Emile Broussard. Emile Broussard. It was two years or so after their father had left them. Henry was seventeen, so Mary would have been fourteen, and their mother had begun spending all day every day in her bedroom, which soon became crowded with books and newspapers and magazines and paint-smeared cloths and an ashtray for her thin cigars, whichever canvas she was working on perched on a low easel by the bed—landscapes with fiery-red hills and trees bruised with purple-tinged leaves and clouds as dense and dark as smoke. A small gallery uptown sold his mother’s paintings, most of which Henry found frightening, nightmares of color with titles that bore no apparent relation to what was depicted in the paintings—Erica Controls the Weather, Waving at Trains, The Gatekeeper’s Forgotten Garden, The Florentine’s Leaves—which somehow made them even more disconcerting.
The gallery owner, an Italian woman named Marianna Greco, would stop by the house sometimes when his mother finished a canvas or needed more supplies. Marianna usually arrived with a bottle of wine or champagne, and she and his mother talked for hours, Marianna laughing and cursing and recounting long stories that Henry could never follow. He had no idea who bought his mother’s work or what they paid for it, though once, when Henry was still in high school, a man in a gray flannel suit had knocked on their door at home and asked to speak with the artist Jocelyn Garrett.
Henry had hesitated, surprised that anyone other than Marianna knew who his mother was. The man then held out a card with the name and address of some gallery in New York: Maldich and Lietche, it said in gold-embossed letters, 46 East Seventieth Street. Henry left the man in the front hall and took the card to his mother’s bedroom. She looked at the card, frowned, and handed it back. “Tell him he needs to speak with Marianna, Henry,” she said. “Tell him I’m not here.”
“But you are here,” Henry said.
“Then tell him I’m not available,” she said.
“But he might be important,” Henry said. “He might be somebody it would be good for you to know.”
His mother put her hands on his shoulders. “I don’t want to speak to him, honey,” she said as though she were merely trying to comfort Henry. “I just want to be left alone to paint.”
And Henry had looked at her for a few seconds and then said okay. He nodded and said that he understood. Then he walked back to the front of the house and told the man that his mother wasn’t available just this moment, that he should please talk to Marianna Greco at her gallery. Henry shook the man’s hand. He had tried to make his voice sound both professional and casual; he hoped that he’d conveyed that, although his mother was a bit shy and strange, there was nothing truly disturbing about her.
When the man left and Henry closed the door, he wondered again, as he’d wondered before, if it was somehow because of his mother, because of something she had said or done or simply because of who she was, that his father had decided to leave them. Who had been the crazy one? Maybe she’d told him to leave, told him she just wanted to be left alone, told him she was done with their marriage and from that moment forward just wanted to paint. Maybe she had somehow convinced him that it would be best for Mary and Henry not to know where he was going, or even why he had to go.
“You understand the problem?” he’d asked Amy after recounting what had happened. “I could never figure out which part of my life was the most fucked up. All of it was fucked up, I knew that. But it seemed important to clarify what the worst part was.”
A few months after his father left, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, Henry had come across an old photo album tucked beneath some books on a shelf in the living room. Paging through the album, he’d stared at each picture as if it might contain some kind of clue. There were black-and-white photos from his parents’ honeymoon in Jackson, the two of them sitting side by side on a porch swing, looking like teenagers out on a date, their hands clasped together, fingers entwined. There were photos from his father’s research trips, his father dressed in a seersucker suit and standing in front of old white clapboard churches next to ministers in red robes, Bibles clutched to their chests, and women in elaborate hats and matching dresses who smiled but also seemed to regard the camera with suspicion. He had no idea who took these pictures—his mother, maybe, if she’d been with him. One of the photos from a trip his parents had taken to New York showed them both at some crowded, smoky jazz club sitting with their arms around each other at a small table with people Henry had never met, all of them laughing and raising their glasses for the camera. These photographs seemed to depict the life of two strangers, of some couple Henry only vaguely recognized.
But his parents had always been, if not exactly affectionate with each other, then at least gentle and soft-spoken and kind; he didn’t remember ever hearing them argue, didn’t remember them talking about anything except art and literature and music, as if the real world didn’t exist. Surely there had been other things that required their attention—bills and pediatrician appointments and parent-teacher conferences and their children squabbling or outgrowing their clothes—but Henry couldn’t remember any of this. It was as if he and Mary had been merely angelic, mildly entertaining sprites who floated—vaguely, indecipherably—in their parents’ midst. Why, then, hadn’t his mother been enraged or despondent or even discernibly surprised when her husband, their father, had left? Why hadn’t she been, like Henry and Mary, stricken with grief, reduced to a numb, staggering silence, as though their house had become shrouded in an impenetrable fog that they would be forced to wander through for the rest of their lives? Wouldn’t she, if they had loved each other, if they had been happy, have done anything to find her husband? Wouldn’t she—wouldn’t anybody—have told them what had happened, how they were supposed to carry on with their lives? Wasn’t what his mother had done as inexplicable, as unforgivable, as his father’s leaving, even if he had betrayed her in some shameful, unspeakable, detestable manner?
