Next of Kin, page 2
He was the oldest and I was the youngest, with nine years between us in the lineup, but I can see from my spontaneous cry that I’d already long ago begun to think of him as a junior, as if we had closed the age gap between us, if not even reversed it. I had already been aware of a kind of surpassing—not the stark physical kind directly in front of us with him dead and me still standing, but in other intangible ways.
Regardless of this—junior or senior, oldest or youngest—it is Jeffrey’s suicide that will eventually bring me back to my mother. It won’t be immediate or even soon, but ultimately, his sudden, incomprehensible death is what leads me to turn the knob on that decades-closed door at the end of that long corridor. It is what sets me walking along it toward that junction up ahead—my mother making her way in the other direction, unaware—where we will eventually cross paths. One of us clocking out and the other clocking in for her shift, like janitors.
The last time I saw Jeffrey had been just a few years before, at a great summer party at my sister’s house, in our hometown, where a few of us had remained. The occasion was the high school graduation of our beloved niece—an outdoor lamb roast celebrating my sister’s oldest daughter and her classmates. I drove down from New York and did the cooking for the party, because my sister had a serious and unbudging work conflict on that same day. So in her stead, I’d spent the day hustling in their kitchen to knock down the prep list, while Michael, her husband, corralled my two preschooler boys into “helping” him as he dealt with the lawn and the swimming pool and the firepit and the lambs outside. Just before guests began to arrive, my sister slipped in right under the wire, and, wasting not one second, relieved me so I could run and take a shower while she sped her way through a final kitchen tidy-up. She put all the furniture and the dog bowls and the floor mats up on the counters, then she swept, then she vacuumed after the sweeping. Then she mopped once with liquid soap for the dirt, then got new clean water and did a second mopping with polish—for the shine—then she washed the mop itself. Like a surgeon before surgery, she pumped dish soap into her dish-gloved hands, washed thoroughly up to the cuffs, then tugged off the squeaking gloves and left them to drip-dry by stabbing them onto wooden spoons sticking out of the crock by the stove.
“I just need it done a certain way, Gabs, and I prefer to do it myself,” she’d said apologetically, as if she needed explaining, and I’d replied, “Oh, Meliss, please, I totally know, do not even worry. I’m the same.” And ran upstairs to shower, shampoo, floss, brush, tweeze, and moisturize.
The sun slanted, and the dusk dropped into all the crevices, as roughly a dozen cars started to pull up the driveway and people arrived out on the lawn. They paused to admire the lambs roasting on their spits over a long, narrow bed of coals; they traipsed in and out of the house, the screen door slamming each time. Soon there were kids cannonballing and jackknifing out at the pool. I saw Jeffrey arrive, take a seat at the firepit, and set a bottle of wine, open, at his ankle. When I was dressed and in a fresh apron, I finally had a minute to go outside to hunt down my own two boyos, to start to think about boiling some plain pasta for their dinner, and I found the maniacal maniacs, looked after by cousins, being pushed to terrifying, thrilling heights on the tire swing. They are eighteen months apart, here on this evening at the tail end of their toddler years, and their modesty has not yet kicked in. They refuse to be clothed; they insist on running around naked. But in the countryside they always ask for shoes; they dislike being barefoot in the unfamiliar grass. I find them otherwise buck naked, screaming fear-joy, with ice cream stains on their faces like clown makeup.
This idyll—what my sister and her husband have done here, all these years, with their own kids and kids’ friends, with my kids, with what’s expanded through our marriages and contracted after our divorces and separations—reliably, still, at this time, manages to end up as some version of this exact summer evening lawn, with its gathering of friends and family and food and drinks and brightly burning fires. I’ve had a lot of professional success in New York by this time, but this evening’s golden-hour tableau of a sturdy and abundant home life has remained elusive in my personal world. It’s what I eternally dream of, what I live for.
