The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (7 page)

And so the stage was set for the biggest fiasco yet. When my mother arrived in New York—it was Saturday, the day before Scott’s scheduled departure for Germany—he told her with considerable bitterness that they wouldn’t let him back in the dorm to collect his fucking stuff, etc. My mother agreed to take care of it, and asked Scott to wait outside. This he refused to do. In the lobby was a security guard who, for all we know, had been specifically retained to bar his entrance. These two began to scuffle, while my mother screamed at Scott to get the hell out of there. Abruptly he seemed to obey, shoving free of the guard and walking, with scornful dignity, out the door, then breaking into a giddy little scamper around the building (my mother in hot pursuit) to a glass door in back. Locked. Without a whit of reflection, Scott stepped back, lowered his shoulder, and crashed through the glass.

William Maxwell once wrote, “New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy,” and that day my mother learned just how right he was. Walking uptown through the Village—past old haunts, the places where she’d been so happy and sad, burning her candle at both ends à la Edna St. Vincent Millay, arguing about Ayn Rand and Camus and the like—she wept and wept. Wailing away, a weaving gait. Weeping, weeping, all the way back to the Hotel Chelsea, all the way up in the elevator, all the way down to the restaurant, where the waiter could scarcely help but notice her distress and kindly plied her with liquor (“not a good idea,” she recalled). Later she got a message from the concierge: Call Precinct Eight. Whereupon she was told that her son was uninjured but naturally in jail and would appear before the judge at nine o’clock in the morning. On Sunday? Oh yes, seven days a week. And so the next morning my mother appeared in court and presented the judge with Scott’s plane ticket for a two o’clock flight to Germany; the miscreant was lectured and let go with a warning.

By then the pot and drugs and drink had metabolized somewhat, and Scott was contrite. He agreed to go to a barber and get a respectable haircut prior to his departure. The door-smashing episode had caused a further stir in his dorm, and Scott’s three suitemates were eager to accompany him and my mother to the airport. She made this gleeful trio wait with her at the gate until her son’s plane was unmistakably in the air, then breathed “a humongous sigh of relief” and invited them all to dinner at the Chelsea. Theirs was a merry table—the same table, it so happened, where she’d been so inconsolable the night before, and the same waiter, who was glad to see her feeling better. Later she and the boys sat around on her bed, drinking and laughing about the whole incredibly fucked-up mess. The guys thought it was wild that Scott, that crazy fucker, had such a cool mom.

I HEARD A
few things about Scott’s time in Germany, but the rest is speculation. The one photograph is telling: he is slouched between my grandparents, laughing, arms flung over their shoulders; my grandfather, propped stiffly against his metal cane, shares nothing of Scott’s mirth; my grandmother clutches her purse and deplores Scott with a look of stern, melting love. She adored him and vice versa. Her babbling admonitions to be good and go to church seemed to soothe him. He’d sit passive and smiling while she brought him food and insisted on rubbing his pimply face with some kind of ointment that had worked for her as a girl. Both of them reproached my grandfather, whose exasperation was such that he became the weary embodiment of Wittgenstein’s dictum, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.” As the head of an asylum, Opa had been around lunacy all his life and sympathized up to a point: during the war he’d saved a number of patients by alerting their families to come take them home and hide them from the Nazis. His own son, my uncle Richard, had been a little off when young (low grades, a dazed loutish look), and now was a clubby bearded burgher who sold neon signs.

As for Scott, poor Opa could hardly believe what a difference five years had wrought. What had become of his
lieber Sohn
? Who was this sullen
Tage Dieb
(“day thief” or “wastrel”)? Asked not to play his music so loud, Scott would lock himself in Opa’s study with a cache of liquor and blast the Ramones. This went on for a month, maybe, until Opa called Richard, who yanked my brother to his feet, slapped him around a bit, and told him to get his ass on a plane. Oma saw him off at the gate, weeping.

WHEN SCOTT CAME
home for Christmas he looked ghastly. His face was boiling with pimples, pimples on top of pimples, and his hair hung like a pair of dank curtains one wouldn’t care to part. He seemed weirdly cheerful withal. Between Germany and Oklahoma he’d stopped in New York for a couple of weeks, basically living on the street and somehow managing to stuff himself with drugs enough to last into the new year. Or so I assumed, since he didn’t appear to be getting high in our house. But who knows. All I knew was that every time he opened his mouth something strange came out, as though he were addressing us from the fog of some alien world.

