. Efforts to revive him were unavailing.

MARLIES LIKES TO
tell of how she got the news that night, as it appeals to her love of both the macabre and the scatological. She’d just woken up with terrible stomach cramps when the phone rang. She knew it was bad news; she knew it had something to do with Scott; but such was the urgency of her condition that she had to grab the cordless with one hand, staggering, and fumble at her panties with the other. She’d just exploded on the toilet when the chaplain said, “I’m afraid I have bad news, Mrs.—”

“And I think he must have
heard
something,” said my mother, “since he sort of hesitated, you know? Then he asked me to pray with him. He asked me to get down on my knees. So I said ‘Okay, go ahead,’ and the whole time I was straining at stool.”

Then she bursts out cackling, beet red in the face, subsiding at last with a pensive sigh. “Ah God,” she says, dabbing an eye. “Poor Scott.”

I didn’t get the news until the next afternoon—this from my kindly aunt Kay. The phone rang, and I let the machine get it. “I was just calling to say how sorry I am about Scott,” she said, and I picked up the receiver.

“What about Scott?” I asked, though I knew then and there he was dead.

“You haven’t heard?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well. I’m terribly sorry, sweetie. He, well, he killed himself last night.”

“He did? How?”

She told me. At the time everyone thought he’d hanged himself; it was only later, after my mother had gotten the autopsy report, that we learned the actual details. But at the moment I pictured Scott dangling in his cell (when in fact he’d been recumbent), and while the image had pathos, I wasn’t quite moved to tears by it. My tenderhearted aunt, though, had begun to sniffle—she hadn’t expected to be the one to break the news—and by pausing a lot and sort of groping for words, I was able to convey a semblance of devastation.

After that I called my mother. At the moment she was sitting on the porch with Burck; Sandra had brought him over and left the two alone so they could commiserate about their dead son. Burck sounded composed in a sort of gloomy, irascible way. On the one hand, I think, he wanted to succumb to a seemly grief, while at the same time he was damned if he’d embarrass himself over someone like Scott. I felt rather the same way—if less so—and our talk was awkward and brief.

My wife wouldn’t be home for a few hours, and I didn’t see any reason to spoil the rest of her day. I went about my afternoon as usual. I took the dog for a walk and tried to think about Scott, but I could only conceive of his suffering in the abstract: he must have felt ill, of course, smothered in aches and pains, and utterly alone in the world (except for Jesus and Maryam); meanwhile his depression would have been worsened by withdrawal from drugs and alcohol. It must have been pretty awful, I thought, but that’s about as far as I got.

Later I sat in my study looking through an old photo album. There we were as children, Scott a bit more handsome than I and well aware of it. Again I noticed the complacence with which he regards me in these photos, as though he’d pegged me as a good enough egg but not really to his taste, and certainly not a threat. And I, sitting there at my desk, viewed the comely juvenile Scott with like detachment; the sad part was that I didn’t remember him very well. He’d been eclipsed by the later version.

I was still sitting there when Mary came in to kiss me, and by way of explaining the photo album I said, “My brother hanged himself in jail last night.” I’d always been dismissive of the whole subject, and I’d meant to make this a rather casual, even callous announcement. But instead I began sobbing and couldn’t stop—as if my wife’s decency had infected me and suddenly I felt the force of Scott’s suffering in this world. Or maybe it was just hearing myself say those terrible words.

The rest of the night I lay on a couch sniffling and sipping gin. I was aware of my wife in the other room, hearing me sniffle and feeling sorry for me, which made me feel all the more sorry for myself but a little disgusted too. It occurred to me that I was thinking more about how sad I seemed than about Scott, who at his best would have laughed at that, or maybe not.

SCOTT WAS CREMATED,
and a couple of months later my mother held a funeral of sorts in the pet cemetery behind her house. We had discussed, the night before, how things should proceed. My mother wanted me to read Prospero’s speech from
The Tempest
(“Our revels now are ended”), but I thought it a hackneyed idea and even in doubtful taste, given the debased nature of Scott’s revels. Instead I wanted to read Rupert Brooke’s “Clouds,” which was elegiac without relating to anything too specific Scott-wise. I read it aloud, and Marlies let it pass. She insisted I also read I Corinthians 13, since Scott himself had requested that passage for his obsequies, the better to chide us from beyond the grave for lacking
charity
—which, as St. Paul would have it, “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “We didn’t ‘endureth’ every bit of his bullshit so now he’s
dead
, is that it?”

