Waking the Dead (17 page)

“Look at you,” said Danny, fixing me with both his pointers. He was wearing a loose-fitting charcoal jacket; he’d pushed up the sleeves and the pink shirt beneath it. The hair on his arms was wiry, golden; his tendons thick and close to the skin. “You’ve really done it. Congressman Pierce. Really adds class to the family.”

“We always had class, Danny,” Dad said. He’d just come in with Skipper’s tray and placed it on a side table. “And the best kind of class.”

“Yeah,” said Danny. “
Working
class.”

“You always wanted more than we could give you,” Dad said. “But when I was coming up, being a first-rate printer was nothing to turn your nose up at.”

“We didn’t turn our noses up at it,” Danny said. “You turned our noses up for us.” He was smiling, but it seemed a pretense at good humor. There was a sharp, boyish urgency in his voice, a vein beating hotly along his temple.

“OK, you two. It’s getting on my nerves already,” said Mother. With a shrug, she turned to me and said, “They’ve been fighting all year.”

“What about?” I asked. “Noses?”

“That’s truer than you think,” said Danny to me, with one of those weird, Las Vegas-y bang-bang gotcha gestures.

“Who knows what they fight about?” Mother was saying, casting her eyes about and finally settling on Caroline, who nodded sympathetically. Caroline had always had a spooky fondness for Mother, a love so complete and self-effacing that it could only be unrequited. As a child, she followed Mother around the house, studying her, and Mother’s nature had enough steel in it to clang with despair over her daughter’s adoring her so. It seemed like weakness, madness. Mom was repelled by anything easy and it was too easy for her to please Caroline. To make it seem more interesting, she began to interpret Caroline’s unstinting praise, to search out the secret aggression, the snottiness beneath it, and with that breach of faith their relationship turned tragic. Caroline began expressing her love with a kind of daredevil self-hatred. “Love ya, Mommy,” she’d called, slamming out of the house to some adolescent rendezvous. She was part of a crowd of wild girls who went with their boyfriends to a creepy, end-of-the-world-looking place near the Brooklyn Bridge, where in all kinds of weather they swigged Southern Comfort and fucked in the backseats of Buick Skylarks, Plymouth Furys, Chrysler LeBarons. You could see the Watchtower clock from where they parked, looming over the stark girders of the bridge, counting off the seconds we sinners squander in our spiritual morass. I’m remembering now the milky dawn and Caroline sneaking into the house, like a drunk in the Sunday funnies, with her shoes in her hand, and our mom sitting in the yellow chintz chair, a Pall Mall glowing in her hand, a cup of tea gone tepid near her elbow. I heard the screams from my alcove upstairs and came running down in my Fruit of the Looms. “They laugh at you when they’re done with you, you know that, don’t you,” Mom was hissing and Caroline sat on the floor before her, her head down, her arms wrapped around her knees, as if waiting to be beaten.

Dad was supervising the opening of the presents. He stood at the tree and picked up the gift-wrapped boxes one at a time and called out the name of the recipient. “Caroline, this is for you, from Santa and Danny,” he said, giving the box an avid shake next to his ear. (Danny’s presents as usual put the rest of us to shame—they were invariably expensive and perceptive. Caroline received an antique Cartier watch from him. I got a French leather briefcase with my initials burned in, Mother got an autographed picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt framed with a letter FDR sent to Mayor Walker in 1930, and Father got a huge history of the C.I.O. and a specially made pair of glasses for reading in bed.) The boys made out like bandits, though the gifts seemed to embarrass them as much as please them. I knew their father had them in a Muslim school uptown and I supposed they were learning things that made these rituals seem rather foolish. Watching Rudy gently peeling the candy-striped paper off the binoculars I’d brought for him and then seeing the tender but withheld smile he gave to me, I had a quick sinking feeling that in a few years I would hardly know this boy at all. Malik, younger, accommodating by nature, seemed closer to us, but when he came to kiss me after opening my present I made the mistake of holding him too closely and with his bony little chest pressed into me I could feel his spirit leaping back like a toreador evading the horns of a bull.

