Apologize, Apologize! (13 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
CAME TO A FEW HOURS LATER, MY HEAD POUNDING, THE ROOM
spinning, my jaw wired in place, harsh light in the hospital corridor overhead, nurses whispering confidentially, the low-grade olfactory smear of liquor and residual anesthesia making me sick to my stomach. Pop was crazy drunk and bent over me, his hair an irregular skyline, his florid Celtic face inches from my own and sounding like a refugee from
Going My Way
.

“There, there, Collie, you’ve had a terrible time. You’ve just come out of surgery. Your mother, God bless her, she packed quite a wallop, the strength of the bereaved, she had, the madness of a corpse. But you’re on the mend and your papa is here and I’ll take care of everything. You haven’t a worry. And Mammy and Bingo are in heaven, and I’ll bet there are dogs in heaven, aren’t there, Collie? Now, you must not try to talk. And you’re forbidden to think. I don’t want you thinking of anything, just that your papa is in charge and everything’s taken care of, everything’s perfect, never better,” he said, slurring and choking back sobs.

I stared at him, finally aware of what people mean when they refer to a feeling of sudden terror.

“And I don’t care what anyone says, you’re the bravest one of them all, and I’ll fight to the death anyone who says otherwise. If you’d gone in after him, you’d be dead, too.”

He took my hand in his. “I’ve never been more proud of you, Collie. I’m bursting with pride in my son. You did the practical thing. Let no one tell you otherwise.”

Pulling a deck of weathered cards from his back pocket, he swerved unsteadily from side to side. “Are you thinking of a card, Collie? Pick a card.”

Drawing himself up, he swayed back and forth, complained of not feeling very well, and passed out cold and blunt on my chest, all two hundred pounds of him. He was covering my face, the cards spraying across the bed. I couldn’t breathe. He was like a plastic bag over my head. I was seeing stars, resigned myself to dying right then and there, when one of the nurses spotted my predicament, and she and an orderly pulled him off me—it felt as if the whole world were shifting—and they shook their heads in disgust at his condition.

I closed my eyes and went away. Hours passed, maybe days. The next face I saw was my own, taking blurry shape in the form of the great and powerful Peregrine Lowell standing over me.

“I suppose you’d like to know what happened to your mother,” he said. “It appears she died of something called stress cardiomyopathy—it typically occurs among middle-aged women who’ve suffered a great shock or trauma, although I pointed out to the doctors that King Lear succumbed to the same condition, an example which seemed to elude them altogether. It isn’t always fatal, it doesn’t need to be fatal; however, in the case of your mother, unfortunately, it proved quite deadly.”

He inhaled deeply and then exhaled slowly, as if he were making an effort to control his breathing.

“Now, Collie, let me say that none of this is your fault.” His gaze was slightly deflected, his focus was on the black beret he held in his hands, his fingers clenching and unclenching the fabric. He paused and stared into my eyes. “Now, I acknowledge the temptation to lay the burden of blame at your doorstep. After all, it was your idea to go caving, to take along your younger and inexperienced brother, to attempt such an ill-conceived venture with so little consideration for your safety.”

Setting aside his hat, he began to smooth the sheets on my bed as he talked, straightening out the wrinkles and tucking in the edges until I was so tightly wedged in white cotton, I felt as if I’d been consigned to a pod.

“As a result, not only is Bing dead, so is your mother and so are two other young people, including Telfer Ferrell’s only grandson. I have no doubt but that your mother would be alive today had she not been faced with the horrendous shock of Bing’s terrible and premature death.” He paused and surveyed his handiwork, his lips curving into a half smile, my immobilization somehow satisfying to him. He leaned down, his eyes trained on mine, and put his hand on my right forearm, the only limb that remained exposed, and he secured it under the sheets and pulled the blanket up around my neck.

“Considering the carnage, one might be moved to say, Thank God you didn’t actually set out to do harm.” He finished me off with a smile.

Covered head to toe in a dark, rich shade, he looked like a bottle of cognac, tall and slim and so well dressed, it hurt my eyes to take him in.

“That aside, I’d like you to know I don’t blame you for what happened, nor do I think you were cowardly for
not
trying to rescue your brother. You made the right decision.” He hesitated. “At least, let’s hope it was a well-reasoned response and not the act of a coward—I give you the benefit of the doubt in that regard, although others might not be so generous. I’ll leave the matter to your conscience, and you and Bing can sort it out in the afterlife, assuming, of course, that Catholics go to heaven, which is another matter entirely. So, we understand one another, then?”

