Apologize, Apologize! (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

T
HE PHONE WAS RINGING OFF THE HOOK. INGRID CAUGHT IT JUST
as Pop was about to hang up. I’d done a pretty good job of avoiding him and Uncle Tom since my sailing debacle.

“Thanks, Ingrid,” I said as she handed me the phone.

I held the receiver to my chest, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Hi, Pop.”

“Oh, Collie, Mambo’s dead.” Pop started to cry. “He was hit by a car and killed. When he didn’t come home, your uncle Tom went to look for him and found him by the side of the road. . . . Jesus, Collie, it’s like losing Bingo and Mama all over . . .” Pop lost it again.

“What did you say?” For an instant, I felt as if I’d stepped into an empty elevator shaft and I was plummeting. “Oh, Pop. How could something like this happen?”

Ma was fierce about keeping the dogs away from the road, and it was a quiet road—training them as puppies never to leave the property. They all knew better than to wander down the laneway, and among all the dogs, Mambo was the smartest. We called him the Commissioner; he used to alert us when any of the other dogs started down the driveway, rushing to tattle, barking and whirling, jumping up and insisting we follow him, herding the offenders like sheep.

“He’s been inconsolable without you boys, not eating, his tail dragging, he’s been heartbroken missing Bingo and your mother, and he’s been looking for you, too. He’s gotten in the habit of waiting at the end of the laneway, checking out the cars, hoping. . . . Tom and I’ve been after him about it. . . . I’ve walked that laneway a hundred times in the last few weeks, dragging him back up to the house. You know the way some people barrel down that road and around the curve. . . .”

“I should have spent more time at home. I should have come home. I should have known.” I had to fight the urge to keep on repeating the same refrain. I should have come home. I should have come home.

“Don’t go blaming yourself, Collie. It’s nobody’s fault. These things happen. And who’s to know but that seeing you all the time might have made him think that Bingo was coming home? Oh, Jesus, to think of Bingo coming home and no Mambo to greet him . . .”

“Cocksucker. Dogfucker,” Carlos said as he caught sight of me heading past his perch. That damn parrot. I could hear Bingo’s distinctive way of speaking in every word and inflection. Carlos laughed, and I recognized the carefree echo.

He whistled as if he were summoning a dog. “Lassie, Lassie, here, girl . . .”

He sounded like Bingo, but he thought like Ma.

“Collie?” The Falcon emerged from his office on the third floor, and leaning over the banister, he shouted down at me from the landing, “Was it you who tracked mud from the pond onto the carpet in the living room? How many times have I spoken to you about your habit of making a mess wherever you go?”

“Lassie . . . here, girl, here, girl . . .” Carlos carried on until I disappeared from his view, the bathroom door making a dull thud behind me. 

“Yoo-hoo. Shit for brains,” he said, his muffled final insult.

I went about the business of emptying medicine cabinets, tossing things onto the floor, pills spilling into the sink as I looked for stuff to swallow, all the while I was chugalugging cough syrup and downing vials of dated prescriptions. I even tossed in a little lawn fertilizer and splashes of the Falcon’s cologne—it was expensive stuff, terse as marginalia, a redolent memo in low notes of verbena from the desk of Peregrine Lowell.

Just to make sure, I used a razor blade on my left wrist. I did such a good job slicing up one artery, I didn’t have the strength to cut the other one.

Despite my finest efforts, felo-de-se eluded me somehow. It was almost funny what happened. Crazy old Cromwell sounded the alarm shortly after I passed out. Jesus, what can I say? The world is awash in unlikely heroes. He dragged me by the shoulder into the hallway and rallied the household.

I woke up a day or so later in the psych ward, and from there I was transferred to Parados House, a therapeutic hideout for privileged lunatics.

I quit talking for the second time in my life. Over the next couple of weeks, I felt myself becoming a solitary outgrowth of volcanic stone, parched rock in the still center of an eerie private universe. I kept saying Bingo’s name over and over in my head. I repeated his name the same fearful way obsessive-compulsives wash their hands.

“What in heaven’s name is wrong with him?”

I was faintly aware of my grandfather’s raised voice, somewhere around me, doctors and nurses nervously trying to appease him. Louder than the people surrounding me was the sound of my own blood flowing through my veins. It made a
whoosh
ing noise in my ears.

I was under the impression I was sitting up until one of the nurses reached around my waist and gave me a lift up. Turns out I was slumped over, listing to the left, my forehead touching the breakfast table in front of me.

