Apologize, Apologize! (6 page)

“Nice,” I said to him, but he just laughed. Bing’s attitude toward sex could probably best be summed up in a single word, “Woo-hoo,” and that’s when he was feeling pensive. For some bizarre reason, Ma found his promiscuity oddly charming, though she didn’t extend the same latitude to me. When it came to my love life, Ma assumed the role of disgusted adolescent being forced to contemplate her parents “doing the hoob,” as Uncle Tom referred to intercourse, insisting it was a proper biological term. Thanks to him, I got the strap in grade five for referring to coitus as hoobalah in sex ed class after Uncle Tom “corrected” my terminology.

Unlike Bingo, who lost his virginity at thirteen to the island’s official deflowerer, Melanie Merrick—he had to scramble around the kitchen, emptying cupboards to find Saran Wrap to create a makeshift condom—I was a late bloomer, relatively speaking, struggling to catch up with my younger brother. When it came my turn, I was sixteen and I told Ma I was spending the night at a friend’s house.

Instead I pitched a tent in the conservation area near home, and that’s where I lost it to Eleanor Parrish, who undid the zipper on my jeans as casually as if she were pulling her blond hair into a ponytail.

Her parents found out and went nuts, though their response was mild compared with Ma’s reaction. She let out one long scream when she saw me the next morning, and gathering up my shirt in her fists, twisting it into a noose around my neck, she pinned me against the nearest wall.

“How dare you take advantage of that innocent girl,” she said. “Animal! You have no idea what you’ve unleashed! Girls are very emotional about sex. She may never recover from you exploiting her.”

Pop looked at me as accusing and disappointed as if he’d caught me trying to set fire to him while he was sleeping. He and Ma grounded me for three months.

Years of Catholicism burning a hole in my conscience, I crawled into the study and stretched out on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling and thought about how much I loved Eleanor Parrish.

“Say, what were you thinking?” Uncle Tom appeared in the doorway.

I don’t know who was more horrified, Uncle Tom or me, when I began to cry. I covered my face with my hands.

“I just wanted to see what it was like,” I said, sobbing and unable to stop. I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since I was a little kid.

“Well, I could have told you that you’d like it,” he said, wandering over to the sofa. He sat next to me and took my hand.

“It’s all right,” he said. “And you’re not grounded.” He reached into his pocket. “Would you like some peanut brittle?”

“No thanks,” I said, starting to regain some composure, rubbing my eyes with the sleeves of my shirt.

Uncle Tom and I sat together in silence, the only sound the persistent buzz of a circling fly.

“I’ve been listening to him for the last few minutes. It’s true what they say about flies humming in the middle-octave key of F. And it’s a good thing they do,” Uncle Tom said, pausing, inviting the question, refusing to continue unless he was satisfied I was fully engaged.

“Why?” I asked him, powerless after so many years to resist.

“Think about it. The possibilities are staggering. You wouldn’t want a common housefly with a magisterial high C. Say, he’d have the power to break your heart.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
WAS SEVENTEEN, JUST ABOUT TO GRADUATE AND TRYING TO
decide what to do after Andover. Ma wanted me to organize migrant workers. I wanted to go to Brown with my friends.  

“Friends! Hah!” Ma shrieked. “What friends? You don’t have any real friends. They’re all a bunch of vacuous social climbers, and you’re the worst of the lot. Just once I’d like you to express a single unconventional thought. I’m surprised you weren’t born wearing a tie.”

“You get that from your grandmother McMullen,” Pop said to me after the long weekend at home. He was talking about my conservatism, a family preoccupation generally referred to as if it were a disease or chronic condition, like syphilis of the soul.

“How I detest conservatism in a man,” Ma said as she lit the gas stove.

What passed for conservatism in our household, however, could get you arrested anywhere else.

Pop was more accepting of my flaws than Ma, since in his quixotic but definite view of things, you were the preordained sum of all your parts. My mother was simpleminded over Bing, but according to Pop, it was in the DNA.

“She gets it from her mother. The Buntings are fixated on good-looking people to the exclusion of all other considerations.” He paused for a sip of spiked coffee, the full cup raised to his lips. Lovingly, he inhaled the steam. I intuitively took two steps back. You could have gotten drunk on the fumes from his coffee. 

“When it comes to looks you’ve got nothing to apologize for, Collie. You’re a fine-looking lad, Jesus, you look like an Irish prince, and more important, you wear the clever pants in this family, and that comes right from your cousins the Hanrahan twins—”

“I know, Pop. You’ve told me about those idiots a million times. . . .” But it didn’t stop him. His chin hit the floor.

