Apologize, Apologize! (5 page)

I never again felt quite the same about the Catholic Church or about Bingo. Though I thought the world of Bing, I took pains to conceal it, resenting him for his bravery as much as I admired him for it. 

It’s not easy coming to terms with your shortcomings. I was just an average grunt—not so pathetic that I was the movie cliché in the prison camp who loses it and throws himself into the barbed wire trying to escape his frenzy of fear, but more like the guy crouching in the dirt who sees something of himself in the aberration. I was always more of a chicken than I would’ve liked to acknowledge, but I was saved from full egg-laying status by my habit of taking my cues from the hero.

Ma knew.

“Run for your life, Collie,” she used to say to me. “The creek’s gone dry.”

CHAPTER FIVE

B
ETWEEN POP AND UNCLE TOM, AND THE SHEER QUANTITY OF
alcohol they consumed, most of the time our house was something lost at sea, aimlessly floating and drifting, rocking gently back and forth like a cork in a bathtub full of gin.

It was an unholy baptism, Tom getting grotesquely drunk every month, submerging himself body and soul in the stuff, a full immersion, evangelical in its fervor, part of a weeklong ritual, passing out, coming to, drinking some more, passing out, drinking until his small government pension money ran out.

He kept his cash in a discarded peanut-butter jar under his bed surrounded by a moat of mousetraps, a familiar sequence of snaps, in quick succession, signaling his deposits and withdrawals. It was an intense operation. He used a cane to trigger each one, going in like a demolition expert. Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Tom must be doing his bang-king,” Pop said to Bing and me, eyes rolling upward in the direction of each tiny blast. It was early evening. We were in our mid-teens, sitting around the kitchen table eating an evening meal of vanilla ice cream, the only thing Pop knew how to cook.

“Look out, the world’s about to get shook. Bingo, there’s no choice, you’re going to have to sneak in there and take what’s left. You’re the only one allowed in the inner sanctum. If he insists on getting sloshed the way he does, he’s going to kill himself.”

Bing was trying to squirm out of it. He didn’t want to steal from the old reprobate even for a good cause.

“I don’t know,” Bing said. “It doesn’t seem right. He trusts me.”

“So you do have a conscience after all,” I said.

“I do not.” He frowned and, giving me the finger, headed up the stairs. Bingo resented any suggestion that he might possess character or integrity.

“You’ll need to stay hidden in the stable for a couple of days,” Pop said when Bingo, looking paler than usual, handed over the dough. “He’ll be gunning for you.”

“Here he comes.”

The stable was located on the acreage behind the house. I was perched at the window, eyes peeking above the ledge, as I caught sight of Tom and his drinking buddy Swayze heading in our direction, the pair of them making up an arthritic posse, not quite two men, more like front and ass ends of a donkey costume.

Before she married Pop, Ma was an equestrian, competing internationally, specializing in three-day eventing. She rode a big black Irish draft horse called Lolo, pidgin for crazy. He used to try to come in the kitchen, Ma encouraging and coaxing him all the way. No one else could go near him. Bing and I grew up thinking of him as a psychotic older brother, his teeth marks decorating my ass well into adolescence.

Bing, giddy, scared, and excited all at the same time, scrambled to hide himself under a pile of straw in Lolo’s box stall, Lolo mulling over a course of action, pawing the floor and snorting, tossing his head, thinking about turning in Bing for the reward. Lolo was staring at me, and I was staring back at him, hoping for the best—that horse had no moral center.

“Where is he?” Tom said, his face inches from my own, eyes taking on the color of malt liquor. “We’re here to perform a citizen’s arrest. He stole my money. He’s going to jail and he’s going to make full restitution.”

“I don’t know where he is,” I said, stepping away from him. “He’s probably with friends.”

“How would you like me to arrest you as an accomplice?” Tom said, grabbing the collar of my shirt.

“Uncle Tom, for crying out loud . . .”

