The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  In those days Tulane was almost 50 percent Greek, and lest I become a Karate Clubber or Frisbee-tossing stoner, I pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the first fraternity founded in the South (on the fertile banks of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa). Dead drunk, I was practically dragged to the house that first night of rush by a girl with whom I’d made out at a riverboat party the night before. She delivered me like a sack of soggy, redirected mail and went on her way. Insofar as my eighteen-year-old self belonged anywhere at Tulane, he belonged there—that is, he dearly wished to belong with such supernormal specimens of the haute bourgeoisie: a lot of boozy, ruddy-faced blokes from Choate, Woodberry Forest, Lawrenceville, or their local country day, attired in oxford shirts starched stiff as cardboard and pants of khaki or startling plaid, all their haircuts done, it seemed, by the same no-nonsense barber.

  A few months later I moved to the SAE house, encountering Koenraad (in his karate togs) as I skittered down the steps at Phelps with my suitcase in hand. I’d told him nothing. “You are leaving?” he asked in his wistful way. I hadn’t been a good roommate, much less a friend, but I was one of the very few people the poor guy knew. I clasped his hand feelingly and we parted forever.

  FOR THE PAST year or so, Scott’s public behavior had been almost exemplary: he was now a full-fledged waiter at the best restaurant in town, as Kelli would have it, he took classes at the Drahn School of Business (which prepared one for white-collar employment as a “data-entry specialist” or retail manager who could handle the books), and his Oldsmobile was still intact after several months in his care. Best of all, he continued to be a functioning, appreciative member of our new family: he was respectful toward Sandra, doting toward Kelli, and an eager playmate for Aaron—perhaps a bit too eager, as he broke the kid’s glasses once by drilling him in the head with a football. But nobody expected perfection, and by the time Scott’s twenty-first birthday came around my father was ready to make a large gesture, putting down the security deposit and first month’s rent on a sleek one-bedroom unit in an apartment complex not far from Nichols Hills. I never got a chance to visit Scott there, but I was told about the chromium furniture and mirrored walls, the gatehouse and swimming pool and so on.

  And that’s not all. As my brother had proven himself a careful driver (my own views weren’t canvassed), he also deserved a better car than the stalwart Oldsmobile that didn’t even have a fucking stereo, he liked to point out. The car was Sandra’s idea—she thought my brother needed some extra incentive, a vote of confidence at age twenty-one: he was a true adult now, and as long as he did his best (“whatever that may be”) he should have nice, adult things. Since young men tend to identify with their cars to a morbid degree, this was deemed crucial to my brother’s self-esteem—and what was the matter with Scott, really, if not low self-esteem? With Sandra and my father, then, he went shopping one day for a car.

  “So what d’you think?” the friendly salesmen would ask him after a test drive.

  And eerily Scott would remain silent. With a nervous laugh perhaps (exchanging a look with Burck and Sandra), the salesmen would repeat their question.

  As if pained to oblige them even that much, Scott would jerk his head No.

  “You want to try the same model in a different color?”

  No.

  “Something a little more compact maybe? Faster? Better mileage?”

  No. No. No.

  “So, um, maybe you’d prefer . . . ?”

  “I’d prefer not to drive something that’s an obvious piece of shit.”

  Truth be known, Scott was antagonized by salesmen, or anyone he suspected of tricking him or looking down on him in some way, however subtle. This included most people in service-related capacities—bartenders, store clerks, fellow waiters—and it got worse if Scott was in the company of family or someone he needed to impress. I can honestly say I was never in a particular kind of public situation with Scott when he didn’t embarrass me with that weird hostility of his. On the other hand, he was the kindest of men toward bums, minorities, old people, children, pretty girls, and women of a certain age.

  Sandra had never quite seen this side of Scott, and for that matter had never seen anybody use that sort of language around perfect strangers, and even my father’s aplomb began to sag after a few hours.

  “You know what?” Sandra told Burck that night. They were sitting on the patio coddling well-deserved cocktails; the long day of test drives had not borne fruit. “If anybody should get a new car, it’s you.”

