The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

“It was good advice, Joe. Now I have some for you. If you fly out to California you’ll not achieve what you want to. These trips, these sprees, the holing up — you think they don’t matter, but they do.”

  “Everything’s under control. The children don’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  He had never taken a drink in this house but he wanted one right now. Wanted the heft of the bottle in his hand.

  “Give them the winter in California. You stay here. You know and I know where we come from. You’re no Mick Heaney. Pull yourself together, brother. When I got back from France, there was nothing behind me but dead men and one balls-up after another, but we’re family men: we have to stay around, no running away. They’d shoot a man in the war, Joe, for running away. Write Iseult a clear letter; ask her what she wants and tell her you will do whatever’s best for her and the children. But no wild goose chase to L.A.”

  “I’ve lost everything, haven’t I, Grattan.”

  “Maybe.”

  Joe groaned.

  “It sure is a beautiful home you’ve made here, brother,” Grattan said.

  “It’s a grave without them.”

  “You can’t bend other people to the way you want them to be. I guess Iseult has had about enough.”

  “If I had a jug of coal oil I’d burn this place down.”

  “When you’ve had time to think, write her a letter.”

  His head ached. He still wanted to be on that plane and in that night sky.

  Grattan sat with legs elegantly crossed, tie perfectly knotted, and collar crisp, though it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Grattan’s clarity and calm, set against his own confusion, was upsetting the lifelong pattern of their relationship.

  His brother stood up, took the brass poker in his hand, and began to work the fireplace logs, pushing and airing them, kicking up more of a blaze. They had all of them been damn good at laying a fire. Growing up in the wild, in the bush, had taught them some things they would never forget.

  Gases released from the wood were snapping, groaning, and in that sound he could hear wagon wheels creaking and grinding, the hired wagon hauling them out of childhood so long ago. There were lessons he’d learned, but he hadn’t learned them all. He was plunging into his own dark water, like Grattan, drowning.

  SANTA BARBARA, 1931

  Sea and Seawall

  His mother had been vague and lethargic since Chicago, keeping to her bedroom on the Los Angeles Limited, not touching any food. At Cheyenne he noticed her breathing was rougher, and by the time they had reached Los Angeles there were dark circles under her eyes. She seemed to Mike to have lost any sense of purpose or strength of will, though when he asked if she wanted to see a doctor in Los Angeles and get an adrenaline shot, she refused strenuously, insisting they board the next train for Santa Barbara.

  It was a musty local that stopped at Glendale, Encino, Ventura, and Summerland, taking four hours to reach Santa Barbara. He organized the luggage and hired a pair of taxis to take them out to the house at Butterfly Beach, which had been closed since August. It was a sparkling southern California winter day, and the house, even after being shut up for five months, smelled cleanly of polished wood, cool stone, pungent eucalyptus. Iseult took off her shoes and stockings and wandered around the lawn and the flower-beds, perfectly maintained by the Japanese gardeners, while Frankie and Margo raced around reclaiming bedrooms and rediscovering clothes they had left in the closets.

  When Iseult finally came inside, she said she needed a bath more than anything in the world. Would he go down into the cellar, check the furnace, and turn on the boiler?

  While she bathed, Mike and Margo shook out sheets and blankets in the fresh air.

  “I know why we’re here,” Margo said. “She wants to stow us here so she can go to Reno and get a divorce.”

  At the sound of the word Reno he felt dismayed but tried not to show it. He knew Reno was a town, in Nevada. Was it the state capital?

  “We’ll probably all be excommunicated.” His sister was clipping one corner of a sheet to the line with a wooden clothes peg.

  “Ah, stuff it, Margo.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. Who do you think you are? Just because mother’s sick you think you can boss everyone.”

  “No, but somebody has to take charge.”

  “Doesn’t have to be you.”

  “Right. I can just let everything go to hell and see how you like it.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Together they shook out the rest of the sheets. He regretted his tone — he and Margo were usually allies, usually understood each other. He kept trying to get Reno out of his head but it kept coming back. It made him think of fire.

  Margo was heading inside with a bundle of sheets when he touched her elbow.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said sharply.

