The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
Page 1
the
splendid
things
we
planned
a family portrait
blake bailey
w. w. norton & companynew york • london
dedication
To Marlies and Scott
epigraph
That’s one of the damnedest things I ever found out about human emotions and how treacherous they can be—the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.
—Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret
table of contents
cover
title page
dedication
epigraph
prologue
part I day thief
part II weeds don’t die
part III a functioning mediocrity
part IV stille nacht
part V the calm mid-heaven
acknowledgments
copyright
also by blake bailey
the
splendid
things
we
planned
prologue
My brother Scott was born in 1960 and screamed a lot as a baby, until one night my parents left him in their dorm room at NYU and proceeded to the roof, where a locked door prevented them from splattering themselves on a MacDougal Street sidewalk. In later years they’d tell the story for laughs, but I wonder if they saw the humor at the time. In the “funny” version I always heard, there was no locked door, and they carried Scott to the roof with them; the question was whether to throw him or themselves off. For a while they stood there, staring down at the lights of Washington Square while my brother yowled and yowled as if to egg them on to their doom. Not wishing to inflict this racket on the populace, perhaps, they retreated downstairs with the burden still in tow.
Life had been a heady affair up to then. My father, Burck, had come to Manhattan as a Root-Tilden Scholar at NYU Law, on his way to fulfilling his promise as the most gifted young man in Vinita, Oklahoma, a gray blur off the Turnpike between Tulsa and Joplin. He was whip smart, top of his class, American Legion “Citizen of the Year,” even something of an athlete; he insisted on playing football even though—at five-ten, 135 pounds—he wasn’t really big enough and kept getting banged up, almost losing a leg to gangrene when it was stepped on by a steel cleat. My mother, Marlies, was an offbeat German girl who bore a striking resemblance to Shirley MacLaine. She’d come to the States a couple of years before, age nineteen, and took an apartment at the Hotel Albert with two Jewish girls who thought she was a kick and vice versa. She and my father had met on a blind date. Both were escaping a home life they found oppressive, unworthy of the personages they hoped to become. Then my mother got pregnant.
My father supplemented his scholarship by working at a liquor store, while my mother had to stay home with the baby. Home was a tiny room with a Murphy bed, on which my mother sat in a funk all day, hour after hour, while little Scott emitted one heart-shriveling shriek after another. He rarely slept. Sometimes his eyes would glaze as he screamed; he’d stare at some vague speck on the ceiling, as if screaming helped him concentrate on some larger plan. For her part (I imagine) my mother dwelled ruefully on the recent but dead past. She’d been having such a good time in America. Before marrying my father—before this—she worked in the gourmet shop at Altman’s and got plenty of dates; her English was excellent, she was wistfully intellectual, and she liked to argue in favor of atheism and Ayn Rand.
The doctor had given her some sleeping drops for the baby, which she ended up taking instead. Meanwhile she’d gone a little mad with postpartum depression. She couldn’t keep food down, and had pretty much given up on eating. “I had huge milk-filled breasts and the waist of a ten-year-old,” she remembered, wondering whether her milk had been somehow tainted by the dreariness of it all. Plus her crotch itched something fierce; the doctor had sloppily shaved her prior to slitting her perineum.
Many years later my mother and I had a lot of tipsy conversations about all this. Where did we go wrong? conversations. One night she started sobbing—drunk or not, she cried only in moments of the most terrible grief—and said she’d once done a terrible thing when Scott was a baby. This was around the time my father had almost died from a bleeding ulcer. As usual he’d been studying in the bathroom late at night, sitting on the toilet with tissue in his ears, when my mother heard a thunk (his head hitting the sink) and found him passed out in a fetal slump. While he was away at St. Vincent’s, Scott redoubled his efforts to nudge our mother into the abyss—screaming and screaming and screaming as if to berate her for some ineffable crime against humanity. Marlies, in turn, tried frantically to calm him: nursed him with her aching breasts, changed and rechanged his diaper, shushed and cuddled and pleaded with him. Finally, beyond despair, she muffled him with a pillow. If the baby had struggled, writhed a bit, she might have forgotten herself and held the pillow in place a moment too long—but he only lay there as if to emphasize his helplessness. Even then, Scott had a knack for self-preservation in spite of everything.
When I later mentioned the episode, Marlies vehemently denied it. She’s denied it ever since. So maybe she was only dreaming out loud that night, unburdening herself of a persistent but intolerable thought.
part I
day thief
A crucial difference between my brother and me was that he spoke German and I didn’t—which is to say, he inherited my mother’s facility and I inherited my father’s all but total lack thereof; in fact, it became another aspect of Scott’s curious bond with my mother, as they’d lapse into German whenever they wished to speak or yell privately while in my presence. Scott learned the language at age thirteen, during a solo trip to Germany to visit our grandparents, and on return he contrived to insult me in a way that would call attention to this superiority. I was ten and didn’t brush my teeth as often as I might, so he dubbed me Zwiebel Mund, or “onion mouth.” It stuck: he never again called me anything else unless he was angry or discussing me with some third party.