“Idiots?” he thundered. “They graduated from the university when they were only fifteen years old. They were the smartest boys who ever lived. The only thing is they weren’t practical, and it cost them their lives. They hadn’t a clue about water and electricity. Who would ever have thought a plugged kitchen sink and an old toaster could wreak such havoc? Always be practical, Collie. To paraphrase the great Mr. O’Brien, pragmatism’s your only man.”

Probably because he was so hopelessly inept, Pop viewed practicality as if it were the mother lode, a treasure as elusive and fulfilling as the Holy Grail. This was a guy with an unreasonable reverence for duct tape, which he deemed a discovery of enormous cultural significance surpassed only by fire and archery. He once backed Ma’s car out of the garage in a drunken stupor with the passenger door wide open, nearly tearing it off the hinge. The next day, he proudly showed me how he’d fixed it using miles of duct tape. 

“Now that’s pragmatism,” he said.

I’d never seen so much tape. The whole side of the car was sealed up so tight you could have used it to safely transport the plague. Ma drove around for months with the car door sealed shut. I don’t think she ever noticed—all that money, and we were some can of piss.

Ma and Pop used to stay up all night and sleep all day, stumbling into the kitchen to make coffee, her hair wild as the wind, sleeping mask worn like a necklace, his eyes watery and red.

“It’s the circadian rhythms,” Pop would say. “Each man is a prisoner of his internal clock. God help the man who won’t make peace with his circadian cycle.”

“What are you doing up? Washed and dressed. Have you already eaten?” my mother asked. I was teetering back and forth on a swivel chair in the corner near the window, the bad-humored ocean bubbling and hissing in the background.

“Ma, I’ve been up since seven. You were supposed to take me back to school, remember? I should have known. Next time I’ll get to the ferry myself.”

“Oh, I know. In bed by eleven, be up at seven. The drivel they espouse at that school of yours. You know, of course, nothing interesting ever happens before one o’clock in the afternoon. You and your pasty face and your banker’s hours.”

“What am I supposed to do? I’ve got school! I need to get back.”

“And God knows we wouldn’t ever want to miss a day of school. Aren’t you the good little comptroller.”

Her conversation was turning into one long protracted sneer. I could feel something warm glowing at the base of my skull. The years away at school spent among teachers who liked me for my ordinary urges and common interests had made me bold with Ma. It must have happened somewhere between all those weekend trips from the house to the campus and the campus to the house. I finally had decided I wasn’t going to want her to love me anymore.

“Leave the boy alone, Anais,” Pop said, speaking up from the other side of the room, where I could see him pouring more brandy, like cream, into his coffee. He sighed. “He can’t help himself. It’s right in him.”

I got up and stared out the window; the skyline and the waves were an identical slate color, the greater world a stark monochrome, the frayed white curtain blowing, one of the little dogs standing on all fours, trying to catch the fluttering lacy edges in his teeth.

“Did Tom feed the dogs? Did Bingo get something to eat?” my mother asked me.

“Yes,” I said with no small hint of frustration as I turned away from the window to face her.

“Is that exasperation I detect? The nerve of you.”

Oh, I can still feel the rising tension in my shoulders, my neck tightening, my veins constricting, the flow of blood roiling to a crimson standstill, me silent and growing taller and straighter with every weighted word, vertical with the sheer breadth and scope of her. 

And somewhere in the background, a million fleas were hopping from dog to dog to dog and back again, an invisible flea circus, full of the sounds of scratching, heads shaking, collars ringing, and paws thumping. To this day, I’m still coughing up hair from hundreds of dogs. A dog is curled up in every chair my inner eye surveys, every sofa draped in dogs, dogs piled on dogs like firewood from the floor to the ceiling. I drag a dog by my shoelaces across the uneven floor of my daily life; there’s a dog tugging on my pant leg, refusing to let go, pulling me back when all I want to do is go forward.

“Hey, Collie, look smart!” Pop said, grinning as he pulled a coin from behind his ear and tossed it. I caught it between my fingers and nodded. He laughed. Charlie always figured there wasn’t an unhappy moment that couldn’t be redeemed by a flick of the wrist.

“Darling, darling, how is my precious darling?” Mom was diverted from her impending tirade by the sight of Bingo coming through the door after a long, lively day of truancy, feeding chocolate-chip cookies to his favorite dachshund, Jackdaw, looped round his shoulders like an inflated inner tube, ready to burst at the seams.

“Look at him, just look at him, Charlie, standing there as beautiful as if he’d stepped from a bandbox. Look at him, Collie. Isn’t he a picture with the sun in his hair?”

