The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  Somehow we got through breakfast and finally, with the exhilaration of tunneling convicts, my mother and I made it out to the car. Scott was framed pensively in the doorway, watching us. As ever he’d wanted to come along.

  “Don’t forget,” I said, as my mother drove carefully over the ice, “to mention the fact that he assaulted you.”

  But she wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted to help Scott, she said; maybe the police could persuade him to get treatment. In any event she had no intention of saying anything that might get him arrested. She just wanted him out of her house, period. She went on like this all the way to the police station.

  We had to wait in the lobby for a few minutes, and I used the time to cancel my lunch appointment with an old friend.

  “Sorry, Chris,” I said, when his machine beeped, “but my brother Scott threatened to kill my mother last night so now we’re at the police station and it looks like it might take a while. Rain check? Well . . . wish me luck!”

  Then we were sitting in a cubicle opposite a police officer, who asked Marlies a series of deadpan questions and jotted some notes.

  “And you say he’s violent?”

  “Well—he’s potentially violent. He drinks!”

  The cop made note of this. “So he hasn’t actually done anything to you?”

  “Can’t we just take him to the hospital?” my mother pleaded. “I want to help him. He needs help.”

  “He’s violent,” I told the policeman. “He assaulted her and he’s capable of worse. A lot worse. Last night he threatened to kill her.”

  “He did not!”

  “He did too.”

  “He was drunk!”

  “Right. He drunkenly threatened to kill her, and he’s drunk most of the time. It’s like saying he was breathing at the time.” The cop mirthlessly jotted this down, and I mentioned a few other salient details. “He needs to be institutionalized,” I said. “A mental hospital would be nice, I guess, but we’ll settle for prison.”

  “We will not!” said my mother.

  The man put down his pencil. Arching his eyebrows as he scanned his notes, he advised us that the best they could do was remove Scott as a trespasser. They’d be happy to do this.

  “Can’t you take him to a hospital?” my mother asked.

  “With his consent, sure.”

  I laughed. “What about some kind of restraining order?”

  The cop replied that some kind of order—not exactly a “restraining order” per se, but some lesser equivalent—could be issued under the following conditions: if, having been removed as a trespasser, Scott were to come within a hundred feet of us and still be imminent and menacing by the time the police arrived, we could petition the court for an order; then, if he returned again after that, and was again willing to wait around for the police without maiming or killing us, he could at last be arrested.

  “Sounds dicey,” I said.

  The cop frowned in a noncommittal way. “So. Would you like him removed from your property?”

  “Yes, please.”

  WE RENDEZVOUSED WITH a police car about a mile from my mother’s house. One of the cops was a burly guy in his fifties with a walrus mustache that seemed to capture the gravity of the situation. He explained what was about to go down. He assured my anxious mother that Scott wouldn’t be arrested or molested in any way as long as he didn’t resist. He advised us to stay in the background and let them handle it. His partner, a tense younger man, gave a sharp affirmative nod: just so.

  Scott didn’t answer the door right away. I worried that he’d spotted the police car and bolted out a back window—waiting in the woods until the coast was clear to kill us—but then the door swung open and there was Scott. For a moment he registered faint surprise: his eyes narrowed and he cocked his head slightly; then, darting a glance at me, our mother, and back at the cops, he said:

  “Won’t you come in, officers?”

  When sober Scott understood that it didn’t pay to mince words with cops; this was one nugget of wisdom he’d culled from his dark sojourn. His voice was soft, concerned—what could the trouble be?—and when the tense cop asked him to step away from the door, Scott obliged with hasty composure. Then, with an almost comic diffidence—a mildly flustered butler—he invited the cops to follow him into the living room and have a seat. They remained standing. Scott asked if they minded whether he sat; they did not. Scott arranged himself in a chair, crossing his legs, and waited for the matter to be explained to him.

  “Sir,” said the walrus mustache, “your mother would like you to leave her house.”

  Scott gave our mother a wondering look: surely not.