“This is Scott’s funeral,” said my mother. “I think his voice should be heard.”

So finally I agreed to read it, as long as I got to keep my Rupert Brooke poem. That night my mother also showed me the various funeral accoutrements: the wooden urn that Dave had lovingly carved and polished, Scott’s ashes inside (a lot of gravelly bone meal for the most part); the airbrushed portrait of Scott as a sternly handsome marine (“If only he’d stayed in the marines!” my mother sighed); the little pawpaw tree that would be planted at Scott’s grave and fertilized with his ashes. Marlies had gotten as many as fifty cards and e-mails from old family friends who’d known and loved Scott as a child. They’d heard his life was troubled, of course, but it’s a strange leap from the fussy, precocious little man Scott had been, once upon a time, to the weary bearded lunatic who’d killed himself in jail. When you look at it that way—the one and then the other—life seems a terrible thing.

The funeral was a nice occasion. One of Scott’s childhood friends, Kent, was summoned from the ether of almost three decades to give a eulogy. He was meant to represent a more innocent time in Scott’s life—also, my mother liked to point out that any number of Scott’s old friends had found him
wonderful
, essentially wonderful, whatever his vagaries and chronic bad luck. My rebuttal to this part of her vast apologia on the subject of Scott was that such old friends—Todd the Tortoise, Maryam, Thomas, various church people my mother had met—were every bit as fucked-up as he, albeit some more subtly than others. Kent, then, was Marlies’s way of settling my hash on that point: after an admittedly misspent youth—much of it spent with Scott—Kent had gone on to become a successful chef, indeed had moved back to Oklahoma City recently to open his own restaurant; and though he’d been out of touch with Scott for many years, he continued to think of him fondly.

If the world were a stage and Scott’s life a play, the dramatis personae would be a large and various menagerie—but in the end there was only a single boyhood chum and family, the least exasperated of whom (my wife) had never met Scott. My uncle Richard had come all the way from Germany, where he’d last seen Scott as a slaphappy drunkard of eighteen. In his baritone broken English, Richard told me that he’d had to knock Scott on his ass a few times, but clearly he’d never given up hope that he and Scott would be reunited in this life amid a lot of beer and laughter. One of the most poignant sights that day was Richard with his loud painted necktie, dashing away tears like a disappointed child and frowning with furious dignity. Also present were my aunt Kay and her husband, a retired army colonel, both of them kindly people who had tried to keep in touch with Scott, at long distance, almost to the end. The whole thing bewildered them. They’d never known Scott to be vicious or stoned or mendacious: as a child he’d been delightful, and as an adult he’d been little more than a diffident voice on the telephone or a card that came twice a year. My father, meanwhile, arrived inscrutably cheerful; Sandra wore a chic mourning outfit, the main flourish of which was a wide beribboned black hat. While we all stood around sipping wine (“since Scott was such a tippler,” my mother reminded us), Dave walked back and forth, yeomanlike, setting up the gravesite: the urn, the portrait, the pawpaw tree.

At last we settled in our little semicircle of chairs, in the twinkling leaf-scattered sunlight of a late June morning, and listened to Kent’s eulogy. He got off to a bad start, piously proclaiming that if anyone felt any guilt or “negativity” over Scott’s death, he or she “should just let it go.” My father’s vague amiable smile hardened a little. But Kent rallied. Basically he’d brainstormed every good thing he could remember about Scott, typed it all up, and haphazardly rattled off the high points. He nicely elided every hint of the sordid, and even managed to be touching there at the end.

“Whatever Scott did or didn’t do,” he said, folding his notes with trembling fingers and cramming them into his pocket forever, “I want you to know he loved you all. He always talked about how proud he was of his family.”

I doubted whether Kent had known the later Scott well enough to say he “always” talked about one thing or the other—but alas, it was a fair assumption that Scott’s love for us had, in fact, never quite failed. He possessed, at bottom, a loving heart.

Next were my readings from Corinthians and Rupert Brooke, and I was determined to be every bit as unflappable as my father, who smiled at me with blank amiability as I stood next to that portrait of Lance Corporal Bailey. All but winking, I informed our fellow mourners that my first reading had been chosen by Scott himself—and I daresay that, yes, we could hear his voice in the charge that one was “nothing” without charity. So that was done. Before I read “Clouds,” I explained that Brooke had meant to evoke the perspective of the trenches—
clouds
, to wit: the last thing of nature a soldier in the Great War was likely to see. Then I began to read. At the following lines, though, my voice cracked and crumbled: