The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  Kelli nodded. She knew what was coming.

  “But one time, Scott kissed me.”

  Mary glanced at me with furtive puzzlement: What’s wrong with that? I remained poker-faced.

  “You mean he kissed you on the cheek?” I said. “Or what?”

  Sandra slowly shook her head. She pulled her chair a bit closer. “He kissed me on the lips,” she all but whispered. “He kissed me with his tongue.”

  Kelli chuckled in a worldly sort of way. She’d lived in San Francisco for some ten years by then and was little fazed by the endless oddity of human conduct.

  “It was right after we moved here,” Sandra said. “I think it was the first time Scott spent the night . . .”

  Her voice became a little rushed and flustered as it occurred to her that my brother had been welcome at the ranch right up to the time he went to prison almost, a time when I myself—a schoolteacher of decent repute—would have been escorted off the grounds by hired hands, Jack barking viciously in my wake.

  “. . . and your father had left for the day, or maybe he was out with the horses? I don’t know. Anyway he wasn’t around. So we were here in the kitchen, Scott and me, and I think maybe I’d packed him a lunch for the road—maybe that was it: I’d packed him lunch! Anyway he wanted to thank me for the lunch. I don’t know. Anyway you guys: he took my face in his hands and he kissed me.”

  She stared at the memory, freshly aghast.

  Poor Scott. Briefly, briefly, as a boy on the verge of manhood, he’d been so handsome and promising that the sequel must have seemed a dream; behind the acne and brain damage and bewildering alienation, he was a golden boy still. Probably he thought he’d given his poor old stepmom the thrill of her life. One thing was certain: at that moment he’d loved her and was sorry for ever thinking ill of her—she’d packed his lunch!—and wanted to convey this in some meaningful way. Probably, too, he was drunk and/or high.

  As Scott’s only brother—a person who shared his sense of humor and some of his darker tendencies too—I considered explaining as much to Sandra, for what it was worth. Instead I said, “Welcome to the club.”

  “. . . No!”

  I nodded. “Tongue and all.”

  Sandra and Mary were speechless, but Kelli only wagged her head and looked more worldly than ever.

  “Scott’s not going to make it in this life,” she sighed. But she was smiling too. The implication was that perhaps he’d fare better in the next life. At the time, oddly enough, it was a comforting and not implausible thought.

  I LISTENED GRUDGINGLY whenever my mother shared news of Scott. Her obsession with the subject was exasperating. She missed Scott and wanted to talk about him, simple as that—to speculate about his motives, to retrace our steps to the exact point when everything went blooey.

  At the time his life was either picaresque or tragic, depending on how you look at it. After that last Christmas en famille, Scott got out of jail with the help of an old gay friend of my mother, Roger, the man who used to tell me about his 160 IQ. Roger was now a lonely sexagenarian living in Hawaii (where he and Scott had renewed their acquaintance while Scott was in the marines). As a purely philanthropic gesture—so my mother was given to understand—Roger flew my brother to the islands and gave him a place to stay.

  “Isn’t that great?” said my mother. “He’s thousands of miles away! And he loves Hawaii! Maybe he’ll . . .”

  I guess it was maybe three weeks later that Scott beat the shit out of poor old Roger, who’d made the mistake of insisting that Scott not drink another beer, since they’d agreed to hold the line at a six-pack a day or something. But one night Scott took a seventh or eighth or twentieth out of the fridge; Roger picked up the phone and threatened to call the cops, whereupon Scott wrested the phone away and used it to cudgel his benefactor senseless.

  Scott was homeless after that, but the Hawaiian climate was gentle and for a while he did all right. He slept in parks and churches, ate at shelters, and used his VA pension for liquor and drugs. I suspect he stole quite a lot too, and then Marlies would send him a little something from time to time, whenever Scott would call her to announce he was ready to turn over a new leaf.

  “He’s taking classes,” she told me one night. “Isn’t that great? He’s enrolled at the University of Hawaii!”