  “Scott, you need help,” she said. “You’re an alcoholic and you need help.”

  “An ‘alcoholic’?” He slowly shook his head, as though he didn’t quite get the joke. “Because I got a little drunk last night, I’m suddenly an ‘alcoholic’ . . . ?”

  I thought about interjecting a scornful laugh at that point, but decided to stand on my dignity. I sighed and gave the officers a vaguely pained look.

  “Scott,” said my mother, “please let these men take you to the VA.”

  “I’m not going to a hospital. There’s nothing wrong with me.” He considered the matter further and added, “It’s Christmas!” And there was real dudgeon in his voice. Christmas was sacred to Scott: it meant family and good food and booze and carols and Christ and an overall serenity that was otherwise missing from his life.

  “Christmas is canceled this year,” said my mother.

  “Well,” said Scott, “Christmas is on as far as I’m concerned.”

  I sighed again, a definitive sigh, a sigh that called for an end to the whole charade. With reticent dignity I approached the older cop and asked where Scott would be taken if not to a hospital. The man replied at length. He said that Scott would be taken to the end of the long gravel driveway leading to the main road, where he’d have to wait for a cab. And yes, the cops would keep Scott company and make sure he got into the cab. In a kindly reminiscent way, the man went on about various contingencies that sometimes arose in this sort of dispute. He took no account of Scott’s presence as he spoke, though I could feel Scott’s stare on the back of my neck. At one point I turned slightly and Scott managed to lock eyes with me (the cop was still talking) in a way that was, I think, meant to intimidate and yet also appeal to my finer feelings. His eyes were brimming with hatred, with love, with sadness that it had come, at last, to this.

  “I bet you’re enjoying yourself,” he said.

  “It’s one of the worst experiences of my life,” I replied.

  This sounded maudlin and a little craven, but I was mostly in earnest. It was a bad time, all right. But then, too, such a remark was precisely the sort of thing you say if you’re posing as the Good Son, the mature one who only wants what’s best for his long-suffering mother and so on. Which is to say, I was enjoying myself rather.

  “Well, it’s almost over,” said Scott. “For now.”

  “You hear that?” I asked the older cop, who closed his eyes and nodded. He was a decent man who found such matters regrettable.

  The cops took over from there. The younger one followed Scott to his room and stood in the doorway while he packed his things. Now and then the man chuckled a little nervously, and I knew Scott was trying to charm him, to win him over with jokey bravado: “Well, this is a hell of a note! Frankly, I hope those two get coal in their stockings . . .” Drawers opened and shut with judicious restraint, wire hangers tinkled lightly. Finally Scott emerged with his duffel bag flung over his back; he looked as though he’d decided to find the whole thing amusing, though I could tell he wasn’t amused. He dropped his bag in the living room and turned to the cops.

  “I want you guys to know,” he said, “that I find your professionalism commendable. You couldn’t have been more courteous and kind, and I want you to know I’ll never forget it.”

  On the simplest level, Scott was being since
re—the policemen were nice blokes. On another level, he meant to contrast their niceness with his family’s vicious duplicity (at Christmas no less), suggesting that someday, perhaps, he’d be in a position to repay both kindness and cruelty. On a final, murkier level, he was casting ahead to some future court hearing: No, the defendant was perfectly polite. He seemed genuinely perplexed and saddened by the whole . . .

  “Scott—your presents—” said Marlies, gathering them out from under the tree. When Scott seemed hesitant to accept them, she dropped to her knees and began packing them expertly in his duffel bag. Two things occurred to me: one, that only my mother would dare take such a liberty, and two, that Scott was traveling light under the circumstances (he hadn’t packed the rest of his liquor—this for the sake of appearances, no doubt, though I found it ominous).

  Finally he stood at the kitchen bar consulting the Yellow Pages for a motel. “That place is good,” the younger cop suggested, tapping his finger on a particular listing. “Clean and cheap and kinda in-between here and the city.” Scott nodded and phoned for a reservation; then he called a cab and gave the dispatcher patient directions to our remote location. Hanging up, he stood there shaking his head, as if the whole business were simply too bizarre for words.