That first day home he came into my room and sat on the floor. After a few inconclusive exchanges, he fell silent and began surveying every detail of his surroundings, his head rolling around on his shoulders, slowly, like a security camera. Finally his eyes fixed on me.

“Your face . . .” he said, after almost a full minute of scrutiny, during which I’d tried to seem oblivious and then said “
What?
” a number of times. “It’s all—kind of fucked up . . .”

Look who’s talking, I thought. “How so?”

“Your nose is like”—he stared hard, trying to fathom it—“I don’t know, Zwieb, it’s like
asymmetrical
and shit . . .”

Actually my nose is fairly straight, or at least it was in those days. “Really?”

“Yeah!” And he went on staring while his hand traced ineffable shapes in the air that were meant to approximate my nose. He wasn’t trying to be offensive so much as helping me see what he saw.

Mostly Scott embarrassed me. I was fifteen, puberty had kicked in at last, and I wanted nothing more than to be normal—that is, as unlike my brother as possible. I didn’t want anyone to see us together, to guess we were brothers, and I couldn’t understand why my father would invite both of us downtown for lunch. But there he was, my father, natty in a tailored gray suit, striding out of his office and hugging my ragamuffin brother for all to see: a modern-dress Prodigal Son. The odd colleague would drift into our ken and pause with a barely perceptible start as he or she recognized Scott and absorbed, smiling, whatever Martian pleasantry he made. “Hey, Terry,” Scott said to one of them in an intense half-whisper, as if he were mimicking the sort of self-assured bigshot who could affect such intimacy and get away with it. “How’s the wife? You’re looking very . . . healthy.” Burck’s expression at such times was fixed, inscrutable, with perhaps a shimmer of misery underneath.

We spent Christmas Day with Oma from Vinita. She’d broken her hip the month before, and my father had brought her to Oklahoma City to recuperate in one of the nicer rest homes. Her roommate was a crazy old mummy named Tula who delighted in tormenting her: Tula threw food at my grandmother and once, slyly, left a bedpan full of coy turds on their common bedside table. (Marlies—who had a very German fondness for scatological humor and a rather strained relationship with her mother-in-law—adored Tula.) In short, Oma was having a bad time of it, and I wondered if she might be spared the sight of my brother.

But we were a family, after all. So we sat around taking pictures and opening presents in that gloomy, yellow-curtained common room. Scott was creepily solicitous toward Oma, kneeling at the foot of her wheelchair and caressing her shrunken shoulder, while my parents smiled and I looked on with a kind of cringing bemusement. Oma returned Scott’s tenderness by touching a trembling hand to his pimply cheek, his arm, as though she were trying to palpate the precious boy within.

I thought of my favorite Christmas, eight years before. Oma was visiting, and Scott decided to put on a show for her and our parents. Before we opened presents on Christmas Eve, my brother and I sang and danced and did a skit in identical blue pajamas. The highlight was my reading of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” accompanied by my Pooh bear, who was dressed in a vest and bow tie and seated beside me on a bar stool. We alternated lines: I read mine with an orotund flourish, while Pooh muttered his in a bear-voice I’d practiced all week. We were a hit. I can still see Oma—who often smiled but rarely laughed (because of her teeth?)—clutching her son’s shoulder with gasping hilarity. There’s a photo of me taking a deep bow afterward while Scott, beaming, stands behind me. The show had been his idea, and he was proud of me.

AS MUCH AS
possible I stayed away while Scott was home. What galled me most was not that Scott himself was oblivious to his condition, but that my parents too seemed bent on pretending that nothing much was amiss, that time would heal. They doted on Scott in my presence, as if to rebuke me for failing, balefully, to do my part. But I couldn’t help it. The sight of Scott struck me dumb; I was terrified of turning into him.

One morning he came into the bathroom while I was washing my face—still pretty clear at the time—and said he wanted to watch, that perhaps he was doing something
wrong
to have so many pimples. It occurs to me now that he was just trying to find something for us to talk about.

