Apologize, Apologize! (9 page)

“See! Look! There they are,” Bingo shouted, pointing to a distant spot in the sky, and we glanced up in unison, watching as the birds, all six together, came around a big copper beech tree near the loft and made a smooth hook to the left, dipping the trailing edges of their wings downward before landing.

Each day after that, we took them a little farther than the day before, and each day, no matter how far we took them, they made their way back home, the signal flap of their wings stirring me in ways I took great effort to hide. Not Bingo, who was so unconcealed that he might as well have been a goat.

“Here they come! Collie, look at them, they’re coming. Son of a bitch!!” He was shouting, his arms thrown wide over his head.

“A racing pigeon’s heart is bigger than the Parthenon,” Uncle Tom proclaimed, and then he began whistling the tune to “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” ordering us to do likewise. Pigeons, like dogs, respond to whistling, according to Uncle Tom.

“Jesus!” I yelped as the returning flock passed overhead and one of them shit on my upturned forehead, much to Bingo’s delight. Ignoring me, Uncle Tom, continuing to look skyward, never missed a beat.

“They’re opinionated, too, with a talent for punditry, just like you, Collie. I never knew a pigeon that didn’t have a gift for summing up a man’s character in a single eloquent gesture.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE LAST WEEKEND IN MAY THERE WAS A LAVISH ROCOCO AFFAIR
held in New York City to honor the Falcon for his various measured philanthropies, an event that generated not a little discussion around the table at home.

“Next they’ll be pinning a medal on Pol Pot for his humanitarian work,” Pop said.

Obsessed with opera, the Falcon was practically a parody in his violet Napoleon-tie cravat—he always seemed to be financing some new skylit performance of
Tosca
in exotic international locales. When he developed diabetes in his sixties, a mild case controlled through diet and exercise, he got all fired up about finding a cure, donating millions of dollars to research.

“Self-interest is a perverse foundation for charity. For all his wealth and power, your grandfather lacks humility and perspective. Always seek the panoptic view, boys,” said Pop, who was committed to the notion that check writing begins at home.

The Falcon issued an embargo on Pop and Uncle Tom—they were forbidden to attend the party.

“I’ve no problem with the banning of Tom, but what will I say when people ask me where my husband is?” Ma asked him.

“Believe me, no one will inquire,” the Falcon said.

The big night arrived, and I was in my room getting ready—we were flying out of Boston in the Falcon’s jet. Ever the control freak, he had suits made for Bingo and me just for the occasion. The fabric of my dark blue jacket was so soft, I felt as if I were plunging my arms up to my shoulders in rainwater.

“You’re a cheap date,” Bingo said from the doorway, spotting from a distance my willingness to be sartorially seduced.

He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his face burned red from an afternoon in the sun. “Why aren’t you dressed?” I asked him.

“I’m not going.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going?” I stopped buttoning my shirt midway through and looked at him.

“Pop and Uncle Tom aren’t invited. If they’re not going, then neither am I.”

“Come on, in our crazy family, what the hell difference does it make?”

He shrugged and leaned into the door frame. “It makes a difference to me. Anyway, I’m going to San Francisco for the weekend with Peter Holton and his family. We’re leaving tonight.”

“The Falcon’s going to be pissed if you’re a no-show.” I pulled on my pants.

“That’s all right. He’s always mad about something.” He was tossing a tennis ball in the air and catching it.

“I suppose you think I’m wrong for going.”

“I didn’t say that.” He caught the ball and held it for a second before sending it soaring. It made a loud mechanical thump on the tin ceiling overhead.

“You don’t need to say anything. It’s implied.” Slipping on my shoes and bending over to inspect their shine, I deliberately avoided looking at him.

“Oh, it’s ‘implied,’ is it?” He was making fun of me. “How’s it implied?”