“Swayze.” He turned to his tipsy deputy. “Cuff him.”

In the final analysis, there wasn’t much to choose between Pop and Uncle Tom when it came to their old buddy booze. “Those damn Dolan boys got me drunk,” Pop used to say to Bing and me—one way of explaining what happened on my fourteenth birthday when he crawled into a neighbor’s chimney, where he got stuck and passed out. He’d still be there except that Sykes, his white bull terrier, refused to come home and barked for hours at the roof in a high state of excitement.

I was the first to figure it out. Bingo scrambled up the eaves trough, waving madly when he reached the chimney, choking with laughter, shaking so he could hardly stand, and hollering that he’d found him.

“Pop says to call in the army,” he shouted. “He says he’ll need expert extraction. He doesn’t trust the locals to perform such a delicate operation.”

I argued for leaving him there permanently, but the nice old lady who owned the place wouldn’t be persuaded.

“It’s not right, Collie, he’s your father, and besides, think of the smell.”

“You’ve got me there.”

A few days later, Pop, a man of pure inspiration with a sanctimonious aversion to self-reflection, decided that Bingo and I were culturally deficient and needed exposure to the work of some of the great Irish playwrights. He also wanted to reward us for rescuing him from the chimney, so he took us into Boston to see a production of
The Plough and the Stars
.

For some mysterious reason, Pop hated restaurants. He loathed restaurants but loved hotels and longed to take up permanent residence in one.

“I could live in a hotel. As a matter of fact, I intend to retire to the city and live in a hotel suite, and then it’s a steady diet of plays, concerts, horticultural shows . . . no more homemade meals and nights in a rocking chair. Your mother is free to join me if she chooses,” he told us as Bingo scrunched up his face and looked at me, puzzled.

“Huh?”

“Crazy,” I whispered.

We roamed the old-world lobby of the Steinbeck, Pop turned out like the Prince of Wales, heads swiveling to look at him, everyone trying to figure out who he was—people always said he looked like a movie star. He was winking at every attractive woman in the place. We had dinner at Heliotrope, a formal dining room, where he got exasperated with Bingo for insisting on having a giant steak and nothing else. He just wanted one big, juicy steak on a plate. After we finished eating, Pop left us to our own devices in the lounge while he disappeared into the bar for an hour or so, looking like the Red Planet when he finally emerged, spinning wildly on his axis, his disheveled hair the victim of crazy weather patterns, toxic vapors spewing into the solar system.

Once at the theater, the other patrons cleared a path as Pop, leaning to the left and teetering to the right, attempted to find us our seats, loudly losing his temper with one of the ushers. It was at that point I began to scuff the carpeted floor with my shoe, focusing all my attention on the vast sea of cabbage roses under my feet.

The play was set to begin at eight o’clock. By quarter past eight, Pop stood up and hollered, “When will this performance begin?” as Bingo, thrilled at the commotion, looked over at me and giggled, field of freckles glowing against his pale skin, while I quietly burned away on a pyre of mortification.

At eight-thirty, Pop, radiating impatience, rose to his feet, shining like a beacon, and began to sing the Irish national anthem, his clear tenor voice ringing out like a church bell as stunned members of the audience shifted in their seats to stare, one giant set of eyes in one huge head on one enormous craning neck. Bingo was incandescent with joy and excitement, gasping and laughing, and me, well, I was somewhere on the ceiling looking down on the lifeless body I’d abandoned, pupils fixed and dilated, respiration and heartbeat ground to a skittering stop, skin the color of chalcedony, inner voice a dying squeak.

Bing adored Pop. As for me, well, Pop had a way of testing the fragile limits of my humor—there’s something about being a teenager and bringing your friends into a house where they’re met by a middle-aged man sunning himself in the living room window in February and bragging about his tan. All the while he’s wearing a skimpy bathing suit and scuffed black brogues with no laces, his ample stomach glistening, and he’s making elegant, expansive gestures with his long, perfectly manicured fingers, sporting sunglasses and a wide-brimmed lady’s straw hat, big turquoise chiffon bow tied under his chin.

