* * *
—
I had always known the way the story ended: my father, gazing up at the sky as Cher Ami made her final flight; the buzzer sounding in the pigeon loft at division headquarters; a Signal Corps officer peering in to see which of the little birds had arrived; his finding there none other than little Cher Ami…Imagine! It was nothing less than a miracle! Shot in the chest, blinded in one eye, and covered in blood, she still carried her message.
I had, countless times, heard my father conclude the story in the following way: “And so at last our voices were heard, and we were delivered”; had heard him proclaim, therefore, the proximity between ourselves and God (whose judgment, he vowed, would soon be upon us). I had as many times heard him promise salvation to all those possessed of the courage and strength, like the forty-six men of the 307th and 308th Infantry, NOT TO SURRENDER. And yet I had not, until that moment, realized…I did believe. I, too, was one of my father’s faithful.
But it wasn’t only belief that I felt then. It was more than that.
I saw it. I felt it. The combined judgment of heaven and hell as it entered me, and just in that exact moment, I heard a voice outside and it spoke, saying, “We know you are in there, you son of a bitch.” And then the light by which we were illuminated burst in upon us, rending a gaping hole in the side of the tent. We smelled the canvas as it began to burn.
From behind, my father gave both my brother and me a shove.
“Run!” he shouted.
Hand in hand, we ran. We could hear the steady rhythm of our father’s breath as he followed, and I didn’t know if I was running away from him or from the light, or from God himself. When finally we stopped, however, neither my father nor God were anywhere to be found, and I realized that the heavy, winded breathing that had chased me down the hill had been my own.
All night we crouched, my brother and I, in the cold grass, which, as darkness gradually faded with the first light of day, became wet with dew. The dew gathered on our eyelids, on our bare elbows, on the ends of our noses, and we shivered and shook as though, indeed, the final judgment had come.
But in fact it was only the dampness of another early morning, rising almost exactly like the last.
MAVIE DOYLE HAD LIVED IN GRAND ISLAND, NEBRASKA, her whole life, until, in January of 2003, her son, Fred, who had made his name in real estate in the late nineties, left New York and bought a sprawling house in a quiet suburb just outside Old Saybrook, Connecticut. It was at this time that Fred Doyle invited his mother to live with him in a small, self-contained unit located on the western edge of the property.
To say “invited” is not perhaps quite accurate, however. As with everything Fred did, there had been no room for negotiation. He had simply announced the move to his mother over the phone one Sunday afternoon during one of their weekly chats—which Fred, bless his heart, had never neglected. Not even during the heady days of his initial success with Doyle and Sons—the company he’d managed to get off the ground back in 1994, on little more than (as Mavie always put it, proudly) a wing and a prayer.
Fred had been only recently out of law school then, and everyone else was still reeling from the hard blow of the recession. He’d been a late bloomer; had frittered away most of his twenties and was now almost entirely unable to account for them. But, still, he’d managed to land a spot at St. John’s Law School, and was able to pay for it himself, with the last of the fairly sizeable sum he’d inherited from his father. Usher Doyle, an oilman, had left Texas sometime in the early fifties for Nebraska—though no one, including Mavie, had known why. It had been almost “certifiable,” Mavie had said at the time. Now she said, smugly: “Foresight surely ran in the family.” Though he never lived to see it, it made both Mavie and Fred sentimental to see how the money was now flowing into the state—just as quickly and as plentifully as the oil flowed out.
Four years at law school had taught Fred to declare that there was no future in law—that it would be wiser to get into real estate. He sold off what was left of his father’s claim, and didn’t lose too much sleep over it. By the time Mavie came to live with him in Connecticut, there was nothing left but the old Grand Island house—a modest enough two-storey on a residential street that eventually sold well below market value. (But that was just fine, Fred told her, because everything else—including the scattered holdings up in western Nebraska that Usher had bought the year Fred was born, on spec—had sold at a significant profit.)
The important thing, after all—as Fred always said—was not knowing when to get in, but when to get out. In 2003, everything was telling him to get out. It was the Towers, for one thing, he said, his big head waving a little from side to side as he spoke and looking like (if he were physically capable of doing so) he might even cry. Fred had never cried in his life; he was pretty sure it was genetic—a tear duct issue. His father had once mentioned something to that effect. You see, it was from his father, Usher Doyle, that Fred had “inherited” his interest in the subject of genetics. It was a natural inclination; a way of addressing (Usher, and then Fred, always said) some of life’s most basic, and most pressing, questions. A way of feeling (and here Fred’s voice, as he repeated his father’s words, would catch slightly in his throat, though he still wouldn’t, or couldn’t, cry) the way that, though it didn’t often seem it, everything was connected somehow.
Fred was childless. By the time he and his wife, Bea—whom he’d met in his first year of law school and married a year after that—pulled up and moved from New York to Connecticut, they had been trying for nine years. When Fred graduated and immediately launched Doyle and Sons, the name had been an optimistic gesture. Later on, however, he emphasized its success as a marketing ploy. “People like” (he’d told his wife, and anyone else who asked) “continuity. If I just say to you, Fred Doyle, what do you care? You want to know, who is this Doyle? What happens when he’s gone?”
