Only Love Can Break Your Heart Read online

  My mother looked up with a start from where she sat in her armchair. As the Old Man rose from his seat at the corner table, I ran to him and buried my face in the soft cotton of his red flannel shirt.

  “What in the hell,” he said.

  “Frank Cherry shot Paul,” I cried.

  My mother warmed me with a throw blanket, fussing all the while about how wet and dirty my pants and shoes had become, how cold I was, how likely I might be to come down with pneumonia on account of having been tramping around outside when the temperatures were still dropping below freezing at night. I babbled about Paul and Twin Oaks and Frank Cherry’s ghost and the gun and the brains on the wall beside the rocking chair.

  The Old Man disappeared into his closet. A few moments later he emerged wearing his hunting boots and jacket. In one hand he held a large police-style flashlight; in the other, his .38 snub-nosed revolver.

  “Dick,” my mother said, her voice shrill with alarm.

  “Just a precaution,” he replied.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said.

  But he was already off, down the hall and out the front door.

  My mother led me upstairs and helped me out of my wet clothes.

  “Get ready for bed,” she said.

  She went into Paul’s room to stand vigil at the window, her eyes following the journey of the Old Man’s flashlight up the hill toward Twin Oaks.

  As I envision her there now, standing before the window with her arms crossed, I remember that my mother was still very beautiful then, and quite young. Except for a bit of lingering postpregnancy weight in her belly and hips, she was slim and dainty, with delicate, nervous hands. She wore her sandy blond hair in a girlish bob. Her eyes were wide and earnest, as if she was always seeking someone’s approval.

  I had only just begun to comprehend the abnormality of my parents’ marriage. In 1977, my mother was thirty-three years old; the Old Man was nearing sixty. The previous fall, on parents’ day at my school, my teacher had mistakenly identified the Old Man as my grandfather. I barely noticed her error and would not have been bothered by it but for her obvious embarrassment and the casual scorn in the Old Man’s eyes when he corrected her.

  I still can’t grasp exactly how they ended up together. My mother couldn’t have been without other prospects. The most obvious explanation was the most cynical: that she had married him for his money. The dime-store psychiatrist’s explanation would be that she had married a father figure. Both of her parents were killed in an accident when she was very small; she was raised by her grandmother, who was already a widow before my mother was born.

  Life with the Old Man couldn’t have been easy for my mother. Even when you think you know what you’re getting into, some situations can’t be adequately prepared for—namely Paul, who was not quite old enough to be her brother but too old to be her son and, in his mind at least, too old to follow her rules.

  Years later, my mother told me she’d only once considered leaving the Old Man, before I was born. Paul had done her some horrible insult, the nature of which she would not reveal to me. The Old Man had taken Paul’s side, and the argument devolved from there. The next day, when the Old Man came home, he found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes stained with tears. On the table in front of her were a checkbook and her three credit cards: American Express, MasterCard, an Exxon gas card.

  “What are you doing?” he had asked her.

  “I was going,” she said.

  “Where?” the Old Man asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just knew I wasn’t going to come back.”

  The Old Man sat down next to her and grasped her hand.

  “Why did you stay?” he asked.

  “Because—” she said, “because I don’t have any money of my own. Because I knew you could stop my checks and cancel these cards, and I’d have no one to turn to.”

  “I would never do that,” the Old Man said.

  His voice was pained and gentle, she said. Filled with love and guilt.

  “But I would use the cards,” he said. “I would use them to find you.”

  She must have thought of that moment and all its implications as she stared out the window into the darkness, her arms still crossed, her face blank and absent, as if she had forgotten I was there. She must have seen that flashlight again, moving faster, coming closer, until she could see the Old Man emerge from the darkness into the glow of the front porch light.

  “Dear God,” my mother said.

  We hurried from the window and down the stairs to open the front door.

  “What happened?” my mother asked.

  “He’s been shot,” the Old Man’s voice replied.

