Fitting Ends (20 page)

At first, I thought it would end with my brother leaving, barreling out of the house with the slamming of doors and the circling whine of the fan belt in my father's old beater pickup, the muffler retorting all the way down the long dirt road, into the night. Once, when he was drunk, my brother had tried to drive his truck off a cliff on the hill out behind our house. But the embankment wasn't steep enough, and the truck just went bump, bump down the side of the hill, all four wheels staying on the ground until it finally came to rest in the field below. Del had pointed a shotgun at my father that night, and my father was so stunned and upset that my mother thought he was having a heart attack. She was running around hysterical, calling police, ambulance, bawling. In the distance, Del went up the hill, down the hill, up, down. You could hear him revving the motor. It felt somehow like one of those slapstick moments in a comedy movie, where everything is falling down at once and all the actors run in and out of doorways. I sat, shivering, curled up on the couch while all this was going on, staring at the television.

But the night after I'd almost fallen, my brother did not try to take off. We all knew that if my parents had to call the police on him again, it would be the end. He would go to a foster home or even back to the juvenile hall, which he said was worse than prison. So instead, he and my father were in a shoving match; there was my mother between them, screaming, “Oh, stop it I can't stand it I can't stand it,” turning her deadly, red-eyed stare abruptly upon me; there was my brother crying. But he didn't try to leave. He just sat there, with his face in his hands. “God damn all of you,” he cried suddenly. “I hate all your guts. I wish I was fucking dead.”

My father hit him then, hit him with the flat of his hand alongside the head, and Del tilted in his chair with the force of it. He made a small, high-pitched sound, and I watched as he folded his arms over his ears as my father descended on him, a blow, a pause, a blow, a pause. My father stood over him, breathing hard. A tear fell from Del's nose.

“Don't you ever say that,” my father roared. “Don't you dare ever say that.” He didn't mean the F-word—he meant wishing you were dead, the threats Del had made in the past. That was the worst thing, my father had told us once, the most terrible thing a person could do. My father's hands fell to his sides. I saw that he was crying also.

After a time, Del lifted his head. He seemed to have calmed—everything seemed to have grown quiet, a dull, wavery throb of static. I saw that he looked at me. I slumped my shoulders, staring down at my fingernails.

“You lie,” Del said softly. “You can't even look me in the face.” He got up and stumbled a few steps, as if my father would go after him again. But my father just stood there.

“Get out of my sight,” he said. “Go on.”

I heard Del's tennis shoes thump up the stairs, the slam of our bedroom door. But just as I felt my body start to untense, my father turned to me. He wiped the heel of his hand over his eyes, gazing at me without blinking. After all of Del's previous lies, his denials, his betrayals, you would think they would never believe his side of things again. But I could see a slowly creaking hinge of doubt behind my father's expression. I looked down.

“If I ever find out you're lying to me, boy,” my father said.

He didn't ever find out. The day I almost fell was another one of those things we never got around to talking about again. It probably didn't seem very significant to my parents, in the span of events that had happened before and came after. They dwelt on other things.

On what, I never knew. My wife found this unbelievable: “Didn't they say anything after he died?” she asked me, and I had to admit that I didn't remember. They were sad, I told her. I recalled my father crying. But they were country people. I tried to explain this to my wife, good Boston girl that she is, the sort of impossible grief that is like something gnarled and stubborn and underground. I never really believed it myself. For years, I kept expecting things to go back to normal, waiting for whatever was happening to them to finally be over.

My parents actually became quite mellow in the last years of their lives. My mother lost weight, was often ill. Eventually, shortly after her sixtieth birthday, she went deaf. Her hearing slipped away quickly, like a skin she was shedding, and all the tests proved inconclusive. That was the year that my son was born. In January, when my wife discovered that she was pregnant, my parents were in the process of buying a fancy, expensive hearing aid. By the time the baby was four months old, the world was completely soundless for my mother, hearing aid or not.

The problems of my college years had passed away by that time. I was working at a small private college in upstate New York, in alumni relations. My wife and I seldom went back to Nebraska; we couldn't afford the money or the time. But I talked to my parents regularly on the phone, once or twice a month.

We ended up going back that Christmas after Ezra was born. My mother's letters had made it almost impossible to avoid. “It breaks my heart that I can't hear my grandson's voice, now that he is making his little sounds,” she had written. “But am getting by O.K. and will begin lip-reading classes in Denver after Xmas. It will be easier for me then.” She would get on the phone when I called my father. “I can't hear you talking, but I love you,” she'd say.

“We have to work to make her feel involved in things,” my father told us as we drove from the airport, where he'd picked us up. “The worst thing is that they start feeling isolated,” he told us. “We got little pads so we can write her notes.” He looked over at me, strangely academic looking in the new glasses he had for driving. In the last few years he had begun to change, his voice turning slow and gentle, as if he were watching something out in the distance beyond the window, or something sad and mysterious on TV as we talked. His former short temper had vanished, leaving only a soft reproachfulness in its place. But even that was muted. He knew that he couldn't really make me feel guilty. “You know how she is,” he said to my wife and me, though of course we did not, either one of us, really know her. “You know how she is. The hardest part is, you know, we don't want her to get depressed.”

She looked terrible. Every time I saw her since I graduated from college, this stunned me. I came in, carrying my sleeping son, and she was sitting at the kitchen table, her spine curved a little bit more than the last time, thinner, so skinny that her muscles seemed to stand out against the bone. Back in New York, I worked with alumni ladies older than she who played tennis, who dressed in trendy clothes, who walked with a casual and still sexy ease. These women wouldn't look like my mother for another twenty years, if ever. I felt my smile pull awkwardly on my face.

