by Sue Miller
I was startled. “What do you mean, you know how?”
She sat back in her chair wearily and looked at me. She shook her head slowly. “I think John had a hard time, a terrible time, with the way you both grew up, and it made him want—oh, I don’t know. Not money, exactly, but kind of the sense of place, of knowing where you belong, that money can give you. At least in a town like Haley.” She shrugged. “And that, the way he grew up, that was my fault.”
I answered quickly. “No it wasn’t, Mom. If he feels that way, it’s his responsibility. I mean, I grew up however he did, and that’s not the way I feel.”
“Yes, but you’re different from John.”
I started to protest again, but she lifted her hand to silence me. “No, listen. I can explain it.” Then she sighed again, as if coming around to some central, hard truth. “You know that after Charlie—your father’s—death, I was just … I was just a mess. I hurt so badly that some mornings I’d be crying before I even woke up. And then I had you.” She looked up at me. “And poor old John, well, he just got lost in there. I just didn’t have anything left for him.”
She shook her head. “He was such a sad sack kind of kid anyway. He’d always been jumpy and intense, even as a baby. I just couldn’t settle in and be loving to him. He was too nervous. Whereas you …” She smiled at me. “You just slept and smiled and nursed. When you were a toddler, I had to pin a sign on the back of your shirt saying, ‘Don’t feed this child,’ because you’d go around the neighborhood and everyone would just give you things.
“And I swear, as I remember it, I spent weeks just sleeping with you in bed after you were born. I got dressed for meals, but that was about it. Otherwise I’d sleep and sleep and sort of come alive just to nurse you or change you. I just couldn’t believe Charlie wasn’t coming back. I was twenty-four years old.” Her face was blank, remembering things I couldn’t understand.
She cleared her throat. “And John just floated away from me. My mother was right there, you know, and terribly concerned about me, and she sort of took him over. That was what she felt she could do for me. I can remember early on sometimes I’d hear him crying or calling for me, and then I’d hear her, and after a while he’d stop, and I’d be glad. I’d just hold you and go back to sleep. Or more like a trance, it really was. I’ll never forgive myself.”
I wanted to comfort her. “But he loved Grandma Vetter,” I said. “I mean, he ended up getting a lot out of that.”
“Well, yes, I think he did, but in the meantime, making that shift from me to her was terrible for him. And I’m not so sure having my mother as a substitute was so good for him. I mean, she was born in another century. All her values and rules, while they’re perfectly good ones, were ones that sort of … stiffened John, fed that side of who he was. And I, I knew that he, much more than you, needed to learn to relax, to be playful. But I just didn’t, couldn’t, help him.” She twirled her cup slowly in its saucer. “And then I was working and he was so good and reliable, and you were the one always in scrapes.”
I felt a pang of something like guilt. “But he turned out fine, Mom. He turned out great.”
“Oh, I know he did, darling, but I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about why John struggles so hard to have certain things in his life. Or even certain people.”
I frowned at her, not sure I understood.
“I let him go, Doug, don’t you see?”
I shook my head, resolute on her behalf.
She looked at me for a moment. Then suddenly she said, “All right, I know. I’ll tell you. It’s like the time, I remember, I was driving you boys back from somewhere … Oh, I know where it was. It was that time—I’m sure you don’t remember, you were so little—but we’d been out East to visit your dad’s folks, and we were coming home through Sandusky. We were going to stop at my great-aunt’s for the night. Viola. She’s dead a long time now. And I just couldn’t find it. I tried for about an hour and a half, but nothing was where it was supposed to be by my directions. And so I finally just pulled over—I was so aggravated—and I said out loud, ‘Well, that’s it. We’re lost.’ And I was so busy looking at these directions and maps and things that I didn’t notice John for a few minutes. But when I finally looked at him … Well, I’ve never seen a child so terrified. I asked him what the matter was and he said, ‘You said we were lost!’ And suddenly, by the way he said it, I knew he thought I’d meant lost in a sort of fairy-tale sense—like Hansel and Gretel, or someone being lost for years in a forest. Never getting home. Starving to death. I remember feeling just terrible that he had so little faith in me. In my ability to protect him.”
