The famous tattooing, on which he had squandered the fortune he had made as a brilliant second-story worker, began very neatly at his neck, like a well-cut sweater. All the colors had fled and even the blue of the primary design had gone to gray. What a gaudy sight he must have been! His chest and his upper abdomen were occupied by the portrait of a horse named Lucky Bess. On his left arm there was a sword, a shield, a serpent and the legend "Death Before Dishonor." Below this was "Mother," wreathed in flowers. On his right arm was a lewd dancer, who could probably buck when he flexed his biceps. She stood above the heads of a crowd that covered his forearm. Most of his back was a broad mountainous landscape with a rising sun, and below this, forming an arch above his buttocks, Farragut read, in faded and clumsy Gothic lettering: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Serpents sprang from his groin and wound down both his legs, with his toes for fangs. All the rest of him was dense foliage. "Why did you sell your gitfiddle, Chicken?" he asked. "For two cartons of menthos," said Chicken. "But why-why?" "Curiosity killed the cat," said Chicken. "Why did you kill your brother, Zeke?"
The accident or what they called the murder had taken place, Farragut thought, because of the fact that whenever he remembered or dreamed about his family he always saw them from the back. They were always stamping indignantly out of concert halls, theaters, sports arenas and restaurants, and he, as the youngest, was always in the rear. "If Koussevitzky thinks I’ll listen to that…" "That umpire is crooked." "This play is degenerate." "I don't like the way that waiter looked at me." "That clerk was impudent." And so on. They saw almost nothing to its completion, and that's the way he remembered them, heading, for some reason in wet raincoats, for the exit. It had occurred to him that they may have suffered terribly from claustrophobia and disguised this weakness as moral indignation.
They were also very bountiful, especially the ladies. They were always raising money to buy skinny chickens for people who lived in tenements or organizing private schools that often went bankrupt. Farragut supposed they did some good, but he had always found their magnanimity painfully embarrassing and he knew for a fact that some of the people who lived in tenements had no use for their skinny chickens. Farragut's only brother, Eben, possessed both of the family traits. He found most waiters, barmen and clerks impertinent, and to meet him for lunch in a restaurant almost always meant a scene. Eben didn't distribute chickens, but he had informed Farragut that on Saturday morning he read to the blind at the Twin Brooks Nursing Home. On this Saturday Farragut and Marcia drove out to the country where Eben and Charrie lived. It had been more than a year since the brothers had met. Farragut thought his brother heavy and even gross. The lives of his two children were tragic and Farragut resented the fact that Eben claimed these tragedies to be merely the nature of life. When they arrived Eben was about to leave for the nursing home and Farragut went along with his only brother.
The Twin Brooks Nursing Home was a complex of one-story buildings with such a commanding view of some river and some mountains that Farragut wondered if this vastness would console or embitter the dying. The heat when they stepped into the place was suffocating, and as Farragut followed his brother down the hall he noticed how heavily perfumed was the overheated air. One after another he smelled, with his long nose, imitations of the thrilling fragrances of spring and verdancy. Pine drifted out of the toilets. The parlors smelled of roses, wisteria, carnations and lemons. But all this was so blatantly artificial that one could imagine the bottles and cans in which the scents were stored, standing on shelves in some closet.
The dying-and that's what they were-were emaciated.
"Your group is waiting in the Garden Room," a male nurse told Eben. His black hair was gleaming, his face was sallow and he gave Farragut the eye like the hustler he was. The room they entered was labeled the Garden Room presumably because the furniture was iron and painted green and reminiscent of gardens. The wall was papered with a garden landscape. There were eight patients. They were mostly in wheelchairs. One of them maneuvered on a walker. One of them was not only blind, but her legs had been amputated at the thigh. Another blind woman was very heavily rouged. Her cheeks were blazing. Farragut had seen this in old women before and he wondered if it was an eccentricity of age- although she couldn't have seen what she was doing.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," said Eben. "This is my brother Zeke. We will continue to read Romola by George Eliot. Chapter Five. 'The Via de' Bardi, a street noted in the history of Florence, lies in Oltrarno, or that portion of the city which clothes the southern bank of the river. It extends from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza de' Mozzi at the head of the Ponte alle Grazie; its right-hand line of houses and walls being backed by the rather steep ascent which in the fifteenth century was known as the hill of Bogoli, the famous stone-quarry whence the city got its pavement-of dangerously unstable consistence when penetrated by rains…”
The blind were very inattentive. The rouged woman fell asleep and snored lightly, but she snored. The amputee wheeled herself out of the room after a page or two. Eben went on reading to the near-dead, the truncated, the blind and the dying. Considering Farragut's passion for blue sky, he thought his brother contemptible; although they looked enough like one another to be taken for twins. Farragut did not like to look at his brother and he kept his eyes on the floor. Eben read to the end of the chapter and as they were leaving Farragut asked him why he had chosen Romola.
"It was their choice," said Eben.
"But the red one fell asleep," said Farragut.
"They often do," he said. "One doesn't, this late in life, blame them for anything. One doesn't take offense."
On the drive home Farragut sat as far from his brother as possible. Marcia opened the door. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Eben," she said, "but your wife is very upset. We were talking about the family and something she remembered or something I said made her cry."
"She cries all the time," said Eben. "Don't pay any attention to her. She cries at parades, rock music; last year she cried through the whole World Series. Don't take it seriously, don't blame yourself. Do sit down and let me get you a drink."
Marcia's face was pale. She saw the tragic household, Farragut knew, much more clearly than he. Eben was working at that time as a paid executive for some charitable foundation that carried on the tradition of distributing skinny chickens. His marriage could be dismissed, if one were that superficial, as an extraordinary sentimental and erotic collision. There were the lives of the two children to be considered, and their lives seemed ruined by the reverberations of this matrimonial crash. The young man, Eben's only son, was serving a two-year sentence in the Cincinnati workhouse for his part in some peace demonstration against some war. Rachel, the daughter, had tried three times to kill herself. Farragut had exorcised the details, but they would be remembered by Marcia. Rachel had first gone into the attic with a quart of vodka, twenty Seconals and one of those dry-cleaner's bags that threaten suffocation. She had been rescued by the barking of a dog. She had then thrown herself into a barbecue pit after a large party in New Mexico and had been rescued again-disfigured, but rescued. She had then, a month later, blown off a piece of her face with a sixteen-gauge shotgun, using a number nine shell. Rescued again, she had written two high-spirited and passionate letters to her uncle about her determination to die. These had inspired in Farragut a love for the blessed paradigm, the beauty of the establishment, the glory of organized society. Rachel was an aberration and Farragut would sweep her under the rug as her father seemed to have done. Eben's house, the cradle of these tragedies, was distinguished by its traditional composure.