The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (10 page)

As for those walks . . . they served a purpose, perhaps. I took them sometimes very early in the morning, in the powdery twilight, and sometimes at night when our neighbors’ interior lights were on and I got little glimpses of how other lives were led. And how did I aspire to live myself? That question would hang in the air for many years.

As one walked east from our house on the corner of Wilshire and Dorset—again with the English street names, far more suitable in Nichols Hills than in our shabby old tract-house neighborhood, the Village—the houses gradually and almost aggressively became grander. Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg is described as “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy,” and this would not have been out of place (indeed, when Nichols Hills was founded in 1929—so I just now read on the town’s website—the entrance at the corner of 63rd and Western was marked by “two stately towers of true Normandy architecture”); because the curving, park-dotted streets had been laid along sumptuous prairie north of the city, there was much in the way of vast, Gatsbyesque “blue lawns” as well. The Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club was only a few blocks away from our house: it was pleasant to walk along the golf-cart paths at dawn, cheered by birdsong and the warble of little speakers concealed in the trees that played Muzak around the clock. The clubhouse itself was a sprawling Tudor, further east of which, the sky brightening, was an almost bumptious parade of prosperity—not just Normandy mansions such as Gatsby and Dr. Nichols had inhabited, but Greek Revivals, Georgians, Spanish Colonials, glassy Modernist castles, or composites of all these styles and more, a gallimaufry reminiscent of Nathanael West’s Hollywood. At Christmas the light displays were competitively dazzling.

So I walked those many mornings and nights. And yes, part of me coveted the big houses, the verdant neighborhood, the never having to protest too much about one’s little importance in the world. But part of me could also see—could see very easily—a different kind of life: a little garret apartment, say, in some other part of the world, with nothing but books and a few souvenirs of the oddball life I’d led, and perhaps an occasional lapse into real squalor from time to time. Given my vagaries, it was all possible—the high and low and in-between.

WHEN MANDY RETURNED
from Edinburgh for a month over the holidays, I was amiably tolerated but encouraged, as ever, to make myself scarce. There was no question of my celebrating Christmas with them. My mother, whom I’d seen maybe five times in the past year, stepped obligingly to the fore. She too liked Mandy (or the idea of her), and in the interest of giving the happy couple their privacy, she gladly invited me and my brother to spend Christmas at her little condo in Norman. I viewed the prospect as one might view a bit of court-imposed community service, to be performed in a rest home or hospital. Christmas was the one time I couldn’t depend on friends; Christmas was family, of whatever sort.

For some reason my brother drove. He’d recently bought (with my father’s help) a big tan Oldsmobile that rumbled with a kind of elderly resolve when Scott stepped on the gas. His old twill cap, I noticed, had somehow survived New York, and he’d adjust the bill with a little flourish each time we slowly gathered speed after a stoplight. An aspect of my brother’s evolving, quasi-adult persona was a heavy pair of horn-rim glasses that lent him a kind of comic dignity; he’d been a little nearsighted since his early teens, though he’d usually worn contacts to spare his then-handsome face. Now, with his cap and glasses and trench coat, his smile of vague importance as he chauffeured us to Norman, he gave me the sense of playing a minor role in a costume farce.

My mother and Scott brought out, if not exactly the worst, the weirdest in each other. Starved for love, Scott would follow her around her tiny condo, her little garden, finding excuses to hug and kiss and caress her. I suppose my mother did her best to reciprocate, but she wasn’t a patient woman, and Scott was pathetic in a thousand ways. Besides, she was trying to
cook
, and Scott would hover and hover around her tiny kitchen until she groaned with exasperation. “Scott, will you get
outta
here?” she’d finally explode, waving her wooden spoon and bugging her eyes. And Scott would join me on the couch and sullenly sip his beer, his umpteenth strong German beer, which seeped from his eyes and pores while he nursed this latest hurt. Perhaps he’d comfort himself with one of my mother’s cats, and here again Scott demanded more from the world than it was ever prepared to give him. Because I ignored the cats they vastly preferred me to Scott, and would writhe free of his clutches and seek refuge in my indifferent lap. Whereupon Scott would sigh and waver to his feet for still another beer. “
Another?
” roared my mother, snapping it out of his hand and returning it to the fridge. “Not until you’ve eaten something!” On and on they’d argue over a beer and its many implications. Since the result was always the same—Scott would not stop until he got his beer (though maybe he’d consent to “eat something”)—I found Marlies’s tenacity at least as loony as his.