Mind, there were many variations. Usually he called me Zwieb, and what had begun as an insult assumed, over the years, the caress of endearment. In its adjectival form—Zwiebish, Zwiebian, etc.—it meant something like: pompous but in a kind of lovable, self-conscious way (as he saw it), or benignly self-absorbed (ditto) and given to odd, whimsical pronouncements because of this. The nuances were elusive and mostly lost on the world beyond my brother and me. There were also ribald noun variations—Zwiebel-thang, Zwiebonius, etc.—or, when he was particularly delighted (high-pitched) or admonishing (low), he’d throw his head back and say Zwiiieeeeeeeeb! with a faint, nasal Okie twang to the vowel sound. My brother had more of an accent than I, especially as we got older, due in part to the different company we kept and perhaps because he was often stoned. Kind people tell me I have little or no trace of an Oklahoma accent. If so, I have my mother to thank—her own English sounds, if anything, vaguely British—though my father too has mostly purged his deep, lawyerly voice of its Vinita origin, except when he’s trying to connect with the common folk, and in any case he still pronounces the a in pasta like the a in hat.
And what, in turn, did I call Scott? I called him a very matter-of-fact (or deploring) Scott. No endearments on my end.
AFTER NYU, MY father was hired by Morrison, Hecker, Cozad & Morrison in Kansas City, where he and my mother and Scott lived in an apartment complex called the Village Green. I picture their two-story row hou
se as a rather drab, dispiriting place, but of course it was paradise next to Hayden Hall at NYU. Life got steadily better. Burck’s colleagues at the firm were a festive, hard-drinking bunch who thought Marlies was a hoot (she danced on tables at parties), and meanwhile she’d found “some kindred women” through volunteer work at the Nelson Art Gallery. One of her better friends was a gorgeous trophy wife who used to complain bitterly about things, and finally hanged herself in the attic.
The Village Green was aptly named, as its long blocks of housing units surrounded a big lawn perfect for frolicking toddlers. Scott played mostly with toy cars, pushing them back and forth in the grass while making a monotonous vroom vroom sort of noise; when the neighbor kids tried to join him, he’d gather up his stuff and leave. Indeed, he preferred the company of an imaginary friend named Ralphie. No doubt Ralphie was a quiet, thoughtful little chap like Scott, and hence a reasonable alternative to the real-life playmates at hand, so raucous and silly in comparison. The two-year-old Scott also had a great fondness for climbing, another maverick tendency: on the children’s playground at the zoo was an old fire engine, and he’d scare my mother by skittering to the top while the other kids watched wide-eyed from below.
That was the year they decided to move back to Burck’s home state. As Marlies would always tell it, they’d been driving through a blizzard to Vinita for the holidays, almost wiping out at one point when the car went into a spin. Then, at the Oklahoma border—like entering Oz—the snow stopped: not a flake in sight. “This is where I want to live,” my mother announced. As luck would have it, the state’s new attorney general was a friend of Burck’s cousin, Bill Bailey, who urged my father to apply for assistant AG: the pay wasn’t much, but it was a good way to build trial experience. Burck was hired a few weeks later, and in January 1963 they moved to Oklahoma City with me in utero.
AT THE BACK of my grandmother’s house in Vinita was an ugly paneled room that used to be a screened porch. My grandfather had once gone there to drink in peace; Scott and I slept there during our childhood visits. One wall was covered with photographs of then-living relatives I knew slightly or not at all—for example, my great-uncle Tom and his wife, Louise: not only did these two refuse to smile for the camera, they appeared to make a positive effort to look nasty. Perhaps they thought it was more dignified. A few years later, when I was seventeen or so, I encountered my uncle Tom in the anteroom of the funeral parlor he ran with his (nicer) brother, Charles. This was maybe the second time our paths had crossed. Tom had a glass eye that stared obliquely over one’s shoulder. After a brief chat he announced—apropos of nothing I can recall—that I was a bleeding-heart liberal just like my father. Tom’s glass eye gave him a dreamy air as he sat there denouncing me.
The first time I ever heard the expression “not worth the powder it would take to blow them up” was when I asked my father about that photograph of Tom and Louise, whom I’d yet to meet at the time. In those days, as far as I could tell, my father divided his Vinita family into two basic categories: tiresome, bigoted creeps like Tom and Louise, and “salt of the earth” folk like my uncle Charles, who almost never left the environs of Craig County during his eighty-odd years on earth. The second kind of person was better than the first, of course, but I’m not sure either was particularly desirable.
My grandfather Frank was the local postmaster for twenty-five years. He’d served his country in both world wars, never missed a Rotary Club meeting, and (according to his obituary in the Vinita Daily Journal) could “cuss out his best bird dog then pet him as he would a child.” A man’s man, in short. When he first heard that his son had married a German, he was furious:
“I go over there to kill the bastards, and he marries one!”
Marlies was fretful, then, at the prospect of meeting this man for the first time (his remark had reached her somehow), and she asked her husband to suggest some of his favorite foods. But Burck was no help; his family, never mind their cuisine, had apparently made little impression on him, as if he’d grown up in a series of foster homes. So finally she chose something simple but tasty from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook—corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes—and the man’s heart was won. Or so she reductively tells it. The main thing, perhaps, was that Frank enjoyed having a comely young woman in his life, and a refreshingly eccentric one at that: far from scolding him for his drinking, she’d join him on the screened porch and match him snort for snort.