My eyes watered, tears pooling, blurring my vision, an involuntary response to all the pain I was feeling. The Falcon impatiently drummed the back of a chair with his fingers.

“Good. The matter’s put to rest. So it’s back to school this fall. You must focus firmly on the future. There’s a job for you at one of the newspapers after you finish school. I want you to learn the business from the ground up. I’ve arranged for you to come home with me. Enough of this damned hospital business. . . .” Looking around the room with an expression of disgust, he waved his arms dismissively.

The Falcon despised doctors—he had never recovered from the indignity of a colonoscopy he’d had when he was fifty. In his view, the test was clinically sanctioned buggery, and he hadn’t been to a doctor willingly since.

“You’ll live with me.” He glanced out into the corridor, speaking vaguely, seeming to be distracted, although there was no one there. “It’s what your mother would want—especially now,” he added, knowing that sending me to Cassowary would be my mother’s way of telling me to go to hell, a fitting punishment for what had happened.

“What is it?” he said, turning back to confront me, his mouth twisting with exasperation, noting my reflexive frown.

“What about Pop? Uncle Tom?” I wrote in a shaky hand on the yellow notepad kept on the little table next to my hospital bed. My shoulders were sloping; I felt so tired, the effort to breathe brought more tears to my eyes.

He glanced down at my note, then methodically tore the paper from the pad, shredding it into small pieces that fell to the floor.

“What about them?” he asked, heading for the door, delighted by my enforced silence. We’d never had such an agreeable encounter.

There was a joint funeral for Bingo and Ma in Boston, the same church where Ma and Pop were married, their burnished coffins side by side at the front of the altar, so near that they touched. I sat in the first pew, my swollen face a deep aubergine. On one side of me, Uncle Tom was clear-eyed, well scrubbed, and sober. He smelled like cold air. My grandfather sat on the other side, gloves on his hands, silk scarf at his throat protecting him from the disease of Catholicism. Pop was nowhere to be found.

“Unforgivable,” the Falcon said, dusting off his lap, scanning the pews, conducting a silent head count.

Pop showed up midway through the Mass, reeling down the center aisle of the church, leaning to the left and bending to the right, hollering at the priests and berating guests of the Falcon, stopping to attack me.

“You’ve stabbed me in the back for the last time, you yellow coward, leaving your dear brother to drown, and he was worth a thousand of you, and killing your mother as sure as if you’d plunged the dagger into her heart. Go on, coward, traitor, bastard, I know your dirty game.”

“Pop, please . . .” I was talking to myself, my jaw clamped shut, marveling at my own ability to think things couldn’t get any worse.

“Mr. Flanagan, you’re obviously distraught,” said one of the priests.

“Don’t practice your priestly bullshit on me,” Pop said. “Pederasts, the lot of you. You wouldn’t recognize the will of God if it came down from heaven and bit you on the wrinkled ass.”

Crimson-faced and speechless, the Jesuit abandoned his benevolent posture and signaled for the ushers at the back of the church to escort Pop from the premises.

Pop never did grasp the concept of gracious defeat. “Dignity,” he used to say, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.” He started swinging the moment they came near him.

The choir continued its protracted torture and murder of “Ave Maria.” Pop shook his fist up at the balcony. “Catholics cannot sing! Catholics cannot sing!” he shouted in a desperate parting shot, his voice echoing from the vestibule.

I felt the eyes of the world on the back of my head. Poor Collie, what do we make of him, having recently distinguished himself as a moral and physical coward? And what of the old man, his shanty Irish father whom he obviously takes after, a raving drunken lunatic?

Back at my grandfather’s house, I was subject to endless rounds of solicitous inquiries and compassionate murmuring from people who could hardly bear to look at me. I was nodding and smiling weakly, good manners my formal wear, as around me the conversational buzz grew loud and uniform, absent melody, sounding like the godless chant of cicadas deep in August.

“Poor Anais, she died of a broken heart.” I overheard two women talking, friends of the Falcon. “She adored that boy. I understand her heart stopped beating on the spot.”

