The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey Page A
Authors: Blake Bailey
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eight years before, when we’d attended midnight mass in Germany with my devout grandparents. Now the place felt like true sanctuary. We arrived early and sang carols with the rest of that wonderfully normal congregation. Marlies embarrassed me by singing in German, or, in the case of “Adeste Fidelis,” the original Latin (she deplored the decadent reforms of Vatican Council II). Later, when the priest read the Christmas story, I heard a wet sniffle and knew my mother was letting out the tears she’d held back all day. Finally we went home and found Scott passed out on his stomach by the fireplace, hands tucked under his crotch for warmth like a little boy.
THE NEXT DAY he was churlish with hangover, humiliated after waking up in a dark room with his pimply cheek pressed against the bricks. It didn’t help that my mother nagged him ceaselessly, threatening to banish him from the condo until he’d cleaned up his act. Then Scott lost his temper and told her that she of all people should talk! I think he called her a cunt at some point (the word was such a normal part of Scott’s vocabulary that it didn’t really convey the usual nastiness). As ever, of course, Marlies went on giving as good as she got, all to no purpose. I might have tried walking back to my father’s house in Oklahoma City had it not been for my mother’s boyfriend, Dave—the baby-faced grad student—who joined us for brunch that day. Because his own youth had been somewhat troubled, and because he adored my mother, Dave took special pains to be nice to Scott, and that alone made the rest of the afternoon bearable.
There was one last argument in the parking lot as we were leaving. A few minutes before, my mother had caught Scott sneaking a slug of Scotch on the back porch; he said it was hair of the dog and he’d only had the one, but my mother said it didn’t matter—one was all it took!—and demanded he hand over his car keys so I could drive us home. Naturally my brother refused and would go on refusing until the Last Trump, but Marlies stood there berating him all the same and poking her hand out (“Scott: Give . . . me . . . the keys !”) for a long, long time. Dave stood there holding a camera my mother had asked him to fetch, and finally ended the dispute by snapping a close-up of mother and son in midwrangle. A moment later he took the posed version: my mother standing between us, wan but smiling, vaguely exultant at the prospect of our departure. “Christmas 1980” was her simple but pregnant gloss in the photo album.
From my mother’s condo to my father’s doorstep took about forty-five minutes in normal traffic, but Scott made it in less than half an hour amid holiday congestion on the interstate. He roared out of my mother’s presence and bore down on any motorist who hindered his speed, however innocently; their eyes bugged in their mirrors as they caught sight of the behatted madman in their wake. Scott’s only reply to my occasional protests (“ Fuck! . . . Fuck! . . . Slow down, you crazy fucking asshole! ”) was to go faster, or rather flex his foot against the already floored gas pedal. Finally we parted without a word in my father’s driveway, Scott pausing just long enough for me to step clear.
Burck answered the chain-locked front door in his bathrobe. Flushed and apologetic, he asked me to take a walk, please, and come back in an hour or so.
SHORTLY AFTER MANDY’S return to Scotland, my father began (actually resumed) seeing a woman more or less his own age, Sandra, and soon they decided to marry. Mandy dwindled away amid a welter of tearful transatlantic phone calls, and within a couple of months our lives were entirely different.
Sandra was the antithesis of my mother—they despised each other—and for my father that, I dare say, was the point. Twenty years before, my grandmother and Aunt Kay had thrown a welcoming soirée in Vinita for Burcky’s pigtailed, inexplicably German, and quite pregnant
THE NEXT DAY he was churlish with hangover, humiliated after waking up in a dark room with his pimply cheek pressed against the bricks. It didn’t help that my mother nagged him ceaselessly, threatening to banish him from the condo until he’d cleaned up his act. Then Scott lost his temper and told her that she of all people should talk! I think he called her a cunt at some point (the word was such a normal part of Scott’s vocabulary that it didn’t really convey the usual nastiness). As ever, of course, Marlies went on giving as good as she got, all to no purpose. I might have tried walking back to my father’s house in Oklahoma City had it not been for my mother’s boyfriend, Dave—the baby-faced grad student—who joined us for brunch that day. Because his own youth had been somewhat troubled, and because he adored my mother, Dave took special pains to be nice to Scott, and that alone made the rest of the afternoon bearable.
There was one last argument in the parking lot as we were leaving. A few minutes before, my mother had caught Scott sneaking a slug of Scotch on the back porch; he said it was hair of the dog and he’d only had the one, but my mother said it didn’t matter—one was all it took!—and demanded he hand over his car keys so I could drive us home. Naturally my brother refused and would go on refusing until the Last Trump, but Marlies stood there berating him all the same and poking her hand out (“Scott: Give . . . me . . . the keys !”) for a long, long time. Dave stood there holding a camera my mother had asked him to fetch, and finally ended the dispute by snapping a close-up of mother and son in midwrangle. A moment later he took the posed version: my mother standing between us, wan but smiling, vaguely exultant at the prospect of our departure. “Christmas 1980” was her simple but pregnant gloss in the photo album.
From my mother’s condo to my father’s doorstep took about forty-five minutes in normal traffic, but Scott made it in less than half an hour amid holiday congestion on the interstate. He roared out of my mother’s presence and bore down on any motorist who hindered his speed, however innocently; their eyes bugged in their mirrors as they caught sight of the behatted madman in their wake. Scott’s only reply to my occasional protests (“ Fuck! . . . Fuck! . . . Slow down, you crazy fucking asshole! ”) was to go faster, or rather flex his foot against the already floored gas pedal. Finally we parted without a word in my father’s driveway, Scott pausing just long enough for me to step clear.
Burck answered the chain-locked front door in his bathrobe. Flushed and apologetic, he asked me to take a walk, please, and come back in an hour or so.
SHORTLY AFTER MANDY’S return to Scotland, my father began (actually resumed) seeing a woman more or less his own age, Sandra, and soon they decided to marry. Mandy dwindled away amid a welter of tearful transatlantic phone calls, and within a couple of months our lives were entirely different.
Sandra was the antithesis of my mother—they despised each other—and for my father that, I dare say, was the point. Twenty years before, my grandmother and Aunt Kay had thrown a welcoming soirée in Vinita for Burcky’s pigtailed, inexplicably German, and quite pregnant
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