“Well, you’re sticking by Pop and Uncle Tom. I’m betraying them, choosing the Falcon over them—anyway, that’s how it will seem if I go and you don’t. Thanks for making me the bad guy.” I stood up, turned around, and confronted him.

“That’s your problem.” He let the ball go, and it bounced across the bedroom floor and under the chair.

“Look, Bingo, even Ma is going . . . what’s the big deal? Pop and Uncle Tom don’t give a damn. Stay or go . . . all of them will have something crazy to say about whichever option either one of us chooses. It’s only a party . . . can’t anything in this family just be simple? I want to go. Why do I need to feel guilty about it?”

“Who’s making you feel guilty? I’m doing what I want and you’re doing what you want. Like you say, it’s only a party. I don’t feel guilty about my choice. Why do you feel guilty about yours?”

“I don’t.” I put one arm into the sleeve of my jacket. “Shit.” I reached for a lint brush sitting on the dresser top, a skein of dog hair making faint layers on the suit’s dark fabric.

“Well then, forget about it. You do what you want and I’ll do what I want.”

“Great. I intend to.”

“Yeah, well, have fun,” he said as he stepped backward into the hall, “you treacherous, disloyal, star-fucking sack of shit.”

Even Ma was persuaded to attend the tribute to her old man, despite the banning of Pop. She claimed it was so she could buttonhole some of the world’s most influential people—you know, wave her index finger in their faces, shriek abuse, and make them change their minds about the importance of boycotting lettuce.

But from the way she fussed over her hair—by the time she and her team of gardeners were finished, she looked like an enormous hydrangea—it was clear to me her real purpose was to meet Robert Redford, which isn’t to say that her entrance was any less reminiscent of a Bolshevik charging the palace on foaming horseback.

“My kingdom for an ice pick,” the Falcon muttered as I stood next to him, watching in dismay as she chased down a prominent CEO, running him through with her verbal pitchfork. Before the night was over, just about everyone in the place had sprung leaks, blood and champagne spurting from all those glamorous human fountains.

Several senators, the usual Hollywood actors and industry players, media personalities, big Democratic Party donors, and a smattering of international philanthropists were among the guests, old money and new money chatting warmly, patting one another on the back, and kibitzing—you could lace up your ice skates and slide across the burnished ease of it all. Then Ma plowed in among them, making war and sport, hip checking and high sticking and smashing everyone into the boards.

Ma turned especially vicious whenever she found herself in the company of men who liked to proclaim their uncompromising belief in excellence, a propensity for which she reserved special loathing and contempt.

“Spare us from two things,” she said, her zealotry so out of place that she might as well have been a plumber wandering around looking for a drain to rescue. “Spare us the community-minded and their zealous pursuit of excellence.”

“I’d like to add a third item to that list, if I may,” the Falcon said, recognizing an implicit insult when he heard one. “Lord, spare us your perplexing and relentless juvenilia.”

Champagne—Ma was drinking a lot of it that night—inevitably made her susceptible to one of two courses of action, fomenting revolution or launching a direct frontal assault on her old man. On this occasion, she decided to go for broke and attempted to do both.

“Hey, Perry . . .” She leaned forward and poked the Falcon in the chest with her index finger as the group around him cleared a space roughly the size of Manhattan.

I closed my eyes and braced for the worst. Whenever Ma referred to her father as “Perry,” it was a signal to release the flying monkeys.

“I’m not a member of your fan club. I’m not looking for a donation or an endorsement. I’m not some mandarin on the make. Don’t confuse me with one of your groundlings. Save the Pliny the Elder crap for someone who actually needs your self-serving approval.”

“You’ve all met my daughter, I presume? The jewel in my crown.” The Falcon glanced around at the shining assembled, who stood dumbfounded, too shocked to respond.

Embarrassment washed over me, so gangrenous that I felt as if skin tissue were dying systematically, starting at my feet and burning upward, devouring every last living part of me. Sometimes I think my real life’s purpose is to refute the cliché notion that you can’t actually die of embarrassment.

