Barefoot to Avalon

A Brother's Story

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Contents

On November 7, 2000, at around 8:30 in the evening, as the polls are closing in the East and the networks give the early edge to Gore, I lock the door of our house in Wells, Vermont, and place the key, by prearrangement with the realtor, in a Tupperware container under the back steps. In the dark front yard, a twenty-six-foot U-Haul truck sits low on its suspension, its lights angled toward the culvert at the top of our steep gravel drive. The high beams splash a stand of birches and lose themselves in the thick woods on Northeast Mountain, which looms over the protected meadow I bought eleven years ago and where I built the house I'm leaving.

My 1996 Ford Explorer idles nearby, and I can see George A., my brother — forty-two and heavy, his thick black hair and mustache sable-frosted — smoking in the greenish backwash from the panel. On the hitch is the twelve-foot trailer I didn't think we'd need when he flew up last week to help. Stacy, my wife, is already in North Carolina with our two-year-old daughter and our infant son. Having the children underfoot, we've agreed, would make a stressful job more difficult.

For eight days, George A.'s gone with me room by room and shelf by shelf, taking the Wells house apart, down to the wild turkey feathers and New York City restaurant matchbooks, the loose change scattered at the bottoms of the drawers.

My original plan had us leaving after lunch on Sunday, two days ago, November 5. By midnight Sunday night we'd just started to attack the bookcase in the great room I drew and built with nine-foot sidewalls and a vaulted ceiling and a loft and barn sash windows in the gables. On a ladder, pulling volumes down, I handed George A. the family pictures and fragile ware, and he — crossed-legged on the plank pine floor in soiled white socks — swaddled them in Bubble Wrap, tearing ragged swaths of masking tape and fighting with the roll. It seemed to me the tremor in his hands had worsened and the smudges beneath his eyes were darker — like the eye grease he wore when he played ball beneath the lights on Friday nights in high school. The difference was worrisome.

It had been eight months, perhaps a year, since I'd seen him. The last time I visited Winston-Salem, I caught the smell of George A.'s cigarettes as soon as I walked in the front door of Margaret's town house, where I found her alone in a pool of lamplight in the small front parlor, working on a book and a glass of Pinot. She — who'd stopped smoking years before — looked up at me with a grievance in black eyes that were George A.'s eyes, too — something bemused and sad and angry and exhausted, resolved above all else to see it through — while George A. chain-smoked in the larger den in back and sipped a beer and laughed his croupy laugh at South Park. Once a top producer in the Winston office of Dean Witter Reynolds, married with two sons in private school, a BMW and a house in the tony district, Buena Vista, George A. had been there with Margaret for nine years. The tension was so thick a knife would not have scratched it. During the day when Margaret was at work, he smoked and watched the back crawl of the ticker tape on the financial channel. At night when she came home, Margaret cooked his supper and took it to him on a tray, and when he'd eaten, George A. left it for her on the kitchen counter and she'd tiptoe up and kiss his cheek and tuck a $10 or $20 in his pocket as he headed to the bar — no longer the one favored by the hotshot brokers with their Gordon Gecko haircuts and spiffy braces — but to Rita's, a humbler establishment in Clemmons, an exurb twelve miles distant, where Margaret had lived with Jack Furst, her second husband, after they were married.

I knew why our mother did this, why she cooked his meals and paid his medical and life insurance premiums, why she'd bought him the new Chevy Blazer and took his guns and hid them at a friend's house, including the double-barreled A. H. Fox our grandfather had left me that was reassigned to George A. in the aftermath of his first breakdown. George A. had been diagnosed with manic depression, or bipolar I disorder.

The DSM, the manual of the American Psychiatric Association, categorizes bipolar I by degree, as mild, moderate or severe. George A.'s was "severe, with psychotic features." Since the age of seventeen, he'd experienced periodic breakdowns — manic highs followed by protracted, crippling depressions — at three- or four-year intervals. During manic phases, George A. experienced the incandescent highs that tempt so many sufferers to go off their meds, pour out their secrets to bewildered strangers on the street, risk their savings on a hand of cards, embark on dubious business ventures and occasionally to triumph. The list of brilliant sufferers is long and includes many artists — Byron, Hemingway, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and scores of others. In George A.'s case, over weeks and months, the mania accelerated toward psychosis, when he experienced hallucinations and delusions, believed he'd been assigned "missions" by supernatural agents. Then, he'd wind up in the psych ward.

