CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE PHONE WAS RINGING OFF THE HOOK. INGRID CAUGHT IT JUST as Pop was about to hang up. I’d done a pretty good job of avoiding him and Uncle Tom since my sailing debacle.
“Thanks, Ingrid,” I said as she handed me the phone.
I held the receiver to my chest, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.
“Hi, Pop.”
“Oh, Collie, Mambo’s dead.” Pop started to cry. “He was hit by a car and killed. When he didn’t come home, your uncle Tom went to look for him and found him by the side of the road. . . . Jesus, Collie, it’s like losing Bingo and Mama all over . . .” Pop lost it again.
“What did you say?” For an instant, I felt as if I’d stepped into an empty elevator shaft and I was plummeting. “Oh, Pop. How could something like this happen?”
Ma was fierce about keeping the dogs away from the road, and it was a quiet road—training them as puppies never to leave the property. They all knew better than to wander down the laneway, and among all the dogs, Mambo was the smartest. We called him the Commissioner; he used to alert us when any of the other dogs started down the driveway, rushing to tattle, barking and whirling, jumping up and insisting we follow him, herding the offenders like sheep.
“He’s been inconsolable without you boys, not eating, his tail dragging, he’s been heartbroken missing Bingo and your mother, and he’s been looking for you, too. He’s gotten in the habit of waiting at the end of the laneway, checking out the cars, hoping. . . . Tom and I’ve been after him about it. . . . I’ve walked that laneway a hundred times in the last few weeks, dragging him back up to the house. You know the way some people barrel down that road and around the curve. . . .”
“I should have spent more time at home. I should have come home. I should have known.” I had to fight the urge to keep on repeating the same refrain. I should have come home. I should have come home.
“Don’t go blaming yourself, Collie. It’s nobody’s fault. These things happen. And who’s to know but that seeing you all the time might have made him think that Bingo was coming home? Oh, Jesus, to think of Bingo coming home and no Mambo to greet him . . .”
“Cocksucker. Dogf*cker,” Carlos said as he caught sight of me heading past his perch. That damn parrot. I could hear Bingo’s distinctive way of speaking in every word and inflection. Carlos laughed, and I recognized the carefree echo.
He whistled as if he were summoning a dog. “Lassie, Lassie, here, girl . . .”
He sounded like Bingo, but he thought like Ma.
“Collie?” The Falcon emerged from his office on the third floor, and leaning over the banister, he shouted down at me from the landing, “Was it you who tracked mud from the pond onto the carpet in the living room? How many times have I spoken to you about your habit of making a mess wherever you go?”
“Lassie . . . here, girl, here, girl . . .” Carlos carried on until I disappeared from his view, the bathroom door making a dull thud behind me.
“Yoo-hoo. Shit for brains,” he said, his muffled final insult.
I went about the business of emptying medicine cabinets, tossing things onto the floor, pills spilling into the sink as I looked for stuff to swallow, all the while I was chugalugging cough syrup and downing vials of dated prescriptions. I even tossed in a little lawn fertilizer and splashes of the Falcon’s cologne—it was expensive stuff, terse as marginalia, a redolent memo in low notes of verbena from the desk of Peregrine Lowell.
Just to make sure, I used a razor blade on my left wrist. I did such a good job slicing up one artery, I didn’t have the strength to cut the other one.
Despite my finest efforts, felo-de-se eluded me somehow. It was almost funny what happened. Crazy old Cromwell sounded the alarm shortly after I passed out. Jesus, what can I say? The world is awash in unlikely heroes. He dragged me by the shoulder into the hallway and rallied the household.
I woke up a day or so later in the psych ward, and from there I was transferred to Parados House, a therapeutic hideout for privileged lunatics.
I quit talking for the second time in my life. Over the next couple of weeks, I felt myself becoming a solitary outgrowth of volcanic stone, parched rock in the still center of an eerie private universe. I kept saying Bingo’s name over and over in my head. I repeated his name the same fearful way obsessive-compulsives wash their hands.
“What in heaven’s name is wrong with him?”
I was faintly aware of my grandfather’s raised voice, somewhere around me, doctors and nurses nervously trying to appease him. Louder than the people surrounding me was the sound of my own blood flowing through my veins. It made a whooshing noise in my ears.
I was under the impression I was sitting up until one of the nurses reached around my waist and gave me a lift up. Turns out I was slumped over, listing to the left, my forehead touching the breakfast table in front of me.
“For God’s sake, what’s the purpose of this pathetic performance? Get him back into bed,” the Falcon ordered, thunder and lightning accompanying each word, as a pair of orderlies scrambled to lay me out on the hospital bed, fluffing my pillows, pulling the covers up to my chest, my arms at my sides, my eyes dim and lightless like broken windows. I peered out at the world through cracks in the glass.
“Granted, Mr. Lowell, this medication hasn’t given us the result we were hoping for. We’re planning on trying a different course of drug therapy,” one of the doctors explained. “There’s a promising new antidepressant we think may prove effective. . . .”
The Falcon reached down and picked up my hand, holding it limply aloft. He let go and watched in disgust as it flopped back down on the bed.
“That’s the best you overeducated idiots can come up with? Another goddamn pill? I don’t think my grandson’s depressed. Frankly, I’d be delighted if he were despondent. Unfortunately, I think he’s dead.”