“You’re going to make him conceited as a corpse with white teeth, Anais. Let him be a man. No man worth his salt ever gave a hoot about his appearance. Back me up on this, Collie. When’s the last time you washed your hair?”

“I don’t know . . . a few days ago, I guess. . . .”

“There’s the man. Jesus, I’ve never been more proud,” he said, squeezing my shoulders, as I tried to shake off the implications of being the son so without distinction that his erratic personal hygiene was cause for celebration.

Bingo looked over at me and grinned, opening up like a tulip under the sunshine of Ma’s blinding adoration. Bingo liked everyone, and everyone liked Bingo. He knew Ma was crazy, but so what? She was crazy about him. He sat back and enjoyed her, reveling in her insanity as if she were a recurring character in some sketch comedy. Parody Ma, he sometimes called her.

“Shut your mouth, Coll,” he said. “You’re catching the flies your hair is attracting.”

“Don’t listen to them, darling,” my mother said, pulling Bing into her open arms, hugging him until he begged for air; she was kissing Jackdaw on the top of his head, the other dogs crowding excitedly around them. “What else would you expect a couple of run-of-the-mill fiddles to say in the presence of a gleaming Stradivarius? They’re forever stuck at the barn dance, but you, Bingo, my love, you’re going to the ball.”

And then she swept around the kitchen with him in her arms, loudly singing her dissonant Sondheim tunes, the dogs going crazy.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, I GRADUATED FROM ANDOVER. IT WAS
a hot day, and the air-conditioning broke down just before the ceremony, the hall hazy as a sauna. I stepped up to receive my diploma, my hands slippery with sweat, and glancing down, I saw my mother glowering at me from the front row, she and the Falcon separated only by the presence of Pop, heavy-lidded and bored, the smell of whiskey filling the air around him like incense. Ma’s right fist was clenched inside a black leather glove. Her version of a tennis bracelet, it was intended to express her solidarity with whatever injustice currently engaged her imagination. That day, she was pretty worked up about the plight of coffee plantation workers in Brazil.

Bingo got ejected a few minutes later for causing a disturbance with his coughing—based on their experience with him in the past, the staff was convinced it was a deliberate disruption, but this time they were wrong. The intense heat kicked off an asthma attack, the first one he’d had in years.

Two men, their voices turned down low, discreetly tried to escort him away, but Ma, who never missed the opportunity to make a scene, reacted as if Bingo had fallen into the hands of a military junta and were about to become one of the disappeared.

“Get your hands off him!” she yelled, reaching for Bingo’s arm as the men tried in vain to calm her down, audience members craning for a better look, my friends laughing, my nervous system experiencing a series of rolling blackouts.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave, Mrs. Flanagan,” one of the men said firmly but soothingly, as if he were trying to talk down a mental patient from the ledge of a high-rise.

My mother spun around to face me on the stage. “Are you happy now?” she yelled up at me.

Pop, who had up to this point shown unusual restraint, jumped to his feet, wavered a little, and announced, “We’re leaving.” Taking Ma by the elbow, pushing his way past the two men, cheerful Bingo in the lead, he headed down the center aisle. Ma kept noisily resisting.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” she screamed as she vanished from sight, her voice echoing in the corridors, a slight smile crossing the Falcon’s face, his eyes locked briefly on mine, his arms crossed over his chest.

He relaxed his posture, stretching out his legs, and I heard him chuckle. I couldn’t believe it. I was as astonished as if I’d stumbled across a saltwater crocodile giggling over something a giraffe said at the local watering hole.

I stared at him, and then I laughed, too, a little apprehensively, maybe, but it seemed the impossible had happened. The Falcon and I were sharing a laugh.

A few days passed before I managed to work up the courage to confront Ma with my decision about the fall. I may have given up on winning her affection, but I still feared her wrath. 

“I’ve decided to go to Brown,” I said, fan whirring overhead, my hand gripping the collar of Bachelor, our two-hundred-pound St. Bernard. He was sitting next to me as I stood in the middle of the kitchen, his dense fur pressing against my bare legs. Panting and grinning, drooling in the early summer heat, steam rising from his dangling tongue, his tail banging, he was leaning into me, and I was leaning back, grateful for the support.

“Oh. And what do you intend to study?” Ma paused at the open refrigerator door, her back to me, then closed it slowly and turned around to face me, a tray of ice cubes in her hand.

“I don’t know exactly . . . I guess maybe I’ll get a liberal arts degree to start. . . .”

She dropped the tray with a bang. It hit the black-and-white checkerboard tiles, ice shattering, shards spraying across the floor. The little dogs attacked like fire ants, scrambling and bickering, competing for the spoils, crunching loudly on the frozen fragments.

