The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  THOUGH HIS GRADES had fallen those last two years of high school, my brother was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He was going to study acting. He got excellent recommendations from some of his teachers.

  His last summer at home was a blur of disaster. It was then that Scott totaled the Porsche for good—or maybe, since it was the fourth or fifth time he’d wrecked it, my father just stopped paying for repairs. Scott also managed to alienate all but his most worthless friends. One guy who was a year younger than he, a fellow actor named Kevin, looked up to Scott as a kind of mentor and filled three pages of Scott’s yearbook with a touching tribute. My brother responded by writing “Dear Kevin” at the top of a blank page in Kevin’s yearbook, at the bottom of which he wrote “Sincerely, Scott.” I had no idea what it was all about and didn’t ask when Scott showed me, proudly, what he’d done.

  One night he was arrested with Kara and another couple; I can’t remember the details except my brother had resisted the police in some way and been roughed up a bit. In the middle of the night my father went to get him out of jail. Marlies and I were sitting at the kitchen table, having a desultory talk about the awfulness of it all, when Scott preceded my father through the back sliding door. His long hair was wrapped in a bandanna and he was strutting on the balls of his feet in a cocky, defiant way, weaving a bit from the lingering effects of whatever drugs he’d taken. He had the beginning of a black eye.

  “The Oklahoma City cops,” he said. “The royal scam.”

  That last phrase was the title of a Steely Dan album he liked. By then his cultural references were all but entirely derived from the more pretentious rock bands. He no longer read Salinger or any other fiction.

  “Oh Scott,” my mother said wearily. “You’re just disgusting.”

  We all sort of nodded. My brother sneered and went to his room. There was nothing much to say. We drifted back to bed.

  I was half-asleep when I became aware of Scott standing in the doorway. The light was behind him, but I could make out his slitted eyes and curled lip.

  “You’ve got them scammed,” he was saying. “Only a matter of time . . .”

  He was shaking his head in a dopey, wondering way. I asked him to leave. He folded his arms and slumped against the door frame.

  “I know you,” he went on. “I know what you’re like. You’re gonna be just like me. You’re gonna be worse. Look at you, you little fuck . . .”

  On and on. I kept telling him to get out, and finally I began to scream. My brother went on in a hissing monotone, electrified by the effect he was having.

  “Scream for Mommy,” he said. “Scream for Daddy . . .”

  My room was connected to the master bedroom via a bathroom, at the door of which my father appeared in his robe. He flicked on the light and stood there. At that moment he looked like a washed-up pug rising for the last round on guts alone. His face was mournful, puzzled; perhaps he was wondering why he’d worked so hard for this—a houseful of drunken queers, Arabs, a hopped-up son . . . how did this happen?

  “Get him out!” I was screaming, thrashing in my bed as though a rattlesnake were under the sheets. “Get him outta here!”

  Burck silenced me with a wince, then walked across the room and took Scott gently by the elbow. He guided him down the hall and out of sight. Then I heard Scott’s voice rise in protest, and I followed to where the two stood beside the back sliding door. My father was in the process of throwing Scott out of the house, and I grabbed a heavy poker from beside the fireplace. I was almost hoping Scott would make some move on our father—I was drawing a bead on that silly bandanna of his—but instead he stood pleading in a wheedling, infantile way.

  “Remember when you first saw me onstage, Papa? And you thought maybe I had something? That maybe I wasn’t all bad? Papa . . . ?”

  He was crying or pretending to cry. Burck sighed; he looked small in his bathrobe, standing beside my lanky brother.

  “I never said you were ‘all bad,’ son. I never thought it. But I’m tired now, and I want you to go.” He flung open the sliding door and pointed into the darkness. “Out.”

  Out my brother went with a tragic stumble, muttering how he’d never expected to be treated this way by his own family.

