All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  That night, long after the Jacksons had departed, we had a quiet dinner in the house by the sea. My half siblings, my mother, my sisters, Dean, and me. It was very quiet that night. After dinner, we sat in the living room drinking coffee. When the phone rang, one of the half brothers went into the den to take the call. He returned to tell us our father had died. We all embraced, and it was as if the scene stopped, a freeze-frame shot. It was suddenly very still; the only movement came from the sea outside, the waves breaking, and the brush of fabric as we hugged. Silent whimpers. He had died alone while we ate, the day after the wedding. I still don’t know why he died alone, why my mother, who must have known it was the end, decided that we would eat dinner rather than sit by his bedside and hold his hand as his heaving gradually stopped.

  “Kids, your father is at peace,” my mother told us. She sighed. “Hope was gone.”

  The next morning, just as the caravan from Camden had arrived only days earlier, horns honking as they drove up the driveway to the house, two black limousines drove the same path, disgorging the family lawyer and his junior associate and in the following car a representative from the bank.

  Our family lawyer wore a three-piece black suit, pin-striped, summer weight, his Phi Beta Kappa key on a watch fob in his pocket. His teeth and fingers were yellowed, a result, judging from the smell, of years of smoking, and his hair so greased it did not move, even in the breeze off the ocean. The banker and the two lawyers all carried briefcases. The junior associate was a young woman about my age who sat on an upholstered chair in the living room in a tailored suit and stockings, with her ankles neatly crossed, taking notes as the lawyer spoke.

  The lawyer passed out copies of the will, and then he passed around pens with the law firm insignia along the side. He explained that it was customary that everyone sign something agreeing not to contest the will. He then passed us each a piece of paper with the signature line blank at the end.

  He spoke about what “John” had wanted, as laid out in his will. John this, John that. It was a lengthy preamble to whatever he was going to read, and I found myself wondering how this guy in the three-piece suit with the yellow teeth and hands and my father were on a first-name basis. Or was that what lawyers and bankers do when they are preparing to read a will to a client’s family. Set the family at ease? Or to imply they were so chummy that they knew firsthand what “John” really wanted? He also called my mother Pat, and she seemed to take that gracefully in stride. It seemed he was on the approved list for calling her Pat.

  The will had only one surprise in it. Which was that, instead of distributing my father’s wealth among his wife and seven children, my father left everything to my mother. Yet no one debated this at the time; we all signed quietly, obediently, all my father’s children, as the junior law associate stood over us, one by one, to collect our papers, the block heels of her sensible pumps digging into the shag rug as the pen scratched along the dotted line seven times. My mother, on her side of the couch, sat smoking as we signed, one leg crossed casually over the other, blowing long trails of smoke into the still air as her eyes followed the junior law associate move around the room. Just outside, seagulls skimmed the sky, landing on the lawn, raucously squabbling at each other.

  I wonder if birds talk like us, I was thinking as we were signing, if they fight like us, and we just don’t understand them.

  “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  “How come you never tell me that?”

  “I’m telling you now. I love you.”

  Maybe that’s what birds are saying in their own language, maybe they are having a lovers’ quarrel and we just don’t realize it. Maybe they are breaking each other’s hearts over and over again in the blunt flat light of the midmorning summer sun.

  Eventually the limousines departed, driving down the driveway into the second half of August. The tent from the wedding was down; the sprinklers hissed their arcs of mist over the lawn. The waves kept on coming. It was white flag at Georgica Beach down the way, meaning it was safe for swimming. There, young kids with boogie boards chased the surf, hurling themselves into the waves. Lifeguards took shifts sitting on the high wooden chair, keeping watch over the stretch of sand between the orange flags that delineated public-beach territory. The Good Humor truck pulled up to the edge of the tar parking lot, and a line of sandy children formed at its window, shifting from foot to foot on the heated tar as they waited their turn.

