The Bad Angel Brothers, page 25
26
Monologues
One of the starker examples of abject failure is a man of fifty-six, broke, divorced, out of work, and living back home with his mother, sleeping in his old bed, hands behind his head, his eyes upturned to the familiar stains on the ceiling. I reflected on the ogre in profile with the long warty nose, the misshapen island, scattered clouds, the pickax near the cabin, the cocked pistol, the bobbing boat, the broken bird’s wing that speaks of arrested flight, injury and loneliness and despair—all this and Mother’s odors: soap, cologne, hair dye ammonia, meatloaf.
Inattentive in my prospecting, looking hard for a meaning in something inconsequential, I had stepped from a sunlit cliff into a steep ravine, and bumped and battered by the long drop, I lay in darkness, pinched by the narrowness of the ravine’s bottom and up to my neck in water in the downslope channel. I could not budge. I wondered if I might be insane. Nervous breakdown had always seemed to me a hard-to-define condition—what was it exactly? Feeling shattered in this pit? Where I was and how I felt made no sense.
How had I ended up with nothing—less than nothing—debt?
Prospecting is all about risk, borrowing big against a possible strike, failing spectacularly with a dry hole one day, hitting pay dirt the next. I was used to failure, but this was something else, something bottomless, as Frank had once said of his condition, abysmal. I had no experience of absolute ruin.
It was mental—confusion in my brain—and a sadness that made me tearful. But it was physical, too, a dull ache in my shoulders, as though I’d strained my back lugging a box of rocks. And with that the nausea you feel from chronic pain. I felt a slackness, a weakness, an inability to hold a thought for any length of time, enfeebled by a sense of helplessness—action of any kind seeming absurd, what was the point? I’d let myself down, I felt guilty, I felt stupid and sorrowful, I was dying, locked in bewildering immobility. Being home was confinement that amounted to a kind of paralysis, and being in Littleford meant I was reduced to being a Bad Angel brother once again.
I needed someone to lean on, but who? The human voice was an irritant, sound of any kind upset me. I was sick inside, I couldn’t eat. I thought: So this is what it’s like, being abandoned.
Well aware that my condition—motionless in my childhood bed—was related to Vita dumping me, Mother said, “Dad and I had such a wonderful marriage. He was a kind and loving man.”
She was standing at the door to my bedroom, holding a glass of milk in one hand, a plate of homemade cookies in the other, a mother’s innocent comforts.
“Do you remember the time he surprised me with that beautiful painting?”
A gilt-framed oil of Littleford in colonial times, men in frock coats and tricorn hats, women in bonnets, holding parasols, horse-drawn carriages, a trotting dog, some children chasing a ball, and in the foreground a young man and woman—lovers—strolling together.
Mother set down the glass of milk and the cookies on my bedside table and crept away, smiling at the memory of Dad’s present, the painting that still hung over the fireplace.
I tried not to cry, but before I turned aside I saw Mother limping to the top of the stairs, then pausing, trembling a little, nodding at nothing, gripping the banister, poor arthritic woman, bracing herself for the descent. I was ashamed of my idleness, feeling sorry for myself. And this lame old soul had not uttered a word of complaint, while I lay feeling sorry for myself.
With my hands behind my head, I interpreted the stains on the ceiling. They were like water streaks on a cliff face, or the weathered crusty rinds formed by deposits, the blotches I’d seen from manganese oxide, rock coatings accreting on surfaces of exposed scarp. I knew from a college textbook that Leonardo da Vinci, sometime geologist and full-time artistic genius and describer of cliff faces, was one of the first to understand the origin of sedimentary rocks and the former life of fossils. He was also a connoisseur of stains. He urged in his “Treatise on Painting” to pay close attention to the stains on a wall or ceiling as a way of stimulating thought or provoking ideas. All the stains I saw hinted at villainy and my own stupidity: now my ceiling made sense, as an indictment of me, for all the bad decisions I’d made.
