Almost a Family Read online

  And yet there were problems. Mom seemed to be working too hard, or at least this appeared the likely reason for the growing number of evenings when she had to stay late in the city. On the nights she was home in time to tuck us in, something strange and unsettling was occurring: When she came into my bedroom to kiss me good night, we had arguments—over little things, seemingly, resentments that had piled up, tensions between us, awkward misunderstandings. I remember being surprised by this, confused as to why it was happening. On one occasion, I rigged up an alarm clock to ring when my door was opened, a simple device that amounted to inserting a piece of cardboard between the ringer and the bell and attaching it to the doorknob. It was a makeshift burglar alarm and was intended as a sort of joke—or so I told myself—but when she tripped the alarm, her feelings were hurt. Soon afterward she began skipping our good nights altogether. At about this time, contending with my usual difficulties in falling asleep, I began thrashing my head up and down on my pillow, a ritual I adopted, I told myself, to tire myself out.

  When did things begin to go bad? I can’t say for certain, because there was no clear-cut starting point—it must have been when I was eight or nine. That’s when I became aware of my mother as an adult carrying a heavy burden of responsibilities. At times, I viewed her almost objectively, from a distance. I believed that Mom, whose spirit craved nothing so much as to be carefree and spontaneous, was being crushed by responsibilities or some other problem that I couldn’t fathom. She needed my help and protection, and yet we seemed to be moving further and further apart. At times, she didn’t seem like herself. Sunday mornings, when Bob and I used to pile into her bed to talk and snuggle, lost their laughter. Often she appeared cranky and loath to wake up. Once, talking about Stalin’s Russia, she observed that the dictator hated journalists and remarked that if the Russians took over the United States, she would surely be executed. Because I had a child’s sense of the world and, having heard so much about the Russians, assumed they were about to invade, I was upset—visibly so. I extrapolated from all the war movies I had seen and envisioned myself as an orphan, hungry and freezing in the snow. I began to cry. Yet she made no effort to reassure me, to tell me that such a thing would never happen.

  Sometimes Mom would tell me that she would pick me up and then fail to show. She left me waiting for long periods of time at friends’ houses or at the movie theater or somewhere else downtown. Once she was to fetch me from the beach for lunch. I waited so long by the food shack that I got hungry. Eventually, I rummaged in a garbage pail for bits of food—half-eaten hot dogs, soggy french fries, and half-filled containers of soft drink. When she finally turned up, four hours late, I told her what I had done, proud of my ingenuity, and was taken back by her reaction. She seemed inordinately upset.

  And yet at other times, she would be her old self, capable and seemingly confident, proposing some new venture, like teaching us to play craps or a quick game of charades. This revolving door of personalities seemed to account for an odd perception I had of my life as it was unfolding—that it was proceeding on contradictory levels. It was moving on parallel tracks that led in opposite directions. One was happy and normal, shot through with freedom and Tom Sawyer adventures and all the normal ups and downs of a cohesive family. The other was a dark underside, in which we were anything but normal and refused to own up to it. Something seemed to be dragging us down, something dangerous, and it was impossible to determine exactly what it was because it was nameless and unidentifiable, like the monsters I used to dread in my bedroom at night.

  As Mom worked late and began to fade as an everyday presence in our lives, the void was filled by Inell, our live-in housekeeper. Inell was the same age as Mom. Her skin was wrinkled and the color of ebony. She was from Mississippi, and we children didn’t know much about her past. Her last name changed several times—from Jones to Atkinson to something else, reflecting changes in husbands. Sometimes the men would show up at our house, balancing us kids on their knees and bringing a rough whiff of New York City street life. Inell also had a daughter who, I was shocked to learn, was herself a mother at the age of fourteen. Mom told me not to ask questions about her. Inell lived in a back room with an attached bathroom. We were not supposed to go in there—it was her private area—but on those occasions when we were invited in, we readily accepted. The heat was turned on high, the radio was playing a soap opera or an episode of The Fat Man, and it felt warm and safe.

