CHAPTER TEN
A FEW MONTHS LATER, AND BING AND I WERE TOGETHER AGAIN, both of us home for the holidays. It was late spring 1983 and I was almost twenty years old, reasonably happy at Brown, still trying to figure out what to do with my life and looking forward to enjoying the humid pleasures of summer inertia. I had my first real girlfriend, Alexandra, whom I liked well enough. Her father was a producer, bankrolling shows on Broadway and in London’s West End. He was thrilled by proximity to the Falcon’s money and influence and encouraged sleepovers.
“Dad, Collie and I have something to tell you,” Zan said as the two of us stood outside the door to his home office, whose lined walls and overstocked shelves paid homage to his career. We were visiting her home in Connecticut for the weekend.
“Are you pregnant?” His eyes glistened, quavering.
“No! Honestly, Dad . . . the things you say. We were thinking about going to the house in Palm Beach for spring break.”
“Oh, well, of course. Whatever you’d like,” he said, shrugging, the light in his eyes flickering out, cataracts forming, things growing dim.
A swirling series of spring storms that year had cut the beach in half. On fierce days, the ocean banged away at the front door, the wind raging, Uncle Tom getting doused from the spray, hollering and shaking his fist as if the encroaching water were a neighbor intent on selling him a magazine subscription.
Bingo and I spent most afternoons digging our toes in the sand and body surfing, the bigger dogs wading into the foamy waves alongside us, the smaller dogs pacing along the shoreline, barking.
It was a beautiful day near the end of May, and I was back from an early morning sail and hauling the boat onto shore when I saw Pop’s great shadow darken the sand around me.
“Hey, Pop,” I said, squinting up at him, hand covering my eyes as I reached into my pocket for my sunglasses. It quickly became apparent that Pop was in no mood for summery salutations.
“The tennis club just called. The fellow on the other end said you didn’t need to come in this afternoon but they’d need you for tomorrow morning. What in heaven’s name does that mean? Do you have a job? What’s going on here?”
“Pop, it’s just a part-time job, chasing balls and . . .”
“And what else? Helping bored society ladies improve their serve?”
I looked at him incredulously. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Why would you go behind my back this way and get a job, and at the tennis club of all the places on earth? What is this secret life you lead?”
“Secret life? Pop, do you have to be so dramatic all the time? It’s no big deal. It’s a dumb job. What am I supposed to do all summer, sunbathe and avoid Ma?” I’d been wrestling with the idea of getting a part-time job for a while—kind of a half-assed attempt at making myself mildly useful—but Pop wouldn’t hear of it.
“Wherever did you get such an idea?” he said, looking at me in astonishment, as if I were wearing a different face. The slightest whiff of industriousness was an insulting glove to the cheek as far as Pop was concerned.
“Who’s been encouraging you to take up the horse’s harness? Is this your grandfather’s influence? Have you learned nothing at all from my example?” Pop said as we began walking back toward the house, where he resumed his spot on the chaise longue. He’d spent the morning in his bathing suit, sunning himself outside on a small patch of overgrown grass. He peered at me from behind his sunglasses, the stems covered in silver duct tape, an overzealous attempt at repair.
“Pop, it’s not like I’m planning on becoming a sharecropper. The tennis club was looking for someone to help out a few hours a week. . . .” I sat on the ground under the white oak tree and braced for the explosion to come.
“Have you lost your mind? No son of mine will ever work for a tennis club. Why, I’d just as soon you went to work for a radio station as have you become a professional tennis bum.” Pop had a noisy aversion to all kinds of people—chiropractors, cheerleaders, folk dancers—he especially disliked tennis players, whom he lumped in with on-air radio personalities, despising them for their “commonness. To think they’re proud of themselves, the great belches.”
“Look at that boorish brute, spitting on the court! You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with that profane, stringy-haired crew,” he used to say whenever he caught us watching a match on TV.
Wimbledon coverage was an annual nightmare.
“Who’s talking about playing professional tennis? I’m just helping out around the courts and clubhouse.” The dogs had discovered me on the ground. Pushing them aside, I felt as if I were cutting a swath through the rain forest, hacking through endless resistant curtains of undergrowth.
“And isn’t that how it starts? Next thing you know, you’ll be answering me back with your middle finger. No. Sleep until noon, play in the water with your brother, soak up the sun, and forget about the rest. You’ll get a bellyful of the rest before life is through with you. I’ve higher expectations of my sons than to see them flinching under the lash of menial labor.” He was staring skyward, hands extended over his chest, fingers waving elegantly in midair, like a maestro of leisure directing some inner symphony.
