Worthy Of This Great City Page 15
Even for fraternal twins they were remarkably dissimilar, as if on purpose, for a joke. Family opinion unanimously accorded Pat the more attractive appearance, upholding this opinion with religious fervor, permitting no argument for all the decision seemed ludicrous to any rational outsider. Frank was tall and lanky and not merely handsome but remarkably so, a silly movie-star handsome people noticed on the street, with a deeply cleft chin and very fine light brown hair and a constant air of conceited certainty: really a bit of the bully with his feet planted too wide apart in a mocking but defensive posture. Whereas Pat was shorter, wide if not exactly fat, with narrow shoulders and a characteristic proud curve to him, and he walked with a pouter-pigeon roll: stomach forward, nose high, lips tight, a butler in: swallow-tails, a preening Jeeves. He was some kind of high school administrator of unremarkable intelligence, his casual conversation limited to himself, his family, and conventional reactions to current events, but he remained mysteriously complacent.
By contrast, or rather through the comedic law of human attraction, Kate was exceptionally sensitive and emotional, not like other people, so you always had to be careful of her feelings. It was like she longed for your attack, this tiny, round woman, this red-cheeked hard rubber ball. Theirs was a tough marriage for others to endure, what with the subtle undermining of your every minor success, the infatuated updates on their children, the lavish show-off dinners with carefully rehearsed topics of conversation.
Never mind the public displays of deep mutual contempt. “We’re making a gym out of the boys’ room now it’s empty.” Pat making this announcement as if propounding the secret of the universe, then sitting back for the applause, forever confident in his ability to fascinate the peasants. Ruth cringed with the embarrassment of an adolescent, imagining some ideal boyfriend witnessing this pettiness. She’d recognized Pat’s coldness and fearful suspicion of her way before she could articulate it.
Kate, as usual, was unsuccessfully fighting back tears. “Yeah. Well, we can still wait a little.” Nice little smile.
“We have to start sometime, Kate.” Self-assured, even smug, with his hands outspread. The voice of reason explaining things to the people.
“I want to wait, if that’s alright with you!” And then delicately sniffing, turning that vulnerable face stoically aside. Kate was a second wife; the boys were from a first marriage back in some mythical period confined to overheard remarks and hidden photo albums, another of those family events Ruth wasn’t supposed to ask about. Fortunately those stepsons were in college by the time Kate entered the picture as some sort of administrative assistant admiring the boss; she was a frail parent who flapped her hands helplessly if the boys got physical or worse: argumentative, logical.
As for Frank, his Sharon disappeared in the company of a dwarfish, good-natured auto mechanic from upstate shortly before Ruth’s seventh birthday, and that was the end of casual soft hugs with the scents of lotion and female flesh, balanced meals with pretty touches like napkins and salad plates, and the tiny back garden with the pungent summer marigolds and Easter hyacinths. Now they only had a meager scattering of pale crocus and daffodils and some scant grass given over to bright dandelions that Frank yanked up when the mood took him, although Ruth rather favored their stubborn sunshine. Some three years later Sharon perished for real, decimated by a female cancer that simultaneously killed Ruth’s burgeoning fantasy of a loving return along with something else in her young soul. I mean what can you say about a woman who goes and gets cancer? Frank informed Ruth of this life-changing event in his usual self-conscious manner almost a whole year after it occurred, making a game of it.
“You’ll never guess.” Mocking her, really. “You remember when I was so upset last summer?”
“No.”
Her dad consulted the patient heavens: “See!”
All of which constitutes a disturbed and uncomfortable if not unique situation, nothing to serve as a real explanation. What can I say? How can I explain the cult of Pat, the demigod status accorded him for no reason except to keep the mob rule going, unless the entire perspective is Ruth’s delusion? Pat’s value was an integral piece of the family faith: it reflected the will of God. And since Pat took outright reverence as his due, he was obviously much too busy to spare a moment’s attention on an insignificant, unattractive creature like Ruth, or a personal conversation, or even one personal phone call for that matter. But that was her fault; that was because she acted like a wild animal instead of a young lady.
