The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (6 page)

SCOTT’S LOOKS BEGAN
to fade toward the end of high school. As he lost the last of his baby fat, his face became narrow and angular, and its rather strange shape was accentuated by the way he wore his hair, long and lank, parted precisely down the middle like the later John Lennon’s. The main problem was acne. I used to have a photo of Scott from this time, thrusting his cheek toward the camera to show off his many pimples.

My face was still perfectly clear at age fourteen—that is, during Scott’s last months in high school, when I became the better-looking one. I knew this because my mother’s gay friends began to make a bigger fuss over me, and one of them actually told my brother (because he’d asked) that I was the “tastier” of the two. This made me smug, and I wasn’t averse to playing the flirt, at least for a while. The fat chef at the GBR, for example, had an obvious crush on me; an amateur magician, he’d regale me with gadgety little tricks in his office that resulted in elaborate desserts that I was then welcome to eat. Another old friend of my mother, a tall guy with a comb-over named Roger, began to draw me out on the phone when my mother wasn’t home to take his calls. With a kind of weary petulance he’d insist that his IQ was over 160, that I should listen to him and take him more seriously. Roger had a responsible job in public relations (at night he danced with a tambourine at the Free Spirit) and my parents trusted him once to house-sit while they were out of town, lest Scott trash the place in their absence. As it happened, Scott was elsewhere and I was left alone most of the time with Roger, who sat around the house in bikini underwear and one night offered me a Quaalude.

Marlies was in a ticklish position. Her own conduct was hardly beyond reproach, as she was still in the midst of a hedonistic phase (though this was on the wane), and moreover she felt somewhat justified in making up for lost time: growing up in a burgherish German home had been stifling, whereas her subsequent emancipation in Manhattan was rudely interrupted by pregnancy and marriage. “Do as I say, not as I do” was the unspoken mantra of her parenting style. She was a great believer in temperate habits for children, the idea being that one becomes jaded if given the chance to indulge too soon in pleasures of the flesh.

That said, Marlies was the opposite of a conscious hypocrite and refused to act shocked about things that didn’t shock her. She was less and less shocked by my brother’s vagaries, and less inclined to express whatever shock she felt. For his part Scott never hesitated to point out her own dissipation when she tried to remonstrate about his; it was the burden of their many squabbles. Also, my mother was trying hard to understand Scott, a long process of self-hypnosis that would ultimately turn her into his foremost apologist. At the time it made her less than objective. When, for example, we found him straddling the roof of our garage in the nude—he was, of course, stoned out of his gourd—Marlies good-naturedly tossed him a pair of pajama bottoms, which he proceeded to wrap around his pelvis like a loincloth. A photo of this episode appears in one of my mother’s albums over the twinkly caption “My nutty first-born!”

One night we sat at the dinner table, the four of us, discussing Scott’s plans for his senior prom. By then he was dating a girl named Kara, who was always smirking about something, a smirk that became vague and almost vanished into politeness (ironical) when she spoke to adults. I never heard her say anything clever, so I suppose she was just zonked most of the time, a sphinx without a secret.

Scott went over his prom agenda, smiling at the subtext of how wasted he’d be, and finally announced that he and Kara had reserved a hotel room for the night. My father’s chewing slowed and he narrowed his eyes at my brother. It might have ended there, but my mother was in a provocative mood.

“What?” she said to my father. “You think he’s a virgin at his age?”

My father’s lips thinned.

“You think other kids won’t be doing the same thing? That they’re not having
sex
at that age?”

And so on, and
on
. I suppose she meant to model a liberal tolerance of Scott’s lesser peccadilloes, or perhaps she felt piqued by my father’s rectitude, by what she liked to think at such moments was his underlying provincialism. Mostly, though, I think they were just fed up, both of them, that each blamed the other for any number of things. I looked at Marlies’s bright eyes as she baited Burck, looked at Scott’s besotted little grin, and I alone seemed to know that Burck was about to blow. I asked to be excused. My father gave me a quick nod, a flick of his chin, eager to get rid of me.

I’d just closed the door to my room when I heard the crash. I rushed back to the kitchen and saw my father standing over my mother, her raised arms trembling slightly; otherwise neither moved nor spoke. My brother was on his feet. I fled.

