Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER NINE

THE NEXT WEEKEND, THE FALCON AND I WERE IN NEW YORK CITY, alone at last, a kind of nightmare honeymoon in June, just the two of us. A couple of times a year, he swept in and spirited me away to shop for a “decent bloody wardrobe.” The Falcon took clothes and appearance seriously, a characteristic he weirdly shared with Pop.
“The face you present to the world,” the Falcon called it. “Where the exterior eye leads, the inner eye will soon follow.”
It was ninety degrees, or maybe it just felt that hot. Rivulets of sweat ran down the back of my neck. I glanced into the mirror in the dressing room and tried vainly to batten down the curls. Jesus, the only thing missing was a Pan flute.
I took a quick appraising look and groaned—when it came to informal wear for young men, the Falcon was all about Barbour jackets, varsity cardigans, cashmere scarves, and moleskin trousers. I looked like an effete fugitive from Wallis Simpson’s id.
“What are you smiling about?” he demanded, standing at ease in a cream-colored suit, slim and straight, the salesman fluttering around him like a butterfly when I emerged from the dressing room.
“Nothing, I guess.”
“Do you always walk around grinning about nothing?” He seemed to be making an effort at levity, but his voice betrayed an arctic edge.
“Well, actually, right at the moment, I feel as if I may never smile again.”
“No one likes a wise-ass, Collie,” he said, moving toward me, adjusting the lapels of my jacket. I stood my ground, but psychologically I shifted a couple of steps to the side, unaccustomed to such intimacy with the Falcon. That kind of proximity to my grandfather made me feel as if I were stranded in the most isolated pocket of the earth and trying vainly to scale the volcanic cliffs of Tristan da Cunha. I took a deep breath—if good taste were a scent, it would have smelled like the Falcon.
“Hmmm . . .” He paused to consider, narrowing his blue eyes. “Stand up straight . . . there now. That’s better. I must admit, you do wear clothes well,” he said, both hands lightly dusting my shoulders. “You’ve got me to thank for that. You’re the image of me at the same age. It’s like looking in a mirror.” The Falcon shook his head as if he were trying to comprehend the idea that nature could be so generous, not once, but twice.
“Too bad about Bing—oh, he’s cute enough, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? Unfortunately, your brother is too diminutive to make much of an impression. That mop of hair and all those freckles are damned undignified for a man.” He patted me on the arm before stepping back to take a better look.
Appearing satisfied, he summoned the salesman with an all but invisible gesture—as if he were carrying around a silent dog whistle that only the pathologically subservient could hear. Despite daily exposure to high-profile types, the salesman was so intimidated by the Falcon that he performed an involuntary half-bow on approach.
“We’ll take the lot, and I want him measured for a couple of suits,” the Falcon said, his demeanor communicating a sort of generalized impatience, as if he had places to be and people to see.
“Thanks, Granddad, I appreciate it, but when am I going to wear this stuff? I’m going to be living in Rhode Island, not eighteenth-century Glasgow. I look like somebody shoved a skeet-shooting rifle up my ass, as if I should be hunting pheasants on the Scottish moors or something.”
The salesman gasped and erupted into a hiccuping fit of pedestrian conversational tics; visibly panic-stricken at this mild insurrection, he measured my inseam as my grandfather stared out the window and onto the street below. From his jacket pocket, the Falcon retrieved a silver cigarette case, which he slid methodically between his fingers before turning his full attention to the man on his knees in front of him. Terrified, the salesman started blithering.
“Young people today have their own ideas about how they want to dress. Blue jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps seem to be the order of the day. Oh well, youth will out, I suppose. I can remember wearing some pretty offbeat stuff myself, all part of the rebellious age,” he said cheerfully, his lips trembling.
“If I was interested in your theory concerning the apotheosis of adolescence, I would ask for it,” the Falcon said to the salesman, who appeared to be shrinking before my eyes. “Do you always insinuate yourself in the private conversations of clients?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the salesman responded, laughing uncomfortably, clicking into instantaneous robo-servant mode. I felt my liver shut down, my insides shuddering in response to what seemed like an obnoxious historical extract—it was like being present the moment before the start of the French Revolution.
“Yes, well, enough of your fumbling exegesis. Just do your job. Does my grandson look like some teenage street riffraff? Don’t waste his time with your silly chatter.” The Falcon strode past me, pausing just long enough to tell me he was going down to the first floor to speak to Michael, his driver.
“Hurry up. I don’t want Collie waiting any longer than is necessary,” he ordered the salesman as he left.