“Do you know ‘Long Ago and Far Away’?” I asked one of the musicians who was passing by, touching him on the forearm, reaching out in desperation, anything to shift the attention away from Ma and the Falcon. It was one of Pop’s favorite songs and the only thing that came to mind, and as the first familiar notes sounded, I nodded in the direction of the orchestra, offering up quiet thanks, and then, like everyone else, I stopped to listen, impelled by an urgent hollering that was coming from the direction of the room’s entranceway.

Pop, impeccably dressed and manifestly drunk, had apparently decided to crash the party and was threatening to take apart anyone who tried to interfere.

“What’s he saying?” one of the guests asked while I watched, aghast and disbelieving, as Pop, shouting and red-faced, spewing spit and rage, trumpeting and heaving like a rogue elephant, wrestled with security. He was bent over at the waist, his stomach straining against three sets of arms, hotel employees trying vainly to drag him back outside.

“Peregrine Lowell . . . something . . . I can’t understand him. . . .” The woman next to me shook her head in bewilderment.

“Sounds like ‘Peregrine Lowell . . . please.’ Please what, I wonder?” her friend asked.

“Beats me.”

Peregrine Lowell, he was saying Peregrine Lowell, that part was terrifyingly clear.

“What the hell?” a combined murmur went up, accompanied by barely suppressed laughter as the message finally emerged with mortifying clarity.

“Peregrine Lowell pees!” Pop was screaming to the heavens, claiming his bizarre revenge. “He is not a god! He’s a man with a complete set of human frailties. Peregrine Lowell pees!”

Trevor Boothe, grandson of Senator Avery Boothe—we went to Andover together—came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I made a half turn and was taken aback by his horrified expression. In Boothe’s world, my parents were enacting a chain-saw massacre. I touched my hand to my cheek, thinking I was developing a nervous tic. Trevor was so white that he shamed the linens.

“Oh, my God. Sorry, Collie, how embarrassing for you,” he muttered, shaking his head, his hair not moving—funny, the small things you notice while you’re being cremated.

“Embarrassing? You think this is embarrassing? You don’t get it, Trevor. Embarrassment is my business. It’s my only business,” I said, inexplicably merry, convinced I was having a nervous breakdown. I was giggling the same way I did when I was seven years old and Uncle Tom licked his fingers and used spit to clean off my dirty face in front of the whole congregation before Mass one Sunday.

I felt Trevor’s hand press fleetingly against the hollow of my back, as if he were extending comfort to a stray dog with fleas. Then, as he was slipping away, trying to put subtle distance between us, I instinctively looked over at the Falcon, who appeared momentarily transported to another realm, some wonderful place where Fantastic Charlie Flanagan had just been pronounced dead after choking on his own rum-soaked vomit.

Cognizant suddenly of the spotlight, and as Ma rushed to Pop’s side, the two of them disappearing noisily into the corridor outside the ballroom, Ma’s scream of “Murderer!” threatening to shatter the crystal, the Falcon took immediate remedial action and, apparently fully recovered, started to laugh and then went on chatting as if nothing were wrong, and the room heaved a huge sigh of relief as the band played on, the singer launching into a hypercheerful version of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

My eyes burned, and I felt a familiar ache deep in my throat. Ma was certifiable, but Pop . . . well, Pop spent his whole life snapping towels.

Bingo would have loved every moment of the performance Ma and Pop put on. I was wrong about the Falcon being mad about Bingo not attending the party in his honor—the truth was, he didn’t even notice that Bingo was missing. But I did. Without Bing, it felt as if I’d shown up without my teeth. I spent the entire night grinding my gums, half listening, imaginary conch to my ear, the evening’s low, reverberating party talk mimicking the insistent roll of the tide back home.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HE NEXT DAY, BINGO CALLED FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO
commiserate with Ma and Pop about the events the night before, which were being played out in the New York gossip columns, and to announce that he was staying on for a few more days.

