The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Read online

  ONE TURNING POINT was a trip to Germany we took as a family in 1972, when I was nine and my brother twelve. My father chose me to accompany him to Stuttgart, where he wanted to visit his old army base and other haunts. (While at Westminster College in Missouri he’d run out of money and had to enlist for two years.) Marlies, who didn’t want to go to Stuttgart, had urged him to take Scott instead of me; she thought Burck and I were both bumblers and together we’d be doubly so. Scott had been the responsible one ever since that precocious sojourn on the Nieuw Amsterdam, and the idea was that my monoglot father would get in some kind of trouble if he traveled without Scott’s assistance. Burck was still in his thirties then, already a top antitrust lawyer in Oklahoma, a formidable man, and thus he decided to take me and to hell with my mother’s advice.

  On the train he taught me how to play chess, and later that night our taxi took us to a sinister neighborhood and dropped us at a hotel that turned out to be closed. My father stood pondering the Gothic letters on the locked door—“Geschlossen? . . . Oh! Wait!”—but the cab was gone and we couldn’t find another. Four or five trains came and went, my father pounding the door of each, shouting at the passengers inside, but whoosh whoosh whoosh . . . until finally he discovered the big metal button one had to push to make the doors spring open. At his army base the next day we were accosted by MPs—the flag was at half-mast, I remember, because Truman had died the day before—and escorted to the CO’s office, where we were reproached for wandering onto the base without clearance. I sat there in my little woolen parka, my feet kicking above the floor, amazed that my father had gotten us in trouble. That night he put me to bed and went out on the town alone. I panicked: I’d had my first-ever cup of coffee with dinner, my heart was pounding, and I was all but certain I’d never see my father again—he’d get lost and disappear, board the wrong train to nowhere, and what would become of me? When he finally returned I burst into tears, and he sat on the bed and hugged me to his chest.

  From that point on, I was closer to my father than Scott was, and no doubt about it; we were a comfort to each other, all the more so over time.

  FOR A WHILE my brother seemed to work harder for my parents’ attention. He’d conduct elaborate surveys on random topics—carry a clipboard to the grocery store and jot down, say, tar and nicotine levels of various cigarette brands, though he didn’t smoke and was, if anything, proud of the fact that our mother wolfed her Salems all the way down to the filter. There was also a dog food survey, though I don’t think we had a dog at the time. A given survey would go on for months. When Scott pursued his researches in Vinita (“What kind of cigarette is that?” he’d inquire of some old lady. “Can I see the pack?”), my grandmother would sheepishly joke about it, which did nothing to dampen his weird enthusiasm.

  He became extravagantly neat. My mother helped him turn his bedroom into a cool seventies “pad” (think Greg’s attic retreat in The Brady Bunch), complete with beaded curtains around the bed and so forth. Scott was so pleased with the effect that he took to sleeping on the floor rather than mussing his beads and remaking the bed.

  Objects were arranged around the room with a kind of cryptic symmetry, and if I happened to pick something up and put it down somewhere else he was liable to hit me. His record collection was carefully alphabetized, and I was forbidden to use his turntable because I sometimes forgot to clean his records (or I cleaned them “wrong”) with the plush little tool he placed in plain view for that purpose. He was lavishly fond of a fat white hamster named Algernon, whose Habitrail palace was disassembled each week and scrubbed with Pine-Sol. Scott had human friends too (they also failed to clean his records properly), but he still spent a lot of time alone in his room, his “pad,” communing with Algernon.

  One night in the paneled room at Oma’s house he confided that he lived in two separate dimensions. The present one I knew. In the other he had a different and far more appreciative family, and no little brother. He described the whole setup in detail. The main conceit was that this other family was more or less opposite to the one we shared: blond like him (my parents and I were dark-haired), inclined to take him along when they traveled (as opposed to ditching him in Vinita), wholly devoted to him, in fact. He became a bit tearful as he told it, as a sense of what he was missing in the here and now came over him. I started crying a little too. Already I felt as though we were about to say good-bye to each other forever.