“Sorry about that,” I said to the salesman, who politely dismissed my concerns.
“Some of this stuff isn’t that bad,” I said, trying to make amends. “I like the pea coat, and you can throw in a couple of pairs of cords, too, with all the other stuff, while you’re at it.”
Although I’m not one of those rich guys who assume that everyone I meet is after my fortune, I learned early that when you’re loaded, money is the only form of apology that matters to most people.
“Certainly, whatever you’d like,” he said. “Thank you.”
After that, we both relaxed a little and wound up talking about baseball, until the Falcon reappeared and the salesman began to struggle with his train of thought and we both lapsed into an uncomfortable quiet.
The silence persisted most of the way home in the car, until the Falcon finally spoke:
“I’m going to make a prediction about your future, Collie, and you won’t like it. I regret to say that you’re not going to amount to a hill of beans. Do you want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you suffer fools gladly.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to be a little nicer to people,” I murmured into a cupped hand.
“What did you say?” the Falcon said, leaning forward in his seat, his hand on my knee.
“Forget it,” I said, unwilling to elaborate.
“No, I won’t forget it. You made an accusation, now you must defend it.”
“Well, I don’t think that money and power entitle you to treat other people badly, especially people who lack privilege. I don’t notice you being unpleasant to the people who attend your parties. It’s obvious what you think. Someone has to have a lot of money before you take them seriously.”
“How much money do you think that salesman back there makes?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty thousand. . . .”
“That’s right. Think about what type of person would be content to settle for so little. What in God’s name would such a person have to offer someone like me? Why would I be the least bit intrigued by anything such an individual would think or say?”
“Not everyone is interested in accumulating wealth and power. People have other priorities. . . .”
“Like what? Watching hockey games?” Sometimes the Falcon demonstrated an almost demented aptitude for belittlement.
“I’ve met a lot of famous people and important people. I’ve gone to school with their kids and been in their houses, and most of them are pretty disappointing.”
He sighed. “Well, of course they are. Who would argue otherwise? There is an old saying, Collie: ‘Get a reputation for rising at seven and you can safely sleep until noon.’ It’s only by acquiring wealth and position that you can truly derive the benefit of reputation—it’s a form of protection against the vagaries of life. I’m not interested in life’s victims.”
“You know, you and Ma come at this stuff from opposite extremes, but you’re really not that different in the way you view things. I’m starting to think that it doesn’t matter what people believe in—it’s the way you treat people that counts.”
The Falcon settled back into the leather seat and looked straight ahead.
“Collie, if a mockingbird can change its tune dozens of times over the course of a few moments, surely you can find a new song to sing.”
I started classes at Brown that September unsure about what I wanted to do, so I kept my options open by taking mostly arts courses and a few science courses. Unimpressed, Uncle Tom told every tradesperson, merchant, and deliveryman on the Vineyard I was majoring in hieroglyphics. Even now, more than twenty years later, I occasionally run into someone who asks me how long I think it will be before hieroglyphics catch on again.
Bingo, finally kicked out of Upper Canada College, went from there to Exeter, but not for long. He wasn’t exactly focused on schoolwork or issues of character building. First semester, he and a bunch of friends sneaked home and hijacked the Falcon’s vintage Bentley—everything the old guy owned was vintage; Bingo once semi-innocently asked him if he drank vintage milk—and drove it off the pier and into the Boston harbor.
A few months later on a school-sponsored skiing trip to Colorado, he entertained his friends by ducking behind a tree, stripping off all his clothes, and flying naked down the slope in subzero temperatures. He was promptly sent home and suspended for the rest of the semester.
“Not to worry. I understand that when Lenin was a young man he liked to do the same thing in the Urals,” the Falcon commented dryly to my mother, who had no sense of humor.
Bingo got the boot from Exeter on Holy Thursday. My second year at Brown, Deerfield sent him packing on Thanksgiving Day. My third year, the Falcon enrolled him at Rugby in England, where he achieved an A plus in swinging from chandeliers—they gave him the heave-ho just before Valentine’s Day.
“I’m like my own special occasion,” he joked as he alternated studying from home with brief erratic stints at a local high school.
“There’s nothing left,” the Falcon said, sounding helpless for the first time in his life. “We’ve run through every good school and several countries.”
“There’s always Miss Porter’s,” I joked, but he didn’t see the humor.
Bingo celebrated his expulsion from Rugby by making headlines—the name Bing Flanagan was splashed in crimson like a bucket of spilled paint all over the English tabloids. They delighted in pointing out his relationship to the Falcon, which made Ma giddy with happiness. Reports were he’d had sex with some girl in a public place.