  “Look, I’m sorry, Margo.”

  “We’re never going to see our friends again. We’ll stay out here for good. We’ll never see Daddy again. He’s a drunk and she’ll be a divorcée.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s the truth.”

  He didn’t say anything. They were all very tired. If they started arguing, Margo would lose her temper. Then their mother would overhear, and she’d want to start talking about things none of them were in any shape to discuss.

  His mother was still in her bath, so he helped Margo make up the bed. She opened their mother’s trunk and shook out a nightdress.

  “It is the truth,” she finally said. She was near tears.

  Mike began building a fire in the fireplace. His sister watched for a moment, then took the nightdress into the bathroom, and a couple of minutes later their mother came out and slipped into her bed.

  “Do you want me to go into town and send a telegram to say we’ve arrived?” he asked her.

  “No, I don’t want you doing anything of the sort. Open the window, please, Mike, so I can hear the ocean.”

  They left her with her window open and a fire blazing. Going outside, he walked to the bottom of the garden and took the concrete steps down to the beach. A seawall fronted their property for fifty yards. It was at least thirty years old, and every year new cracks and fissures were patched and repaired. He rubbed his hand along its cement face. The wall was warped and bulging and sooner or later would have to be replaced. He remembered his father talking about getting the work done, but nothing had been accomplished so far. The old wall was practically rubble.

  For lunch Margo heated a tin of tomato soup and the three of them ate it in the kitchen, with stale pilot crackers and evaporated milk. Margo took a bowl upstairs and reported back that their mother was still asleep. “Getting a little spooky,” she said. “I feel like an orphan.”

  “What do you mean?” said Frankie.

  “Nothing,” said Mike. “It’s a joke. Finish your soup.”

  After lunch he let Frankie help him light fires in all the fireplaces, using chunks of oak that had been stacked in the coach house for as long as he could remember. Then they all went to their rooms for naps, and when he stretched out on his bed he thought he could hear the ocean licking at the base of the cement seawall, which signified a high tide. Winter was the season for Pacific storms.

  His sheets were still flapping out on the line. He lay on mattress ticking, hands clasped under his head, and imagined a winter storm, the waves breaking over the seawall and crashing onto the lawn. He’d often found shell fragments and knots of dried kelp on the lawn in summer, left over from the lashing winter storms. If a storm pounded hard enough it would crack the old seawall. Backfill, clay, sand, and topsoil would gully out and sluice into the surf, destroying the lawn and eventually exposing the foundations of the house itself, which must sooner or later start to crumble. He could always see to the end of things, and it was always the same: nothing held together all that long, nothing was permanent.

  An hour later he awoke and felt the s
waying of the train as if he were still aboard, steel wheels rumbling beneath the floor — then realized it was only the electric washing machine, which his sister had started up in the laundry room. Struggling out of bed, he tied his shoes and brushed his hair, then went to have another look at the seawall. It was definitely not in good shape.

  The next morning Margo telephoned the doctor, who came out to Butterfly Beach and gave Iseult an adrenaline shot. While Mike and the girls were eating lunch — more pilot crackers, with sardines, and more evaporated milk — the Mexican woman who’d been their housekeeper the previous summer appeared at the kitchen door. Mike told her she was hired and sent her off with the girls to put in a grocery order at the Montecito village store. Then he resurrected his old bike in the coach house, oiled the hubs and sprocket, and set off for downtown Santa Barbara.

  The Western Union office was on State Street near the station, but first he went into the chop suey café next door and ordered a cup of coffee. Sitting at the counter, scribbling on a paper napkin, he composed a telegram.

  WU SANTABARBARA CNCPMONTREAL

  3089883-14232 CNCP

  11 JANUARY 1931

  TO: MR. J. O’BRIEN

  O’BRIEN CAPITAL CONSTRUCTION LTD

  CANADA CEMENT BUILDING PHILLIPS SQ MONTREAL CANADA

  CABLE: WILDERNESS

  SAFE AND SOUND ALL FINE I’LL LOOK AFTER THINGS UNTIL YOU GET HERE LOVE MIKE

  When he knocked on her door the next morning and entered her room, his mother was sitting up in bed reading the Los Angeles Times. The headline was

  KWANTUNG JAP ARMY IN MANCURIA

  When he told her the seawall would not last much longer, she looked at him over the top of the newspaper. “What do you think ought to be done?”

