Apologize, Apologize! (4 page)

After the burn healed, Bingo was left with a white scar shaped like a half-moon on his inner arm beneath his elbow joint, so just in case Ma was ever tempted to forget, she always had his disfigurement to remind her, confirming her view of him as a serious hard-luck case, unlike me. She looked at me in my playpen and saw the president of the World Bank and not the future president, either. The whole time I was growing up, in every conversation between us, Ma acted as if she were sparring with John D. Rockefeller about the merits of socialism.

Bingo was different. He looked like Pop, though he had Ma’s chestnut hair. Everything seemed to go wrong for Bingo, which only increased his irresistibility factor. Nothing Ma loved better than a beautiful victim, since it played so well into her own image of herself.

She used to talk about how people should never stop with one child since it was important to have a basis for comparison, gives a much-needed perspective, she would insist, leaving most people to wonder what the devil she was talking about, though I got the message loud and clear.

Her adoration for Bingo was exclusive, but she made me a critical part of their relationship, casting me in the role of his malicious persecutor. I could never separate her love for Bingo from her contempt for me. 

“Your little brother died last night,” Pop said at first sight of me in the doorway the morning after the asthma attack. Hearing him and Tom, the sun rising and rosy, I hopped from my bed and went down to the kitchen, where the two of them were sitting at the table drinking coffee and eating fried-egg sandwiches.

“But like Lazarus, he was brought back to life,” Uncle Tom said, telling me how Bingo turned blue in the hospital, pure Irish blue, he said, “an exotic mix of Himalayan poppy, antifreeze, and the eyes of a Siberian husky.”

“Lazarus, my ass, that low-rent bastard,” Pop said. “Bingo rose up like Jesus himself. Come to think of it, he did better than Jesus. It took Bingo only three hours to resurrect himself. It took Jesus three days!”

“Match that, can you, Noodle?” Tom asked me. “Start by spelling ‘unremarkable.’”

“Where’s Ma?” I inquired, making my way to a plain wooden stool, which I dragged from the counter to the table, one of the poodles tugging at the bottom of my pajama leg.

“She had to be admitted—it was the reaction. She had a heart arrhythmia, according to the doctors,” Pop said casually, sifting through the mail.

“I wasn’t aware she had a heart,” Uncle Tom said.

“What about George?” I persisted. He’d just arrived for a week-long visit.

“Oh well, he’s been called back home. Some kind of problem at the clinic,” Pop said.

“May I have an egg sandwich?” I asked, trying to extricate myself from the dog’s playful grasp.

“Oh, my Lord,” Tom said, sighing, shoulders collapsing, his face an anguished mask. “Look here, Noodle, I’m melted after all I’ve been through these last hours. I’ll make you some tea and you get yourself a couple of lovely pieces of fresh bread with butter.”

“That’s not a proper breakfast,” Pop said. “He’s not on death row, you know. Surely he deserves better than thieves and murderers.”

“Fine. Tea and toast, then, the act of toasting adds nutrients to the bread, same as if it were a bowl of oatmeal.”

“What nutrients, Uncle Tom?” I asked.

“Zinc.”

“Well, you know what I think?” Pop said. “There’s nothing like a miracle to make a man crave a drink.”

“There’s no one to say we didn’t earn it,” Tom said.

“Bartender!” Uncle Tom snapped his fingers in my direction.

I jumped down from my stool and ran to the cellar to get them their beer, startling the mostly sleeping dogs, who leapt from their spots, barking, wondering what all the fuss was about. Uncle Tom and Pop watched silently for once as I carefully set out two immaculately clean, tall and skinny, cylindrical glasses.

“Why do they represent a better choice for drinking beer?” Tom quizzed me.

“Nuance,” I said, whispering, concentrating on the pour, tipping the glass on a forty-five-degree angle, focusing on the slope. I poured with confidence—I’d been doing it for half my life. The bottle half-empty, I shifted the glass to ninety degrees and kept pouring down the middle, creating a perfect foam head.

“Beautiful, Collie!” Pop said. “You’re the champ.”

“Not bad,” Tom said. “You’ll do until someone better comes along.”

I handed the drinks over without so much as inhaling. Pop made me take the pledge of total abstinence when I was three years old, and which I’ve maintained to this day, with the exception of one adolescent slip.

“Here’s to Bing Algernon Flanagan,” Pop said, raising his glass in salute. “Died and rose again on April 7, 1969.”