“So much for the so-called experts who say you can’t get a tan through glass, well, I’m living proof the experts don’t know what they’re talking about. Everyone asks me if I’ve just come back from Florida. An hour a day in front of a sunny window is all you need to give Nat King Cole a run for his money.”

We were back at home—the embarrassment I endured at the theater days earlier still working its way through secondary skin layers—and I could hear Pop in the next room delivering one of his famous daily affirmations.

“Oh, my God, look at that,” Ma said. “Charlie, please stop talking such nonsense and step away from the window. Tom, come here quick before you miss it. Collie, you too.”

Ma got up from the sofa and stood next to Pop, who had his back to the window, as Tom slowly ambled in from the kitchen, feigning annoyance. Curious, I abandoned the TV in the study that adjoined the living room and joined the crowd gathered around the window.

Bingo and one of his favorite dogs, a young Leonberger called Mambo, were playing a game. There was a small tree near the stable with a single branch that extended for a long way and hung about seven or eight feet off the ground. Mambo was running to the tree and leaping into the air, twisting midway through his jump, a giant, growling, furry corkscrew. He clamped his teeth into the branch and hung there for a couple of seconds.

After repeating the same jump sequence five or six times, Bingo joined him, and then the two of them would take turns snarling and spinning and hanging from the branch; sometimes they’d even perform their little trick in unison. 

I could hear Bingo laughing and Mambo barking, and for a moment it felt like fun, the four of us assembled around the window to watch, the sun pouring in.

“Say, this is better than a fireworks display,” Uncle Tom said as Pop chuckled and Ma agreed. Agreed! Ma!

“The woman is an aphid,” Ma said, interrupting the moment, confusing me with her remark. “She was born pregnant.”

It was then I realized that we were looking at different things. Ma and Uncle Tom were deep in discussion, enjoying a rare conviviality, sharing their mutual contempt for the woman down the road. The Conceiver, Tom called her. She had seven kids under the age of ten and was expecting her eighth. I welcomed her pregnancies since they tended to produce a
sitzkrieg
in the war between Uncle Tom and Ma.

“That creature sets the cause of women back by generations,” Ma said, leaning forward, squinting to get a better look.

“The size of her, she looks like a Guernsey,” Uncle Tom said. “It violates the laws of natural science.”

“Have a little respect,” Pop said. “She’s doing God’s work. What else are we good for except to repopulate the world? I consider the boys to be my greatest achievement.”

“I know, Charlie. I know. You are an absolute bore talking about it,” Ma said wearily.

“Having kids is nothing. Chimpanzees have kids by the barrel. I once found a toad inside a hailstone,” Uncle Tom said. “Now there’s an achievement.”

“Wow,” I said under my breath as Mambo and Bingo jumped, soaring so high that they seemed to touch the edge of the sky, Bingo’s triumphant hoot blending in with the noise of the seagulls and the calls of the blackbirds as they scattered from the adjacent trees and circled overhead.

“What’s that, Collie?” Pop said distractedly, looking my way. He and Ma and Uncle Tom were still focused on the Conceiver.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “You missed it.”

CHAPTER SIX

I
WAS SENT TO ANDOVER FOR HIGH SCHOOL—SENTENCED TO
Andover, was how Bing put it—a concession to my grandfather’s conviction that his financial support meant he could institutionalize any of us at will. By age sixteen, I was well established at school. It was 1979, and I’d grown accustomed to living away from home as a residential student, where I was a three-year upper, which is prep-speak for being in the eleventh grade. Reluctantly, I used to come home one weekend a month at the insistence of my parents. Trying to get back to school after any holiday was a recurring nightmare. Pop was always encouraging me to relax and forget about school.

“What’s it matter?” he’d say. “Good Lord, Collie, you’re due to inherit a bundle. Take an extra day at home. Jesus, if I had your situation, I’d live like a lawn chair.” 

