Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  In Doctor Zhivago there’s a scene at the beginning when you see the funeral procession, tiny, in the vast spaces of the Russian steppe. On the bier lies eight-year-old Yuri’s mother, and preceding her the priests in robes with crucifixes, waving incense, ringing bells, chanting, offering up their prayers, while behind loom the snowcapped Urals, unmoved, majestic in the distance.

  That’s how I see us, me leading, waving Jung, my crucifix, George A. following, small against the backdrop of bipolar I disorder, Nature, life, the universe, which shows so little fairness in the distribution of reward and punishment and hurts some so much more than others, but hurts us all in some way and makes us angry, sad and weary, and sometimes surprised and overjoyed by evidence of an intelligence beyond our own that’s guiding us along our way, requiring consciousness of us and rewarding perseverance with happiness and malingering with suffering, and sometimes rendering the jewel into mud, taking consciousness away from those no less deserving than ourselves, those like Hölderlin and Nietzsche and George A. Payne, my brother.

  Was George A. already falling when he called me at my dorm at Avery, had he looked down and seen the whitecaps on the ocean far below him, the way Bill fell in Boston and kept falling through Atlanta, where he had no job, no money, no one to lean on and a lis pendens on his property, down and down until he landed in those washouts in the Shenandoah, up there where his father and his father’s people came from, the same place where George A. and I ended on November 8, 2000, at the first exit outside Lexington, when I look down at my feet and see by magic black and terrible the Zip disk lying chipped and spattered in the gravel with George A.’s blood upon it, and I gaze up at the sky and say, Please, God, don’t make me carry this, don’t make me be responsible, let my brother be alive, I require it of You, I compel You because if he isn’t and I’m responsible then the universe is intolerable and I return my ticket. Yet the sky was empty and returned no answer and here I am still holding and George A.’s gone and I still miss him, as I sit wondering Who I Am and Who We Were and how different we were from other families and their stories—­outside the bell curve, out of hailing distance altogether, or only as fingerprints and snowflakes, each unique but from the middle distance more or less the same as every other?

  6

  Break. The semester’s over. I’m packing up my things at Avery when George A. calls to tell me Bill’s put out the Christmas summons.

  –I’m going down to Henderson tomorrow, he says.

  –I didn’t get a phone call.

  –Dad wants you there, too.

  –You’re sure of that?

  –He wants us all to come so we can get our presents.

  –He couldn’t bring them to us? Put them in the mail?

  –He wants us to see Granddad and Letty.

  I’m silent.

  –They couldn’t make it to the hospital and you’re going down like normal?

  –It’s Christmas, David. Can we just keep it simple?

  –I guess if it doesn’t bother you, it shouldn’t bother me. It does, though.

  –Are you coming?

  –No.

  –Then I’ll see you at home tomorrow night.

  –I’ll see you in Clemmons.

  Given a choice between Bill and me, I suppose I should have known that George A. was always going to choose a father. Perhaps I’m less surprised than disappointed, because I might have liked to have George A. beside me in the insurrection.

  Here I am then, the next evening, on Fair Weather, turning up the driveway past the lions, which are wearing garlands for the season. Here’s Jack Furst, my stepfather, polishing a bit of brightwork on the quarter panel of his Rolls, a Silver Shadow, which sits in this neighborhood of upscale spec homes like a Siberian tiger at the dog pound.

  –Pool tonight? he asks.

  –Wouldn’t miss it. I’m short on cash, though, so I won’t be going easy on you.

  –Forewarned.

  Jack grins, and we shake with a heartiness that borders on aggression.

  On my way through the garage, I hear Margaret in the kitchen.

  –Separate the yolks and whites and put them in two different bowls . . .

  I stand observing from the doorway as she instructs Jack’s sons, Jack Jr.—aka Little Jack, who’s twenty-two, two years my senior—and Alvin, George A.’s age, reading them the eggnog recipe from the soiled and faded cookbook of the Churchwomen of Holy Innocents Episcopal in Henderson. For Christmas, Margaret’s wearing a red silk blouse open at the throat to show her pearls and a forest-green apron featuring appliquéd reindeer rising skyward at forty-five degrees, having trouble getting Santa airborne. With her hair curled and her jewels and her mother’s sterling punch bowl on the table in the nook where all the silver and china are laid out—the same silver and china that sat on this same table once upon a time on Woodland Road beside a salt-cured country ham like this one—Margaret reminds me of a younger Mary Rose, perhaps the first time I’ve noted the resemblance.