She shook her head and smiled ruefully. “You know, most kids his age—he was five or six, I think—don’t think they’re lost as long as they’ve got their mother with them. But I knew right then that I’d lost John. Just lost him.” She shook her head again.
After a moment I said softly, “I think he’ll be all right, Mom.”
“Oh, I know he’ll be all right, honey,” she cried. “I know it! That’s what breaks my heart.” And for the first time in my memory since Grandma’s death, I saw my mother cry.
I went over to Jacey’s apartment more frequently that fall than I had in the past. I had a sense of him as a trust that my mother had placed in me. I’m not sure what made for the conviction that she had never spoken about me to him as she’d spoken about him to me; but I felt secure in it. And I felt she’d somehow asked me to help her pay a debt to Jacey that she, and therefore perhaps I too, owed him.
It didn’t make much difference to our relationship, because Jacey simply wouldn’t speak to me about anything intimate; but in fact, I liked the order and the quiet in his carefully furnished apartment. On Sundays, I almost always bought English muffins and the Times and walked over there. We’d sit quietly all morning, eating and going through the paper, occasionally reading aloud or commenting on some story.
But as the fall wore on, I found more and more, when I dropped over unexpectedly, that he’d come to the door in a bathrobe or towel and tell me that it wasn’t a good time. He never smiled or suggested in any of the ways some of my friends might have that it was because there was a woman inside, but I knew that’s what it was, and I was happy for him; though a little surprised after the intensity of his feeling for Alice. But it was clear to me, by now, that Jacey was a lover of women, that he needed and enjoyed their company in a way that some men don’t—perhaps, I remember speculating then, because of my mother’s painful turning away from him when he was a young child. That he was again able to be interested in women seemed to me a sign of health, and I wrote my mother that Jacey was, as I put it, “beginning to go out a bit,” though he hadn’t actually spoken to me about it.
He invited me to early dinner one Friday in late October. Early, because he was doing something later on. It was a cold, rainy night, and I remember a sense of nostalgia swept over me as I walked the short distance to his apartment, stumbling occasionally over the bumps in the rain-slicked brick sidewalks. I was in the throes of another dying romance, powerfully disappointed because the woman I thought I had loved was so much more mundane than I had originally conceived of her as being. Jacey had made a fine meal—scallops and salad and a very good wine. We had several cups of coffee afterward, and I remember thinking how thoroughly in charge he was of his own life, wondering how many years it would take before I would be able to know what shape I wanted to give my life, let alone do anything about it. He went into his study to get some slides he wanted to show me, and the doorbell rang.
“Shall I get it?” I asked.
“Sure,” he called back.
A woman stood under the porch light, wearing a poncho, her head bent down, her face lost in the shadow of her hood. As I opened the glass door, she raised her head. It was Pamela Abbott. She looked startled, but her voice was smooth. “Hello, Doug,” she said.
I said hello. For a few confused moments, I thought that she’d someh
ow come to my brother’s apartment to see me; but as I followed her in, I realized this couldn’t be, that it was, of course, John she had come for. Even then I couldn’t make my mind work to understand it reasonably.
Jacey greeted her coolly and took her coat, shaking it away from him several times before he hung it up. She sat down at the table, and I joined her. He was standing. He asked her if she wanted some coffee. She shrugged. “Sure, if you’re having some.”
While he was in the kitchen, I felt compelled to make talk. “So, Pamela,” I said. “What’s up?”
She shrugged again.
“I mean, God,” I said, feeling more and more like an idiot, “I’m really sweating our this facing life business. Trying to decide what in hell I’m going to do next year, you know?” She looked steadily at me and didn’t respond. “Do you have any idea what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll probably go to New York and get a job in publishing, I think.”
