“OSCAR SAD,” Oscar now says as he wanders the house in the mornings after his waffle and apple slices. When he hears his parents fighting he makes what Alicia calls his Kabuki Face. His little lumps are visible when the light's right. At a stoplight this week he asked for an explanation of the red light. They told him it meant Stop.
“What about yellow?” he asked.
“Go slow,” Alicia said. She teared up all the time now. While they waited for the news, it was like every single thing he said was impossibly poignant.
“What about green?”
“Go,” Alicia said.
“What about purple?” His head was back against the headrest of his safety seat. He looked tired. He looked out his window, distracted.
“There is no purple light,” Alicia said.
“Yeah there is,” Oscar said.
“Then what's purple mean?” Emmett asked.
“Purple means Go Like Crazy,” Oscar said.
Alicia's always been the better parent. And she was sacrificing right and left before Oscar even showed up. She got her degree in landscape architecture and walked away from an on-the-map firm in Providence when Emmett decided he was an academic. Then she left even the hole-in-the-wall firm in Vermont when he bailed on teaching at Middlebury. Now she gets whatever work she can, haggling patiently with suburbanites who want to do something half-Japanese with the area near the birdbath. She set up her drafting table and materials and piled the books she saved in the space adjoining the laundry room in the finished basement. With Oscar, most days she doesn't get down there.
THE BULLETS SOUND on the hard caps and saddlery like gravel flung at wood. The end of the valley is an unbroken white bank of gunsmoke and haze with the occasional flash of orange. Under such fire, the instinct for advancing cavalry is to quicken the pace, and then to charge, to get into close quarters where the horses' momentum and power can be brought to bear as soon as possible. The trooper to Emmett's left is lashed backward, his chin-chain spinning in the air where his head had just been. The air is a maelstrom. Each instant they survive seems inconceivable. In the roar one trooper, then two, then three shoot ahead.
“Steady, steady, the Seventeenth Lancers,” Alicia calls without looking back, her voice hoarse.
The cannons gouge huge holes in the lines, men and horses in groups of two or three seeming to flash backward and disappear. Sticky mists bloom and pass, and a fleck of bone appears on Emmett's glove. Their lines close up as they continue. The concussions jolt them in their saddles, like someone giving them a rough shove. With the gaps filling in so reliably, the Light Brigade as a target is always equally dense, so every shot and shell has a field day. Halfway to the guns the First Line is only half as long as when it began. Emmett spurs his horse so that it's level with Alicia's. They're riding knee to knee.
“I never felt like I was sure I should be doing any one thing,” Emmett tells her. “This is the first thing I was ever
sure
I should be doing.”
A shell concusses thirty yards to their right and something wind-mills past in his peripheral vision. Alicia ducks her head and shakes it once to clear her eyesight. “So much for getting married,” she says bitterly. “So much for having Oscar.”
“You know what I mean,” he says. Something incandescent from all the way down the valley helixes past his ear. There's a ringing and then the ringing goes away. The Russian fire from the front is now all-consuming. Officers can be heard as the men can no longer tolerate the pace: Close ranks! Close in! Back the left! Close ranks!
Come on! someone yells from the rear, and the back lines are all in a gallop, their gallop becoming headlong, forcing the forward lines to charge or be overwhelmed, and the last shouts audible are Close in! Close in! before the noise sweeps everything before it. Alicia and Emmett are at the apex, deafened, bloodthirsty, maddened by what they've been through, aiming for the gaps between the cannon mouths, so close they can see the gunners' expressions.
Grit in his teeth and soot in his eyes. Ten horses' lengths, six, two, and one gunner seems to have picked him out. He locks on Emmett's eyes. The entire battery fires.
“It's the doctor,” Alicia says, holding out her Nokia. “You answer it.”
He's been flattened, unhorsed, and he's on his back and elbows. The top of his head feels grated. His horse seems to have gone away. Alicia's on one hand and her knees. Her Hussar's cap is gone and her hair is splaying upward as if from static electricity. There's a spray pattern of darker blood on her cherry pants.