OKLAHOMA CITY WAS hardly a marvel of cosmopolitanism, though there were bits of wistful striving in that direction. My family moved to a neighborhood called the Village (no “Green”), whose street names—Manchester, Stratford, Sheffield, et al.—evoked the provincial charm of the Mother Country, as did a number of incongruous little motifs like wishing wells, Cotswold roofing, diamond-shaped casement windows, and the like. These seemed the remnant of some romantic, postwar builder, whom I imagine being shoved aside by moneymen who said, “Let’s just get these fuckers built.”
To my mother, even the bleakest species of Eisenhower-era, tract-house suburb—and the Village was that—meant comfort and efficiency tout court. It didn’t faze her that they could only afford one car, for my father’s use. When she’d go shopping at nearby Casady Square—a jolly promenade, the high point of her day—she’d fill my brother’s stroller with grocery bags until only his stalwart little head stuck out. (Casady Square was a tableau out of Edward Hopper, its ugliness all the more stark in the dusty amber sunlight of Oklahoma: groceries, dry-cleaning, drugs, shoe repair—the bare necessities, as if life were a purely pragmatic interval between birth and eternity.) And her neighbors were so kind! The elderly couple next door gave her a ham on moving day; a minister invited her to join his church. Such decency, she decided, was at least somewhat indigenous to Oklahoma, and partly for that reason she never left.
EVERYTHING WAS BETTER by the time I came along. Marlies was resigned to motherhood, Burck was making a name for himself in the AG’s office, and Scott seemed to want a little brother. We were a study in contrast. As a baby I rarely cried or fussed, which delighted my mother, who’d kiss the little button between my legs and watch me chortle and kick. But I think she actually preferred my brother: in my normalcy I was a bit insipid; Scott had a peculiar kind of gravitas. Indeed he seems conscious of that quality in all our photos from early childhood, as he stares at his drooling brother with a sort of wise passivity. His face in repose had become solemnly handsome.
My mother finally went back to Germany in 1966, when I was three years old, for her brother Richard’s wedding; she took Scott along and left me in Vinita with Oma (whom we called “Oma from Vinita” to distinguish her from Marlies’s mother, “Oma from Germany”). My father had work to do and stayed in Oklahoma City. He visited every other weekend or so, but it was a three-hour drive to Vinita. Scott and Marlies bonded, abidingly, during that trip abroad. They crossed on the Nieuw Amsterdam, and Marlies was laid low by a bad case of strep throat. As she would tell it and tell it over the years, Scott took care of her: he’d sit by her bunk and play with Ralphie or his bear or both, but as soon as she needed something he’d bolt to his feet and get it; other times he’d just watch her with large attentive eyes. My German grandparents were enchanted with him. There’s a photo of the four standing on the gangplank, and Scott seems almost a parody of the well-behaved Little Man—dressed in a navy blazer and clip-on necktie, far too serious to smile; in another gangplank photo he clutches his Teddy as if it were an orphan he’d saved from drowning.
Meanwhile I was an unremitting misery to my grandmother in Vinita, and she emphatically told my mother as much. I’d thrown tantrums and broken some beloved tchotchkes. Evidently I didn’t like being farmed out to Vinita, though of course I can’t remember a thing about it.
I was aware that my parents found Scott more interesting, but it didn’t bother me much. I took the long view, finding insidious ways to assert my own specialness. For one thing I affected to be a great reader and would b
other my mother about ordering books from the catalogs we got at school; I loved the way these books smelled when I first cracked them open, but that was about it. My parents hinted, for my pains, that I was the smart one—or maybe that was just a sop they tossed me. My mother simply laughed when I brought Dead Souls home from the bookmobile in second grade. In general I was on the lookout for ways to capitalize on my brother’s failings. If he wouldn’t eat a certain food, say, I’d make a point of gorging myself on it. Also I’d use words that I knew would aggravate him: “Don’t quarrel” . . . “I implore you” . . . “How uncouth.”
For the most part, though, I liked my brother and he liked me. As we got older he’d let me play football with him and his friends, a privilege for which I was willing to take any amount of punishment. I cherished their good opinion. “Bronko Nagurski” my brother called me, after the legendary fullback: I’d butt heads with his bigger, helmeted friends and make them cry. I had a very hard head. The downside was that my brother took to proving how tough I was; for years he’d hide behind trees and hedges and hit me out of nowhere with bone-rattling tackles, and I’d just have to take it. I’d hear those last rapid footfalls just before impact—too late.
One day Scott and I were standing in front of the bathroom mirror when he stepped back, sighed, and said, “Don’t you wish you were this handsome?” I considered him there in the mirror. “You are better-looking,” I conceded. He was; there was no use denying it. My brother, happy that I knew it too, magnanimously claimed to be joking. I in turn was pleased with my own modesty, and something else: a sense that my brother wouldn’t always be the golden boy. In his preening I detected a little protesting-too-much, an inkling that his luck was running out even then, at least in comparison with his hard-headed brother.