“So, Collie, what do you say?” Uncle Tom jabbed me in the ribs. “Can you spell ‘thaumaturgy’?”

CHAPTER FOUR

W
ITH HIS SLIGHT BUILD AND HABITUALLY UNDONE SHOELACES,
Bingo, despite a kind of slouching natural elegance and balmy rich-kid veneer, was as wild as if wolves had raised him. Perpetually on the prowl, he was always looking to mess around and make trouble, always changing shape and challenging the people around him to keep pace.

Bing had a kind of heightened vibrancy, as if he’d emerged intact from Walt Disney’s imagination. His chestnut-colored hair, the same rich shade as Ma’s, hung in his eyes—he had an annoying way of constantly shoving it off his forehead and tucking it behind his ears. When he was younger, Uncle Tom used to grab him every few months, catching him for an impromptu trim on the way out the door. “The virgin accountant,” Uncle Tom dubbed the result, an ear-skimming Alfalfa cut with a slick center part.

With his spooky green eyes and translucent white face, he was a freckled landscape, like an animated Jackson Pollock, with big brown spots wall to wall—I swear Ma must’ve shacked up with a Dalmatian.

He was always in some kind of jam, mostly arising out of his sense of humor, which overran him like a form of Tourette’s. The nuns and priests had his prison cell picked out by the time he was ten years old, though Ma waged guerrilla war against anyone attempting to discipline him, including Pop, who had a special talent for throwing up his hands.

When Bingo was twelve he started to throw snowballs at the altar boys as they arrived to serve Mass at St. Basil’s on Sundays, me yelling at him to cut it out, both of us forced to attend church by Ma because she knew how much it annoyed the Falcon. I’m sure the only reason Ma converted to Catholicism was to bug her old man—meanwhile she so scandalized the priests with her views during obligatory marriage classes, they canceled her wedding to Pop the day before it was to take place. Despite his opposition to the marriage, the Falcon reluctantly went into secret negotiations with the bishop, and things went off as planned.

“After some discussion,” he told me, “the bishop and I both concluded that your parents deserved one another.”

The nuns warned Bingo over and over to stop tormenting the altar boys, but he wouldn’t listen. He loved it—the nuns’ wrath, scolding, and threats were like fuel supplying his incorrigibility. Finally one of our teachers, Sister Mary Ellen, out of patience, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, gave him a push, made him kneel down, and ordered him to bury his face in a freshly shoveled bank of snow.

“Fuck off, Sister,” he said, kicking snow up into the air, so high that it reached the treetops, landing lightly like a dusting of icing sugar. He grinned over at me and, running, cleared the iron fence in a single leap; then, whooping, he left the churchyard and disappeared down the street. He vanished into a shower of snow and rebellion, and when the priest came later that day, we were told to pray for his soul.

In a lot of ways, Bingo was a chip off the old block. Every night was devil’s night as far as Bing was concerned, the clergy his favorite target and toilet paper his weapon of choice, toilet paper streaming from every tree in the churchyard. He got into big trouble when Father Woodward, setting up for morning Mass, and after discovering that his vestments were missing, fell to his knees at the sight of Jesus on the cross wearing a T-shirt, “Too Fuck to Drunk” emblazoned across the chest. 

His stolen vestments were found by a hiker later the same day, floating in the ocean, seagulls circling, swooping in closer for a better look. I think the most outrageous thing I ever did as a kid was drink Pepsi before ten o’clock in the morning.

After the vestments’ prank, Pop was summoned to an emergency parent-teacher conference, where Sister Mary Ellen delivered an impassioned review of Bingo’s crimes.

“The prosecutors at Nuremberg were indifferent by comparison,” Pop said, standing in the middle of the kitchen, unbuttoning the jacket of his navy blue suit, and loosening his tie as Uncle Tom and I looked up from where we sat together at the table, drinking hot chocolate.

“And you let her spew this nonsense unchallenged?” Ma demanded, appearing in the doorway at the first sound of Pop’s voice. “What kind of a father are you?”

“Well, according to the teachers, the same as the one who raised Charles Starkweather.”

Pop pulled a chair out from the table, scraping it along the floor and into the middle of the room. He sat down with a thump and, preoccupied, began tapping his foot. Brightening suddenly, he gave me an admiring glance. “On the plus side, Sister Mary Ellen raved about our Collie. Said he was the smartest and the finest boy she’s ever taught.”