The presents were open and the living room was a wasteland of torn colored papers. Danny built the fire up to a chimney-charring roar and our father filled his cup with the killer punch Mother had brewed. (I was starting to resent my club soda.) Dad stood in front of the fireplace holding the cup before him. With his large noble head, the rich white hair, his broad shoulders, his ardent eyes, it looked as if he were about to erupt into song. “I want to make the toast,” he said. “The first of many.” The fire danced behind him and suddenly the heat made him turn around. “It’s burning my ass,” he said.

We all laughed—but especially Caroline. She had always found our parents strictly puritanical and any deviation from that Gothic picture of them she carried in the most injured part of her consciousness made her giddy.

“And I’m going to make one after that,” our mother said.

“Everything in its time and place, Mary,” Dad said, with a bow. “To Christmas,” he said, in a boom. “To a season of family happiness … and sharing … and peace.” His voice suddenly stopped, as if blocked by an avalanche of emotion. His face darkened, he looked away. There were luxuries of feeling he would never have allowed himself ten years ago, which now he felt were his entitlement, like a pension. “To a new year coming, the first year of the decade. A year which I hope will bring us together many times in happiness.” He stopped again and took a deep breath, forcing something down in himself.

“Get a grip on yourself, Pop,” Danny said, in a perfectly adolescent way: taunting and embarrassed.

Dad nodded at Danny, acknowledging, even a little grateful for having been brought up short. “I want to make a toast to the kids, then,” he said. “To Rudy and Malik. The most …” He took another deep bream and now extended his lower lip and shook his head—an old, affectionate gesture, meant somehow to symbolize the fragility of everything that was good and decent in the world. “The most terrific couple of grandsons anyone could ever hope for. And I want to make a toast to my kids, too. OK? To my firstborn, Caroline, who always could wrap me around her little finger—”

“That’s news to
me
,” said Caroline, in a voice that wanted to be more humorous than it was.

“And who has made us so proud with her accomplishments as a mother and in the world of art. And to our second, Fielding, on his way to the capital, helping to bring a new day to this country, new directions. Like an arrow that’s always known its mark or a hammer in the hands of a man who knows how to use it, Fielding has always known where his life was going and though we’re proud, none of us is surprised.”

He nodded toward me and I grinned back at him, though a part of me felt raw, cheated. I had always been the easiest child, the one to see the world through their eyes, the one who could be counted on to cause the least trouble, and I had been waiting all my life for a moment I realized now would never come—the time it would be my turn to be seen as I truly was, when it would be my turn to make them gasp and worry and radically revise all of the clear, convenient ideas they held about me.

“And to Danny,” he was saying. “Our youngest.”

“And baddest,” said Danny, raising a finger.

“True, true,” said Father with a smile.

“And vainest and most preening,” said Caroline.

“And most decadent,” I added.

“OK, OK, Jesus,” said Danny.

“Wait wait wait,” said Father, holding his hand up. He wanted to get through this. “His achievements are many. For a son of the working class to live like a prince …”

“Christ,” said Danny. “Here it comes.”

I glanced over toward Rudy and Malik. They were sitting with their hands folded on their laps, their lips pursed. Caroline stood behind them, a hand on the shoulder of each.

“And to have his own business,” Father was saying. “With people who look to him for their livelihood. All my children are hard workers, who know the dignity of labor, and the pride of accomplishment and since …” He paused and brought the cup closer to his lips, signaling us all that soon we would drink. “Since none of you little snot-noses would be here on earth if it wasn’t for me, I think I got the goddamned right to feel pretty good myself.”

“OK, OK,” said Caroline. “Mommy has to make a toast now.”

“I think I’ll hold my tongue,” said Mom.

“Sounds like fun,” Danny said.

Mom looked at Danny and kissed the knuckle of her thumb. We never quite knew the origin or the meaning of that gesture. It seemed to have come from her old neighborhood, but whenever we asked her what it meant she said, “Whatever you want it to, kiddo.” She went to her chair and sat down, legs crossed, and took a deep drink from her cup of punch—eggnog, ginger ale, dark rum, Spanish brandy, Old Bushmill’s.

And then, watching her drink, and looking around the room at my father, brother, and sister, each with a cup of punch, and listening to the steady, gloomy beating of my heart, as even and desperate as human time, pulling me in its tidal rhythms toward the end of my one life, I felt a sudden desire go through my resolve like a knife slashing through an oil painting: I would have a drink, too.

