Acts of Faith

Douglas

“He thinks they’re patsies. The slang isn’t au courant”—she comically exaggerates the French to show that she isn’t being pretentious, she hates pretense—“but you get what I mean.”

She sits in the passenger seat of her abused Cherokee, binoculars not much bigger than opera glasses strung from her tanned neck by a vinyl cord tucked into the cleavage of the bosom she tries to conceal by wearing a shirt that would fit his father. She does this because she doesn’t want people to take her for some babe with big tits instead of the serious woman she believes herself to be. The serious woman she is. Lucille Braithwaite has a sense of humor and a natural enthusiasm, but both are restrained by the lessons of her Mormon girlhood, which she’s never forgotten. Life is no gag, and we are here to merit the Celestial Kingdom.

“Yeah, I get it,” Douglas says, feeling grown up because he’s driving. Indeed, chauffeuring his mother makes him feel more adult than soloing in the Beechcraft in flight school.

“What’s more, he thinks his family has a history of being patsies. Not exactly the kind who get roped in by pyramid schemes, but dopes who let their principles get in the way of their self-interest.”

The inflection in her voice makes it clear that she, on the other hand, approves of such people.

“Like for example.”

“Like for example, some great-grandfather or great-great-uncle—I forget which—had a friend who was starting a chewing gum business in Chicago. He needed investors, you know, seed money, and asked the great-whatever to kick in and get in on the ground floor. He was a real old-timey Boston Yankee. Thought chewing gum was a disgusting habit, so he turned his friend down, who happened to be named P. K. Wrigley.”

“Like in Wrigley’s Spearmint?” Douglas asks, impressed.

“Like that. Disapproving of gum chewing isn’t what I’d call a moral principle, but maybe it was to a Boston blueblood.”

As she speaks, she looks out the side window, scanning phone wires, mesquite and palo verde trees, and the tall, prickly candles of saguaro. The back of her head faces Douglas, so that all he sees out the corner of his eye is the long, thick, naturally blond hair that very much contributes to the babe look she works so hard to hide with her baggy shirts and minimal makeup and sensible shoes. Too hard sometimes, so that the attempts to camouflage her physical attractions, by their very obviousness, call attention to them. That’s all right with Douglas; he’s proud that his mother doesn’t look her age and fits no one’s image of a mother.

“I think your dad thinks there’s a funny gene in his family, the patsy gene,” she goes on. “That’s why he came out West when he wasn’t much older than you are now.”

“On account of this gene?” asks Douglas, baffled.

“Because of, honey. ‘On account of’ sounds like some hick cowboy.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“He needed to get away from his family, I mean all of them, that whole clan, that tribe. He wanted to start with a clean slate. A nineteen-year-old ought to have a clean slate to begin with, but he felt that his family and all that history of theirs had scribbled on his slate and that, willy-nilly, he’d become whatever they wanted him to become. So it was ‘Go West, young man’ for him. What’s the West for? What’s it always been for? It’s where you go to invent yourself, or reinvent yourself, depending on how much life you’ve lived.”

Much of this is going over Douglas’s seventeen-year-old head, though he has an inkling of what she means about Dad’s family. His uncle Tim, Dad’s younger brother, and aunt Betsy, who live in Amherst, visit him often at Milton and have become almost surrogate parents. A month ago, at the end of the second term, they scooped him up and brought him to the family compound on the coast of Maine to meet some of his relations. The big old house, big as a hotel, had a weird name, Mingulay—a Scottish name, someone told him—and oil paintings and brownish old photographs of Braithwaites going back several generations hanging on the board-and-batten walls. The place teemed with around forty aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, first, second, and even third cousins, with whom he sailed and canoed in Blue Hill bay, played tennis, hiked in the piney woods, and ate dinner in the baronial dining room, where all males over sixteen were required to wear jackets and ties and all females over the same age had to wear dresses and everyone engaged in brilliant, witty conversations he had a hard time following. Tim and Betsy showed him a family tree that was periodically updated, like the U.S. census. He saw his own name and where he fit into that consanguineous universe and learned that he was directly descended from two people who’d come to America not long after the Mayflower. His father had never once mentioned that. In the library one evening his aunt and uncle paged through photo albums with him, and he saw his father as a kid, back in the early fifties, and his grandfather and great-grandfather in their youths. On the bookshelves were family histories and self-published biographies and autobiographies of various ancestors, and he got the idea that Braithwaites were proud of their past and the high-minded, noble things family members had done, putting their principles above their self-interest, like the Boston doctor who could have made a pile treating rich patients but started a charity hospital instead, like the woman who’d been arrested in a demonstration to give women the right to vote, like the naval officer who’d left the quarterdeck during a sea battle in the War of 1812 to save his wounded captain and got court-martialed for abandoning his post. To a kid from the West, where people’s roots didn’t go down very far, unless you were an Indian or a Mexican, all the ancient family lore was fascinating; yet it was also kind of smothering. He too was proud that he came from such fine people; at the same time, he felt an eerie pressure from his dead relations, as if they were telling him that he had to live up to their self-sacrificial ideals, whether he wanted to or not, while the presence of so many living relatives made him feel that he was losing his individual identity, that he was being absorbed into their collective life, like a drop of water into a sponge. He’d had a lot of fun, but a week was enough, and he was relieved to be by himself after Tim and Betsy dropped him off at Boston Logan and he boarded the plane for Tucson.

So he can understand why Dad wanted to get away and be his own man, but he can’t fathom what that has to do with the reason his mother started this discussion about his father.

“He dropped out of Princeton and transferred to the University of Arizona,” she is saying now. “Can you imagine? Trading Princeton for the U of A?”