People with bipolar disorder commit suicide at a rate fifteen times that of the general population, and we know George A. had attempted it at least once. His episodes lasted a few months, three or four on average, and between them, for years at a time, he was seemingly normal and high-functioning. A gifted and successful broker, well liked and relied on by his clients, he was promoted many times at his office. From his first breakdown in 1975, until 1991, he gathered himself after each episode and went back to his life, career and family. Sixteen years after that first one, however, in a manic phase, he made unauthorized trades at work, was sued and lost his job and his wife divorced him. After the hospital that time, George A. went home to Margaret's to recover and never left. According to the DSM, "Many individuals with bipolar disorder return to a fully functional level between episodes." George A. had been one of them. Now he'd become part of a different group, the 30 percent who suffer "severe impairment in work role function."

Living far away, I'd failed to see the deterioration as it happened and didn't really understand it. He'd risen from the ashes so many times — why not this time? His intelligence appeared unimpaired. When he could scrape the cash together, he still made short sales, traded options and executed complex financial gambits. It seemed to me that there was too much left of George A., too much of Margaret, for them to fall into the enchantment that held them in the black woods they were lost in. As the years went by I visited North Carolina less frequently and spoke to him less often. Sometimes when I called, Margaret put him on and we spoke for a minute about the season prospects for the Tar Heels or cracked wise about Bill Payne, our long-vanished father.

Those tremors, though, those smudges had something more serious in them than I'd grasped. Against it, my certainties and resentments seemed suddenly small and brittle.

Once upon a time in that gray-shingled house on Ruin Creek in the little amber room we shared, George A. slept beneath me in the bottom bunk and we had matching cowboy quilts and college pennants thumbtacked to the wall. On summer nights we kept the windows open and could hear the creek below us in the creekbed. My oldest competitor and ally, he was the only one who knew or ever would know what that time and place had been for me, as I was the only one who knew for George A. — our much younger brother, Bennett, grew up after I left home, in Margaret's second marriage, in a different house, a different town, a different family under Margaret's second husband Jack's regime. Preoccupied with my affairs and far away, I'd failed to see what had happened to George A. and had let things shutter down till there was almost no light left between us.

Then the lightning struck me. After working four years on a novel under contract, I sent in the final pages and the editor rejected it. Instead of the installment payment I expected on completion, suddenly I owed back four years' worth of income. In the two years it took me to resolve this, Stacy and I lived on credit card advances and I burned out my thyroid gland and cracked four bottom molars, grinding them while sleeping. By the end, I could barely bring myself to walk down to the mailbox, afraid to find the letter commencing legal action. My single-jigger vodka had become a double and I was often having double doubles and, on bad days, triple doubles, and Stacy and I were either fighting about money or practicing mutual avoidance, and in Vermont it was as if we were under an enchantment like George A. and Margaret's down in Winston, and maybe that was why I could no longer call my brother.

Then Stacy, pregnant for the second time in two years, took our toddler and told me she was leaving, moving back to North Carolina with me or without me, and that if I wanted to be married to her and to be a father to our child — our children — that's where I could find her, and then she walked off down the jetway in Albany carrying Grace, our towheaded little daughter, who looked back at me over her mother's shoulder. And as I drove home to Wells and set out into the meadow with my chain saw, I knew I was saying goodbye to the place and bringing in my firewood for the last time.

I called the realtor. I called Mayflower. The quote they gave me for the men with the big van was about as feasible by then as a summer on the Riviera. I called Margaret and told her I was moving back to try to save my marriage and that I meant to rent a truck and pack it.

— Why don't you ask George A. to help you? she asked.

— Let me sleep on that, I answered.

I didn't get to. Less than an hour after we hung up, the phone rang and it was George A., offering his help.

And here he was — by then we'd been at it since 8 A.M. — wrestling the masking tape with his unsteady hands at midnight Sunday, November 5.

And though on the first day, when I picked him up in Albany, we were careful and subdued in the beginning, by evening we were cracking jokes and playing music. I played him OK Computer, and he played me Tupac's "I Ain't Mad at Cha" and "Picture Me Rollin'." We picked it up where we'd dropped it somewhere long before, as if no time had passed at all. In the middle of a bad thing, I got back my brother.

— Check this one out, I said, handing him a faded 4x6 in a cheap Plexiglas frame. It was him, bare-chested, wearing Birdwell boardshorts, on the beach at Four Roses, our family summer house, a week or two before his seventeenth birthday.

— Was this the day I beat you to the pier?

— The one time, I said.

George A. stared at it like a pilgrim at a relic.

— I was pretty good-looking, wasn't I?

— Was, I said. Not that you're that bad now — just not, you know, good.

— I guess we've all seen better days, he answered, glancing at my ball cap, the one I'd taken to wearing as my hair thinned, while his stayed thicker than a mink's pelt.

— Touché, dickwad.

— Heh heh heh, said George A., and his old laugh had something new in it, a hint of broken crockery or gravel. I did kick your ass pretty bad, though, didn't I?

— You beat me by a small, small margin, bro. Inches.

