Family Night (6 page)

Cam finished high school when he was just sixteen. Margaret had two years more. Cam spent half a year skulking around. After wrecking a car, he went to Fort Dix with a letter from family court explaining his young age and his need for productive rehabilitation through his participation in war games and three-day marches. From Fort Dix he was sent to Korea. The army was sweeping up after Korea while the next war in Asia was just starting. Already, the topographers were drawing up some preliminary blueprints of the Vietnamese jungles. Cam had a rare blood type, AB Negative, and this mix, according to the army physicians, was a hematological find. Part of his routine was to give pints for operations and emergencies in the refugee camps. The army was supposed to feed him some extra beef, but Elizabeth sent over some desiccated liver and tins of chocolate kisses to make up for the foul-tasting supplement.

Margaret wrote to him using the blue Crane stationery, and he sent her postcards that showed near-naked Oriental girls or a city’s narrow streets crowded with surreys and bicycles. Margaret imagined Cam in a rich
landscape with bamboo thickets and white egrets, but he wrote and told her it was wet and freezing cold. She wrote to Cam, and his cards came back sometimes three at a time. The cards were delayed in the government mail pouch, her father would tell her. “No soldier has time to write three cards in one day.” Margaret didn’t know whether her father seemed uncertain of Cam’s commitment to the service or if he was jealous of Cam’s commitment to her. She shrugged. She excused her father, figuring that his mistrust of people was a trait that developed when he was orphaned at the age of five. At that age, someone’s trust is like a custard; it either firms up in its proper mold, it sets, or it turns out thin and hard to predict.

Cam sent her a jewelry box. The cardboard package showed Oriental lettering; it must have said
Fragile
in that strange ladder of signs. The jewelry box was glossy with horses galloping over the lid. The horses floated over the landscape of black enamel, legs extended, eyes white, nostrils flared open like lotus petals.

After she received the jewelry box, Margaret wrote to Cam and asked him what it was like to give blood all the time, to give it to the Koreans. She told him she knew that he didn’t mind not giving it to white people, but did it make him tired? Was he eating the desiccated liver, she asked him, because it looked disgusting.

He wrote back and told her that he put the liver in gelatin capsules and swallowed it that way, but he didn’t do it often. She should tell Elizabeth not to send any more. He said he was sick for the last week with fever sores all over his lips because they weren’t waiting
enough time before taking more of his blood, and he was still doing the regular work there without any more rest than the others. He was getting pretty sick of being a volunteer donor.

She wrote back and told him to put his foot down. She said she hated getting fever blisters; they looked like leprosy. Cam told her that all the grunts had fever blisters, rashes, funguses, anything that takes hold of the flesh overnight after drilling all day or working too hard. It was better to be in Korea giving a pint now and then than to be leaking it yourself somewhere in a war. He was satisfied to be where he was, and he wasn’t about to complain over his fever sores or his collapsed vein. They had been using the same vein until it got too bruised; now they were sticking him somewhere else. At least his arm wasn’t sore from junk; some of the fellows were developing addictions, but he wasn’t. He told her that some troops were sent to Vietnam to retrieve equipment for the French and two men were killed. Margaret wondered when the army would decide that Cam’s blood was more useful circulating in his own veins, circling like a target.

It turned out otherwise. Cam contracted hepatitis. After two weeks in an infirmary in Manila, he was discharged with honors. He served eighteen months and was freed. They didn’t wait for him to get better and he came back to Wilmington looking yellow as butterscotch. He landed at Dover, Delaware, where they often send U.S. casualties. The place was empty. Cam told Margaret if he was lucky only once in his life, this was it.

Cam slept for two days because of jet lag and because his condition left him weak. Margaret put a pitcher of ice water beside his bed in case he woke up and was thirsty. It was the old blue pitcher, its shiny glaze crackled with dark veins. She set the ice water down and stared at the pitcher as Cam slept; its round shape mimicked an eight ball. She stared at the pitcher until it started to sweat.

Elizabeth didn’t give Cam more than a couple of weeks before starting a family discussion about his working at Rice Industrial Supply. Cam wasn’t interested. “Think of the benefits,” Elizabeth said. “You can be a partner one day, then who knows, when Richard retires, you can be king!”

“King of material-handling equipment? King of the double nylon fan belts, of planetary winches? King of worm-drive hose clamps—”

“Why won’t you work with your father?” Elizabeth asked him.

