Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER THREE

BINGO DIED TWICE BEFORE HE WAS NINETEEN. THE FIRST TIME HE was five years old, pale as the moon and small for his age, “no bigger than a beer bottle,” as Uncle Tom would say. Bing coughed when he laughed, he was always coughing, sand and grit in his voice, scratchy as Pop’s old record collection. It was spring 1969, the air blowing cold and dry. All it took was a sudden shift in temperature and Bing would be in trouble.
“Why didn’t you wake us?” my mother screamed at me, standing next to Bingo’s bed in her nightgown, teeth chattering uncontrollably, her body shaking so much that she was a blur, coming at me in waves of hysteria as I squinted against the sudden sharp injection of light.
Bingo, lying on his back, struggling to speak, reached out for Ma, but her focus for the moment was on me.
“For Christ’s sake, Anais, it’s not Collie’s fault,” Pop said, grabbing her by the shoulders. The words were hardly out of his mouth when she lashed out, wound up, and slapped his face. Whack! I marveled at her speed; there was no palpable distinction between cause and effect.
He didn’t miss a beat, but shoved her against the dresser, her head wobbling like one of those dashboard ornaments. Way to go, Pop! She rebounded, took another swing at him, he ducked, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit her back, and I was right!
I was only six years old, I should have been horrified, but I was thrilled. Ma forever accused me of leaping to my feet, the mattress a trampoline, and clapping my hands in glee when Pop struck back. Wham! Right across the kisser, it was the joyous sound of a hundred angels getting their wings.
“It’s therapeutic! It’s therapy!” he shouted, trying to explain why he had my mother in a headlock. “It’s medicinal, Anais. I’m sorry, Collie, but your mother’s gone right off her nut!”
“Jesus, what’s all the fuss about?” Tom wandered in, wearing boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, his gray hair standing upright as quills, the familiar smell of booze trailing him like one of Ma’s wiener dogs. Eyes rheumy and face muscles slack, he was trying in vain to impersonate alertness. His eyebrows rode up his forehead like a couple of struggling elevators.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Ma wailed, throwing her head so far back that it was practically sitting on her shoulders. She’d broken away from Pop and stood in the middle of the room, seeming to generate her own spotlight, her legs spread apart and arms thrown skyward in a pose so dramatic, I felt convinced the hand of God was going to break through the ceiling like some sort of cosmic crane operator and spirit her off, Ma’s unbearable intensity finally propelling her into another dimension.
“Someone call an ambulance!” Pop hollered as if he were in the midst of a crowded dance floor.
“Daddy! Daddy, where are you? Help me. My baby! I want my father.” Ma just kept shrieking, her feet planted, arms pinned to her sides, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide as a cavern, calling for the Falcon, a scenario that had me, young as I was, completely flummoxed, since she was popularly known to hate his guts.
Tom, weirdly calm and self-involved, nudged me and bent over, whispering, “Oh, listen to that. The proof we’ve been wanting all this time. I told you, Noodle, the Female B is father-fixated. It’s love-hate—that’s what makes the world go round. What did I tell you?”
By now, Bingo was quietly smothering, making only the weakest croaking and squeaking sounds in a last-ditch effort to attract some meaningful attention.
“What about Bingo?” I asked finally, fully awake and mildly exhilarated, standing up in the middle of my bed. “Who’s going to save Bingo?”
I pointed over to his bed, where Bingo was lying on his back, still and staring, one hand resting on his chest, the other hand at his throat, the mechanical sound of his breathing whirring and clicking.
All three of them stopped and stared at me until Ma let out the biggest scream I’d ever heard.
“Jesus, she’s gone Crazy Horse on us!” Uncle Tom said in amazement, scratching his cheek, his fingers noisily scraping stubble.
Fortunately, I remembered that Ma’s cousin George was visiting. A mild, quiet-spoken veterinarian, he was as ordinary as a crew cut, but that night he was our only hope. Jumping to the floor and running from the room, I shouted his name as I ran along the hallway.
“Help! George, help!” I banged on his door, turned the knob, swung into the room, and flipped on the bedroom light.
“What the hell?” he said, instantly alarmed, popping up to a sitting position, squinting, hand at his forehead, struggling to understand what was happening.
“It’s Bingo. He can’t breathe. Help me. Please.” I dragged him by the hand, rushing him toward the room I shared with Bing.