I called him from a phone booth on the beach in Rhode Island.
“Hello,” I said, my voice conveying a whole lot more than simple greeting.
“So?” he said.
“So? So, interesting headlines.”
His silence was a shrug.
“Bingo. You rogered some girl in a bar?”
“Yeah. No. We made out. It’s gotten so exaggerated.” His offhand manner was designed to deflect my accusatory tone. “Anyway, it’s not like it wasn’t consensual.”
“That’s hardly the issue.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Come on. What are you, an animal? Thanks, by the way. It’s really been a pleasure fending off all my friends.”
“Oh yeah, I know how easily offended the Andover and Brown crowd is,” he snorted.
“Give me a break. You sound like Ma. You don’t need to have a trust fund to be disgusted by what you did.”
“You couldn’t even tell. We were standing up. We were at the bar. Anyway, it didn’t go that far.”
“Well, apparently you weren’t quite as discreet as you thought.”
“Look. I’m not happy about it, but I’m telling you, nothing major happened. I was drinking. Things just got out of hand. I can’t help it if people in England are uptight about sex.” I couldn’t believe how casual he was being. Jesus, he didn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed.
“So this was a socially motivated act of civil disobedience? Score one for the revolution. . . .”
“In a way. Yeah.” He was obviously warming up to the idea—I envisioned him curling up in the nearest fuzzy armchair.
“Then it’s a proud day for the Flanagans. . . . Don’t you think maybe you’re pushing the irrepressible factor a little?”
“How’s the Falcon taking it?”
“Well, publicly he’s not dignifying the matter with comment, but privately he’s ready to dip you into a vat of burning oil. He summoned me to Cassowary, and I had to spend the whole weekend listening to him rage. Why don’t you come home and deal with him yourself? Why should I have to take all your flak?”
“Really? He’s that pissed?” Bingo wasn’t sounding quite so chipper. “What about Pop and Uncle Tom? Are they mad, too?”
“Well, it’s really fun listening to them review the teachings of the catechism by the hour. The two of them are hung up on the premarital sex part. Pop says it’s a venial sin—Tom’s arguing it’s a mortal sin and you need to go to confession or you’re going to go to hell.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’m sick of listening to them tell me off instead of you. I’m not the one living like some low-rent playboy. Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of your life? It seems like every time I talk to you it’s because you’ve pulled another stupid stunt. Why can’t you just do what you’re supposed to do? You can start by coming home.”
I got off the phone with Bing, and first thing I did was call Pop.
“Pop, don’t you think something should be done about Bingo? He’s completely out of control. Where’s it going to end?”
“I agree with you, Collie. But what can I do?”
Faced with the throbbing bass line of Pop’s obliviousness and the perverse pride Ma took in Bingo’s antics, I decided it was up to me to talk to Bingo about his future. I was pretty earnest in those days.
It was midmonth, one of the warmest March days on record, and he was just back from England. We were on the beach with the dogs, and Bingo was riding Lolo, walking him along the shoreline, cooling him down. I was on foot, trailing alongside them, chirping ineffectively, struggling to keep up.
He was wearing jeans and sandals with work socks, miscellaneously topped off by a white T-shirt with a red plaid flannel shirt over it and Uncle Tom’s crazy old wool sweater tied around his waist. Bingo practiced a wayward form of cross-dressing—one part tony frat boy, the other part a jumbled paean to the nursing home.
Finally, ready to knock him off his perch, I reached for the reins to slow them down, Lolo’s ears flicking dangerously.
“I want to talk to you about something,” I prefaced as Bingo stayed silent, making it plain he wasn’t interested in what I had to say.
“Hey, would you listen?” I said, stopping and standing still.
“Why? So you can start your usual crap—”
“Jesus, Bing, you’re not even nineteen years old and you’re totally f*cked. You’ve got no education. You haven’t even finished high school. You don’t take care of yourself . . . you’re drinking a lot . . . you’d screw a cabbage if there was an opening. You’re going to wind up like Pop and Uncle Tom. . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got plans, big plans, I’m going to be a dental hygienist,” he said, slipping his sandals from the stirrups, letting his feet dangle. He was a good rider, natural, like Ma.
“It’s not funny. You’re not funny. You’re an idiot.” I had vowed this wasn’t going to degenerate into insults, and there I was frothing at the mouth—moron, shit-for-brains, a*shole—I was rabidly trying to come up with an insult big enough, but it didn’t exist.