  Toward the end of her life, Oma from Vinita was cheerfully senile, and would go on and on about all the wonderful things she’d done in her ninety-plus years. For example, she was under the impression that she’d ridden with Bob Hope (or Elizabeth Taylor or Marlon Brando) in a hot-air balloon over the Atlantic. Why not? “Wow,” I’d say, patting her desiccated hand, “you’ve had an incredible life, Oma.” But I rather doubt that Oma, even there at the end, would have believed that Scott was enrolled at the University of Hawaii.

  “Scott’s not enrolled at the University of Hawaii,” I said. “Scott will never be enrolled at the University of Hawaii.”

  Pause. “How do you know?” my mother asked, with genuine curiosity, as if I were privy to some special intelligence.

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d said it all a thousand, thousand times. One tried to be kind. “Mom, just call the registrar’s office. They’ll tell you. Or don’t. It doesn’t really matter, I guess.”

  “But how do you know . . . ?”

  For the next few weeks I considered calling the University of Hawaii myself and putting the matter triumphantly to rest, but then I forgot about it, and finally Scott spared us any further curiosity by getting arrested and going back to prison. He assured my mother it was a travesty of justice and asked her to contact the ACLU on his behalf.

  A YEAR AFTER Scott’s arrest, I was married in Scotland—the Isle of Mull, to be exact, populated almost entirely by sheep, whose company we preferred for that sort of thing. Mary looked lovely as we took our vows; there were rose petals on the coverlet back at our seventeenth-century inn amid the heathery hills of Dervaig. After a week of blessed isolation, we met my father and Sandra in London, where as luck would have it an International Bar Association conference was in progress. There were a few awkward moments—Sandra felt strongly that my wife should not have kept her name—but the worst seemed behind us.

  So we went home and pleasantly took up our lives. I resumed trying to write, and my wife entered a prestigious doctoral program. We began to talk about kids. When, rarely, a cloud scudded into my purview, I had only to remind myself that Scott was in prison and the sun would shine again, more or less.

  THEN SUDDENLY (though in fact three years had passed) he wasn’t. During an otherwise happy Christmas, my mother was contacted by a shyster Scott had hired. The man could get Scott out of prison, he explained, if we could arrange for him to leave Hawaii. Scott, of course, was eager to come home again.

  “Well, that’s easy,” I told my mother. “Just don’t pay for his plane ticket.”

  “But it’s his money!” she said. “How do you think he hired the lawyer?”

  As it happened Scott’s financial affairs were in good order, thanks to Marlies, who’d arranged for his monthly VA checks to be deposited into a high-interest savings account. Quite a bundle had piled up over the years, and what could my mother do now but fork it over? We quarreled hideously about it, and I invoked my old threat to wash my hands of them both. My mother’s position, as ever, was that somebody had to help Scott or he’d lose hope altogether. My position was that losing hope was good in Scott’s case; losing hope was sensible. But Marlies saw herself as the last buffer between a hopeless, desperate, possibly homicidal Scott and the rest of us—me, Mary, Burck, even Sandra. At length she confided that, indeed, Scott had often indulged in reveries of harming us: we’d betrayed and abandoned him, after all, and besides we were nonbelievers—his was the Sword of Righteousness and so forth.

  “Why don’t you notify the fucking authorities?” I asked her. “Call the warden in Hawaii and say he’s making these threats, for Christ’s sake! We don’t need you as a buffer!
We need iron bars! We need the Pacific Ocean!”

  But we needn’t have worried. The Scott who left prison in January 2003 was pretty much incapable of harming anyone but himself, and this he did promptly. The day after his release he fell from a third-floor storage compartment, bouncing off another compartment on his way down and, flailing to halt his fall, ripping large strips of skin off both arms. I daresay the process of sifting those pathetic belongings of his—the mad clothing, old magazines, dead letters, hospital supplies, crates of dusty audiotapes and whatnot—had been a melancholy business, and doubtless he’d gotten plastered in the process. Hence the fall.

