This is Tad? my father said, lest he play too dumb.
Yes, that’s right, John said. Tad. Really generous guy, big lovable bear of a guy, and he can’t stand how my father’s treating Bron. He’s been on the couch with this look on his face—let me tell you, this look said it all. Here’s a man who can do serious physical damage, a person his size. A real Southern gentleman, too, so there’s that overzealous thing about taking care of women, but it’s nothing compared to his respect for his elders, so he’s in a spot with my father. Even though you can tell he wants to tear his head off, gentleman Tad holds his ground.
It’s funny. Turns out I’d seen him play on TV once. Has that ever happened to you—you meet someone and then much later you cast your mind back and realize that this was someone you had actually seen on TV, or in a play, or whatever? It was the ’63 Gator Bowl. And here’s one of the stars of the game, sitting on the couch—it’s embarrassing, to be honest, to have him witness our wreck of a family. I’m pretty damn sure his family doesn’t operate that way. Which is why he’s where he is today, and why his brother is where he is—brother’s a congressman from Durham, got elected at something like twenty-eight—and why we’re all where we are. But finally Tad’s had enough. He gets up really slowly and he walks in the direction of the sliding door, probably thinking he’d like to run through it and never look back, and he’s holding this sweaty glass of iced tea that looks like a test tube in his hand he’s so huge, and there’s something about it that’s profanely uncomfortable, like it pains him to have to hold this stupid glass and act like a civilized human being in the midst of this insanity. So he sets it down on a coaster and he walks on over to the glass door.
He stands there for a second before he decides to go outside. Completely reasonable reaction. Like I said, he’s a real gentleman. He believes in an ordered universe. If he has a fault, that’s it, his belief in the system. He’s never in his life raised his voice to an elder. Even if my father was wailing away on Trace, Tad would stand aside and swallow it. That’s why Southerners are so goddamn passive-aggressive, you know. They have to stand there and swallow it because of the social order, the fucking system. It’s bigger than all of them put together. And the system says fathers over daughters and old over young and white over Black, and god almighty over everyone. So for Tad to walk across the room is a display of almost heroic proportions. He’s registered his disapproval of his own father-in-law. You see? And for him to actually leave the room, to walk out of the house entirely—you have no idea unless you’ve met this guy. He’s broken with the system. He’s taken the only yardstick he has for measuring his self-worth and he’s snapped it over his knee. Snapped it just like that, the sense of duty to his family and elders, generations of tradition.
And does my father even notice? Of course not. Doesn’t even notice because he’s very calmly and logically working on Bron, dissecting her, working his appeal to her as a mother. You know him. You know that when Counselor Caldwell shows up there’re going to be bloody chunks on the floor by the time he’s done. He’s going to get his way, hell or high water, he’s going to put the screws to you and by god you’ll submit or die. He’s appealing to her childhood, her idyllic childhood in Santa Rosa—well, he doesn’t know about how idyllic it wasn’t. It never is, is it? Not with that much good cheer slathered all over everything. Her parents—her entire family—smell like candy apples. Complete con job.
My father listened to John’s address thinking that it was a deflection, too polished, a speech worked over in the dark reflection of tragedy. Blame must lie somewhere. Perhaps the son has every right to indict the father. After all, that’s the covenant of parenthood, isn’t it?
So it was Tad who got to him first, John said. He walked out the sliding door, and like the gentleman he is, closes it behind him. Then he jumped in the pool. I saw him jump. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. He’d finally cracked up, you know? Captain America lost his marbles, and it was our family that did it.
I think Trace laughed. She was right to laugh. It was funny. She’s thinking he’d done it for comic relief. And she and I walked over to the glass to see what he was going to do next, but he didn’t come up. And when he did, he comes out of the water with my son in his arms.
He brings half the pool with him. Like someone dropped a car in. He lays him down on the concrete and he starts to work on him. That’s the other part—Tad drove an ambulance for a couple of summers, so he knows what he’s doing.
You know, funny thing about Tad, John said. The next morning we’re all sitting in the living room and Tad looks at Beatrice—this is my other sister’s daughter, Fil’s daughter, she’s all of eight at the time, she’s in complete shock, she’s just old enough to understand what’s happened—and Tad looks at her and reaches out and takes her hand, and he says, Bea, it’s not your fault.
Tad thought he’d done some emotional calculus there that would help Bea out. He was thinking, Bea was the last person who was out by the pool with the boy, and even though that was an hour before, since she’d been out there with him, somehow she would think it was her responsibility, that her child’s mind might believe it was her fault for not watching over him. No one had asked her to babysit him. No one would have given her that responsibility. And if you could have seen her face—it obviously had never crossed her mind. She’d never thought for a second it was her fault. No one had. And now, oh boy, that kid’s face. Now it was her fault. She knows. She’s sharp as a razor. So all of a sudden now she’s bawling her eyes out, she’s wailing and screaming, and Tad’s looking around like he doesn’t get it—and it’s genuine. He really doesn’t get it. It’s not in him, that sadistic streak. That’s my father’s stock-in-trade, but it’s inconceivable to Tad. He was only trying to help. He’s sitting there, he’d been scouring his memory, trying to put together a timeline to explain how it happened, and he keeps getting hung up on one thing, that John and Bea had been splashing around on the pool steps together. And he thinks, Dear Lord, what if this kid thinks it’s her fault? One of those things that hits you like a bolt from the blue and leaps out of your mouth, because what if that poor kid thinks it’s her fault and she’s sitting there silent as a mouse, keeping it to herself, and it’s eating her up inside—he’s got to let her know pronto that’s crazy thinking, there’s no way it’s her fault, no one would ever think it was her fault.
But, my father said, the truth is, Tad did think it was her fault.
John nodded grimly. And now she thinks it’s her fault. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. It’s been five years, and you look at her now and it’s all you see. It’s in her forever, and nothing’s going to convince her otherwise. She’ll never eat cake or ride a horse or make out with a boy without that guilt sitting on her shoulder. She’ll for sure never go to sleep without thinking about how it’s her fault. Because that’s how it works, right? A kid can’t make an independent judgment about something that devastating, not the way an adult can. Not even a kid as smart as Bea. Kids are absolutists. With kids it’s all or nothing.
Not just kids, my father thought.
The off-duty cop had sauntered over and was leaning against a concrete pillar. You looking for an elderly male? he said.
Albert Caldwell? John said.
The cop had at his disposal a vast arsenal of expressions to convey exhaustion, from existential malaise right up to full physical collapse, and he invoked two distinct efforts then, first a burping sigh, followed by a pinching of eyelids with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, before saying, I can’t confirm. Elderly man, Caucasian.