While Pop had no memory of the party, or pretended not to, anyway, Ma was as triumphant as if she had single-handedly brought down the Bastille, spending so many hours on the phone being celebrated by her activist cohorts that she developed situational laryngitis.

“Your brother wants to speak to you,” she whispered in deadly fashion, handing off the phone as I smiled weakly and thanked her—she’d been giving me the long stare ever since we got home. I felt as if my neck were being measured for the guillotine.

“Poor Pop,” Bingo said.

“Well, I don’t know about that. Poor Pop put on quite a public performance last night. It was pretty humiliating,” I said.

“I wish I’d been there,” he said, voice full of longing.

“Yeah, I wish you’d been there, too,” I responded, though my tone wasn’t quite so winsome. “When are you coming home? Ma’s looking at me as if she wants to sacrifice the fatted calf.”

“I promised Pop I’d get him Karl Malden’s autograph. I wanted to cheer him up. It may take me a few days.”

“How can you make such a stupid promise?” I asked Bingo. “You’re not going to meet him.”

“Yes, I am. Why are you always so negative?”

“Being negative has nothing to do with it. Would the outcome be any different if I was acting like a cheerleader? San Francisco is a big city with tons of people. You might as well say you’re going to meet the queen because you’re in London.”

“Collie, you’re not going to change my mind, so you might as well quit trying. I’m gonna meet Karl Malden and get his autograph for Pop. Why else do you think I’m staying on?”

“You’re crazy. I give up,” I said. But I didn’t give up, the whole situation induced a kind of temporary madness in me. I kept calling and arguing with him about it.

“You’re not going to meet him,” I said, gripping the phone as if I were hanging from the ledge of a cliff.

“Yeah, I am,” he said.

Pop loved the movies, fancied himself a bit of an authority and a discerning critic. His favorite actor was Karl Malden, which meant that Karl Malden assumed a disproportionately large role in our lives— between Ma and Pop and their mutual obsessions, we might as well have hung separate Christmas stockings for him and for Rupert Brooke.

Pop would argue his merits to anyone, always concluding his carefully prepared defense of Malden’s performances by insisting that his looks were underrated, at which point you could always depend on Uncle Tom to say, “What you see in that thin-lipped proboscis on legs, I’ll never know.”

“If I hear the name Karl Malden one more time, I’ll go mad,” Ma would chime in right on cue.

“I still say he was cheated out of the Oscar for
On the Waterfront,
” Bingo would say, clever enough to know the events he was setting in motion.

“Don’t get me started . . . ,” Pop would say, nicely getting started.

Bingo and Pop never missed an episode of
The Streets of San Francisco
, starring Malden.

“Hey, Pop, our show’s on!” Bingo used to alert everyone five minutes before the starting credits.

“I’ll spontaneously combust if I see that man’s face staring back at me from the TV screen one more time,” Ma would say, using her fingers to make tiny revolving circles at her temples.

“It’s insane to think that Bing is going to get you an autograph—you can’t will these things to happen,” I said to Pop, who looked at me with pity as he prepared a place of honor on the mantelpiece in the living room.

“You most certainly can,” Uncle Tom interjected, sticking his nose in, emerging from the kitchen in an apron and carrying a dishrag. “And by the way, I take umbrage to your tone,” he continued, his hands red from water so hot that it would practically peel flesh. He took pride in his ability to withstand scalding temperatures. He turned around to face me where I was sitting straddled over Mambo sleeping on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pop hastily slip away—he didn’t have much tolerance for Uncle Tom’s digressive pronouncements.

“Conventional expectation has no sway over me,” Uncle Tom said, pausing for a moment as he sat on the sofa across from me, squeezing aside Bachelor, waiting out the cutlery, still too hot to handle even for him.