  Around the age of thirteen he became more and more arrogant. I think it was John Lennon, one of his heroes, who inspired him to flash a two-fingered peace sign (sneering) in almost every photo from that era, and “middle-class” was his favorite epithet—meaning the dull herd, etc.—an anathema he applied to the whole doltish world. His smile was an occasional simper of amused superiority. He was right about everything even when he wasn’t. Once he corrected my use of the word “haberdasher”—he said it was a place to buy hats. I replied that one could get more than hats at a haberdasher, and the dictionary seemed to bear me out on that. My brother called the dictionary “a piece of shit” (his language was foul and getting fouler, another aspect of his rebellious persona), then slunk off to his room and slammed the door. One day he grabbed me by my shirtfront and yanked me into a punch that left half my face bruised and swollen. He’d always pushed me around a lot and blindsided me with those tackles out of nowhere, but this was different, and Burck was furious. Though he rarely spanked us, he gave my brother a smart lash with his belt, then let me decide whether Scott should get more of the same. I shook my head, but I had to think about it first.

  Even as a boy I knew Scott’s arrogance was pathetic, and in a secret way I was the more arrogant one, because I really believed in my essential superiority (at least where Scott was concerned). And lest there be any doubt, my father had pretty much told me so, though I wonder if that’s what he intended at the time. During our frequent chess games I’d mention all the vicious things Scott had said about me and done to me, until one night my father remarked, “He’s just jealous,” and went on to say some nice things about my intellect and the like. Again, this was probably just a sop, though I was glad to have it. I could hardly wait to throw it in my brother’s face.

  I didn’t wait long.

  The year before, we’d moved to the country near the town of Edmond, about a half-hour drive via the expressway from downtown Oklahoma City. Burck had received his first six-figure fee after he’d successfully prosecuted an asphalt price-fixing cabal in a widely publicized trial. (Noting that my young father had opposed a team of wily, more experienced lawyers, the Daily Oklahoman called it a “David and Goliath” story: “But in the end people might have wondered: Who was David and who was Goliath?”) Because of her lifelong love of Karl May, the fanciful German chronicler of the American West (Old Shatterhand et al.), Marlies had wanted a place in the country where she could keep Arabian horses and immerse herself in animal husbandry and whatnot. Thus my father bought eight acres of land in one of several rustic subdivisions north of the city, Deer Creek Estates, and built one of those blocky “modern” monstrosities that were all the rage in the seventies but still pretty daring in Deer Creek: a white-brick two-story with chocolate-colored trim, three balconies, a high slanted roof on one end, and a lot of shag carpeting and Peter Max wallpaper on the inside. My parents were enormously proud of the place, and why not? Just over a decade had passed since Hayden Hall.

  One night my brother was babysitting at one of our neighbors’ houses (some residual legend of responsibility clung to him), and I was home alone. I was ten years old, and I guess my parents thought I could handle the odd evening by myself. They were mistaken. A sudden sense of rural isolation had spooked me. In tears, I called my brother and begged him to come home right away. Somehow or other he managed it—he got our neighbors on the phone at some dinner party and made up a bogus emergency so he could leave early—and when he came in the door I threw myself at him, kissing him on the lips. For a few minutes we loved each other
better than anyone.

  Our happy reunion didn’t last. Ever since we’d come back from Germany the year before, I’d been fanatically attached to seven cartoon figures called Mainzelmännchen—little men from Mainz, whose fifteen-second antics were interspersed with commercials on German television. I had little rubber Mainzelmännchen that I played with constantly, most memorably in the rain, when the irrigated pasture on the property behind our house became an enchanted city of canals. For a while my brother was interested too, but less so over time—he was thirteen, after all. Unfortunately, the night he came home early from his babysitting job to comfort me was also the night he let me know once and for all that he didn’t want to play with the Mainzelmännchen anymore, that he was sick of the Mainzelmännchen.