  In Oklahoma City, bandaged like a mummy, he took a room at a motel in a seedy patch of neighborhood off Classen Circle: 19 DOLLARS A DAY, said the sign outside. WEEKLY RATES AVAILABLE. Our dear old high school was visible in the distance, like Gray’s Eton where ignorance is bliss. Here he spent almost ten thousand dollars in less than a month. His girlfriend Maryam called my mother and blubbered in that nebulous accent of hers, “He is smoking the crack all the time! He is trying to get me to smoke the crack!” Scott had apparently managed to segregate his crack-and-hustling life from his church-and-Maryam life over the years, but now the two blurred, and it must have been disconcerting for all concerned. At the motel Maryam found Scott with all sorts of derelict characters; Scott showed up for Sunday services at the Crossroads in a state of nattering lunacy. When, however, my mother arranged to meet Scott for lunch, she stopped by his motel room and saw nothing amiss but a few chaste beers on ice in the bathroom sink. Scott looked a bit gray in the face, a bit banged up, but otherwise seemed in decent fettle.

  “Oh, that goddamn Maryam,” she told me afterward. “Scott’s fine! Well, not fine, but I’ve seen him worse.”

  A week or so later Scott called her to say he was broke, utterly broke. “I don’t know,” he said over and over, in the same woebegone way he’d told my father, twenty-five years before, that he’d dropped out of NYU after less than a single semester. “I don’t know, Ma.” He wanted to live with her again. Turn over a new leaf. When she refused, he sighed but offered little argument; in that case, he said, he wanted to come over and pick up his stereo, his last valuable possession, which he’d left behind that day the cops had removed him from the premises. Marlies forbade him to come anywhere near her house, but arranged for her ex-boyfriend Dave to bring it to Scott’s motel.

  “What did he look like?” I asked Dave a few months later.

  Dave groped for words. He’d always been fond of Scott and vice versa. Finally he just shook his head and said, “I left there feeling very fortunate.”

  Scott had decided to become a preacher. For those who wonder where preachers come from, it might be interesting to know that there are actually training camps where one spends a month or so studying the Bible, practicing declamatory gestures, and perhaps learning a few financial rudiments—or so I imagine. Whatever the case, one emerges with a diploma, an official man of the cloth, all for a fee of five hundred dollars. Such anyway was the camp Scott planned to attend—and so far so good: he got almost eight hundred dollars for his elaborate stereo system and called our mother in a jubilant mood. He’d report to camp on Friday, he said, and within a month he’d be a bona fide fisher of men. Already he deplored the sinner he’d been in days gone by, to say nothing of his atheist mother and his whole atheist family—bound for the pit.

  By Friday his money was gone. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he told Maryam, begging her to buy him a bottle of gin and take him to a movie, any movie, anything to get outside of himself. She did as he asked; it would have been cruel to refuse; besides, she loved him. In the movie theater Scott drank the whole bottle of gin and commenced a kind of weepy muttering, so that people around him changed their seats or left the show altogether. A total stranger could see that Scott was drowning, drowned.

  On Saturday, a day late, Maryam dropped him off at preacher camp. She’d decided to loan him the five hundred dollars; she prayed God would intervene and make Scott a preacher after all—then, perhaps, they could be married. On Monday he was either asked to leave or took it upon himself to abscond with Maryam’s money. Anyway, he disappeared for a bit.

  I got the news from Marlies, who blustered against that worthless miserable sonofabitch and vowed never to trust him again. A few days later Burck called: “Any news of your brother?” he asked, with the usual wincing hesitation, and I told him the whole story—the preacher camp, the hocked stereo, the gin bottle, on and on. I told it for laughs, but my father didn’t laugh: Scott had yet to become a remote figure of fun in his eyes. When I mentioned the part about the moviegoers recoiling from poor old boozy Scott, my father seemed to stifle a gasp, as if he’d been knifed.

  Scott resurfaced on Valentine’s Day, when he gave our mother a call. The moment she heard his voice she let loose a typhoon of abuse, until finally, her anathemas exhausted, she waited for the usual ingenious rebuttal. But there was none. Silence.

  “. . . Scott? You there?”

  He breathed. He was there.

  At last she said, “Well, anyway, it’s Valentine’s Day. C’mon, I’ll take you to lunch.”

