The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  “So I’m going to hell,” I said, when my mother told me as much. “Does this mean he’s finally going to kill himself, or what?”

  My mother deplored my flippancy—“Nuh!”—adding that the note had actually been dictated a week or so earlier and Scott was still alive as far as she knew. So perhaps he’d changed his mind.

  He hadn’t changed his mind. In fact he was waiting for an apt occasion—Good Friday, as it happened, though I’m not sure whether Scott identified more with the martyred Christ or the “good thief” Dismas (“today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”). In any case, just before midnight, he made a slipknot out of his sheets and strangled himself in bed. Efforts to revive him were unavailing.

  MARLIES LIKES TO tell of how she got the news that night, as it appeals to her love of both the macabre and the scatological. She’d just woken up with terrible stomach cramps when the phone rang. She knew it was bad news; she knew it had something to do with Scott; but such was the urgency of her condition that she had to grab the cordless with one hand, staggering, and fumble at her panties with the other. She’d just exploded on the toilet when the chaplain said, “I’m afraid I have bad news, Mrs.—”

  “And I think he must have heard something,” said my mother, “since he sort of hesitated, you know? Then he asked me to pray with him. He asked me to get down on my knees. So I said ‘Okay, go ahead,’ and the whole time I was straining at stool.”

  Then she bursts out cackling, beet red in the face, subsiding at last with a pensive sigh. “Ah God,” she says, dabbing an eye. “Poor Scott.”

  I didn’t get the news until the next afternoon—this from my kindly aunt Kay. The phone rang, and I let the machine get it. “I was just calling to say how sorry I am about Scott,” she said, and I picked up the receiver.

  “What about Scott?” I asked, though I knew then and there he was dead.

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well. I’m terribly sorry, sweetie. He, well, he killed himself last night.”

  “He did? How?”

  She told me. At the time everyone thought he’d hanged himself; it was only later, after my mother had gotten the autopsy report, that we learned the actual details. But at the moment I pictured Scott dangling in his cell (when in fact he’d been recumbent), and while the image had pathos, I wasn’t quite moved to tears by it. My tenderhearted aunt, though, had begun to sniffle—she hadn’t expected to be the one to break the news—and by pausing a lot and sort of groping for words, I was able to convey a semblance of devastation.

  After that I called my mother. At the moment she was sitting on the porch with Burck; Sandra had brought him over and left the two alone so they could commiserate about their dead son. Burck sounded composed in a sort of gloomy, irascible way. On the one hand, I think, he wanted to succumb to a seemly grief, while at the same time he was damned if he’d embarrass himself over someone like Scott. I felt rather the same way—if less so—and our talk was awkward and brief.

  My wife wouldn’t be home for a few hours, and I didn’t see any reason to spoil the rest of her day. I went about my afternoon as usual. I took the dog for a walk and tried to think about Scott, but I could only conceive of his suffering in the abstract: he must have felt ill, of course, smothered in aches and pains, and utterly alone in the world (except for Jesus and Maryam); meanwhile his depression would have been worsened by withdrawal from drugs and alcohol. It must have been pretty awful, I thought, but that’s about as far as I got.

  Later I sat in my study looking through an old photo album. There we were as children, Scott a bit more handsome than I and well aware of it. Again I noticed the complacence with which he regards me in these photos, as though he’d pegged me as a good enough egg but not really to his taste, and certainly not a threat. And I, sitting there at my desk, viewed the comely juvenile Scott with like detachment; the sad part was that I didn’t remember him very well. He’d been eclipsed by the later version.

  I was still sitting there when Mary came in to kiss me, and by way of explaining the photo album I said, “My brother hanged himself in jail last night.” I’d always been dismissive of the whole subject, and I’d meant to make this a rather casual, even callous announcement. But instead I began sobbing and couldn’t stop—as if my wife’s decency had infected me and suddenly I felt the force of Scott’s suffering in this world. Or maybe it was just hearing myself say those terrible words.