“I heard she’s the one who broke the older boy’s jaw. Imagine. She must have been out of her mind with grief. What a tragedy. It makes me shudder to think about it. Her death feels like a curse. Poor Colin. . . .”

The other woman looked startled. “Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic? Anais wasn’t a Gypsy, after all. Oh, by the way, I think his name is Collier.”

I stopped listening and wandered alone into the study, where I sat in the window seat and stared outside.

The Japanese call what happened to Ma
tako tsubo
, which means “octopus trap” in English. The left ventricle bulges and balloons—in an X-ray, the affected part of the heart looks like a traditional fishing pot for snaring octopus.

When Ma died she let the octopus out of the bag. I had already begun to feel the long strangulating reach of its tentacles.

Ingrid, the housekeeper, came looking for me and, with her arm around my shoulders, ushered me back to the main part of the house, where the Falcon’s guests continued to circulate.

“This is no time for you to be alone,” she said.

It was hot. The sun was bright and hard. I went and stood by the open window in the cherry-paneled dining room. The curtains were blowing, but the breeze was warm as wool. Everyone was embarrassed, discomfited—each awkward kindness a searing rebuke.

Parched and feeling as if I were about to burst into flames, I retreated to my room on the second floor, where I sat dejected on the edge of my bed, cradling my glass jaw. Eyes wide open, still I couldn’t see a thing. It was dark where I was.

“Collie!” I heard a muted shout as a spray of gravel hit the bedroom window.

I drew the curtain. Pop stood below, a debauched Romeo pleading his mottled case.

“Collie,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’ll come to the point. Could you spare a twenty? It seems we were living a lie. Your dear mother ran through most of her fortune years ago, spending it all on the Commies. Your grandfather’s been supporting us, and now he’s frozen the accounts and left me practically penniless but for a meager monthly honorarium. I’ve got only enough for dog food.”

I signaled him to wait a moment, walked over to the dresser, picked up my wallet, and withdrew the contents—three twenties. After taking a moment to fashion them into paper airplanes, I leaned out the window and let fall all three bills, watching as they drifted gently downward, an incongruous rescue flight, Pop struggling to catch them in midair.

“You’re a peach, Collie. I won’t forget it. I’m a broken man, but I’ve got my integrity. I can’t be bought, and by God, they’ll never own me. They can’t take it away from you, try as they will, don’t let the bastards get to you, promise me, Collie, you’ll never surrender.”

It’s hard to surrender when you’re not putting up much of a fight. I wasn’t Pop—Pop didn’t know how to give in.

“Collie,” Pop said, turning to leave, pausing, not looking up at me there in the window, holding back the white curtain, crumpling the bills and folding them into his pants pocket, “it’s all right. You mustn’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”

I just looked at him, his profile outlined in a charcoal glow. I was listening to him talk, and all the while I knew that by morning it would be my fault once again, that Pop’s emotional support was as unsettling as a Mafia kiss.

“Your mother loved you, Collie,” he blurted out as if he were apologizing for something.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. “Well”—Pop was struggling—“if it seemed sometimes she preferred your brother, it was only because she’d convinced herself he was her reincarnated Irish setter  . . . and didn’t she love the look of him?”

The dog’s barking grew louder and more insistent. “Jesus,” Pop said, suddenly fuming, turning to face the offending sound.

I stared after him as he disappeared into the amber light.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
HE FALCON WAS POOLSIDE, FROWNING INTO THE SUN, A SEAWALL
of newspapers stacked around him like a fortress when I took up my seat across from him, a climate unto myself—the fog rolling in, gray sky as far as the eye could see. He was eating lunch beneath a huge unfurled patio umbrella. A creature of enshrined routine, the Falcon ate scrambled eggs and fruit every day at ten minutes past twelve, the table always formally set, white linens and white porcelain plates shimmering.

Lifting his eyes from his grapefruit, he took one long, wintry look at me and let me have it.

“Look here, Collie, this nonsense, this infernal silent routine of yours, has gone on long enough. Your jaw’s healed. There’s not a thing wrong with you. Grief is not something to be indulged; it’s to be overcome. Moping is very unbecoming in a young man. Even the dogs are starting to think you’re nuts.”

I reached for a piece of bread, my gaze fixed on the butter, the sharp edges of all those words passing through me like rock through haze.

Impaling the summer air with his fork, his arms approximating a flail, his white cheeks deeply flushed, the Falcon was reaching new depths of lividity.

