Anthropology of an American Girl (79 page)

Powell nodded as he considered that. “I suppose so. Lying and crying.”

“And being a tremendous pain in the ass,” Mom added.

“You’re right, Irene. He wouldn’t be worth shit.”

Though I could not exactly imagine the Flemings giving me a warm welcome, I trusted my mother’s opinion. She’d been to hundreds of funerals. She was always the first to volunteer in cases of crisis. If anyone tried to discourage her from attending yet another memorial service, she’d say, “There’s nothing worse than poor turnout at a funeral. I certainly hope
you’re
not alone on the day you bury one of your people.”

When the chairs were set—in curves rather than lines, no lines for Jack—I came in from the yard and found his mother sitting in the living room, dressed at last. She was wearing a taupe pant suit and on her lap lay a closed book, an album of some kind. Though she said nothing, there were two cups on the table and a plate of those triangular sandwiches without crusts. I figured I was supposed to join her.

She transferred the book to my lap as though passing a clipboard in a doctor’s office, without fanfare or emotion. It was a photo collection of Jack’s life that she had assembled from family events—weddings, graduation parties, birthdays. She intended to display it at the memorial. I didn’t have to look hard or long to see that Jack was miserable in every shot, despite the fact that he had successfully bastardized all his dress-up clothes. There were Boy Scout badges Superglued onto his wide-lapeled Brooks Brothers suit and flames painted onto his one silk tie, and Wacky Pack stickers varnished onto his good shoes. I could not see the shoes in the photos, but I knew they were there. The shoes were legendary. Denny had borrowed them for the senior banquet even though they were two sizes too small, and when we’d danced, he’d moved like magic, not missing a single step.

I was overwhelmed. I hadn’t seen pictures of him in so long. I wanted desperately to restore him. I couldn’t understand why it was not possible to do so. Me just thinking,
his voice, his voice. His face, his eyes, his voice
. I realized that I had not neared the bottom of my pain, that my sorrow was stronger than I could ever be, coupled as it was with the sickening knowledge that I’d wasted years with Mark that could have been spent instead with Jack—helping him, if that would have been possible. I held the book close to my face, squinting.

“Is something wrong?” Jack’s mother asked in her deflated sort of monotone, not looking up from the book.

“I forgot my glasses,” I said, lying.

“Glasses,” she said dismissively. “You’re awfully young for glasses.”

I stayed that way with her for the better part of an hour, going through photo by photo, squinting and sinking further into despair, because I couldn’t exactly leave her alone with the wretchedness of memories on the day of the funeral. After the funeral it was going to have to be every man for himself. And, besides, Rita the housekeeper had made a fresh pot of coffee, and though I’d often walked past the Fleming couch, I’d never sat on it. It was actually quite comfortable. Mrs. Fleming didn’t seem worried in the least about me holding a cup of coffee and eating sandwiches while flipping through the overstuffed album and blowing my nose, despite the very real potential for spills, which led me to wonder whether Jack had not made more of her cleanliness neurosis than she deserved. I kept looking up, half-expecting Jack to walk in, to join us. I thought it was something we could have gotten through well together—not the funeral, but coffee with his mother. I was sorry we’d never tried.

I heard myself say, “Do you mind if I open the drapes?”

She struggled with the suggestion as though having some cognitive lapse, as though a word or term I’d used were foreign to her. She moved her mouth, but nothing came out.

I stood and drew back the curtains on each window. “It’s pretty today,” I said. Rays of sunshine charged in at varying angles like they’d been waiting. “Isn’t it pretty?”
Pretty
as a word might not have been an appropriate choice for a funeral day; however, I used it with authority. The day was mine, I’d decided, and even if it wasn’t, I intended to take it. In old film noir movies, the detective takes on someone else’s problem, and in the process of solving it, solves his own. He works backward through the crime while moving forward in his mind to crack his own riddle. In such narratives the crime is a metaphor, and the riddle is a metaphor, and quite possibly, beginning at the end is also a metaphor, a prescriptive for successful living. The way it goes is this—
The story starts when I enter it
.

Mrs. Fleming flinched as though stunned by the flare of oncoming headlights. Then she settled back, looking wide-eyed and stony.

