The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  Max went upstairs and told Nick there was going to be a battle royal and that he would take him to Robin’s house for a while.

  Max’s sister was a clinical psychologist and a pretty cool customer. When Max returned, his father was sitting in the big den alone, not watching television.

  Where’s Nick? John asked.

  I thought we’d better do this alone, Max replied. We don’t need Nick for this. Where’s Mom?

  I don’t know, his father said. In her room, I guess. She was here a minute ago.

  Max walked around the enormous room, went to the window to inspect the lawn, the extra acre of woods they had bought in the back for privacy; everything, inside and out, in perfect order. He turned to his father.

  Where do we begin, Dad?

  I don’t know, John replied, not looking up, then looking up. You tell me.

  After a pause in which he assembled the words carefully, Max said, I recently faced the fact that I am a homosexual.

  I’m aware of that, John said.

  Well, I guess it’s time you faced it too. I like men and I’m in love with Nick.

  You’ve got a fucking nerve coming in here and saying that to me, his father snapped. What the hell do you have to tell me about it for?

  Well, you asked why I moved to Rome, and anyway I wasn’t going to sneak around and lie about it to you. We’re going to live in New York and … we’ll be right there. Unless you’d rather not see us.

  His father didn’t answer. Max made another revolution of the room, winding up back at the window, which was a sliding door and therefore an exit. He realized suddenly that he was at an enormous disadvantage, perhaps an overwhelming one. Everything here was his father’s.

  Mom doesn’t seem to care particularly, he said, turning from the window. Why do you?

  Because! His father brayed the word. I just don’t like it, that’s all. Why should I? Who the hell does?

  Let’s not drag the world into this, Pop, Max said, trying to be as light as possible.

  The world is the point, John said. Is everybody wrong?

  Yes! Everybody’s wrong! Max shouted back. And it’s not the first time.

  That’s your opinion, John said derisively. I don’t agree with it.

  Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Max said. Pretend I’m straight? So you won’t feel bad?

  Yes, John said calmly.

  You’d rather I was straight and unhappy than happy with Nick.

  That’s right, his father said.

  And I should keep it a secret.

  That too.

  Or?

  Or nothing. You can do what you want. I don’t care, John said.

  Max drifted out of the den and into the dining room, which had a dark mahogany table twenty feet long in its center, ten, high-backed, brocade chairs in slavish attendance, six more against the walls. He wandered into the foyer, which like the den was two stories high. The big chandelier from their triumphant trip to Messina was caught in descent like a crystal parachute. He went back into the den. His father had not moved.

  Does Nick make enough money from these films to live on? John asked without preamble.

  Usually. He’s not established yet. Why do you ask?

  I do not approve of this lifestyle, John said, and I have no intention of paying for it.

  Well, good, Max said quickly. You can keep your money.

  How would you like me to come over there and break you in half? John said.

  How’d you like to work this out for yourself? Max replied, thinking of Lydia.

  They glared at each other, but neither moved and the moment passed.

  Max went into the kitchen and poured a glass of juice from the refrigerator. He turned around and raised the glass to his lips. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table listening, her hand supporting her chin at an angle that caused her to gaze out the front window. She did not look up at him.

  It went on like this for hours. At one point Nick called to find out what was happening.

  He’s cut off the money, Max said, but I knew he’d do that. He thinks you’re after the Desir millions.

  Nick said, Pick me up. We’ll spend the night at Paul’s, meaning a friend in Manhattan. Tomorrow we’ll find an apartment.

  Max said, Oh God …

  I know it’s hard, Nick said. But you have to stand up to them.

  No, my mother is fine. She said as long as I’m happy and he said as long as I’m not…

  Just leave and pick me up. Your sister is terrific. She’s filling me in.

  MAX BEGAN TO WEEP AND COULDN’T STOP, not for the awful things that were being said, but for the things that had been withheld. He did not try to hide his tears, and in fact broke down completely in front of his father. Of all his efforts this seemed to have the most effect, though not enough to make any difference. John never cried.

