“You must come at once. I’m so worried and your brother” (the last two words heavily accented to show how little that member of the family belonged to her even though they’d been married for over three years) “has gone away to work. Again. And left me on my own.” In the pauses I could hear a baby crying. Pat (who only answered to Patricia) sighed down the phone. “For goodness sake, you are Algernon’s aunt. I’m at my wit’s end. Bring a bottle of wine.”

I cancelled whatever I was doing and got into the car. I was pleased that Pat had called me. Since she’d had the baby she had made it impossible for me to visit, citing tiredness, overwork, my lack of knowledge of the stresses of motherhood and my well-known dislike of babies. And the fact that I was the sister of her husband who was failing her in every way. But she had called, so I was keen to be seen to be supporting her. Hopeful of redeeming myself.

She answered the door holding a glass of wine and gestured feebly to the drawing room where the peevish whining was soft but persistent. She followed me and plopped onto the sofa. Algie was sitting in his bouncy chair and squirming, pushing his fist into his mouth, drooling and crying, exhausted. Pat threw her head back and closed her eyes.

“I’ve changed him, fed him, sung to him, given him his teething ring, walked around with him. But he still is doing this.” I opened my mouth to speak. “Just don’t tell me he’s teething. I know he’s teething. There’s some wine in the fridge.” The last said as I’d made a move toward Algie to pick him up.

When I returned she was squatting in front of her son with tears in her eyes “I think God is punishing me,” she said. “I love Algernon so much but I’m a sinner and He is going to take my son.” I started to disagree, but she interrupted me. “You know.” She looked sideways at me, accusingly. Remembering her divorce, the abortion, the suicide attempts before she’d met my brother, I kept quiet. As she stood up I moved towards Algie and softly smiled at him.

“Oh poor Algie,” I said, taking his fist and holding it, “poor Algie…” I brushed his cheek. His eyes focused on my face and he gave me a wide vibrant smile, drummed his feet and held out his palms, making a noise of welcome. Turning, Pat saw his expression and pushed past me to snatch her son to her.

“His name is Algernon,” she stated and gave me a look of searing hatred.

The following year they moved to Canada.

The next time I saw Algernon was at his wedding.

When I was seven years old, we had the first Christmas tree in the neighborhood with miniature lights that flashed off and on.

My two brothers and I received more gifts than most kids.

We were spanked more often and much harder, for sure.

Little League football and baseball were our life for ten years, along with church, skating, fishing, and swimming. Our dad might have missed one, two games – might have.

Every year during inventory, Dad worked overtime to provide school clothes for all three of us.

Dad taught us to ride motorcycles, roller skate, and fish. We were not allowed guns or skateboards – fifty years later we are still not allowed.

Our dad read the Bible to us every night.

When the bills were caught up, Christmas came along and the bills multiplied.

Our dad had to rob Peter to pay Paul all the time.

Our dad worked hard all day, but always had time to practice football plays in the den or pitch baseballs in the back yard.

You know how it is – we bragged how our dad could beat up other dads in the neighborhood.

The thing is, we really believed she could.

Look at us there, on a perfect night with a perfect full moon, driving home from a dinner party up the canyon. It’s like a scene from a movie. Background music comes from the radio. We add our voices.

On a cool dawn / Of a good life / In a new world / We’re feeling f-i-i-ine . . .

And we trail off, not knowing enough of the words.

The camera captures the moonlight, carefully placed to pour over the child, exquisite in sleep across the back seat.

I tense and press my foot against the floor on the passenger side. He notices these things. On a good day, he says, “Don’t worry, Toots! I haven’t crashed a car for weeks and weeks.” And I relax.

But tonight, he says, “God, Eleanor, will you cut it out?”

I consider saying, “Cut what out?” but realize how disingenuous it sounds. I don’t say anything.

“It was only two drinks,” he says. “Two.” With index and middle fingers, he waves a victory sign in front of my face, and the car swerves almost imperceptibly. I translate this “two” into the more likely six.

He tries logic. “An hour to oxidize one drink, right? And you figure we were there for what, three hours? I was stone sober an hour ago.”

I don’t say anything.

He tries a diversion. “Shit. Did you see Jason Kramer with that grad student out on the back deck? Now that’s wasted. There’s going to be hell to pay when Sarah catches wind of it. Hell to pay.”

He is hoping that I’ll join in, that I’ll agree, connect, recognize his own rock-solid faithfulness and sense of responsibility, that I’ll say, “Oh, poor Sarah to be in that marriage. She doesn’t know what she’s missing, not having what we’ve got.”

But I have caught that repetition of his. He does that when he gets like this – falls in love with a little phrase and uses it to death, as if it’s punctuation. I stare out the window into the darkness and don’t say anything.

He shifts tone again. “Damn it, Eleanor. I am stone sober. You can stop giving me the silent treatment and doing that thing, that thing with your foot.”

And just like a movie, in which the everyday-ness of a scene presages its opposite to follow, just before the car misses a curve and flies off through the moonlight, he repeats, “Stone sober.”

The call came at 3 a.m. and after that I was wide awake. Got onto the computer and booked a flight to Singapore.

I knew this day would come. Every time I said goodbye, I held my dad a little longer, hoping that wouldn’t be the last time I hugged him.