“To what end? Film studies? Theater arts? My God, is this about going into show business? You’re going to be an actor? You want to be in the movies, is that what this is all about?” Her voice had a pinging quality, like the taut quiver of a bow.

“No. No. Ma, jeez, here we go. . . .”

“I’m expected to bankroll an Ivy League education so you can churn out crap? Does it occur to you that the world does not need yet another aspiring creative with no talent? Next you’ll be telling me you want to write comic books. Are you looking for fame? Is that it? Is your life nothing more than one enormous vanity project?”

Her hair was getting curlier by the moment, each serpentine tendril coiling into a series of minitornadoes blowing wildly, the room seeming to swirl and spin. I held tight to Bachelor, watching helplessly as the world around me took on a deep indigo blue color, Ma’s eyes flashing like heat lightning.

“You with your bristling bourgeois ambitions . . . Why not just be an orthodontist and be done with it? Proclaim to the entire world: ‘I am a bore. I think only of braces and bruxism and accounts receivable and slender blondes with bobs! Nothing else matters!’”

“Ma, what are you talking about? You never listen. Would you listen for once? You just go off on these crazy tangents of yours. . . .” I was standing there out in the open, Bachelor licking my knee, his watery spit running down my leg, as I shoved my hands through my hair, ducking flying objects coming from the other side of the room.

“He has to ask, my God, he just doesn’t get it. Charlie, do you hear this? Are you paying attention? Your son has just announced his intention to become a movie star.”

Pop was sitting on a wooden chair, reading yesterday’s
New York Times
. He was always two or three days behind the rest of the world, his bare legs tucked under a long pine table, Bing’s initials carved into its scuffed surface.

“I thought we discussed this, Collie,” he said, sapphire blue eyes peering over the top of the page. “We decided you were going to become a mechanical engineer and design bridges, don’t you remember?”

“Pop, that’s your idea. I don’t want to be a mechanical engineer.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous. How could anyone given the opportunity not want to be a mechanical engineer? A man can do nothing finer in his lifetime than build a bridge.”

“The real question is, how can anyone submit to all those years of Westernized education yet emerge knowing absolutely nothing about what truly matters? The world hovering on the precipice of revolutionary social change, and you want to wear makeup and chase starlets,” Ma said, getting warmed up, practically eating coal, she was that stoked.

“All well and good, Anais, but your revolutions and the men of mysterious angers that spearhead them are small potatoes compared to the timeless achievement of building a bridge,” Pop said, turning his divided attention back to the op-ed page.

My heart sputtered, every nerve ending sparking and shorting. I felt as if I needed to loosen my tie—I wasn’t wearing one. I put a figurative gun to my forehead and fired several times. I missed. Most times, dealing with Ma, I knew better than to jump into the fray, but not this time. This time, I was just plain angry.

“What makes you such a revolutionary?” I walked toward her. “You’re a joke. You shoot your mouth off about the poor, but you don’t have any idea what it’s like to be poor. You don’t even know what it’s like to be middle class. When’s the last time you were even in a grocery store? Uncle Tom does all the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning. What do you do? You think because you don’t wear lipstick that you’re a social maverick? You claim to despise Granddad because he’s some sort of evil oligarch, but meanwhile you use his money to live like a member of the royal family.

“If you were serious about what you say you believe, then you’d give up everything and we’d live among the kind of people you claim to love so much. But you won’t do that because the truth is that you hate everybody—you just want to annoy everyone around you and establish rules for them that you don’t follow. If we moved into some public housing unit, you’d be parading around in a tiara and bragging about your silver spoon. How can you stand being such a hypocrite?”

Whenever Ma was confronted, which wasn’t often, she’d inevitably react with a preternatural calm, swallowing her furies and reimagining her anger as a state of Zen, heightened tolerance her favored tool of torture. She smiled over at me, a doctor’s wife sheathed in silk and sarcasm, exuding the kind of painful predatory pleasantness usually confined to social encounters among strangers who instinctively dislike one another.

“What is this? Some kind of teenage tantrum? Upset because you can’t get a date to the dance, Collie? Yes, I use your grandfather’s money. You bet your ass I do, because it suits me. I like the fact that I’m committing enormous amounts of his fortune to destroy the system that helped create him and protects and sustains everything he stands for—and believe me, Collie, I make things happen with that money. I serve my causes well.” She leaned back against the fridge, arms folded in front of her, self-satisfied grin on her face.

“Oh, please, you’re always intimating that you’re some kind of international outlaw when all you do is hand over money to a bunch of homegrown Marxist phonies who’ve learned how to work the cocktail circuit. Granddad has a party and you show up in work boots and start insulting everyone, and you think it means something, like you’re on the front lines of battle—when all it really means is that you’re a jerk who enjoys making people uncomfortable and belittling them.”