  Max went up to his room to get his things and Nick’s. Exhausted, he sat for a moment on the edge of the bed. His mother came in noiselessly and sat down beside him. She took him in her arms and he sobbed against her.

  He wouldn’t even bend, Max said.

  I know, darling, she said, and held him as he wept.

  V.

  IN JULY, AFTER A SERIES OF TWENTY-EIGHT RADIATION treatments, Marie said she would spend the rest of the summer as usual in Cedar Beach, at the oceanfront house they had bought fifteen years before. In the intervening summers the family had met there in smaller groups for a few weeks at a time. But they had never assembled, down to the last grandchild, for more than a few hours or a day like Memorial or Labor Day. Now, to be with Marie, everyone went. They were twenty on weekends, including Dan’s wife Phoebe, and Nick, and a few less during the week when some of them commuted to work. The effect was of a small, well-run guest house whose boarders had all been invited for a purpose.

  The house had been built in the late thirties by a family named Eagles and was called the Eagles Nest, so written in an old dictionary left behind and sold with the furniture. Among the Desirs the name didn’t catch on. After three decades spent in different houses, they called it the beach house, or simply the shore.

  The house faced the sea from a low bluff of dunes beside a red-brick lighthouse with a fourteen-mile, two-second light. Down the coast green lawns met the beach with a thin gray strip of boardwalk in between, like gallooning. All the way down, where on the clearest days the horizon came ashore, the rocks of an inlet led into Barnegat Bay. To the north, the eye stopped at the cupola of a large nineteenth-century hotel, half wood, half stone, whose days seemed beyond numbering, but which were nevertheless numbered. In between—the hotel being in the next community—was a row of beachfront houses, and then a small lake, called Pirate’s Pond, which once had been connected to the ocean, but which now was plugged up, to seaward, with a jetty of black rocks that arced into the water. Other jetties occurred at intervals of a half-mile, like commas without phrases, and in fact there was little to say about the beach. In summer it was crowded; in the fall local people ran their dogs in the afternoon, the elderly sat along the boardwalk watching the waves and reading newspapers, men and boys sailed catamarans in the wind and fished from the jetties. Then it was empty through winter and most of spring.

  The house itself was large and handsome, covered in weathered shakes, with blue-and-white-striped awnings af the upper windows and a two-story porch that ran around three sides. From the beach it had a crab look— the porch stuck out white claws, the red roof was a carapace, and at night two amber porch lights were eyes. From another angle, with Pirate’s Pond and its dry marsh behind it, the house looked colonial and sensible, with unadorned, strong green lawns surrounded by banks of sea rose that thinned into beach grass and white sand. At night, when the moon came up—full, fast and so close over the edge of the sea that it reminded him of the sensation felt at the top of a Ferris wheel—it was the moon and the sea of Max’s childhood, enhanced by memory. The house happened to be theirs, but he could have been sta
nding in front of twenty different houses all along the coast, putting his face into the sky as into a basin of water, in any summer of his life.

  Inside, the house was as Marie had made it, a sweater and skirt of a house, rather than the stately ball gown of the house in Hillcrest. It was pierced everywhere with windows through which the sea, sky, pond, lighthouse and beach, each framed by the porch supports, made bright pictures on the walls. The rooms seemed to Max to contain the reverberant stillness of a particular moment of a particular afternoon in the forties—a moment of warm gold light, laced with the scent of honeysuckle from the marsh and of salt from the sea; a moment in which the idea of many perfect afternoons was distilled into a deep, flawless, bell-like calm.

  One morning shortly after they arrived, Penny washed Marie’s hair and all of it came away, as if her scalp had turned to cream. Within moments she was completely bald. Penny said, It will grow back, Mom. The doctor says in a few months. But Marie seemed to know better and only looked at the ocean, holding a tuft of the fallen hair in her hand. Thereafter she wore the new wig or one of a number of bandanna caps the girls bought for her. Her head was beautifully shaped, egglike; and if the wig made her look old, her baldness was almost alien in its agelessness. She would not let her grandchildren see her without the wig or a cap, but a few times, for emphasis, she suddenly pulled off whichever she was wearing as if exposing something shocking or macabre.

