Beach Music (17 page)

“Hello, everybody,” I said, trying not to make eye contact with anyone in the room. “Long time, no see.”

“I’m Jim Pitts,” an unfamiliar man’s voice said. “Your mother’s husband. We haven’t had the pleasure.”

I shook hands with my new stepfather and felt light-headed, as though I were walking through the atmosphere of a planet so dense that songbirds could neither fly nor sing.

“How are you, Dr. Pitts?” I said. “You have nice taste in women.”

“Your mother will be very grateful that you came,” said the doctor.

“How is she?” I asked.

Dr. Pitts looked perplexed, then frightened, and I saw that this tall, white-haired stranger with his baritone voice was close to tears.
When he tried to speak and no words followed, he could not have given me a more accurate or devastating portrait of my mother’s condition. In appearance, the doctor was a much softer, toned-down version of my father, but when I mentioned this later to my brothers, none of them had made this connection. Like teenagers, the doctor and my mother had eloped two years before, when the ink was barely dry on our parents’ divorce decree. My brothers had kept Dr. Pitts at arm’s distance and still treated him as an unlikely addition to the family circle. He looked like a man who valued constancy and recited maxims about birds in the hand.

“The other kids call me Doctor,” he said. “Please call me Jim.”

Except for my youngest brother, John Hardin, the other “kids” were in their early thirties, but I said, “Glad to, Jim.”

“The face is familiar,” my brother Tee said out loud to the room. “But I can’t place the name.”

“You from around these parts, stranger?” Dupree said, winking at Dallas.

I told them both to get laid in Italian and Dallas broke out laughing. Dupree rose out of his chair first and gave me a hug. He was the only person I knew who could embrace you and keep his distance at the same time. Being the smallest of the brothers, he had a natural gift for arbitration, for those delicate negotiations which bind families together or send them into scattered and ungatherable fragments.

“It’s good to see you, Jack,” said Dupree. “Any chance of us getting to meet Leah again?”

“Seems like there’s a chance for anything,” I said, returning his embrace, then accepting the full-fledged bear hug of my brother Tee, the second youngest of five boys. Tee’s emotions were always out front, running over the banks. My mother considered him the softest version of the McCall male and by far the best shoulder to cry on among the McCall brothers. But Tee also held the biggest grudge against our mother. He was the only one who would say, out loud, that she had crimes of incompetence and inattention to answer for … Because of this, her coma had hit him particularly hard.

“Brace yourself, Jack,” Tee said. “Mom looks like shit. I don’t know what Dallas told you but it’s worse than you imagine.”

“He’ll see soon enough,” Dallas said.

“I thought it was an act,” Tee said. “You know, our mother’s not above putting on an act to get her way. I tried to figure out what she wanted. The doctor here bought her a Cadillac, so I knew it wasn’t a car. He got her a ring big enough so a gorilla couldn’t lift his arm. So I knew it wasn’t a diamond. But she’s a master planner. Right? We know she’s got something up her sleeve. Right?”

“I resent what you’re implying about my wife,” Dr. Pitts said.

“Relax, Doctor,” Dupree said. “Tee’s just thinking out loud.”

“Hey, Doc. Trust me,” Tee said. “You don’t know the broad. You’re brand-new at the game. I’m not criticizing Mom. Really. I admire this about her. Just because it happened to screw up my life. Hey, I’m not one to hold grudges.”

“Could you write me a prescription for an animal tranquilizer, Doctor,” Dupree said. “I need to put Tee down for the night.”

“Your mother’s the most wonderful woman in the world,” Dr. Pitts said, rising to leave the waiting room. “What a shame her sons can’t see it.”

When he had left I said, “I go away for a little while and you guys go to seed. I thought I’d trained you better than that.”

Dallas shook his head and said, “Dr. Pitts has had some trouble adjusting to us. He lacks wit, irony, sarcasm, all the necessary cruelty that makes life possible in this family.”

“He thinks Mom’s perfect,” Dupree said. “Nothing wrong with that. It’s how a husband’s supposed to think.”

“Dupree hasn’t changed,” Tee said. “Still the biggest phony in the world.”