“For God’s sake, what’s the purpose of this pathetic performance? Get him back into bed,” the Falcon ordered, thunder and lightning accompanying each word, as a pair of orderlies scrambled to lay me out on the hospital bed, fluffing my pillows, pulling the covers up to my chest, my arms at my sides, my eyes dim and lightless like broken windows. I peered out at the world through cracks in the glass.

“Granted, Mr. Lowell, this medication hasn’t given us the result we were hoping for. We’re planning on trying a different course of drug therapy,” one of the doctors explained. “There’s a promising new antidepressant we think may prove effective. . . .”

The Falcon reached down and picked up my hand, holding it limply aloft. He let go and watched in disgust as it flopped back down on the bed.

“That’s the best you overeducated idiots can come up with? Another goddamn pill? I don’t think my grandson’s depressed. Frankly, I’d be delighted if he were despondent. Unfortunately, I think he’s dead.”

I dreamed about myself as a man, brave, intelligent, hair miraculously straight, confident half smile on my lips, looking faintly amused but all-knowing, as if I had access to some secret denied the rest of humanity. There were women at my feet, children and dogs, other men looked at me and felt jealous, but I was too mature and character-filled to enjoy the shortcomings of lesser men. I was the naked savage.

And then I heard Bingo. He was calling my name. And when I heard his voice, I got confused about my life. Was I a brave man dreaming that I was a coward? Or was I a coward dreaming that I was a brave man?

I couldn’t move. Bingo needed me, and I couldn’t move. I banged on my thighs with my fists, but my legs wouldn’t budge. So many nights I woke with a start, dreaming that he needed me, feeling his hand in mine, feeling the tips of his fingers touch the tips of my fingers, scraping him off of me, thinking better of it, reaching out for him finally, only to let him go.

“Oh, Collie, that much, you hate me that much. . . .” It was so dark, but even in the dark I could see thin strands of chestnut hair hanging down over his eyes.

“Hate you? Hate you? Is that what you think?”

Somewhere outside my reverie I heard a couple of orderlies in conversation, their talk intruding on this dream of my past and future selves.

“What a little prick,” the older man said as they lifted me from the bed to the chair. “And more money than God—wouldn’t you know it?”

“Imagine if he actually had to deal with life same as the rest of us,” said the younger one. “I’d love to see him doing our jobs. Can you imagine him changing bedpans?”

“Life stinks. I’m working for peanuts, driving a shit box, living in a dump, and I’ve got to bust my hump for him just because his grandfather’s a big shot,” the older man said as the younger one pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. For a second, I thought he was going to strike a match on my forehead. Instead, he checked his watch. “Break time. Let’s finish him off fast.”

He hooked his hands under my arms and signaled for the other orderly to grab my feet as they lowered me back into the bed, where I landed with a deliberate thump.

“Man, if I’d been there that day, to hell with it. They were white-water rafting, right? I read all about it. The brother got trapped under a log or something. I would have jumped in there so fast . . . I wouldn’t even’ve thought about it,” the younger guy proclaimed, pulling the covers up to my chest.

The older guy was quick to concur. “Same here, but then that’s just me. You know me. You know what I’m like. I don’t back down from nothing.”

An hour or so later, I sat up, and after kicking off the bedcovers, I tapped the nurse on the shoulder—she almost fainted, kept staring at me as if I’d risen from the dead. I asked to use the phone. 

“Uncle Tom?”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s me. Collie.”

“Oh. I’m not speaking to you.”

“Is Pop there?”

“I suppose.”

“May I speak with him?”

“Oh, so now it’s you who wants to talk . . .”

“Uncle Tom . . .”

“I’m not impressed.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Tom, I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do . . .”

“And wasn’t I the one who gave you the secret of happiness all those years ago when you were a little boy? What did I tell you to do whenever you got upset?”

“You told me to whistle.”

“That’s right. It’s humanly impossible to whistle and feel sad at the same time. My mother taught me that, and she’s right. You had the secret, but you made the conscious decision to despair. Shame on you. And what about your uncle William? Didn’t he advise you about the French language?”

When I was twelve, my uncle William told me a story. He was Pop and Uncle Tom’s older brother and served with the American army in the Second World War. He and a handful of surviving members of his fighting unit prepared to make a last-ditch assault on a German-held farmhouse in France. It was near the end of the war.

“We didn’t expect to survive,” he said. “We made our plan and put our faith in God and one another and got up and ran directly into the incoming mortar, machine-gun, and artillery fire. Suddenly our only commanding officer started to scream,
‘Appel du devoir!’
I thought he had gone mad, but then we all started to holler,
‘Appel du devoir!’
as we attacked the house.

“Collie,” he said, “I believe that’s what saved my life that day.”

“You mean the moral power of duty, Uncle William?”