He takes the phone and puts a finger in his other ear to try and hear. The doctor's voice says something like
retro gooner.
The second line is thundering over them. An officer getting to his feet a few yards down the line is poleaxed by a flash of chestnut. A trooper from the 11th vaults Alicia, wearing the wrong headgear: some incoherent mishmash of a French Dragoon's helmet and a shako, with a plume no less. The sky and smoke have gone monochromatic and the cacophony has morphed to include stirring theme music. The next guy flying past Alicia is Errol Flynn, his horse galloping impossibly fast, undercranked. Flynn's bareheaded and holding a lance. Color pours back into the world like seawater swamping a boat. John Gielgud's standing over him doing his prissy, citrus-eating squint. Gielgud's commander in chief's expeditionary cap is historically accurate and features a pleasing fan of crimson and white feathers. This is the Tony Richardson version.
Whatever you're about to hear, you'll recover from,
he realizes about himself, still holding the phone.
After their fourth date, Alicia took him to see her great-aunt, dying of cancer. It was a three-hour drive. On the way, she explained how Rosalie was one of those relatives who saved you from your parents by demonstrating that not all adults were psychotic. And of course, the last few years Alicia'd been busy with school and neglected her. And now it was too late.
Rosalie was so bad off they'd let her come home. She was on a sofa that had been dragged onto the sunporch. She was on what he assumed was inadequate pain medication. She studied his face like that was one of the last things she could do for Alicia.
“Do you think she's as wonderful as I do?” she asked, with Alicia sitting there. He told her he did. And then when Alicia was laid low with strep he drove up to Rosalie's without her and without telling her, and sat there in the sunroom just keeping the woman company, his mind emptied of its own agenda.
There's some presence but the situation is treatable,
seems to be the gist of what the doctor's saying. Alicia's on all fours, her attention on his expression, her pelisse in wrack and ruin across her back. There's a smudge on the end of her nose.
They're more or less at the very wheels of the guns, around which there's now pitched fighting. Russian cavalry has counterattacked and there's a lot of
Cut Three
and
Guard Four.
It's hard not to see it as derring-do. Alicia's got her back to it, waiting for his information. Behind her two horses are on their sides, washed with blood and spooning. Over them goes Oscar on a gray thoroughbred, his safety seat wedged between the saddle's pommel and cantle. The impact of the landing tips the seat, and out he tumbles. He lands in Errol Flynn's lap. Nigel Bruceâanother Warner Brothers standbyâlies beside Flynn, also mortally wounded. Broken lances crook up out of the ground in different directions and the Brigade's colors are planted just behind them, fluttering fiercely.
“What did he say?”
Alicia calls into his face.
“He said he's never seen a couple as much in love as we are,” Emmett calls back.
“What did he say about
Oscar
?”
Alicia says with exasperation. Behind her Oscar's gotten to his feet, Flynn holding one hand and Bruce the other. He sees his father and sticks out his lower lip: the big boy who survives all bonks.
Alicia turns to follow Emmett's look and sees him. Above his proud little head sabers cut and parry. Someone turns with a lance and then claps a gauntleted hand to his breast and arches his back, as if miming O! I am struck!
Who had the right to give my boy this? Emmett's thinking. Who
says
any
presenceâone fucking
particle
of presenceâis acceptable?
He's flummoxed by the force of his feeling. A caisson's powder-tray detonates and the cannon barrel and carriage and wheels behind Oscar erupt outward, the blast wave sweeping the bodies like the wind over grass. Flynn and Bruce are rolled under and in an instant Oscar kites from their hands to his mother and father. Alicia has one hand up and Emmett has both. They're thinking not of their own bodies, but of his: luminous with the explosions powering it, intricate with its own history of neglect and care, and inexhaustible in what it's taught and what it teaches.