How hard was it to list the possibilities? A murderer, bigamist, homosexual, drug addict, epileptic, amnesiac, con man, philanderer, incorrigible cad, compulsive gambler, Mob boss, hit man, foreign agent, a black man passing as white. And which of these would have been, in his mother’s eyes, sufficiently worthy of shame? Which would have convinced her to declare, again and again, that he’d simply been some kind of helpless dreamer, a man carried off by the blues?
Henry knew, of course, that other people didn’t live like this. He didn’t know anyone whose father had simply disappeared; he didn’t know anyone whose mother was an artist who shut herself off from the world, who spent days and days without getting dressed, who was content to eat bread and fruit and cheese and canned soup for dinner, who didn’t watch television, didn’t call on friends or seek any commerce with the world. Everything in his mother’s bedroom had wound up covered with paint: her pillows and blankets and sheets, her nightstand and alarm clock and slippers, the carpet and closet doorknobs and drapes, the window sashes and windowpanes. When Henry complained about the mess, when he told her she needed to get out of the house and they really ought to clean her room, she had simply laughed; she said she liked being at home, liked working in the bedroom, liked that it had become her studio. “It’s not dirty, honey,” she told him. “It’s paint. It’s pigment. It’s all just light.” Having everything around her, living with her work, made her feel comfortable, she told him. It made her feel free. She was more than okay, she said. She was content.
And she was content, it seemed to Henry, more content than she’d been before his father left, when she had spent her days attending to his father’s academic career, organizing his field notes, typing transcripts of his interviews, cataloging the recordings he made, proofreading drafts of the articles he wrote. She had lunch with his colleagues’ wives, prepared dinners for his graduate students, accompanied him to lectures and concerts. In the midst of all this activity, she had seemed almost normal, though Henry had also sensed, as though it were a menacing villain standing just beyond the stage lights, poised to mak
e an entrance, the presence of despair.
At night, his mother painted. She shut herself off in the spare room she had used as her studio, a room across the hall from where Henry slept. He would wake up sometimes before dawn and know that she was still working. He’d hear a brush clattering in a can of turpentine, the palette knife scraping again and again against the canvas as though she were erasing everything she’d just done. He’d hear her pacing back and forth, talking to herself; even under the covers, he could smell the oil paint and the turpentine and the smoke from her cigars. By the time morning arrived and he had to get up for school, she would be in bed, asleep next to his father, as though Henry had merely imagined her working through the night. He had wondered why his mother’s painting seemed somehow furtive, a secret she did not want to share.
Though she appeared to be happy as a recluse, though she let Henry be, rarely asking where he was going or how he spent his free time, she never wanted Mary to leave the house except to go to school. It seemed strange to Henry that this was the one thing she took the trouble to care about, as if all the usual parental concerns had been boiled down or stripped away to this single preoccupation. Henry wondered if she was somehow worried about boys, worried about what kind of trouble Mary might get herself into. She liked to say that Mary was saucy, and though Henry wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, he understood that there was both pride and disparagement in this description. She would keep Mary busy, asking her to read out loud—they both liked Shakespeare’s plays and Victorian novels—or hunt for particular paintings in the art books stacked on the floor in her room. She taught Mary to stretch and prepare canvases, to name the constellations and types of cloud formations. They designed their own tarot decks with a ludicrous cast of characters, ones they’d made up together: the Pigeon-Toed Gardener, the Belated Henchman, the Flummoxed Maiden, the Angel of Debt, the Alabaster Raven, the Coruscating Fool. And his mother talked with Mary in a way she did not with Henry, the two of them curled up on the bed together, whispering and laughing. Once Henry had asked Mary what they talked about, and she’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Nothing, really. I think she just likes to hear my voice.”
“All the junk in her room, the mess—doesn’t it bother you?” he’d asked her.
Again Mary had merely shrugged. “She’s not exactly the most normal person in the world, if that’s what you mean.”
He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d meant. He wanted to ask Mary what she thought was wrong with their mother, why she lived the way she did, but the question seemed too important to speak out loud. And besides, Mary was nearly three years younger than he was—what would she know, what would she understand, that he didn’t?
The one thing their mother didn’t seem to mind Mary doing was babysitting for neighborhood families on Friday and Saturday nights. If Henry was around, if he didn’t have plans with his friends, he’d sometimes go with her. They’d watch television together once the kids had been put to bed. Mary was good with the children she watched—she’d get down on the floor and pretend she was a pony or a dog; she’d hold them when they cried; she’d patiently read them the same book over and over. Her greatest gift, though, was her voice. She could quiet even the most distraught child by simply singing. She sang lullabies and nursery rhymes, but she also sang some of the blues songs they’d heard their father play on his stereo, songs whose lyrics made the little children laugh: Let me be your wiggler until your wobbler come, she’d sing, dancing, flailing her arms. If she beats me wigglin’ she got to wobble some.
