The Burgess Boys, Page 3

  “Fine,” Jim said. He picked his head up, looked at Bob. “You go. Fine.”

  “We’re one mess of a family, aren’t we, Jimmy?” Bob, sitting next to his brother, put his arm over Jim’s shoulder.

  “Stop it,” said Jim. “Would you stop? Jesus Christ almighty.”

  Bob walked back home along the darkened streets. As he got closer to his building, he saw from the sidewalk that the television was on in the apartment below his. He could just make out the form of Adriana sitting alone and staring at the TV. Had she no one who could spend the night with her? He might knock on her door, ask if she was all right. But he pictured himself, the big gray-haired man who lived above her, standing in her doorway, and thought she would not want that. He climbed the stairs to his place, tossed his coat onto the floor, and picked up his phone.

  “Susie,” he said. “It’s me.”

  They were twins.

  Jim had his own name right from the start, but Susie and Bob were The Twins. Go find the twins. Tell the twins to come and eat. The twins have chicken pox, the twins can’t sleep. But twins have a special connection. They are, fingers crossed, like this. “Kill him,” Susan was saying now, on the telephone. “String him up by his toenails.”

  “Susan, take it easy, he’s your kid.” Bob had switched on his desk lamp and stood looking over the street.

  “I’m talking about the rabbi. And the queer-o woman minister of the Unitarian church. They’ve come out with a statement. Not only has the town been damaged by this, but the whole state. No, excuse me. The whole country.”

  Bob rubbed the back of his neck. “So, Susan. Why did Zach do this?”

  “Why did he do it? When was the last time you raised a child, Bob? Oh, I know I’m supposed to be sensitive about that, never mention your low sperm or no sperm or whatever it is, and I never have. I’ve never said a word about why Pam might have left, so she could have children with someone—I can’t believe you’re making me say all this, when I’m the one in trouble.”

  Bob turned away from the window. “Susan, do you have a pill you can take?”

  “Like a cyanide tablet?”

  “Valium.” Bob felt an inexpressible sadness go through him, and he wandered back toward the bedroom with the phone.

  “I never take Valium.”

  “Well, it’s time to start. Your doctor can phone in a prescription. You’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

  Susan didn’t answer, and Bob knew that his sadness was a longing for Jim. Because the truth (and Jimmy knew it) was that Bob didn’t know what to do. “The kid’s safe,” Bob said. “No one’s going to hurt him. Or you.” Bob sat down on his bed, then stood up again. He really had absolutely no idea what to do. He wouldn’t sleep tonight; not even a Valium, and he had plenty, would get him to sleep, he could tell. Not with his nephew in trouble, and that poor woman below him watching TV, and even Preppy Boy in jail. And Jimmy headed off to some island. Bob walked back to the front of the apartment, switched off his desk lamp.

  “Let me ask you something,” his sister was saying.

  In the darkness, a bus pulled up across the street. An old black woman sat looking out the bus window, her face implacable; a man toward the back nodded his head, maybe listening to earphones. They seemed exquisitely innocent, and far away—

  “Do you think this is a movie?” his sister asked. “Like this is some boondocks of a town and the farmers are going down to the courthouse and demand his head on a stick?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Thank God Mommy’s gone. She’d die all over again. She would.” Susan was crying.

  Bob said, “This will blow over.”

  “God’s teeth, how can you say that? It’s on every news station—”

  “Don’t watch,” Bob told her.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked.

  “A little bit. At the moment.”

  “That’s helpful. Thank you. Did Jimmy tell you a little boy in the mosque fainted, the pig’s head scared him so much? It’d begun to thaw, so it was bloody. I know what you’re thinking. What kid stores a pig’s head in his mother’s freezer without her knowing, and then does something like this? You can’t deny you’re thinking that, Bob. And it makes me crazy. Which you just called me a moment ago.”

  “Susan, you’ve—”

  “You expect certain things with kids, you know. Well, you don’t know. But car accidents. The wrong girlfriends. Bad grades, that stuff. You don’t expect to have anything to do with friggin’ mosques, for crying out loud.”