THE MORTALITY OF PARENTS
It's 1970. He's the glue that holds us together, the UN van pelted with rocks and bottles, the pro wrestling ref floored by the occasional dropkick but always gamely back on his feet and working to keep the eye-gouging to a minimum. Morning in and morning out, my father's up and has the coffee made and is reasonably ready for whatever we're about to, in our misery and impatience and bell-jar self-absorption, dish out.
Ours is not one of those families in which the tensions are played out in intricately subterranean gestures. My brother has thrown me across the living room so that my back impacted the wall above the sofa. To more fully demonstrate his dissatisfaction with the general drift of our family life, in our presence he's upended the dining room table, fully set, a massive Shaker cherry rectangle with big, cross-beamed legs. My mother has slung a just-filled humidifier across the length of the kitchen. The water reservoir's rubber-sealed cap ricocheted off the ceiling. I've been known to run full bore at the walls, all shoulders and elbows, the hero in a movie breaking down doors where no doors are evident. Our plaster is patched with football-sized ovals. The trim is scissored with scuff marks. Homicidal or suicidal exasperation is the norm.
As
Life
magazine reminds us every so often, it's a time of great uncertainty.
In each case, our attempts at self-expression are diverted by Shep into channels at least eventually more acceptable to the neighbors. He reasons, he pleads, he cajoles, he throws people around. The fact that we're still standing is incontrovertible evidence that he gets results.
I've put the leg of a serving table through the speaker on our console television from across the room during a football game. My mother has snapped an
oar
âa kid's oar from a plastic boat, but an oar nonethelessâaround a cross-beam support in the basement when I ducked and wove while she was trying to apply a two-handed lesson. My brother has cleared our driveway from his second-story window with his turntable when the thing still made vocalists sound vaguely quaaluded after a third straight trip to the repair shop.
So there it is, the big broad granite slab perpendicular to our slippery little slope, dug in at the bottom of an increasingly steep drop:
What's going to happen when Shep dies?
We're going to go head-on smash into it sometime soonâhe's fifty-nine and not the healthiest guy in the world in 1970âand none of us, including him, are anywhere in the neighborhood of being prepared. So what
is
going to happen? At all of fourteen years old I manage to think about it incessantly without enlightening myself on the matter. I don't know. I don't know because I don't want to know. In our family, we're either screaming or breaking things or cleaning up. Who has time for hypotheticals?
EVERYONE CALLS HIM SHEP. He's been Shep since the Dawn of Time. I apparently started calling him Shep when I was three, amusing visiting relatives and friends. My mother only became Ida when I was thirteen or so. He has his faultsâfor the sake of everyone concerned, in social situations, we don't get my mother started on his faultsâbut in 1970, for the fourteen years I've been alive and the ten I've been sentient, he's been for me the epitome of goodâgood being defined as patient and/or generous in his dispensation of care. Nowhere in my world do I know anyone as doggedly resourceful in his desire to do what he can for others.
Though my mother, when she overhears relatives marveling at how often her husband thinks of others, works to make clear that by “others,” we all mean his two sons, me being one. By 1970 she's long been of the opinion that she gets a raw deal when it comes to conflicts with her sons, and as far as her sons are concerned, she's right; Shep's mode with her is an only slightly amended version of a position he's taken from the very beginning:
They're
just kids, but
you
should know better.
Our lives are divided into ongoing topics of contention. What do we fight about? Everything. My father has gone on record as believing we could fuck up a wet dream. Some subjects seem to roll out the ordnance more reliably than others, though. In ascending order of seriousness:
Number one: music. My mother inclines toward Jimmy Roselli and Lou Monte: singers so Italian they embarrass even other Italian singers. My father favors Nelson Eddy and Earl Wrightson: booming-voiced guys who sound as though they only sing in Mountie uniforms. Passing the stereo, they turn each other's music down, or off. My brother and I crack each other up regularly by making fun of both
oeuvres.
He favors vandalizing my mother's scungilli favoritesâ
Please, Mr. Columbus, turn-a da ship aroun'.
I get a bang out of replicating on car rides that basso-pretentious sound my father so enjoys:
Give me ten men that are stout-hearted men . . .