  The very first summer we lived by the sea, the Army Corps of Engineers had hauled dozens of old, rusted VW Bugs onto the beach and set them upside down in piles along the first dune, just past Georgica Beach. Juan Trippe, the Pan Am founder who lived down the road, had ordered the Bugs to be formed into a makeshift jetty as a defense against erosion. This first attempt to save the coastline, to keep the line of shingle-style cottages on the beachfront between Georgica Beach and Main Beach safe on the coveted first dune, worked for a while. The sand gradually built up over the cars, and so the eyesore of rusted junk heaped on the gentle sand dunes disappeared. As children, we fantasized about the lives of families who had driven those cars long before they were scrap metal used to ballast our homes. We’d find a fragment of a bandanna, ragged, coarse pebbles and sand embedded in its knots, and keep it in a shoebox along with our shells and chips of blue and green beach glass. We’d imagine it was the bandanna worn on the head of the mother of a family who had driven out to the beach on a fine summer day. We made up stories about the family, where they were from and what they ate as they picnicked by the waves. They drove out in a convertible Bug, we decided, and they drove from the city for the day. Their car was yellow. They had a radio and they sang as they drove. Beach Boys music. Maybe one of the kids wanted to be a surfer when he or she grew up, and kept a secret pile of surfing magazines in a box at the bottom of the bedroom closet. Maybe the mother was pregnant again, and soon there would be a baby sister or brother. Maybe they were going to visit the grandparents. Maybe they had a dog.

  Soon after they were first laid in the dunes, the VW Bugs were eclipsed by modern jetties, and the coastline where the strip of shingled cottage homes stretched out along the dunes appeared secure. The rusted Bugs, their service no longer needed, were to lie forever under the dunes, their existence known to fewer and fewer generations as time went on.

  Walking down the beach that afternoon, I thought of a line of scripture from John. My father was John.

  “Let not your heart be troubled,” the scripture read. I walked past the rows of shingled houses, past the house of the neighbor who had pitched himself into the sea, down past the beach where, deep underneath, the VW Bugs still held memories of distant families long gone.

  “Let not your heart be troubled . . . In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”

  X

  The Franklin Stories

  My father lived on in Franklin, in a box in my desk. The white legal-size envelopes with the barely legible penmanship, the stories typed on onionskin paper, the pages creased over time, the fold marks deep. If I wanted ever to hear his voice, I would open that box.

  An Encounter at “Ralph’s Rest”

  By John I. B. McCulloch

  It was a wet autumnal night in New York, and I had found no taxis available. Since my left leg (the arthritic one) was giving me an unpleasant time, I had managed to drop in at a few bars en route home to give my agony temporary surcease, before proceeding further.

  It was at the third bar, I believe, that I decided to risk a longer pause, and here I discovered two amazing things. One was that the name of the bar was “Ralph’s Rest,” which would seem to suggest a mortuary establishment rather than a hotbed of fun and games.

  The second thing I noticed was my companion on my right. To describe him as a slithery creature would be perhaps an injustice, but this was the first adjective that drifted into my mind. In any event, we were the only two customers that Ralph ha
d occasion to deal with that evening. The slashing rain that battered against the windows (its force had increased) was sufficient explanation for this.

  As we were the lone patrons, I felt it perhaps incumbent on me to attempt a small conversation, particularly since, of the two of us, I was the only one in a virtually erect position.

  “Have one with me? Can’t fly on one wing, you know,” I asked in my most amiable tone.

  Then I glanced at my bar mate, and blurted out, “Oh, I say, I am sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said wearily. “Happens all the time. But I do accept your offer.”

  “What will it be?” inquired Ralph, appearing suddenly from the wings.

  “Eight scotches and sodas please,” said our friend casually.

  There is really not very much further to tell about this particular encounter. The rain had abated, and since a young couple had just descended from a taxi, my drinking companion—having gulped down eight scotches—jumped into the cab and indicated to the driver eight different directions. The chauffeur departed with a pleased expression on his face.