I’d had a piece published in The New Yorker by then, and as I made my way across the lawn that evening, I found myself flushed at the warmth of being enthusiastically greeted by old hometown friends who generously congratulated me on it. But as I paused by the firepit to say hello to Jeffrey, he seemed physically uncomfortable and standoffish. He found himself, he must admit, stumbling over a detail I’d gotten wrong in the piece. He was sorry to have to mention it, but he was not only disappointed that I’d missed it but also incredulous that the copy editors at The New Yorker had missed it. It was in a passage I’d written about something I thought I knew so well: those indelible childhood lamb roasts my parents threw every summer—like the very one we were creating here this evening—a family tradition, with the animals roasting over coals, the paper-bag luminaria flickering at stream’s edge, the glow-in-the-dark Frisbees, the long reedy branches of the surrounding weeping willows. I felt I knew every detail in my bones. But I’d written, and it had made it into final copy, that the lambs had been skewered onto applewood branches to be set over the coals, and Jeffrey was now in front of me, agitated, struggling to contain his frustration.
“It’s just not even possible, Gabs. Apple branches grow too crooked. We only use ash. It has to be ash. Only ash branches grow straight enough to skewer a lamb onto, not apple. How could they have missed that?”
He threw up both hands in a gesture of incredulity mixed with resignation, as if we were soccer players on opposing teams who had clashed, and the referee has blown the whistle on him, the wrong player, instead of on me, and there’s nothing he can do about this injustice but walk away with his hands in the air, shaking his head. The New Yorker is the ultimate authority, the midfield ref who has ruled erroneously in my favor and published my flawed piece—and he was galled by it.
“That’s all I’m saying, Gabs. I just don’t know how they can call themselves The New Yorker and have missed something so obvious.”
I nodded apologetically and agreed. “Oh. Crap. I didn’t know that about the branches. That makes the narrator unreliable, then. Ugh. If the reader spots the writer’s mistake, the writer’s then untrustworthy.”
“Exaaaaactly!” He groaned his long, bodily relief that I understood him and that I agreed. “You see?” He quickly turned to the others around the firepit with whom he must have just been arguing this detail, and gestured in my direction as if to say, Look! The foul is hers and she admits it!
But he seemed soothed. His affection for me returned. His body relaxed. In a newly good humor, he continued.
“But, Gabs, you know, no offense. I’m just saying, The New Yorker hasn’t been what it used to be ever since Tina Brown took over. If they let you publish that, this is the end of American Literature, don’t you think?”
The way he included me there—“don’t you think?”—with that invitation to agree with him about my own role in bringing about the downfall of American Literature, left me with the unmistakable sensation that I was in some way out-maturing or outgrowing him. I remember noticing in that moment that if he’d likewise had something published, my own response would’ve been simple and sincere: Hey, man! Nice hustle! And I remember grimacing through my disappointment as I corralled my naked maniacs back indoors for buttered pasta and hot baths, knowing that I would need to keep a much greater distance between myself and Jeffrey going forward. But I never imagined it would be the last time I would see him.
* * *
With my mother, those thirty years earlier, I had known in my marrow that it would be the last time. Not that it had been explosive or that there had been some volatile episode. In fact, it had been strangely calm.
A routine phone call like so many dozens, maybe dozens of dozens, we’d had up until then—me on my end in New York trying to describe something about myself or my experience or my opinion on some matter and her on her end in Vermont saying, “Well, no, Gabri. You’ll think differently when you mature.”
This summary dismissal was commonplace with her and used to send me into fits when I was a kid. As a ten-year-old I would graffiti my bedroom walls in ballpoint pen with outrage—I hate Mom forever! She is a bitch!—which she would discover upon entering my room, and meet with an eye roll to the heavens and an “Oh, please, can’t you be more imaginative?” But somehow on this particular day, in my early twenties, I was not moved to protest or yell or defile the walls. I was simply realizing in a profoundly serene moment that I had already reached the outermost limits of what she would ever be capable of seeing in me. It stunned me in the way a great discovery can stun—as if a whole new room had appeared in a house I had otherwise been living in my whole life. It didn’t occur to me to explode. I just knew with such profound certainty, as one knows very few things, that if I didn’t put the phone down and get away from her that very instant, I would perish.