The flight took 14 hours. I thought of what I would say to guests at the wake. Who would deliver the eulogy? I wrote some things down. I wasn’t crying yet.

Upon landing, I walked straight out to the taxi stand. Dad would have been waiting at Pillar number 4 if he were still alive. His Toyota wasn’t there. No one was.

Mother was playing the drama mama scene, locking herself in the toilet and wailing. This is her modus operandi. It is the Chinese tradition to wail at death. She did it very well.

When she finally came out of the toilet, she surprised me by saying she wouldn’t be going to the wake. Married for 60 years didn’t count for a thing. She said funeral parlours had spirits that would be detrimental to her health. The rest of us took our chances.
 

My eulogy was never needed. It was a Chinese funeral – lots of monks chanting, with incense and gold paper burning. Condolences came in the form of tax-deductible blankets advertising the names of well-wishers.

It was just as well Mother wasn’t there. Dad’s mistress of 52 years attended. She was distraught and when I met up with her again a few months later, she was a ghost herself, still grieving for the man who was the love of her life. Mother, on the other hand, was a picture of health, wealth (dad left all his money to her), and happiness.

I lifted my hand and touched the cool marble plaque bearing Dad’s face at the crematorium. It was a hug of sorts. The tears finally came.

Sister Romilda (a name she disliked greatly but hadn’t chosen for herself) was up before dawn that raw December morning, listening to the silence. She had tossed through the night, hot on her mattress, tormented by mental images of personal failings and weaknesses and assorted stupidities. Memories of childhood sorrow. Memories of adulthood shame and regret. Things had gotten to the point where she dreaded climbing into bed, knowing that once she closed her eyes, the horror show would begin and a host of recriminating demons would flay her alive, spooling scenes from her Hieronymus Bosch internal world, informing her with great relish that hers had been a sour, wasted life.

Perhaps because she was almost 80, sharply aware that each breath brought her closer to crossing the veil between this life and the next, with scant hope of making things right again, the taunting reveries seared her soul like steak on a grill.

Under the glow of her reading lamp, she sat alone in her study, earnestly mouthing her morning prayers. She considered the many volumes of spiritual reading that lined her orderly shelves – classic memoirs, daily meditations, inspirational devotions, sacred texts – and plucked her beloved copy of The Cloud of Unknowing. Mystics soothed her. But she couldn’t concentrate. She replaced the book and opened her worn daily missal. “There will be signs in the sun and moon…” her Advent reading began.

In the stillness, she humbled herself. She read and petitioned and praised. She drained a final cup of tea and slipped into the chapel for 7 a.m. Mass. From there, she lumbered along the shoveled cobblestone walk to a low brick building, a school for developmentally disabled children, where she had been a well-regarded teacher since its doors first opened decades ago.

Sister Romilda arrived in her classroom early and opened the blinds. She fussed with the thermostat and straightened a stack of tablets on her desk. The first of her young students entered the room. He was a straw-haired boy with Down syndrome, just turned six, with a bright and inquiring face. His pale eyes were preternaturally direct.

“Good morning, Jeffrey,” she said, then helped him wrestle with the stuck zipper on his parka.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it? Did you see how the snow glittered in the sun?”

“So, let’s say a little morning prayer,” she began. She traced the sign of the cross over her starched, black-robed body. “Let’s do this together, Jeffrey.”

“I think I’ll just smile,” the child said.

The boy next door killed himself fifty years ago. He went down to the basement and hanged himself. He was sixteen and a nice-looking boy. His hair was dark brown as were his eyes. He had a lopsided smile and a small purple scar above his right eye. He often sat in his backyard reading.

He had the reputation of a loner, but had some close friends. We met them at his funeral: three teenage boys somber in navy blue suits and a slender, blonde girl, all bowed in grief.

His mother and father were the usual upward bound couple living in our suburban town. They espoused liberal causes while purchasing the latest model cars, televisions, and upper-class gadgets. Their children, they boasted, would go to top colleges.

In the fall of 1969, they went to Washington to march against the Vietnam War. His younger sister, Susan, went with them.

They’d tried to persuade him to go but he refused. He was a junior in high school and too old to have a babysitter. Finally it was agreed that he could remain home if had no more than two friends over at once.

We spoke to him the day before he killed himself. He was reading the poems of Robert Frost as he sat in his back yard. My husband and I asked if he would join us for a cookout that night. He said he had a date but thanked us, almost too profusely.
 

When I replay that afternoon, I wonder if he had already made his decision or was in the process of doing so.

His parents found his body on their return from Washington. During the aftershocks of grief, I can imagine them blaming themselves and each other. We blamed ourselves.

Why hadn’t we insisted that he come for dinner? Why hadn’t we realized how very young he was? Why didn’t we ask him who his date was and would he like to bring her too? Did he actually have a date? Why had we been so casual about our invitation? Why hadn’t we realized that something within him was hurting, was terribly wrong?

His parents divorced the following year.

We stayed together although we had our problems.

After a while we moved to another town. I think of him every October.

I remember clearly that the leaves were dropping golden-red and brownish upon our manicured lawns. His name was Bernard. Not many youngsters have the name Bernard these days. It’s an old-fashioned name, a name that resides in the imagination after all the currently popular names have disappeared.