The Other (34 page)

Mr. Barry, short of breath merely sitting, tried to straighten his tie by rummaging through the folds of his shirt front. I couldn’t help noticing the brevity of his torso, or its rounded collapse; his slacks were pulled high so that the distance from his wattles to his belt buckle seemed a matter of inches, and this shirt swath, which included part of his tie—the lower two-thirds was pooled in his lap—appeared rumpled in a way he couldn’t address. The futility and blindness of his effort, the absentmindedness of it—you would guess that as a younger man he hadn’t been handy, that screwing in a light-bulb might have tested his dexterity (though I did know already how much he’d loved a boat’s tiller and, by inference, the complicated trim and tackle that goes with sailing). Such native haplessness was in his face, too, though his face was most prominently stringent and severe—and, in default, torqued by consternation. Those spots old people suffer, from too much sun? Mr. Barry’s had been burned off, leaving crimson silhouettes on his cheeks and temples, shades of aborted precancerous lesions (but their removal might also have been due to vanity). His eyebrows, like Pierre Salinger’s, looked steel-wool-ish, a feature that ought to make a man appear merry but that made Mr. Barry seem irrational and fierce, ready to deliver a reprimand or an order. Finally, by some dermal distress, his earlobes were scabbed, and his skull, scrimmed by a few well-pomaded hairs, was liver-spotted and knotty. The picture of age, decline, and desiccation, and though there was nothing to be done about it all, the hand befuddled and restless at his shirt front belied a soul who raged against that, however feebly. Yet to no avail. Mr. Barry’s Argyle dress socks had slipped, and a sliver of his purple shins showed. His ankles, where they disappeared into his shined and buffed wingtips, put me in mind of stilts.

His infirmity seemed to me an opening. On the other hand, he’d been a Boeing executive—a vice-president in sales late in his career, and before that a project engineer—so some tincture of past authority still clung to him. Sure enough, while I vacillated, Mr. Barry took the initiative, insisting that I run down the facts of my life, which I did, in brief, beginning by reminding him that I’d chatted with him in his backyard in the summer of ’74, and ending by giving him the name, at his request, of the school where I worked for twenty-six years. “English teacher,” he observed. “I myself am not well read. I did recently complete
In the Heart of the Sea
by an author called Nathaniel Philbrick, which is a wonderful account of the whaleship
Essex,
and before that I enjoyed reading the book by Alfred Lansing on Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica in 1914 and ’15. So I do read. Not often novels. But I am not an illiterate philistine entirely. I got out
Main Street
last March and took a stab at it and found it enlightening and entertaining, and earlier this spring I completed reading the Arthur Miller play
Death of a Salesman.
”

I told him I’d never been to the Rainier Club before. Mr. Barry took this as a cue for genealogy: on his mother’s side, he said, they were the Fosters from a Tacoma investment house and the Colemans in logging—not members of the club, but one of the Fosters had been mayor of Tacoma, and one of the Colemans had been a lead engineer at Grand Coulee Dam. On his father’s side, though, they’d all been club members, starting, of course, with his father himself, and including his great-uncle James Barry, who’d owned the Acme Fish Company, and his great-uncle Langdon Barry, founder of Western Sand and Gravel. Mr. Barry didn’t stop there: Dexter Coleman, on his mother’s side, was vice-president of Meyer Brothers, the company responsible for logging most of southwestern Washington; Thaddeus Coleman was a partner at Coleman & Denny and a legal adviser to First National Bank of Commerce; Younger Foster financed hydroelectric projects; Toby Foster was a majority partner in Foster Shipyards. At last Mr. Barry paused, possibly to consider if he’d forgotten any family luminaries, but also to grapple more vigorously with his tie and to sip from the Sprite with ice our server had delivered, on a pewter tray, with my coffee and a fresh bowl of mixed nuts. “By the way,” he said, locating a cashew, “I congratulate you on your enormous good fortune. You could join the club, you know, if that was what you fancied.”