Over the next dozens of years I would take it pretty hard from various of my siblings and family friends who found my decision not wholly incomprehensible but still, somewhat too strident. Jeffrey not the least. “It’s harsh, Gabs. That’s all I’m saying. Pretty harsh.” But, in the moment, I wasn’t harsh with her at all.
The certainty was, if anything, exhilarating. And I said goodbye to her in a nearly exuberant state.
“Mom! Unbelievably, this is the end! I am going to hang up the phone now and I will never speak to you again. This is so weird, so unexpected, but this is the very last time I will ever speak to you, so goodbye.”
And then I did as I said I would; I put the phone down and walked away.
Daddy-O Quits Smoking
My father I’d like you to meet at the very beginning, before any of us are lost or dead or cut off.
There will be plenty of time up ahead to retrace the steps, to examine how a whole family is tugged asunder and shipwrecked—each of us like lost silver cutlery and bone china tableware, strewn across the ocean floor. But here now, where this story begins, you should really meet my dad when we all—as a family—are like that great gleaming ship just setting sail on its maiden journey. I’d like you to meet him—The Bone, Papa Boner, Ham, Hambone, James Harvey Peterman Hamilton—in the bright excitement of morning.
Behind his back, we call our dad The Bone, and we find him delightfully, irrepressibly de-Bone-aire. He has long sideburns, drives a Mustang, wears aviator sunglasses, signs his name like it’s a hieroglyph.
He is not concerned with legibly knitting together a series of letters in deference to the notary or the clerk or the secretary who files such paperwork. Rather, he slashes out a bold pair of lines and a hovering simple dot: his mark.
I find it dazzling that one could be so disobedient. So noncompliant. I thought you had to meticulously ink out every single letter of your name so that the bureaucracy would not be inconvenienced by your unwieldy and unbridled individuality. But our dad is unapologetic, if not even proud. Daddy-o!
* * *
It’s the early 1970s, before the divorce, in the family home in Pennsylvania. He comes downstairs into the kitchen and crumples his pack of Camel filterless cigarettes and declares he will never smoke another cigarette again. And he doesn’t. From that safe shore of morning, he told of the wild night he had just endured drowning in his own lungs, choking and racking on a smoker’s cough so prolonged so bloody so mucosal as to feel cystic and fibrotic. He was so close to dying in his own lung fluid that a mortal terror seized him. Our mother turns from the sink where she is standing and just stares at our dad. Incredulous.
Our house was in many aspects enormous—downstairs a great room with a cathedral ceiling, a dinner table the length of a luxury car, a kitchen with a six-burner restaurant stove—and yet also, in many true ways, miniature. Upstairs where we all slept, like moles in a nest, it was a warren of tiny bedrooms and cramped attic spaces and narrow sharp-cornered left-then-right corridors. You could hear the pigeons cooing in their little pockets in the stone walls as you lay in bed in the mornings, and, at night, the needle crackling the grooves on your sister’s record player just above your head in her attic room. And yet still, it felt like it would’ve spanned a quarter mile from end to end if you could have laid it out straight like a rail, from their master bedroom at one end to the last kid’s cubicle at the other.
Our mother had bat ears and spider senses and witch’s premonitions so attuned that a child’s minor cough from the attic room three hallways away, a nocturnal whimper, or the dream-state moan of a toddler behind a closed door at the end of yet another hallway had her instantly alert, at the bedside—rushing me, or one or another, to the toilet to throw up, to the medicine cabinet for chewable aspirin, to the sink for a cold washcloth. So pricked up were her senses and so light was her slumber that she never missed. She heard you rustle the sheets on the bed long before you rolled out of it onto the floor.