“Good God!” he said, pushing through the dumbstruck audience of Ma and Pop and Uncle Tom, all of them looking down into the bed as Bingo, ribs shuddering, struggled for air, hissing and whistling like a steam kettle.
I looked on expectantly. It was the first time I’d seen George without his black-rimmed glasses, and where once he’d seemed bland and concave, now he seemed positively inflated with dynamism—the only thing missing was the cape. He didn’t hesitate for a second, picked Bingo up, cradled him against his chest, and issued calm instructions. His voice was as steady as a piston. He said, “Let’s get him to the hospital for emergency treatment,” and clearing a swath, he headed outside—I sat back in my bed, stunned to encounter an adult capable of decisive action—Ma and Pop following behind him, shrieking orders at each other.
I watched from my window as they climbed into George’s car and took off, George holding Bingo close, Pop driving wildly, and Ma screaming into the night.
“Is Bingo going to die?” I asked Uncle Tom, who’d been rendered almost sober by the night’s events. He rolled his eyes in exasperation as he slid next to me on the bed.   
“I thought you were smart. That’s just about the dumbest question anyone has ever asked in the history of the world since the beginning of time. Now, if you’re so intelligent, spell ‘Mississippi.’ You can’t, can you?” he said, complaining all the while about having to sleep with me, even though it was his idea, not mine.
“At your age! Say, it’s nothing short of a national disgrace. When I was your age, I was the financial mainstay of the family, selling newspapers in the predawn hours on the corner of Newcastle and Abbey. How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m six,” I said.
“Six! I had no idea. I thought you were five. Six! Why, I was a corporal in the army by the time I was six and thriving on a steady diet of boiled Spanish onions and raw shrimp. So, what about it? Let’s hear you try to spell your mother’s middle name, Termagant.”
“T-e-r-m-a-g-a . . .”
Uncle Tom covered his eyes with his hands, pretending to beat on his forehead with clenched fists. “Haven’t I had enough to contend with tonight? I don’t have time for your nonsense. This is why no one with any sense likes children. They haven’t a thought for anyone but themselves. Mangle the English language on your own time for your teacher. At least she’s paid to pretend she’s interested. Good night and good riddance,” Uncle Tom said, gathering his pillow into a ball, shifting onto his side, his back in my face.
“Aren’t you going to get under the covers?” I asked him.
“And have you infect me with some intestinal parasite or ear mites? Your father picked up fleas from your mother on their honeymoon. . . .”
“He did not.” I giggled—the idea of my mother suffering from a plague of vermin had definite appeal.
Then I remembered. “T-e-r-m-a-g-a-n-t,” I spelled aloud, gazing at the back of his head, stubbornly finishing my assignment, though Uncle Tom pretended not to listen.
The spelling bee was a classic device Tom used to shut me up. But I was reading by the time I was four, and I was a pretty good speller, which frustrated him no end. Eventually, he resorted to making up words to stump me.
“Spell ‘auntiefrankensteinestablishmentitarianism,’” he said, his voice full of sarcasm.
He was prepared for me to get it right, which I often did.
“Wrong,” he said, carrying on with his housework, avoiding my eyes. “The first part is spelled ‘auntie,’ not ‘anti.’ Even the village idiot knows that.”
“It’s not a real word.”
“Oh yes, it is. I wouldn’t expect you to know with your limited intelligence and lack of sophistication.”
“What’s it mean, then?”
“It refers to the sweeping powers possessed by a catastrophically ugly female relative.”
“Use it in a sentence.”
“My sister, your maiden aunt Brigid Flanagan, is a classic example of the terrifying phenomenon known as auntiefrankensteinestablishmentitarianism, whereby children, at seeing her hideous visage, instantly turn into turnips. That’s why they’re known as turnips, by the by, just one more thing about which you’re abysmally ignorant.”
“Uncle Tom . . .” I crawled onto my knees and touched him on the shoulder. “Why can’t Bingo breathe?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone like you put a pillow over his face. Now that I think of it, I don’t much like the malignant shape of your head, and you’ve got the shifty eyes of a murderer.”
“I do not,” I said, unaffected by Tom’s accusations, which were as regular as rain. All the time I was growing up and anytime there was a homicide anywhere in New England, he used to demand that I produce an alibi or he’d threaten to turn me in.