Bea had been twenty-seven when they married. Nine years later, she was thirty-six and beginning to lose hope. “You are two healthy individuals,” one doctor after another had told them. “These things sometimes just take a little time.” Fred had done his best to console his wife, but as the years passed it became increasingly difficult, and he could not get it out of his head that she blamed him a little—even though she was careful to say that she didn’t.
Fred was certain it would do Bea good to get out of the city. “The fresh air,” he said. “All that space…”
But Bea did not want to move. She was happy in the city, she told Fred. Though she knew that this was technically incorrect. In truth, she was simply afraid that she would be more unhappy in the country, with nothing but Fred and Mavie and a bunch of fresh air.
But officially, if anyone asked, Fred always said they had moved out of town because of the Towers. They just made me rethink everything, he said. From a real estate perspective, if nothing else. “I had to ask myself,” he’d say, “where is the future?” in a way that made whomever he was speaking to feel, for some reason they probably couldn’t even identify, suddenly very sorry for Fred Doyle.
There was just something about him. Even at the zenith of his real estate career, when things could not have been going any better, you couldn’t help feeling a sort of pity for him. The sort of pity you might feel for a caged gorilla. Because despite—or because of—anything he said out loud, you knew he was always acting on pure animal instinct. That it was all about self-protection—and fear. You could almost see his hackles raised, for example, as he went about quietly selling Doyle and Sons and making arrangements for the purchase of the Old Saybrook house.
But even with all of his obligations in the city, he had managed a trip out to Nebraska, to help his mother pack. The house had become something of a museum over the years, in homage to Mavie’s personal family history. The walls were plastered with ancestral photos, all of which had been blown up at least several times their original size so that they appeared pointillist, nearly abstract. The
faces of the relatives on both sides of the family had been so blanched of detail that it was nearly impossible to tell them apart.
That’s where the stories came in. Mavie talked endlessly, given even the slightest opportunity. About her parents: John MacArthur, a Scot who had landed in Boston but almost immediately made his way west. And a certain Josephine Aiken, by some reports a mute. It was only (Mavie later said) that she didn’t speak to strangers. In fact, some of Mavie’s earliest memories were of her mother singing. Less a memory than a physical trait. She could still feel those songs, Mavie said. Inside her. Ancient Omaha songs; nearly tuneless, and in a language she couldn’t understand. “But that voice!” she would say, closing her eyes as though she were hearing it still.
It was always convincing. Watching Mavie remembering the songs her mother sang to her as a child would almost make you think you remembered them, too. In fact, Mavie had had some success in her youth as an amateur actor. Even through the hard years after Fred’s birth—through a series of miscarriages and subsequent “nervous complaints.” She would often become disoriented, actually begin to behave differently, dress in other people’s clothes. She would put on the ancient headdress that had somehow come into her possession, and slip into something of a trance.
The headdress had been passed down to her from her grandfather, Mavie said—an Omaha chief. The fact that the headdress was not actually Omaha did not trouble Mavie particularly. It was a fact that had first been pointed out by Fred, at the age of only ten, after returning from a class trip to the local museum. When Fred told his mother that the headdress was not Omaha in style, and even looked it up in a book in order to prove it to her, Mavie had merely shrugged. She was proud of him for having an inquiring mind, but there was an awful lot—she said—you couldn’t learn in a book.
Especially after Usher died, Mavie’s ancestors developed even more of a presence around the house. Where once, for example, the story of Grandma Josephine’s Omaha lineage had been vague enough for Usher to have pronounced it, once, little more than a euphemism for her having always been “a little strange,” over the years it became increasingly concrete. The “museum pieces”—at one time mere decorative objects, which had helped to create in the house a certain whimsical mood—likewise developed concrete, if shifting, historical explanations and roots. Aside from the headdress, the most impressive item by far was a nearly life-sized cigar store Indian, which for some reason that no one remembered had been nicknamed Major Stokes.
Mavie Doyle had been pretty heavily medicated since the early 1980s, and still dutifully took her prescribed dose of lithium every morning with her breakfast cereal, so—though she hadn’t actually become her ancestors in a long, long time, and her medical treatment kept her just this side of genuinely daft—she liked to be surrounded by her “people.”
By the time Fred arrived to help his mother pack, it was difficult to move in the house without bumping into a museum relic. This seemed fairly deliberate on Mavie’s part, because every time Fred did so—as he edged his way around an end table piled with turquoise jewellery, for example, or brushed against a wall hung with tapestries and beadwork and the two or three genuine Remington sketches she had somehow managed to acquire—Mavie would launch into each object’s long history.
On the couple of occasions Bea visited, she and Fred would catch one another’s eye as Mavie spoke. It was a rare pleasure for the two of them to exchange a look like this. To demonstrate with a raised eyebrow or a shrug that they were in agreement on at least this one thing: they didn’t believe—and had never believed—a word that Mavie said.