  Inell was the rock in our lives. It was she who was at home when we returned from school in the early years, and who got us in and out of our snowsuits and cooked dinner for us—hamburgers or fried chicken or pork chops and, on special nights, lemon meringue pie. I loved her cooking, but I was not much of an eater. At the small table where Bob and I ate most nights, I discovered a drawer below my place setting. Each night I ate as much, or little, as I wanted, opened it, and shoveled the remainder inside—a solution that worked fine for about a year, until someone opened the drawer and found a festering pile of mold.

  Inell called me “Boss Tweed.” She answered my barrage of questions—why school was important, why people acted the way they did, why dogs sometimes bit—with homespun directness. On the day in third grade when I was accosted at school with the unexpected question “Are you a Yankee fan or a Dodger fan?” and I took a stab in the dark and replied, “Dodger,” she approved of my selection. I felt I had passed some kind of test. Sometimes her wisdom could be a little too homespun. She planted ideas in my young brain that were not altogether true and that blossomed a long time afterward, like errant seeds. I learned, for example, that pepper could make you sneeze, and as I was inhaling a handful to test the proposition, she told me of a young boy about my age who sneezed so much that he couldn’t stop, until he just sneezed himself to death. For years, I tried to stifle a sneeze whenever I felt one coming on. Nor was she perfect in every way. One morning, I was horror-stricken at the bus stop to discover that I had forgotten the paper bag that contained my lunch. She promised to deliver it to school. As the morning drew on, I watched the clock with mounting anxiety; when lunchtime came, and she still had not shown up, I flew out the back door and ran all the way home, tears streaking down my face. I burst in at the front door, to find her calmly chatting on the phone. She was apologetic but not, by my lights, sufficiently so. Inell was so much a part of our lives that we didn’t think she would ever leave. She was there, had always been there, and would continue to be there—that was our assumption.

  I disliked school. I disliked the regimen and being forced to sit still at my wooden desk, watching the minute hand of the wall clock drag along at a slug’s pace. As far as I was concerned, teachers, charter members of the adult world, were suspect. On rare days they would read us a story, which I enjoyed, but mostly they enforced drills and memorizations. Whenever adults asked that patronizing question—“And what do you like best about school?”—I replied with honest enthusiasm, “Recess.” I retain a vivid memory of one particular moment: Ascending the school staircase, I paused to peer through a window at a distant patch of blue sky; I calculated the number of years I had been in school and the number of years still to go and I wondered how I could possibly endure them.

  In the fifth grade, our school was inexplicably swept by Civil War mania—some merchandiser must have had boxcars of Yankee blue and Rebel gray caps to unload—and recess turned overnight into a make-believe battlefield. That improved things immensely. I chose to be a Johnny Reb. We enjoyed hamming up our deaths and especially lying wounded and groaning while the nurses—girls who up until then had seemed pointless in the scheme of things—bandaged us and whispered sweet nothings so that we might recover. One day the craze passed as abruptly as it had begun.

  I was the smallest kid in my class. That meant that I had to develop alternative survival skills. I chose wit and guile. I was forever hatching plots, inventing games, and getting in trouble, and as a result, I had a wide circle of friends. We were comrades of the heart, suppo
rting one another no matter what. We accepted one another’s weaknesses and failings, we listened to one another’s problems, and we confessed things we would never have told our parents. We knew when to extend sympathy and when to remain supportively silent. We traded bits of information about the larger world and tips on how to contend with it. Our bikes—chrome-heavy Schwinns with balloon tires—lay sprawled on one another’s lawns and moved about in packs to other lawns throughout an afternoon. Often we went to one another’s houses directly after school and walked home at dusk. Typically, I walked for miles along twisting back roads. During one particular frightening stretch of road, a valley where the trees arched to form a darkening canopy and where strange sounds emanated from a swamp, I used to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as loudly as I could to keep the evil spirits at bay.

