As seems to happen more than I'd like, this is not what I'd planned to write. But the phone rang...
The caller-id read-out showed a 503 area code, which means nothing to me. The caller's first name was Michel. I thought it might have something to do with our finances.
Michel had a navigable French accent, and said he was calling from Hudson County. I thought it was about jury duty. But I live in Essex County. I moved from Hudson County decades ago. What am I going have to do now, to prove...
But no, this was not the Hudson County in New Jersey. He said he was making a courtesy call, on behalf of a woman who is petitioning to take legal guardianship of my brother. I heard that, and I stopped thinking altogether, and started feeling nauseated.
Michel went on to explain some legal technicalities, mentioning that he'd spoken with my youngest sister in Florida, and he was patient with me as I tried to grapple with what I was hearing. He gave me a rough overview of my brother's physical and mental health -- something about MRI scans showing brain damage, associated with age and long-term alcohol abuse. He asked for my mailing address and date of birth. Then, after giving me the name and phone number of a lawyer handling the appeal, he asked me if I had any objections to this woman (whose name I have never heard before) taking control of my brother's life. I didn't know what to say, so I said no, no objections. Then he said goodbye.
Even now, I don't know how I feel. When the man with the French accent was talking, it was as though a bomb had just gone off in the room, and I could barely hear what he was saying. Now, I feel as though my insides have been shredded, like a mound of cole slaw -- it's impossible to separate one thought from another, or to pull one length of distinct emotion out of the tangle.
My brother's name is George. He was named for our maternal grandfather, and he's always hated his name, complaining that it comes from the Greek for 'farmer'. Plus, he always got the 'Georgie Porgie, pumpkin pie...' rhyme thrown at him. (How would he feel, I wonder, if he'd been given my grandpa's real first name -- Mulford?) He's two and a half years younger than me. He was my first family play-mate. I was skinny and blond, but George was stocky as a child, with a great shock of dark brown curly hair, and enormous dark eyes.
George was the one who walked to the school bus with me, and back home again, when we were living in what turned out to be the last house our entire family would inhabit together. One afternoon, home from school, I couldn't get the front door open, and there were no lights on in the house. My parents had been talking about 'The Divorce', and I knew 'Divorce' meant someone going somewhere else. And although I still hoped against hope that, when the time came for the wrenching apart of our little gene pool, I would be chosen to go with my mother, I wasn't really that optimistic. The locked front door, and the darkness in the afternoon, made everything clear to me. I took George, and we went to a neighbor's house. I knocked on the back door, and told the woman standing there in her kitchen that our parents had gotten a divorce, and had left us behind. She brought us in, sat us at her table, heated up a can of Spaghettios, and fed us an early dinner. I'm sure I told her lots of things that she could retail over back fences for weeks to come. My mother came back from wherever she'd been, and somehow found us. She was furious. My father had been asleep on the couch.
Months later, all four of us boys were in the orphanage I talk about, and I had my first opportunity to betray my brothers. It was after bed-time, but none of us was sleepy, so we were laughing and clowning around, and I made a noise that was just a little too loud not to be heard down the hall, in the housemother's room. Miss Adams' open-toed shoes clicked on the linoleum in the long hallway, and when she reached the doorway, she turned on the light. 'Who made that noise?' she asked. I pointed to George. She went over to him, and with her long fingernails, gave him a nice hard pinch -- it was her trademark, as it were. George cried. As she left, she turned out the lights.
And, after the orphanage event, our lives ceased traveling along the average, 'normal' trajectory. For years, we lived separate lives, in separate homes. From time to time, George would return, to live with my father's second family, apparently on a trial basis. Once, when we were still living in the dread-filled house out in the country high above the Monongahela River, George found me doing chores in the kitchen, and he told me that he was running away. He asked me not to say anything, so he could at least get to Pittsburgh before dark. 20 miles. I was jealous of his bravery. I did as he asked.
He had left at about three pm. and my father and stepmother were frantic, when night fell, and George wasn't in the house. I pretended not to know anything, hoping that George was all right. About a week after he'd disappeared, we got a phone call, from a woman in West Virginia. George had gotten to Pittsburgh all right, and had convinced a man at the bus station that George needed to get somewhere south. The man bought George a bus ticket, and now he was at this strange woman's house, and she wanted my parents to know.
We all immediately got into the car. We made a stop at my Horrid Grandmother's restaurant, to drop off my little sisters -- nothing could delight this woman more, than to dote on her 'real' grandchildren -- and then we set off for West Virginia. Wherever that was.
My father drove straight through, down and around and then up again, on the twisting mountain roads south of Pittsburgh. It was like being inside a sad country-western song. We finally descended along a winding narrow road, with bare tree tops so close, we could have touched them. The trip couldn't have taken that long, but it was light by the time we reached the house where George was being sheltered. My father brought him out to sit in the car with me, pulling him along by one arm and thrusting him into the back seat. Then my parents went back into the house to talk with George's hostess a little longer.