“Good God, these eggs are a culinary obscenity. Ingrid, is it possible to get a decent lunch around here, or must I make it myself?” He banged the fleshy part of his palm on the table, making the cutlery jump and inspiring the canaries in their cages to sing.

The Falcon kept a dozen canaries in a collection of antique cages in the dining room’s big bay window—their cheerfulness seemed to be voice-activated; the more annoyed the Falcon got, the more loud and joyful grew their collective chorus—since I had moved in, their soaring high notes threatened to shatter glass. In summer, staff moved them outside for short periods during the day.

“They’re done the way you like them. I can’t imagine what would be wrong with them,” Ingrid said, winking in my direction. I smiled back at her and reached for the cheese. Ingrid had been with the Falcon for years, since before I was born, since Ma was a little girl. She supervised the staff—cook, chauffeur, gardeners, a couple of housemaids, the groom—good old Ingrid knew where all the bodies were buried.

“They simply have no flavor. . . .” The Falcon was going on and on. “Is it too much to ask that an egg should taste like an egg? Never mind. Coffee and grapefruit will have to do.”

“No, it won’t do at all. Don’t be so stubborn, and eat,” Ingrid insisted. “I’ll reheat them for you. Just give me a moment,” she said as she absently went about deadheading long stalks of freesia in a tall vase set in the center of the table.

“By all means, Ingrid, take all the time you need. Don’t rush on my account. Where was I? . . . Ah yes, Collie. Where’s your fight? Have a little moxie. This other stuff, sulking like a little girl, is bloody offensive. I have a philosophy about life and it’s served me well, and I’ll pass it on to you at no cost.” Pinning back my shoulders with the sharp edges of his tone, he leaned across the table. “Get on with it!”

I broke off a small piece of buttered bread and tossed it to Cromwell.

“Must you feed the dog at the table?” His dramatic sighs were taking deadly physical shape, rising up like mushroom clouds and hovering overhead.

“Would you mind passing the sugar?” I asked, the first words I’d said aloud in almost a month. Cromwell lifted his head and wagged his tail. Otherwise it was a pretty anticlimactic moment; despite his ranting, the Falcon never even noticed.

“Don’t you think you get enough sugar? My God, you’d think you were five years old the way you eat sweets.”

“It’s nice to have you back, Collie,” Ingrid whispered, pausing on her way to the kitchen, hugging me in the open doorway between the conservatory and the dining room.

Alexandra broke up with me a few days later. She came to Cassowary to spend the weekend and, intermittently crying and shaking, kept talking about the merit of going our separate ways. She was sorry for the timing, but given the circumstances, wouldn’t it be worse for me if I were to rebuild my house on a shaky foundation?

She broke down, beige hair covering her face, and talked about how difficult this whole thing was for her, how terrible she felt about Bingo and Ma, and what an impossible spot she was in.

“I swear to God I planned to break up with you that weekend, but then Bingo died and your mother . . .”

“It’s okay,” I said, handing her a tissue, giving her an epicene squeeze. “I understand. Believe me, if I could figure out a way to break up with me, I’d do it.”

“Oh, Collie,” she wailed, face flushed and soggy.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. You could have popped a live grenade down the front of my pants and I wouldn’t have reacted. I felt as if I’d been stripped of my humanity, were empty inside and inured to the concussive effects of all that was exploding around me.

Wringing out my shirt, water dripping onto the floor from her equatorial drenching, I watched from the dining room as she drove away, hand like a white glove waving proper farewell, when the Falcon appeared in soundless landing behind me.

“Well, sorry as I am for your situation, one can hardly blame her. After all, women do like a knight in shining armor, and unfortunately, Collie, given recent events, your breastplate’s looking a little tarnished—at least to those who make a habit of being uncharitable in their judgments.”

He put his hands on either side of my neck and tightened his grip in some bizarre burlesque of comfort, as if asphyxiation were somehow reassuring. He relaxed his hold on me, and as I turned to leave, I noticed a framed portrait of my mother, an oil painting done when she was in her teens, newly hung on the dining room wall.

“It went up this morning,” the Falcon explained, seeing my expression.

“It’s nice,” I said. “She’s not smiling.”

“No,” he said. “It’s a good likeness.”