“Go see Mom, Jack,” Dallas said. “Get ready for the shock of your life.”

Then I walked down the corridor with Dallas and entered the intensive care unit. Once the door shut behind us I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and leaned against a wall to regain whatever equilibrium I could before looking at my mother.

“Tough, huh?” Dallas said. “I should have warned you that the brothers had all gathered.”

A nurse in a gauze mask motioned us toward a bed and signaled five minutes with her left hand as I approached a bed where a
woman unrecognizable as my mother lay. The name tag read “Lucy Pitts” and for a moment my heart swelled thinking a terrible mistake had been made, that this broken woman was masquerading as the beautiful mother who had borne five sons and could still fit into her wedding dress. Her body was frail and covered with bruises.

I touched my mother’s face; it was hot to the touch and her hair was wet and unkempt. I leaned down to kiss her and saw my own tears fall on her face.

“Jesus, Dallas,” I said. “She’s not faking. Who would’ve ever thought that Mom was mortal.”

“Be careful. The doctor tells us she might be able to hear us, even in the coma.”

“Really?” I wiped my tears away. Then I leaned over again and said, “Your son Jack loved you the most. Your other children resented you and thought you were horseshit. It was Jack who was always your biggest fan, your number-one cheerleader. Jack, Jack, Jack. That’s the only name you must remember with love and adoration when you wake up from all this.”

I took my mother’s hand, pressing it softly against my cheek, and said, ‘I keep expecting her to open her eyes and scream ‘Surprise.’ ”

“Not this time,” Dallas said.

“The guy she married,” I said. “He seems all right.”

“A nice guy. Further right than Attila the Hun, but a decent sort.”

“She deserves a decent sort. She always has.”

“Mom thinks you hate her,” Dallas said.

“I’ve had my days.”

“Dad thinks you hate him too.”

“He’s on the right track. How’s his drinking?”

“Not bad lately,” Dallas said. “He got drunk for a month when Mom married Dr. Pitts, but then he sobered up and started dating teenagers.”

“Has he been to see Mom yet?”

“You’ve been out of the loop for a while, Jack. After Mom’s honeymoon with Dr. Pitts, they returned to their house on the Isle of Orion and found Dad sitting in their living room. He had drunk all the doctor’s booze and he had a shotgun pointed at Dr. Pitts’
heart. He had a plan worked out to kill Dr. Pitts, kill Mom, then kill himself.”

“Should you be talking like this?” I asked, pointing to the bed.

“She knows all about this,” Dallas said. “She even got where she could laugh about it, but it took a while. Dad had been drunk a month, and the whole week that Mom and Dr. Pitts were in Jamaica. His scheme was foolproof except he had not planned on being drunk when the happy couple returned from their travels. Nor did he expect that Dr. Pitts would have such a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Dad had drunk every drop of liquor the man owned, but it had taken him the full week to do it. He was too drunk to lift the gun to fire when the honeymooners returned. By the time he got organized, Mom and Jim Pitts had run screaming into the night.”

“Did they press charges?”

“Yes. They certainly did.”

“You got them to drop the charges.”

“Yes. But it took some work. Dr. Pitts is terrified of the man who graciously gave of his own sperm to bring us into this world. All my considerable legal skills were brought into play. It was a mess.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“You don’t get to play it both ways, pal. You leave the family—the family isn’t required to tell you every Dear Abby story that comes up.”

“You just told me that my old man threatened to murder my mother and her new husband. Someone should have told me,” I insisted.

“No, no. It seems to me a great man once wrote a letter to all the members of his family …” Dallas began with bitter irony.

“The letter was a mistake.”

“Quite possibly it was a mistake, but it still arrived safely in all the mailboxes of all us McCalls. The man stated quite unequivocally that he never wanted to hear from any members of his immediate family ever again. Nor did he wish to correspond or communicate with anyone who had ever known him as a child or adult in Waterford.
He wanted to see no one from his hometown, his college, or his family. The great man was starting life anew, afresh, and this time he was going to get it right.”

“When I wrote the letter, I thought I knew what I was doing.”