  And so they decided to give Scott my father’s five-year-old Sedan de Ville, which after all was immaculate (except for a salvaged right-front wheel that only I knew about). My brother tried to be gracious but was vividly downcast, viewing the old boat as a booby prize, hardly better than his Oldsmobile. I think my father might have soothed his disappointment by installing a state-of-the-art stereo system. Scott had said hard things about the radios in those cars he’d test-driven.

  A week or so later, when Scott was due for dinner, Burck and Sandra stood on their front lawn getting some air and letting the dog pee; suddenly they heard what sounded like a swiftly approaching typhoon. The grass hummed under their feet; the dog bolted back into the house. Just as they thought surely the world would explode, the storm gulped out and was punctuated by screeching tires—my brother’s abrupt arrival at the curb. He’d been listening to a bit of music while driving around the streets of Nichols Hills as if on the Autobahn.

  By then the car’s title had been transferred, and besides, “Scott’s an adult now!” as Sandra liked to say. There was nothing to do but wait. They didn’t wait long. Almost a month to the day after he turned twenty-one, my brother reduced an entire 1976 Cadillac Sedan de Ville to scrap metal. The details were sketchy to the driver and hence to posterity. The car was found strewn around an entrance ramp to the Northwest Expressway—a trail of glittering detritus that led like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs to a smoldering hull well beyond the guardrail. Scott had involved no other motorists in his accident; indeed the car seemed to have been driven by some mad ghost, since no charred or shockingly mutilated remains were found anywhere near the scene. That was another motif in my brother’s career. No matter how bad the mishap, he generally emerged unscathed, an outcome my mother summed up with an old German adage, Unkraut vergeht nicht: “Weeds don’t die!”

  The only injuries Scott suffered that day came later—a few nasty abrasions that resulted from his smashing every bit of glass in his sleek new apartment. Scott would always insist that this was a sober, considered decision on his part.

  “But Scott,” I said later, during a candid chat, “almost every surface in the place was glass.”

  “That’s what made it so tempting, Zwieb. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

  I confessed I hadn’t.

  “Well,” said Scott, slugging my shoulder a bit too hard, “maybe you’re the one who’s fucked up!”

  So Scott left the scene of the accident and walked, in whatever condition, back to his apartment and smashed all the glass. The illusion of spaciousness would have collapsed once the mirrors were broken, and because he felt hemmed-in and guilty (I guess), Scott departed, walking a mile or two to my father’s house. I like to imagine his progress through Nichols Hills, a kind of monitory apparition to the residents of that affluent banlieue. “An advocate,” as Cheever wrote of one wretched, drunken protagonist, “for the lame, the diseased, the poor, for those who through no fault of their own live out their lives in misery and pain. To the happy and the wellborn and the rich he had this to say—that for all their affection, their comforts, and their privileges, they would not be spared the pangs of anger and lust and the agonies of death.”

  Kelli was alone at my father’s house when Scott arrived. She was sitting in a big chair by the front window, doing her homework, when she sensed she was being watched, or maybe she heard something. In any event she turned around and saw Scott’s face in the window. Kelli was too p
olite to scream at the sight of her own stepbrother; I imagine she even summoned a weak smile. Scott let himself in and sat at her feet. There was glass dust in his hair and tiny points of blood all over his face and scalp, but otherwise he seemed fine. He held Kelli’s hand and petted her leg as he told her what he’d done that day. Finally Sandra and my father came home, and Scott seemed happy to see them.