Or she’d sing, I’ve got a merry-go-round, little girl, don’t you want to ride? And she’d grab the children’s hands and swing them around and around.
All you ladies gather ’round, she’d sing, glancing at Henry, raising her eyebrows and smiling. That good sweet candy man’s in town.
Henry would look away, embarrassed that his younger sister understood what these songs were really about, that in one way or another, they all had to do with sex.
His stick candy don’t melt away, Mary would sing, clearly enjoying Henry’s discomfort. It just gets better, so the ladies say. And Mary would strut back and forth, stick out her bottom and shake her hips. Saucy, Henry decided, was exactly the right word for what Mary was.
Eventually, Mary began babysitting on Saturday nights for the Broussards, a new family, she said, that had just moved into the neighborhood. They had twin blue-eyed boys who were two years old. She told her mother that the Broussards lived over on Chamberlain, that Mrs. Broussard was young and blond and beautiful, that Mr. Broussard looked like a movie star, handsome and broad-shouldered and very, very tall, with a cleft in his chin like Kirk Douglas’s, a voice as deep as Gregory Peck’s. He’d told Mary he worked for the government but also suggested with a shrug of his broad shoulders that he couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t tell her much more than that. He’d wanted to know if she could be discreet, and she’d told him that she could, that she wouldn’t give out their address or phone number, that she wouldn’t let anyone know where they’d gone to dinner, when they’d left or when they’d be back. He didn’t say so, Mary said, but she figured he must be some kind of special agent or spy.
“Maybe he’s in the Mafia,” Henry had said, thinking about an elementary-school classmate named Sandra Corso. When she and Henry were in fourth grade, her father had been shot dead in his bed by a man who had broken into their house. Word spread around school that her father had been part of the Carlos Marcello crime family, that he’d been a hit man himself, dumping bodies in the swamps out in St. Bernard Parish, leaving them as delectable dinners for the alligators there.
“He’s not in the Mafia,” Mary said, looking from Henry to their mother. “I know he’s not.”
“Of course not,” their mother said. “Not with a name like Broussard.”
“Maybe he changed his name,” Henry said, but then he saw that Mary was on the verge of tears.
“That’s enough, Henry,” his mother said. “You’re frightening her.”
Mary came back home with stories about the cute things the Broussard twins had said or done, about the beautiful dresses Mrs. Broussard wore, about what she’d learned of their life—how they’d lived in New York for a while and then in San Francisco, how they’d spent two years in London and one in Paris. “They both speak French,” she told her mother. “It’s so beautiful. You should hear them.”
It was a while before Henry discovered that the Broussards didn’t actually exist, that Mary had invented them as a way to go out with her friends. He’d offered to keep her company one Saturday night when he had nothing else to do, and Mary had told him that he didn’t need to, that the twins kept her busy. “Well, I want to meet this guy,” he told her. “I’ve never met a spy.”
Mary said she didn’t know if that was a good idea, but their mother said she was sure the Broussards wouldn’t mind if she brought her brother along. Mary turned to Henry; he could see the pleading look in her eyes but didn’t understand it. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else going on.”
When they left home, Mary walked down to the end of the block and then headed in the wrong direction, away from Chamberlain, the street where she’d said the Broussards lived.
Henry stopped and Mary turned to look at him. Just from her posture, from the way she stretched out her arms, the palms of her hands turned toward him, her shoulders slumped, he realized what was going on.
“Oh my God, Mary,” he said.
“Please,” she said, desperate. “Please don’t tell her, Henry.”
He shook his head and laughed. “They don’t exist?” he said. “You just made them up?”
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
And he’d laughed and laughed, amazed—and a little frightened—by Mary’s imagination, by the fact that she had conjured this family from thin air, that she’d had the nerve not just to create such a lie but to embellish it from one week to the next. What else had she said she�
�d done that hadn’t been true? “What do you do?” he asked her. “Where do you go?”
“We just hang out,” Mary said. “Just Julia and Eleanor and me.”
“But where?” Henry asked.
“Just around. Julia’s got keys to her father’s office.”
“His office?” Henry said. “What does he do?”
“He’s an optometrist,” Mary said. “He doesn’t care what we do as long as we stay out of the examination rooms and don’t mess with the machines.”
“What do you do, then?” he said.
“I don’t know. He’s got a radio there. We listen to music. We talk.”
“And boys?” Henry said.
“Jesus, Henry,” Mary said. “It’s nothing. We just all hang out. It’s just I know Mama wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t let me.”
“What happens when she finds out?” he asked.
“She won’t,” Mary said, and she gave Henry the same pleading look she’d given him earlier. “She won’t find out,” she said.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “It’s not like I’m going to say anything.”
“Yeah, but now she thinks you’ve met them.” He watched Mary stop and reach into the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a crumpled pack of Camels and some matches.
“Jesus, Mary,” he said, pointing to the cigarettes.
“And Joseph,” she said. “Get it? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She lit a cigarette and expertly flicked the match away. “So now you’ve got to help,” she said, exhaling the smoke. “You’ve got to make her keep believing it.”
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Page 7