  As another result of the radiation, her speech returned, partially, along with some of her mobility. But as a statement she would hold up her lifeless right arm with the left, and let her hand drop like a stone into her lap. Her right foot dragged behind her when she walked, but the leg still supported her.

  Robin came back from the food shopping one morning with an armful of giant daisies, which for some indeterminate time had been Marie’s favorite flower. Robin put them, efficiently, into a large ceramic vase that stood on the living room floor. For the rest of the morning Marie sat on the rug, the daisies strewn around her, rearranging them with one hand, sometimes folding the long stems back or biting them off with her teeth. Max asked if he could help but she waved him away.

  Later when Penny brought her downstairs again she was depressed, apparently because the children were all on the beach and the house was empty and quiet.

  I … She started every remark with the sound. I …

  What is it, Mom?

  She began to cry. They went through a litany of things that might be bothering her, never mentioning the obvious—fear, anxiety, the cancer, pain, death. Did she want her bath? Was she hungry? Marie gave them an angry look and puffed out her cheeks.

  You’re worried your cheeks are going to swell from the steroids, Penny said. At times his sister was so quick Max thought she could read her mother’s mind. Marie raised her eyebrows and nodded enthusiastically, as she had in charades. Since the first seizure she had enhanced her range of facial expressions and become an actress.

  They’re hardly swollen at all, Penny said, a mild lie to which Marie rolled her eyes. To divert her now, Penny suggested they spend the rest of the morning at a nearby flea market.

  Increasingly, as Marie lost her ability to talk, shopping became a direct and adequate expression of being. She shopped, therefore she was. She tended now to buy on whim, easily and with no regard for cost. To pay a high price for quality was a statement of philosophy, accompanied by a shrug and a wave of dismissal. She was ill, she was dying, but she could afford to buy anything. That morning she bought a twelve-foot catamaran. She had heard John agree to get one for the children next season. She considered the intention thoughtless. Where would she be next season? She called Max aside and pointed toward the ocean five or six times before he understood she meant the line of catamarans moored on the beach and not the water.

  I … a red one, she said, and indicated her eyes, meaning she would be able to see a boat with red sails from the porch. It was delivered the next day, accompanied by an instructor. John put Penny’s son, as the eldest male grandchild, solemnly in charge. Marie however could not see the boat or the red sail from the porch. Max helped her with the binoculars. She caught a glimpse of it and her face brightened. She had followed the idea through, from explaining it to Max, to seeing the boat in the water—hers, as she had wanted it—which was enough. She didn’t have to watch it.

  One morning Max got up at dawn to check on her. John was asleep, but he found his mother sitting on the floor by an open window, watching the sun come up. He sat down beside her. The morning was clear, delicately colored and already warm, the sea flat and syrupy, with small slapping sounds of wavelets unraveling on the beach. The sun was just rising. The horizon seemed to cling upward to it momentarily, as to a separated yolk. Then the edge of the sea fell back and an orange light bled out in all directions, bathing their faces and painting a strip of color on the wall behind them above John’s head. Marie’s face was suffused with a sleepy, appreciative look and she rested her head on Max’s shoulder. He thought this was meant to mark and replace every sunrise she had ever seen and could not remember. It seemed the combination of the beauty of the seascape and the fact that she must crawl from her bed to face it alone had been, by some dreamlike connection between her and Max, narrowly averted. When the orange light grew pale and turned to lemon, he helped her back into bed, and she sighed and fell asleep.

  One afternoon she was able to walk slowly down to the water’s edge with Max. Nick ran ahead and took pictures. They sat on an overturned lifeboat and watched the grandchildren in the catamaran, flying above the water. He told her when to wave back. It was, second by second, the last time she would go down to the beach. Later he and Nick smoked a joint on the deck and Max came down onto the porch and found his mother just waking from a nap. Sitting down beside her, he experienced a circling feeling in his head, small gyrations from the marijuana. Immediately, she said, I … dinner, then paused and looked at him vacantly. She had lost the thought. They looked blankly at each other, both of them trying to think of what she had intended to say. And because of the grass Max realized what she felt—a reaching back to something that was no longer there, having let go of a tiny trapeze in his mind but missing the catcher’s grasp. Now a tiny net of confusion caught him as he fell. She looked at him anxiously. It seemed terribly important, in the seconds that grew longer, that he make the connection. It would be like saving her in a way. Then momentarily, he shook himself free of the grass and remembered she had mentioned dinner.