“Pop, I want to do something and I’ve got to start somewhere. I don’t want to just coast through life.”
He sat up and removed his sunglasses. “And why not, for heaven’s sake? By Jesus, if I could attach runners to the soles of my feet, I’d do it, and you and Bingo, you two boys were born wearing roller skates and you have the temerity to turn your back on such a gift—”
“Say, if you’re so anxious to make yourself useful, then how about making yourself useful to me,” Uncle Tom interrupted, appearing from inside the house, stopping briefly to speak to Pop and me, Pop almost naked and glowing red from hours of exposure to the sun; and me in shorts with Sykes panting between my bare legs.
“Eavesdropping as usual, Tom, I see,” Pop said, putting his sunglasses back on and resuming his prone position.
“Surveillance, more like it,” Uncle Tom said, a reference to what he broadly termed “matters needing expert attention.” Once invoked, that entitled him to violate privacies and usurp personal liberties, listen in on telephone conversations, read journals, open letters, upend drawers, and go through pockets.
“I need you and what’s-his-name-the-green-eyed-devil to come with me to the lighthouse first thing in the morning,” Uncle Tom said. “It’s time to release the youngsters, same as always.”
“How about I take a rain check?” I said, leaning the back of my head against the old tree trunk and staring up at its heavy branches resting along the roof.
“Oh, I forgot, it’s the Kublai Khan. Never mind, the nuisance and I will do quite well on our own,” Uncle Tom said as he stepped off the veranda and headed round to the back of the house. “We’ve outgrown you, anyway.”
“Okay,” I hollered after him. “You win. I’ll come with you and Bing. I can always call in sick at the club.”
“No, I wouldn’t think of disturbing your schedule,” he answered as he turned the corner.
I jumped to my feet and headed after him. Despite the heat he was wearing his uniform, a red-and-black-checked, long-sleeved flannel shirt and oversize tan slacks.
“Do you want me to come or not?” I was talking to the back of his head.
He shrugged and kept walking. “Suit yourself. Well, it makes no difference to me what you do, but since you’re so mad to come, then prepare for an early start.”
The next morning around six, Uncle Tom, Bingo, and I set out on our bicycles, six young pigeons in release baskets—two to a basket—strapped to the backs of our bikes, making the journey, part road, part sandy beach, to the lighthouse, where we’d toss the birds skyward and then pedal back home to await their arrival. It was an annual event signaling the start of preparations for the racing season.
Uncle Tom had been racing pigeons since he was a boy, and although he considered himself a leading international authority on the subject of raising and training homing pigeons, he’d never enjoyed much success in competition. Never one to let the greater world cloud his personal skyline, however, he continued to espouse and develop his own theories, oblivious to the ideas or opinions of others.
Uncle Tom was like Mount Everest, daring you to climb to the top of him and take in the view.
The conversation on these expeditions to release points all over the island never varied. Year in and year out they followed the same pattern, like a familiar song you know by heart.
“Uncle Tom, how do you think pigeons are able to find their way home?” Bingo always got things under way. He and Uncle Tom had an established, comfortable conversational rhythm, a sort of call-and-answer routine they both enjoyed. Bingo was like Tom’s prompter, the official facilitator of his eccentricity.
“Multiple factors,” Uncle Tom said as we rode along, side by side, taking up half the road, swerving briefly into single-file formation to avoid the occasional car.
“The sun, the earth’s magnetic pull, and common sense are key. Then of course they follow the roads same as we do. A homing pigeon will observe a stop sign as diligently as any traffic cop. Why, I once had a pigeon called Brendan Behan that would even yield right-of-way at a four-way intersection.”
We were laughing and pedaling, but not too fast, keeping up a nice relaxed pace—Uncle Tom was opposed to speed, considered it the province of nitwits—and Bingo and I were exchanging confederate glances as Uncle Tom carried on talking.
“But then, what do you expect? The pigeon has character, guts, intelligence, and heart—the very things you two brass tacks lack in abundance.”
The three of us stood close to one another in the early morning sunlight, breezes blowing gently, and we tossed the birds high into the air, watching until they disappeared over the treetops, and then we cycled back home and climbed to the top of the stable roof, where we sat and waited for them to reappear. Bingo kept checking the stopwatch while Uncle Tom, lying back, eyes closed, the sun beating down, pretended not to care.
“They’ll be along,” he said. “In the end, it’s the people they come home for.”
“I think you’re romanticizing their motives, Uncle Tom,” I said, squinting in his direction from my spot where I sat on the roof’s crease across from Bingo, elbows resting on my knees. “Where else is a pigeon going to go? The Cannes Film Festival?”