  “Isn’t that dreadful?” said the young lady, whose name turned out to be Sheila. “He’ll take him to the Empire State, the Midtown Tunnel, Shea Stadium, Bloomingdale’s, and God knows where else, and triple charge him. That’s what they do to these visiting octopuses.”

  “Octopi, dear,” said her companion, whose name was, I believe, Sir Rodney Stedly-Smythe, who had apparently an almost morbid fixation with classical plurals.

  My Friend Franklin

  By John I. B. McCulloch

  Note: JJ dear, here is an installment of Franklin. I finally managed it.

  You’re getting too old for my stories, but as you keep asking for them, your wish is my command. But this is the last one I believe. With love and pride, Daddy

  It was some three days after I had last seen my new octopus friend entering a taxicab headed in eight different directions that our paths crossed again. I was on the same barstool at “Ralph’s Rest,” since my left leg was still aching, and no medical man in his right mind would have recommended further physical exertion in these circumstances.

  My friend—whose name, he now told me, was Franklin—drew up a stool next to mine, bringing with him a rather bracing ichthyne odor (I might possibly have coined this word). Franklin had, it appeared, done a Cook’s tour of Manhattan and escaped a taxi bill for seven hundred and fifty dollars by the simple expedient of going into Bloomingdale’s to buy a toothbrush, and emerging out the other entrance.

  Despite this triumph Franklin looked unhappy, and after he had consumed twenty-four Scotches (eight triples) I tried to draw him out.

  “It’s this damn social life,” he complained. “I may as well confess that I do not lead a totally celibate existence. Theodora (the metropolitan press insists on referring to her as my Constant Companion) is a great one for giving parties. Unfortunately, the CC is of my own species, with certain minor but fundamental differences, and she does not know her right flipper from her left flipper (she has, you will understand, a multiplicity of choices). Tonight, we are having for dinner both the Chilean Ambassador to Upper Volta, and the Turkish Ambassador to Outer Mongolia, and how we’re to seat them God only knows.”

  Franklin ordered another round of scotches (he had cut down to sixteen) and a reminiscent look came into his eyes.

  “Sometimes these things can be positively embarrassing. Once Theodora inadvertently put Dr. Walter Shadd, the eminent neurosurgeon, next to Miss Virginia Rowe, the authoress. The Shadd-Rowe combination caused our other guests considerable merriment (without which we could have easily done). And then, of course, there was the case of Sir Gilbert Prawn, KGBHQ2QED, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

  “Ambassador Prawn,” said Franklin, bolting down a potato chip, “had had his eye for some time on a young lady at the other end of the table, a Miss Esmeralda Curry who (I later ascertained to my dismay) was no better than she should have been. When the butler arrived with a steaming tureen of prawn curry, it was more than Sir Gilbert could resist and he swept Esmeralda (who was no better than she should have been) off into a waltz. This would have been perfectly correct, I suppose, except that the music had not yet begun. In any event, Esmeralda shortly suggested that they lie down, sorry, sit down, I meant to say. I have never understood whether it was the lack of music, or the fact that Ambassador Prawn kept massaging Miss Curry’s left buttock with an enthusiasm worthy of a nobler cause. Heaven knows how everything will end up this evening. CC’s parties usually result in total confusion. The Chilean Ambassador will probably land in Outer Mongolia and the Turkish Ambassador in Upper Volta. Their problem, not mine.”

  “One more round for the road, sir?” said Ralph, the barman.

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so,” said Franklin, “but only eight scotches this time. A wise man (or a wise octopus) knows when to taper off.”

  XI

  Going Back

  “Family business” is what my mother called it. She said it to each of us over the telephone, my half siblings, my sisters, and me, the long-distance wires crackling. “It’s high time we conduct our family business,” she said. When she wanted something, she knew how to get it. We agreed to gather in New York in June, ten months after my father’s death.