“God, that sounds exciting. But it’s rough, isn’t it? I mean, to get a job?”
“I don’t know. My father has a couple of connections. I don’t think it’ll be too hard to get some shit lower-level thing.”
Jacey was standing in the doorway now, a cup of coffee in his hand. “And then climb the ladder, using his connections all the way,” he said sharply. I looked at him, but his face was blank. He walked over to her and set the coffee in front of her. She shrugged again. She looked at him as he went back to his seat. I watched her watching my brother, and saw that she was frightened of him. I realized that I should have left as soon as she arrived, that she was what my brother was “doing” later. We sat in silence for a minute. Jacey lit a cigarette and the smell of sulfur and burning tobacco hung in the little room.
“Well,” he said suddenly to Pamela. His voice was still sharp. “Do you want to go to bed?”
She looked quickly at me and then away. After a moment she raised her shoulders. “Sure,” she said without emotion, as though accepting some punishment. He stood up. She stood up. I stood up. I was trying to meet my brother’s eye, and it seemed to me that for a second I did; but his gaze slid quickly sideways. He walked out of the room first, and she followed him, without looking at me again.
I left the apartment immediately. My heart was pounding in my ears. I walked down to the black river in the rain, across the Western Avenue bridge and all the way up to the boathouse on the other side, trying to understand what my brother was doing to himself, to Pamela, to me. He who was so private, who kept his life and emotions so masked, had exposed himself and Pamela to me, had shown me how contemptuously he could treat her, how despicable he could be. He who had felt used, I know, by Eleanor; and who, I could guess, had felt abused by Alice, was now doing both to Pamela. It seemed to me like a violation of everything I would have said he believed in. And I felt slapped that he had asked me to witness it all, as though he were exposing also my pretensions to understand anything about life.
I was cold and drenched by the time I got home. I took a long shower, grateful that both of my roommates were out, and went to bed early. I lay awake for a long time, thinking about Jacey, about myself, about how we had grown up.
I didn’t get in touch with my brother or go to his apartment again for several weeks. Finally he called. It was Sunday. He said he’d gotten the Times and made breakfast and he wondered if I wanted to come over. I said okay, not enthusiastically; and then I said, “Will there be just the two of us?”
“Yes,” he said. “That won’t happen again.”
It was cold outside, gray. The trees were nearly stripped of leaves and I had the sense of winter coming on. John had a fire going in his fireplace and had set breakfast out on the coffee table. I was, for once, repelled by the orderliness. I wondered if I’d ever see my brother in a spontaneous moment. I swallowed some of his good coffee.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“What I did was wrong.”
“Did you tell that to Pamela?” I asked.
“What business is that of yours?” he said, flaring suddenly.
Then he looked away, into the fire for a moment. We were sitting side by side on the couch. “Yes,” he said tiredly. “You’re right. And I did say it to her. I’m not seeing her anymore. I wanted you to know that.” Then he slouched lower in the couch and started to talk. He told me that Pamela had come over unexpectedly almost as soon as school started. It upset him to see her and he had a lot to drink while she was there, as she did. He said she did most of the talking, about her family, about Alice, about Eleanor. She seemed eager to align herself with him against her parents. She told him that they were stupid, rigid. Worse, they were cruel. She said that they had destroyed Eleanor and were destroying Alice; that she was the only daughter smart enough to see the process, the pitfalls on the one hand of resisting too hard, or, on the other hand, of caving in. She called her father a tyrant, a bastard. She said that Jacey couldn’t imagine the kinds of things said about him, about our family, in their house.
And then, drunk, she said how wonderful she’d always thought he was; how much she admired him; how much she wanted him. She thought they ought to sleep together.
Drunk too, and angry, he had done it. Then he had passed out, and in the morning she was gone. He said he had thought that that was probably it, that she’d seen herself as fulfilling some part of what he called her “Abbott destiny” by having him as a lover.