“Oh, is that cleverness you’re practicing? Well then, if that’s what Professor Collie Flanagan thinks, then I’d better revise the experiences of a lifetime and reconsider every thought I’ve ever had.”
“You’re wrong, Collie. You’re forgetting about Gabriel,” Bingo said to me, hand at his brow, jumping in quickly to back up Tom.
When Uncle Tom was ten years old and living in Ireland, he had a little white homing pigeon named Gabriel that he found by the side of the road struggling to survive with an injured wing. He spent the summer nursing him back to health.
“I had a ruptured appendix and had to be rushed into surgery,” Uncle Tom said, taking up the story Bingo and I knew by heart. “I was recovering at my grandmother’s house, and on the third day I hear this tapping on the window and there’s little Gabriel perched outside my room on the windowsill. My grandmother and aunts were all so impressed, they let him spend the next few days with me until I went home. Even the local priests and nuns came in to view my miraculous bird.”
“I love that story,” Bingo said as Uncle Tom stood up and moved to the other side of the roof, trying to catch sight of the birds.
“You would. He’s making it up, you moron,” I said. “It’s bullshit pure and simple.”
“No, he’s not. I believe it. Even Pop says it’s true.”
“Oh well, if Pop verifies it, then that’s different. Pop believes in leprechauns, for Christ’s sake.”
“Why do you always have to be a prick?” Bingo asked me.
“You get like the people you share parents with,” I said.
“How come you never go anywhere, Uncle Tom?” Bingo asked, changing the subject and rechecking the horizon.
“What do you mean, never go anywhere? Are you referring to the fact that unlike the rest of you, I don’t have ants in my pants?” Uncle Tom asked.
“Well, I mean you grew up in Ireland and then you came to Boston and then you moved to the Vineyard and that’s it. I can’t even remember you ever crossing over to the mainland,” Bingo said as I looked on with something approaching interest.
“And where should I go, according to you? And why would I want to go there?” Uncle Tom asked us.
“Travel is good for you, Uncle Tom,” I said. “You can’t say it isn’t.”
“Oh, can’t I? Well, as far as I know, Aristotle never made it to Puerto Rico, and he was smart enough. Why, look at you two nitwits, you’ve been plenty of places and neither one of you knows which end is up.”
Bingo looked over at me and grinned as Uncle Tom pulled his hat farther down over his forehead and continued.
“In the interests of advancing your education, I’ll tell you something else that happened to me when I was a boy. . . .”
“Oh no,” I groaned in an aside to Bing, who lay back down on the roof, eyes closed against the sun. “Here it comes—death by anecdote.”
And then Uncle Tom, ignoring me, told us about an annual spring ritual at his school conducted by the nuns and priests.
“They used to round up all the boys, including your dad and me, and force us to march in prayerful procession to the outer boundaries of the parish, where they’d beat us with a strap.”
“Why’d they do that?” Bingo asked.
“So we’d never forget who we were and where we came from,” Uncle Tom said.
“Typical Catholic pathology—parochialism as an excuse for sadism,” I said with a high degree of personal satisfaction and drawing a derisive snort from Bingo.
“You’re such an a*shole,” he said.
“That’s Professor A*shole to you,” I said.
“I’d expect just such an obtuse remark from you,” Uncle Tom said. “I should have taken a stick to you when I had the chance.” He stood up and pointed skyward. “Here they come. Look at them. Now there’s an intelligent creature. Pigeons know that home is the only place worth traveling to.”
“See! Look! There they are,” Bingo shouted, pointing to a distant spot in the sky, and we glanced up in unison, watching as the birds, all six together, came around a big copper beech tree near the loft and made a smooth hook to the left, dipping the trailing edges of their wings downward before landing.
Each day after that, we took them a little farther than the day before, and each day, no matter how far we took them, they made their way back home, the signal flap of their wings stirring me in ways I took great effort to hide. Not Bingo, who was so unconcealed that he might as well have been a goat.
“Here they come! Collie, look at them, they’re coming. Son of a bitch!!” He was shouting, his arms thrown wide over his head.
“A racing pigeon’s heart is bigger than the Parthenon,” Uncle Tom proclaimed, and then he began whistling the tune to “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” ordering us to do likewise. Pigeons, like dogs, respond to whistling, according to Uncle Tom.
“Jesus!” I yelped as the returning flock passed overhead and one of them shit on my upturned forehead, much to Bingo’s delight. Ignoring me, Uncle Tom, continuing to look skyward, never missed a beat.
“They’re opinionated, too, with a talent for punditry, just like you, Collie. I never knew a pigeon that didn’t have a gift for summing up a man’s character in a single eloquent gesture.”