  –Little Jack, she says, stir half the sugar with those yolks. Alvin, beat the whites and when they’re stiff, we’ll fold in the remaining sugar.

  Mary, too—“Nanny,” as we knew her—required that things be done just so, the eggnog mixed according to the old recipe, the mantels draped with evergreen and new candles placed in all the girandoles and sconces, the wicks prelit and snuffed . . . because they must be blackened, ever so faintly marred or soiled; not to mar or soil them is an error no knowledgeable hostess would commit or fail to note the commission of in others. And is it because pristine wicks might invite the retribution of jealous gods, who hold perfection as their purview? Perhaps it’s perfume from a dress that makes me so digress, but it’s unsettling to observe Margaret, my mother—ours—instructing two new sons in the qigong of a religion that failed the first time, as though with better luck we’ll miss the iceberg and the hull will hold back the ocean water this time.

  –Why not mix the eggs and sugar all at once and save six steps?

  Margaret turns, eyes widened at my heresy.

  –You! Come here and kiss your mama! And don’t bother trying to exasperate me. You know as well as I do, if you don’t beat the whites, the eggnog won’t be fluffy.

  –And if the eggnog isn’t fluffy?

  –The Earth goes off its axis!

  This is Little Jack, displaying his advancing mastery.

  –Smart-ass! Margaret says, delighted. Smart-ass and Smart-ass Jr.!

  –I think I have seniority, I say, extending an open palm to Jack, who lifts me off the floor instead with a hug that’s somewhere between a chiropractic manipulation and a wrestling takedown. Built like a baseball power hitter, he has a brush of surfer-blond hair and thick-lensed glasses that make his blue eyes googly behind them.

  –Hey, Alvin, I say, Merry Christmas, what’s the skinny?

  At the counter with the mixer, Alvin turns and smiles at me with narrowed eyes in which seasonal good cheer floats like an oil slick over oceans of bad knowledge. Unlike Jack Jr. and his other siblings, who went to California with their mom, Alvin got triaged off to relatives in rural Alabama and came back with a rural Alabama accent and has small grayish teeth that resemble the flawed pearls called baroccos, as though his diet there lacked some essential nutrient. Alvin has sideburns like a pair of putty knives and a ’50s-style pompadour like Jerry Lee Lewis’s, and at the moment he’s wearing a purple-and-pumpkin-striped rugby jersey I recognize as George A.’s.

  I met him, met all the Fursts, three years ago, the summer following my junior year at Exeter. Margaret married Jack that spring and didn’t fly me to the wedding. Straight from Boston then, I arrived at Four Roses and found a new blond family installed there. There was Jack Jr. and little Dickie, six then, Bennett’s age, and Imogen, eighteen, a year my senior, a California girl with a breezy California confidence and manner. Im had waist-len
gth hair and the sort of rack that gives girls dark celebrity in high school and leads to back problems and reduction surgeries later. Fifteen minutes after I met them, we were around the kitchen island at Four Roses, Big Jack massaging the fillet mignons with olive oil and garlic as I sliced lemons for gin and tonics. Sitting on the kitchen counter kicking one leg out and letting it fall back against the cabinets, Im was barefoot in jeans with white tears at the knees and a T so tight and white that you could see the pink gleam of skin beneath if you happened to be looking, and I guess I was, though she was, in fact, my stepsister, and had been at that point for close to sixteen minutes. And as we talked and laughed too loudly to mask the strangeness of the situation, a car pulled up and a door slammed in the driveway, and in came Alvin, our new brother, with a grocery bag from which he removed three Saran-wrapped trays with three large Idahos in each one.

  –There are ten of us, said Jack with unsurprised displeasure.

  –Oh, dear, I’m sorry, Alvin. I must have told you wrong, said Margaret.

  –No, ma’am, ten is what you said, said Alvin. Only they was in packs of three, and I didn’t want to spend the extra. Me, I don’t really need a tater.