  “I’m driving up there tomorrow, Susan.” He had told her this when he first called. “I’ll take him in with you, help contain this. Don’t you worry.”

  “Oh, I won’t worry,” she said. “Good night.”

  How they hated each other! Bob cracked open the window, shook out a cigarette, then poured wine into a juice glass and sat down in the metal foldout chair by the window. Across the street, lights were on in different apartments. There was a private show up here: the young girl who could be seen in her bedroom walking around in her underpants and no top. Because of how the room was laid out, he never saw her breasts, just her bare back, but he got a kick out of how free she seemed. So there was that—like a field of bluets in June.

  Two windows over was the couple who spent a lot of time in their white kitchen, the man reaching into a cupboard right now—he seemed to be the one who cooked. Bob didn’t like to cook. He liked to eat, but as Pam had pointed out, he liked the stuff that kids ate, things without color, like mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese. People in New York liked food. Food was a very big deal. Food was like art. To be a chef in New York was like being a rock star.

  Bob poured more wine, settled himself at the window again. Whatever, as people said these days.

  Be a chef, be a beggar, be divorced a zillion times, no one in this city cared. Smoke yourself to death out the window. Scare your wife and go to jail. It was heaven to live here. Susie never got that. Poor Susie.

  Bob was getting drunk.

  He heard the door open in the apartment below him, heard footsteps down the stairs. He peered out the window. Adriana stood beneath a streetlamp, holding a leash, her shoulders hunched and shivering, and the tiny dog was just standing there shivering too. “Ah, you poor things,” Bob said quietly. Nobody, it seemed to him in his drunken expansiveness, nobody—anywhere—had a clue.

  Six blocks away, Helen lay next to her husband and listened to him snore. Through the window in the black night sky she saw the planes on their way into La Guardia, every three seconds if you counted—as her children had when they were young—like stars that kept coming and coming and coming. Tonight the house seemed full of emptiness, and she thought of how her children used to be asleep in their rooms and how safe it had been, the soft buoyancy of nighttime. She thought of Zachary up in Maine, but she had not seen him for years and could only picture a skinny pale boy, a motherless-seeming child. And she did not want to think of him, or a frozen pig’s head, or her grim sister-in-law, because she saw how the incident was an irritant rubbing already against the fine fabric of her family, and she felt right now the small pricks of anxiety that precede insomnia.

  She pushed on Jim’s shoulder. “You’re snoring,” she said.

  “Sorry.” He could say that in his sleep. He turned over.

  Wide awake, Helen hoped her plants wouldn’t die while she and Jim were gone. Ana was not particularly good with plants. It was a feel, and you had it or you didn’t. Once, years before Ana, the Burgess family had gone on vacation and the lesbians next door had let the lavender petunias that filled Helen’s window boxes die. Helen had tended those plants every day, snipping off the sticky dead heads, watering them, feeding them; they were like sweet geysers gushing forth from the front windows of the house, and people commented on them as they walked by. Helen told the women how much attention was needed for any flowering plant in the summertime and they said yes, they knew. But then, t
o return from vacation and find them shriveled on the vine! Helen had cried. The women moved soon after, and Helen was glad. She’d never been able to be nice to them, not really, after they had killed her petunias. Two lesbians named Linda and Laura. Fat Linda and Linda’s Laura is how they’d been spoken of in the Burgess home.

  The Burgesses lived in the last of a row of brownstones. On their left was a tall limestone, the only apartment building on the block. Co-ops now. The Linda-Lauras had lived in the street-level co-op and then sold it to a banker, Deborah-Who-Does (short for Deborah-Who-Knows-Everything, as opposed to the Debra in the building who didn’t know everything), and her husband, William, who was so nervous he had introduced himself as “Billiam.” The kids would sometimes call him that, but Helen asked them to be kind because Billiam had, years ago, been in the Vietnam War, and also, his wife, Deborah-Who-Does, was a terrible nuisance and Helen thought it had to be awful living with her. You couldn’t step out into the back garden without Deborah-Who-Does stepping out into hers, and in two minutes she’d be mentioning that the pansies you were arranging wouldn’t last on that side of the garden, that the lilies would need more light, that the lilac bush Helen planted would die (it had) because there was so little lime in the soil.