  Jack went fishing, he said. He’s bringing back tuna for dinner.

  She lay back in the chaise and relaxed, deeply relieved. She was able then, as if having got hold of the end of a tangled skein, to unravel the rest of the thought. She looked at him and said forcefully, Sweet and sour, then reached for his arm for help in rising from the chaise.

  What do you mean, Mom? he asked impossibly and helped her to stand. She led him into the house and through it into the kitchen. Phoebe was at the sink as they came in and Marie said again, quite clearly, Sweet and sour.

  Phoebe said, You want to make sweet and sour for the tuna, Marie. Phoebe brought out a big frying pan and a bag of onions.

  I’ll get you started, she said. Max put a chair in the middle of the kitchen and Marie sat in it. She watched him peel the onions.

  Let me know if you need me, his aunt said, and left the room.

  When he had finished peeling and chopping, Marie had him put the onions in the frying pan, in a little oil, on simmer it seemed; sometimes covered, sometimes not. She stood by his side at the stove, making small adjustments, jiggling his arm to make him stir the mixture. She had him pour out vinegar into a measuring cup. Two tablespoons of sugar. The onions turned pink and pearly. Abruptly she turned off the heat under the pan, pulled him down to her level and kissed him on the cheek. At dinner when the fish was served, Penny said, Mom made this, and everyone ate the fish differently.

  ON RAINY DAYS THE CHILDREN went a little mad with boredom. When the we
ather didn’t clear one afternoon they begged Max and Nick to take them to the penny arcade in the amusement park down the line. Max found it much the same, the carousel intact, opulent, spinning on a wave of romantic music, although you could no longer reach for the brass ring coming around by Fascination. Nothing cost a penny. When the rain stopped they were dragged onto the rides—the Whip, one called the Flume that used sea water and drenched them all. Nick and Max were avuncular to a turn, parading their brood through the midway, the smaller ones hanging back or being carried, the older girls folding their arms beneath their new, prized breasts, the boys appearing and disappearing into the crowd like excited scouts on the march, filled with reports of what lay ahead. Max missed the lady in the iron lung and said so: the children would not believe there had ever been such a thing. And the boy with the body of a crocodile, and spider man and other gross-outs of the past, currently touring Europe.

  When they got home the three older girls baked a birthday cake for Mary Kay, Jack’s wife, decorating it with tiny flowers from the garden. A nice touch, girls, Max said. Later, in a white caftan, he wafted about to their amusement. Uncle Max was so exotic. The birthday party was a big success; the cake, a sugar bomb, devoured. Because “Happy Birthday” was easy for Marie, they sang songs and she managed some of the lyrics. Now and then Mary Kay would slip into the dining room to compose herself. Max did the same onto the porch, through one door, Penny through another, Nick through another, like a French farce. Then John stood Marie up and led her in an abbreviated, stationary Peabody that for the moment seemed real. He led her so firmly and carefully that she appeared to be dancing with him, dancing for the children, all the adults having slipped out of the room.

  THEY WENT FOR A RIDE ON the Mara, through the inlet to the ocean, up as far as the house and back again. Max carried his mother aboard. John and Jack stayed up on the bridge piloting, Nick and the children sat on the bow. Coffee was prepared in the galley and served on a little table set up amid the fighting chairs. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead, as if having spotted the coffee cake. It was a high, blue, hot day. It seemed they might all sail away; it seemed for a moment as if they had. The sky went out in every direction with nothing in it except a shot-up moon. The glassy sea dropped off sharply at the edge, the coffee scarcely moved in the cups.