  He said he could hire all the men he needed at the labourers’ shape-up on Nopal Street. The job would have to be completed during a period of neap tides between the new moon and a full moon. He figured five to six days for the job as long as there were no winter storms. All she would need to do was sign the cheques.

  She was looking at him but he couldn’t tell if she was really listening or understanding what he was saying. He was still a few days short of his seventeenth birthday. He had never built anything bigger than a radio set, but if they didn’t do something, and quickly, the wall, the gardens, the house — everything sheltering them could easily be destroyed.

  “My estimate came in at five hundred and nineteen dollars. That’s materials and labour — everything.”

  “How much will you pay the men?”

  “Three dollars a day for labourers. Four dollars for a finisher and a carpenter.”

  “Not very much.”

  “It’s the going rate.”

  “All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Build us a wall.” She went back behind the newspaper, the Kwantung, the Japanese army, Manchuria.

  He left her room feeling slightly delirious with responsibility and struggling for calm. Engineers ought to be precise and clear, and everything — everything — had to be worked out mathematically, with careful planning. It was just a goddamn wall after all, he told himself. It was no big thing.

  Their summer car, an old Ford station wagon with a wooden body, was up on blocks in the coach house. After changing the oil and spark plugs, filling the radiator and tires, and charging the battery, he drove to the shape-up yard at the bottom of Nopal Street, where he hired two Mexican day labourers and a concrete finisher. Bringing the men back to the house, he set them to work demolishing the old seawall while he started drafting his plan for the new one.

  The weather stayed clear and dry. The new wall was fifty yards long and seven feet high. The men he’d hired — Miguel Prieto, Guillermo Hernandez, Ruben Betancourt — worked hard day after day, and he hired a Mexican carpenter to supervise the building of the forms. They carefully laid planks across the lawn so the concrete mixer could back right up to the site without scarring the turf, and the pour took two days. The concrete was reinforced with steel rods and there were pipes and holes for drainage. The wall was thirty inches thick at the base, tapering to twenty-four inches, and incorporated a set of steps leading up from the beach. The steps were tied in and supported by sleepers, backfilled and buried on the leeward side.

  While the concrete was still setting up he took a sharp stick and carefully inscribed the workmen’s initials and his own on the top of the wall, and the date, 17th Feb 1931. It felt good to make his first real mark on the world, to build something solid and useful. No matter the weather, the seawall would protect them all.

  ~

  Mr. Spaulding, the lawyer, drove up from Pasadena to make arrangements for the two girls to attend Marymount School and Mike to enrol at Santa Barbara High. Spaulding wore a thick tweed suit and plus-fours. Frankie called him “Monkey Face.” After his wife died he had grown a long white beard, and his face was small, seamed, and brown from the sun. His daughters were married and living back east. He had resigned from the Pasadena Theosophical Society when it split into warring factions.

  After spending an hour upstairs with Iseult, Spaulding joined Mike and the girls on the porch for lunch. He even ate like a monkey, snatching rolls from the basket with little wizened hands, tearing the bread to pieces. He took quick sips of his lemonade, chomped a stick of celery, and didn’t say very much. Halfway through the meal Frankie got a bad case of the giggles, then Margo began to choke and snort. Finally both his sisters excused themselves and disappeared inside. He could hear them laughing, but Mr. Spaulding didn’t seem to notice.

  “I should like to have a look at this wall of yours, Michael.”

  They walked to the bottom of the garden. Spaulding sat on the grass, took off his brogues and thick woollen stockings, and followed him down the concrete steps to the beach. The tide was out. A flight of brown pelicans was skimming over the ocean.

  “You have your father’s talent for translating an idea into the material realm. Making it concrete, so to speak.”

  They stood looking at the wall, surf fizzing around their ankles.

  “It came in at just under five hundred dollars,” Mike told him. “Just about my estimate.”

  “Your father would be proud.”