But she kept coming over, and he kept sleeping with her. He said he knew it was wrong, that he didn’t even like her really. But that in some ways it was like having Alice again, and it was like getting back at her too. And so he just kept doing it.
He got up and poked the fire. He sat down again, this time on the floor. “And then I began to feel used again,” he said. “It was crazy; I was using her too. But I began to feel that somehow I was just … some bit actor in some part of their family drama. She kept telling me she loved me; and I just kept getting more and more cruel to her. More angry.” He looked at me suddenly. “I guess inviting you over was a way of seeing how much she’d take, how low she’d go.” He turned away again. “I was pretty far gone too, in some kind of rage I’d lost control over. But finally I just said I wouldn’t see her anymore. I was trying to be kind, but it ended up being a pretty ugly scene. Lots of tears and yelling.”
I thought of Pamela, so flip, so sure of herself. “Did she not want to stop?”
He shrugged. “She claims she’s in love with me. She threatened to tell Alice we were lovers if I wouldn’t see her anymore.”
“God!” I said. “Think she will?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. She may. I’m hoping it’ll seem so uselessly cruel that she’ll decide not to. But it’s her family. And I took that risk when I slept with her. And there won’t be anything more between me and Alice anyway, so maybe it’d be for the best. Maybe it’d confirm all the terrible things her father has to say about me, and make things easier for Alice.”
“That’s pretty magnanimous of you,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. “Not entirely. I’d like to be able to let go of her. It’s been hard. I mean, I’ve been in love with her for a year and a half and I’ve slept with her maybe ten times. And I never will again. She still writes to me all the time, even though I can’t answer. That kind of stuff. I mean, maybe it’s part of the whole thing. Why I slept with Pamela in the first place. To push that possibility away forever.”
We talked on into the late afternoon, sometimes about other things—his work, my theatrical ambitions—but we’d always circle back to Alice and Pamela. When it began to get dusky, Jacey got up and turned the lights on. I stretched. I told him I had to go. I took the theater section of the Times and headed back to Adams House.
That was the end of my brother’s involvement with the Abbott girls. He told me a few Sundays later that he thought Pamela must have said something to Alice
or to her family, because the letters abruptly stopped, but otherwise we didn’t speak of them again. I went home the following summer and he stayed in Cambridge. He had a drafting job with a little design company. Alice was still living at home and I saw her a few times during the summer. At first I didn’t recognize her. She’d put on a least twenty-five pounds. She didn’t say hello to me, but I didn’t really expect her to. In fact, as if by some unspoken agreement, we each pretended not to know the other when our paths crossed.
In the fall I moved to New York. I saw Pamela there occasionally, for a few years. We still had friends from college in common. She was an assistant editor at a good publishing house, and I was trying to get any kind of acting job. We’d talk when we met, a little edgily. She’d ask about Jacey, and I’d ask about Alice and Eleanor, as if they were vague acquaintances, and not a part of who we both were. She was in touch with Eleanor again, but Eleanor refused to see the family at all. She was a stewardess, and she loved it, loved to travel, Pamela said. Alice lived at home and let her parents run her children, her life. Pamela went home every now and then for a few days, which was about as long as she could stand it, she said.
Our only really difficult conversation was our last one, when I had to tell her that Jacey had gotten married. She looked pained for the smallest fraction of a second, and then the tough smile reemerged. “Well, I assume that whoever it is is rich.”
“Why do you assume that?” I asked. In fact, Jacey’s wife, an architect too, did have some money, perhaps even as much as the Abbotts had. But I knew enough now to know that that really wasn’t rich. And Jacey seemed happy no matter what.
“Isn’t that the only kind of girl he’s ever been interested in?” she asked jauntily. “Hasn’t he been trying to marry up since about the day he had his first erection?”
There were so many levels on which her remark offended me—the insult about Jacey’s intentions, the implied insult about his, and therefore my, social class—that I wasn’t able to choose at which level I wanted to respond. I answered quickly, almost without thinking, “Why do you assume that for him to have married one of you would be to marry up?”