“I would, I would work for
my
father,” he said. “Tell me, what was his line? Modeling? Do I have the profile for that? Or what was it, Prince Valiant Escorts? An escort service of some kind, if I recall, for women of all shapes and sizes. Isn’t that right?”

Elizabeth touched her hair. She plucked an auburn wave and let it bounce to her cheek again. She lifted her necklace, running her thumb under the chain. She tugged the amethyst left and right, then let the pendant fall against her blouse. She walked out of the room.

Cam refused to work in the family company and moved out of the house into an apartment. Margaret helped him arrange his things in boxes; she took two thick towels and the pin-striped sheets from the closet and stuffed them in his duffel. There was an ID tag on the duffel that said
Cameron Goddard
instead of Cameron Rice.

“You really did this, you changed your name?”

“I didn’t change it, that
is
my real name.”

“I know. But you never even knew your father, you never even met the guy.”

“I don’t have to meet him. It’s just a matter of genes, lineage.”

“What have genes got to do with it? You can’t see genes, you can’t feel the difference,” she said.

“It’s a matter of knowing. Just knowing what you’re made of,” he said.

“How can you know?”

“I know what I’m not. I’m not half Richard. Half of me is a kind of mystery, but I’m not going to let just anyone claim it. I thought you, Margaret, would get it. You aren’t too tight with Elizabeth, are you?”

“Of course I am. I love Elizabeth—” Just because Cam had turned against her father, she wasn’t going to dump Elizabeth, her stepmother. Elizabeth was all she knew. Margaret couldn’t really remember her own mother, Sandra, whom she saw only a few times at the Granville Sanatorium. She could picture only a final visit there, a scene she wasn’t sure was real. Her recollection was perhaps just a story her father had told again and again. There had been so many embellishments,
details were often mercurial until the story itself began to bubble with its own yeast.

She was three years old. She wore black patent-leather shoes in which her face was reflected. Her own face, its one off-center dimple, and lips too red from always licking them in winter. The sanatorium was unattractive; everything looked down-to-business. The halls, disinfected with pine detergent, scented the cavernous rooms. It didn’t smell clean like the scrub pines on the sand dunes at Lake Michigan; it was pine cleaner masking an odor of rancid cooking oil worked into old, porous linoleum and woodwork.

Margaret’s mother was waiting in the solarium where patients received visitors; the room was crowded, everyone coughing. Her mother held a handkerchief in her lap, a small triangle of linen, which she discreetly put against her mouth when she needed to expectorate a red smear of phlegm, then folded it carefully away from sight. Although the nurse warned her, Margaret’s mother took her daughter on her lap. Had Margaret perhaps only imagined, then put to memory, the embrace? It was clutching, but it loosened now and then, letting her fidget. Her mother’s voice was low, her words like plunks of rain on dust. The woman’s intensity made Margaret fearful, and she couldn’t sit still. Finally, she wriggled off her mother’s lap and stood just out of Sandra’s reach. How long did Sandra lean forward, her arms extended, before she sat back in her chair, dabbing her lips with the balled-up hankie?

Her father always told her the same words, “The last time you saw your mother you wouldn’t sit still.” He
followed this by saying, “And there was nothing they could do for her. It wasn’t just TB; it was lung cancer.” After all, they had expected her to live with just the tuberculosis; the physicians said it was improving. Sandra was at the Granville Sanatorium resting, taking steam, then sunning. She had been sick throughout her pregnancy. Margaret was born early, terribly scrawny. They said she looked like a beef tongue lying in the cradle. They gave her rice formula, then soy, and she responded. But Sandra never improved; she coughed until the cough itself weakened. It sounded small, closed off, then the red drifted up to her lips and she touched the hankie to her mouth.

When Sandra was hospitalized, it was just Margaret and her father. Instead of hiring a nurse, he brought her down to the plant and she played in the cinders outside an office trailer. One of the secretaries watched Margaret from the window as she lotioned her hands to clean off the blue carbon before she started in on another one.

“A little girl needs a mother,” her father said to her. “These tragedies shouldn’t happen.”

“But did she have a will to live?” Margaret wanted to ask him. Whose fault was it if she didn’t have a will to live?