Ma held prep schools in particularly low esteem, labeling them capitalist propaganda outlets. The main reason I was at Andover was that the Falcon threatened to cut her off financially if she didn’t give in to him on the critical issue of our education. When it came to self-preservation, Ma could be flexible.

“The priests had them for the first eight years. Now they’re mine,” he said.

Although I pretended some consternation in an attempt to appease my mother, I was quietly thrilled by the Falcon’s edict. As usual, Ma saw right through me. She referred to Andover as “Collie’s folly.”

Like a salamander that’s found its rock, I basked in the warm sunshine of Andover’s conventions and certainties, ceremonies, clean sheets, and Latin mottoes. At Andover, life was reduced to a series of rituals ruled by an unwavering sense of assured outcome. Samuel Phillips, school founder, despised idleness. In 1778, he had a beehive engraved on a silver seal along with two mottoes:
Finis Origine Pendet
—The End Depends on the Beginning, an admittedly scary thought in my case—and
Non Sibi
, which means Not for Self. My home life, in contrast, was a paean to the cult of narcissism.

Andover had pretty definite ideas about what constituted ideal young manhood, and I made an avid study of all of it. Like most prep schools, Andover was big on fostering excellence in all things, yet for much of the time the whole experience seemed to me like a protracted sigh of relief. Occasionally, though, alternating between Phillips Academy and home could feel a bit like trying to outrun schizophrenia. Every day a different voice whispered in my ear, competing for my loyalty—the inveigling voice of Samuel Phillips kept urging me to get out of bed at the crack of dawn to run five miles and still have time to practice the cello before breakfast.

Sometimes all that striving for excellence could get on your nerves, particularly when your roommate is Kip Pearson, son of the Canadian ambassador, and he never quits talking about his collection of edible underwear. And gradually I was discovering that a little Latin in the service of an epic sense of obligation goes a long way.

That’s when I’d begin to feel a twitch from another direction, like an embarrassing itch signaling the recurrence of a secret rash. I used to wait until Kip went out for his nightly troll, then I’d reach for the phone and dial home, just wanting to hear the sound of Pop’s mutinous voice.

But first I had to get by Uncle Tom.

“I’m going to spell a word, and I want you to pronounce it for me.”

I groaned.

“Cholmondeley,” he said, emphasizing each letter.

“Chumley,” I answered.

“Finally, I have it, the proof you’re a snob. That’s something only a snob knows. And you fell for it. Collie Flanagan, the so-called brain box, isn’t so clever after all.”

“You knew about it . . . so what does that make you?”

“It makes me a Renaissance man.”

“Let me speak to Pop. Is he there?”

“Charlie!” Tom hollered into the receiver. “It’s your long-lost son.”

“Collie?” Pop said into the receiver. “It’s grand to hear from you. Will you be coming to see us?”

“Sure I will, Pop. I’ve been busy with school, I’m sorry.”

“No need for apology. Everything is understood. But listen, Collie, hear me out. Slow down, don’t work so hard, and learn to take it easy. What do I always tell you? School would wear a mighty sour puss if it weren’t for recess.”

I hung up and sat for a while, staring and tossing a tennis ball into the air, and then I went back to gathering pollen to make honey for the hive.

When I was in my final year, the Falcon hand-delivered Bingo, freshly ejected from St. Paul’s School in Concorde, to the admissions office, where he enrolled him in the tenth grade—a random choice, since he hadn’t achieved a legitimate promotion since kindergarten. Holding him at arm’s length, the oval tips of his long fingers hovering in the air just above Bing’s shoulders, he was as squeamish as if he were scraping gum off the sole of his shoe.

Bingo cut into my bespoke existence at Andover like a serrated edge through fabric. I didn’t want him there, and he knew it. I resented him for insinuating himself into what felt like my secret life. There I was, all laid out like a pair of gray flannel pants, and in he came—a set of shears ready to rip me apart at the seams.