“No! No! Don’t be such a schoolgirl, Collie. The French language. Don’t you see? It has remarkable powers of inspiration. It provokes one to marvelous feats of courage. Always remember: When you’re frightened bolster yourself with a French word or two. The effects are positively galvanizing.”

Pop grabbed the phone away from Tom.

“Collie, is it really you?”

“It’s me, Pop.”

“Thank God. How could you think of taking your own life? Where did your mother and I go wrong? What did we do? How did we fail you? Didn’t I always tell you when you’re feeling low to say the Hail Mary? I could walk through fire as long as I’ve got the rosary in my hand.”

“Pop, I want to come home. . . .”

“Don’t move. I’m on my way. Just the small matter of my train fare and traveling expenses and I’ll catch up with you tomorrow. . . .”

The next morning I got up and sneaked out of the clinic, which wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds. I called a cab and walked out the front door and caught my ride in the parking lot. I waited for Pop at the local train station. His train came and went. It whizzed through the station without stopping.

Pop got so drunk in the dining car that he passed out and wound up somewhere in Canada, a mining town in Ontario called Sudbury. He came to on a park bench and stumbled into a store on the main street that specialized in hunting and knitting supplies.

“I got out of there fast,” he said when I finally talked to him. “This great behemoth in a toque was making plans to go hunting all right. ‘You remind me of my dead husband, Squeak,’ she says with a toothless grin. Squeak? Well, I ask you.”

I decided against the train. I shredded my ticket, abandoned my luggage, left the station, and stepped outside onto the quiet street and into a downpour. Whistling to beat the band, singing the French national anthem, hair in my eyes, my running shoes full of water, I hoisted my thumb in the air and said the Hail Mary.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I
T WAS A LONG WALK TO CASSOWARY, A FEW DAYS, AT LEAST, AND I
was in no rush. I wanted some time to think, time away, free from the opinions of the living and the dead. The side of the road was the last place that anyone would ever think to look for me. I spent my first night lying on the broken and weathered floorboards of an abandoned barn.

Brotherless and motherless, but with an oozing excess of father, uncle, and grandfather, my inadequacies pulsing like stigmata, I decided that with the right attitude I could exert some influence over the rest of my life. I needed a strategy. I needed a blueprint, some kind of template that I could follow.

The moon and the stars were visible overhead; the old roof was open in a large gaping part to the black sky. It was there by the silver light of a country night that I remembered Bingo’s Man Plan—despite the way I’d ridiculed him at the time, I was beginning to think that setting goals wasn’t such a bad idea. In some ways, it made me feel as if he were still a vital part of my life, as if it were a project we shared.

I figured two years would do the trick, a timeline I soon realized might need a little adjusting. Waking up on the floor of my bedroom one afternoon soon after arriving back at Cassowary, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, Cromwell licking my hair.

When you find yourself regularly substituting dog spit for shampoo, successful adulthood seems about as attainable as a gold medal in synchronized swimming.

The two-year plan officially became the five-to-ten-year plan. 

My first thought was to approach manhood as if it were a formal design, as if I were tearing down one old building and erecting a more functional shiny new structure in its place. I was taking notes, writing things down, setting goals, and establishing timelines, but I had to face it, I was operating less on doctrine and more on impulse. Like me, the Man Plan was a work in progress, a book I could set down and then pick back up again.

According to my evolving strategy, sometime between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, finally I would be a man. It was a heartening thought.

But to start, I needed to dispose of Collie the boy, murder his memory, and bury him where no one could ever find him, including me.

I’d been back at Cassowary for about a week. First on my agenda was to tell the Falcon that I had no interest in the family business. When I was at Andover, I did a brief co-op stint at one of his papers, the
Boston Expositor
, which was enough to convince me that I wasn’t interested in working as a journalist.

“So you’re the golden-haired boy,” said one of the editors by way of introduction. I got accustomed to their derision. The literary editor referred to me as the Rajah, and the sports department called me Peewee. The food editor called me the Little Prince, and the guys in the advertising department favored a rotating number of preferred alternatives, including Pretty Boy or Poor Little Rich Boy. On the loading dock, I was simply Dogfucker Flanagan.

The editor, Darryl Pierce, had an assistant who was the only person to call me by my real name, and she mangled the pronunciation, referring to me repeatedly as “Coaly.”

Despite the Falcon’s threats of reprisal, even Mr. Pierce, a reverse snob with a fetish for reminding everyone that he’d come up the hard way, had his own nickname for me.

“Nice to meet you, Shoes,” he said, glancing down at my feet. “Never seen it fail. You can spot a rich kid from miles away— well-shod and manicured paws.”