Then George begged me, again, to let him go. To let him run away. This was one of the brothers I'd had to chain in bed every night. I'd heard him screaming while he was being beaten for one infraction or another. Then he'd had to go back, to the orphanage again. And he was asking to do what I didn't have the nerve to do myself. I nodded. He opened the door and started running. I lay down on the back seat of the car, and tried to look like I'd fallen asleep.
When my parents came back out, for the drive home, they were furious that George had gotten away again. Of course they screamed at me, and then my father started the car, and set off to comb the narrow streets of this little town. A few minutes later, we saw George, running down a sidewalk. My father caught him and threw him in the back seat again. In a few months, George went back to an institution in Pittsburgh.
Our brother Glenn was living there too, and a few months later, both of them were back with us again. On the usual 'trial basis'. Which trial unfailingly went downhill almost from the moment my brothers had decided which of the attic beds they would sleep in, and begun unpacking their clothes. This instance was no different. But now they had a plan. George had found a spare key to my Horrid Grandmother's turquoise and white Chevy BelAir, and they weren't coming back this time. They asked for my help. I knew where my step-mother had a collection of $2 bills, maybe $200 in all. I got the money, and we divided it. I hid my share in one of the black-and-red bound volumes of the Collier's Encyclopedia we kept in the attic. My brothers took theirs, got in the car, and George drove away. Two blocks from the house, George ran into a light pole. Someone called the police, and George and Glenn were caught and taken to the city jail. The 'trial basis' had soured as much as possible, practically overnight.
When my father came home from his classes in electrical repair, and found out what had happened, he took me with him, to the police station. There was no question of what had happened. The car had gone halfway up the pole, it seems. I confessed to my part in the plot. All three of us were shown a jail cell, and told that this would be where we would be living, if my father so chose. My brothers sat together on a long low bench against a cinder block wall. I was standing off to one side, hoping to disappear. My father was talking with a uniformed policeman -- a man about my father's age, but stocky, with the standard buzz-cut. My father was shaking his head.
'I don't want them,' he said, loudly enough for me and my brothers to hear. 'No, I don't want them.' I remember feeling tremendous shame at that moment. And the police officer gave my father the strangest look, kind of out of the corner of his eye. It was a look of disbelief, I think. With just that little bit of an expression, and the way his body seemed to jolt a bit, it was as if this officer had become transparent. And I thought -- this man has no sons of his own. He wishes he had even one boy, a healthy boy, even if he was bad. (It was just a stupid Chevy, after all) Or maybe, this man did have sons, and so loved them that he couldn't imagine not having them in his life. And, standing right next to him in his police station, was a man perfectly willing to throw two decent, unbroken sons away.
In any event, my father brought the three of us back to the house. I returned the $2 bills I'd hidden, and got a beating. My brothers, of course, packed their clothes and went away again.
As a result of this, and other adventures, my brothers and I don't have much to share, really, besides painful memories. Though it was always a cause for comment, if all my brothers and I were in my father's house at the same time, I wonder that we ever went back to visit at all.
And this is but a tithe of what I could say about George. (And really, this is much more about me, anyway, isn't it?) I do think that, of all of us, he was the one for whom the separation from our mother was the most perplexing and damaging. I'd been prepared for it for months; I knew what was going to happen before my father did. My younger brothers were really too unformed for anything to make much sense to them. George was in kindergarten when things splintered, and his life has been a sad dance with women ever since. Partly an attempt to bond, partly a need to express unbearable rage at a barely-remembered betrayal. It's as though his life has been impacted by these emotional undercurrents like Florida limestone reacts to underground rivers: everything looks stable for a while, and then a huge sinkhole opens up overnight, and a viewer can see that there's really nothing much at all underneath.
And now, George is sick, and living... someplace. I looked up Hudson County in both Washington and Oregon, and these isn't one in either. He has never give any of us his correct address. When we try to call, he doesn't answer. I'm told he has lost a considerable amount of weight. He flirtatiously hints that he has untreatable stomach cancer, or a brain tumor. He has also maintained, for years, that he suffers from a life-threatening ailment that no one on earth has ever seen, except in babies of three weeks old or younger. My brother presents a slippery slope to negotiate.
So, I'll call other family members, and see what we can hash out together. Right now, I just feel numb. Guilt wants to creep in, as always -- the legacy of being the big brother, don't you know: I'm supposed to do everything first, and that includes dying. I also feel a jumbled anger that's desperate for a target to demolish: of course George has made contributions, and -- as is always the case with anyone who doesn't live in a cave -- he has changed people's lives; but what might it have been reasonable to expect (and at this, the anger flares up, hot), had the garden, in which my brothers and I grew, been tended differently?
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
No comments:
Post a Comment