“Well, what about the incident with the boiling water last summer . . . the attempt on your brother’s life . . .”
I lay back down beside him, the back of my head flat against the pillow. “I never did that, Uncle Tom. . . .”
“So you say—that’s what they all say.”
“Uncle Tom, you know I didn’t do that.”
“Maybe I’m just covering for you so you don’t wind up in the penitentiary with all the other desperadoes. Now for heaven’s sake let me alone—and remember, I sleep with one eye open.”
I rolled away from Uncle Tom, putting distance between us, so far from him that my face was pressed against the wall, the plaster cool against the bare soles of my feet as they climbed up along the window frame.
“You’re not funny,” I said.
“All right, Noodle.” Uncle Tom lifted his head and looked over his shoulder in my direction. “I’m only teasing.”
I wasn’t talking. I didn’t want Uncle Tom to know I was crying.
Outside the window, an owl called.
“Parliament’s in session,” Uncle Tom said. I didn’t respond.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said suddenly. “Fine, have it your way. I’ll get under the covers.”
Soon he was snoring away, but I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid that Bingo would die and Ma would tell the police that I had killed him. It wouldn’t be the first time. Ma was having one of her famous political gatherings. It was a bright afternoon the previous year, in June, and Bingo and I were put in charge of the dogs. With everyone talking, gesturing, making points, conversation coming at us from all directions like pockets of small-arms fire, the dogs quickly got out of hand. Giving up on trying to control them, Bingo and I went into the kitchen, where Ma was making tea. I watched as she poured boiling water into several mugs, and then, interjecting loudly, she rushed to rejoin a gathering of three or four people at the end of the room.
I caught sight of one of the missing puppies and bent down to call him over, and at the same time I was looking around for something to eat, when there came this long gasp and a crack, something shattered and then quiet, then a little kid’s sharp scream, then a fulsome silence, all of it seeming to happen at once—and then all hell broke loose, and Bingo was crying in explosive spurts the uncontrollable way that he did when something was really wrong.
Steam rose from his bare arm, scalded a deep red color and soaked. The skin seemed to melt and then bubble up into a transparent bag that filled with fluid. One of Ma’s guests was a doctor, who took a quick look and volunteered to go with her to the hospital since Pop was officially nowhere to be found.
Ma gathered up her stuff and was so unhinged that she was filling up her arms with crazy things, The New York Times, a loaf of bread, a tea towel, until she spotted me over by the window seat, and then she was all focus as she swooped down, grabbed me by the shoulders, and shouted in my face.
“What did you do? What did you do?”
“Nothing. I did nothing,” I said, shrinking into the corner, the hushed murmuring of all those strangers hovering like smoke, settling in like guilt.
“You poured that boiling water on your little brother, didn’t you? He couldn’t have reached it on his own. What did you do?” She shook me so hard that I couldn’t answer.
Uncle Tom appeared and started arguing with Ma.
“Say, you let him alone. I saw the whole thing from the doorway. Bingo climbed up on the stool, and before I could stop him he reached up and pulled the cup off the counter. He lost his balance. Collie wasn’t anywhere near him.”
“No . . .” Ma spat out her words and releasing her grip on me stood up straight as Bingo wailed in the background. “Impossible. You’re lying, sticking up for him when he doesn’t deserve it. I set those cups back far enough from the edge of the counter so nothing like that could have happened. If that’s what you saw, then Collie deliberately moved them.”
“I suppose he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, too,” Uncle Tom said. “You’ve got a screw loose, lady. You should be ashamed of yourself, accusing Collie to cover up your own carelessness.”
“For God’s sake, I haven’t time to fight with you, Tom Flanagan,” Ma said, pausing once again to bend down, her face next to mine, so close that her hair fell against my cheek. I can still smell the woodsy fragrance of her shampoo.
“This isn’t over. I’ll never forgive you for what you did today to your little brother. Never!”
She told everyone at the hospital what I’d done, and someone, a man in a suit, came to speak to me and Bingo—Ma told me it was the police and to expect a long sentence—and I never knew the outcome of his visit. I was too scared to ask. When I didn’t go to jail, I figured it was an oversight.