  On the ride to the airport, everyone was wrapped in their own individual fog, staring out the window of the car as if the expanse from the Midtown Tunnel to JFK, the dull sameness of the highway, was the most interesting thing in the world to look at. Finally, my mother broke the silent ride. “My neck knows we’re getting on a plane,” she said. “It’s already tightening up.” Then she asked Keith, “How many pieces?” This was a line of our father’s. It’s what he would say before we arrived at any airport. He was a zealot on the art of travel logistics. He loved making plane reservations and planning complicated flight connections. He’d call any airline at least three times to reconfirm our seats. His favorite was the baggage claim, when we’d have up to ten pieces, including a medicine chest, and along the way a laundry bag our father checked through to the next airport. He had a hanging bag for suits, a trunk for books, and three leather suitcases that he’d fill only halfway, one for underwear and shirts, one for shoes and bathing suits, and one for “toilet articles”—hair tonic, his prescription medication, razors and brushes and the like. A good many family hours were spent around baggage claim conveyer belts over the years, waiting for bags to emerge, often with long, empty lulls between sightings. When his laundry bag broke, as was often the case, the entire family and a baggage handler and driver had to scatter the length of the conveyer belt, darting in and out of the elbowing airport crowd to snap up loose socks and stray boxer shorts. So, when my mother asked Keith “How many pieces?” I knew she was thinking of him. Then she added, “I wonder, should we check him?”

  Keith had been put in charge of our father on this trip, and he’d been carrying his ashes all the way from the funeral home in Manhattan, where he’d gone to pick them up. Keith had our father in a white leather tote bag he’d brought from Florida for the occasion. He wouldn’t let any of us look in the bag, not even to see what the ashes looked like. “He’s in a plastic case,” he said, “you can’t see anything anyway,” pulling the bag closer. Catherine wanted to move our father into her knapsack. “He’d die if he knew he was in a white leather bag,” she told Darcy and me, but I couldn’t figure out how we’d do it, and I was not sure he’d care. He wasn’t a big one on clothing aesthetics; he just wore whatever our mother told him to, which was always blue. Blue suits, blue shirts, blue ties. “It brings out the blue in his eyes,” she would say, which was surely true. When I thought of him, I thought of his eyes. How his eyes were a soft, pale watercolor blue.

  We were traveling to a place only my mother remembered, but she thought the rest of us ought to too. A lake town in Switzerland called Lugano, where my parents spent summers when Darcy and I were very young and then when our mo
ther was pregnant with Catherine. In her photo albums, Lugano is a rustic village in primary colors: sun-whitened stone houses, bright bursts of red and yellow flowers in window boxes and along walkways, smooth, curving green hills, and in the center a dark, flat span of blue lake. Darcy and I are in most of her pictures wearing matching monokinis, or matching sundresses, or matching T-shirts and shorts. In one picture, we are wearing large dark glasses and sun hats that hide most of our faces, each of us clutching a blow-up duck. Apparently, the half siblings came to visit once, arriving for a long weekend in a defiant knot. They insisted they had no memories of coming to visit Lugano, but my mother had the photos to prove it, a series of faded black-and-white snapshots of a picnic on the lake. “You were all in fine moods too, I can tell you. Real brats.” Keith, Scott, and Rod must have been in their late teens; in the photos they are wild-eyed and clean-shaven, their bodies taut and brown.

  As we approached the town, things started to take on a startling familiarity, yet the kind that comes when a landscape long stared at in photographs suddenly spreads out in real life. It was an empty feeling: things looked familiar, but there were no memories to punctuate them with. My mother, on the other hand, had a story for just about every street corner. “This is where you took your first steps,” she said to me, pointing to a grassy triangle of park off the road. “Here is where your father and I would take a walk after he finished sitting around with his nose in a book all morning, down that road, by the lake. And here—here, kids, is where we’d stop for an aperitif on the way back up the road.” She continued on, tapping the window of the car as we drove by a small outdoor café with red umbrellas and cockeyed wicker chairs. From the front seat, she looked back at us, half excited and half impatient, as if at any moment we’d all burst forth with recognition to match hers.