  The rest of the night I lay on a couch sniffling and sipping gin. I was aware of my wife in the other room, hearing me sniffle and feeling sorry for me, which made me feel all the more sorry for myself but a little disgusted too. It occurred to me that I was thinking more about how sad I seemed than about Scott, who at his best would have laughed at that, or maybe not.

  SCOTT WAS CREMATED, and a couple of months later my mother held a funeral of sorts in the pet cemetery behind her house. We had discussed, the night before, how things should proceed. My mother wanted me to read Prospero’s speech from The Tempest (“Our revels now are ended”), but I thought it a hackneyed idea and even in doubtful taste, given the debased nature of Scott’s revels. Instead I wanted to read Rupert Brooke’s “Clouds,” which was elegiac without relating to anything too specific Scott-wise. I read it aloud, and Marlies let it pass. She insisted I also read I Corinthians 13, since Scott himself had requested that passage for his obsequies, the better to chide us from beyond the grave for lacking charity—which, as St. Paul would have it, “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “We didn’t ‘endureth’ every bit of his bullshit so now he’s dead, is that it?”

  “This is Scott’s funeral,” said my mother. “I think his voice should be heard.”

  So finally I agreed to read it, as long as I got to keep my Rupert Brooke poem. That night my mother also showed me the various funeral accoutrements: the wooden urn that Dave had lovingly carved and polished, Scott’s ashes inside (a lot of gravelly bone meal for the most part); the airbrushed portrait of Scott as a sternly handsome marine (“If only he’d stayed in the marines!” my mother sighed); the little pawpaw tree that would be planted at Scott’s grave and fertilized with his ashes. Marlies had gotten as many as fifty cards and e-mails from old family friends who’d known and loved Scott as a child. They’d heard his life was troubled, of course, but it’s a strange leap from the fussy, precocious little man Scott had been, once upon a time, to the weary bearded lunatic who’d killed himself in jail. When you look at it that way—the one and then the other—life seems a terrible thing.

  The funeral was a nice occasion. One of Scott’s childhood friends, Kent, was summoned from the ether of almost three decades to give a eulogy. He was meant to represent a more innocent time in Scott’s life—also, my mother liked to point out that any number of Scott’s old friends had found him wonderful, essentially wonderful, whatever his vagaries and chronic bad luck. My rebuttal to this part of her vast apologia on the subject of Scott was that such old friends—Todd the Tortoise, Maryam, Thomas, various church people my mother had met—were every bit as fucked-up as he, albeit some more subtly than others. Kent, then, was Marlies’s way of settling my hash on that point: after an admittedly misspent youth—much of it spent with Scott—Kent had gone on to become a successful chef, indeed had moved back to Oklahoma City recently to open his own restaurant; and though he’d been out of touch with Scott for many years, he continued to think of him fondly.

  If the world were a stage and Scott’s life a play, the dramatis personae would be a large and various menagerie—but in the end there was only a single boyhood chum and family, the least exasperated of whom (my wife) had never met Scott. My uncle Richard had come all the way from Germany, where he’d last seen Scott as a slaphappy drunkard of eighteen. In his baritone broken English, Richard told me that he’d had to knock Scott on his ass a few times, but clearly he’d never given up hope that he
and Scott would be reunited in this life amid a lot of beer and laughter. One of the most poignant sights that day was Richard with his loud painted necktie, dashing away tears like a disappointed child and frowning with furious dignity. Also present were my aunt Kay and her husband, a retired army colonel, both of them kindly people who had tried to keep in touch with Scott, at long distance, almost to the end. The whole thing bewildered them. They’d never known Scott to be vicious or stoned or mendacious: as a child he’d been delightful, and as an adult he’d been little more than a diffident voice on the telephone or a card that came twice a year. My father, meanwhile, arrived inscrutably cheerful; Sandra wore a chic mourning outfit, the main flourish of which was a wide beribboned black hat. While we all stood around sipping wine (“since Scott was such a tippler,” my mother reminded us), Dave walked back and forth, yeomanlike, setting up the gravesite: the urn, the portrait, the pawpaw tree.