“Ingrid told me that when Ma was a baby she used to sleep all day and that you could hear her laughing alone in her crib at night. She said that when she was six she drowned her pet crow in a rain barrel after he flew off with her charm bracelet.”

“Ingrid should confine her hyperbolic color commentary to the back staircase,” the Falcon said as he positioned himself directly in front of the portrait, turning his back to me. I hoisted myself onto the dining room table.

“What was Ma like when she was younger?” I asked him.

“Your mother was right-handed.”

“No, she was left-handed,” I said, puzzled by the remark. “She always made a big deal of it, saying that Fidel Castro was left-handed and Joan of Arc and Cole Porter.”

The Falcon turned around to face me. He wore a mildly condescending expression—usually he looked at me as if he were suppressing his gag reflex. I perked up a little, thinking that his view of me had evolved from contemptuous to patronizing.

“So were John Dillinger and the Boston Strangler . . . and you, too, for that matter. I assure you, Collie, your mother was right-handed. She decided as a little girl that being right-handed was dull. She trained herself to use her left hand so that she would appear more interesting to the greater world. Anais thought being difficult was the hallmark of the artistic mind. . . .”

I nodded in recognition as he continued.

“If her criterion was accurate, then your mother died with the distinction of being the most creative intellect of her time.” 

He walked over to the garden doors, where something caught his attention, and he trained his focus on the canaries trilling away in the background.

“Canaries are remarkable for being uninteresting,” he said, reaching into one of the cages, setting things aflutter. “They tend not to form attachments to their human caretakers and need very little interaction or stimulation to make them happy. Pretty, entertaining, and remote—a perfect pet for those who admire beauty and performance but don’t want to be bothered with emotional engagement.”

“Unlike Carlos,” I said. Carlos was the Falcon’s forty-year-old hyacinth macaw.

He laughed—laughed! I couldn’t believe it. This was turning into a latter-day version of
A Christmas Carol
.

“Carlos is a damn nuisance,” he said.

Encouraged by his friendliness, I persisted. “Did you and Ma ever get along?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Genetics. Let’s just say that when it came to alienation of affection, her mother, your grandmother, could have written an instruction manual.”

He snapped shut the birdcage door and walked back toward the portrait, pausing in front of a large mirror in an ornate Oriental frame.

“In some ways, your mother was very much like my grandmother Lowell, who was a willful, opinionated, stubborn woman. Very stern and unyielding, though certainly she had her good qualities, too,” he said, making some concession to her character while seeming a little unconvinced. “I spent a great deal of time with her when I was a child after my mother died. I lived with her until I was twelve, and I formed an attachment to her of sorts. She passed away when I was about your age. She was the most humorless person I’ve ever encountered. I suppose I loved her, well, yes, I did love her, but to this day, I’ve never shed a tear over her passing. ” He paused and glanced over at the grandfather clock as it chimed in the background, and then he turned and waited for me to speak.

“I don’t know why, but I haven’t cried over Ma,” I blurted out. “I did love her.”

“Maybe you loved her in the same unkind way that she loved you,” the Falcon said softly.

“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry, Collie, your mother will extract her period of mourning from you. Some people just get buried more deeply than others. You’ll find out that sorrow takes different forms, but in the end true grief is an honorific conferred on those people, however unlikely they may be, who bring us some measure of joy. Your mother was many things, but a joyful presence she was not. Unfortunately, Anais’s grave is not a shallow one.”

Ingrid appeared at the dining room door. “Have you forgotten the plane is waiting?” she said to the Falcon, tapping her foot.

“Please feel free to interrupt us anytime, Ingrid. Do I actually pay you to be meddlesome? If so, then you deserve a bonus for a job well done.”

The Falcon reached for his leather bag looped over the back of one of the dining room chairs.

“Well, I must be going. I’m flying to Chicago, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning. In the meantime, Collie, please don’t sit on the table. It makes you look like a yahoo.”

Hearing his footsteps on the stairway, his vigor belying his age, I slid off the table and walked through the garden doors and out onto the patio, where cages of canaries were enjoying the brilliant sun and its early morning warmth.

Ingrid followed behind me. “Would you like some tea, Collie?”

“No thanks,” I said, the prosaic sound of my voice no match for the singing of the canaries and the responsive chorus of wild birds. “I’m fine.”

“Of course you are,” she said.