Apologize, Apologize! (2 page)

Brawling came naturally to the Flanagan brothers.

“Your grandfather never backed away from a disagreement,” Pop told us. His father’s penchant for fighting was one of Pop’s favorite topics when we were growing up. Pop had a fairly narrow measure of manhood and used broken noses to chart masculinity the way scientists recruit tree rings to chronicle age.

“He got into a terrible flap with the parish priest back home one Sunday after Mass.”

“What were they fighting about, Pop?” I asked him, already familiar with the answer by the time I could tie my shoes.

“The fighting skills of the American army, of course—how he loved to hold forth on that subject. I well recall your grandfather talking to me about the glories of the American fighting man in my high chair. ‘The Americans couldn’t lick their own lips,’ says Father Duffy to your grandfather the moment he sees him—this is before the Yanks entered the war. Well, you might just as well pour gasoline into hell . . . the eruption could be heard from miles around. Let me tell you a little something about your grandfather, God bless him, you wouldn’t want to stand next to him and light a match.”

Whenever Pop talked about his old man, I could smell something burning. Hugh Flanagan was a firestorm, according to Pop. “He left grass fires where he walked. He burned down barns with the ferocity of his judgment.”

He sure as hell knew how to piss off a priest.

“May your sons never have any luck,” Father Duffy shouted, slamming the door behind him. Soon after, Hugh and Loretta Flanagan left Ireland with their family, three boys, Tom, William, and Charlie, and two girls, Brigid and Rosalie, and immigrated to Boston. It was 1940. When it came time for the United States to enter the war, Hugh wanted his two older sons, Tom and William, in American uniform. Pop was too young to enlist.

“Your grandfather never recovered from the disgrace of your uncle Tom trying to join up wearing ladies’ underclothes,” Pop told me. I was eight, standing across from him in the living room, where he sat parked in his favorite morris chair, voice booming as I flinched.

“That’s a goddamn lie, Charlie Flanagan, and you know it. I wanted to serve. My flat feet kept me out of the action. Name one veteran, dead or alive, that’s suffered as much as I have,” Tom hollered from the kitchen, where he was chopping onions for stew.

“Oh, so that’s what they’re calling cowardice these days, a matter for the podiatrist, is it? Next you’ll be telling me had you only been born with balls, you’d be the boys’ uncle instead of their aunt.” Pop, never happier than when he was producing friction, approached me playfully, shoulders hunched, assuming a classic boxer’s stance, punching the air, one-two-three, narrowly missing my chin.

“Your uncle Tom single-handedly put the personality in disorder,” he said.

Uncle Tom was my mother’s sworn enemy. He referred to her as the Female B—his obtuse way of calling her a bitch. He was always doing funny things with language, mangling words, making up crazy expressions, being deliberately provocative, saying schedule as if it were pronounced “shek-a-dool” and then daring you to correct him. Tom never outgrew the desire for negative attention, a trait he shared in common with Ma.

Ironically, considering their mutual hatred, there wasn’t much to give or take between their views. Tom and Ma were against just about everything everyone else was for, yet year in and year out, they circled each other, glaring like rival warlords.

“And thank God for it,” Pop proclaimed. “Jesus, Collie, can you imagine what might happen if they joined forces?”

“Move over, Abbott and Costello,” I said.

I suspect that my mother underwrote every postwar revolution undertaken by Marxist insurrectionists from one end of the globe to the other. Anais Lowell Flanagan was writing checks for her pet causes all through the 1970s when we were growing up. Nothing Ma enjoyed more than the incendiary overthrow of established order.

Uncle Tom lived for the pleasure of infiltrating and disrupting her political gatherings. He used to call everyone on the guest list and tell each one there had been an outbreak of impetigo at the house, leaving my mother to fume when no one showed up.

“Some revolutionary he turned out to be . . . scared of a little fungus,” he’d report to Bingo and me, receiver to ear, as he knocked them off the list one by one.

He raced for the phone whenever it rang, and if he didn’t approve of the caller—he never acceded to anyone—he’d shout into the receiver, “Gotta go. There’s a squirrel in the house!”

Once in a while, someone would call back.

“Hello, this is Denny the Red. May I speak with Anais?”

“I’m sorry, there’s no Denny the Red here. You’ve got the wrong number.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m Denny the Red—”

“Are you deaf as well as dumb? I told you there’s no Denny the Red at this number.”