THOUGH HIS GRADES
had fallen those last two years of high school, my brother was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He was going to study acting. He got excellent recommendations from some of his teachers.

His last summer at home was a blur of disaster. It was then that Scott totaled the Porsche for good—or maybe, since it was the fourth or fifth time he’d wrecked it, my father just stopped paying for repairs. Scott also managed to alienate all but his most worthless friends. One guy who was a year younger than he, a fellow actor named Kevin, looked up to Scott as a kind of mentor and filled three pages of Scott’s yearbook with a touching tribute. My brother responded by writing “Dear Kevin” at the top of a blank page in Kevin’s yearbook, at the bottom of which he wrote “Sincerely, Scott.” I had no idea what it was all about and didn’t ask when Scott showed me, proudly, what he’d done.

One night he was arrested with Kara and another couple; I can’t remember the details except my brother had resisted the police in some way and been roughed up a bit. In the middle of the night my father went to get him out of jail. Marlies and I were sitting at the kitchen table, having a desultory talk about the awfulness of it all, when Scott preceded my father through the back sliding door. His long hair was wrapped in a bandanna and he was strutting on the balls of his feet in a cocky, defiant way, weaving a bit from the lingering effects of whatever drugs he’d taken. He had the beginning of a black eye.

“The Oklahoma City cops,” he said. “The royal scam.”

That last phrase was the title of a Steely Dan album he liked. By then his cultural references were all but entirely derived from the more pretentious rock bands. He no longer read Salinger or any other fiction.

“Oh Scott,” my mother said wearily. “You’re just disgusting.”

We all sort of nodded. My brother sneered and went to his room. There was nothing much to say. We drifted back to bed.

I was half-asleep when I became aware of Scott standing in the doorway. The light was behind him, but I could make out his slitted eyes and curled lip.

“You’ve got them scammed,” he was saying. “Only a matter of time . . .”

He was shaking his head in a dopey, wondering way. I asked him to leave. He folded his arms and slumped against the door frame.

“I know you,” he went on. “I know what you’re like. You’re gonna be just like me. You’re gonna be worse. Look at you, you little fuck . . .”

On and on. I kept telling him to get out, and finally I began to scream. My brother went on in a hissing monotone, electrified by the effect he was having.

“Scream for Mommy,” he said. “Scream for Daddy . . .”

My room was connected to the master bedroom via a bathroom, at the door of which my father appeared in his robe. He flicked on the light and stood there. At that moment he looked like a washed-up pug rising for the last round on guts alone. His face was mournful, puzzled; perhaps he was wondering why he’d worked so hard for
this
—a houseful of drunken queers, Arabs, a hopped-up son . . . how did this
happen
?

“Get him out!” I was screaming, thrashing in my bed as though a rattlesnake were under the sheets. “Get him outta here!”

Burck silenced me with a wince, then walked across the room and took Scott gently by the elbow. He guided him down the hall and out of sight. Then I heard Scott’s voice rise in protest, and I followed to where the two stood beside the back sliding door. My father was in the process of throwing Scott out of the house, and I grabbed a heavy poker from beside the fireplace. I was almost hoping Scott would make some move on our father—I was drawing a bead on that silly bandanna of his—but instead he stood pleading in a wheedling, infantile way.

“Remember when you first saw me onstage, Papa? And you thought maybe I
had
something? That maybe I wasn’t all bad? Papa . . . ?”

He was crying or pretending to cry. Burck sighed; he looked small in his bathrobe, standing beside my lanky brother.

“I never said you were ‘all bad,’ son. I never thought it. But I’m
tired
now, and I want you to go.” He flung open the sliding door and pointed into the darkness. “Out.”

Out my brother went with a tragic stumble, muttering how he’d never expected to be treated this way by his own family.

