But over the last few years there’s been a change with him. It’s so noticeable even my mother has commented on it, though she’s put it down to absence of familial responsibilities, etc. Approaching fifty is dreadful, I’m sure (and you know better than me, right?). With him it’s made for a certain restlessness and listlessness simultaneously. It’s almost (and here’s where I’m sure we discussed him as an example) proved our point that one drifts into conservatism because it’s less complicated (offers a clear right and wrong view, good and bad), seems the natural outcome of age and its subsequent tendency to withdraw and avoid contact with what’s ugly, complicated, and sorry in the world.
Anyway, without children, he’s poured himself into the law, and in it, I think, he’s passed from some idealistic desire to help the unfortunate to a dwelling on the unsavory character of his clients, their melodramatic and awful plights; most of all, on their refusal to accept the consequences of their actions. His politics have gone from McGovern to Reagan and beyond (he holds some absolutely horrific views on personal freedoms vs. the state’s power, etc.). I know we talked all about this when we discussed some of our colleagues, whom we dubbed “The General Staff.” And we noticed that almost axiomatically as compassion lessened, stature and bucks grew. So did feelings of disappointment, isolation. Now the naive and youthful worldview was something to be embarrassed about like a vestigial tail, an open fly. They were grownups now and only children saw things without wise cynicism.
Sorry I’m drifting, though I wanted you to recall what I’ve said about my brother and what we together have said about the way the world’s turning lately. Now, quite unexpectedly, I’m afraid I may have an answer for such stuff.
Here’s the important point of all this; the simple but mind-boggling thing which outdistances all our lovely writers who altered the man and the world in ways we could understand and accept, indeed applaud and admire. What the Friends of Beccari can do is something utterly fantastic and profoundly disturbing.
Allan wired me from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, about six weeks ago. He sent me airfare with a cable asking me to join him for a week or ten days and saying we’d fly back together. B. was a bit upset at the whole idea of, as she said, “the boys getting to play,” but she didn’t really mind. She and Allan have never gotten along very well for all sorts of reasons, and besides, her father was ill with his prostate again. So, she chided me but was finally eager about the trip. She and the girls decided they’d spend the time at her parents’, easing her mother’s duties.
He’d left four months earlier, closed down the office, let the secretaries go, and simply slipped away without an itinerary. Mother was dismayed at the immaturity of it all. I was delighted because I realized he needed immediate relief from his job. And, I suppose, I hoped he’d mellow his cynicism somehow and return some sort of optimistic liberal as he’d once been when I was in high school (In the state legislature, he’d authored bills broadening the state’s pitiful social services). Anyway, he’d once been my hero and I wanted the best for him. A trip that’d provide him with whatever he needed. Though I guess I foolishly believed he only needed time alone in some exotic place to shake a fifty-year-old man’s summing up of things. I honestly don’t know what I really expected to find in Tegucigalpa, his last stop before coming home. I never once thought about those Kipling poems he’d made me memorize, or his romantic view of the military (even, honest-to-God, after four years in the Pacific with the Navy!). All of which had been given to me too, a legacy from him. But I’d stopped with it years ago through Sassoon, etc. Though I readily admit it can still fascinate. Why else do I so enjoy The Raj Quartet, all those ancient Bengal Lancer movies? Now it all wells up and frightens me because of the possibilities.
Anyway, he wired that he’d arrived and I flew from Houston to Tegucigalpa. I’m not a good traveler, as you well know, so all the way I was disoriented, fearful of foreign languages, saw myself as homeless, unable to eat or drink in comfort. Stepping out of the plane, I encountered the unruly crush of hundreds of people. Though it was cooler and less humid than in Houston, the tropical sun seemed sharper, closer.
I had the address of his hotel, but out in front of the terminal, standing before one of a hundred battered Toyotas, was a shabbily dressed wiry fellow who rushed up to me with a sealed envelope. Torn open, it revealed a note from my brother, though hastily written (I guessed then) because it was his handwriting but not clearly so. In it he told me to stay with the bearer, who’d bring us together.
Four hours earlier I was in traffic on the way to Houston Intercontinental, but now it was all different — just off-key and foreign enough to exclude me without fascinating.
I have few impressions of Tegucigalpa. It seemed full of cars and the staggering vegetation of tropical places (though Florida’s my only true reference). All the time I was rereading, refolding the note. I had no expectations really. But I had thought we’d meet in his hotel, have dinner, etc. And though this was hardly upsetting, it was unexpected enough to worry me.
We left the city, at least its center, and wound up a hillside and turned abruptly into an almost hidden driveway — a brass plaque and opened, heavy iron gates blurred past. Here was a wide pearly gravel drive traveling even higher up the hillside until it ended in a small parking lot full of expensive vintage cars. As I paid the driver, who remained in the car and passed my light bag out the window with some difficulty, I heard the sounds of powerfully stroked tennis balls and splashes into water, though neither court nor pool was visible through the thick but well-manicured trees and shrubs.
I relaxed a bit under the wide archway of the front door. This could be anywhere, I thought. San Francisco, Houston. And though I also realized its sumptuousness — beveled glass panes in the heavy oak doors, muted carpet, and the glimmer of brass in the vestibule beyond — I’d really only seen such in magazines and movies.
The doors suddenly swung open and, as I’d been whisked through the city, I was now rushed into the paneled darkness and glittering brass. The liveried Honduran spoke quickly and too quietly for me to comprehend as he took my bag in his left hand and my elbow in his right. There was some sort of central hallway. In one room off it there was an incongruous fire blazing dramatically in a magnificently manteled fireplace. In another, farther along, the high walls were crowded with trophy heads, their glass eyes sparkling in the dismal light. Jerking my head around and pulling against the man’s grasp, I managed to slow us enough to see two youngish men standing near the far window of the room next to the fully erect trophy of a gigantic brown bear, its paws aggressively outstretched. I sensed they turned to look my way, though we hurried past. Here, muffled by brocade carpets and tapestried walls, our feet made no noise. Somewhere, far off, or close at hand — it’d be impossible to say — there was the click of billiard balls.
This is too perfect, I remember thinking — trophies, tall angular men, billiards — when my silent guide stopped, set my suitcase just inside a door, and gently pushed me forward as if I were a bashful child. And certainly I was worse than that at the moment. The two-hour roar of the jet engines, the frantic taxi ride, this perfect movie set — all of it coalesced in my bowels with a sharp stitch of pain. I felt the sweat on my forehead, and I staggered a bit in the gloom and reached out to steady myself on a table edge, rattling some immaculate arrangement of delicate cups on pale lace.