He used to put Bingo and me through the same crazy routine. Dialing home was like trying to get God’s private line. When I was in grade six I broke my arm at school, and the hospital called, trying to get permission to operate. I was going nuts from the pain—it was a compound fracture—everyone, including the surgeon, was standing around waiting to go, and a nurse walked in with a bewildered look on her face and announced there appeared to be some emergency at my house.

“Something about a squirrel?” she said.

CHAPTER TWO

P
EREGRINE LOWELL, MY GRANDFATHER, WAS PRESIDENT AND SOLE
owner of Thought-Fox Inc. A big wheel in the Democratic Party, he owned hundreds of newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries, including some of the world’s most influential dailies. An aggressively merciless proprietor, he had a reputation for being hands-on when it came to editorial content, viewing the op-ed pages of even the lowliest community publication as his personal soapbox. One time, he got so inspired by the proposal to ban outdoor cats in some little town in Iowa that he wrote a guest editorial championing the rights of songbirds.

Not content simply with interfering in the grinding minutiae of his empire’s daily operations, he also considered it his duty to despise and denigrate everyone who worked for him, reflexively pointing to his signature on their paychecks as evidence of his superiority.

My grandfather both demanded and deplored compliancy, which meant he posed a unique set of challenges for the people around him. Fortunately, working for him was generally a temporary condition. He set some sort of industry record for firing people, a distinction he welcomed, saying, “Good people come, and good people go,” and sounding a whole lot like a raptor that’s just decapitated a goldfinch.

Nicknamed the Falcon by Bingo and me—seemed clever when we were kids—he sat darkly in the tops of trees, sleek and straight, eyes like stones, defined from all angles by his remote habit of trenchant surveillance. An Anglo-Irish Protestant on loan to New England from Ulster, he was bored by the conversation of field mice, and it showed. 

It’s safe to say that he terrified and intrigued me. Stuck for a moment alone with him in the butler’s pantry at his sixty-third birthday party when I was ten, I weakly inquired what kind of icing he liked best, chocolate or vanilla, feeling as if I were interviewing Dracula about his preference in blood type.

“What
are
you squeaking about?” he asked, looking down on me, his contempt a talon, snapping my neck with the power of his disdain.

“Never mind,” I said, temporarily unable to swallow. I had asked him a question. For years, I never asked him another. A distinguished Dickens scholar, he’d published several books on the subject, but ornithology was his true passion, part of a family tradition that extended to the naming of male heirs. His old man was named Toucan by his father, Corvid, my great-great-grandfather, an unchecked eccentric from an aristocratic background—nicknamed Cuckoo Lowell by all who knew him. He bizarrely practiced ornithomancy, a form of divination using flight patterns.

The Falcon wanted us named after birds—Larkin and Robin were his choices—but Ma infuriated him by naming us after dogs instead.

“It could have been worse,” Bingo said. “She could have called us Sacco and Vanzetti.”

The Falcon lived on a century-old estate called Cassowary, a few hundred choice acres of woodland, marsh, and open field tucked into the New England coastline and within spitting distance of Boston. A black wrought-iron gate at the entranceway had this cheerful, biblical admonition engraved across the top, his idea of a welcome mat: “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away.”

My grandfather wasn’t big on small talk.

Cassowary was formally landscaped with topiaries, walls, and hedges. Four life-size elephants constructed of metal frames and filled in with a cladding of dark green English ivy paced round and round a large ring outlined in yew, their inertia like an airless memento of Pompeii. The big, Georgian-style gray brick house was covered in an ancient flowering wisteria; its winding stems were thick as tree trunks, a momentous sight in the spring, with thousands of lavender blossoms hanging like lanterns.

An outdoor aviary sat beneath my bedroom window, filled with ring-neck doves that made a pretty opiate sound in the mornings. Their cooing reminded me of Uncle Tom’s racing pigeons, a hobby he’d retained from boyhood.

Bingo and I loved to play in the rose garden, where there were two life-size limestone sculptures of English mastiffs, one sitting, the other one standing. We used to chase fireflies and feed the koi in the fishpond, hide in the tall grasses. The koi we fed as children still inhabit the pond, swimming back and forth in those same mysterious geometric patterns, pausing as always to bask in the sunlight as it feeds through the waterfall.