  BY THE TIME I came home for Christmas that year, everything was back to normal. Scott had found yet another apartment near Todd the Tortoise and was now adept at using public transportation. One day we sat at his little card table—placed with a certain geometric nicety vis-à-vis his other belongings—and after he’d discussed the Cadillac crash and its aftermath as if he were explaining some esoteric hobby, he went on to describe his daily routine. Each morning he awoke at five forty-five, showered, and ate cereal at his card table while watching Bullwinkle on a six-inch TV. Then he made a snack for later and walked five blocks to catch a bus that took him to the Drahn School of Business. His classes ended at ten thirty, and if he had to work a lunch shift at the restaurant there was a different bus to catch; otherwise he went home, ate, read (Rolling Stone, Stereo Review, or Tiger Beat) and napped until the dinner shift. A coworker took him home at night, when Scott would carry his little TV to bed and watch Carson until he fell asleep.

  I asked him what sort of drugs he was doing these days, and Scott reared back and said “Zwiiieeeeeeeeb” in a tone of antic mock-reproach. The exchange was typical of our grown-up dynamic: that is, I tended to remark on the seedier side of his life with a kind of derisive sangfroid, as though he were incapable of shocking me further, and my brother would wax indignant in a way that was meant to rebuke my cynicism while implying that I was at least somewhat correct. We had a similar sense of humor.

  But this time he insisted I was mistaken. When did he have time for recreational drugs? And where would he get the money? Certainly not from our father, who’d cut him off without a sou after that Cadillac business. Scott paid his own bills including his fees at Drahn, he said, showing me a couple of report cards as evidence of his new seriousness: straight A’s. I imagine most of his fellow students were the kind of dim hicks who used to amuse Scott in high school, and probably he enjoyed the mild challenge of shining in their midst. But once the challenge was over—he got his diploma the following May—he never mentioned the place again and never to my knowledge sought employment relevant to the skills he’d acquired.

  MEANWHILE THERE WERE inklings that all was not well, or not as well as Scott would have one think. That spring, while he was in the home stretch at Drahn, he was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace. He’d been spotted dangling from a horizontal flagpole at the top of Fifty Penn Place—perhaps the tallest building in the northwest suburbs of Oklahoma City—the first three floors of which were occupied by posh shops and cafés. Quite a little crowd had gathered below, a lot of genteel lunching ladies, I imagine, an audience that would have pleased Scott.

  In May my mother finished her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude, a few days after I came home for summer vacation and Scott got his Drahn diploma. She particularly wanted the three of us, her ex-husband and two sons, to attend her graduation in Norman. It would be a nice little reunion, a way to acknowledge that things had turned out not-so-badly, what with Burck’s happy marriage, Marlies’s degree, and Scott’s slow but steady progress in the world (despite the odd misadventure). As for me, well, I’d made it through my first year at Tulane with middling grades, but that was about the best anyone seemed to expect at that point.

  The plan was to pick up Scott at his apartment in the Earl Hotel—his last sleazy apartment, we hoped, now that Drahn would surely land him at least among the lower rungs of the middle class. He didn’t answer the door, so my father and I let ourselves in. A number of things were wrong. Scott was lying on a ratty sofa, eyes and mouth smiling as if in greeting. He was wearing his old vagrant uniform of checked trousers (gone in the crotch) and yellowed T-shirt. He looked at us and laughed, and for a moment I had a sense of being ludicrously overdressed; that was the year I affected bow ties and madras trousers.

  Then Scott began to talk: his phrases, or riffs perhaps, had all the cadence of normal speech, but not a single word was intelligible as English (or German). He went on and on, pausing to laugh from time to time. He remained recumbent.

  My father considered him there on the sofa. “Son?”

  Scott gave him a wavering look, sort of rocking his body from side to side. He was talking the whole time.

  “Son?” My father patted his cheek as if to wake him.

  “He’s not asleep,” I said.

  “Hm.” My father sat on the edge of the sofa and stroked Scott’s hair a moment, staring into that beatific face of his. Scott’s speech had become a kind of happy crooning. Finally my father rose and walked out the door without a word. I followed, shutting the door behind me. The crooning pursued us down the hall.

  The following Monday, Scott called my father at his office and asked why we hadn’t picked him up the other day as planned. Burck ventured to explain.

  “I was sleeping!” said Scott. “You should’ve woken me up!”

  “We tried. Your eyes were open the whole time.”

