Philipp Meyer - The Son

Thomas was content to live with his mother and she was content to have him, he had a car, a large allowance, trips with his friends. He’d been a gorgeous child and it had ruined him; even now he expected to be the center of things. A man in love with his own face, that was how Ted put it, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him, he really did look like a young Peter O’Toole, the fact of which he was enormously proud, so much so that she was often tempted to point out that Peter O’Toole did not live with his mother.

As for his eccentricity, he hid it so well that she sometimes wondered if she were mistaken, though other times she was certain, and scared, and waiting for him to be caught in public. In truth, there was not much to be worried about. Everyone knew Tom McCullough, and Texans were good at ignoring things they didn’t want to see, it was a leftover from the frontier days when you couldn’t choose your neighbors.

Yes, her children were happy. It was a real pack, even Susan. These were good years. And perhaps because of this she continued to unwind her properties, to undiversify, she sold the steel company and the insurance company she had bought with Hank, most of the real estate, she plowed it all into oil, domestic acreage, which everyone was happy to sell her. It happened so easily she sometimes wondered if she was walking into her own suicide — financial suicide, at least — which would leave her family greatly diminished.

She wondered if it was the same liberated feeling that allowed her father to blow his inheritance on the ranch. Though her father was an actual fool. This was something else. She had gone touring around the Middle East with Cass Rutherford and while he found nothing amiss, in fact he thought things were getting better — the infrastructure, the competence of their drillers and geologists — she found the whole thing disturbing. Twenty years earlier, it had been men on camels. Now it was housing blocks, trash everywhere, people staring you down on every street corner. That was the problem with television — everyone saw what you were taking — what these Arabs saw was rich foreigners buying up their oil at ten cents on the dollar. By the end of the trip, she felt so corrupt and depressed that she’d considered getting out of the business altogether.

After a few weeks at home she came to her senses, but the uneasy feeling remained. Something was going to happen and the overthrow of Mosaddegh was a miracle unlikely to ever be repeated. And so she had begun to look at domestic acreage. She was a fool, though later they would call it women’s intuition, though it was not, it was just a question of seeing what was actually in front of you, instead of what you wanted to see.

Oil went nowhere. Then Bunker Hunt bet big in Libya and got massacred and the Egyptians went into Israel and the embargo hit. The boom had lasted ten years. And still this dissatisfaction. She had won her bet but they would not recognize her. They being … she was not sure. The world? Her dead father and brothers and husband? You expect a medal, she thought. And she did. It was not entirely unreasonable, some notice from the other operators, a bit of recognition, a mention of her alongside the Richardsons and Basses and Murchisons, the Hunts. She was certain — ragingly certain — that if Hank had pulled off what she had, his name would have been included. Maybe she had a victim complex. That’s what they wanted her to think.

She focused on her home life, maybe for the first time ever. Here was her medal: a happy house, happy children. Ben and Thomas and all their friends, who, like them, had gotten exceptions from the draft. They made her house their own, drinking and swimming at all hours, it was like being an older sister, young people drunk in the kitchen, drunk in the yard, they would tell her their problems.

THEN, QUICK AS that, as if a single twig had been holding it all up, it was over. Ben was down at the ranch; his truck went into a bar ditch. Milton Bryce had gone with her to see him — he did not look himself, she was not sure how, he had only a single black eye — they had parted his hair wrong — she walked out of the room and they had handed her something sweet — a Coke? — and then she was thinking of her brothers and then she remembered nothing.

They had buried him and then nothing more was expected, she had sat down in the old familiar house and everything became gauzy and unreachable. She had allowed, in some far corner of her mind, that something might happen to Thomas or Susan — their judgment was terrible, the risks — but Ben had been the linchpin, the steady soul. And if he… she had a feeling she would lose them all. She had failed in some fundamental way. They had been right about her all along.

Thomas also seemed to sense this, to sense that his brother’s death was her fault, that there was some power she had failed to exert, over the driving habits of young men, or the sharp curve in the road, or the bar ditch that flipped the truck. One day he went out and never came back. Susan called to say that he’d arrived in California; he’d driven all night. Gone forever, as it turned out. She sold the house in River Oaks and moved in with Ted.

She could admit it was different from losing her husband. She knew she would survive, she knew she would recover, do not take this as a lesson, Jonas told her, but she did, she had expected too much, and if it was not a lesson, then what was the point?

EVEN IF GOD existed, to say he loved the human race was preposterous. It was just as likely the opposite; it was just as likely he was systematically deceiving us. To think that an all-powerful being would make a world for anyone but himself, that he might spend all his time looking out for the interests of lesser creatures, it went against all common sense. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise, and if God was out there, he was just as the Greeks and Romans had suspected; a trickster, an older brother who spent all his time inventing ways to punish you.

She was bitter, Ben had changed her, first for the better and then for the worse, she was furious and defeated, when she was not too low she assembled a vast dissertation, praise from various figures, approval from the Colonel, success in business, the covers of magazines, her marriage and worthy lovers and her saving of the McCullough name, it buoyed her for a time, it held her above the darkness, but always, always, she plunged. None of it mattered.

The boom continued. Time magazine came around again: now she was the woman who’d predicted the embargo. Incidentally, was she a feminist? No? Back on the cover she went, not entirely defeated, though it was not the same, not the same. A publisher approached her about a memoir, something inspirational for other people, women, they meant, your life story, the way you think and solve problems, something for the young to take inspiration from, though likely they meant housewives.

But what would she say? That the Colonel had been right? That you could only depend on yourself? It would not exactly fill a book. She tried anyway, and for a time a dream came back to her from youth, sitting behind a desk, answering letters from all her subjects, the cameras lingering on her every word, she wrote about her father and two brothers and the mother she had never known, her husband and son, where should she stop, children in the graveyard, the dead pouring forth until she set the papers aside. She knew why the Colonel had hated talking about the old days. Because the moment you looked back, and began to make your tally, you were done for.

BY ’83 THERE were wildcatters going bankrupt left and right, but for Ted and most of their friends, the boom had been nothing more than a period of unusual wealth, in which the royalty checks they all lived on had been preposterous instead of merely large.