“When I was fifteen years old, I was struck by lightning. They found me in a field still smoking hours later. It turned me into a kind of good-luck charm and a talisman to boot. Some say my powers are even greater than those attributed to the Miraculous Medal of Mary.”

He pointed his finger at me—his certainty poking me hard in the chest.

“Who are you to challenge life’s great mysteries with your dourness? All I know is that I can cure a toothache if I put my mind to it.”

Two days later and Bingo arrived back home, rushing from the cab and in through the back door, hollering for Pop from the kitchen, Ma actually tripping over her trailing housecoat as she rushed from the study to greet him. Something deep inside me recalibrated as I watched Pop proudly hang a framed sheet of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook that said “To Fantastic Charlie Flanagan, with warmest wishes from Karl Malden, June 2, 1983,” dated the last day of Bingo’s trip.

“Oh, my God, you’re a marvel. Isn’t he the most amazing boy!” Ma was exclaiming all over the place. “And you said he couldn’t do it,” she said to me, watching with evident scorn as I approached the fireplace to have a better look.

“How’d you do it?” I asked Bing, who was busy fending off the worship of the mob.

“What’s the collective for killjoys?” Uncle Tom asked me as he spit into a cloth and wiped a smudge on the glass of the frame that contained Pop’s greatest treasure.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” I said.

“A Collie of killjoys,” he responded with exaggerated blandness.

Bingo launched into an elaborate explanation for how he got the autograph, Ma and Pop standing arm in arm, looking as if they were on board a moonlight cruise swaying to the smooth musical styling of Bing Flanagan.

“I tried everything. I went to every hot-spot restaurant and hotel in the city. I checked out nightclubs, made some calls, even conjured up the evil specter of the Falcon to try to find Malden, but nothing was working. I had some tough moments, believe me,” he said, laying it on thick but careful to wear the mantle of his greatness lightly as I shook my head through the whole protracted tale of his triumph.

“I was almost ready to give up. It was the last night and I figured that I’d failed, but I couldn’t understand it because I was so sure it would happen. I could see the outcome in my head, so why wasn’t it happening? I couldn’t believe that I’d been so wrong. It didn’t make any sense. I had to catch an early plane, so I was certain it was over. I left the hotel room to go to this little store on the corner—it sells that drink I like, you know the orange one?”

Pop and Ma are nodding—you couldn’t move in the mudroom for the boxes of Bingo’s favorite orange drink.

“Anyway, I’m on the elevator feeling depressed and defeated—now I know what it feels like to be you, Collie,” he said in an unamusing aside, though Ma let out a howl of appreciation that caused Lenin to leap up from his spot in the dining room and attack poor Bachelor.

“The elevator stops on the eighth floor, and I’m so dejected my head is hanging, but I summon up the interest to look as this guy with great shoes steps aboard, and it was him. I couldn’t believe it!”

“It was Karl Malden?” Pop said, as stunned as if he’d been visited by God in his sleep. “What are the chances?”

“Slim to none,” I said.

“He was a wonderful guy, Pop, a real powerful presence, just the way you imagined he’d be. . . .”

“What did I tell you?” Pop said.

“Charlie, let him finish,” Ma said, exasperated.

“When he heard the whole story, he was as excited as I was, and when we reached the lobby he stopped some high school kid walking by and asked for a piece of paper from his notebook and signed it. He said I made his day.”

“I’m sure he’s still talking about it,” Pop said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s made the rounds in Hollywood and Kirk Douglas is entertaining his friends with it.”

“It’s a miracle, someone should notify the pope,” I said.

Pop never questioned the authenticity of the autograph or the veracity of Bing’s story. He believed in Bingo’s ability to conjure up Karl Malden like a rabbit from a hat—as far as Pop was concerned, life was a series of magic tricks.

I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t know what to think, though my thoughts about it have evolved a little over the years. Eventually the autograph just seemed to disappear, got lost as treasures sometimes do.

I wonder where it is. It would be nice to know.