  AND THEN IT was August and Scott was packing a big steamer trunk for NYU. I remember feeling tolerant about things. Scott had just gotten a haircut and looked clean and fit, sober and somewhat chastened, eager to prove himself in the greater world. He made much of the fact that he was attending our father’s alma mater, that they were on the same level more or less, and such was my hopefulness that I didn’t bother to point out that our father had gone to NYU Law School on a famous scholarship because he’d worked hard and stayed out of trouble and even then he’d had to take a job in a liquor store and never, ever would it have occurred to him to pursue some half-assed boondoggle (all bills paid) such as acting as a so-called course of higher study. That’s what I was thinking in the back of my mind, but I was also willing to believe that Scott’s behavior these last few years had been a kind of purging, that the worst was over, that his worthless friends would find themselves banished like so many Falstaffs from that day forward. I kept Scott company while he packed, and watched with smiling complaisance as he made room at the bottom of his trunk for his various bongs and other paraphernalia. Finally I helped him lug the thing out to my father’s car.

  “Well, Zwieb—”

  “Well—”

  I wasn’t going to the airport. Burck wanted to talk to Scott alone for that last half hour or so, and that was fine with me. I was eager to move my stuff into Scott’s bigger, better-appointed room. I started to give him a brisk hug, a stiff whack on the back, but he held me there and stroked my head in a way that embarrassed me. “You behave yourself,” he said in a thick whisper, and when he let go his eyes were red. He’d taken to affecting a flat, twill cap he’d bought at an army surplus store, and he put this on now with a little flourish of adjustment. It looked ridiculous, and sad, and my heart went out to him for the first time in years.

  HE LASTED MAYBE two months at NYU. From the start his letters to my parents were long and weird and woefully confiding. He had much to say about his roommate, a fellow acting student named Oscar. Scott was convinced that Oscar wanted to fuck him and was therefore a “pathetic faggot.” Eventually, though, the roommates seemed to reach an understanding. The only bit of Scott’s NYU correspondence that I can remember with perfect clarity was something he wrote after a long disquisition on the nature of his all but hopeless alienation: “I mentioned this to Oscar, and he just looked at me and said ‘Everybody’s alone, Scott.’ ”

  One night Burck and I sat in the kitchen talking. He kept losing the thread and peering into the ether, rubbing his chin. He’d puff out his cheeks now and then with held-in sighs. Finally he said, “Scott’s dropped out of college.”

  “Already?”

  My father nodded slowly. He went on talking amid many pauses, as if he were trying to put the matter as precisely as possible. “He called me at the office today . . . Said ‘Papa, I’m sorry’ . . . And I said ‘What, son? It can’t be all that bad’ . . . Said he hadn’t been going to classes, and now he didn’t really see the point. I asked”—he frowned deeply, pushing his bottom lip out—“I asked him, ‘What’s wrong, son? What’s the matter?’ . . . ‘I don’t know, Papa.’ ” My father shrugged and repeated, in Scott’s woebegone way, “ ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  My father was staring intently at the curdled surface of his cream of mushroom soup. His face was turning red. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Is the tuition refundable,” I asked finally, “or what?”

  He covered his eyes and shook his head. He didn’t bury his face in his hands—that would have been too embarrassing—but just pressed his fingers hard against his forehead while his face froze into a proud, trembling frown. I’d never seen him cry and knew he didn’t want me to sit there and watch. I st
ood up, kissed the top of his burning forehead, and left the room.

  MY BROTHER’S FEES were paid until the end of the semester, so he went on living in the dorm a while. He was something of a legend there, for the usual reasons only more so. The NYU authorities had asked him to leave after various infractions, but Scott wouldn’t cooperate. The stalemate persisted a few days, until finally they managed to eject him, bodily (“Get your fucking hands off me, man!”), and wouldn’t even let him return to collect his trunk.

  So things stood when Marlies flew to New York in an effort to settle her son’s affairs. She and Burck had decided to send him to Germany, in hopes that my grandfather, a psychiatrist, could somehow figure him out. Indeed, both my grandparents were nothing but eager to help. They remembered Scott as the solemn, sensitive boy in a blazer and clip-on necktie who’d nursed his sick mother aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, as the moody but still tractable lad they’d seen a few years later, at age thirteen, when he’d gone abroad all by himself and learned to speak German after a fashion. My grandmother, a great-souled woman, had fretted over reports of Scott’s problems and was full of advice for her wayward daughter, who was thus inspired to say, in so many words: He’s all yours.