“Just stay far away from me. Don’t even look at me,” I warned him, knowing it was an exercise in futility. The more I threatened, the more he glistened like early morning grass, his eyes taking on a familiar green gleam. I might as well have thrown popcorn at an advancing tank.

I knew he was going to start it up. Bingo always insisted on going right to the seditious heart of things. In no time, the school was churning with him.

He smuggled a girl into his room, and when he was found out, he claimed she was our sister. The first week of school and already he was threatened with expulsion. The only thing that saved him was the Falcon and the universal terror he inspired. For punishment, he was supposed to clean the windows in the downstairs floor of his residence. Later that night, he and twelve apostles removed all the glass from the windows and in the morning offered up the air for inspection.

“They’re so clean they’re invisible,” Bingo said as the headmaster did a double take.

Bing insisted that he didn’t have anything to do with the missing window glass but reluctantly confessed that he knew who did, describing where they could find the proof right underneath my bed.

“Don’t worry. I wasn’t born yesterday, Mr. Flanagan,” the headmaster said as I sputtered inelegantly about my innocence.

A few days later, Bingo rigged up a dummy to look like a student and then waited until nighttime, when he and the boys laid their jerry-rig corpse in a pool of ketchup in the middle of the road leading into the school and lingered in the bushes for their hapless victims to arrive on the scene.

It took a pile of the Falcon’s dough to save him from that one. Mr. Fadras, the biology teacher, called Fat-Ass by just about everyone, including his colleagues, swerved into a ditch at first sight of a bloody corpse in his headlights and damaged the front end of his car.

When a cheating scandal erupted in the early fall—someone stole the answers to the second-year math midterm—Bingo was a natural suspect and spent hours undergoing the third degree.

“Let me get this straight,” I confronted him in my room, where he was collapsed on the bed, both exhausted and invigorated by yet another grueling interrogation. “You stole the answers to the exam and you still failed? That must be some kind of a world record for dumb. Or, don’t tell me, you were too lazy to memorize them.”

“I didn’t steal the answers.”

“Then who did?”

“Teagan.”

“Mark Teagan stole the answers and sold them. . . .”

“Yup.”

“But he says that you did it.”

“Yeah, well, he’s lying. His old man will kill him if he gets turfed from the school.”

“So what? He’s an asshole. His dad is his problem. For once you didn’t do it. You’ve got to tell them.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’m no rat.”

“Are you insane? This isn’t the Cosa Nostra. Why are you protecting that little creep? He sure as hell isn’t worried about you. Come on, Bing, you don’t want to get expelled for cheating. Stuff like that follows you. . . . It’s one thing to shit on the roof of Fat-Ass’s Toyota . . .”

He laughed at the memory. I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh, too, both of us side by side on the bed, so close we were touching, our shoulders adhering through the glue of habit, both of us staring up at the ceiling, laughter gradually subsiding, not looking at each other. In the end, my tone was pleading.

“Come on, Bing, save yourself. . . .”

But he wouldn’t, and I knew he wouldn’t because he was so goddamn unrelenting. I felt my throat pound and constrict. Bingo’s stubbornness was its own desolate country. Sometimes trying to navigate that barren landscape, I thought my heart had altered its geography, relocating to my feet, throbbing away inside my shoes.

“Why does it always have to be like this? What’s wrong with you? Are you missing some crucial chromosome? Even Ma and Pop will make concessions when it suits them. Why is everything a crisis with you? Can’t you ever just stand down?”

“Hey, Collie, just because you lack conviction . . .”

“Lack conviction? Holy shit! You terrorize everyone with your behavior, and then you peddle all these moral absolutes. . . . Fine, get expelled, get branded a cheater . . . what do I care?”

“You know what your problem is, Coll? You’re obsessed with what other people think.”

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and looked down at Bing, who smiled back up at me. He didn’t have a clue.