  In deadpan earnest I told him I hated him. For a moment he looked stunned; then he began to cry. “You were so happy to see me,” he sobbed, “and now you s-say you hate me . . .” It was a fascinating business—my brother crying over a trifle, so it seemed to me—and I didn’t want it to end. So I told him, too, what our father had said while we were playing chess: “He says you’re mean to me because you’re jealous. Because I’m smarter than you and can do things like play chess and play the piano.”

  Rather abruptly Scott stopped crying; he nodded slightly, once, twice, as if this were something he’d suspected all along and now saw clearly, the way a person finally accepts the irrefutable fact of cancer. Without a word he went to his room and shut the door.

  After an hour or so, a guilty panic got the better of me and I looked in on him. He was lying on the floor in that sleeping bag he used so he wouldn’t muss the bed. In the dark I saw the glimmer of his staring eyes. “He didn’t really say that,” I ventured, but Scott didn’t bother to dignify this with a response.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT my brother made less of an effort to cultivate my parents’ favor. He was particularly defiant toward Marlies, who was going through a Madame Bovary phase and seemed annoyed by the finer points of motherhood. Life in the country had been nice for the first year or so, but the rest of us didn’t share her enthusiasms and she became bored and a little bitter. She took to spending long hours at the Old Dodge, a mall bar in Edmond, and was often tipsy when she came home to make dinner. At the best of times she was quick to slap or yell at us; volatile by nature, she’d been brought up in a German household so strict she’d put an ocean between it and herself. One night Scott made a typically snide remark at the dinner table, and just as typically my mother slapped him. I doubt Burck and I even looked up from our plates. But then my brother began shouting: “Don’t you hit me! This is my house too and I can say whatever I want!” So my mother hit him again.

  Suddenly they were both on their feet, scuffling along the kitchen floor. Marlies was still bigger than Scott and had the better of it, but he refused to give in. “You shut your mouth!” she yelled, her thorny gardener’s hands flapping at his face, which was flushed with unrepentant rage. “I’m not going to shut up! I can say what I want! Don’t you hit me anymore!” She pummeled him out of the kitchen and their voices trailed off down the hall, down the stairs, punctuated at last by a banging door. “And you stay in there, buster!” my mother bellowed. My father and I sat there looking at each other.

  NOW IN HER midthirties, Marlies began taking classes at the University of Oklahoma in nearby Norman. She’d yet to get a college-equivalent degree, and anyway it was something to do. Not only was she an excellent student (she got straight A’s on her way to an eventual master’s in anthropology), but something of a party girl too. Enamored of all things Arabian, she mostly hung out with Arabic exchange students, who embraced the Afros, bell-bottoms, and chest-hair jewelry of seventies America. Two young men I remember in particular, Khalid and Muhammad, as well as their older friend, Walid, who was roughly my mother’s age. When I came home from school in the afternoon, I’d find them all lounging around our living room with my mother and a few of her girlfriends—Penny and Lenore and Phyllis, the last of whom fancied herself a belly dancer and torch singer. A pall of cigarette smoke hung near the ceiling while the ice tinkled in big glasses of Scotch. “Heyyy!” Walid would greet me with a drunken growl, and Khalid would give me a dopey grin; Muhammad, the moody one, would look away. It all seemed harmless enough. Sometimes my mother would ask me to play piano, and Phyllis would sing along with a lot of harrowing coloratura: “Chlo-eeee! Chlo-eeee!”

  My father was a good sport about things and at one point agreed to throw a big catered party for the whole Arabic cultural exchange program. In one of the photographs from this occasion my father is wearing a keffiyeh and smiling gamely; my mother is decked out in a kaftan, her sleeves drooping as she hugs my father around the neck. Probably I was in bed by then—anyway, I don’t remember the keffiyeh. What I do remember is the small gathering at dusk as the caterer was setting up. My father was still at his office in Oklahoma City. I’d snuck out of my room to lurk around the swimming pool, and I watched, undetected, as my mother took Muhammad by the hand and led him off behind the propane tank, where their silhouettes came together kissing in the twilight. Then, a bit later, I followed my brother and his friend Warren at a stealthy distance as they left our house along the gravel driveway. By then I was dreading the worst. Standing behind one of the brick pillars at our entrance gate, I peered into the dark and saw Scott and Warren pause around a flaring match, then walk away with two embers swinging at their sides.