“Well, there’s nothing much
to
it,” I said with faint exasperation, with the kind of stoical condescension one shows a pestering six-year-old. If my brother caught on to this, he gave no sign; the year before he would have clouted me upside the head. Now he just stood there, lips parted, while I covered my face with Noxzema and washed it off with a hand towel and hot water.

That was the last I saw of Scott for a long time. For a week or so I contrived to stay away at friends’ houses, and one day when I came home to change clothes, Scott was gone. He’d decided to go back to New York for no particular reason.

THAT WAS THE
year my parents’ marriage, long moribund, came to an end. They still had moments of companionship, but mostly they led separate lives. Even when my mother was home she slept alone in my old bedroom, which she’d converted into a kind of Arabic caravansary—a low brass table with elaborate pewter pitchers, tapestries of desert scenes, and the like. But the whole Arabic thing had palled, and I imagine such decor served only as a bleak reminder of certain failed experiments. Little wonder she preferred life in Norman: most of her stuff was there, and she’d taken up with a tall, baby-faced grad student, Dave, who helped her care for some famous chimps who knew sign language.

On the surface, at least, my father grudged her nothing: for a long time she’d been unhappy—despite the seeming festivity of her life—and now she was somewhat better. Besides, Burck was doing his own thing as well. That summer he went to Colorado for an Outward Bound program. Slender enough to begin with, he returned several pounds lighter and glowed with idealistic notions of a better life: more simplicity, more reflection, fewer “poisons” such as coffee and alcohol (which he’d never consumed to excess anyway). He showed me a photo of his Outward Bound group, all of them happily bedraggled after their long ordeal in the mountains; Burck was the oldest by far (forty-five), but his smudged and grinning face was boyish. That summer, too, he spent a month or so with a family in Sweden. The mother was a big woman in her late thirties named Elsie, who’d met my father while touring the States with an avant-garde acting troupe. She was the type who sensed “connections” with certain people—correctly so in my father’s case. A couple of years later, I too visited Elsie’s family in Sweden, and they spoke of Burck as an almost holy figure—so kind and curious and fun. They showed me a drawing that the little girl had made of my father in a diving pose at the village lake. By comparison I was a big disappointment: a glum, self-conscious adolescent, I was taken aback by Elsie’s persistent wish to discuss things like masturbation; also (to my later shame) I showed little interest in getting to know her daughter, then a shy thirteen-year-old who didn’t speak much English and was rather plain. For my father, though, it was a liberation of sorts. Not long ago I found some letters he’d written my mother from Sweden, all about how hopeful he was for a renascent marriage on his return.

AMONG MY FATHER’S
resolves that fall was to rescue Scott from New York. My brother’s letters and occasional phone calls had become increasingly bizarre, all the more for being fairly articulate. With a lot of elaborate wordplay he described all the “crazy moothray fookrays” that one encounters in the course of a long, idle day in the city. A bum in Tompkins Square had put a knife to Scott’s throat and demanded a blow job; certain people, normal-seeming to begin with, had beaten the shit out of him “for no reason.” He was persecuted on all sides but, with a kind of wan bravado, insisted he was happy. New York was the only town for him.

Burck went to an address in Hell’s Kitchen indicated by Scott’s letters. I picture him standing on the sidewalk in his suede blazer and loafers, the rabble reeling around him as he glances from an envelope to a squalid tenement and back to the envelope again. Scott’s apartment was several flights up; perhaps there were a few sunburned, shirtless junkies asleep on the stairs. Though my father had alerted Scott to his visit—writing well in advance and specifying date and time—Scott wasn’t expecting him. He received my father warmly but had a hard time staying awake. A pair of checked, institutional-looking trousers hung loose and filthy around Scott’s bony pelvis; a patchy beard sprouted amid the pimples. At some point he began talking about a Utopian society he wanted to found on the bottom of the sea. My father offered to pay his way home on the condition that he see a psychiatrist, kick the drugs, and go back to school (or get a job), in that order, but Scott wasn’t ready yet. He thanked him all the same.

My father told me about this visit only once, some twenty years later, and I may be misremembering certain details. By then we only spoke of Scott once or twice a year, while a kind of gas filled the room until we could barely breathe unless we changed the subject. Before that happened, usually, either he or I would have found some fresh detail or story, a bit of colored glass to add to the mosaic of my brother’s life. It was a work in progress on our part.