  At last we settled in our little semicircle of chairs, in the twinkling leaf-scattered sunlight of a late June morning, and listened to Kent’s eulogy. He got off to a bad start, piously proclaiming that if anyone felt any guilt or “negativity” over Scott’s death, he or she “should just let it go.” My father’s vague amiable smile hardened a little. But Kent rallied. Basically he’d brainstormed every good thing he could remember about Scott, typed it all up, and haphazardly rattled off the high points. He nicely elided every hint of the sordid, and even managed to be touching there at the end.

  “Whatever Scott did or didn’t do,” he said, folding his notes with trembling fingers and cramming them into his pocket forever, “I want you to know he loved you all. He always talked about how proud he was of his family.”

  I doubted whether Kent had known the later Scott well enough to say he “always” talked about one thing or the other—but alas, it was a fair assumption that Scott’s love for us had, in fact, never quite failed. He possessed, at bottom, a loving heart.

  Next were my readings from Corinthians and Rupert Brooke, and I was determined to be every bit as unflappable as my father, who smiled at me with blank amiability as I stood next to that portrait of Lance Corporal Bailey. All but winking, I informed our fellow mourners that my first reading had been chosen by Scott himself—and I daresay that, yes, we could hear his voice in the charge that one was “nothing” without charity. So that was done. Before I read “Clouds,” I explained that Brooke had meant to evoke the perspective of the trenches—clouds, to wit: the last thing of nature a soldier in the Great War was likely to see. Then I began to read. At the following lines, though, my voice cracked and crumbled:

  They say that the Dead die not, but remain

  Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.

  I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,

  In wise, majestic, melancholy train,

  And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,

  And men . . .

  It was hard to go on. At the moment it seemed rather likely that Scott would spend eternity in some cloudy limbo, watching us all, the way he used to skulk around strange houses in the middle of the night and stare at family photos on the wall and wish . . . God knows what. I gave my father a helpless look, but his smile had faded like an old poster on a ruined wall. Finally I managed to gasp

  . . . coming and going on the earth.

  and returned red-faced to my chair. My wife rubbed my back, and Sandra, touched, came over and gave me a hug that made her hat fall off.

  Finally we each scooped a bit of Scott’s ashes into the hole Dave had dug for the pawpaw tree. It was planted next to a little plaque that gave Scott’s name and the legend:

  United States Marine Corps

  Born 1960

  Died 2003

  Next to Scott was the grave of Rosebud, his favorite cat. Rosebud alone had never let on that she minded his incessant, boozy stroking.

  My father slipped away as the rest of us headed back to the house, and nobody went looking for him. Maybe twenty minutes later he returned for the feast my mother had prepared with Kent’s help. Smiling again, he took his place at the table and began eating with good appetite, as did we all.

  FOR A FEW months after his death I thought a lot about Scott, and sometimes I’d cry a little as I remembered reading those lines from Rupert Brooke. Part of me knew such sentiment was maudlin and all for myself—the bereft little brother who could have tried harder—and I’d take a deep breath and think of other things. A better kind of mourning was the times I’d laugh at something and realize that Scott, and perhaps Scott alone, would have laughed too.

  It strikes me as odd that I never once dreamed about Scott after his death. Marlies reports the same phenomenon, and it’s a lot weirder in her case. She tells me that every other day or so she visits her pet cemetery and sits on the bench next to Scott’s pawpaw tree, chattering at him. Whimsically she invests him with the supernatural powers of the dead: “You were a pain in the ass when you were alive, Scott,” she notes fondly, “so tomorrow I want you to give us a little rain. My herbs are dying!” Mostly, though, she scolds him for his conspicuous absence from her dreams: “Why don’t you ever visit?”