  “By who?”

  “Brad Culver, the stupid son of a bitch.”

  I pushed past the Old Man and out the door. Paul sat on the porch with his back against the railing, his face ashen, clutching his leg with bloody hands.

  “Get towels,” the Old Man said. “Call the emergency room.”

  I knelt next to Paul and threw my arms around his neck.

  “Don’t cry, Rocky,” he said. “’Tis but a flesh wound.”

  “Are you going to die?” I asked.

  “No, he’s not going to die,” the Old Man said, appearing at my side with a stack of worn-out bath towels. The anger in his voice felt strangely reassuring.

  A pair of headlights turned into the driveway and drew closer. A silver Mercedes sedan sped up to the house and stopped, sliding a bit in the loose gravel of the driveway. Out from the driver’s side door stepped the black-clad man I’d seen at Twin Oaks.

  “Frank Cherry!” I cried.

  “What did you say?” the Old Man asked.

  “Don’t let him take Paul, Daddy!” I wailed.

  “Shut up!” the Old Man barked.

  “Dick,” the man said. “Let me drive you.”

  “You’ve done quite enough, sir,” the Old Man answered.

  “I told you it was an accident,” the man said. “He just surprised me, that’s all.”

  The Old Man stood and moved toward the man, who, illuminated by the headlights of his car, was still, for all I knew, a ghost. My mother, who had returned from the kitchen phone, grasped my shoulders and held me there.

  “Dick,” she cried.

  The Old Man had pulled his own gun from the pocket of his hunting jacket.

  “An accident, you say?” the Old Man repeated.

  The man said nothing; he merely stared at the Old Man—or, more accurately, at the gun in the Old Man’s hand.

  “Would you be surprised,” the Old Man said, “if I accidentally blew your goddamned head off?”

  The man had no answer for that question. On the steps beside me, Paul observed the scene with bemusement.

  “Dick!” my mother cried. “Your son!”

  The Old Man turned his head toward my mother, his face constricted in a rictus of fury.

  The Old Man slowly put the gun back in his pocket.

  “I’d like you to leave,” he said to the man.

  “All right,” the man said. “I’ll meet you over at the hospital. You can shoot me there if you’d like.”

  “Maybe I will,” the Old Man said.

  The man returned to his car, which was still idling. He made a sharp three-point turn and sped away.

  The Old Man marched back up to the porch. His lips parted, peeling back to reveal his gritted teeth. His face seemed weighted with something more obscure and troubling than mere rage. With his free hand, the Old Man reached out to take the keys from my mother. With his other, he presented the gun to her, handle first.

  “Here,” he said.

  “I don’t want to touch that,” she said.

  “Take it,” he said. “I don’t have time to put it away.”

  My mother grasped the handle of the pistol with her thumb and index finger and held the gun out, dangling from her hand like a dead mouse hanging from its tail.

 
; The Old Man stripped off his hunting coat, revealing where the strain of his efforts and his worry had seeped out of him, staining the armpits of his red plaid flannel shirt. He stooped and draped the coat around Paul’s shoulders.

  “All right, son,” he said. “I’m going to get the car.”

  He turned and walked briskly toward the garage.

  “Yo, Rocky,” Paul said. “Could you do me a quick favor?”

  He took one hand away from his leg for a moment and tapped the breast pocket of his shirt.

  My mother looked on helplessly as I knelt and removed the pack of Camels. I placed a cigarette between Paul’s lips, flipped open his Zippo, and sparked the wheel into flame as if I’d done it a thousand times.

  2

  PAUL DIDN’T DIE. When I came home from school the next day he was there in his room, his leg heavily bandaged and propped up on pillows. Leigh Bowman, Paul’s girlfriend, sat on the bed beside him. Across the room by the window, Rayner Newcomb slouched in the desk chair. All three of them were smoking cigarettes and laughing the careless laughter of impudent youth.

  “Here’s Rocky,” Leigh said.