“I
do
get it,” Margaret said to Cam. “It’s kind of a free-for-all, isn’t it? I guess it’s par for the course that you take your rightful name. Just for the record, I do feel a kind of love for Elizabeth.”

“That’s your problem,” he said.

“Well, I do, and you can’t do anything about it. We
had good times. Elizabeth and I used to iron clothes and listen to Pegeen Fitzgerald on talk radio. You know, on WOR? She used to talk about her cats.”

“You’re getting it mixed up, Margaret. You’re remembering your good times with
Pegeen
,” Cam said.

Cam signed up to work for a contractor, and on weekends he began riding bikes again, competing. Her bond with Cam seemed strong as ever. Cam didn’t like Margaret’s clothes. Margaret wore black turtlenecks pulled up to her chin, and she carried a fringed bag that always had a little sheaf of incense sticks and an eyedropper bottle of patchouli oil. She scrawled political slogans on poster board. Her favorite hitchhiking sign said
ANYWHERE
,
WORLD
. Cam wore a dirty nail apron and his jeans were straight-legged at a time when everyone’s pants ballooned and swirled around the ankles.

He started to win an assortment of glossy Motocross trophies, which he displayed on the back windshield of his truck until they obstructed his rear vision and a policeman gave him a warning citation. He tried to get Margaret to appreciate his bike’s conformation, the rise of the handlebars, the elongated globe of the tank, solid chrome with yellow stencils, the rich, throaty tones of the engine. He raced the same Triumph Trophy Trail for years, and she teased him, saying it was his bride. He didn’t like a Japanese bike, complaining that the engine sounded like a can of bees. His racing career left him with pipe burns and injuries; he took the reverberations through his feet, ankles, into his knees
and hips. Riding the street, he lost a footpad at fifty miles an hour and he put the bike down; the skid burned through his boot and shaved his anklebone against the asphalt.

Cam’s most interesting accident happened when he was working on a clutch in the driveway. As he was lying underneath his bike, a metal shaving chipped off from the head of a screw and implanted itself in the iris of his eye. He had to keep from blinking until he reached the hospital. Margaret was fascinated by his willpower. Cam stalked through the house, his face tilted, head angled forward, his posture frozen, rigid like Frankenstein, as he kept his eye with the metal shard, wide open.

One day Margaret came home from the high school for lunch and Cam was there, in the kitchen, with a girl. Margaret noticed the girl’s hair was blond like hers. Margaret’s hair sifted in loose gold snarls to her shoulders, but the new girl kept hers woven beneath a tortoiseshell clasp like a sensuous puzzle. Cam was kissing her at the kitchen sink, keeping his hand flat against her buttocks. She was wearing a tight tweed skirt, which Margaret saw as secretarial garb, and Cam was squashing the fabric. He didn’t stop for Margaret. He pressed his face closer, deeper into the kiss, hiding from his sister. The girl was pinned against the stainless-steel counter, but she still could have waved hello to Margaret. Margaret left the room without any acknowledgment.

Cam married Darcy on Kentucky Derby Day. Darcy
thought she was pregnant, and when it turned out not to be so, the arrangements had already been set in motion. The TV was going at Darcy’s house during the reception. All the men gathered to look at the race. Margaret edged in to see the screen. She watched how they broke from the gate, calling out the silks for her brother, who was across the room with his new bride. Margaret kept looking over her shoulder at Cam to tell him who was moving up, who got bumped, which horses broke down and missed their opportunities. He looked back at her, frowning, as if telling her to stop acting so stupid. Darcy stared at Margaret without blinking, enforcing Cam, who, without her warnings, might have given in to his sister. Margaret felt betrayed, unhappy in her sudden estrangement. She turned back to the race but the horses were finished, the jockeys lifted in their saddles, and the men around her became officious as they divided up the kitty.

Perhaps it was coincidence or a queer snag of fate, but Margaret was at the horse races at Delaware Park, to watch Kelso’s last race, the day Cam threatened to shoot himself. The sky was arid and glassy as if there were a great magnifying hoop held over the Earth. The sun intensified, taking clear aim at them. Elizabeth was complaining even before they parked the car. She would perish unless they could go up into the clubhouse restaurant. She quieted down once she was seated in the stands with a collapsible aluminum drinking cup as Richard poured gin from a flask. Margaret bought a
Baltimore Sun
from a machine and sat making hats for her parents and one for herself. She could make paper hats or paper boats.