Music generates the most benign of our free-for-alls. My father gives as good as he gets when it comes to heaping abuse on what he hears. He's caustic on the subject of Janis Joplin. He periodically suggests a saliva test for Joe Cocker. He refers to Jimi Hendrix only as “that banshee.” But when he can make out the lyrics, and they're wittyâas in the case of the Kinks or Randy Newmanâevery so often, from down below in the living room, our stuff can get a laugh.
Number two: drinking. Shep puts it away like he has a hollow leg, and the volume annoys my mother mostly because of the insulation it seems to provide. Maybe because he brushed by alcoholism so closely himself, and certainly because he's had so many good friends who've taken that easy slide into the pool (the best man at his wedding died of cirrhosis of the liver), his comedy is particularly blunt on the subject. Which, for Shep, is saying something. “She was a jug artist,” he'll say. “He was always facedown in the sauce somewhere.”
For spiff events, my mother drinks whiskey sours. When she thinks she's getting a cold, she may take the occasional shot of four-dollar brandy or rye. Her favorite drink is Thunderbird: wine of choice for winos, screw-topped and so cheap that it seems a bargain even to her. It smells so awful that I begin making fun of it when my age is still in the single digits. It tastes like something from a crankcase. “It's good enough for me,” my mother always says in response.
Which brings us to number three: money. Money dictates our children-of-the-Depression parents' mantra, the bottom-line creed by which they live:
It's good enough for me.
Restaurants with linen napkins are too fancy, a big car or a new car is more than we need, vacations somewhere other than a dank knotty-pine cabin on Lake Champlain would be very nice if money meant absolutely nothing to us and was pouring in at an unprecedented rate. In Beloit, Wisconsin, years later, traveling on my own, I come across a marketing strategy apparently designed for my parents: a billboard that reads
Miller: Because Budweiser Is Just Too Darned Expensive.
All expenses and all bills for whatever amount irk Ida. All charges of whatever size seem fair to Shep. Ida's expression will darken after having opened an electric bill of seventeen cents, while Shep's face will remain unperturbed watching a cashier ring up a wiffle bat for $21.95. Without waiting for birthdays or holidays, Shep spreads his money around like Diamond Jim Brady. He could spend twenty dollars on a trip to the dump. He buys the boys smallish thingsâfour-dollar models, five-dollar albumsâthat the boys have agitated for, while Ida does her best to save, hating her role as the bad cop who always gets to suggest that the boys can wait. We're encouraged to hide gifts when arriving back home, but Ida checks all incoming packages like a customs agent. Fights follow. We sit up in our rooms enjoying our new whatevers while in the arena below the insults escalate in volume. Sometimes we go downstairs for a drink in the middle of it all. Nobody asks, but privately, we take Shep's side, while intuiting guiltily that Ida's probably right.
Then there are the topics that cause much more serious fights.
The Length of the Boys' Hair.
The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.
My brother's refusal to go to school.
Relatives.
My brother in general.
Me.
By 1970 my brother and I have put in a staggering thirty-one combined years with Shep and Ida in our household, and time with Shep and Ida in our household is the analog to spending time with Henny Youngman and Anna Magnani in Beirut. My brother and I don't have a lot of advanced training in this area, but even we can sense that as far as our parents' emotional lives go, there are compatibility and empathy issues that are not being properly addressed. Certain goals that are not being well met.
All of this would have sailed along with its own kind of stabilityâthe way events sailed along from Shiloh to Antietam to Fredericksburg in 1862âbut in August of 1970 my father had the first of his three heart attacks.
As far as my mother was concerned, his heart had always been the problem. His heart was too big, his heart was too good, his heart was the problem. His heart was evidently listening.
By the time I'm fourteen and my brother's seventeen, in 1970, we've provided my father with a string of unprecedented opportunities to confirm his status with relatives and friends as the biggest worrier they've ever known. At my brother's suggestion, I've taken a wagon down the steepest paved hill in a five-hundred-mile radius and landed on my face. We've both been caught jumping off the roof of our neighbors' house in an attempt to conceal that we'd been poking around the ground floor uninvited. Our summer fad of pelting passing cars with jawbreaker-sized rocks has backfired badly.