  My father came home around eight or so—his usual time—and asked me to keep him company while he changed for the party. Off the master bedroom was a balcony overlooking the pool, and we could hear Marlies’s friends hooting and splashing around below. “What’s wrong, son?” he asked, pausing in his underwear to look at me. I was crying. I couldn’t help it. Probably I shrugged and bit my lip, shaking my head, but my father persisted.

  “I saw Scott and Warren,” I said finally, “smoking.”

  He nodded with a grave, thin-lipped look. Like most little brothers I had a tendency to tattle, but this was nothing like that, and my father knew it. Nor did he find my grief melodramatic, as it certainly seems in retrospect—devoid, that is, of the weird subjective dread I think we both felt at the time.

  “Have you told your mother?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  A bit later that night, at my father’s behest, my mother met me in the garage (why the garage, I wonder). She seemed put out; I had taken her away from the party.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  I told her.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” She gave me a look of elaborate disgust, throwing her head back and rolling her eyes. “He’s fourteen years old! Kids that age take a little puff now and then!” Unwilling to waste another second on me, she left the garage with a whirl of her silken hem, barking “Go to bed!” over her shoulder. I thought I’d get even by telling my father about her little monkey business with Muhammad, but I never did.

  DURING HIS MIDTEEN years Scott didn’t worry so much about his status in the family because he didn’t have to—he had plenty of distractions. He was more handsome than ever: his face was clear, his hair was still golden blond in the summer, he’d grown a few inches and had better muscle tone than I ever would. I look at photographs of us together, shirtless around the pool, and it’s just pathetic. No wonder he didn’t mind when I was elected president of the seventh grade. Now that I was in junior high, we attended classes in the same building of a small rural public school, and the day of my election it promptly got back to me (as intended) that Scott had sneered at one of my classmates, “You people must be desperate.”

  A lot of the older kids hated me because of Scott. Big scary hicks with baseball caps advertising chewing tobacco or cattle feed would corner me in the halls and ask me if I was Scott’s brother. In response to my apologetic nod, they’d bend down and give me a piece of advice: don’t be like your brother, unless you want to get your ass kicked. And yet I can’t remember Scott getting into
any fights. I think he was careful not to cross the line, or was just too loftily disdainful of the whole redneck crowd to bother mincing words with them. Scott’s friends were stylish worldlings like himself, children of commuters who lived in the same sort of upscale subdivisions (Sorghum Mill, Rambling Wood). They didn’t play sports or attend FFA meetings; they acted. During Scott’s sophomore year, our last in the country, he appeared in a scene from Barefoot in the Park as part of a “montage” production of duet acting and dramatic monologues; the Jane Fonda part was taken by his girlfriend, Barbie Benedict, a blandly cheerful brunette. All I can remember about Scott’s performance was the natural way he took off his necktie, as if he’d worn one all his life. My parents and I were impressed by little touches like that.

  What I saw of my brother at home was somewhat in contrast to the dashing (if controversial) figure he struck at school. Perhaps it was jealousy to some extent, but I found him a pretty despicable character. He was constantly baiting my mother, who didn’t hit him anymore because he was too big and it would only prolong the nastiness. Instead she stayed away more than ever, rarely home when I returned from school in the afternoon, and often a bit drunk if she showed up later. Scott did what he could to make my life miserable too, insofar as he bothered. He mocked me constantly, repeating my every word in a girlish whine. Any protest on my part, emotional or not, was met with the same shtick: Scott would bunch up his face and say “Aye-lie-lie!”—a bawling baby. Sometimes I did cry, which really brought out the sadist in him, especially if our friends were around. “Aye-lie-lie! . . . Aye-lie-lie!” he’d cry over and over, gamboling about, shoving me, getting in my face. He’d force me to the floor and make me smell his farts, and once he insisted I watch when he climbed to the roof and took a shit off the chimney. Afterward he scrambled down and confronted me.