There was a roar—air conditioning starting up—and with it came the smell of supper: the daily buffet was being prepared for service in the Heritage Dining Room, which we’d peeked into, with its wall sconces and Rococo chandelier. Mr. Barry chose this moment to extricate a monogrammed white handkerchief from his coat pocket, ball it between his fingers, and pat his nose. He also checked his watch, and I recalled that he was looking forward to Hospitality Hour downstairs; when I’d met him in the lobby, with its timbered ceiling, he’d stopped to scrutinize a readerboard schedule with a hint of anxiousness coloring his mien. John William once told me that his father stopped drinking, every year, as a Lenten regimen: forty days of prohibition Mr. Barry endured to justify indulgence through the rest of the calendar. After Easter, no cocktail would be poured in the house until five, except on weekends, when noon was the rule. I supposed this explained the glass of Sprite Mr. Barry held now, as well as his agitation as he’d scrutinized the lobby’s readerboard—he was holding back and looking forward simultaneously; he wasn’t indulging at the moment, with me, so as to enjoy hospitality later with his friends.

“It’s hard to see myself as a member of the Rainier Club,” I said. “Did you get my letter?”

“I did,” he answered, “and I’m very appreciative of your sincerity, Neil, but I would also advise you not to be too hard on yourself, because you’re not to blame for a thing.”

“But I am to blame, if blame’s the word. I—”

“Right there,” Mr. Barry said, and pointed at me. “I’ve noticed a tendency with your generation—the difficulty it has in assigning blame. With responsibility. With things that aren’t gray but instead black and white.” Mr. Barry spilled some pop and added, “I believe it has to do with Vietnam. That was the problem for your generation. When I was with the Seabees on Munda, we knew what we were doing there. We were going to stop the Japanese, because they’d attacked Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t complicated. So let me tell you who’s to blame insofar as my son is concerned. His parents are to blame. Virginia and myself. We did a very mediocre job of raising him.”

I said, “He’d still be here if I’d—”

“I don’t believe that,” said Mr. Barry. “That poor boy was in trouble from the get-go. First of all, he had no siblings, because his mother had the operation done that prohibits future pregnancies. By the way, this wasn’t something she and I conferred on, that John William would be an only child. This was unilateral on her part. I heard about it after the fact. You have two children, so you know that the exchange between them, the interplay between siblings, is extremely important. I felt we should have had more children, but my point of view was dismissed.”

He sipped from his Sprite. “Another thing,” he said, picking up steam now. “So you don’t blame yourself, Neil. John William had a terrible colic. I used to put cotton balls in my ears. Do you want to know what his mother did about it? She planned a schedule. And she implemented a regime I didn’t approve of. Her thought was that the boy should not be deferred to—she characterized his crying as a test of wills: who would break first, the mother or the child? There was a hell of a lot of crying in that house as a result of this ridiculous campaign of hers. I’m not sure where she came up with this plan, or if a pediatrician recommended this strategy, but her idea was to sit in the corner of the living room with her nose in a book while the boy was crying in his crib and not to go to him no matter the duration. We were at odds about that, because I did not feel it was the proper approach at all to a child’s crying. I used to feel sorry for him, but my hands were tied, and I was not allowed to meddle in this business of his crying. You know, I wasn’t there very much. I worked for the Boeing Company from June of 1948 until August of 1989, so I was not in charge of child-rearing. We had roles. I was the breadwinner, and I was a more-than-adequate breadwinner, but I couldn’t walk in the door at five-thirty p.m. and take command or make decisions regarding this crying that my son was doing. So I put in the cotton balls. That was my strategy. That was how I dealt with things. I came home, said hello, and put in cotton balls. Now, would you do that?”

I shrugged ambiguously. “You wouldn’t,” said Mr. Barry. “But I was a very busy man then. My work was demanding, but I liked my work because it was so challenging and…stimulating. Frankly, I preferred work to being at home, with all that crying going on.”

Mr. Barry fiddled some more with his shirt front. “If you want to blame someone,” he said, “blame the psychologist B. F. Skinner, because Virginia believed in this B. F. Skinner, that you didn’t want to positively reinforce the negative behavior of crying by offering comfort, that was her argument. Incidentally, there was no speaking with Virginia about this or anything else. She was always smarter than me and always correct—she was correct as a matter of course. Personally, I thought it best to console the boy. There were reasons for crying. This was his way of communicating, he had no other. From time immemorial, women have taken babies to their bosoms in response to crying. Wasn’t this obvious? Let me tell you something I remember perfectly. If I was making a point, Virginia kept her nose in her book. My points were so negligible and unworthy that she could read while I made them. Now, I saw the scorn in that, of course, as I know she meant me to. She would read while I was talking, and she would talk into her book while she was responding to me. Which was she talking to, the book or her husband? Here was all this crying, and then Virginia taking her position so adamantly. I’m going on a bit, but my point is, I’m sure it had an impact on John William. What if your first experience of the world is to cry and cry and get no response? I’m not a psychiatrist, but I have made my own cursory forays in the area of psychology, reading a little about these things, and everyone who is an expert on the subject agrees, you can’t mistreat an infant like that and afterward have a reasonable expectation that all will go right in adulthood. It doesn’t work that way. It’s basic. It’s fundamental. Do you agree with that?”