“Are you okay?” I asked, not sure if she knew who I was anymore. She didn’t seem flustered or disoriented; as a matter of fact, she appeared to have made her way back to safety. This was nothing new, I realized, and here lay the riddle of her chill—she was incalculably depressed. Of course Jack would have wanted to save her. Of course he would have tried. And, of course, his every effort would have been undermined. Yes, this is where he’d gotten lost. How sad. In his little-boy mind, he’d been her failure. Rourke had felt this way too, except that Jack had felt a companion disgust unknown to Rourke—Jack’s father was no hero as Rourke’s had been.

And the riddle of Jack was the riddle of us. Him not wanting to smother me as his father had his mother, but him not being able to stop. Him psychologically resorting to the tools and terms that had given his father power over others. Him holding me, teaching me, coming whole to my need with his need, and in the end, him leaving as he came, carrying away his pain as if in a suitcase, because I’d done nothing to relieve his burden.

“Look at this one,” Mrs. Fleming said, tapping a page we’d passed at least twice before. I opened my eyes wide.

It was a picture of the two of them, Jack as a baby. In it his hair was white and hers was white. They looked lovely, mother and son, and hopeful with the new bond between them. He was no more than twenty pounds with his symphony-shell ribs poking over his diaper and his ankles like twigs. And his eyes, searing blue as though the color had been branded onto his face, as though he’d been awakened already to the nonsense of inequity.

“Never side with your husband over your children,” she confided in a hiss. I turned to find her eyes. There was something eerie about the vacancy there, the hollow helplessness, the pathological refusal to invest in anything beyond the sphere of her own unhappiness. Looking at her, I felt the way others must have felt when they looked at me. She looked as if she were suffering from vertigo. “They’ll tell you to do that. Never do that. Men are disposable. Children are not.”

We were interrupted by a crash from the floor above. My hand jerked, and coffee spilled narrowly onto the saucer. The china shook unevenly,
and I carefully lowered my cup to the table. The house had been so quiet, I’d presumed we were alone.

Mr. Fleming shouted,
“Susan! Where did you put my cuff links?”

More unnerving than the sound he made was the fact that she had invoked him only seconds
before
the sound. She had detected him before he’d become detectable. Just as she’d been seducing me into doubting her connection to him, she demonstrated the strength of the bond.

“I didn’t
put them
anywhere,” she replied to the banister. “They’re on your dresser.”

She waited in case he was going to yell some more, then she returned to me with a joyless smile. “Jack loathed him. I loathe him too. I stayed married because I had no alternative. I had to consider
their
college,
their
future,” she said. “What would I have done? Aging, with two children. Who would have hired me? Who would have loved me?” She took back the book. “At least my son had the courage to die. His father will cling to life until the bitter end. Unless I kill him first. I’d like to kill him first.”

A procession of somber guests passes the row of Jack’s belongings that Elizabeth and I arranged on the garden wall before the service. There’s the stuffed mouse I made, the harmonica my mother had given him, his drawings, his skateboard, his surfboard, his books, his mother’s photo album.

Jewel is still next to me. “Did you love him, Jewel?” I get the feeling she did.

She hunts through her tapestry purse and nods.

“From when?”

“December 1980,” she whispers, withdrawing a tissue. “Dan and I ran into him at the John Lennon vigil. Jack was high. He hardly recognized us. He hadn’t seen me in years, but Dan, well—We took Jack back to my parents’ apartment on West End Avenue and we hid him in my room. He didn’t talk for two days. The third morning he was gone. I didn’t hear from him until he showed up at my apartment at Yale two months later. He was in bad shape again, so I cleaned him up and drove him back to school in Boston. That summer we got a room together in
the East Village. In September, he dropped out of Berklee and came with me to New Haven.”

Yale. I remember Alicia saying she thought she had seen Jack.

“For a while it was okay. We’d go to concerts and movies, and I would borrow books for him from the library. I bought him a guitar,” she says. “I guess he got bored or restless, so he started to go down to the city. At first he would stay with this bass player on Fourteenth Street and Avenue A—they formed a new band—but soon he started disappearing for days at a time. His family tried an intervention, but it was excruciating for him. All of them in Elizabeth’s living room on First and Seventy-seventh with a therapist and these pickled kitchen cabinets. He couldn’t get over the cabinets, like why anyone would go to all that trouble.

