Read Online The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey - Free Book Online Page A

had kicked in at last, and I wanted nothing more than to be normal—that is, as unlike my brother as possible. I didn’t want anyone to see us together, to guess we were brothers, and I couldn’t understand why my father would invite both of us downtown for lunch. But there he was, my father, natty in a tailored gray suit, striding out of his office and hugging my ragamuffin brother for all to see: a modern-dress Prodigal Son. The odd colleague would drift into our ken and pause with a barely perceptible start as he or she recognized Scott and absorbed, smiling, whatever Martian pleasantry he made. “Hey, Terry,” Scott said to one of them in an intense half-whisper, as if he were mimicking the sort of self-assured bigshot who could affect such intimacy and get away with it. “How’s the wife? You’re looking very . . . healthy.” Burck’s expression at such times was fixed, inscrutable, with perhaps a shimmer of misery underneath.
    We spent Christmas Day with Oma from Vinita. She’d broken her hip the month before, and my father had brought her to Oklahoma City to recuperate in one of the nicer rest homes. Her roommate was a crazy old mummy named Tula who delighted in tormenting her: Tula threw food at my grandmother and once, slyly, left a bedpan full of coy turds on their common bedside table. (Marlies—who had a very German fondness for scatological humor and a rather strained relationship with her mother-in-law—adored Tula.) In short, Oma was having a bad time of it, and I wondered if she might be spared the sight of my brother.
    But we were a family, after all. So we sat around taking pictures and opening presents in that gloomy, yellow-curtained common room. Scott was creepily solicitous toward Oma, kneeling at the foot of her wheelchair and caressing her shrunken shoulder, while my parents smiled and I looked on with a kind of cringing bemusement. Oma returned Scott’s tenderness by touching a trembling hand to his pimply cheek, his arm, as though she were trying to palpate the precious boy within.
    I thought of my favorite Christmas, eight years before. Oma was visiting, and Scott decided to put on a show for her and our parents. Before we opened presents on Christmas Eve, my brother and I sang and danced and did a skit in identical blue pajamas. The highlight was my reading of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” accompanied by my Pooh bear, who was dressed in a vest and bow tie and seated beside me on a bar stool. We alternated lines: I read mine with an orotund flourish, while Pooh muttered his in a bear-voice I’d practiced all week. We were a hit. I can still see Oma—who often smiled but rarely laughed (because of her teeth?)—clutching her son’s shoulder with gasping hilarity. There’s a photo of me taking a deep bow afterward while Scott, beaming, stands behind me. The show had been his idea, and he was proud of me.
    AS MUCH AS possible I stayed away while Scott was home. What galled me most was not that Scott himself was oblivious to his condition, but that my parents too seemed bent on pretending that nothing much was amiss, that time would heal. They doted on Scott in my presence, as if to rebuke me for failing, balefully, to do my part. But I couldn’t help it. The sight of Scott struck me dumb; I was terrified of turning into him.
    One morning he came into the bathroom while I was washing my face—still pretty clear at the time—and said he wanted to watch, that perhaps he was doing something wrong to have so many pimples. It occurs to me now that he was just trying to find something for us to talk about.
    “Well, there’s nothing much to it,” I said with faint exasperation, with the kind of stoical condescension one shows a pestering six-year-old. If my brother caught on to this, he gave no sign; the year before he would have clouted me upside the head. Now he just stood there, lips parted, while I covered my face with Noxzema and washed it off with a hand towel and hot