After the burn healed, Bingo was left with a white scar shaped like a half-moon on his inner arm beneath his elbow joint, so just in case Ma was ever tempted to forget, she always had his disfigurement to remind her, confirming her view of him as a serious hard-luck case, unlike me. She looked at me in my playpen and saw the president of the World Bank and not the future president, either. The whole time I was growing up, in every conversation between us, Ma acted as if she were sparring with John D. Rockefeller about the merits of socialism.
Bingo was different. He looked like Pop, though he had Ma’s chestnut hair. Everything seemed to go wrong for Bingo, which only increased his irresistibility factor. Nothing Ma loved better than a beautiful victim, since it played so well into her own image of herself.
She used to talk about how people should never stop with one child since it was important to have a basis for comparison, gives a much-needed perspective, she would insist, leaving most people to wonder what the devil she was talking about, though I got the message loud and clear.
Her adoration for Bingo was exclusive, but she made me a critical part of their relationship, casting me in the role of his malicious persecutor. I could never separate her love for Bingo from her contempt for me.
“Your little brother died last night,” Pop said at first sight of me in the doorway the morning after the asthma attack. Hearing him and Tom, the sun rising and rosy, I hopped from my bed and went down to the kitchen, where the two of them were sitting at the table drinking coffee and eating fried-egg sandwiches.
“But like Lazarus, he was brought back to life,” Uncle Tom said, telling me how Bingo turned blue in the hospital, pure Irish blue, he said, “an exotic mix of Himalayan poppy, antifreeze, and the eyes of a Siberian husky.”
“Lazarus, my ass, that low-rent bastard,” Pop said. “Bingo rose up like Jesus himself. Come to think of it, he did better than Jesus. It took Bingo only three hours to resurrect himself. It took Jesus three days!”
“Match that, can you, Noodle?” Tom asked me. “Start by spelling ‘unremarkable.’”
“Where’s Ma?” I inquired, making my way to a plain wooden stool, which I dragged from the counter to the table, one of the poodles tugging at the bottom of my pajama leg.
“She had to be admitted—it was the reaction. She had a heart arrhythmia, according to the doctors,” Pop said casually, sifting through the mail.
“I wasn’t aware she had a heart,” Uncle Tom said.
“What about George?” I persisted. He’d just arrived for a week-long visit.
“Oh well, he’s been called back home. Some kind of problem at the clinic,” Pop said.
“May I have an egg sandwich?” I asked, trying to extricate myself from the dog’s playful grasp.
“Oh, my Lord,” Tom said, sighing, shoulders collapsing, his face an anguished mask. “Look here, Noodle, I’m melted after all I’ve been through these last hours. I’ll make you some tea and you get yourself a couple of lovely pieces of fresh bread with butter.”
“That’s not a proper breakfast,” Pop said. “He’s not on death row, you know. Surely he deserves better than thieves and murderers.”
“Fine. Tea and toast, then, the act of toasting adds nutrients to the bread, same as if it were a bowl of oatmeal.”
“What nutrients, Uncle Tom?” I asked.
“Zinc.”
“Well, you know what I think?” Pop said. “There’s nothing like a miracle to make a man crave a drink.”
“There’s no one to say we didn’t earn it,” Tom said.
“Bartender!” Uncle Tom snapped his fingers in my direction.
I jumped down from my stool and ran to the cellar to get them their beer, startling the mostly sleeping dogs, who leapt from their spots, barking, wondering what all the fuss was about. Uncle Tom and Pop watched silently for once as I carefully set out two immaculately clean, tall and skinny, cylindrical glasses.
“Why do they represent a better choice for drinking beer?” Tom quizzed me.
“Nuance,” I said, whispering, concentrating on the pour, tipping the glass on a forty-five-degree angle, focusing on the slope. I poured with confidence—I’d been doing it for half my life. The bottle half-empty, I shifted the glass to ninety degrees and kept pouring down the middle, creating a perfect foam head.
“Beautiful, Collie!” Pop said. “You’re the champ.”
“Not bad,” Tom said. “You’ll do until someone better comes along.”
I handed the drinks over without so much as inhaling. Pop made me take the pledge of total abstinence when I was three years old, and which I’ve maintained to this day, with the exception of one adolescent slip.
“Here’s to Bing Algernon Flanagan,” Pop said, raising his glass in salute. “Died and rose again on April 7, 1969.”
“So, Collie, what do you say?” Uncle Tom jabbed me in the ribs. “Can you spell ‘thaumaturgy’?”