She snorts, suggesting that she thinks that move was as dumb as the great-whatever passing up a chance to get in on the ground floor of Wrigley’s Spearmint.

“If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have met you,” Douglas says in its defense.

“True.”

“And then I wouldn’t be here.”

“Also true.”

“And neither would Megan and Lisa.”

“Ditto.”

“So we’re real glad he dropped out of Princeton,” he adds, reaching for a lighthearted tone.

She senses that it’s not genuine, a pretty wrapper in which he’s trying to smuggle a not-very-pretty question.

Turning from the window, she says:

“I am, too. You’re all three the most precious things in the world to me. Don’t worry. I know it sounded bad last night, but it’s not as bad as it sounded. How many times have you and your sisters heard us quarrel?”

“Mom, that wasn’t a quarrel.”

“Fight, then. How many times?”

“Not many.”

“Drop the m and you’ve got it.”

“Okay, first time. But it was—it scared us.”

“I lost my temper. There was no earthly reason for him to do what he did. He’s one of the most successful men in town, in the whole state. The governor—the governor, for Christ’s sake—calls him by his first name.” She was getting worked up again. “And we’ve got that house and those cars and you in a fancy-dancy eastern prep school, and a portfolio to die for. There was just no good reason.”

“Hey, Mom? I’ve learned something at the fancy-dancy school. Trial by jury? Innocent till proven guilty?”

She sighs and fiddles with the binoculars, her lower lip curling into the pout she assumes whenever she has to say something she doesn’t want to say.

“Honey, your dad admits to doing everything the people who are suing him say he did. Well, almost everything, and the houses are right there to prove it. He’s just saying, and the hotshot Phoenix lawyers are saying, that he had a legal right to do it.”

“What do you say?”

“I don’t like getting into the legalities, I’m not a lawyer, thank God. It wasn’t necessary, that’s what I say. He knew he was pushing the edge of the envelope, knew he was taking a big risk of getting sued and maybe worse, but he went right ahead with it. So now his reputation is on the line, his future, our future could be in jeopardy, and for what? The whole thing, legal or not, was kind of sleazy. Your dad always prided himself on being a class act, so that when you saw the Web-Mar logo on a development, you knew it was top of the line and on the up and up. This—this was the kind of thing some fly-by-nighter would do. Pull over, Doug.”

She’s spotted something, and he slows down and steers to the shoulder of the road. She tells him to back up, which he does, twisting and craning his neck to see over the stacks of boxes that partly block the rear window.

“Here. Stop.”

She lowers her window, the scorching June air smacking Douglas like a hot hand. His mother freezes the binoculars on several birds, perched on a roadside wire above a dry wash, and after looking for half a minute, she hands the glasses to him.

“Time for one of Mom’s pop quizzes. Identify them.”

Leaning over, he focuses on the stocky birds, a few drab females and two males with royal blue crowns and breasts and black eye-rings like masks. He isn’t sure what they are, and it’s hard to concentrate, what with his heart still fluttering from that remark she’d made about their future being in jeopardy.

“The females look like cowbirds, but the males like indigo buntings.”

“Close doesn’t count. Can you see the male’s wings?”

“They’re facing head on.”

“Which means, honey, that you have to get out and change the angle.”

From ten yards up the road, amid the heat and unearthly desert silence, he spots the rufous wing bars. She’s unbelievable, he thinks. How did she see them, going by at sixty miles an hour?

“Blue grosbeak,” he calls, and she sticks her hand out the window, bends thumb and forefinger to form a circle, then waves him back.

They drive on in silence for several minutes, crossing the boundary into the reservation, where she is going to deliver the stuff in back: notebooks, textbooks, pencils, used electric typewriters. Most of it was donated by one of the charitable organizations she belongs to. She bought the rest out of her own pocket, following the maxim that she repeats to her children every chance she gets: Much is expected from those to whom much is given.

The land on both sides of the two-lane asphalt rolls away, meeting, toward the south, the blue, hazy wall of the Baboquivari mountains. Dwelling place of the Papago Indian gods, his mother has told him, cautioning him to refer to the Indians by the name they have for themselves, Tohono O’odham.

“No good reason for him to do it, but there is a reason,” she says, picking up where she left off. “Your dad has this need to think of himself as a tough-minded, hard-nosed guy without a sentimental bone in his body, who never lets an opportunity pass him by and never lets anything stand in the way of him getting what he wants. Why am I telling you this? Same reason I tell it to myself. So I can understand him better. He’s just got to prove that he isn’t like the rest of his family. He wouldn’t have loaned P. K. Wrigley a few bucks, he would have made himself his partner and then taken over the whole shebang.”

She pauses in this analysis to glance at a settlement of squalid adobe shacks, in front of which dark-skinned children play in the dust and the inevitable pickup trucks squat on deflated tires. Douglas, who has never been on this reservation before, feels vaguely uneasy, as if they’ve crossed the border into Mexico.

“And all the deed restrictions and covenants and conservation easements that old woman put into the contract were in his way,” Lucille resumes. “Stopped him from building a high-density development at double, triple the profit. So he got those Phoenix lawyers to change the contract and they somehow got the old lady to agree to the changes. How, I don’t know, maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Mom, the paper said the woman’s heirs, her kids and all? It said they said she didn’t agree.”

His mother shrugs.

“They told the paper they might do more than sue. That they might go to—to—“

“The attorney general. Criminal fraud. Maybe they will, but I don’t think it would stick.”

“He didn’t do that, fraud, you’re saying?”

“I told you, I don’t like to get into the legalities.”

This is not the answer Douglas hoped to hear.