At this point I’d retreat to my mother’s bedroom, where she kept a piano she’d acquired to make me feel more at home during my rare visits (with the result that I played piano rather than talk to her). I relished my solitude while it lasted. Once the argument had petered out in the other room, my brother would join me there at the piano, or rather stand behind me and knead my shoulder with one hand while he held his hard-won beer with the other. He cherished dreams of becoming a rock star—all that bouncing around on his toes was, I believe, by way of regaling a phantom audience. The vocal style he most emulated was that of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. I could almost stand hearing
“Stille Nacht”
sung in a nasal falsetto, ditto having my shoulder patted and prodded and probed, but the combination was unsettling, and soon I’d have to end our recital. I would either go for a walk before dinner (the environs included a parking lot and university golf course), watch a bit more TV, or pretend to take a long shit. The last was the only definitely private activity, so there I’d sit while a cat pawed under the door as if begging me to rescue her from Scott.

Dinner was served late in the afternoon. Scott would take his place at the table and survey the victuals with a look of tipsy discernment, then raise a glass to the chef. Their latest brawl momentarily forgotten, Marlies would return the tribute with a kind of sad, proprietary smile, suggesting that Scott was a pain in the ass, all right, but a gracious young man and her own son for better or worse. We’d eat. There was a pork roast, say, with crispy skin and scarlet flesh just so; lovely sweetbreads of an ideal chewiness, never mushy, cooked with mushrooms in a wine sauce; new potatoes and red cabbage and brussels sprouts and a cauliflower steeped in mock hollandaise. My brother would chew each morsel of meat with endless care (eyes fixed on the middle distance), then fastidiously remove the residual fat from his mouth and place it aside, for all to see, on a little plate he’d fetched for that purpose. When I asked him about it—this novel quirk—he explained with old arrogance that he’d rather
not
die of congestive heart failure, thanks. I was about to ask whether he followed the same procedure when eating in public, and (if so) whether he’d ever been denounced as a repulsive idiot, but my mother derailed me by leaning forward on her fists and hissing “Oh Scott, you’re so full of
shit
.”

After the plates were cleared and the snarling subsided, we decided to go see a movie, a comedy. We had a long night ahead of us, and the thought of spending it, just we three, in that little condo was out of the question. Also it would force my brother to sober up a bit. We wanted to laugh and forget ourselves, however briefly, and few things are more depressing than being thwarted in this simple wish. My brother sprawled between us stinking of beer, not just refusing to laugh but sighing and smacking his lips and scratching his balls (inside the pants), so that a number of people got up and moved. When we got home again and Scott discovered we were out of beer, he started on the Scotch.

At some point he lurched into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and began picking his face. He still had a lot of pimples, the kind that swell beneath the skin and really explode when given a good hard squeeze. Scott kept the door open so he could talk to us the whole time: “You’d think by now this shit would go away . . . How’m I ever gonna get
laid
? . . .”

This went on for almost an hour. At some point my mother asked me, in an urgent whisper, if I wanted to go to midnight mass. I did. Scott heard the sounds of our departure, the zippered coats and jingling keys, and stuck his puckered bleeding face out the door. “Oh,” he said, when Marlies explained where we were going. “Save me a wafer.”

We hadn’t been to church together, my mother and I, since eight years before, when we’d attended midnight mass in Germany with my devout grandparents. Now the place felt like true sanctuary. We arrived early and sang carols with the rest of that wonderfully normal congregation. Marlies embarrassed me by singing in German, or, in the case of “Adeste Fidelis,” the original Latin (she deplored the decadent reforms of Vatican Council II). Later, when the priest read the Christmas story, I heard a wet sniffle and knew my mother was letting out the tears she’d held back all day. Finally we went home and found Scott passed out on his stomach by the fireplace, hands tucked under his crotch for warmth like a little boy.