  “My father probably would have done it for under four.”

  Mike looked at Spaulding. With his white beard, bright eyes, and hairy tweed suit, the little lawyer resembled George Bernard Shaw in a photograph Mike had seen in Time. He wanted to ask the lawyer if Iseult had said anything about a Reno divorce, but he was afraid that once it was mentioned it would seem inevitable.

  “I’m taking your mother up to Ojai this afternoon, Michael. There’s a remarkable man I’d like her to meet.”

  “A doctor?”

  Spaulding looked at him with curiosity. “Why do you say ‘a doctor’?”

  “Isn’t she sick?”

  “His name is Krishnamurti — he’s an Indian, a young man, a great teacher, a great soul. I’ve suggested that she photograph him; an image is needed to further his work.” The old man slapped the wall. “Lovely work here. Steadfast. Your father will be proud. And your dear mother and I had better get started.”

  Spaulding drove Iseult up to Ojai that afternoon in his old Lincoln convertible, and it was late, near midnight, when Mike heard them return. The next morning the lawyer rode the train back to Pasadena and left the Lincoln for her use.

  During their Santa Barbara summers she always spent a couple of afternoons a week at the free-milk clinic on Milpas Street, and with a couple of other Montecito women she collected produce from farms in Summerland and the Goleta Valley and distributed it at transient camps or gave it out to poor mothers at the clinic. On Wednesday evenings she visited women in the city police lock-up on De La Vina Street or at the County Jail, bringing them clothes and writing letters for them — but this year she wasn’t doing any of that.

  After that first trip, she started driving up to Ojai in the old Lincoln three or four days a week, and usually c
ame home wearing wildflowers in the buttonhole of her blouse. She said the dry, scented heat of the Ojai Valley made it easier to breathe. She took her cameras up there and told them she was photographing Krishnamurti at Arya Vihara, his house in Ojai, as well as the people who came from all over the world to take lessons from him.

  “What sort of lessons?” Margo asked.

  “Dancing lessons?” asked Frankie.

  “They want to learn to see things clearly, that’s all,” their mother said.

  “Are they learning the hootchy-koo?” asked Frankie.

  “Why must you go all the way up there so often?” Margo said.

  “The truth is a pathless land,” their mother said. Those words didn’t sound like her. What could she mean? Why did she have to speak to them using someone else’s words?

  She’d married their father when he was building a railway through the mountains. Did she really not believe in him anymore?

  WU SANTABARBARA CNCPMONTREAL

  3089883-14232 CNCP

  20 FEBRUARY 1931

  TO: MR. J. O’BRIEN

  O’BRIEN CAPITAL CONSTRUCTION LTD

  SUN LIFE BUILDING MANSFIELD ST

  MONTREAL CANADA

  CABLE: WILDERNESS

  SEAWALL $261.33 MATERIAL, $230 LABOUR, TOTAL $491.33. IT WILL STAND. LOVE MIKE

  ~

  S.B. High was much bigger than Lower Canada College. Mike had never before sat in a classroom with girls. The teachers were easygoing compared to the brittle young Oxford and Cambridge men who’d taught him at LCC, with their ferocious sulks and rages. Lessons in unfamiliar subjects — Civics, U.S. history — consisted mostly of childish fables, like tales from a storybook. Students slept in class. Sometimes teachers nodded off as well; everyone at S.B. High seemed willing to tolerate a lot of boredom. Perhaps the sleepiness was caused by the mild, sunny weather. Everyone assumed Santa Barbara to be the best place in the world.

  Anxiety pressed at his chest when he awoke in the mornings, but he finally had a routine: gathering his books, eating breakfast, starting the station wagon, driving into town. After dropping his sisters off at Marymount, he drove himself to school. On Saturdays he went for solitary drives up the coast or over San Marcos Pass into the Santa Ynez Valley, past cowtowns, ranches, and oilfields stuttered with steel derricks, pumps, and storage tanks. Sometimes he stopped for dusty hitchhikers — roustabouts, Mexican ranch hands, standing by the side of the road — but he really preferred being alone, driving fast with all windows down and the wind tearing in.