I held a thumb and index finger up.

— I think you're measuring something else, he said.

I widened my eyes.

— Ass-hole!

And George A. — who was as prone to laugh at his own jokes as I am — rolled over on his side and slapped the floor, convulsing.

— Jesus. Jesus, he said, tapering off. I've got to go to bed, DP. I'm going to catch a smoke and hit it.

— Go on and fire it up in here, I told him as he started rising. Doesn't make much difference now.

All week he'd been going out to the front porch, using a Hellmann's mayo jar lid for an ashtray and tucking it into the mulch in the front bed as though to hide the evidence.

— Nah, that's okay, he said, and so I joined him outside in the Indian summer weather. The meadows had just been mowed and the air was fragrant with green hay scent with an undertone of something inorganic, perhaps diesel from my neighbor's tractor.

— You can really see the stars up here, George A. said, blowing his smoke toward them.

— The summer I was building, I used to drive up the Taconic from the city on Friday nights, and I'd camp here and build a fire when the stud walls were going up. The night the house was finished — it was right around this time, but cold — I got here after midnight and the northern lights were playing. Right up there — I pointed over Northeast Mountain. Pulsing waves. Green, like an oscilloscope. That was the only time I ever saw them. I'm going to miss this place.

— I think you're doing the right thing.

I was quiet for a bit after he said that.

— I hope so, George A. Listen. Hear that?

In the middle distance, below the culvert, the brook, a trickle over big stones.

— Sounds familiar, he said, smiling.

— Does, doesn't it? I said, smiling back.

A lefty, George A. stabbed out his Winston in his right hand and tucked the jar lid in the mulch beneath the blueberries. He put an arm around my shoulder and hugged me, and I kissed him on the hair above his ear the way I did when he was four and I was seven.

— Sleep tight, buddy.

— You too, David.

After he went in, I sat out a little longer and thought about the day I first came here in 1988. Thirty-three and living in Manhattan, I'd just sold my second book and gone from struggling to make rent to shopping for apartments. One weekend on a visit up here, I thought what the hell and called a realtor, and though land wasn't what I sought, he took me to see a fifty-acre parcel on the lower slope of Northeast Mountain outside a little town called Wells. Five miles up an enclosed and wooded gravel road, the landscape suddenly opened into a hidden valley a half-mile wide and a mile long that held the late-day sunlight like a little bowl holds water. On the right as we advanced was a pond fed by a brook that came from higher up and around the pond a meadow full of black-eyed Susans, daisies, Joe Pye weed and chickory. Over the ledge, the land stair-stepped to a second higher meadow that beetled over the town road, and above that, the mountain disappeared into a low cloud bank. As I looked up I felt the hair rise on my back and a little current arcing, and then the realtor put his Wagoneer in four-wheel and drove me up to the top meadow, and we got out on that height and as I looked out to the west, through a small gap I could see the Adirondacks in blue profile fifty miles away. Standing there with me, this garrulous Irish fellow — who'd probably seen this happen scores of times with other clients — had the good sense to keep quiet. Dusk was falling and the wind picked up and I heard it rustling in the treetops and the brook murmuring over stones as it came down Northeast Mountain, and something in me remembered summer nights in the gray-shingled house in Henderson with George A. in the bunk below me when we kept the windows open and Ruin Creek whispered in the creekbed down below us. It came to me, This is where the house goes, and I was lost then just that quickly.

I dreamed the house and built it and wrote the novel I called Ruin Creek about George A. and me, and Bill, our father, and Margaret, our mother, when we were still a family and believed that family love is stronger than time or death, except it wasn't. Love was like the sunlight on the surface of the iceberg; beneath, some dark force was operating in the underwater portion, and it was stronger than love and we were scattered by it.

And now Stacy and I had been scattered in our turn and to try to save it, I was giving up the house and land I loved and had made out of my life's work.

I think you're doing the right thing, George A. said.

I hope so.

In my mind's eye I saw Grace, her little face looking back at me over her mother's shoulder. At fifteen months she started walking and I began to take her with me out on the old logging trails where Stacy had never been much interested in going. I showed Grace the secret glade beneath the hemlocks, where we sat in silence and listened as the wind blew through the treetops. And often in the sodden leaf mold, Grace with her keen eye picked out the hidden life, the orange newts that lived there under fallen logs, creatures I'd never noticed. Grace studied them with thrilling focus, reached down and picked them up with no fear, watched them crawl over her hands and then put them back respectfully. And as I watched her something tightened in my chest, I had difficulty breathing, my heart was pierced with some new feeling, something urgent, I didn't know what to call it, regret or grief or fear, but that feeling had something to do with selling out and going, and up there with her when the wind blew through the treetops I seemed to hear its voice speaking, trying to tell me something.