  Raisin and I formed a group called “Bosom Buddies.” Others were allowed in from time to time, but that was a social concession; we were the two charter members and it revolved around us. Naturally, we got in trouble. At times, though, our reputation for transgressions outstripped our misdeeds. In the fourth grade, on a day that Raisin stayed home ill, I was hauled out of class and taken to the office of the principal, one Mrs. Netta Spangenberg. I had no idea what was going on, but I was ordered to confess. “Confess to what?” I asked, infuriating her further. She grabbed me by both arms and shook me roughly. She shoved me into a chair and told to remain there until I was willing to admit my misconduct. I had no idea what I was thought to have done. This went on all morning—chastisements mixed in with physical abuse and periods left alone to “think about it,” until finally, mysteriously, Mrs. Spangenberg reappeared to say that I was free to go. “What happened?” I asked. She said someone else had confessed to the offense, which, I was soon to learn, involved an obscene call to a teacher over the weekend. I lingered for a moment on the threshold of the office—even at that age, I had some sense that a fundamental right had been violated—until she looked up and said, “You can understand, of course, why we all thought it was you. You may leave now.”

  Raisin was something of a social misfit. He was afflicted with epilepsy. I grew accustomed to his seizures and fainting spells, and when they occurred, I learned to cover him with something—a blanket if we were indoors, a jacket if we were outside—to keep him warm. I’d stay by him and calm him when he awoke, a look of confusion and sometimes panic in his eyes. I wonder now if the disease or some combination of the disease and his emotionally tangled home life didn’t stunt his maturity. He was one of those rare children who seem to get stuck in childhood. Things that we did as youngsters, which could be put down to a spirited nature, like tossing cherry bombs into the river or balancing on the peak of a rooftop, were less acceptable as we grew a bit older. I sensed that it was time to move on and that he was dragging us back to an earlier age. On excursions he sometimes carried around his old teddy bear, smelly and mangled, with one eye missing and patches of fur pulled out. To an adult, that must have appeared as if he was pathetically attached to a childish toy. But I knew things were more complicated than that. The bear was subjected to an endless round of tortures and tribulations: If we went swimming, it was dunked underwater; if we climbed a tree, it was dropped, crashing, through the branches; once, on a sailboat, it was tied to the front mast, braving the ocean spray like Odysseus. It was a totem, standing in for Raisin himself. It, not he, was assimilating all these blows to body and spirit.

  Some years later, in the sixth and seventh grades, when we boys developed an interest in girls and began meeting up with them at the movies, Raisin did not. A distance grew between us, and not long after that, I moved away from Westport and lost touch with him altogether. About ten years afterward, running into an old friend from those days, I heard that he had gotten into trouble for breaking into a construction shed and stealing a cache of dynamite. Some ten years after that, when I was working as a novice reporter for The New York Times, Eloise Ray called me to ask if I could manage to get an obituary of her husband in the paper. He had died of a heart attack. I asked about Raisin and her voice broke. Hadn’t I heard? she asked. Heard what? He had died, she said, years before, in a canoeing accident, alone on a Canadian river. When I hung up, I had to sit down to catch my breath. The one person who knew me best during those painful, joyful years of growing up—and the one person I had known better than anyone else, and had loved in a way I had loved no one else—was gone. All those years, in addition to being my one and only “bosom buddy,” he was living proof that having a father can be worse than not having one.

  My brother and I were very close. Separately, we treasured the emblem of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town orphanage: the image of one boy carrying another one piggyback and saying, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” We made it our own, for it seemed to sum up, if not our situation, our relationship. There was no doubt in either of our minds about which boy was doing the carrying and which was getting the ride. Our bond was strengthened by this gathering sense that things were going off the rails, although we didn’t talk about that. I was developing into a mental escape artist; I turned aside hints that all was not as it should be. Bob had taken on an additional role as my protector, which meant that he couldn’t share his fears. But I could tell that he was under a great deal of stress. He rarely laughed or joked and seemed weighed down by a burden of responsibilities.