  “Die, Frank Cherry, you whore!” Rayner squealed.

  Again, they laughed, even Paul—perhaps Paul most of all. My whole head went purple.

  “Aw, come on, Rocky,” Paul said.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “I think it’s pretty funny,” Paul said.

  My eyes brimmed at this small betrayal.

  “Well, it’s not,” I said. “You scared me!”

  “I know,” Paul said. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t shoot myself, you know.”

  My mother appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, Alice,” Paul said.

  “Are you feeling any better?” my mother asked.

  Paul shrugged.

  “It hurts,” he said.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Rayner, would you mind opening that window?” my mother said. “Paul could probably use some fresh air.”

  Rayner sat up to lift the window sash closest to the desk. He slouched back into his chair without looking up or uttering a word.

  “Thank you,” my mother said. “Richard, I left your snack on the breakfast table.”

  The moment she turned and drew the door shut behind her, the three of them dissolved into that same cruel laughter.

  “Come here, Rocky,” Leigh said, patting the bed beside her.

  Leigh pulled me into her arms, her hair draping the back of my head. I breathed in the scent of inexpensive girl’s perfume mingled with strawberry shampoo and cigarette smoke.

  “I’m sorry Paul scared you, Rocky,” she said.

  “I wasn’t that scared,” I lied.

  I rested my head on the soft slope of her bosom.

  “Say there, little man,” Rayner said. “How did it feel to watch your dad point a gun at some dude’s head?”

  I had to think about it—all of it. Frank Cherry’s brains and blood splattered on the walls and porch of Twin Oaks. Paul entering the house, followed by the appearance of the black-clad man. The crack of the gun. Most of all, the image of my brother reclining on the porch—his face drained of all color, his hands covered with dark red blood—and the Old Man, sweating and wild eyed, pointing his gun at the head of a man I had only minutes before believed to be a ghost. I had never seen the Old Man—or anyone else, for that matter—so unhinged. How did that feel?

  “Good,” I said.

  “It felt good, huh?” Rayner said.

  Paul scrutinized me with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It felt good.”

  “What about you, Paul?” Leigh asked. “How did you feel?”

  Paul looked away, out the windows up the hill toward Twin Oaks.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It hurt too much to think.”

  He reached into his shirt pocket for another cigarette.

  “I do remember having one thought the second after I realized I’d been shot.”

  “What’s that?” Rayner asked.

  “Oh, hell,” Paul said, “my old man’s going to kill me.”

  We all laughed at that.

  “My dad probably would have taken the dude’s gun and shot me again himself, for good measure,” said Rayner. He couldn’t contain his envy. Misadventures like breaking into abandoned houses and getting shot were supposed to be his department.

  “You know, when I heard the Old Man’s voice outside, I expected the worst,” Paul said. “But when he came through the door and spotted me with his flashlight, he ran and fell all over me, hugging and kissing me like I was a two-year-old. Culver jabbered on and on about how sorry he was, how it was a big misunderstanding and all. The Old Man didn’t even look at him. He just humped me up on his back in the ole fireman’s carry and ran down the hill like he was back with MacArthur on the beach in the Philippines, huffing and puffing the whole way home. If I didn’t know he was just too out of shape to haul a hundred and fifty pounds on his back at a full run, I would have thought he was crying.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Leigh said.

  I could feel Rayner rolling his eyes behind us.

  “Yeah, I know, right?” Paul said. “Who knew the Old Man could be such a softy.”

  “Let this be a lesson for you, Rocko,” said Rayner. “If you ever feel like your daddy doesn’t love you anymore, get somebody to shoot you in the leg.”

  “Shut up, Rayner,” Leigh said.

  But Paul laughed.

  THE NEXT DAY, Paul’s mother arrived from Ohio. The Old Man picked her up from the airport after work. Somehow it had been decided that she was going to stay with us, in the guest bedroom, next to Paul’s.

