“Never gave the time of day.” Mrs. Williams must have been eighty, at least, someone who could remember big floods down South and weevils in the cotton and the day the Armistice was signed. Yet she was a display totem of mascara and lipstick and red nail polish and jangling bangles, her grandson’s, the late Clark’s, perhaps, as she stumbled from chair to chair in Uncle Ralston’s direction. For some reason, I thought of Manfred’s car.
“Solomon, you’ve been drinking,” Mom said.
“Oh, you think you can smack me?” Mrs. Williams and Uncle Ralston rocked back and forth at each other, unsteady, furious, moist-mouthed, and unable to strike.
“I had brunch with my fiancée and her parents downtown. Francesca’s parents had their car drop me off.” Solomon had to disengage himself from Dad’s look at Mom — and hers right back at him.
Mom was happier than anyone when after four years Solomon broke up with that Vietnamese chick and her Pentecostal family in San Francisco. Maybe he was still a registered Republican, but at least he didn’t accept Christ as his personal savior anymore. He didn’t share his dating life with me, but obviously this was the first Mom and Dad had heard of someone named Francesca.
Because Solomon was away on athletic camp scholarships every summer, he never put in his time at the newspaper. Yet Uncle Ralston would run stories about Solomon’s class in Fortran for gifted high school students at the Illinois Institute of Technology, his picture bigger than any he ever printed of his granddaughter Cello. Uncle Ralston would make a toast at office lunches, the rambling contents of which could touch on the idea that one day all-star Solomon would take up the chair as editor, but clearly just as a way of introducing himself to the city before he embarked on a political career.
It wasn’t just Uncle Ralston and Mom’s gun-happy mother who were in love with Solomon. He was everybody’s shining black prince. Cello’s brother, Ronald, was almost tragic in his worship. Cello certainly approved of him as a relation. He had always been welcome in her biography. But now that I felt like a stronger candidate for her index, I was determined to be different with my brother. I was going to pour down the drain behavior brewed in envy and low self-esteem.
Solomon and I never had the talk, the scene where the older brother says that he always sort of figured his pain-in-the-ass little brother was, well, that way, because of those lame comics and how scared he was of water or balls of any kind aimed at him. But the talk with Mom and Dad had gone so badly, to my lasting astonishment, I decided not to have any more talks with anyone for a while. “I heard,” Solomon said at the time, and nothing else.
Mrs. Williams was trying to keep her balance as she traced the air in front of her like someone wielding a razor. “You such a big fool, you do not believe we landed on the moon.”
Dad himself had pulled Uncle Ralston’s editorial denouncing as a hoax the Apollo 11 landing in the Sea of Tranquility. But Uncle Ralston forced him to print the thing the next week. Dad often said that that was the turning point, the summer of 1969. Anyone any good on the Eagle began to leave after that.
The priest turned off the television and announced that he was going to find some music. I was excited that Solomon drew me to him, out of Mrs. Williams’s path.
“Francesca is perfect. We both grew up in the Windy City and had to meet in the City by the Bay.”
He squeezed my right bicep and I heard myself giggle and felt my teeth show. I saw Mom and Dad put their arms around each other at the sight of their eldest showing affection for his little brother. They acted as if he were ten years older than me. Behind them, I could see the attorney and Aunt Gloria in the same pose, but their eyes were closed. Their heads touched. Uncle Ralston and Mrs. Williams paddle-wheeled at each other. They both missed. They went past each other, as in a jousting competition.
Mrs. Williams was the lucky one, falling facedown into an easy chair, while on the other side of the room people sprang out of the way and several chairs went down sideways with Uncle Ralston like bowling pins.
“Hammer time!” Ralston Jr. screamed from the windowsill. “It’s hammer time!”
I felt Solomon’s arm around my neck and thought I heard applause. “You okay? You’re being careful? Good. Listen up, you have to help us out here, Jeddo. The truth is, Francesca and I are married already. How do I tell Mom we pulled a no-wedding on everybody. Francesca’s father and mother weren’t there either. The last four hours have been real Sidney Poitier, blood. You don’t still do that Katharine Hepburn routine you used to do? I hope not.”
* * *
The summer of Cello’s Bicentennial Disaster, I saw Aunt Gloria get into Uncle Ralston’s Cadillac behind the Eagle. She had on a very big wig and I saw a box of Kleenex go onto the dashboard. Out of nowhere Uncle Ralston gave her the back of his hand. When he had both hands back on the wheel, she was still leaning back against the seat, her hand over her mouth and nose. I could see the sequins of her nightclub-act dress. She reached for the Kleenex and Uncle Ralston backed up his car.
I went upstairs to tell Dad and on the way to his office I told three or four people what I had seen. They knew to run.
“Loose lips are torpedoes in your own waters.” Dad told me never to make Uncle Ralston’s business my business. I pointed out to him that he had. He said the trick was to let people think you had. He gave me the manly task of changing the bottle in the watercooler.
* * *
The year Cello got married on Lake Constance, I was mugged on my circuitous way back from class, in Greektown, of all places. My bag was taken, and with it my paper on eighteenth-century monument sculpture by Rysbrack. It was not “my” paper. I’d bought it for an outrageous sum. A few weeks later I dropped out of college for the second time. Drunk, I again called Cello long-distance in Berlin. She said that she wished she knew what to tell me. She said she was going to call Mom and hung up. She didn’t call Mom.
“Mooch,” Solomon said when I had to come home again.
“Minnie the Moocher, to you,” I answered.
“And a Big Zero.”
“Hot time hoochie-coochie, to you.”
“You are nothing.”
I began to sing “The Wreck of the Jedediah Goodfinch.”
I was on the floor, gasping, holding my stomach. My brother had rammed a fist into my gut and the fall had knocked the wind out of me. He taught me that to complete a victory an army will march through the night without rations.
Successful people, people good at life, can look ahead; they’ve been looking ahead all their lives, even at summer camp. They knew the next school year was coming and their bodies were getting ready for it, while yours was just goofing off and drinking sugar. People say live in the moment, but the moment was the only thing I was good at. I could make the moment last, stretch it out for days, years, my whole life.
* * *
“Married and moving house from one coast to the other. This is certainly something to toss around in the salad bowl of the mind,” Dad said in the kitchen. Mom sat. I looked at Solomon’s feet. The paramedics were gone. Mom began to cry.
* * *
Cello was sixteen when she moved in pretty much for good. Her siblings were ten and nine; my brother was thirteen. School was nuts; the country was on the brink. Mom’s Hyde Park white people were terrified, but they didn’t want to say so in front of her. I was about to be eleven and West Chicago was on TV and in flames. People were afraid to go anywhere. The mayor had given the cops shoot-to-kill orders.
Martin Luther King had been murdered, but it was open season on us, Dad said. Nobody was hiding anything from anybody. We watched television with the lights on in every room of the house. One of Mom’s crazies, an alcoholic seamstress, sat with us, crying. When Solomon opened our door to check out the square, Dad yanked him back inside.