When Fred visited with Bea, he never interrupted his mother when she spoke. The two of them would listen patiently—eyebrows raised—as Mavie told them, for example, the story of her great-grandmother, a Navajo princess who had been kidnapped three times: once by the Mexicans, and twice by the Americans. Each time, her great-grandmother—Navajo princess and warrior—had escaped. She had trekked hundreds of miles, and slept in trees; she had fended off jaguars; collected rainwater in the seams of leaves; had even, briefly, been adopted by a pack of wolves.
* * *
—
It was not as difficult as Fred had initially thought it might be to persuade his mother to move. The biggest hurdle was convincing her that not all of the museum “artifacts” could be moved into the Old Saybrook unit—that the bulk of the collection would have to be placed in storage. Then deciding which ones. Of course, getting rid of anything was absolutely out of the question, and Fred knew enough not to even bring it up. The items were—as they had always been—“for the grandchildren.” Mavie was apparently untroubled by the long period of time that Bea and Fred had so far remained childless and continued to speak of the grandchildren without batting an eye.
When Fred explained to Bea why they’d be paying a monthly storage fee on top of the cost of moving Mavie to Connecticut and caring for her in their home, Bea wondered seriously if Fred had also gone mad. She had been on her way out of their nearly empty Park Avenue kitchen, but now she stopped—turned. From Fred’s perspective, with the light coming in from the curtainless window, setting her thin figure in stark relief, she appeared almost two-dimensional.
“Fred,” she said slowly, “we don’t have any children.” Then, just in case he really didn’t understand: “There won’t”—her voice faltered, but remained firm, almost cruel—“be any grandchildren, Fred.”
* * *
—
Instinct, Mavie called it. Like his father before him, Fred had always had “good instinct.” For example, when he pulled out of real estate and moved his family to the quiet community of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the market was less than two years away from completely bottoming out. Even the country’s top economists had failed to see it coming, and it would become a great mystery afterward how no one but Fred Doyle had bothered to contemplate the internal limit to economic growth, until it was far too late.
When the crash did come, and everyone else was trying desperately to get out from under, Fred had already been living in Old Saybrook for going on five years, and Mavie—well settled in her adjacent apartment—was talking proudly of how her entire legacy would very soon be passed on to Rebecca Doyle, the adopted Chinese daughter of Fred and Bea.
Rebecca had been twenty-two months old when Bea and Fred brought her home; now, at nearly four, she delighted in her grandmother’s collection. She was especially fond of placing the headdress (once worn by her great-great-grandfather, an Omaha chief) on her head and peering out from under it with a four-year-old’s self-conscious grin. “That will go directly to you one day,” Mavie would say, taking evident pleasure in the fact that the headdress would bypass Fred (and, in this way, making it for the first time absolutely clear that Fred’s comment, at the age of ten, which Mavie had brushed off blithely and never mentioned again, had in fact deeply wounded her).
For all of them, then, Rebecca signified a new beginning. But it would be wrong to assume, based on this, that things had become easy between Fred and Bea. In fact, tensions in the household rose to an all-time high immediately after Rebecca’s arrival, then remained that way. To make matters worse, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the line between fantasy and reality, if it ever existed for Mavie, had disappeared entirely. This was not the first time this had happened, of course, but at her age, Fred reflected, it would no doubt be the last.
All of Mavie’s earlier “breaks” had occurred while Fred had still been in grade school, and it was entirely possible—as Bea pointed out more than once—that every strategy Fred had so far developed in life had been in reaction to that difficult period when his mother had made a fairly regular habit of losing her mind. Even his inability to cry, for example, may have been, she suggested, rather than a genetic trait handed down from his father, merely an adaptive response.
Fred was forced to consider the idea again one day when, in the middle of an especially tough therapy session with Bea, he
touched his face and found it suddenly wet. He was so surprised that he almost laughed—but the laugh was so mixed up with whatever else he was feeling that it came out less like a laugh and more like an ugly sob.
So his tear ducts worked! He felt an immense sense of relief—then a strong desire to share that relief, and whatever else was occurring inside him (perhaps somewhere deep in his cellular structure), with his wife. But when, still sobbing, he looked up at Bea, he saw that she was looking back at him with a look of such pure disgust that it sent actual shivers up and down his spine, and made him cry harder—now from a deep sense of shame that he didn’t understand.
They drove home silently—Bea in the passenger seat. She had her head turned slightly, so Fred couldn’t catch her eye. It was a sunny June day, but the tinted window she gazed out of made everything look slightly grey.
Fred thought of Rebecca. Sitting in Major Stokes’s lap at home, listening to Grandma Mavie’s impossible stories—completely unsuspecting of the unspoken violence that had found its way into her parents’ lives. A violence that—Fred understood in that moment—had already begun to quietly eat them up from the inside.
They wouldn’t leave one another, Fred thought quickly—no. Neither one of them would ever have the courage. They would instead let whatever had begun to eat away at them continue to do so until one day, many years later, they would wake to discover that nothing held their lives together at all.
Tiger, Tiger Page 14