My great mistake was the local boy’s shallow brag of returning to his hometown, flush with cash, to buy the big house he’d craved as a youngster, mowing lawns. And I’d idealized my days at Littleford High School, hoping that Gabe would graduate there, an improved version of me at that age. I’d introduced Vita to Littleford, planting her in the town as though to prove how better life was here, more solid and orderly, compared to the improvisation of South Florida—hot, flat, sand and mud, hardly a rock to be found. As though I’d rescued her, delivered her to safety, the sort of selfish motivation I’d ascribed to Frank when he’d taken up with Frolic—his lawsuit love affair that made him rich.
I’d gone away—digging—leaving Vita at the mercy of Frank. I had allowed all this to happen. My staying away had contributed to the breakdown of my marriage and given Frank a chance to encourage Vita to doubt me. And here was another irony: I’d thought that taking a leave of absence and coming home would reassure Vita and heal us, yet my constant presence, intended as loving and comforting, had annoyed her. You again, she seemed to murmur whenever she saw me in the house. My being home had demoralized her and hastened the end of our marriage.
I was sure that Vita had confided in Frank, that she had solicited his advice. It would have been operatic and bizarre if they’d been lovers, but Frank was sexless and too manipulative to allow himself to be passionate. What he did was worse—out of sheer spite he turned Vita against me, in a calculated and cold-blooded way, became her advocate, demonstrating in one of his legalistic memos that she’d be able to profit mightily by divorcing me.
I could hear his pitch: Vita, listen, you could end up a very wealthy woman.
It was my fault. I had allowed it. I had selfishly busied myself elsewhere. I’d even taken a lover in Africa. I’d let it happen—left the door open for Frank. I’d been preoccupied with emeralds and then cobalt, and I let my marriage collapse. Frank had taken advantage of Vita’s loneliness, and he’d helped her rise in the Rescue/Relief agency. As always, his most satanic quality was his helpfulness, his availability—discreet, at her service. How can I help? and It’s no trouble at all. In this way (I’ll nip right over) he’d subverted me, turned her against me in his pretense of generosity, with endless promises. Vita had welcomed these words, because she’d had so few words from me.
Working this out, seeing how I was mostly to blame for the undoing of my marriage, saved my sanity. I’d delivered Vita into Frank’s hands. A better man than Frank, a better brother, would not have behaved this way—used her to try to destroy me. But I knew Frank well enough to realize my error in settling in Littleford. I’d lost Vita, I’d lost the house, Gabe was oblique with me, and here I was in my old bedroom. I didn’t mind having very little—I’d managed quite well prospecting as a camper on a motorcycle—I’d thrived. What I found hard to bear was having less than nothing, being deep in debt.
Frank, being Frank, was still hovering. “It’s for you,” Mother said, handing me her phone, and she mouthed the word Frank with a smile.
“Lunch?” he said—no greeting.
I couldn’t believe that after all that had happened he was insisting on being in my life, that he wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Can’t do it,” I said.
He was talking as I handed the phone back to Mother, who limped away, looking defeated.
I came to see that for him, for most sociopaths, he had no memory—took no responsibility for anything he’d said or done—had no past, no history, it never happened. Memory is essential to conscience; he had no conscience.
The clatter in the upstairs corridor just then was Mother bobbling and dropping the phone. “Sorry!” she called out in a high and quaking voice of apology.
That was another thing. On my visits home while living with Vita, I always found Mother seated on her favorite chair, among all the bric-a-brac—the shawls, souvenir plates, the ornaments and teacups, the porcelain shepherdesses, the dolls in dresses, the sofa piled with pillows she’d crocheted. She seemed so serene sitting there, often knitting, sometimes sipping fruit juice, unchanged since the last time I’d seen her, months before. White-faced and brittle, in a chiffon dress, wearing small furry slippers, her feet barely touching the shag rug, she was doll-like, resembling one of her own souvenirs, but life-size and twinkling and glad to see me.
Those were brief visits, when I’d brought her chocolates, or the groceries she’d requested.