  “I was sleeping,” he insisted, and went on about how disappointed he’d been when he realized he’d missed Mom’s graduation, etc. He even became tearful about it, and my father ended up apologizing.

  THAT SUMMER BURCK and Sandra went abroad for a month or so. They’d arranged to pick up a BMW right off the assembly line in Germany, whence they planned to drive it around Europe before putting it on a boat to the States. In the meantime a few family friends were supposed to check on Kelli and me, though I don’t think anyone was very diligent about it. We were old enough to care for ourselves, while little Aaron was away in Dallas with his father.

  We’d moved to a new house in Nichols Hills with a pool, and most of my weekend time was divided between swimming, reading, and tippling, while Kelli was off with her boyfriend for the most part. I enjoyed myself. I liked being alone, but I also liked having friends over to share my happiness; that summer was perhaps the closest I ever came to achieving a golden mean in this respect. It made me feel benevolent.

  One day I was entertaining five or six friends when my brother called. He had tickets for the Cheap Trick concert that night and wondered if I wanted to come. This was a novel invitation and rather touching, though I wasn’t interested for any number of reasons; still, I wanted to make some sort of reciprocal gesture. I explained that I was busy that night (true), then asked if he’d like to come over and spend the day with me and my friends. It was the first time I’d ever willingly exposed others to the adult Scott, who seemed moved by the offer.

  He rode over on a motorcycle he’d recently bought cheap from one of his coworkers. Full of my own benevolence, I pretended not to mind that he was drinking a beer as he rode up, sans helmet and license to operate a motorcycle or any other motorized vehicle. I looked at his eyes, assessed the slur in his voice, and figured he’d taken maybe a bong hit and drunk three or four beers. It could have been worse, and besides he seemed so happy to see me, just to be there, that I couldn’t bring myself to remark on the fact that he was half in the bag by noon and should be more careful, at least around my friends.

  Everybody tried to be nice to Scott. They knew he had problems and knew, too, that there was something momentous about his being here at the pool—this brother whose existence I rarely acknowledged. My friends acted as if they’d been enlisted in a secret charity, as I suppose they had. Scott sat on the edge of the shallow end, near the gazebo and beer, while, one by one, my friends swam over to chat with him. After a few hours I began to relax a little—even to cast ahead to other such occasions, to plan a whole summer project of easing my brother into the social mainstream and presenting him, at last, to my proud father.

  I was in the kitchen when I caught a glimpse of Scott lurchin
g toward the bathroom. He caromed off a wall and splashed beer all over the floor, righting himself like a fullback pawing his way into the end zone with a scrappy bit of second effort. I dropped what I was doing and waited outside the bathroom. He was in there a long time, then burst out the door and collided with me full speed.

  I got back on my feet and glared at him there on the floor. He was laughing and wanted me to laugh with him.

  “What’ve you been taking?” I asked.

  Scott looked hurt. “Whaddya mean? Justa few beers!” His head wobbled with denial.

  “You are so full of shit.”

  “Justa few beers . . .”

  I went outside and asked my friends to leave—all but sweet-natured, redheaded Matt, my old pot-smoking companion, who came closest to being a confidant where drugs and my brother were concerned. Matt wanted to tell me something in private. The others didn’t have to ask what was wrong, as they’d already noticed (while I was gloating over my benevolence) that something odd was happening to Scott.

  We were all standing around the driveway saying sheepish good-byes when one friend pointed to the roof and laughed. I looked. Scott had somehow clambered up there with Aaron’s banana-seat bicycle, which he was now poised (if that’s the word) to ride into the pool for our entertainment.

  “You think that’s funny?” I said to my friends, all of whom had succumbed to a kind of sickly mirth—these people whose parents had never divorced and whose siblings were a lot of regular guys and gals just like themselves. “Get the hell outta here!” I started herding them into their cars, giving one of them an extra push when he paused to glance back at my brother, who’d apparently sensed he was losing his audience and rolled off the roof without further ado.