“Hello!” I called, but of course she didn't look up. My father flicked on the porch light. “She hates it when you surprise her,” he said softly, as if there were still some possibility of her overhearing. My wife looked over at me. Her eyes said that this was going to be another holiday that was like work for her.

My mother lifted her head. Her shrewdness was still intact, at least, and she was ready for us the moment the porch light hit her consciousness. That terrible, monkeyish dullness seemed to lift from her expression as she looked up.

“Well, howdy,” she called, in the same jolly, slightly ironic way she always did when she hadn't seen me in a long time. She came over to hug us, then peered down at Ezra, who stirred a little as she pushed back his parka hood to get a better look. “Oh, what an angel,” she whispered. “It's about killed me, not being able to see this boy.” Then she stared down at Ezra again. How he'd grown, she told us. She thought he looked like me, she said, and I was relieved. Actually, I'd begun to think that Ezra somewhat resembled the pictures I'd seen of Del as a baby. But my mother didn't say that, at least.

I had planned to have a serious talk with them on this trip. Or maybe
planned
is the wrong word—
considered
might be closer, though even that doesn't express the vague, unpleasantly anxious urge that I could feel at the back of my neck. I didn't really know what I wanted to know. And the truth was, these quiet, fragile, distantly tender people bore little resemblance to the mother and father in my mind. It had been ten years since I'd lived at home. Ten years!—which filled the long, snowy evenings with a numbing politeness. My father sat in his easy chair after dinner, watching the news. My wife read. My mother and I did the dishes together, silently, nodding as the plate she had rinsed passed from her hand to mine, to be dried and put away. When a train passed, the little window above the sink vibrated, humming like a piece of cellophane. But she did not notice this.

We did have a talk of sorts that trip, my father and I. It was on the third day after our arrival, a few nights before Christmas Eve. My wife and my mother were both asleep. My father and I sat out on the closed in porch, drinking beer, watching the snow drift across the yard, watching the wind send fingers of snow slithering along low to the ground. I had drunk more than he had. I saw him glance sharply at me for a second when I came back from the refrigerator a fourth time and popped open the can. But the look faded quickly. Outside, beyond the window, I could see the blurry shape of the elevator through the falling snow, its outlines indistinct, wavering like a mirage.

“Do you remember that time,” I said, “when I almost fell off the elevator?”

It came out like that, abrupt, stupid. As I sat there in my father's silence, I realized how impossible it was, how useless to try to patch years of ellipses into something resembling dialogue. I looked down, and he cleared his throat.

“Sure,” he said at last, noncommittal. “Of course I remember.”

“I think about that sometimes,” I said. Drunk—I felt the alcohol edge into my voice as I spoke. “It seems,” I said, “significant.” That was the word that came to me. “It seems significant sometimes,” I said.

My father considered this for a while. He stiffened formally, as if he were being interviewed. “Well,” he said. “I don't know. There were so many things like that. It was all a mess by then, anyway. Nothing could be done. It was too late for anything to be done.” He looked down to his own beer, which must have gone warm by that time, and took a small sip. “It should have been taken care of earlier—when you were kids. That's where I think things must have gone wrong. I was too hard on you both. But Del—I was harder on him. He was the oldest. Too much pressure. Expected too much.”

He drifted off at that, embarrassed. We sat there, and I could not even imagine what he meant—what specifics he was referring to. What pressure? What expectations? But I didn't push any further.

“But you turned out all right,” my father said. “You've done pretty well, haven't you?”

There were no signs in our childhood, no incidents pointing the way to his eventual end. None that I could see, at least, and I thought about it quite a bit after his death. “It should have been taken care of earlier,” my father said, but what was
it
? Del seemed to have been happy, at least up until high school.

Maybe things happened when they were alone together. From time to time, I remember Del coming back from helping my father in the shop with his eyes red from crying. Once, I remember our father coming into our room on a Saturday morning and cuffing the top of Del's sleeping head with the back of his hand: he had stepped in dog dirt on the lawn. The dog was Del's responsibility. Del must have been about eight or nine at the time, and I remember him kneeling on our bedroom floor in his pajamas, crying bitterly as he cleaned off my father's boot. When I told that story later on, I was pleased by the ugly, almost fascist overtones it had. I remember recounting it to some college friends—handsome, suburban kids—lording this little bit of squalor from my childhood over them. Child abuse and family violence were enjoying a media vogue at that time, and I found I could mine this memory to good effect. In the version I told, I was the one cleaning the boots.

But the truth was, my father was never abusive in an especially spectacular way. He was more like a simple bully, easily eluded when he was in a short-tempered mood. He used to get so furious when we would avoid him. I recall how he used to grab us by the hair on the back of our necks, tilting our heads so we looked into his face. “You don't listen,” he would hiss. “I want you to look at me when I talk to you.” That was about the worst of it, until Del started getting into trouble. And by that time, my father's blows weren't enough. Del would laugh; he would strike back. It was then that my father finally decided to turn him over to the authorities. He had no other choice, he said.

He must have believed it. He wasn't, despite his temper, a bad man, a bad parent. He'd seemed so kindly, sometimes, so fatherly—especially with Del. I remember watching them from my window, some autumn mornings, watching them wade through the high weeds in the stubble field out behind our house, walking toward the hill with their shotguns pointing at the ground, their steps slow, synchronized. Once, I'd gone upstairs and heard them laughing in Del's and my bedroom. I just stood there outside the doorway, watching as my father and Del put a model ship together, sharing the job, their talk easy, happy.

This was what I thought of, that night we were talking. I thought of my own son, the innocent baby I loved so much, and it chilled me to think that things could change so much—that Del's closeness to my father could turn in on itself, transformed into the kind of closeness that thrived on their fights, on the different ways Del could push my father into a rage. That finally my father would feel he had no choices left. We looked at each other, my father and I. “What are you thinking?” I said softly, but he just shook his head.