  Debra-Who-Doesn’t, on the other hand, was a sweet woman, tall and anxious, a psychiatrist and a bit dippy. But it was sad: Her husband was cheating on her. It was Helen who had discovered this. Home alone during the day, she heard through the walls the most appalling sexual sounds. When Helen peeked out the front window she saw Debra’s husband emerge down the front steps with a curly-haired woman behind him. Later, she saw them together in a local bar. And once she had heard Debra-Who-Doesn’t say to her husband, “Why are you picking on me tonight?” So Debra-Who-Doesn’t-Know-Everything didn’t know everything. In this way, Helen didn’t always care for living in the city. Jim yelled like a crazy person when it was basketball season. “You dumbfuck asshole!” he’d yell at the TV, and Helen worried the neighbors would think he was yelling at her. She had considered mentioning it to them in a laughing way, and then decided that in issues of veracity the less said the better. Not that she’d be lying.

  Still.

  Her mind raced and raced. What had she forgotten to pack? She didn’t want to think of herself dressing one night to meet the Anglins for dinner and finding she’d not packed the right shoes—her outfit ruined just like that. Tucking the quilt around her, Helen realized that tonight’s telephone call from Susan was still here in the house, dark and formless and bad. She sat up.

  This is what happened when you couldn’t sleep, and when you had an image in your mind of a frozen pig’s head. Helen went into the bathroom and found a sleeping pill, and the bathroom was clean and familiar. Back in bed she moved close to her husband and within minutes felt the gentle tug of sleep, and she was so glad she wasn’t Deborah-Who-Does, or Debra-Who-Doesn’t, so glad she was Helen Farber Burgess, so glad she had children, so glad to be glad about life.

  But such urgency in the morning!

  On a day when Park Slope opened with its Saturday’s munificence—children on the way to the park with soccer balls in netted bags, their fathers watching the traffic lights and hurrying the kids along, young couples who arrived at the coffee shops with hair still wet from showering after morning love, people who, having dinner parties that night, were already near Grand Army Plaza at the end of the park in order to browse the farmers market for the best apples and breads and cut flowers, their arms laden with baskets and paper-wrapped stalks of sunflowers—in the midst of all this, there were of course the typical vexations found anywhere in the country, even in this neighborhood where people, for the most part, exuded a sense of being exactly where they wanted to be: There was the mother whose child was begging for a Barbie doll for her birthday and the mother said no, Barbie dolls are why girls are skinny and sick. On Eighth Street there was the stepfather grimly trying to teach the recalcitrant boy how to ride a bicycle, holding on to the back of the bike while the child, white-faced with fear, wobbled and looked at him for praise. (The man’s wife was finishing her chemo for breast cancer, there was no getting out of any of it.) On Third Street a couple argued about their teenage son, whether he should be allowed to stay in his room on this sunny autumn day. So there were these disgruntlements—and the Burgesses were having problems of their own.

  The car ordered to take Helen and Jim to the airport had not shown up. Their bags were on the sidewalk, and Helen was directed to stay with them while Jim went in and out of the house, on his cell phone to the car service. Deborah-Who-Does stepped out onto the sidewalk and asked where they were headed off to on this nice sunny day, it must be wonderful taking so many vacations. Helen had to say, “Excuse me, please, I need to make a call,” taking her own cell phone from her bag and pretending to call her son, who (in Arizona) would still be sound asleep. But Deborah-Who-Does was waiting for Billiam, and Helen had to fake a conversation into her phone because Deborah kept smiling her way. Billiam finally appeared and off they went down the sidewalk holding hands, which Helen thought was showy.

  Meanwhile, Jim, pacing around the foyer, noticed that both car keys were hanging on the key holder by the door. Bob had not taken the key last night! How was he going to drive the car to Maine without the goddamn car key? Jim yelled this question to Helen as he joined her on the sidewalk, and Helen said quietly that if he yelled like that any more she would move into Manhattan. Jim shook the key in front of her face. “How is he supposed to get there?” he whispered fiercely.

