Elegies for the Brokenhearted (4 page)

Mostly people were going about their business, coming home from work, carrying paper and plastic bags, carrying purses, intent on dinner, their families, wondering what the kids had done at school, or turning over some problem between them and a lover. On the face of each passerby was a look of isolation, of distraction, of such familiarity with their surroundings that they might just as well have been blind. We were stopped at a red light when we saw a man walking down the sidewalk, toward us—he was wearing a woolly plaid jacket and brown slacks, a gray fedora—and as we watched him someone called out to him from across the street. We watched his face light up like a child whose birthday cake, flickering with lit candles, had been set before him, we watched him wave to his friend. “Shut up, fool!” he called, by way of greeting. Watching him you had a hungry look, your eye narrowed like an eagle's, and it was clear in that moment that what you wanted from life was for someone to say the same to you, you wanted to be a part of something like that, to have friends you might meet on the street, friends calling out to you and you answering in mock rage. New York, Harlem, what you saw there you wanted to become, what you saw there was some long-forgotten dream brought back to life. What I remember most from our trip is this, this the moment we lost you.

 

Y
ou hung around through spring, working long hours laying carpet in the new houses being built at the north end of town. You were saving your money. When we saw you all you talked about was New York, your dream of moving there.
You never seen,
you'd say,
so many people in your life. And the buildings, a million of 'em, and people in all of 'em, you've never seen anything like it,
you'd say.
Right, Mare?
and you'd look to me for confirmation, you'd wink. It was something between us, something unknown to others.
New York,
you'd say, to bartenders, to your sisters, to people in line at the grocery store, is where everything is happening.
You're not in New York, you might as well be dead
.

All that season you were hooked on
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
. You filled the house with it, played it start to finish over and over and over again, sang it in the shower. I sat for long stretches looking at that album cover, all those faces, that collage of the brokenhearted—Marilyn Monroe, W. C. Fields, Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, Shirley Temple, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Marlon Brando, Stephen Crane, William Burroughs, Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Fred Astaire. I knew their names, or didn't, it didn't seem to matter, what seemed to matter was their faces, their expressions, those far-off looks, those joyless smiles. Your favorite line from the album was something eerie and cold, and you sang it all day long, in the shower, over breakfast, in the car, during commercials, in the booths of restaurants and on the swiveling stools of diners, in the library, in waiting rooms, in bars, over and over and over again you burst out with it:
He blew his mind out in a car.

“Would you,” my mother and Malinda would say, everyone would say, “shut the fuck up?”

 

A
ll that February and March our mother was home. She had broken up with her boyfriend and suddenly she was around all the time, talking on and on about the limitations of the Jewish race. “They're a closed society, the Jews,” she said. “Very selfish, very judgmental. Real superior. If you're not one of them, forget it.” All of the interest she'd taken in him she turned on us. Nightly she had us lie on the kitchen counter with our heads in the sink and she washed and conditioned and brushed our hair, she washed and ironed our clothes, in the morning she inspected our teeth and fingernails, wrapped scarves around us and pulled hats down over our heads. Before we left for school she took our faces in her hands and stared into our eyes. “I love you,” she told us. “You're my true loves, my only true loves.” She hugged us and we clung to her like fools.

 

W
hen the weather broke you put an ad in the paper and sold Michelle to a guy with a handlebar mustache. He showed up at the door, head down, hands in pockets. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, no coat, a green Celtics cap with a well-grooved brim. He was wearing, also, cowboy boots, and it was hard to imagine Michelle going off with a man in cowboy boots. But you gave him the keys and he went for a spin around the neighborhood. People did this back then—they'd give away their keys to a complete stranger and simply trust the stranger to return. Which he did. Runs good, he said, nodding. And you said,
She's been good to me
.
She could break down tomorrow, though. Who knows. I hope she doesn't but she might.

“I trust you,” said the mustached man. And you shook hands. There was a trading of money and documents. The man climbed into Michelle and drove off. We could hear her engine roaring long after we had lost sight of her, and then we couldn't even hear that. She was gone. And the next day, before anyone woke, off on a Greyhound bus, so were you.

We went for a walk after you sold Michelle, and this was the last I ever saw you. I seemed to sense it would be. I was kicking a rock up and down the street and in a trance—this was the kind of thing I did, age eight and already a mope, a loner, a drag, a slouch. You walked beside me for a while and I went through the same struggle I always did around people, tight in the throat, the struggle of wanting to talk but not knowing what to say, not knowing the first word. But it was you who spoke.
I want to tell you something,
you said. You were kicking a stone of your own now, and sometimes our rocks crossed paths, bounced and leapt over each other.

I know you don't see much of your father,
you said, and I wondered who you were talking about. Mike Murphy, who came around drunk from time to time and pulled me and Malinda to his chest, who sobbed in our hair, who talked in a strange voice—
ILOVEYOUMYBABIES.
Or were you talking about Michael Collins, who had been our father for three years but whom we never saw anymore? (In fact I would only see him again once in my entire life, in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, where my mother had sent me to fetch a box of Special K. There he was, poor Michael Collins, bald now and thinner than ever, a small, sad collection of food in his cart, there he stood in a blue windbreaker with the name of his old high school scrawled across the back, its mascot beneath, a ferocious hornet, and the loneliness was coming off him in a wave that nearly knocked me over. Then we saw each other, and when he asked about her, my beautiful mother, it was clear that he still loved her, that she had ruined his life.)

I didn't know who you were talking about, but it didn't matter.
I bet it's tough without a dad and I'm glad I was around some. You can always write me, you know,
you said.
I'll write you and you can write me back. I wanna know how you're doing in school.

I nodded, said nothing, kicked and pursued that fat gray stone.
You're a pretty tough kid,
you said.
You're gonna be just fine.