Despite being destined for greatness, the world inexplicably considered Pat an average drone, not especially attractive or brilliant or even moderately interesting – an unread man of no hobbies and no conversation. Well, back in her very early youth Ruth never questioned his superiority. Wasn’t he always ready to answer a rare emergency request with good-natured noblesse oblige? But by late adolescence she saw him for an uninteresting asshole. Even as an adult she automatically pictured him leaning back glass in hand with that superior smirk, expecting to have his ass kissed.
So Pat was in charge of the family opinions, a plump priest at the alter mailing out holiday missives laden with condescension, and hosting holiday dinners with too much heavy crystal and a bewildering array of wines. Welcoming them into his tiny Center City townhouse in a merely respectable neighborhood off Spruce Street where you had to admire everything but never belonged. Smiling down at them from some enormous, undeserved distance. Ruth knew she’d never win no matter how famous she got, that it didn’t work like that. That she was insolent and would learn her lesson one day. When she smiled her joy was afraid to show itself and she blushed. She still does.
All this by Ruth’s estimation, which means accuracy is problematic; I suspect a lot of this history is mere wishful retrospection or worse. But she insisted on reciting it, and that process was obviously painful for her at times. That was something she needed from me, that retelling, a kind of catharsis. But there has to be more to her story, or maybe less, because there’s no real explanation for the barely concealed enmity in that family. And what about Ruth’s own deep sense that she didn’t really count?
Pat suffered greatly from childhood, his diabetes coloring everything between those brothers, but Ruth callously dismissed stories about emergencies and a sick boy’s loneliness and dread. It broke the twins in two, and maybe the healthy, handsome boy bullied the stout weak one, who’s to say? And if Pat was triumphant now he suffered still with decaying vision and heart issues, numbness in his feet and an unexpressed terror of amputation you could find in his eyes.
“Everybody suffers,” Ruth said, refusing to care; she’d developed a real talent for not giving a shit. “He’s just like all my family, looking for some weakness so he can attack. They’re nothing but animals.”
Kate the eternal romantic accepted Pat as her destined soul mate from their uncoordinated courtship, loving him obediently and resenting him to the depths of her unexamined soul. Kate was a contented fumbler, crippled by vast reserves of immaturity and resentment. The kind who manages to scald herself at Thanksgiving dinner and insists on being taken to the emergency room: just that pedestrian and obvious. If Pat played the affable host, Kate was the eternal young daughter of the house, always late or disorganized: you couldn’t trust her with so much as a houseplant, and there she was married to a diabetic. She forgot no slight however ancient or minor, and took positively orgasmic delight in nostalgic regret. This was Ruth’s self-appointed substitute mother.
All that began one Sunday afternoon in a long-ago October when suddenly there was Kate on Frank’s stoop, chin high, explaining in wobbling tones how she’d separated from Pat because she couldn’t go on like that, why did he have to be so cruel? Delivering a fine dramatic display of deeply wounded virtue and repressed tears but her hands shaking nevertheless, her gray marble eyes immeasurably hurt. Ruth was astonished and excited at this extraordinary display of energy, this evidence that Kate after all had some grasp on reality. Maybe thing
s actually could change. Or so Ruth felt, listening from inside her room with the door almost closed, a concealed, watchful forest animal, a primal spirit foreign to the entire race of civilized people and only really comfortable there on the cool floor where she could lurk in her natural habitat.
Temporarily, then, through some largely tacit concession, Kate moved in on them, appropriating the small third bedroom they used for storage, dispensing implicit dissatisfaction and excessive gratitude in equal amounts. Sitting there on the twin bed of a dim, crammed space so miniscule you could touch the closet, radiator, and door without moving, she happily spilled her soul to her niece in detailed, self-laudatory marathon sessions. This while Ruth, just turned fourteen, perched obediently on the one wooden chair, flattered if already skeptical at this initiation into the family’s inner workings.