  My mother spent the hours before her arrival in a state of keen agitation, her lips pursed, aimlessly pacing the floor between bouts of dusting and vacuuming and straightening of couch pillows and other random objects. Paul lazed in his room, his leg propped up, smoking even more than usual, his eyes drifting back and forth between the ceiling and the windows.

  Paul’s mother had left Spencerville years earlier, before the Old Man even divorced her, and before the Old Man met my mother. She existed only as a name—Anne—and as a disembodied voice on the telephone, talking to Paul or to one or the other of my parents. No conversation with Anne came or went without discord.

  Once, not long before he died, in the throes of dementia, the Old Man pulled me close to him as I sat at his bedside. He fixed his eyes on me, clutching my hands to his chest.

  “Son, don’t ever marry a Yankee,” he wheezed. “She’ll ruin your life.”

  Of all the seemingly endless litanies of fatherly advice he dispensed to me, this little mad kernel seemed somehow fraught with importance.

  Still, I know little about the Old Man’s marriage to Anne—how they met, whether they were ever happy together. I knew only one fact of consequence: before Paul, there was another child—a girl, Annie Elizabeth, who died of leukemia in 1966, when Paul was five.

  To me, Annie Elizabeth could be nothing more than a single photograph: an eight-by-ten black and white in a thin silver frame of a beaming child with Shirley Temple ringlets in a flower-patterned dress with lace trim at the sleeves and the collar, an Add-A-Pearl necklace suspended from her thin, frail neck. Paul claimed he had little memory of her. Whenever she came up, the Old Man described Annie Elizabeth as a vision of winsome beauty and steely courage—a little nine-year-old angel-in-waiting, so certain she was of her place in the paradise we learned about in summer vacation Bible school. When she was gone, the Old Man blocked out the sorrow by pouring himself into his work. Anne poured herself a tall scotch, and another, and another.

  One day, as Paul explained it, the Old Man came home from the office and found Anne packed and dressed to travel, having a last drink and a smoke. Oblivious to what was happening, Paul lay on his belly in front of the television while his mo
ther waited for the taxi to take her to the bus station, where she would board a Greyhound bound for Akron. After that, the Old Man and Paul were on their own, until my mother appeared.

  “Were you angry?” I once asked Paul.

  “About what?” he replied.

  When he was older, two or three times a year, Paul took a bus to Akron for a visit. Once, when his and my mother’s difficulties had grown especially intense, he left to live with her. He came back after less than a month.

  But Paul never spoke ill of his mother. He knew it was the grief that had done it to her. The Old Man had borne up and gone on with his life. Anne, it seemed, had surrendered.

  I SAT WITH PAUL listening to records while we waited for Anne to arrive: side A of After the Gold Rush, over and over again.

  On the wall above Paul’s bed hung a black-and-white image of Neil Young sitting on a bench backstage, legs crossed, an open bottle of beer beside him, eyes downcast and hidden, strumming on his big Martin guitar. His hooded brow and bisected long, dark hair made him look like Geronimo in patched, tattered jeans and an untucked oxford shirt. Neil Young. To my ears, the very name was sublimely evocative, like a line of terse, elegantly understated poetry. The exaggerated percussion and practiced sloppiness of the guitars and the barroom piano and that strange, keening, almost childlike voice made the sound seem at once ancient and otherworldly.

  The lights of the Old Man’s car appeared in the driveway. Paul sighed and lit another cigarette.

  “Go on,” he said. “Have a look at her.”

  Downstairs, my mother sat in the living room with her Bible open in her hands—presumably seeking some last-minute spiritual fortification. She stood and smoothed her skirt as the door opened. The Old Man entered, clutching a pea-green suitcase, followed by a small woman in a gray coat.

  “I never thought I’d be darkening this doorway again,” she muttered.

  The Old Man grunted in agreement. When she saw me standing at the bottom of the stairwell, she smiled.

  “Hello there,” she said.