Russell Banks: A Permanent Member of the Family

“How late is it?” he asks.

Jack says, “Late. Quarter of three.”

“What do you want us to do, Dad?” Buzz says again.

Connie asks them what they’ve done with the money, and Jack says it’s still in the gym bag, which he put on the shelf in the closet of the hospital room, where they hung his clothes and coat.

“What about my service pistol? Where’s it at?” A man’s gun is not to be disturbed, especially when the man is your father and a former Marine.

“It’s in the bag with the money,” Buzz says.

“So nobody else knows about this yet, except for you three?”

Jack says, “That’s right.”

Connie says, “Then nobody has to do anything about this tonight, right? It’s late. You boys go get some sleep, and tomorrow the three of you sit down together and decide what you want to do. It’s your decision, not mine. I know that whatever you do, boys, it’ll be the right thing. It’s what I raised you to do.”

They seem relieved and exhale almost in unison, as if all three have been holding their breath. Buzz reaches down and tousles the old man’s thin, sandy gray hair, as if ruffling the fur of a favorite dog. He says, “Okay. Sounds like a plan, Dad.”

“Yeah,” Chip says. “Sounds like a plan.”

Jack nods agreement. He’s the first out the door, and the others quickly follow. They catch up to him in the hallway, and the three walk side by side in silence to the elevator. They remain silent in the elevator and down two floors and all the way out to the parking lot. They stop beside Jack’s cruiser for a second and look back and up at the large square window of their father’s room. A nurse draws the blind closed, and the light in the room goes out.

Jack opens the door on the driver’s side and gets in. “You want to meet for breakfast and figure out what’s next?”

“Where?” Chip asks. “I’ve got the noon-to-nine shift, so breakfast is good.”

“M & M in Au Sable Forks at eight? The old man’s favorite breakfast joint.”

“I can make it okay,” Buzz says, “but I have to be on the road to Dannemora by nine.”

Chip says, “I guess we already know what’s next, don’t we?”

Buzz says, “His pistol, is it loaded?”

“I didn’t check,” Jack says, getting out of the car. Buzz is already walking very fast back toward the hospital entrance, and Chip is running to catch up, when from their father’s room on the second floor they hear the gunshot.

I’m not sure I want to tell this story on myself, not now, some thirty-five years after it happened. But it has more or less become a family legend and consequently has been much revised and, if I may say, since I’m not merely a witness to the crime but its presumed perpetrator, much distorted as well. It has been told around by people who are virtual strangers, people who heard it from one of my daughters, or my son-in-law or my granddaughter, all of whom enjoy telling it because it paints the old man, that’s me, in a somewhat humiliating light. Apparently, humbling the old man still gives pleasure, and not just to people who know him personally.

My main impulse here is merely to set the record straight, even if it does in a vague way reflect badly on me. Not on my character so much as on my ability to anticipate bad things and thus on my ability to have protected my children when they were very young from those bad things. I’m also trying to reclaim the story, to take it back and make it mine again. If that sounds selfish of me, remember that for thirty-five years it has belonged to everyone else.

It was the winter following the summer I separated from Louise, the woman who for fourteen turbulent years had been my wife. It took place in a shabbily quaint village in southern New Hampshire where I was teaching literature at a small liberal arts college. The divorce had not yet kicked in, but the separation was complete, an irreversible fact of life — my life and Louise’s and the lives of our three girls, Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha, who were six, nine and thirteen years old. My oldest daughter, Vickie, from my first marriage, was then eighteen and living with me, having run away from her mother and stepfather’s home in North Carolina. She was enrolled as a freshman at the college where I taught and was temporarily housed in a studio apartment I built for her above the garage. All of us were fissioned atoms spun off nuclear families, seeking new, recombinant nuclei.

I had left Louise in August and bought a small abandoned house with an attached garage, a quarter of a mile away, which felt and looked like the gatehouse to Louise’s much larger, elaborately groomed Victorian manse on the hill. Following my departure, her social life, always more intense and open-ended than mine, continued unabated and even intensified, as if for years my presence had acted as a party killer. On weekends especially, cars rumbled back and forth along the unpaved lane between my cottage and her house at all hours of the day and night. Some of the cars I recognized as belonging to our formerly shared friends; some of them were new to me and bore out-of-state plates.

We were each financially independent of the other, she through a sizable trust set up by her grandparents, I by virtue of my teaching position. There was, therefore, no alimony for our lawyers to fight for or against. Since our one jointly owned asset of consequence, that rather grandiose Victorian manse, had been purchased with her family’s money, I signed my half of it over to her without argument. It had always seemed pretentiously bourgeois to me, a bit of an embarrassment, frankly, and I was glad to be rid of it.

Regarding the children, the plan was that my ex-wife, as I was already thinking of her, and I would practice “joint custody,” a Solomonic solution to the rending of family fabric. At the time, the late 1970s, this was seen as a progressive, although mostly untried, way of doling out parental responsibilities in a divorce. Three and a half days a week the girls would reside with me and Vickie, and three and a half days a week with their mother. They would alternate three nights at my house one week with four nights the next, so that for every fourteen nights they would have slept seven at the home of each parent. Half their clothing and personal possessions would be at my place, where I had carved two tiny, low-ceilinged bedrooms out of the attic, and half would be at their mother’s, where each child had her own large, high-windowed bedroom and walk-in closet. It was an easy, safe stroll between the two houses, and on transitional days, the school bus could pick them up in the morning at one parent’s house and drop them off that afternoon at the other. We agreed to handle the holidays and vacations on an ad hoc basis — postponing the problem, in other words.

That left only the cat, a large black Maine coon named Scooter, and the family dog, a white part-poodle mutt we’d rescued from the pound twelve years earlier when I was in graduate school. A neutered female unaccountably named Sarge, she was an adult dog of indeterminate age when we got her and was now very old. She was arthritic, half blind and partially deaf. And devoted to everyone in the family. We were her pack.

Louise and I agreed that Scooter and Sarge, unlike our daughters, could not adapt to joint custody and therefore would have to live full-time in one place or the other. I made a preemptive bid for Sarge, who was viewed as belonging not to either parent, but to the three girls, who were very protective of her, as if she were a mentally and physically challenged sibling. Despite her frailty, she was the perfect family dog: sweetly placid, utterly dependent and demonstrably grateful for any form of human kindness.