But living with her, seeing her cook and clean and chop vegetables and peel Brussels sprouts, I realized how frail and uncertain she was, frailer than she admitted. I was ashamed, because she exhausted herself in trying to please me, being an active and nurturing mother again. I saw this too late. I was the reason for her fatigue and her frailty. Her shortness of breath worried me. Mild exertion turned her face pink. She sometimes sat gasping, unable to speak.
Now, in her house day and night, I saw that she survived on pills. I hadn’t known this until it became part of my routine to pick up her medicine at Littleford Apothecary—pills for osteoporosis, pills for arthritis, red pills, green pills, blue pills, for ailments I couldn’t guess at. Sorting them into her plastic pill organizer with trembling fingers, four or five to a daily slot, she smiled as though savoring treats, and the multicolored pills did have the appearance of Halloween candy.
She was weirdly whitened, not simply pale and old, but calcified, crusted, her skin like tissue, a flakiness at her neck, fissures in her face distorting her features to the point where it was hard for me to read her expression. Was that a smile, or was she wincing in pain? Was she relaxed, or was she weary?
Mother was, I finally saw, exhausted. She had managed well enough alone, but my presence in the house, feeling low in spite of her diligent mothering, wore her out. She was increasingly forgetful, she had little arm strength, and a poor grip, often dropping things that she was bringing to me—the glass of milk I didn’t want, the cookies she thought I liked, the runny soft-boiled eggs I’d eaten as a child but now disgusted me. They ended up on the floor, and I mopped them while she stood by lamenting her clumsiness. She was becoming visibly fossilized and seemed to have gone into steady decline since my moving in with her. Those press-and-unscrew caps on the yellow plastic pain pill containers: she was in too much pain to press and unscrew them.
And her deafness meant that she didn’t hear water running in the bathtub and sink—flooding was frequent; she didn’t notice the buzz of a badly tuned radio she’d forgotten to turn off. She seldom heard with accuracy anything I said.
“Have you thought of having a hearing test, Mum?”
“Silly!” She laughed. “Why would I ever have a urine test?”
“Soup’s on!” she’d call out in her cheery way, summoning me to lunch from my bedroom, where, instead of lightening her load, I still selfishly and single-mindedly looked for implications of the ceiling stains.
What she served was almost inedible. She’d once been a good cook, but she’d lost the knack, or skipped crucial steps or ingredients.
Yet I ate it all because she sat with me, proud Mother observing her half-cracked and hopeless son at the meal she’d made specially for him. I choked it down, tears of disgust pricking my eyes, while she watched as I struggled to swallow.
I loved her too much not to eat what she made for me, and she knew how saddened I was by my failed marriage. Her motherly mission was to heal me. But her effort was taking a toll on her health.
She denied that, but I could see she needed help more than I did. Feeling responsible for her feeble condition, I roused myself to get a grip. Still she insisted she was fine, though her dropping things and leaving water running or the stove on continued to the point where I knew such forgetfulness could be hazardous.
“What can I do for you, Mum?”
“Just eat my food and cheer up,” she said, naming two things I felt were almost beyond me.
“What else?”
“I hate to ask,” she finally said.
She was knitting, studying her stitches, and had said this shyly, as though concealing something important. I said, “Mum—anything—name it.”
“It would please me so much if you’d have lunch with Frank.”
This rattled me. I said, “I see him all the time.”
“Frank said”—she spoke slowly, at the rate she was knitting, a phrase for each twitch of her needles looping the yarn—“that he hasn’t, um”—another twitch—“seen you”—one more loop—“for months.” Her eyes were cast down at the thing she was knitting, which looked all wrong to me, strangely knotted, lumpy where she’d drawn the stitches too tight, as though she was creating an unusable clumped rag. “That you don’t answer your phone.”
She seemed so sad, her head bowed over her mangled knitting, I said, “Okay. I’ll give him a call. We’ll have lunch.”
She glanced up and beamed at me, her face filling with color, brightening, as with a mood-enhancing pill. She looked younger just then, and drugged and delighted.