“Here, here, Collie, your mother deserves better than that. She is your mother, for goodness’ sake,” Pop interjected.

“Don’t remind me,” I said.

Ma laughed. “Spoken like the spoiled adolescent you are. Oh, let him talk, Charlie. I don’t mind. Only a fool argues with a fool. And anyway, it’s good practice for when he’s acting out scenes in his little movies, helps him get used to all that second-rate dialogue he’ll be spewing for the rest of his life. Is this an audition of some kind, for one of those beach blanket movies?” She looked at me with utter contempt. I was fighting with all my heart the urge to let her have it, wishing a giant anvil would drop from the sky and turn her into a scrambled grease spot on the floor.

I glanced around at the sound of the kitchen door opening and banging shut once and then again, a warm, sudden gust of salty sea air lifting up the corners of the curtains and scattering the newspaper. Tom and Bingo returned from a walk with so many overheated frothing dogs, they flowed like lava into the kitchen.

I struggled with the urge to pant. 

“Collie says he’s going to be a movie star,” Ma said as if she were announcing I was suffering an outbreak of genital herpes. Bingo rolled his eyes.

“For the last time, I don’t want to be a movie star.”

“It’s the only way he’ll ever get the girl, Ma—if it’s in the script,” Bing said, reaching into the fridge for a bottle of soda.

“I think you’re aware of my feelings on the subject,” Tom said, removing his straw boater and sitting in the chair across from Pop. He stared at me.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes. I have only two words for you.”

“Not again.”

“Pigeon coach.”

“For God’s sake, Tom, how many times must we go through this? He’s not going to coach pigeons.” Ma threw her arms into the air and then, bending over, pulled Marty, one of the poodles, onto her lap and buried her face in his curly topknot.

“And why not? Racing pigeons are the thoroughbreds of the sky. Owning a flock of racing homers is the same as owning a professional sports team. Even the damn Royals keep a flock of racing pigeons.”

“Would you stop talking about pigeons? Leave it to you to champion a public nuisance,” Ma said.

“Oh, and I suppose GI Joe is a public nuisance, is he? The most highly decorated pigeon in American history, was he being a pest when he saved the lives of one thousand British soldiers?”

“To say nothing of Captain Lederman, Jungle Joe, and Blackie Halligan,” Bingo said from his spot in the doorway as he sipped his Pepsi. “And don’t forget your own Michael Collins, Uncle Tom. Boy, there was a glorious bird.”

“Thanks, asshole,” I said, eliciting a frown from Pop.

“I’m not likely to forget that bird in a hurry. He disappeared on a five-hundred-mile journey. I looked for him for days, weeks went by, and I’d given up. Broke my heart to think a predator had claimed him. Six weeks later I went out to the loft and there he was, bless his noble heart, his wing broken. He couldn’t fly, so what does he do? He walks.”

“And he wouldn’t have made it but for the Brooklyn Bridge now, would he?” Pop said.

“For God’s sake, Tom, don’t be absurd. Why do you say such preposterous things?” Ma said. “You fill the boys’ heads with utter nonsense.”

The old lady, sighing deeply, decided to put an end to the conversation—it was an argument that diffused into a conversation as opposed to a conversation that escalated into an argument, both standard progressions in our family. “Well, if you’re determined to be a teen idol, you can get the funding from your grandfather.”

“No, I can’t. He wants me to go to Yale and study international law. But it doesn’t matter. . . .”

“Really? He doesn’t want you going to Brown? The nerve of the bastard. Who does he think he is? How dare he tell one of my children what they’re to do.”

“Ma, I don’t need anybody’s money, especially yours. I’ve been offered a full scholarship.”

“What?” She sprang forward in her seat, Marty scrambling to remain in her lap. “What is this, the final days of the Apocalypse? You can’t be serious? You come from one of the wealthiest families in the country and you’re offered free access to Brown? Meanwhile, children of the inner city are left to their own impoverished devices, even at the elementary school level—”

“Ma, for Christ’s sake, a scholarship is based on academic merit, not need.”

“Bullshit! Academic performance is skewed to socioeconomic background. . . .”

“Oh, the Ivy League, is it? Bingo, don’t look at him. No one can have eye contact with him now he’s a Brown man. And don’t talk to him. He’ll only converse in Latin, hadn’t you heard?” Tom said, cast-iron skillet in his hand, preparing to make his habitual late lunch of bacon and eggs—singing to himself every afternoon, “Tom Flanagan’s makin’ himself some eggs and bacon.”