Cassowary was famous for its heritage rose gardens; hundreds of varieties bloomed all summer long, tended to by a battalion of English gardeners who handpicked them for every room in the house. Leave it to the Falcon to take a thing of beauty and turn it into a military operation. White roses in the living room, red roses in the dining room, pink roses in the library, orange roses in the conservatory, yellow roses in the kitchen, blue roses on the mantelpiece overlooking the wintry fireplace in my grandfather’s bedroom.

Cream-colored roses sat atop the desk in my mother’s old room, next to a framed portrait of Rupert Brooke, whom she discovered as a young girl. Ma’s likes and dislikes remained pretty consistent over a lifetime, as I can personally attest. To this day, the rose is my least favorite flower—I think of it as a scented hand grenade—although I still maintain the gardens. Their history outranks any preference of mine.

The Falcon, a widower, lived alone except for staff. I never saw him with a woman in a romantic way, although he was very social in the old-money sense of the word, frequently entertaining and being entertained, making it difficult to reconcile the charming public performer with the private contrarian.

My grandmother Constance Bunting was sole heir to the Ogilvy fortune and died at the age of fifty-one the year before I was born. Cassowary was her family home. My grandfather approached her father in the early thirties wanting to buy the estate, and when he refused to sell, the Falcon set out to marry his only child in order to get what he wanted.

Cassowary was a wedding gift. As for Constance: “Let’s just say that your grandmother was the price I paid,” the Falcon remarked tersely after I discovered their wedding photo buried underneath some old clothes at the bottom of a trunk tucked away in the attic.

My mother’s feelings about the marriage were slightly less discreet. “He never loved my mother. He hated her. He set out to get his hands on the estate, and once he achieved his goal he decided to get rid of my dear mama,” Ma told Bingo and me when we were little, her arms flailing as she paced frenetically around the room, pinging from one corner to another, her consternation as jarring as a slot machine.

“Sounds like an episode of
Bonanza,
” Bingo said, grinning over at me, flicking baseball cards against the kitchen wall, fiddling away as Ma burned.

Faced with Ma’s sketchy mental archives, I got in the habit of consulting outsiders when it came to trying to discern the facts of my family history. The general consensus among the Falcon’s biographers is that a few years into his marriage he fell in love with a champagne-and-caviar socialite by the name of Flora Hennessey and planned to leave his family for her. All that changed when Flora’s small plane disappeared at dawn somewhere along the eastern seaboard.

It might be true. I remember one time Bingo and I were snooping around in the library at Cassowary when we found the key to the Falcon’s desk. After unlocking its narrow drawer, Bingo pulled a small, black-and-white photo of a young, dark-haired woman from inside the pages of a slender notebook. 

“Who’s the babe?” Bingo gleefully asked the Falcon, whose sudden entrance surprised both of us. Rather than conceal the evidence of our crime, Bingo, eleven years old, bravely held up the picture while I felt my scalp smoldering.

The Falcon walked toward us in soundless fury, seized the photo with one hand, and with the other slapped Bingo across the face so hard that he left a bright red handprint that glows in my memory to this day. Bingo tumbled backward off the chair and onto the ground, his hand to his cheek. Jumping to his feet, he met the Falcon’s angry stare and then watched in silence as the old guy spun around on his heels and vanished into the hallway.

“Wow, I’ve never seen him so mad,” I said, feeling weak in the knees, slowly sidling up alongside Bing.

“He’s always mad about something. Who cares?” Bingo answered, rubbing his eyes through clenched fists, trying to conceal an involuntary surge of tears.

“Not me,” I lied.

The truth was that I cared deeply about everything my grand-father thought and said, though I would have surgically removed my liver with a jackknife rather than admit it to anyone—in our family, it would have been less dangerous for me to confess to eating dog meat. 

“Are you okay?” I asked Bing, unable to make eye contact, embarrassed by the sheer honesty of what had just transpired. I felt paralyzed, as if I’d been given a shot of pure unfiltered emotion directly into my spinal cord.

“I’m fine. Leave me alone,” Bingo was mumbling into the shirt collar he’d pulled up around his face. His hands were shaking. I thought about hugging him, but in the end it was easier to hide my sympathy than it was to show it.