My father's response to our mulish and heroic refusal to acquire common sense is a darkly comic and highly obscene mixture of epithets and despairing interrogation that's often metrically pleasingâ
What goes through your fucking head? Your brains stuck up
your ass?
âand we can see, in the aftermath of one of our catastrophic exercises of free will, the physical toll it takes on him: for days afterward, he's exhausted, tentative in his steps, fractionally hesitant when lowering himself into a recliner. He's too old for this. He ages, while we watch.
Of course, in some ways he brings it on himself. We act up, he acts out.
He loves us, he loves us,
we think when the shouting subsides. We go to bed pleased, and entertained, besides.
Shep, don't get excited, Ida says, while he throws Tom Collins glasses against the side of the garage. At times like thatâwhen the boys have shown yet again that they have the collective reasoning power of a squirrelâIda placates, and assumes a long-view perspective, as if to suggest that we'll all chuckle over such shenanigans a few years down the road.
But Shep is a long way from Big Picture serenity. On the day of his first heart attack, he's in a chaise lounge in the backyard, recovering from the revelation that my brother and I have been running around the summer streets at three and four in the morning, potting streetlights with our BB gun, naked. The police have delivered this revelation in the middle of the night after having picked us up. We're without explanation as far as the naked part goes. Our MO is to leave our clothes on one corner or another and retrieve them on the way home.
The heart attack arrives long after the verbal abuse has subsided and all is relatively calm. My brother and I have gone to the beach. My mother is in the kitchen browning meat for a sauce.
All morning long, as far as Shep's concerned, he doesn't feel exactly right. Ida lends a sympathetic ear but her capacity for alarm is muffled by her sense of his slight hypochondria. A burning, parenthesis-shaped pain spreads beneath his sternum. Anxiety builds up, conjuring all sorts of scenarios. He resists jumping to conclusions.
When he leans forward, the pain lances upward to the base of his throat. This is cause for concern. He has trouble breathing. He calls Ida. The grease from the beef is making a racket in the bottom of the pan and he has to call her again.
He works at Avco Lycoming Industries, marketing helicopter engines, and so just as a basic business strategy always affects a formality with strangers whom he considers to be better educated. He tells the Emergency Room intern that he's “experiencing chest difficulties.”
Blood is taken, an EKG is hooked up, and medication is fed into him intravenously before we get word down at the beach. Ida thinks to call a neighbor, who trots the five blocks to tell us, and then is nice enough to drive us to the hospital to boot. It's the same guy who found us on his roof.
When we come into the room, Ida's sitting there holding his hand, and he's chatting with the intern. He's saying, “Once you know it
is
your heart, there's a certain anxiety that takes over, and that affects the whole goddamn thing too, you knowâ” and then we interrupt. We take turns bending over and putting our hands behind his shoulders, the quasi hug for the bedridden.
He lies there for a while while we ask various questions and joke. Ida's eyes mist up every so often. My brother asks how he's feeling and he answers, “Not so good. I had a heart attack.”
After his diagnosis, he's given stuff to stabilize his arrhythmia. In 1970 heart medicine is turning a corner from the Tertiary to the Quaternary, and tests are not as sophisticated as they are today. Certain predilections, certain hidden weaknesses, are missed. After a few days of observation, the little plastic bracelet is snipped off his wrist and he's sent home with medication. After a prudent interval, stress tests are administered. The problem of arterial blockage is addressed.
But Shep's heart, that big shaky flatbed trundling us down the hill, is not all right. It goes on about its business quietly, while we go on about ours. But its business involves preparing to blow up on Shep two more times.
As a family we resolve, with a minimum of discussion, to take it easy. No more battling of the sort that would only add to his strain. Israel and the Palestinians agree to be good. The Protestants and the Catholics decide to Just Try Peace in Northern Ireland.