  “Ma, you’re not really serious about this,” he said. “C’mon. I’m your son, for crying out loud. It’s Christmas.”

  “You brought this on yourself!” said my mother, with her stolid Germanic fondness for platitudes.

  “Oh yeah, and life’s been so good to me,” he said.

  I could restrain myself no longer. Sneeringly I pointed out—not for the first time—that it was always life’s fault as opposed to Scott’s own.

  He took a step in my direction. The older cop saw me brace myself and grabbed Scott by the arm. The younger cop, a little hesitantly, took the other arm, and Scott went comically limp in their grasp. As they led him toward the door, he leaned back and bugged his eyes at me: “See you soo-oon!” he called, with loony menace, and then he was gone.

  THE FIRST ORDER of business was buying a gun. My mother had nothing but an old varmint rifle that looked as if it hadn’t been fired since the Alamo, and besides there were no bullets. After checking the Yellow Pages (still open to the motel listings), we drove to a sporting goods emporium on the interstate, where I explained our needs to a bearded fellow in the gun department. He wore a camouflage jacket and squinted intently with one eye.

  “What you need it for?” he asked, when I mentioned that I hadn’t fired a gun since childhood and didn’t want anything fancy.

  “Self-defense,” I said. “To shoot, you know—people.”

  “Nuh!” my mother protested.

  The man nodded and ducked under the counter, coming up with a snub-nose pistol in a chamois cloth. “This here’s what you want,” he said. “Smith and Wesson .38, just point and fire.”

  I paid with American Express and presented the neat plastic gun case to my mother. Merry Christmas. Then we went to a Chinese restaurant and discussed strategy over martinis and spare ribs.

  “Okay, so you’re holding the gun,” I said. “What do you say?”

  “ ‘Sit down.’ ”

  “And if he doesn’t? What if he comes toward you?”

  “I shoot him,” she said, and took a giggly sip of gin.

  We were both feeling the strain, but I enjoined her to be serious. I’d warned her and warned her and warned her about Scott, and now look what had happened! With tipsy solemnity I added that if she ever let Scott into her life again, ever, I’d wash my hands of them both.

  She nodded a trifle absently. “Fine.”

  “Fine what?”

  She shrugged. “Scott’s not as bad as you think. It’s not all black and white, you know. There’s a little gray!”

  “There’s a little gray. Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that! Got a pen? I want to write that down . . .” Thus my father used to mock her platitudes. She smiled reminiscently. “Look,” I said. “From now on—and I think your cats would agree with me—it’s all black. No gray. If you want to indulge grayness, you do it on your own. Understood?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. So you’ve got the gun. What do you say?”

  “ ‘Sit down.’ ”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  She thumped the table with a meaty fist. “I shoot the bastard.”

  IT WAS GETTING dark by the time we stopped at Walmart to buy bullets. A spindly blue-vested adolescent yanked out a tray of cartridges and said that these here (pointing) were the hollow-tipped kind and that’s what we wanted. “Goes in like that,” he said, making a little half-inch hole with thumb and forefinger, “and comes out like this,” whereupon he described a bloated grapefruit with both hands. We bought a box of twenty-five. “So much for just winging him,” I remarked.

  I should add that earlier, as we were leaving the restaurant, I’d called Scott’s motel to see whether he’d checked in. He hadn’t, or else he’d done so under an assumed name. Probably, though, he was lurking around the house somewhere, waiting for us to return, and if our luck had really gone south he’d managed to find a gun of his own. One remembered his time as a marksmanship instructor in the marines. My mother pulled off the gravel driveway, and we took turns firing into a pond embankment. Fat gobs of mud spattered on impact; a dark curtain of birds flushed into the air. Somewhere, perhaps, Scott was listening.