  Bob was supposed to become a reporter. That our father’s mantle was his to inherit was made clear to him at an early age, following the unsubtle means by which such expectations are communicated from parent to child. I remember any number of discussions about the American press and its sacred duties and many anecdotes about irascible editors and dashing reporters. I, on the other hand, was free to choose my profession, though our mother predicted that I would become an engineer—based largely on the fact that I liked playing with Erector sets and model trains and that whenever we visited New York City, I insisted on stopping at construction sites to peer through the wooden barricades. When grown-ups asked that ridiculous question—“And what do you want to do when you grow up?”—I replied with a single word: “Demolition.” If they failed to understand, I became explicit: I explained that I wanted to swing that giant wrecker ball that smashed down brick walls.

  From the first, Mom treated Bob as more mature than his age. At times she almost seemed to be grooming him for greatness according to some agenda. A wealthy family, who chose Bob as a playmate for their son in hopes he would be a constructive influence, helped guide her in selecting various activities. When he was still in elementary school, she found him a French tutor, a gray-haired Ezio Pinza look-alike; we dropped Bob off for lessons every Saturday morning. On Sundays he would take horseback-riding lessons at a local stable; I would play with a litter of puppies that lived under a barn while he trotted around a white-fenced ring to the exhortations of an exacting riding instructor. Mom and he would talk about books and art and other such things while I listened in from the sidelines. At the time, I thought he had been chosen for these lessons because he was superior and deserving—only later did I conclude that I had missed out on them because by the time I came of age, our home life had deteriorated.

  Over time, Bob seemed increasingly to surpass me. He became ever more serious and ever more responsible. He had a paper route and sometimes used the money to buy his own clothes. On one occasion, he asked me to fill in for him. I followed him to learn the ropes—how he folded the papers, tucking them into themselves, stuffed them into a voluminous canvas bag around his shoulder, and tossed them onto driveways and porches from his bicycle seat. The following day it was my turn. Everything went wrong. The papers seemed too thick to fold and tuck. The bag was too heavy; it pulled my bike over. I tried sticking the papers in wads under the seat, around the wheels, into my pants. Nothing worked. And a deadline was looming, the start of my Little League game. In a panic, I ended up ditching the papers behind a bush on the Post Road and then forgot about it until well after the
game, when Bob asked me how it had gone. We rushed out, found the hidden bundle, and delivered the papers in the dark.

  Bob’s accomplishments accelerated in junior high school. He was a straight-A student and a favorite of his teachers, especially in English. He wrote a column about the goings-on at the school for the town weekly. He was on the varsity baseball and basketball teams and in his senior year ran for class president. I helped manage his campaign, employing a cadre of seventh graders to scrawl posters and hand out buttons. I expected he would win, and when he did, I received the news with a tangled feeling of pride and a sense of my inferiority. When the school’s janitor died, a friendly man known as “Pop,” Bob addressed a throng of students assembled on the playground for a memorial service and delivered a eulogy whose lofty language was the most beautiful and stirring I had ever heard. He was the school’s featured orator. He gave the commencement address in words worthy of Pericles, speaking of “a golden sun that streams down upon this wondrous land” but also warning of “shadows marring the golden light”—by which he meant the vague forces of “insecurity, aggression, distrust, and fear.”

  At the time, Bob was contending with shadows of his own. He wrote a two-page story for English class that was more than a little autobiographical. It described a boy lying in bed, listening to rats in a house he hates, wondering what life would be like if his father had not died. He contemplates running away to Florida but realizes he must stay to help his mother. He excoriates himself for being selfish and self-pitying and wishes he could be carefree like his friends. At the end he falls asleep, whimpering softly, “I hate death. I hate life.” The story, which turned up in an old carton recently, received an A+ from his teacher, who wrote a warm note at the bottom, saying, “I am proud of you!”