“The family apologized; but he felt they’d just been coached to assume blame. He said they hadn’t genuinely changed, they’d just replaced their own authoritarian ideas with someone else’s authoritarian ideas. He said they were only motivated by AIDS and the homosexual connotations they’d have had to face if ever he’d contracted it.

“According to his family, Jack sabotaged the whole thing,” Jewel says. “If only they could have seen how upset he was. He just kept saying,
They’re programmed, they’re programmed
. His mother especially. I think he’d been wishing she’d been shocked into feeling some effect. I didn’t know what to do. I called. I wrote letters. I went to see Elizabeth.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She shrugs. “They wanted him to go to this rehab place in Minnesota, but he refused, so they cut him off. They asked us to do the same. I objected because I knew it would drive him further into the hands of the wrong people.

“Last time I saw him was Christmas, six months ago. I had a sweater for him. He didn’t want the sweater; he wanted a hundred dollars. I said I couldn’t do that, and I didn’t have a hundred dollars. He was like,
Fine, forget it
. And that was it. A month ago, I got a call about the guitar. He’d sold it. My number in Connecticut was scratched onto the back, and the guy Jack sold it to had been arrested. The cops figured it had been stolen.”

I hand her a new tissue; she’s used her last. People keep coming by to kiss me and say hi, or just pat my shoulder.

“He never called you, did he?” she asks, her sad soul swimming. “No,
I don’t suppose he would have.” She looks to her lap. “There was a book. He carried it everywhere. When he slept, I would read it. Songs, poems, pressed flowers. Letters to you, from you. Do you know the book?”

“Yes,” I say, “I do.”

There is a murmur of activity in front. “I’d better get back to my family,” Jewel says. “I just wanted to—to say, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry to me. I betrayed him. You never betrayed him.”

“No, Eveline, you didn’t betray him. You treated him like he was a normal, healthy man. You didn’t let it descend to pity or need. When you couldn’t be honest, you walked away. He loved you all the more for it.”

Father Michael McQuail of Braintree, Massachusetts, begins the eulogy by admitting that he has never met Jack, that he has come as a favor to his friend Cecilia Hanover, Jack’s maternal grandmother, who is too infirm to have traveled from Boston to attend the service.

“Although I am a priest,” he says, gently bending the microphone out of range, then stepping away from the podium altogether, “I have not been invited to speak in a religious capacity.”

He stands before us in a sort of informal traveling priest outfit—black slacks and a short sleeved black shirt and a handsome stainless steel watch. His arms are tanned and healthy. I heard him talking earlier to Reverend Olcott about running—their
other
mutual interest. Father McQuail runs in the Boston Marathon every year.

“I understand that Jack was a plain-speaking boy, and I’m a plain-speaking man, so I won’t bother to carry on about a life unnecessarily lost or precious gifts wasted. I will just say that what this individual did to himself and to his family and friends was a transgression of the worst kind. First of all, drug trafficking and drug use are illegal, and the toxic damage caused to the body and mind by substance abuse represents a desecration of the natural to a perverse degree. Secondly, suicide is a crime. On some other occasion we might have a leisurely discussion as to whether suicide constitutes an
ethical
crime or a
religious
crime, but judging by the pain I see in the faces before me, I don’t think that anyone will disagree that it is a
civic
crime. His death cost all of you. You have been robbed of your ability to provide assistance, to tender compassion, to ask forgiveness.”

Father McQuail speaks quickly, in a kind of nasal bark. Before one sentence is complete, the next begins its tumble from his mouth. He gives the impression of being smart and sincere and in a bit of a fervor. One thing is for certain, he has everyone’s attention.

“But you know about your own pain. Let’s discuss instead what is a mystery. Let’s discuss feelings that are at risk of festering if left undiscussed. Let’s speak of the idea to which each of you is clinging,
That those who fail were failed
. You want to know, is it outside the realm of possibility that Jack was the victim of a crime of a magnitude equal to the one he committed? Not some gross solitary act, perhaps, but fine crimes, subtle crimes, crimes of
omission.”