Ma made a noise like a car backfiring and ricocheted out the room and down the hallway, announcing that she was pulling us out of the school. I wasn’t concerned. Ma never followed through on anything—saying it was the same as doing it as far as Ma was concerned. Uncle Tom poured some Murphy’s Oil Soap on a cleaning rag and started to polish the table, his hands moving in vigorous circles. He claimed to have worked for a traveling circus when he was young and told Bingo and me that he used Murphy’s Oil Soap to clean the elephants.

He looked over at me, and then just as quickly he looked away. “Well, I’m not convinced. That nun must have worked a crop of lemons over the years to put you at the head of the class. I’d like to know one thing that you’ve ever done that makes you so smart.” Pausing to apply more oil to the cloth, he turned around and confronted me. “Say, did you know there’s a species of crab that can climb a tree? Top that, Socrates.”  

“Tom, for God’s sake, you’re eroding the boy’s sense of self-worth,” Pop said, heading for the fridge to seek out his daily consolation of ice cream.

“You can’t possibly be referring to this cathedral of conceit? I’m doing him a great favor, dismantling his vanity piece by piece. It’s the work of a lifetime. Answer me this,” he said, focusing his full attention on me. “What do you call a gathering of ravens?”

“A murder,” I answered, staring back at him. I knew this game.

“All right,” he said. “That was easy. What about a group of goldfinches? Hares? Goats?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Uncle Tom. Who cares?”

“A charm of goldfinches, a drove of hares, a trip of goats. Well, it seems your reputation for brilliance notwithstanding, you’ve been exposed as an imbecile in less than thirty seconds. I rest my case.” He resumed his cleaning.

“I thought this was supposed to be about Bingo,” I said, mildly exasperated.

“You rang?” Bingo popped his head through the open kitchen window as Pop jumped up to let the dogs out onto the veranda to welcome him home.

“Hey, take your shoes off, you slob,” I spoke without thinking as Bingo came in through the door, his running shoes leaving a trail of oozing black footprints on the floor.

He looked baffled. “Why?”

“Look at the mess you’re making,” I said as Pop finally took notice of Bingo kicking off his running shoes.

“What are you doing removing your shoes at the door?” Pop asked.

“Ask Collie,” Bingo said, fighting off the dogs.

“I’ve told you boys a thousand times, removing your shoes at the door brands you as a hopeless member of the middle class. Next you’ll be clipping coupons and asking questions about the state of the eaves trough.”

“Don’t forget to rake the lawn, Pop,” Bingo contributed in good-natured fashion as he drank from an open carton of orange juice. Pop didn’t believe in raking leaves. “That’s why they call them leaves,” he used to say.

“What’s going on?” Bingo said, taking quick measure of the room’s temperature.

“I’ve just come from a meeting with your teacher. I hope never again to hear a child of mine talked about as you were talked about tonight,” Pop said, straining for solemnity.

“Sister Mary Ellen’s had it in for me since grade four,” Bingo said.

“And why is that?” Pop asked as I looked on incredulously.

“Because I told her I didn’t swallow all those stories about the lives of the saints—all that junk about flying around on magic carpets and stuff. . . .” He glanced over in my direction, squinting, his lips pressed together as he tried to conceal a grin.

“Oh, that perpetual nonsense! Is that what this is about?” Pop was instantly galvanized. “Did you mention St. Euphrosyne and her penchant for cross-dressing?”

“Yeah, and St. Uncumber, too,” Bingo added as Pop characteristically pumped the air with his fists.

“Good for you! Did it shut her up?”

“Yeah, but she still smacked me on the back of the head with a ruler,” Bingo said.

“Bullshit,” I muttered.

Pop was obsessed with debunking the notion of sainthood—from the time we were babies, he used to read aloud to us the lives of the saints and loved to deride church claims of miracles. St. Uncumber was a personal favorite of his. She took a vow of virginity, and when her father tried to force her to marry the king of Sicily, she prayed to God to make her unattractive. She appeared one morning sporting a full beard and mustache, putting an end to the marriage plans. Her father was so mad, he had her crucified.

“This changes everything,” Pop said. “I forgot my cardinal rule. Never trust a nun.”

Uncle Tom was searching through the cupboard, pretending indifference.

“You over there, the one with all the disfiguring marks on your face,” he said, turning around to face Bingo. “What’s the collective for a group of pheasants?”