Theirs was a house exactly like every other on the block, narrow and straight through, living room, dining room, and kitchen opening into each other and cement steps giving directly onto the sidewalk in front. It sat halfway down the block in the old neighborhood, the kind of place where even very small children got sent to the corner store alone for milk and hoagies and ice cream sandwiches, where you knew some Mummers personally and you shopped along the smelly confusion of the Italian Market. There was this faint lingering familiarity of ginkgo and slippery elm over backyard walls, of dark brown seedpod crescents falling along back drives. Pungent weeds ran rampant over the few abandoned lots, or just sometimes, by special grace, those dumping grounds of old tires and rocky cement chunks and crushed plastics disappeared beneath a miraculous blanket of giant sunflowers, something straight out of a movie if you had a gullible teenage imagination.
Kate religiously thought the best of everyone, to her own stubborn pride, so of course when she wasn’t feeling humiliated by him she unreservedly adored her husband. So when Ruth dared to call Pat even a little unread or unimaginative Kate came down on her hard, looking furiously off to the side in deaf, righteous distress and waving a dismissive hand.
“Just stop it!”
Such unthinking betrayals felt all the more brutal because Kate, doting on her Ruthie, professed loyalty against all detractors. Weren’t the two of them the only nice, generous ones? The ones who put feelings and kindness first? Ruth made a willing enough acolyte; anyone was better than no one, so Kate strove to impress with her sophistication, with movies and museums and real restaurants, and sometimes a few remembered lines from some famous poem. Then there were sentimental little gifts for no occasion, always elaborately wrapped: perhaps a meaningful brooch or a cute porcelain figurine to cherish forever. Only let Ruth get too self-confident and question the family creed, slightly impugn the great Pat, and that was the end of her compassion.
Anyway, in less than one full cycle of holidays Kate drifted back to her husband, offering no explanation, neither victorious nor subdued, just packing up her shopping bags and departing on a sulky sniff. Ruth attributed this happy reconciliation to Frank’s unacceptable sniping, his constant frustration with her intractable, unashamed lassitude, her universal refusal. Given such a marvelous opportunity Frank was reverting to the basic family type, taking another turn at intimidation. It made Ruth ashamed, and she experienced only a grateful relief when Kate overcame her habitual inertia long enough to get herself up off their tired plaid couch and back to Center City.
Their sporadic closeness survived because of some mutual benefit and because there was, despite everything, real acceptance and love. Because Kate was after all a good woman, in fact infinitely better than Ruth on so many grounds. Occasionally she even ventured into the bar alone, marching in all cheery and unconcerned, seating herself with a proprietary air to confide more details of her placid, martyred existence to her niece in those rehearsed monologues, amusing and self-deprecating but comforting, in their way, because familiar and intimate. Until that nascent rebel, reaching age seventeen, basically ceased communicating with her altogether, or with any of her family on any but the most impersonal level. Thereby confirming everyone’s opinion that she was growing up into a physically clumsy and socially uncouth young woman urgently in need of charm school (Pat’s suggestion) or a therapist.
“Ruth doesn’t share.” Even Kate repeated it right to her face. “She doesn’t listen.” Even Frank, increasingly embarrassed by his ungracious daughter. “Yeah, I know she doesn’t. I guess she has important secrets.” With a significant look at his child, wedged into the booth opposite those two shabby bullies. When you’re dealing with extreme emotional poverty you learn to hoard.
Ruth endured adolescence squinting out at the world in moderate pain, because Frank was erratic at best regarding dentists or eye exams unless unavoidably prodded by some school official. So every morning Ruth pushed the pus from over a crumbling molar, and by sixteen she’d learned to appreciate the numbing effect of the whiskey her dad kept in the china cabinet, especially when combined with painkillers. Then one day for no reason she finally realized everyone in authority over her was an asshole, so she walked out of class and spent five hours on a subway ride to nowhere, exhilarated with herself, and I don’t think she’s ever gone back.
That was hard on Frank; he was desperately lonely those years with Ruth still at home but implacably distant. Not that he deprived himself sexually, you understand; he had those amazing good looks and that deep widow’s peak, the deliberate twinkle in his eye and the facile Irish charm, and sometimes if not often he cared enough to go looking. For Ruth this meant the occasional need to cover her head with her pillow to shut out the arrhythmic thumping through the bedroom wall, some woman’s routine moaning and Frank’s occasional satisfied grunt. “He thinks he’s too small,” one woman told Ruth. It made her anxious, even though her father never expressed interest in a permanent relationship. Difficult to judge how much of Frank’s preference for liberty was authentic and how much an accommodation to fate: something angry or unfortunate generally intervened to spoil his neighborhood amours.