AND THEN IT
was August and Scott was packing a big steamer trunk for NYU. I remember feeling tolerant about things. Scott had just gotten a haircut and looked clean and fit, sober and somewhat chastened, eager to prove himself in the greater world. He made much of the fact that he was attending our father’s alma mater, that they were on the same level more or less, and such was my hopefulness that I didn’t bother to point out that our father had gone to NYU
Law
School on a famous scholarship because he’d worked hard and stayed out of trouble and even then he’d had to take a job in a liquor store and never, ever would it have occurred to him to pursue some half-assed boondoggle (all bills paid) such as
acting
as a so-called course of higher study. That’s what I was thinking in the back of my mind, but I was also willing to believe that Scott’s behavior these last few years had been a kind of purging, that the worst was over, that his worthless friends would find themselves banished like so many Falstaffs from that day forward. I kept Scott company while he packed, and watched with smiling complaisance as he made room at the bottom of his trunk for his various bongs and other paraphernalia. Finally I helped him lug the thing out to my father’s car.

“Well, Zwieb—”

“Well—”

I wasn’t going to the airport. Burck wanted to talk to Scott alone for that last half hour or so, and that was fine with me. I was eager to move my stuff into Scott’s bigger, better-appointed room. I started to give him a brisk hug, a stiff whack on the back, but he held me there and stroked my head in a way that embarrassed me. “You behave yourself,” he said in a thick whisper, and when he let go his eyes were red. He’d taken to affecting a flat, twill cap he’d bought at an army surplus store, and he put this on now with a little flourish of adjustment. It looked ridiculous, and sad, and my heart went out to him for the first time in years.

HE LASTED MAYBE
two months at NYU. From the start his letters to my parents were long and weird and woefully confiding. He had much to say about his roommate, a fellow acting student named Oscar. Scott was convinced that Oscar wanted to fuck him and was therefore a “pathetic faggot.” Eventually, though, the roommates seemed to reach an understanding. The only bit of Scott’s NYU correspondence that I can remember with perfect clarity was something he wrote after a long disquisition on the nature of his all but hopeless alienation: “I mentioned this to Oscar, and he just looked at me and said ‘Everybody’s alone, Scott.’ ”

One night Burck and I sat in the kitchen talking. He kept losing the thread and peering into the ether, rubbing his chin. He’d puff out his cheeks now and then with held-in sighs. Finally he said, “Scott’s dropped out of college.”

“Already?”

My father nodded slowly. He went on talking amid many pauses, as if he were trying to put the matter as precisely as possible. “He called me at the office today . . . Said ‘Papa, I’m sorry’ . . . And I said ‘What, son? It can’t be all that bad’ . . . Said he hadn’t been going to classes, and now he didn’t really see the point. I asked”—he frowned deeply, pushing his bottom lip out—“I asked him, ‘What’s wrong, son? What’s the matter?’ . . . ‘I don’t know, Papa.’ ” My father shrugged and repeated, in Scott’s woebegone way, “ ‘I don’t know.’ ”

My father was staring intently at the curdled surface of his cream of mushroom soup. His face was turning red. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Is the tuition refundable,” I asked finally, “or what?”

He covered his eyes and shook his head. He didn’t bury his face in his hands—that would have been too embarrassing—but just pressed his fingers hard against his forehead while his face froze into a proud, trembling frown. I’d never seen him cry and knew he didn’t want me to sit there and watch. I stood up, kissed the top of his burning forehead, and left the room.

MY BROTHER’S FEES
were paid until the end of the semester, so he went on living in the dorm a while. He was something of a legend there, for the usual reasons only more so. The NYU authorities had asked him to leave after various infractions, but Scott wouldn’t cooperate. The stalemate persisted a few days, until finally they managed to eject him, bodily (“Get your fucking hands off me, man!”), and wouldn’t even let him return to collect his trunk.

So things stood when Marlies flew to New York in an effort to settle her son’s affairs. She and Burck had decided to send him to Germany, in hopes that my grandfather, a psychiatrist, could somehow figure him out. Indeed, both my grandparents were nothing but eager to help. They remembered Scott as the solemn, sensitive boy in a blazer and clip-on necktie who’d nursed his sick mother aboard the
Nieuw Amsterdam
, as the moody but still tractable lad they’d seen a few years later, at age thirteen, when he’d gone abroad all by himself and learned to speak German after a fashion. My grandmother, a great-souled woman, had fretted over reports of Scott’s problems and was full of advice for her wayward daughter, who was thus inspired to say, in so many words:
He’s all yours
.