Read Online The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey - Free Book Online
Authors: Blake Bailey
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eager to accompany him and my mother to the airport. She made this gleeful trio wait with her at the gate until her son’s plane was unmistakably in the air, then breathed “a humongous sigh of relief” and invited them all to dinner at the Chelsea. Theirs was a merry table—the same table, it so happened, where she’d been so inconsolable the night before, and the same waiter, who was glad to see her feeling better. Later she and the boys sat around on her bed, drinking and laughing about the whole incredibly fucked-up mess. The guys thought it was wild that Scott, that crazy fucker, had such a cool mom.
I HEARD A few things about Scott’s time in Germany, but the rest is speculation. The one photograph is telling: he is slouched between my grandparents, laughing, arms flung over their shoulders; my grandfather, propped stiffly against his metal cane, shares nothing of Scott’s mirth; my grandmother clutches her purse and deplores Scott with a look of stern, melting love. She adored him and vice versa. Her babbling admonitions to be good and go to church seemed to soothe him. He’d sit passive and smiling while she brought him food and insisted on rubbing his pimply face with some kind of ointment that had worked for her as a girl. Both of them reproached my grandfather, whose exasperation was such that he became the weary embodiment of Wittgenstein’s dictum, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.” As the head of an asylum, Opa had been around lunacy all his life and sympathized up to a point: during the war he’d saved a number of patients by alerting their families to come take them home and hide them from the Nazis. His own son, my uncle Richard, had been a little off when young (low grades, a dazed loutish look), and now was a clubby bearded burgher who sold neon signs.
As for Scott, poor Opa could hardly believe what a difference five years had wrought. What had become of his lieber Sohn ? Who was this sullen Tage Dieb (“day thief” or “wastrel”)? Asked not to play his music so loud, Scott would lock himself in Opa’s study with a cache of liquor and blast the Ramones. This went on for a month, maybe, until Opa called Richard, who yanked my brother to his feet, slapped him around a bit, and told him to get his ass on a plane. Oma saw him off at the gate, weeping.
WHEN SCOTT CAME home for Christmas he looked ghastly. His face was boiling with pimples, pimples on top of pimples, and his hair hung like a pair of dank curtains one wouldn’t care to part. He seemed weirdly cheerful withal. Between Germany and Oklahoma he’d stopped in New York for a couple of weeks, basically living on the street and somehow managing to stuff himself with drugs enough to last into the new year. Or so I assumed, since he didn’t appear to be getting high in our house. But who knows. All I knew was that every time he opened his mouth something strange came out, as though he were addressing us from the fog of some alien world.
That first day home he came into my room and sat on the floor. After a few inconclusive exchanges, he fell silent and began surveying every detail of his surroundings, his head rolling around on his shoulders, slowly, like a security camera. Finally his eyes fixed on me.
“Your face . . .” he said, after almost a full minute of scrutiny, during which I’d tried to seem oblivious and then said “ What? ” a number of times. “It’s all—kind of fucked up . . .”
Look who’s talking, I thought. “How so?”
“Your nose is like”—he stared hard, trying to fathom it—“I don’t know, Zwieb, it’s like asymmetrical and shit . . .”
Actually my nose is fairly straight, or at least it was in those days. “Really?”
“Yeah!” And he went on staring while his hand traced ineffable shapes in the air that were meant to approximate my nose. He wasn’t trying to be offensive so much as helping me see what he saw.
Mostly Scott embarrassed me. I was fifteen, puberty
I HEARD A few things about Scott’s time in Germany, but the rest is speculation. The one photograph is telling: he is slouched between my grandparents, laughing, arms flung over their shoulders; my grandfather, propped stiffly against his metal cane, shares nothing of Scott’s mirth; my grandmother clutches her purse and deplores Scott with a look of stern, melting love. She adored him and vice versa. Her babbling admonitions to be good and go to church seemed to soothe him. He’d sit passive and smiling while she brought him food and insisted on rubbing his pimply face with some kind of ointment that had worked for her as a girl. Both of them reproached my grandfather, whose exasperation was such that he became the weary embodiment of Wittgenstein’s dictum, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.” As the head of an asylum, Opa had been around lunacy all his life and sympathized up to a point: during the war he’d saved a number of patients by alerting their families to come take them home and hide them from the Nazis. His own son, my uncle Richard, had been a little off when young (low grades, a dazed loutish look), and now was a clubby bearded burgher who sold neon signs.
As for Scott, poor Opa could hardly believe what a difference five years had wrought. What had become of his lieber Sohn ? Who was this sullen Tage Dieb (“day thief” or “wastrel”)? Asked not to play his music so loud, Scott would lock himself in Opa’s study with a cache of liquor and blast the Ramones. This went on for a month, maybe, until Opa called Richard, who yanked my brother to his feet, slapped him around a bit, and told him to get his ass on a plane. Oma saw him off at the gate, weeping.
WHEN SCOTT CAME home for Christmas he looked ghastly. His face was boiling with pimples, pimples on top of pimples, and his hair hung like a pair of dank curtains one wouldn’t care to part. He seemed weirdly cheerful withal. Between Germany and Oklahoma he’d stopped in New York for a couple of weeks, basically living on the street and somehow managing to stuff himself with drugs enough to last into the new year. Or so I assumed, since he didn’t appear to be getting high in our house. But who knows. All I knew was that every time he opened his mouth something strange came out, as though he were addressing us from the fog of some alien world.
That first day home he came into my room and sat on the floor. After a few inconclusive exchanges, he fell silent and began surveying every detail of his surroundings, his head rolling around on his shoulders, slowly, like a security camera. Finally his eyes fixed on me.
“Your face . . .” he said, after almost a full minute of scrutiny, during which I’d tried to seem oblivious and then said “ What? ” a number of times. “It’s all—kind of fucked up . . .”
Look who’s talking, I thought. “How so?”
“Your nose is like”—he stared hard, trying to fathom it—“I don’t know, Zwieb, it’s like asymmetrical and shit . . .”
Actually my nose is fairly straight, or at least it was in those days. “Really?”
“Yeah!” And he went on staring while his hand traced ineffable shapes in the air that were meant to approximate my nose. He wasn’t trying to be offensive so much as helping me see what he saw.
Mostly Scott embarrassed me. I was fifteen, puberty
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