  The silence in the kitchen was brief but fell impartially over me, George A. and Alvin’s California siblings. His hands pink from the meat, Jack stood there looking pained, his face the same pink as his hands, a big gold Rolex on one wrist and on his other hand a signet the size of a California walnut.

  –You did exactly right, said Margaret, whom you could always count on in such situations. Exactly right. That’s perfect, Alvin, thank you.

  I thought all he needed was a good home and someone to treat him decently, she would say later when it came out that all that summer, Alvin had been upstairs at Four Roses showing the little boys what someone taught him down in Alabama, or wherever Alvin learned it, and Dickie, whom I remember as a pretty little boy whose green eyes had something a bit too knowing in them, will end up a hard-faced man with a ’50s-style pompadour and teeth like baroccos on a State Department of Corrections website, doing thirty-six years for serial child molesting.

  By Labor Day that summer, Alvin had cleared out Jack and Margaret’s stereo equipment, hawked the televisions and Margaret’s jewelry. Jack called the police himself and vigorously supported the prosecution. Alvin’s first stretch was in county lockup. His next, if memory serves, was in a pen near Gatesville, one I often passed driving to the beach and would have passed that first afternoon on my way from Raleigh-Durham, a flat yard on the edge of the swamp with a few rotting picnic tables surrounded by Hurricane fences topped with concertina. Down there, with a can of Barbasol and a straight razor, Alvin learned to shave balloons—the trick, he told me, is not to pop them—being prepped by the NC DoC to play a constructive role in society in the future, though he never played it or got much future either. Three or four years from now, in his early twenties, Alvin will steal a car and take a joyride to Virginia, up to Kings Dominion, and, on a residential street outside the park, put a bullet in his head and roll into a yard and overturn a birdbath. And if I’m not mistaken, this Christmas Alvin has just come back from Gatesville. Jack would have driven down to pick him up this morning or earlier this week—I don’t know for certain, but I doubt he took the Rolls-Royce—and in any case, that’s my guess as to why Alvin’s wearing George A.’s jersey.

  I wonder what made Alvin what he was, and if the answer has anything to do with that first night at Four Roses, when he, who must have been so hungry, on readmittance into his family denied himself a potato as a way to demonstrate his good intentions.

  –Are these stiff enough? Alvin tilts the mixer bowl toward Margaret.

  –Not quite.

  –Light or dark?

  And here in the doorway at Fair Weather is Imogen, my sister not-so-sister, holding up two bottles of Bacardi, and the room’s gone silent the way it did when Alvin brought the taters and my face, I expect, is as pink as Jack’s was.

  –A pertinent question! say I, the English major.

  –Light! says Margaret. Always light for eggnog.

  –There I guess you have it, I say to Imogen.

  –There I guess you do, says Imogen to David.

  –Where’s George A., by the way? I ask, since it seems to me a segue is in order.

  –Cleaning his new shotgun, says Jack Jr.

  –What new shotgun would that be?

  –The one your dad gave him for Christmas. He was on the back porch when I saw him.

  I blink at him and turn to Margaret.

  –No kidding? Dad gave him a firearm for Christmas? Brilliant!

  –Sweetie, may I speak with you a minute?

  She pushes open the swinging door, and I precede her into the dining room, where the mirrors hang on facing walls and the portraits of the Manns preside once more over the Charleston sideboard. For the season, they’ve been swagged with garland, which is also woven in a figure eight around the sconces on the table that have new candles, tall and straight and blackened by prescription. This table—Hepplewhite with bellflower inlay, like the sideboard—is a copy of the one from Henderson, as is the portrait of Pa Rose that faces Martha Mann’s. In the property distribution, the originals went to Genevieve, her sister. Margaret had them copied, the table by Mr. Gainsborough of Durham, the painting by some reputable hack in New York or Richmond.

  –A shotgun? I say. Six weeks after his release from Mandala?

  –I wish I could control your father’s actions, but I can’t. David, sit down. There’s something else I have to tell you.

  –What?

  –Just sit down, all right?

  –All right—I pull out a chair—I’m sitting. What?

  –David, the gun Bill gave George A. is Daddy’s.