  And so the stage was set for the biggest fiasco yet. When my mother arrived in New York—it was Saturday, the day before Scott’s scheduled departure for Germany—he told her with considerable bitterness that they wouldn’t let him back in the dorm to collect his fucking stuff, etc. My mother agreed to take care of it, and asked Scott to wait outside. This he refused to do. In the lobby was a security guard who, for all we know, had been specifically retained to bar his entrance. These two began to scuffle, while my mother screamed at Scott to get the hell out of there. Abruptly he seemed to obey, shoving free of the guard and walking, with scornful dignity, out the door, then breaking into a giddy little scamper around the building (my mother in hot pursuit) to a glass door in back. Locked. Without a whit of reflection, Scott stepped back, lowered his shoulder, and crashed through the glass.

  William Maxwell once wrote, “New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy,” and that day my mother learned just how right he was. Walking uptown through the Village—past old haunts, the places where she’d been so happy and sad, burning her candle at both ends à la Edna St. Vincent Millay, arguing about Ayn Rand and Camus and the like—she wept and wept. Wailing away, a weaving gait. Weeping, weeping, all the way back to the Hotel Chelsea, all the way up in the elevator, all the way down to the restaurant, where the waiter could scarcely help but notice her distress and kindly plied her with liquor (“not a good idea,” she recalled). Later she got a message from the concierge: Call Precinct Eight. Whereupon she was told that her son was uninjured but naturally in jail and would appear before the judge at nine o’clock in the morning. On Sunday? Oh yes, seven days a week. And so the next morning my mother appeared in court and presented the judge with Scott’s plane ticket for a two o’clock flight to Germany; the miscreant was lectured and let go with a warning.

  By then the pot and drugs and drink had metabolized somewhat, and Scott was contrite. He agreed to go to a barber and get a respectable haircut prior to his departure. The door-smashing episode had caused a further stir in his dorm, and Scott’s three suitemates were eager to accompany him and my mother to the airport. She made this gleeful trio wait with her at the gate until her son’s plane was unmistakably in the air, then breathed “a humongous sigh of relief” and invited them all to dinner at the Chelsea. Theirs was a merry table—the same table, it so happened, where she’d been so inconsolable the night before, and the same waiter, who was glad to see her feeling better. Later she and the boys sat around on her bed, drinking and laughing about the whole incredibly fucked-up mess. The guys thought it was wild that Scott, that crazy fucker, had such a cool mom.

  I HEARD A few things about Scott’s time in Germany, but the rest is speculation. The one photograph is telling: he is slouched between my grandparents, laughing, arms flung over their shoulders; my grandfather, propped stiffly against his metal cane, shares nothing of Scott’s mirth; my grandmother clutches her purse and deplores Scott with a look of stern, melting love. She adored him and vice versa. Her babbling admonitions to be good and go to church seemed to soothe him. He’d sit passive and smiling while she brought him food and insisted on rubbing his pimply face with some kind of ointment that had worked for her as a girl. Both of them reproached my grandfather, whose exasperation was such that he became the weary embodiment of Wittgenstein’s dictum, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.” As the head of an asylum, Opa had been around lunacy all his life and sympathized up to a point: during the war he’d saved a number of patients by alerting their families to come take them home and hide them from the Nazis. His own son, my uncle Richard, had been a little off when young (low grades, a dazed loutish look), and now was a clubby bearded burgher who sold neon signs.

  As for Scott, poor Opa could hardly believe what a difference five years had wrought. What had become of his lieber Sohn? Who was this sullen Tage Dieb (“day thief” or “wastrel”)? Asked not to play his music so loud, Scott would lock himself in Opa’s study with a cache of liquor and blast the Ramones. This went on for a month, maybe, until Opa called Richard, who yanked my brother to his feet, slapped him around a bit, and told him to get his ass on a plane. Oma saw him off at the gate, weeping.