“We did too,” Dallas said. “We adhered to your wishes and most of us did not try to contact you during those years.”

“Shyla,” I stammered. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Neither did we,” Dallas said. “We loved her too.”

I knelt down beside my mother and tried to pray, but none of the old words seemed adequate. I listened to her hard, rasping breathing and laid my head against her chest. Her valiant heart sounded strong and certain and that heartbeat alone gave me reason to hope.

There was suddenly a slight change in her breathing and something must have registered on a machine where the nurses were, for an efficient black nurse came and took Lucy’s pulse and adjusted the flow of the intravenous into her veins.

Then another nurse came over and pointed disapprovingly at her watch like a teacher circling a misspelled word in red ink.

“She’s not gonna die,” I whispered to Dallas.

“If she doesn’t do it in the next few days, they think she’s got a pretty good shot.”

I leaned over and kissed my mother’s cheek, then took her hand and pressed it against my own cheek.

“Say good-bye, Jack,” Dallas advised. “In case she can really hear you.”

“Listen to me, Mama. It was your son Jack who loved you the most. Your other children resented you and called you terrible names behind your back. It was always Jack who was your biggest fan, your number-one cheerleader. Remember that nasty Dallas. He was always spiteful and hateful toward you.”

Dallas laughed as the nurse hustled us out of the intensive care unit.

Outside in the hallway, I felt hammered, flattened out.

“Your old room’s made up for you,” Dallas said. “Dad’s real excited about you coming.”

“He gonna be there?”

“Not tonight,” Dallas said. “We had to put him in the drunk tank at the jail. Just to dry out. He’s taken the news about Mom real hard. Odd, Jack. He still loves her and seems lost without her.”

“Take me home,” I said. “The scene of the crime.”

N
o story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

The next morning the family gathered slowly again as the ruined cells skirmished in the silent lanes of Lucy’s bloodstream. This gathering was irregular and off-center. None of us wanted to be here. In her coma, attached to all the machines of measurement and warning, Lucy could not hear the house of McCall rallying to her side. No one loved theater or spectacle more than my mother, but this coming together contained no aspects of whim and it was not a joke. She had taught her sons to laugh, but not to grieve. And so, with nothing to do, we sat around and waited, trying to learn the laws and courtesies of dying. Under such extreme pressure, we got to know each other again. We had come to a meeting place in our lives that would be part summing up and part winking to the gods of darkness. The waiting room filled up with strange openings, disorders, and slanted windows facing out to the past. But all exits were barred and there seemed to be no way out as we groped for common ground, as we looked for a straight line to share.

Though we thought we were learning the protocols of dying, we did not know which ones applied to our mother. I had gotten to
the hospital at seven that morning and had visited her amid those humming machines that were monitoring her vital signs. The nurses told me there was no change and I was soon banished to the waiting room, where I would learn the arts of vegetating and stillness as I awaited news. I sat surrounded by piles of bad magazines. I observed the decor and the furnishings and thought it took a sensibility of remarkably piddling genius to design a room this jarring. From a machine, I bought a cup of coffee so mediocre as to encourage the writing of an article pleading with the coffee-growing nations not to export coffee to this country until Americans learned to do it right.

My brother Tee arrived next, unshaven and unkempt. It looked as though he had found all his clothes at the bottom of a laundry hamper. He taught autistic children in Georgetown County and when asked about why he chose such a profession he would say, “After growing up in this family, I found autism refreshing.” Tee always found himself in the dead center of family battles and was always being caught in acts of unsure and ambiguous diplomacy, though no one ever doubted his good will.

“I’m not sure if I’m glad to see you or not,” Tee said to me.

“You’ve got about a week to figure it out,” I said. “Then I’m back to Rome.”

“What if Mom dies?” he asked, then said quickly, “Don’t answer that. Forget I even asked the question. I feel guilty enough as it is. I read that leukemia is the only cancer that’s strictly affected by the emotions. Remember that time I flunked biology? Or the time I shoplifted a bag of M&M’s when I was five? It made her emotional. A leukemia cell could’ve formed right then when she was spanking my fanny.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

“You’re tired of me already, aren’t you?” Tee asked.