He sent me to cover weekly service organization luncheons, nastily making sure the club’s senior officers knew in advance that the Falcon was my grandfather, which pretty much guaranteed my being variously but consistently viewed as a potential son-in-law, an investor, a talentless weasel, or the potential target of a kidnapping.

The Falcon was determined that I would one day run his empire. I was just as resolved never to set foot inside a newspaper or magazine again if I could help it. I realized that an adult would quit stalling and tell him. I kept hoping to catch him in a good mood, which might have been comical if it didn’t represent such a pathetic stall. At that rate, the Man Plan was threatening to become the Old Man Plan.

I approached the dining room, humming and whistling, trying to pluck up my courage. All sensation was gone in my hands and feet by the time I reached the open doorway, where I paused, pulse racing, feeling as if I were about to inform Satan that I’d forgotten to order more barbecue fluid.

The Falcon looked up from his breakfast, mellow September sunlight filtering in through the open window behind him. He was buried up to his elbows in newsprint; all those dozens of newspapers were stacked neatly on the long dining room table every morning for his avid scrutiny. I swear to God he read every word—the air around him smelled like cordite, smoking with his continuously expressed fury.

“Good God! What kind of imbeciles do I have working for me?” he asked me, holding up the front page of one of his London papers, grease pencil marks scrawled in red all over the page. His favorite trick when he was angry was to write, “Ugh!” in huge flaming red letters, scorching the front page, and have the offending edition hand-delivered to the editor.

Obviously, this was not a happy morning—I lost count of all the “Ughs!” that were visible even from where I was standing. It was like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, his radioactive rebukes falling through the air, covering every surface, incinerating onlookers.

A vigorous wind blew through the room—lifted the hair from my forehead and scattered newspaper pages all over the floor.

“For goodness’ sake, Collie, leave them!” the old guy barked at me as I bent to retrieve the papers. “Why do you think I pay staff? Ingrid!” he shouted. “Ingrid!”

Ingrid appeared around the corner from the butler’s pantry. “I’m right here. There’s no need to bellow. Good morning, Collie, and how are you this beautiful fine day?” She smiled over at me, calmly ignoring his bluster.

“Never mind the nonsense. He’s fine. . . . This mess is what you should be worrying about. What kind of a household are you running? Well, don’t just stand there, Collie, with your thumb in your mouth. Sit down. . . . What is it, Ingrid?” His clenched fists simultaneously hit the tabletop, spilling his water.

“You called me, don’t you remember?”

“Can’t you put on a dab of lipstick and some rouge? Add a little bright color to that pale pudding face of yours? It starts raining every time you walk into the room. And for heaven’s sake make an appointment for some hair color. I won’t have gray heads in this house. How many times must I repeat myself? And for God’s sake speak to the staff about the declining state of their appearance. And tell the girls in the kitchen to buy some decent support garments or I’ll fire the whole unsightly lot of you. It’s an aesthetic affront. No wonder Collie’s lost his will to live, walking around here with that hangdog expression all the time.”

“Really,” Ingrid said disapprovingly before turning her attention to me as I slid into the nearest chair across from the Falcon at the dining room table. “Don’t you listen to him. Collie, it’s so wonderful to hear you walking around the house whistling. You’re giving the canaries a run for their money. I can hardly believe it after such a terrible dark time. It’s like a miracle to hear you happy.”

“Thanks, Ingrid,” I said, breaking my rye bread into ragged chunks.

“Personally, I find it a little offputting. So what are we to conclude from this little episode—the dramatic escape from the clinic and the contemplative journey on foot back home? Suicide in small doses will either kill or cure you?” the Falcon said, a glass of tomato juice to his lips. He took a small sip and patted the edges of his mouth with the corner of a white linen napkin.

“Such a dreadful thing to say,” Ingrid said, instinctively raising her hand to her mouth.

The Falcon’s napkin dropped to the floor. “Really, Ingrid, you are beyond the pale. I’m either the most tolerant employer in the world or the most foolish—my God, but you take liberties—”

“I want to talk to you.” I cleared my throat, glancing over at Ingrid, who instinctively withdrew, disappearing into the kitchen.

“Why do you preface your intention with such an inane gratuitous announcement? You are already talking to me. Don’t dilute your conversation with lukewarm qualifiers. Just spit it out. What is it? I’ve got a flight to catch.” He impaled me with his eyes, sharp and metallic as spears.

I felt my resolve gasp and look around frantically for a place to hide, my brief experiment with manhood collapsing.

“Uh . . . nothing—it’s nothing important . . . just . . . well, would you like me to drive you to the airport?”