THE NEXT DAY
he was churlish with hangover, humiliated after waking up in a dark room with his pimply cheek pressed against the bricks. It didn’t help that my mother nagged him ceaselessly, threatening to banish him from the condo until he’d cleaned up his act. Then Scott lost his temper and told her that
she
of all people should talk! I think he called her a cunt at some point (the word was such a normal part of Scott’s vocabulary that it didn’t really convey the usual nastiness). As ever, of course, Marlies went on giving as good as she got, all to no purpose. I might have tried walking back to my father’s house in Oklahoma City had it not been for my mother’s boyfriend, Dave—the baby-faced grad student—who joined us for brunch that day. Because his own youth had been somewhat troubled, and because he adored my mother, Dave took special pains to be nice to Scott, and that alone made the rest of the afternoon bearable.

There was one last argument in the parking lot as we were leaving. A few minutes before, my mother had caught Scott sneaking a slug of Scotch on the back porch; he said it was hair of the dog and he’d only had the one, but my mother said it didn’t matter—one was all it took!—and demanded he hand over his car keys so I could drive us home. Naturally my brother refused and would go on refusing until the Last Trump, but Marlies stood there berating him all the same and poking her hand out (“Scott: Give . . . me . . . the
keys
!”) for a long, long time. Dave stood there holding a camera my mother had asked him to fetch, and finally ended the dispute by snapping a close-up of mother and son in midwrangle. A moment later he took the posed version: my mother standing between us, wan but smiling, vaguely exultant at the prospect of our departure. “Christmas 1980” was her simple but pregnant gloss in the photo album.

From my mother’s condo to my father’s doorstep took about forty-five minutes in normal traffic, but Scott made it in less than half an hour amid holiday congestion on the interstate. He roared out of my mother’s presence and bore down on any motorist who hindered his speed, however innocently; their eyes bugged in their mirrors as they caught sight of the behatted madman in their wake. Scott’s only reply to my occasional protests (“
Fuck! . . . Fuck! . . . Slow down, you crazy fucking asshole!
”) was to go faster, or rather flex his foot against the already floored gas pedal. Finally we parted without a word in my father’s driveway, Scott pausing just long enough for me to step clear.

Burck answered the chain-locked front door in his bathrobe. Flushed and apologetic, he asked me to take a walk, please, and come back in an hour or so.

SHORTLY AFTER MANDY’S
return to Scotland, my father began (actually resumed) seeing a woman more or less his own age, Sandra, and soon they decided to marry. Mandy dwindled away amid a welter of tearful transatlantic phone calls, and within a couple of months our lives were entirely different.

Sandra was the antithesis of my mother—they despised each other—and for my father that, I dare say, was the point. Twenty years before, my grandmother and Aunt Kay had thrown a welcoming soirée in Vinita for Burcky’s pigtailed, inexplicably German, and quite pregnant bride, who endured perhaps five minutes of polite chitchat with the local hausfrauen before planting herself in front of the TV and watching
Bonanza
. Sandra wouldn’t have done that. Indeed, Sandra would have shared the other ladies’ consternation in spades, given that she herself was the favorite daughter of Garden City, Kansas, which is perhaps best known for (a) being near Holcomb of
In Cold Blood
fame (Sandra had known the Clutters well) and (b) having the World’s Largest Outdoor Municipal Concrete Swimming Pool, which we duly visited, en famille, during our one and only trip to Sandra’s hometown. Like my father, Sandra had somewhat transcended her origins: the prettiest girl in her class at Garden City High, and one of the smartest, she’d been Miss Fort Hays State in college and then survived a ghastly first marriage to the local It Boy, a charming narcissist who gave her two gorgeous children: a girl, Kelli, and a son, Aaron, two and eight years younger than I.

Sandra’s ménage moved into our house well before the wedding, and forced me to alter those habits that had evolved as a matter of having the place to myself so much. No more lingering bowel movements; now that I shared a bathroom with Kelli, who looked as though she excreted marshmallows, I set my alarm early so I could finish my business in good time and leave the place ventilated once my future stepsister awoke to the song “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang, as she did every wholesome morning for the six months or so before I left for college. In general I had to be less selfish. The little boy, Aaron, was not taking the change well and was often found weeping under somebody’s bed; what with his mother at work (public relations) and sister off cheerleading or whatever, it was up to me to coax him out and put him on my knee until he dried up.