“No. You know what my problem is? My problem is caring about what you and Ma and Pop and Uncle Tom think. That’s my problem.”

“You don’t give a shit what we think. You’re too busy sucking up to the Falcon to care about us. Anyway, we’re all nuts, isn’t that right, Collie? It must be hell to be so sane in a crazy world.”

I couldn’t sleep thinking about what to do. The next morning, my insides tossing and turning like a washing machine, I went to the headmaster and told him that Mark Teagan stole the answers. He looked thoughtful and thanked me for coming forward. As he spoke, I glanced down at the tiny crack between the closed door and the floor, feeling small enough to crawl underneath.

At lunchtime I was standing around outside my residence, scuffing the recessed ground with my running shoe, digging a deeper hole, surrounded by a bunch of guys, friends of mine, who were reassuring me that I’d done the right thing by ratting out Mark.

“Teagan is a little prick,” somebody said.

“Yeah, well, so is Bingo,” I said, staring down at the ground.

“Yeah, but he’s a likable little prick,” someone else chimed in. “And he’d never hang your ass out to dry to save himself.”

“Uh-oh, here comes trouble,” said my friend Crunchie, whistling, glancing up and nudging me with his elbow, nodding in the direction of Bingo, who broke into a run at first sight of me.

I stepped out from inside my circle of friends to confront him, but before I had a chance to speak, he threw down his knapsack and let me have it, socked me right in the eye.

“You son of a bitch!” he said as the other guys, scrambling, reached in and dragged him away. I fell down on one knee, momentarily stunned, trying to get my bearings, feeling as if the world around me had exploded.

“Christ, Bing . . . ,” I muttered, tears streaming down my cheek. I watched out of my good eye, my hand forming a patch over the other eye, as Bingo reached for his knapsack, turned, and walked away.

“Jesus,” Crunchie said, concerned but a little titillated, too. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, though my eye hurt like hell. I stared after Bing until he vanished into a crowd of admiring girls who parted like the Red Sea to let him through—it looked as if I were his free pass to getting laid that night.

“If that was my little brother, I’d kick his ass,” Crunchie said as we headed back to my room.

Bingo got expelled from Andover for giving me a black eye.

“Say,” Uncle Tom said when I called home to give my side of the story, “it’s about time somebody took a poke at you.”

After he got tossed from Groton for wearing a hand buzzer, the next stop for Bingo was Upper Canada College in Toronto, where he distinguished himself by failing every course he took. His overall percent was 1, which intrigued Pop and Tom as they speculated forever about whatever he did to earn one mark.

“It doesn’t seem mathematically possible. You don’t suppose it was something to do with carnal relations?” Pop voiced his worst fears.

“No, surely he would have earned a passing grade in that case,” Uncle Tom said, looking thoughtful as the two of them sat on the front porch rocking, nodding, sharing a beer. I could hear them from my bedroom above, the sounds of their conversation floating upward through my open window. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I stuck my head out the window. “He got one percent because he only wrote one test and he scored one out of a hundred on it, that’s all. It’s not a great mystery.”

“I say it was the pomegranate. I gave him a pomegranate to give to his geography teacher, who’d expressed an interest in tasting one, that’s the source for sure,” Uncle Tom said, oblivious to my intrusion, his voice holding steady and full of knowing.

“Oh, that would be it!” Pop exclaimed. “The pomegranate, of course! Jesus, you can’t beat fruit! The tales I could tell about what I achieved with a little help from an apple and an Olympian sense of timing.”

Weirdly, despite his academic record, they liked Bing in Toronto and expressed hope for his future. Equally inexplicable, he seemed to like it there, too, and was making plans to return in the fall.

“Canadians have a high tolerance for eccentricity,” the Falcon said when I indicated amazement at the turn of events. “For morons, too, apparently,” he continued, adding his trademark sprinkle of cyanide.

Bingo had a more direct explanation. “I’m making it with the headmaster’s daughter, and she’s got her old man wrapped around her little finger.”