It was a cold bright day in December, my face tightened against an icy wind from the river, my hands jammed in my pockets, scraps of dirty snow refrozen after the last brief thaw, a coating of sand on the sidewalks with a white rime of salt—I associated winter in Littleford less with snow than with sand and salt, the scattered grit that I kicked and crunched as I made my way to the diner.
Frank was in the booth—I saw the top of his head, the dent in his hair left by the rim of his hat, and I smiled at it for the way it made him look silly. But his arriving early always suggested to me that he had a preconceived plan for ambushing me. As soon as he saw me he slid out of the booth and hugged me. I was so startled by this unexpected show of affection—or pretense of affection—that I couldn’t think of anything to say. As I struggled out of my coat I realized his hug had left me breathless.
“You need a heavier coat than that, Fidge. And where’s your scarf?”
“I guess I need a new wardrobe. I haven’t spent a whole winter here in years.”
“This is yours,” Frank said, snatching up a scarf from the seat beside him. Instead of handing it to me, he pulled at my hanging coat and stuffed it into the side pocket.
I’d begun to thank him when the waitress appeared, saying, “A beverage to start?”
“Cranberry juice,” Frank said. “And my son here will have . . .”
“Tomato juice, please.”
“Shall I tell you today’s specials?”
“I know what I want,” Frank said. “Turkey sandwich with cheddar, and a cup of clam chowder.”
“Just chowder for me.”
“That all? You look like you’ve lost weight.”
“Lost my appetite,” I said.
“You need to look after yourself.”
He’d shifted his head so that I did not see his full face, two expressions, but rather gave me the somber angle, with its pleats of distortion, the drawn-down mouth, the doubtful side, crazy clown hair on top.
He was still talking, in a tone of urgent concern, about my health and well-being, how I’d always been the outdoorsman, hiking and camping while he—the nerd—had been in his room studying. He’d envied me for being robust, the strength that had taken me to so many parts of the world, prospecting, pioneering new claims, guiding big companies in their mining. I’d need good health to look after Mother, and of course it was essential for when the time came for me to resume my geology.
“That’s what I keep wondering . . .”
He raised his hand, showing me his stern palm, as if stopping traffic, and I was silenced. I needed to prepare for that, Frank said—for starting again, in the same spirit that had inspired me to make my fortune in the first place. Someone of my caliber, who’d gone into the world and made such a success of it, could do it again, would be better at it, because—didn’t Chairman Mao say this?—all genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. Not sitting in an office like him, staring out the window and munching a turkey sandwich (our food had been served, I’d finished my chowder), but the real thing, the wide world, breaking rocks, digging up gemstones, balls to the wall.
“I doubt whether . . .”
“State of mind,” Frank said, interrupting again, tapping his finger to his dented hair. “It’s all mental. I keep telling Victor that he could learn a lot from you, but he can’t hold a job, and now he’s got a hippie girlfriend with a neck tattoo. It’s all negative energy with these losers.”
I’d always been the positive one, he said, the adventurer—and look how it had paid off. Travelers were optimists, confident that they’d find something amazing just over the next hill, around the bend, down the road. Conquerors were unfazed, their confidence assured their victories. He admired me for my traveling, for my finding gold. Anyone who’d made a fortune had his head on straight, and even if he lost it all somehow—run of bad luck, whatever—he could do it again.
“You’re hardwired to win,” Frank was saying, as the waitress came and stacked the plates on her forearm, and—Frank still talking—I made a thumb and finger gesture indicating a cup of coffee. When she brought the coffee—“And that’s not all,” Frank was saying—I made the scribbling signal, meaning “the check.” She brought that, presenting it on a plate, and Frank pinched it and slapped it on the table, covering it with his hand, and still talking.
He’d seen my destiny in high school, how I’d turned away from school sports, while he’d warmed the bench at football games, not good enough to play unless Littleford was crushing the other team and Coach Rizzo put in the third string for the last few minutes of garbage time. But I was—what?—hiking in the Fells with Melvin Yurick, identifying rock formations, hammering at granite, earning merit badges, serving a kind of apprenticeship that would lead me to great achievements in geology, and Yurick to become a billionaire.