When you said this it was all over. I bawled like a baby, held my face in my hands and sobbed, gasped. I stood on the street shaking and you held me, held my head in your hands. I'd never cried like this and was lost in it, hot, salty, the sorrow itself and the shame of having collapsed into it.
Don't cry, buddy,
you said, your voice cracking.
Don't cry
.

Then you were gone. This was life. This was the lesson we kept learning over and over and over, the lesson our mother was best capable of teaching us. Love—whatever else it might or might not be—was fleeting. Love stormed into your life and occupied it, it took over every corner of your soul, made itself comfortable, made itself wanted, then treasured, then necessary, love did all of this and then it did next the only thing it had left to do, it retreated, it vanished, it left no trace of itself. Love was horrifying.

We didn't hear from you for almost four years, during which time we often wondered aloud, Where were you? Where the fuck were you? And when were you coming home? Would you come knocking on the door, like you'd always done, and if so, when? Now? Was that you knocking right now?

It wasn't that anyone cared. No one would admit to that. It wasn't that we missed you. The phrase with which you were summed up went something like: “Hey, if he wants us, he knows where to find us!” It was just that Pop Beaudry could die at any moment and this was—not that it
really
mattered but in a way it did, you certainly could say it did, in a way when you thought about it, it mattered more than anything else—your father; you were, in fact, Pop's only true family, his only true blood, and what if he died, just up and died? This was possible. Pop was diabetic, he was hypertense, from time to time he suffered from shingles and gout. What your sisters couldn't get past was that Pop could die, your own father would be dead, and you wouldn't even know it. That was the thing. It was disgusting. It was unforgivable. It was, they said, something only you would do.

Finally Christmas 1984 you sent a card, and inside a picture of yourself, grown hairy as Björn Borg, your arm around your girlfriend, a pretty black girl with a red mouth, your newborn daughter held between you, swaddled. The card was full of exclamation points.
Look what I went and did! This is my kid! Meet my girls, Mary and her mother Kim!
Though we could hardly see her face amidst all those blankets we said the baby took after you. Around the mouth, we said.

Malinda said, “Which one's the baby's name? Kim?”

“Mary,” I said. “Jesus.”

“I'm just asking.”

“Look,” said my mother, “she has his eyes.”

“No she doesn't,” Malinda said. “His eyes are gray.”

“Yeah, but the baby's are sad like his. Look how sad. Look at that face.”

Your return address was a Brooklyn hotel. The aunts said:

“He lives in a hotel?”

“Fancy!”

“He must've got a good job or something.”

“Too bad he doesn't invite us down, let us stay for a while.”

“And to think all those nights we put him up!”

“He could at least invite us for a weekend!”

“It's the least he could do!”

They sat for quite some time imagining the luxuries of the Ritz-Carlton. They imagined a maid in a black dress coming through each morning with a feather duster, they pictured mints on the pillow, a doorman in a dark blue suit with brass buttons, a blue cap, your mail and messages waiting for you in a gleaming wooden cubby behind the front desk. They had never been to New York and didn't know what it meant to live in a hotel, a dark room at the end of a dark hallway, a mirrorless bathroom shared with a dozen other people.

That Christmas we were fool enough to expect you. On Christmas Eve Aunt Lily called my mother to read your horoscope:
A TRIP TO VISIT OLD FRIENDS WILL BRING YOU MUCH JOY AND CONTENTMENT
! But you never showed, and soon enough we forgot about you again. My mother kept moving us every year or so, kept falling in and out of what she considered to be love, and with all of this going on we stopped speaking your name, stopped thinking about you even in the privacy of our minds, indeed for some time it was as though you had never existed. And yet when the phone rang that day (it was a Sunday in November, just after we'd turned back the clocks, and we felt ourselves to be standing at the mouth of a cave, the upcoming months of dark and cold, the long season awaiting us, we were going to have to pass through it again), somehow there was the sound of you in it, later we would each confess that we had known from the first ring. My mother had been making meatballs—she was married again and trying to be a good wife—and she'd told me to answer. “It's for you,” I said, and she held up her fingers, slick with meat and egg, wriggled them.

“Hold the phone to my ear,” she said. “Be a help for once.”

I rolled my eyes—those years, this was more or less my only form of communication—and she said, “Hello? Yes? Yes. Yes?” And then, “Oh. Oh no. Oh God, no.” Tears down her face, and if there was any doubt it was over now, I knew, I knew, I knew it was you. My mother clutched the phone, said, “Get a pen.” A grave calm had come over her—the calm that settles on us when we're burdened with a gruesome task—and she said a few more things, wrote with slippery fingers an address, a number, another number, another. Then she set about the business of calling Pop, calling her sisters. It seemed she was on the phone for days after your death. She was, at that time, married to Walter Adams and therefore not really speaking to her sisters (“Black!” they whispered. “Black, Black, Black!” And from their mouths the word seemed to lose its meaning, was less a word than a sound, an expletive). She was six months pregnant with Shirley, the daughter she would lose. Shirley was a kicker. The day after you died, while my mother was talking on the phone to someone about your death, about the procurement of your body and possessions, I felt Shirley kick. Typically my mother wasn't the kind of pregnant woman who endured the inquisitive touch, but that day she did, and I walked around for the rest of the day remembering it, quick and soft, I walked around thinking, something was alive in there. Alive.

For some time we didn't know what had happened, we only knew you were dead. Later we learned the details, how a cleaning lady found you dead in that Brooklyn hotel room, facedown and overdosed, the bed pissed and puked on. You were entirely alone. There was no trace of Mary and Kim. Whether they left you or you left them no one could say. All at once we felt the shame which should have been with us for years, the shame of having fallen out of touch with a loved one, the shame of having turned away from someone who needed us, someone who was alone, a brother.