  “If you would give your brother a key to our house, this wouldn’t be an issue.”

  Approaching around the corner, driving slowly, was a black town car. Jim waved his arm above his head in a kind of backward swimming motion. And then finally Helen was tucked into the backseat, where she smoothed her hair as Jim, on his cell phone, called Bob. “Pick up the phone, Bob.” Then: “What happened to you? You just woke up? You’re supposed to be on your way to Maine. What do you mean you were awake all night?” Jim leaned forward and said to the driver, “Make a stop at the corner of Sixth and Ninth.” He sat back. “Well, guess what I have in my hand? Take a guess, knucklehead. The key to my car, that’s right. And listen—are you listening? Charlie Tibbetts. Lawyer for Zach. He’ll see you Monday morning. You can stay through Monday, don’t pretend you can’t. Legal Aid doesn’t give a crawling crap. Charlie’s out of town for the weekend, but I thought of him last night and spoke to him. He should be the guy. Good guy. All you have to do in the next couple days is keep this contained, understand? Now get down to the sidewalk, we’re on our way to the airport.”

  Helen pushed the button that lowered the window, put her face to the fresh air.

  Jim sat back, taking her hand. “We’re going to have a terrific time, sweetheart. Just like the farty-looking couples in the brochures. It’ll be great.”

  Bob was in front of his building wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and grimy athletic socks. “Hey, slob-dog,” Jim called. He tossed the car key through the open window, and Bob caught it in one hand.

  “Have fun.” Bob waved once.

  Helen was impressed at how easily Bob caught the key. “Good luck up there,” she called.

  The town car rounded the corner, disappeared from sight, and Bob turned to face his building. When young, he had run into the woods rather than watch the car that took Jim off to college, and he wanted to run there now. Instead, he stood on broken cement next to metal garbage bins, and shards of sunlight stabbed his eyes while he fumbled with his keys.

  Years earlier, when Bob had been newer to the city, he had gone to a therapist named Elaine. She was a large woman, loose-limbed, as old as he was now, which of course back then had seemed pretty old. He had sat in the midst of her benevolent presence, picking at a hole in the arm of her leather couch, glancing anxiously at the fig tree in the corner (a plant that looked fake except for its marked and sad leaning toward the tiny sliver of light that came
through the window, and its ability to grow, in six years’ time, one new leaf). Had Elaine been here on the sidewalk right now, she would have told him, “Bob, stay in the present.” Because dimly Bob was aware of what was happening to him as his brother’s car turned the corner, left him, dimly, he knew, but—oh, poor Elaine, dead now from some awful disease, and she had tried so hard with him, been so kind—it did no good. The sunlight shattered him.

  Bob, who was four years old when his father died, remembered only the sun on the hood of the car that day, and that his father had been covered by a blanket, also—always—Susan’s little-girl accusing voice: “It’s all your fault, you stupid-head.”

  Now, standing on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, New York, Bob pictured his brother tossing him the car key, watched the town car disappear, thought of the task that was waiting, and inside him was the cry Jimmy, don’t go.

  Adriana stepped through the door.

  2

  Susan Olson lived in a narrow three-story house not far from town. Since her divorce seven years earlier she had rented the top rooms to an old woman named Mrs. Drinkwater, who came and went with less frequency these days, and who never complained about the music coming from Zach’s room, and always paid her rent on time. The night before Zach was to turn himself in, Susan had to climb the stairs, knock on the old woman’s door, and explain to her what had happened. Mrs. Drinkwater was surprisingly sanguine. “Dear, dear,” she said, sitting on the chair by her little desk. She was wearing a pink rayon robe, and her stockings were rolled to right above her knees; her gray hair was pinned back, but much of it was falling down. This is how she looked if she wasn’t dressed to go out, which was a lot of the time. She was thin as kindling.

  “You need to know,” Susan said, sitting down on the bed, “because after tomorrow you might get asked by reporters what he’s like.”

  The old lady shook her head slowly. “Well, he’s quiet.” She looked at Susan. Her glasses were huge trifocals, and wherever her eyes were, you could never quite see into them directly; they wavered around. “Never been rude to me,” she added.