  WHEN SCOTT CAME home for Christmas he looked ghastly. His face was boiling with pimples, pimples on top of pimples, and his hair hung like a pair of dank curtains one wouldn’t care to part. He seemed weirdly cheerful withal. Between Germany and Oklahoma he’d stopped in New York for a couple of weeks, basically living on the street and somehow managing to stuff himself with drugs enough to last into the new year. Or so I assumed, since he didn’t appear to be getting high in our house. But who knows. All I knew was that every time he opened his mouth something strange came out, as though he were addressing us from the fog of some alien world.

  That first day home he came into my room and sat on the floor. After a few inconclusive exchanges, he fell silent and began surveying every detail of his surroundings, his head rolling around on his shoulders, slowly, like a security camera. Finally his eyes fixed on me.

  “Your face . . .” he said, after almost a full minute of scrutiny, during which I’d tried to seem oblivious and then said “What?” a number of times. “It’s all—kind of fucked up . . .”

  Look who’s talking, I thought. “How so?”

  “Your nose is like”—he stared hard, trying to fathom it—“I don’t know, Zwieb, it’s like asymmetrical and shit . . .”

  Actually my nose is fairly straight, or at least it was in those days. “Really?”

  “Yeah!” And he went on staring while his hand traced ineffable shapes in the air that were meant to approximate my nose. He wasn’t trying to be offensive so much as helping me see what he saw.

  Mostly Scott embarrassed me. I was fifteen, puberty had kicked in at last, and I wanted nothing more than to be normal—that is, as unlike my brother as possible. I didn’t want anyone to see us together, to guess we were brothers, and I couldn’t understand why my father would invite both of us downtown for lunch. But there he was, my father, natty in a tailored gray suit, striding out of his office and hugging my ragamuffin brother for all to see: a modern-dress Prodigal Son. The odd colleague would drift into our ken and pause with a barely perceptible start as he or she recognized Scott and absorbed, smiling, whatever Martian pleasantry he made. “Hey, Terry,” Scott said to one of them in an intense half-whisper, as if he were mimicking the sort of self-assured bigshot who could affect such intimacy and get away with it. “How’s the wife? You’re looking very . . . healthy.” Burck’s expression at such times was fixed, inscrutable, with perhaps a shimmer of misery underneath.

  We spent Christmas Day with Oma from Vinita. She’d broken her hip the month before, and my father had brought her to Oklahoma
City to recuperate in one of the nicer rest homes. Her roommate was a crazy old mummy named Tula who delighted in tormenting her: Tula threw food at my grandmother and once, slyly, left a bedpan full of coy turds on their common bedside table. (Marlies—who had a very German fondness for scatological humor and a rather strained relationship with her mother-in-law—adored Tula.) In short, Oma was having a bad time of it, and I wondered if she might be spared the sight of my brother.

  But we were a family, after all. So we sat around taking pictures and opening presents in that gloomy, yellow-curtained common room. Scott was creepily solicitous toward Oma, kneeling at the foot of her wheelchair and caressing her shrunken shoulder, while my parents smiled and I looked on with a kind of cringing bemusement. Oma returned Scott’s tenderness by touching a trembling hand to his pimply cheek, his arm, as though she were trying to palpate the precious boy within.

  I thought of my favorite Christmas, eight years before. Oma was visiting, and Scott decided to put on a show for her and our parents. Before we opened presents on Christmas Eve, my brother and I sang and danced and did a skit in identical blue pajamas. The highlight was my reading of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” accompanied by my Pooh bear, who was dressed in a vest and bow tie and seated beside me on a bar stool. We alternated lines: I read mine with an orotund flourish, while Pooh muttered his in a bear-voice I’d practiced all week. We were a hit. I can still see Oma—who often smiled but rarely laughed (because of her teeth?)—clutching her son’s shoulder with gasping hilarity. There’s a photo of me taking a deep bow afterward while Scott, beaming, stands behind me. The show had been his idea, and he was proud of me.

  AS MUCH AS possible I stayed away while Scott was home. What galled me most was not that Scott himself was oblivious to his condition, but that my parents too seemed bent on pretending that nothing much was amiss, that time would heal. They doted on Scott in my presence, as if to rebuke me for failing, balefully, to do my part. But I couldn’t help it. The sight of Scott struck me dumb; I was terrified of turning into him.