  I take a beat.

  –Your daddy’s? Pa’s?

  –That’s right.

  I blink at her.

  –Not the A. H. Fox?

  She holds my stare, confirming.

  –I’m sorry, honey. I wish I could protect you and your brothers, but I can’t. I don’t know how to help you.

  –Pa gave that to me.

  –I understand that. I know he did.

  –You remember, don’t you?

  1963 or -4 in Henderson, Christmas Eve, four little boys, myself, George A., and Louis and George Bird, our cousins . . . Pa lined us up and marched us out to the garage, to the hidden cabinet in the stairs, and let us pick by age, and I went first and chose the shotgun. Louis would have followed me—I don’t recall his choice, was it the dagger with the Totenkopf?—but George A. picked the Luger, brought back after V-E Day from Berlin, maybe Paris. And when I ran inside, Margaret asked me, Do you love it? and I said, It’s the best thing anybody ever gave me, and she knelt in her red dress and cupped my face and smiled the vital way she had once in the hospital, the day she brought the ice-cream soda, and said, I’m so happy for you, so happy, David.

  –Mom?

  –I remember, David.

  –Where did Dad even get it? You didn’t give it to him, did you?

  –No, and I’m certain Mother didn’t either. I expect Bill simply went in her garage and took it when he headed for Atlanta.

  –So he’s had it all this time.

  –He must have. Honestly, I might have thought about the gun a time or two. It was so far down the list, though. And then this afternoon George A. walked in with it. Look what Daddy gave me! His face was lit up, David. It was like he was back, the old George A. I haven’t seen since Mandala.

  –But Dad stole it—you get that, don’t you?

  –Well, I can certainly see how you see it that way.

  –What other way is there to see it? If he wanted to give George A. a gun, why couldn’t he go out and buy one? Why mine?

  Margaret’s frown has begun to show frustration and impat
ience.

  Alvin knocks and pokes his head in.

  –Sorry. These whites are getting pretty hard, Margaret. I think it’s time to add the sugar.

  –I’ll come look. I’m sorry, David. Give me just a minute . . .

  As the kitchen door swings open, light flares across Pa’s portrait. In a tuxedo and black tie, he’s younger and more formal than I knew him, but his expression is the same—the painter got that. I remember him in old stone khakis with the bottoms rolled and slip-on boat shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt splayed open at the collar and a beat-up Panama hat with fishhooks in the hatband. We seined for minnows in the morning and launched from the public ramp at Oregon Inlet and cast anchor and tied on our rigs and baited them and let the sinkers take them to the bottom. I sat on the bow thwart gazing aft and he sat on the stern thwart gazing forward and he’d watch my rod tip and my float and nod if they needed my attention. We sat there all day in the lee of unnamed dredge-spoil islands in the Albemarle and didn’t say much. Pa was not a talker. From time to time I’d look up and find him studying me with gray, sober eyes that had his wide experience of life in them, his pain and disappointment, his sisters’ suicides, the guilt and sadness his parents must have carried, and the effect of the Depression on his family and the year he went away to Chapel Hill and pledged DKE as George A. will and had to come home and never got to finish, and whatever it was that made him shut himself away like Bête in the enchanted wing and drink for five or six days running. And I remember Genevieve, my aunt, telling the story of dinner parties on Woodland in her childhood when Pa got drunk and lay faceup in the foyer so the guests had to step over him to make it outside to their cars in the driveway. Genevieve, who deliberately set herself on fire in the psych ward, was droll in her delivery as she smoked and drank her bourbon—she made the story a performance like her mother, Sherry Mary, would have—but in Genevieve’s eyes I could still see tongues of black flame licking as she told it. And Margaret, too, remembered coming home in her saddle shoes and bobby socks to the Seagram’s open on the sideboard and as a grown woman watched Beauty and the Beast on tape weeping into Kleenex. So Pa had darkness in him. He wounded Genevieve and Margaret as my parents wounded me, George A. and Bennett, as I will wound my children. But on those summer mornings in the Sound I knew that of all the places he might be and all the people he might be with, he chose me and that place, and that’s the one time in my childhood when I felt loved without condition or ambivalence.