I dreamed about myself as a man, brave, intelligent, hair miraculously straight, confident half smile on my lips, looking faintly amused but all-knowing, as if I had access to some secret denied the rest of humanity. There were women at my feet, children and dogs, other men looked at me and felt jealous, but I was too mature and character-filled to enjoy the shortcomings of lesser men. I was the naked savage.
And then I heard Bingo. He was calling my name. And when I heard his voice, I got confused about my life. Was I a brave man dreaming that I was a coward? Or was I a coward dreaming that I was a brave man?
I couldn’t move. Bingo needed me, and I couldn’t move. I banged on my thighs with my fists, but my legs wouldn’t budge. So many nights I woke with a start, dreaming that he needed me, feeling his hand in mine, feeling the tips of his fingers touch the tips of my fingers, scraping him off of me, thinking better of it, reaching out for him finally, only to let him go.
“Oh, Collie, that much, you hate me that much. . . .” It was so dark, but even in the dark I could see thin strands of chestnut hair hanging down over his eyes.
“Hate you? Hate you? Is that what you think?”
Somewhere outside my reverie I heard a couple of orderlies in conversation, their talk intruding on this dream of my past and future selves.
“What a little prick,” the older man said as they lifted me from the bed to the chair. “And more money than God—wouldn’t you know it?”
“Imagine if he actually had to deal with life same as the rest of us,” said the younger one. “I’d love to see him doing our jobs. Can you imagine him changing bedpans?”
“Life stinks. I’m working for peanuts, driving a shit box, living in a dump, and I’ve got to bust my hump for him just because his grandfather’s a big shot,” the older man said as the younger one pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. For a second, I thought he was going to strike a match on my forehead. Instead, he checked his watch. “Break time. Let’s finish him off fast.”
He hooked his hands under my arms and signaled for the other orderly to grab my feet as they lowered me back into the bed, where I landed with a deliberate thump.
“Man, if I’d been there that day, to hell with it. They were white-water rafting, right? I read all about it. The brother got trapped under a log or something. I would have jumped in there so fast . . . I wouldn’t even’ve thought about it,” the younger guy proclaimed, pulling the covers up to my chest.
The older guy was quick to concur. “Same here, but then that’s just me. You know me. You know what I’m like. I don’t back down from nothing.”
An hour or so later, I sat up, and after kicking off the bedcovers, I tapped the nurse on the shoulder—she almost fainted, kept staring at me as if I’d risen from the dead. I asked to use the phone.
“Uncle Tom?”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Collie.”
“Oh. I’m not speaking to you.”
“Is Pop there?”
“I suppose.”
“May I speak with him?”
“Oh, so now it’s you who wants to talk . . .”
“Uncle Tom . . .”
“I’m not impressed.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Tom, I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do . . .”
“And wasn’t I the one who gave you the secret of happiness all those years ago when you were a little boy? What did I tell you to do whenever you got upset?”
“You told me to whistle.”
“That’s right. It’s humanly impossible to whistle and feel sad at the same time. My mother taught me that, and she’s right. You had the secret, but you made the conscious decision to despair. Shame on you. And what about your uncle William? Didn’t he advise you about the French language?”
When I was twelve, my uncle William told me a story. He was Pop and Uncle Tom’s older brother and served with the American army in the Second World War. He and a handful of surviving members of his fighting unit prepared to make a last-ditch assault on a German-held farmhouse in France. It was near the end of the war.
“We didn’t expect to survive,” he said. “We made our plan and put our faith in God and one another and got up and ran directly into the incoming mortar, machine-gun, and artillery fire. Suddenly our only commanding officer started to scream, ‘Appel du devoir!’ I thought he had gone mad, but then we all started to holler, ‘Appel du devoir!’ as we attacked the house.
“Collie,” he said, “I believe that’s what saved my life that day.”
“You mean the moral power of duty, Uncle William?”
“No! No! Don’t be such a schoolgirl, Collie. The French language. Don’t you see? It has remarkable powers of inspiration. It provokes one to marvelous feats of courage. Always remember: When you’re frightened bolster yourself with a French word or two. The effects are positively galvanizing.”
Pop grabbed the phone away from Tom.
“Collie, is it really you?”
“It’s me, Pop.”
“Thank God. How could you think of taking your own life? Where did your mother and I go wrong? What did we do? How did we fail you? Didn’t I always tell you when you’re feeling low to say the Hail Mary? I could walk through fire as long as I’ve got the rosary in my hand.”
“Pop, I want to come home. . . .”
“Don’t move. I’m on my way. Just the small matter of my train fare and traveling expenses and I’ll catch up with you tomorrow. . . .”
The next morning I got up and sneaked out of the clinic, which wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds. I called a cab and walked out the front door and caught my ride in the parking lot. I waited for Pop at the local train station. His train came and went. It whizzed through the station without stopping.
Pop got so drunk in the dining car that he passed out and wound up somewhere in Canada, a mining town in Ontario called Sudbury. He came to on a park bench and stumbled into a store on the main street that specialized in hunting and knitting supplies.
“I got out of there fast,” he said when I finally talked to him. “This great behemoth in a toque was making plans to go hunting all right. ‘You remind me of my dead husband, Squeak,’ she says with a toothless grin. Squeak? Well, I ask you.”
I decided against the train. I shredded my ticket, abandoned my luggage, left the station, and stepped outside onto the quiet street and into a downpour. Whistling to beat the band, singing the French national anthem, hair in my eyes, my running shoes full of water, I hoisted my thumb in the air and said the Hail Mary.