I ended up with this, too. I inherited this high-frequency maternal cochlear sensitivity, this one ear cocked to any shift in the somnatic silence. And even from the leaden bottom depth of midnight sleep, I, too, when I became a mother, could hear one of my own children start to salivate and the curiously rhythmic licking and swallowing from across the king bed, and I was instantly up, rushing to get them a bath towel to vomit into. This, a direct chromosomal DNA gift from my mother: not only a sixth sense, but a hyperactive one.
And now she stares at my father, with his dramatic story and flair for telling it, hurling the crumpled packet into the garbage, his vivid and convinced retelling of how his nightmare night had passed—and she is incredulous. She has her own theatrical tendencies, and she looks at my dad with operatic incomprehension.
“Pas. Possible,” she protests, each word its own sentence, and an exercise in French diction. Her grandfather back in Lyon had sent his great baritone across the foggy and thick white sheet of footlights to the topmost tier of seats in the grand opera house there, and her own father knew a stage well for twenty-five years as first chair violist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She herself had painted on winged black eyeliner in the lightbulb infinity of many a mirrored dressing room and tied up the satin ribbons of her pointe slippers before she’d glissade out onstage, as one of les corps de ballet at the Metropolitan in New York City before she’d been married and had children, which is just to say: It was long and ancient in her own chromosomal makeup, this flair and tendency toward the theatrical, the dramatic, when she Maria Callas–ed her disbelief up to the last row of the balcony. In our case, the balcony that held the potted plants and ferns and ficus of their open 1970s modern master bedroom suite upstairs. “Pas. Possible!” She had not heard a sound all night.
She insists he dreamt it.
I am too young to have been witness to this miraculous morning—which I’ve been jealous over missing out on for decades—but I’ve heard the story so many times, I can see it exactly, as if the memory were my own. All of the family gathered there in that kitchen with the pearly white dish soap in the glass bottle on the ledge above the sink: Jeffrey leaning against the cabinets waiting for the toaster to release its catch; Todd and Simon sitting at the round butcher block with their spoons buried in milky homemade granola; the tabby cat sprawled in a patch of sunlight on the terra-cotta floor. And Melissa on the little stone bench near the fireplace, her knees up under her stretched nightgown making elephantine breasts on her foreshortened body, kindling wood crammed into the cubby beneath her ankle-less feet. Our dad recounts the terror of his night, ashen and undone, while tossing his life’s last packet of cigarettes into the garbage can, and we sit rapt and riveted. Our postures nearly in rigor at such credibility, and veracity; such a vivid, detailed, true story.
But not her. Not our mother.
She’s not having it for a second.
“Not possible, Jim. No, not even possible.”
She has utterly no doubt that she would have heard it. And she declares there is not a single possibility that it was anything other than just a dream.
But still, lived or dreamt—and frankly what is the difference to the one who has dreamt it—he never smoked again.
From a pack-a-day man to nonsmoker in the span of one life-altering, amniotic night’s dream.
Bean Counters
At the time of his quitting smoking, he’s got five children under the age of eleven, a wife—our mother—who still affectionately calls him Ploppies, and a theatrical design-and-build studio one town over and across the river in what used to be a mammoth, wooden-domed roller rink. Enormous sets for Broadway shows and industrial expos and even for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus are built there and then trucked off to Detroit or Corning or New Haven. The guys in the back of the shop who build the sets have sawdust in their pants cuffs. They smell of creosote, machine oil, even faintly of lead from the flat rectangular pencils tucked behind their ears for marking stencil cuts on the sheets of plywood. They are sharp-minded, careful, all of them angle-circumference-torque and muscle guys, dry humor and salacious wit. The clock over the bandsaw bench has a handwritten sign, in all-caps red marker letters, that looks like it was made by someone who never finished the eighth grade and says, This Clock Will Never Be Stolen. Everybody Is Watching It. And there’s another one in the coffee station, with raised green lettering like an official government parking sign, that says, OSHA Is Not a City in Kansas. Reed, who runs this union shop, has two blunt cocktail wieners on his right hand where his fingers used to be.