  They met on a street corner near a place where my mother liked to get dim sum. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but Scott was homeless again and wearing what remained of his wardrobe in layers. This created an impression of bulk. Once they sat in a booth, though, my mother got a good look at her son, or what was left of him—the bony face that even she could no longer wish back to health. Its sallowness bespoke a failing liver, and the eyes leaked weary tears, one after the other, catching in a grayish beard and plopping wearily, at length, onto his plate. One after the other. Scott pushed his food around and wept.

  For once my mother was at a loss. “Scott,” she said, “you need help.”

  He nodded, then buried his face in a napkin and tried to pull himself together. He let out a shuddery sigh—shew-ew-ew—blew his nose into the napkin, and said, hardly a whisper, “I know, Ma.”

  She offered to take him to a hospital, but he only shook his head. After a dull pause, again and again, she’d repeat some variation of the remark “You need help” and Scott would wispily agree. The upshot of the lunch was that she found him an apartment and paid the first month’s rent.

  That afternoon she called me.

  “He needs money!” she said. “He needs to eat! He’s dying! He can’t pay the heating bill!”

  On and on. I listened, amazed. “Where will this end?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know! We can’t just let him die!”

  But I detected, or thought I detected, a very faint inquisitive turn at the end of that statement—as in: “or can we?”—as though she were seeking permission or at least canvassing my viewpoint.

  “Let him go,” I told her. “Let him go, Mom.”

  But she couldn’t. “I can’t! Call your father!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know what to do!”

  And she burst into tears. So I called my father and explained this latest development. As he got older my father very rarely lost his temper, but a catharsis was long overdue where Scott was concerned.

  “He’s forty-two years old! Tell him to walk off a tall building!”

  I agreed, but pointed out that I lacked the moral authority or whatever to make my mother see it that way. Would he try? Burck sighed, calmed down: he would try. What was left of his love for my mother was little more than a rueful pang, but the very idea of this idle sickly wretch—his son—glomming onto an old woman was disgusting. It was disgusting.

  SCOTT MUST HAVE agreed, since he dropped out of sight again. He also seemed to agree with the whole tall-building motif. Around this time he took an elevator to the top of Fifty Penn Place—a sentimental journey of sorts, as this was the building where he used to dangle from the horizontal flagpole—only to find the rooftop door was locked nowadays, possibly because of his own antics twenty years before. I
heard about this later from Scott’s friend Thomas, the musician/waiter, who’d since moved away from the city (leaving Scott all the more desolate). One day Scott had called Thomas and mentioned the fact that he was trying to kill himself but being thwarted by stupid shit like locked doors.

  “Fifty Penn Place isn’t the only tall building in Oklahoma City,” Thomas pointed out.

  “Yeah, but it’s the only one nearby,” said Scott. “I’d have to take a bus downtown, you know? Pay a buck. Fuck that.”

  Surely such acedia was a matter of comic hyperbole. Thomas laughed. Scott laughed. It was a fun conversation. At one point Scott said something like “I’m a double felon and my fucking back hurts all the time. I look like shit. I’m totally unemployable. Nobody wants to see me anymore. What would you do if you were me, Thomas?”

  “Talk about a rhetorical question!” his friend laughed. Then he hastened to add that he was joking, of course, and urged Scott to seek help at the VA.

  Scott did not seek help, until one night he was arrested again. My mother called the station and learned he was charged with breaking and entering; also he’d spat on the arresting officers and gotten a good beating in the bargain.

  SCOTT WENT OUT with a certain bravado. The chastened ghost who’d pushed bits of dim sum around his plate on Valentine’s Day was, during the last weeks of his life, nowhere in evidence. As always my mother kept tabs on him at the county jail—a ghastly place—where he was, by all accounts, a real live wire: he talked back to guards and prisoners alike, was roundly pummeled, and finally was placed in solitary for his own safety.

  To the end my mother believed that if only Scott could stop drinking and drugging, he’d become a productive citizen. She always made a point of saying so when she spoke to him on the phone.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Scott would reply, and one night he told her to go fetch a pen. Sulkily he began dictating a suicide note. The tender bits were all for Maryam; what he had to say to us, Burck and me, was loving but defiant: “I miss your pagan asses.”