“A bouquet,” Bingo replied, zinging me in the cheek with an elastic band he’d picked up off the floor.

“Good. What about woodpeckers? Rattlesnakes? Hawks?”

“A descent of woodpeckers, a rumba of rattlesnakes, and a kettle of hawks,” Bingo said, rattling off the answers, reveling in my earned contempt.

“A perfect score so far,” Uncle Tom said, staring over at me. “It seems as if there is some confusion as to who is the real genius in the family.”

Ma laughed so loudly, we heard her from the living room.

“Ignore her,” Uncle Tom instructed Bingo and me, lowering his voice to a whisper. “It’s a biological fact. Try as they might, witches can’t conceal their delight.”

Later that night, I awoke in time to see Bingo climbing out of the open window of the bedroom. We shared a room until we were in high school and I finally rebelled and claimed one of the empty bedrooms as my own.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” I asked him as he dropped out of sight. He’d just started sneaking from the house at night, a practice he kept up all through his teens. By the time he was sixteen he’d often stay out all night, climbing in and out of my bedroom window because it was easier.

On the weekends, he used to head out around ten and would come home just before daybreak, me listening for him in the dark, the snap of wisteria signaling his return. I’d wait for the sound of the first broken branch, hyperalertness fixing me in place. I could hear his jeans scraping against cedar shingles as he scaled the ivy-covered trellis to my bedroom window, dark hair poking through lace curtains. Ma hung lace everywhere, her only concession to domesticity.

“Shit!” he’d say as he dropped his keys, which hit the ground with a metallic clang, followed by a tiny avalanche of gravel and dried sand from the soles of his shoes.

I’d tell him quiet, shut up, you asshole, they’ll hear you.

“Ma and Pop don’t give a flying fuck,” he’d say. “Why do you care, Collie?” He’d be panting gently, gripping the ledge with his fingers, their tips livid with exertion, hoisting himself inside, dusting himself off, careful not to make a sound as his toes touched the floor, but not for long.

He’d leap into bed beside me and tell me everything, let me in on all of it: the lawlessness, the girls, the booze, the fun. And Christ, the guiltlessness! I envied the remorseless pleasure he took in being Bing Flanagan.

By dull contrast, the only time I ever got drunk I was sixteen and made it an exercise in earnestness, hooking myself up to an intravenous of vodka. What a soppy fucking drunk I was. Bingo told me I made out with Eliot Harrigan, captain of my swim team at Andover.

“You lying sack of shit,” I said to him, propped on my elbow, leaning over him in the partial darkness, moonlight casting its silvery glow.

“Maybe,” he said, eyes laughing, “but then again, maybe not.”

A few weeks after Pop’s meeting with Sister Mary Ellen, Bingo got kicked out of St. Basil’s for the remainder of the school year. The caretaker, a creepy guy named Mario who had yellow teeth and pretended to eat worms to scare the girls, trapped a small stray dog in the yard, pulled off his belt, snapped it as if it were a whip, and ran after the little mutt, flaying him with the belt, terrorizing him and us, the black-and-brown dog howling, the little kids crying, the older kids, my friends and I, standing around shocked and numb, looking to the nuns to intervene, expecting the priest to do something.

Nobody moved. The nuns and priest went on with their small talk; only Sister Mary Ellen looked upset, her hands fidgeting with her rosary beads.

“You bastard!”

I turned around at the sound of a familiar voice as Bingo ran across the yard and lobbed a rock at close range at Mario, hitting him hard on the shoulder. Mario stopped and let loose a profusion of profanity so fluent and expressive that I thought he was speaking a foreign language. Then all hell broke loose as the nuns chased Bingo down and the priest, who reached him first, grabbed both his shoulders, and Sister Rosemary, her cheeks red as a geranium, pulled a strap from inside her habit and whacked him across the face, hitting him with so much force that her feet left the ground and her glasses fell off, cracking on the pavement.

For days afterward, Bing walked around with the shape of a strap imprinted on his cheek, his face black and blue and red and swollen, his “valorous palette,” Ma called it, “the colors of courage.” Predictably, Ma turned into a human tornado when she got the news, boring a hole into the ground with the spinning velocity of her fury.

She showed up at the school the next morning with our Caucasian Ovcharka, Lenin—or Lennon, which was what I told my friends he was called—a fierce Russian dog best described as Khrushchev-on-a-rope. She turned him loose on Mario, who had to scramble onto the church roof to escape.