“Hey, what’s your problem? Relax. I’ve got things under control. I’ve got a plan,” he said as I pulled on the reins, Lolo coming to a halt and Bingo swinging his leg over and sliding onto the ground beside me as we resumed walking, Lolo in between us, the dogs crisscrossing back and forth in front of us, racing on ahead, playing in the waves.
“What kind of a plan?” I asked him, neatly sidestepping Lolo’s failed sudden attempt to separate my right cheek from my face.
“I call it the Man Plan,” Bingo said, Lolo’s big head blocking my view of his face.
“For Christ’s sake . . .”
“It’s my manhood project. I’m going to implement it in stages. I figure I’ll start when I’m twenty, begin with small stuff, you know, doing up my shoelaces, quit drinking out of the milk carton, put my laundry away, and then I’ll gradually progress to some of the bigger stuff. . . .”
“Why does everything have to be a joke with you?” I was shaking my head, trying to hear over the din of barking dogs.
“I’m not kidding. By the time I’m twenty-five I plan to own stocks and have a subscription to The Economist. . . .” He was enumerating points with his fingers.
I started to laugh. “Now I know you’re hosing me.”
“No, I’m serious,” he said, grinning. “I’ve got it all worked out. My only rule is that for every step forward, I can’t take a step back.”
“What about school? What about getting an education?” I stopped and stood in front of Lolo, who was pushing forcibly against my chest with his head.
“Well,” he said, not looking at me, focusing on Lolo, “that’s the beauty of the plan, that’s why I don’t want to start too early. I want to get this whole school thing behind me, otherwise it’ll just mess up the plan. Pop’s right when he says that too much education erodes your intellect.”
“And the Falcon is right when he says that annuities were invented for guys like you. Bingo, you can’t make a plan to become a man—it’s like deciding to be generous or smart or funny sometime in the future. You either are or you aren’t. Life is a process,” I concluded, sounding as if I knew what I was talking about.
“Lord, make me a man, but not yet,” he responded, unfazed by my wisdom.
He signaled me to give him a leg up. I linked my hands together, and he used me to hoist himself back into the saddle, its leathery smell mingling with the breeze off the ocean, the dogs leaping around us excitedly.
“All I know is that I’ve got better things to do with my life than conjugate Latin verbs and try to figure out where the Phoenicians went wrong,” he said, leaning forward slightly in his seat, encouraging Lolo with his heels, pressing them lightly into his flanks. He didn’t apply any pressure, just kind of urged things along.
The beach stretched for miles, not a soul in sight as Bingo vanished into Lolo and cantered off along the shoreline, beating up the sand, dogs forming a moving line behind them, leaving me far behind, arms dangling helplessly at my sides. Bing had perfect carriage, a motionless seat, straight, graceful, weightless, and effortless. I was a good rider, too, but I had to work at it, and the effect was more studied.
My little black-and-white dog, Eugene, paused in his pursuit and pranced back to where I was. I crouched down on my knees, and he stood up on his hind legs, his front paws in my lap as I stroked his head, and we both watched Bing until he was no longer visible.
You could have dropped Bingo from the sky onto the back of a horse and he’d land in place like a waterbird skimming the surface of the ocean.
That night, temperatures hovering in the high sixties, Bingo and I went to a party on the beach, everyone home for spring break, giant bonfire set up along the dunes, beer on the night’s breath, a moonless night so dark that everyone was invisible, like Ma’s black dogs, her Labrador retriever, Harry, her Great Dane, Jesper. People vanished quietly into the tall grasses, then reappeared softly without notice, brushing up against you to signal their presence.
“Let’s go,” I said, bored and indifferent, stumbling over couples laid out in the sand. I flipped on the flashlight, the sudden bright light announcing my intention to head home. Bingo wasn’t listening. His attention was on a group of guys heading off the beach and into the trees. Laughing but purposeful, they were not carefree.
“Hand me that flashlight,” Bingo said, taking it from me and shining it after them. I could feel his intensity from where I stood next to him and saw him in silhouette outlined by the flashlight’s narrow beam, up on his toes, staring after them.
“Was that Mandy with them?” he said, referring to the younger sister of a friend of ours. The Lindell sisters were notoriously easy, the kinds of girls Uncle Tom referred to as “streetcars.”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling uneasy. “It might have been.”
“When I saw her earlier she was drunk out of her mind,” he said, turning back around to face me. “We should check it out.”
“I’m sure it’s okay,” I said, knowing he was right but needing a moment or two to talk myself into investigating. “Gimme a break, Bing, this is Randy Mandy we’re talking about. . . .