“Oh, come on, Mommy,” Caroline was saying.

“You’re dripping on the wall-to-wall carpet, Caroline,” Mom said, pointing to Caroline’s cup.

I crept across the room and as unobtrusively as possible I served myself a half cup of punch. I counted to myself: one, two, three. And then I took a drink: my heart began to race like a blind bull let out of its dark stall.

“Well, if you won’t, then I will,” said Caroline, draining her cup and then slapping it down on the sideboard. She gave Dad a seemingly playful little shove and took his spot in front of the hearth. The bark on the logs was popping and hissing; threads of dark gray smoke sparked with orange rose up toward the chimney.

“To Mommy and Daddy, on their first Christmas in the new house,” she said, her voice a little blurry with shyness. “To Danny for getting away with it
sans
indictments, to Fielding for being like a goddamned train that always runs on time, and for poor little me for surviving another year. And most of all to Rudy and Malik—
bon voyage!
”

“Bon voyage?” said Dad. “Where they going?”

“With Eric. He’s going on tour in Africa—Nairobi, Monrovia, Tunis. And he’s taking the kids.” If Caroline was presenting this with false equanimity, she was doing a creditable job of it. Her smile was large, firm, her shoulders relaxed. The lids of her large eyes were a sleepless pink—but that wasn’t unusual: she had always turned in her bed as if on a spit over the fires of hell.

“That’s great, kids,” I said.

“Monrovia?” said Danny, shaking his head.

“Liberia,” said Caroline.

“I know,” he said. “But who’d go there?”

“Speak not if you know not,” said Caroline.

“How long is this trip?” asked Dad.

“What about school?” added Mom.

“We got permission,” said Rudy. “Our teachers
want
us to go.”

“Yeah, that way they won’t have to put up with you,” said Danny.

The boys didn’t seem to have a terrific sense of humor about themselves—but then, neither had we. It’s difficult to bear in mind the incandescent sincerity of childhood, the rapturous religion of self.

“You’ll probably end up learning more in two weeks than you will a whole year in a classroom,” said Dad, adjusting to the shift with fabulous dexterity.

“It’s two months,” said Caroline. “The Academy will give them full academic credit for the trip.”

The Academy was the Malcolm X Academy, on 137th Street and Riverside Drive, a Muslim school where, Caroline feared, Rudy and Malik were being taught to be unable one day to look at their own mother with love, but to see only her whiteness and the cruelty it represented.

“So it’s Merry Christmas and bon voyage,” she said. “And a time for all the rest of you to promise to look after me because—” She stopped, and gave a portion of herself over to the suddenly amassed emotions. “Because I’m going to be lonely. No. Not lonely. But missing them. So everyone has to make a fuss over me and make sure I’m OK. OK?”

“We might have done that anyhow,” Mom admonished. “You didn’t have to put it in words.”

“Your neighborhood’s coming back to life, Car,” Danny said. “After-hours clubs, weird places. It’s a scene now.”

“My neighborhood’s a slum,” Caroline said. “And I’m too old for that shit.”

I happened to look at Dad. He was sitting in his chair, looking down at his feet. He feared one day Caroline would lose the boys, that Eric, the pressures of history, and the steady, persuasive indoctrination of the Muslims would finally make the relationships impossible and she would be a mother in only some half-assed, formal sense and he would cease to be a grandfather at all.

“I’ll look after you, Caroline,” I said. “If you look after me.”

“You going to arrange it so I get a national endowment grant?” she asked.

“Why don’t you come back to Chicago with me and help me get set up? I can make you a part of my staff. Pay you.”

“Oh no you don’t,” shouted Dad, truly alarmed. “Are you crazy?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Eddie’s right,” Mom said. “That’s nepotism and many a promising politician’s taken a fall over just that sort of thing”

“It’s very common to have relatives on staff,” I said. “Jack had Bobby and Bobby had Ted.” I glanced over at Caroline. She’d drawn herself up and stared at our parents, as if they were betraying her.

“I don’t care how
common
it is,” said Dad. “It’s not right.”

“I don’t think I could do it no matter what,” said Caroline. “All my stuff’s here and I’m working three jobs, you know.”

“Expendable,” said Danny. He was crouched by the cast-iron ring in which a dozen or so fireplace logs were stashed.