But if sex wasn’t an issue, Frank was deeply frustrated in his constant hunger to be heard and appreciated by eyes that held no latent threat, for a sheltered space where he could expand into his natural gregarious self. He had a sociable soul but was cursed by an inability to attract a social circle or even maintain a reasonably close friendship through the irritations of everyday life. Not that he ever faulted his own fearful defenses or attempted to moderate his behavior. Frank kept to shallow waters; it was never any use urging him out further.
His daughter had no such limits, being quick to analyze and damn her father’s psyche, intelligence, and eternal soul, and wholeheartedly reject his tastes, reasoning, and life. She noticed things, she knew life was different in those other houses down the block, she hung out and went to sleepovers, she sat around placid dinner tables fending off the usual pleasant parental queries. She watched her best friend from fifth grade get complimented on her appearance with no irony or resentment; she heard college dreams discussed without jeers and parental excuses. She existed in a state of constant anxiety, waiting for the expected explosion, the next histrionic crisis; stress enforced her alienation from the race of normal people, but isolation brought clarity.
She and Frank, confined together, inevitably fell into an abusive pattern. Ruth had to share his television viewing and provide an approving audience for his clever commentary or sarcastic howls. They played tense board games together late into school nights, Scrabble or Monopoly, Frank openly gleeful if he won, preening broadly, condescendingly patting her on the head. Once, when she revolted, he broke in her bedroom door, and despite the most fervent pledges whenever he happened to need her cooperation never found the time or money to replace the skewed hinges. There was constant yelling over anything, loud imprecations that made the neighbors turn overly kind; everything was about continually having to placate and admire and agree. Even today sudden noises make her heart jump with physical terror.
Don’t get the wrong idea: he was neve
r once actually violent, never more than vaguely threatening. It was never that easy, you could never confidently point a finger. Not with the dad who shouted at her to stop coughing when she was suffering with her usual month of untreated winter bronchitis. Or criticized her thoughtlessly, heartlessly, when Kate and Pat threatened an appearance. “Walk straight. Put your shoulders back. Try to act decent for a change.” Boasting about her grades to outsiders but privately mourning, “I wish I’d had your opportunities.”
Don’t ask what ever prevented him from pursuing his own dreams, although given his utter lack of self-discipline how much more explanation was required? That’s why he’d always been the default successor to the family business, a safe sinecure for someone of his modest abilities and drifter’s personality. Better to place Frank behind the bar, dispensing his foolishness in an established small business. Anyway, Pat had a college degree to get him the hell out of the neighborhood, so after Ted’s death Frank, then twenty-six, got himself a loan and bought out his twin’s interest, and that was it for his life.
Except there again we have an incomplete report, not precisely inaccurate but deceptive. Converse long enough with Ruth, flatter her with attentiveness and a very different Frank walks onstage, a dad she was proud of, a man with some local success at his own destined vocation. Here was the quintessential neighborhood politician, a committeeman who put his peers to shame, master of expansive promises, peddler of minor favors, delighting in all those critical social interactions. Wonderful the evening interrupted by a tentative knock at the door, the phone call presenting a vital inquiry to be righteously pursued. How delightful to be entrusted with an urgent request to facilitate, or a favor to be brought to the door of the ward leader, that latest incumbent in the succession of worthies who rapidly appeared and disappeared, losing influence or else trudging on to greater glory or prison. Campaigns with street money handed out over the bar in discreet envelopes, and election nights at Dougherty’s with the poll watchers eyeing the television and everyone bringing in the numbers hot off the machines. It was all so dramatic and unpredictable and important, even prestigious. Occasionally there were important cronies coming in to the bar to settle their mutual opinion, glass in hand. Ruth mostly detested them. On more than one occasion when she was entrained to kitchen duty turning to question her weekday presence with clumsy innuendo, unfairly refuting her wide-eyed protestations. “Oh come on, Ruth!”