“What are you doing?” I asked him, but he ignored me and took off jogging, then broke into a run as he headed into the woods after them.
“Bingo! Hold on!” I hollered after him, trying to navigate the blackness using the leftover light laid down from the flashlight.
He disappeared and with him the light, so I was left to follow the sounds of muffled male laughter and drunken murmuring as I groped my way to a small clearing concealed by tall trees and thick bushes, individual flashlights glowing in random jarring sequence.
There were about a dozen guys clumped together in twos and threes, unwholesome excitement like the sour smell of algae in the air, and Bingo was pushing through them to the head of the line, where Mandy was half sitting half lying on the ground, her shirt hanging around her neck like a lasso.
He reached down, grabbed her by the hand, and pulled her to her feet to lead her, weaving and uncomprehending, out of the clearing and back down toward the beach.
“Hey, what the f*ck do you think you’re doing, Flanagan?” One of the guys stepped in front of him, so drunk that the motion almost sent him spiraling off his feet.
“Get out of my way,” Bingo said, not stopping, hand in hers, pulling her along next to him, so out of it that she might as well have been in a coma. There was a collective shout of anger from the others as they moved toward Bing and Mandy.
I stepped from the darkness, Bingo’s flashlight blinding me, my hands in front of my face as I headed toward him and Mandy, taking her by the elbow and urging Bing to pick up the pace.
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I said as we broke into a sprint, our backs to the wolf pack, their overheated indecision one long, loud pant rivaling the background noise of the waves and the wind.
We walked home in silence, Mandy stopping occasionally to heave into the bushes, me methodically going over what had just transpired and trying in vain to cast my reluctance to intervene in a better light, Bingo navigating the blackness with ease. We left her to sleep it off on a chaise longue in the screened-in summer porch at the rear of her house while we made our way back down to the beach, the shoreline constituting the most straightforward way back home.
“Thanks, Coll,” Bingo said, a disembodied voice that I had to strain to hear over the wind and the water. The waves rushed up onto the beach and pooled around my feet. I could feel the drag of the riptide.
“For what?” I asked him.
“Following me, backing me up.”
I didn’t answer. My insides were burning, embarrassment warming my core like a gastrointestinal blush.
“Hey, will you slow down a little?” I finally complained.
“Don’t be such a wuss,” he said as I came up behind him.
“Hey, a*shole, does part of your Man Plan include leaving me behind?”
“Catch me if you can,” he said, and kept on going, breaking into a jog.
I was thirsty. My throat hurt, my breathing was ragged; I couldn’t keep up with Bingo, he was moving so fast, and he knew it was getting to me, yet he had no intention of slowing down. If anything, he picked up the pace and was amused by my stumbling efforts to tail him. I was having trouble keeping my bearings with no light to guide me. Son of a bitch, why wouldn’t he slow down? He just kept forging ahead while I tried to stick to the path he made.
“Come on, Bing. Slow down. I can’t figure out where I am. What is your problem?”
“You’re the guy with the problem, Collie, not me,” he said. “You should be able to walk this route blind. Quit thinking so much.”
It was different when we were kids. When we were younger, Bingo followed me everywhere as if I were the one to lead him on a great adventure.
“Get lost, you freak,” I told him whenever I spotted that white face and those sea green eyes peering out at me from behind the trunk of a century-old copper beech.
“Come on, Collie, can I come?” His hands were pleading.
“No!” I turned my back and moved on.
“I’m coming.” I could hear him behind me in steady pursuit.
“Beat it!” I faced him, anger surging, fists clenching and unclenching.
“Bingo, please, go away. Leave me alone.” Threats of violence were ineffective, so I was frequently reduced to begging. I’d finally drop to my knees and he’d get down on all fours and crawl forward tentatively, like one of the dogs. And I’d sit slumped with my back against the old tree, the bark rough against my shoulders, and he’d nestle next to me, the winner, the champ, as if nothing had transpired, as if he were perfectly welcome, as if I wanted him with me.
“So what do you want to do?” he’d ask, wriggling with friendliness, practically wagging his tail, and I’d bury my head in my hands. It was a ritual that never wavered, me resisting, him persisting, and me giving in. So why wouldn’t he ever give in to me?
We walked along the rest of the way without saying a word, my pace slowing as Bingo’s picked up until I was trailing way behind and he was practically sprinting for home. It was four in the morning as we headed up the laneway. I heard the muted thud of his footsteps on the veranda, the bump of the old screen door as he went inside.
He flicked on the light. I used the golden glow from the kitchen to pick my way through the darkness.