  “Does he ever answer?” I asked her one day.

  “No,” she said. She sipped her martini and stared at a hummingbird droning at a feeder there on her porch. “I think he’s in a place where he just doesn’t think of us anymore.”

  And I remembered why I’d started crying as a child, thirty-odd years ago, in that paneled room at the back of my grandmother’s house in Vinita. Scott had just confided about his second family who lived in the other dimension, and then he’d added—without vindictiveness, as if he were simply stating a poignant, intractable fact—that someday he’d disappear into their loving arms forever.

  “You won’t even visit?” I sobbed.

  “No,” he said, holding my hand. “I’ll never come back.”

  acknowledgments

  This was not an easy book to write; indeed, it took about eleven years in all—during which, granted, a couple of hefty biographies intervened. Amid the many stillborn drafts, I would have been hopelessly stymied without the help of Matt Weiland, an editor of genius and one of the nicest guys I know. “Wow,” he’d say, in effect, whenever I presented him with the latest draft, “this is such an improvement, Blake. Now all you have to do is . . .” And so on, I know not how many times. Thank you, Matt, for the caress of your velvet goad.

  This is my first book with Matt’s employer, Norton, and so far it’s been wonderful. Sam MacLaughlin is a marvel of efficiency and tact; India Cooper is quite simply the best copy editor I’ve ever had (and I’ve been very fortunate in that respect). I also thank the many nice people who have responded so competently via Matt or Sam on points of design, marketing, and whatever else. I look forward to knowing each and every one of you by name.

  My thanks to David McCormick, whose services as an agent include being a superlative reader. A very busy man, he spent hours marking up these pages in their various forms, and meanwhile said nothing about the more lucrative work we might have been doing.

  My friend Michael Ruhlman was generous, as always, in his enthusiasm for this book, and it’s made all the difference. I’m a better writer and human being for knowing him, as I’ve said before and will certainly have occasion to say again.

  Claire Dederer wrote me a long and priceless critique simply because she’s an exceptionally nice person and so smart she has to do something with the overflow.

  Thanks to the dear old friends of my youth, who have remained friends over the years despite the vagaries recorded in this story, and despite (in some cases) their appearing in this story in whatever form. You know who you are, and you know I love you.

  My most heartfelt thanks, by far, to my family. At his best, my brother Scott was a very lovable man, and—in case I haven’t made this clear enough yet—he and I had a great deal in common, both for better and worse. I tend to laugh whenever I remember him nowadays, a
nd that’s not a bad compliment. As for my father, Burck, I hope I’ve captured something of his sweetness and decency, and I wish him nothing but happiness. Above all, I thank my long-suffering mother, Marlies, who disagrees with certain interpretive points in this book, and yet has been unfailingly helpful, loving, and loyal—to me, to everyone, always. She’s an heroic figure in my life, and I wouldn’t have made it without her.

  To my beloved Mary and Amelia: here we are. It’s lovely.

  also by blake bailey

  Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and

  Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson

  Cheever: A Life

  A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

  copyright

  Author’s Note

  Most non-family names have been changed, for the sake of both privacy and clarity (for example, to avoid confusion when two different people have the same name). In some cases, a few identifying details have been changed as well.

  Copyright © 2014 by Blake Bailey

  Excerpt from Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell, copyright © 1992 by Joseph Mitchell. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Yesterday When I Was Young” (“Hier Encore”). English Lyric by Herbert Kretzmer. Original French Text and Music by Charles Aznavour, © Copyright 1965 (Renewed) 1966 (Renewed) Editions Musicales Charles Aznavour, Paris, France. TRO – Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New York, New York controls all publication rights for the U.S.A. and Canada. Used by permission.

  Portrait of Bailey family by David G. Fitzgerald used courtesy of David McNeese.

  Photographs of Blake and Scott Bailey used courtesy of Marlies Bailey.

  All rights reserved

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