Pharmakon (41 page)

Back then, it was easier for me to fish by my father’s rules. Which is to say, it worked for a while. Not talking about Casper didn’t make me forget about him. But I thought about him less and less often.

In 1966, much to my entire family’s amazement, my father fi-nally not only found but bought a house he could live in. It was a barn that had once been home to a herd of black-and-white dairy cows, built with beams of black walnut felled and squared by hand with double-bladed axes a hundred years earlier. Set into a hillside, it was four stories high and constructed upon a foundation of stones and rocks pulled from its fields by mules when that part of Hunterdon County was first being cleared of stumps of hardwood trees crosscut into eighteen-foot lengths with two-man handsaws to provide boards for the siding. It was a monument to sweat and backbreaking work. And my father loved the struggle that had gone into its construction even more than its unwalled cathedraled hayloft or its cozy stonewalled milking stalls.

In the course of a little less than a year, my father succeeded in paying for the installation of a kitchen, bathrooms, plumbing, and huge picture windows that made it hot in the summer and cold in the winter but allowed him to spy visitors half a mile before they knocked on our door.

The most exciting thing about the barn my father bought to shelter the Friedrich herd was that the twelve pie-shaped acres that came with it had a river, well, a stream, really, running along its longest border. It was fifteen feet wide in places, and had a waterfall that dropped four feet into a pool that was over-your-head deep and home to native brook trout, savage and shadowy. No matter that it was called Cold Creek; it was a major tributary in my mind, the place where my father and I would bond not just for a few hours on weekends, but for forever.

When Dad committed to the purchase, I was in heaven. At the age of twelve, I had become almost as good as he was at losing myself and my worries in the certain sound of water falling downhill from the heartland to the unseen sea. But in the year it took to construct his sanctuary, I gave in to a different kind of gravity.

By then Fiona was in a graduate school MFA program that allowed her to keep painting and still live in New York City. Her paintings were big, six, sometimes eight feet across. She’d start out painting a family, mother, father, couple of kids, then she’d cover the whole thing over with a thick glop of pigment mixed with beeswax, and then smear off just enough with a spatula to make you wonder what she’d covered up.

My mother said Fiona had found her style. My father thought he was being funny when he’d say “I just wish she’d find a husband who could pay for her to keep painting paintings that nobody but me and Lazlo buy.”

Lucy was looking for her style, too. She was the only senior in her college who had had two engagement parties and was secretly contemplating a third. Willy and I had fulfilled our father’s upwardly mobile dreams by being accepted by a private boy’s school older and more snobbish than Hamden Hall, called St. Luke’s.

My parents, especially my father, had made a big deal about how important it was that we get into St. Luke’s. He didn’t come out and say we’d grow up to be losers if that prep school of choice turned us down; he just made it clear we’d be “perceived” as losers. In spite of it being such a big deal, my father’s career, coupled with his anxiety about rejection, prompted my parents to procrastinate in mailing in our applications until after they returned from eight weeks spent in South America testing antidepressants on people who, he came home saying, wouldn’t need mood elevation if they had better plumbing. Perhaps he wanted to be able to blame himself if we didn’t get in. Whatever, after several nervous-making months, our letters of acceptance finally showed up in the mailbox midsummer.

I was too crazy about fishing to get revved up about going into eighth grade at St. Luke’s in September. School was school for me. But Willy was even more excited than Dad. He jumped up and down, clapped his hands, and shouted, “Yes!” The St. Luke’s cross-country team had won state championships four years running.

He felt differently about things when my father announced, “Willy, after giving it some thought, I decided that it might be best if you repeated your junior year.” Willy stopped jumping up and down. I saw the betrayal he felt flush his cheeks. My brother was looking forward to being a senior—Willy was good at school, impatient to get away from us and go to college.

“Why?” Willy’s voice was a whisper.

My father smiled like he was doing him a favor. “Well, a lot of boys, scholar athletes like yourself, take a postgraduate year when they make a change from public school to prep school.”

“Kids who stay back are stupid—I’m smart.”

“That you are. And because of your intelligence, you’ll realize another year of high school competition will toughen you up for the big races you’ll face in college.” My father was doing a good job of pretending he cared about track. Dad liked the winning, but the race bored him.

Willy glared at my father and smiled. “What’s the real reason?”

My father looked at my brother as if he saw something invisible that made him sad. Then he put one hand on each of our shoulders. “Well, it had occurred to me that if you repeated your junior year, when you’d be a senior, Zach would be out of ju nior high and a freshman. Maybe if you shared a year of high school, went to classes in the same building, ate in the same dining hall, went to the same dances, you two would find you have more in common than you now imagine.”

Willy hated my guts before my father applied the brakes to his life for my benefit. Now, in a matter of moments, my father had cubed the distance between my brother and myself.

In fairness to Willy, I was not an easy younger brother to be burdened by. I started fights with him, and then when he won, made him out to be a bully, i.e., I fixed it so there was no way he could win. But part of what separated us was more fundamental than that. Our natures seemed to demand mutual disdain. Willy didn’t care enough about what other people thought of him; I cared too much.