  The house was a vague silhouette in the powdery twilight. When my mother stopped the car I rolled out the passenger side, literally rolled, in the manner of some intrepid TV cop; half-consciously I thought if Scott were watching from his hiding place, he wouldn’t be able to restrain his laughter and then I’d have the drop on him. Cocking the gun at my ear, I scampered like a troll from bush to bush, casing the house—peeking in windows, pausing in a crouch to fan the gun at the darkling woods, and so on. Finally I made the entire circuit and gave my mother a thumbs-up. She hopped out of her car and trotted with awkward haste up the icy path, fumbling in her purse for the house keys. An oddly poignant sight.

  It took a while for the adrenaline to wear off. We turned on every light in the house and closed the curtains, triple-locked the doors; then my mother poured herself some brandy and made phone calls: to a Realtor friend who could get her a deal on a fancy alarm system—indeed could arrange for installation first thing in the morning if not that very night—and to various others who knew Scott and promised to let us know if they gained some inkling of his whereabouts. After the last phone call, my mother drank off her brandy and joined me on the couch, where I sat watching TV with the gun in my lap. A few minutes later the phone rang. We stayed put.

  “I think it’s pretty poor,” Scott’s voice slurred over the machine, “pretty fucking piss poor that I have to spend Christmas in some fleabag motel. I’m thirty-eight years old,” he added, and lapsed into a long drunken silence. My mother started to get up, and I pulled her back down on the couch. “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,” Scott began to sing, “alles schlaft, einsam wacht . . .” At last he sighed, took a drink (ice tinkling), and hung up.

  So he was, it seemed, at some motel—doubtless a real fleabag rather than the “clean” place suggested by the cop, since Scott didn’t mind a certain kind of tidy squalor and of course he’d want to husband his money for liquor and drugs. That was reassuring. My mother and I laughed a little, and even waited somewhat hopefully for Scott to call again and perhaps sing another carol.

  The rest of the evening was pleasant enough. We sat around drinking Scott’s liquor and opening a few early Christmas presents. My mother had some kind of Hopi prayer stick or incense wand, and at one point she lighted this and walked all around the house—a wobbly but dignified saunter—waving smoke at whatever remained of Scott’s spirit. One by one her cats came out of hiding and joined us there in the living room as though nothing had ever been amiss.

  Scott called again around 3:00 A.M., and roughly four times a day after that. Drunk
or sober he was unrepentant, but not really vengeful: as usual he tried alternately to sweet-talk our mother and make her feel guilty, but she only kept repeating that mantra about his bringing it all on himself, which must have driven him up the wall. I worried she’d relent as soon as I returned to New Orleans, but happily Scott was arrested on a public-drunk charge and back in jail by the new year.

  part V

  the calm mid-heaven

  O ne good thing about that last harrowing Christmas with Scott was that it led, for a time, to reconciliation between my father and me. We hadn’t spoken in almost two years when I called him that day at his office to let him know I’d just bought a gun—this shortly after I’d learned that Scott hadn’t checked in at the “clean” motel. I asked my father if maybe he’d be willing to hire a private detective to find Scott and follow him around, or better yet arrange via his friend the DA for Scott to be arrested on some trumped-up charge. Though Burck kept his own counsel with regard to these rather wayward suggestions, he was calm and kind and comforting to talk to. He asked me to keep him posted, which I did, and we met for lunch a few days later.

  Talking about Scott became more and more painful for my father, and it was understood one didn’t broach the subject without his implicit consent. Sandra, however, liked to talk about Scott, as he remained a danger as long as he was alive and it made sense to inquire about his whereabouts; also he was just a fascinating subject. My father was still at his office in the city when Mary and I arrived at Breeze Hill for a visit—our first—so we sat in the kitchen with Sandra and Kelli (whom I hadn’t seen in six years, since that awful ski trip to Santa Fe), chatting, easily enough, about Scott.

  “Listen, you guys,” Sandra said, lowering her voice and edging closer in her chair, “I’ve never told this to a soul—well, I’ve never told your father . . .”