“What was Grandma like?” I asked my mother a few days later as I lay on my back stretched across the bottom of my parents’ tarnished brass bed. Bingo and I didn’t dare tell Ma about the slapping incident. The repercussions would have demoted the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the status of a minor irritant, a stray lash in the eye of history.

“She was a saint . . . ,” Ma said, her large, almond-shaped eyes a dilute blue watercolor as she stared beyond me and somewhere into the distant past. She was sitting at the head of the bed, legs extended beneath the covers, perfectly erect, narrow shoulders square as a military parade. The pillows at her back were purely ornamental—Ma never needed propping up.

The buttercup yellow wall behind her was bathed in late afternoon light. I was fascinated by the shadows cast by her chestnut brown hair, so wild and wavy that it could have supported teeming jungle life.

“Constance Lowell was skinny and mad, a veritable vibrating hairpin. . . .” Next to her, naked and ruddy, covers pulled up to his waist, Pop rubbed his face in disbelief and interrupted with a hoot. “She fell off her horse when she was thirty-five, sprained her ankle, and went to bed for the rest of her life claiming she couldn’t walk. Except that the servants used to hear her up and moving around all night while the rest of the house was sleeping.”

Laughing at the memory, he leaned forward, his big hand on my knee, and I felt the infrequent thrill of his undivided attention. “You should have seen her, Collie. She had long brown hair that hung in waves to her waist, all done up with satin ribbons. She was white as a ghost from being inside all the time, and she wore white lace nightgowns and collected ivory figurines, with a somewhat ironic emphasis on elephants. Her bed was covered in silk and satin. She was crazy as they come.”

“Don’t you dare ridicule Mama!” Ma’s long upper lip disappeared, her lower lip protruded like a boxing glove. “The most wonderful woman that ever lived, and he poisoned her a little bit every day. She warned me. She told me he was adding things to her food. He’s a monster.” The circles under her eyes darkened.

“For heaven’s sake, Anais, according to every medical man short of St. Luke, she died of stomach cancer. You throw around accusations of murder as if they were rice at a wedding. For years you’ve been accusing Tom of adding plant fertilizer to your coffee.” Pop looked over at me and winked as Ma’s escalating fury caused the room to spin. I hung on to the blanket out of habit—I knew where this was going.

“My mother did not have cancer. She was poisoned. He killed her, and he paid off the doctors. And as for Tom, you tell me why does my heart beat so erratically every time he serves me something he’s made? I enjoyed perfect health until he moved in with us, and since then I’ve had one ailment after another.” Her voice lowered to a whisper as she glanced fleetingly toward the door, as if Uncle Tom were poised outside with ear to glass—not an entirely far-fetched idea, by the way—and would up the ammonia content in retaliation if he overheard.

Ma never had a prosaic thought or justified suspicion except in the case of Uncle Tom’s eavesdropping, which fell into the same category as birth, death, and Lawrence Welk. She painted pictures in blood and tears and secret passions, everything intensely fragrant and wildly overgrown.

“Like most aesthetes, she’s a barbarian at heart,” Pop once confided to Bingo and me, the two of us nodding silently, chins bobbing in unison, though at the time we were barely able to write our own names and didn’t have a clue what he meant.

She threw back the covers, the fringe from the chenille bedspread covering my face, and launched herself from the bed as if it were a catapult—Ma always seemed poised for takeoff—her worn cotton nightgown reaching below her knees as she yanked open the top dresser drawer and began rooting strenuously through dozens of mismatched socks.

“Tell you what, Collie, the Lowells and the Buntings are all nuts, every one of them,” Pop said agreeably, settling deeper into the pillows, cozying up to one of his favorite topics, the shortcomings of my mother’s family, gesturing broadly, mellow as honey. “Do you know that the only time your mother and grandfather ever saw eye to eye, they accused your batty old grandma and me of having an affair? They might just as well have accused me of carrying on with an opinionated coat hanger.”

At the time, I had only the vaguest notion of what constituted an affair—if you’d asked me for a definition, I would have said it was something that my father did.

“Ha! You did, and you know perfectly well you did.” Ma banged shut the drawer and spun around to face Pop, who was visibly enjoying her anger. “And you got off easy. My mother paid for her vulnerabilities with her life, while you’re pensioned off courtesy her fortune.”

“Is that why Granddad hates you, Pop, because you did an affair with Grandma?” I’d taken up Ma’s position next to Pop on the bed.