That night, after we found out about St. Luke’s, Dad took us out to a restaurant called the Ryland Inn, and Lazlo drove out from New York to join us and ordered champagne and gave me a present from Zuza, a small bronze brain with wings on it. Between having my own river and getting into St. Luke’s, the future looked like a sure thing. Until I got up from my shrimp cocktail to go to the bathroom, and Willy followed.

“You’re lucky to have me for a brother.” As Willy straddled the urinal next to me, he fingered the tie tack he had gotten for coming in second in the state cross-country championship.

“We’re both lucky.”

“I work for what I get. With you, it’s just dumb luck.”

“You’re just jealous ’cause fish don’t like you.” If I hadn’t been feeling so good, I would have said,
You’re just jealous ’cause Dad
likes me the best.

“I don’t think they have courses in fishing at St. Luke’s.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You told me yourself you didn’t know half the answers on the entrance exam.”

“So?”

“So the only reason you got in was because the track coach wanted me on the team, and Dad said we were a package deal, and told him you were psychologically scarred because of Casper.”

“Dad told you that?”

“He tells everybody that before they meet you. That’s why everybody’s so nice to poor little Zach.” He flushed the urinal and let me linger with that possibility.

The next morning, I greeted my father at the breakfast table with “Do I have to go to St. Luke’s?”

“We paid for it.” He meant that in more ways than one. “What’s wrong?”

I told him what Willy had said. My father looked out the window. He could see Willy running down the hill, shorts over his long winter underwear. “Is it the truth, Dad?”

“It’s Willy’s truth.”

“Was he lying?”

“You didn’t flunk the entrance exam.”

“You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to give up.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you this, but you scored higher than anyone else who was applying in your class.”

“But I guessed.” We both knew I wasn’t very good at school.

“Maybe you know more than you think you do.”

I liked that idea. And after I let it sink in, I asked, “Why’d you hold Willy back for me?”

“I did it for Willy, not for you. He needs more time to think about who he is.”

Even though I didn’t like Willy, I thought it was shitty of my father to stick him with an extra year of high school. And yet, I sensed my father wasn’t trying to be shitty; he was trying to do something kind for his first-born son. But at that moment, what I wanted most was for Dad to stay focused on me, say something else that would make me feel better about myself.

“But Dad, what I don’t get is, if I know more than I think I do, why don’t I do better in school?”

My father was pleased I’d asked that question. “Maybe you’re mad at me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“You tell me.” Like I said, you had to be careful of my father on dry land.

My brother had his driver’s license now. In a well-meaning attempt to bribe Willy into befriending me, my father gave our now old Pontiac Skylark wagon to my brother and bought himself a fuel-injected Volvo with leather upholstery. Perhaps if he had kept the Skylark for himself and given Willy the Volvo, my brother might have been more cooperative.

What I knew was, Willy liked to say no. And my father, like all fathers, liked to hear yes from his children. Willy said no to accompanying my father on his search for a house, and no to fly-fishing; even when he ate Oreos and cocooned himself in fat and beat off, he was telling my father no.

When you said yes to my father, he’d get close to you. At first, it’d make you feel special and safe. You’d tell him your problems. But once you told him, they became his problems, not yours. He swallowed you up.

I remember on Sunday night when Willy and I were fighting over what to watch on TV, my father changed the channel on us and made us watch a new show that had just come on the air called
60 Minutes.
There was a shrink on who he was friends with and who had been to our house, talking about antidepressants, and even mentioning my father’s name. Which seemed impressive and cool to me, even though Dad put it down with a shrug. “It’s not going to change my life.”

But hearing my dad mentioned on TV got me thinking,
What
could I ever do to get my name mentioned on television?
And that worried me, because I knew that’s what he expected. At dinner that night, I asked my father, “What could I be great at?”

My mother was quick to answer for him, “There are lots of things you boys could be great at.” But I wanted to hear from Dad. Even Willy was interested. We looked at my father for a response.

He cleared his throat and sighed. “I could have been more successful, famous, if I didn’t have children. But I enjoyed having them. It was important to me.”

It wasn’t what my mother wanted to hear. “Zach was asking about himself, not about you.”

“I want them to learn from my mistakes.”

Willy excused himself from dinner and went for a run. I was left at the table to digest it. My father never mentioned the fact that they’d interviewed him for that
60 Minutes
show, but in the end, he’d been cut out.

Every few months my parents would suddenly remember they were parents, and try to throw Willy and me together in what my mother called “outings for the boys,” whether it was a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a bonus stop on the way to see medical oddities preserved in the Mütter Museum (Grover Cleveland’s tumor, the skull of a man with a horn coming out of his forehead, midget skeletons, and my favorite, the world’s largest colon), or a long weekend at the beach house Lazlo now owned but rarely used out on the tip of Long Island. Willy would say no by saying, “I have a race to get ready for.” Saying no, like running 10K in 35:40, made Willy feel like he was in control. It gave him the last word and freed him from the tyranny of wanting and waiting to be loved.

I, at thirteen going on fourteen, was a people pleaser. Trouble was, I was better at pleasing adults than teenagers, and I was lonely now that my semiadult sisters were out of the house. It was not so much them I longed for; it was having somebody around who I could make laugh, for distracting others was my way of distracting myself. Adults were blind to my neediness. Kids my age could smell it a mile off. Worse, I was not content to be liked. I wanted to be loved by everyone, even my brother, Willy.