I said I did.

“Blame,” said Mr. Barry. “As far as blame is concerned, I have to say that a measure of mental illness enters into the equation as far back as 1956, the year John William was born, even though Virginia wasn’t hospitalized for this condition until the summer of 1967, eleven years later. I would say that her actions, from the time of his birth, did not proceed so much from logic as from difficult and irrational emotions. I’m certain I first noticed this about Ginnie at about the time John William was born, and I remember being disturbed to realize that the woman I married, I don’t know, was
off
somehow, if that term makes sense. Does it? Of course, it was obvious politically that Virginia was not in the mainstream, and that she fancied herself as among the left wing, at that far end of the political spectrum, even an anarchist, but strictly in theory—because she liked to live well and did live well, enjoying fine dining and so forth, nice vacations, and sailing trips, as much as she could—but let me make this other point now, that Ginnie was also just mentally
off
for many, many years before it blew up and became a self-evident, material mental illness demanding my intervention. What do I mean?” Here Mr. Barry lifted his left hand in a fist, out of which popped his little finger. “I mean, first, that she was sometimes very adamant and forcefully committed to an illogical course of action, as I have pointed out in describing her techniques of child-rearing in 1956, and I mean, second, that she was a terrible insomniac from the time of our wedding until 1967, when a doctor prescribed her with the right medication. Third was environmental phobias. I couldn’t paint a stair railing without her making a stink over toxins. There were just so many perturbing and difficult things that were part of her makeup, I had to throw up my hands and keep my mouth shut if I was going to survive. And I did keep my mouth shut,” said Mr. Barry. “I was mum in the face of Virginia’s mental illness, and that was just a terrible mistake.”

I have to say I was surprised by his sudden cogency and by the turn our afternoon had taken toward confession. He was so forthcoming that I asked about it, to which he replied that he had prostate cancer—“the slow kind”—and was interested in seeing “that the record reads accurately. You know,” he added, “I mentioned to you earlier my interest in reading, not literary reading most of the time but books I enjoy, and in this vein I’ve read, oh, at least a half-dozen biographies that are sensationalistic, and let me tell you, these kinds of authors are coming out of the woodwork. Have any of them contacted you, Neil? Two have contacted me.”

“No,” I said. “What did you tell them?”

“That I would never cooperate regarding that sort of thing.”

“In that case,” I said, “I should probably tell you that I’m…fiddling with a book about your son.”

Rand seemed unruffled by this bit of news. “Well,” he said, “you were his friend, if the newspaper is correct, and friends have an interest in the truth.”

“Truth’s like blame for my generation, though. It doesn’t mean anything clear.”

Rand said, “Personally, I think it’s interesting, the truth. I think readers would be interested in hearing what happened.”

“What happened?”

“His parents happened. Virginia and I. I’ll give you an anecdote,” added Rand. “I’ll give you a representative ‘for instance.’”

T
RUTH?
A
FTER A DAY
at the Boeing Company, in mid-July of 1956, Rand came home to find the house in disarray and poured himself a Dewar’s and water. The kitchen smelled like spoiling food, and in the bathroom, on top of the ammonia of baby urine and the lidded bucket of soiled diapers incubating its stench of infant stool, there was the odor of Ginnie’s houseplants. Meanwhile, in a corner of the living room, Ginnie sat blithely reading in her favorite chair, a Chippendale turned toward a garden window. (This was before her revelation about “modern,” when everything in the house would be summarily carted off and replaced by furniture Rand didn’t care for.) And, of course, the baby was crying. It was all oppressive in the extreme for Rand, standing in the kitchen doorway and assessing Ginnie in profile, Ginnie with her reading glasses and her book of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (he couldn’t quite see the cover from his distance, though it looked like the book by this Ferlinghetti she’d been carting for the last three days). Rand tucked the
Post-Intelligencer
under his arm and swirled his drink. He knew better than to say “dinner.” Beset by domestic facts, he gathered soda crackers, a cutting board, a knife, and a wedge of Swiss cheese. “I’ll be on the patio,” he said.