Feel This

Jack or Margo would catch the overnight train, settle the hotel bill, get Daddy dressed and into a cab, then head back to Grand Central and the next train to Montreal. Once Jack made the cab stop at Brooks Brothers while he ran in and bought a summer suit. Margo always brought us back cartons of Chesterfields — we liked American cigarettes. Neither of them ever said a word about how Daddy had acted in New York or on the train, or whether he tried to explain his behaviour or apologize.

Jack did love to tease, and if he happened to overhear Daddy laying down the law to my sisters and me over curfews or clothes or deportment, Jack might start whistling “The Sidewalks of New York.” Or even sit down at the piano and play “Give My Regards to Broadway.” It was cruel, but Daddy could be cruel, too. We couldn’t stop laughing.

I imagined Daddy feeling disgust and disgrace at the start of each trip north, but sitting up straighter and straighter as the train ran up over the Green Mountains and along the shore of Lake Champlain. By the time it stopped for customs, I pictured Daddy as nearly himself again: watchful, wry; a man of few words, most of them sharp. Between the border and Windsor Station, I could see him tipping the Pullman porter a dollar to shine his shoes and press his suit, so that when they pulled in at Windsor Station Daddy would be thoroughly himself again, tipping redcaps, using his walking stick to summon a cab. He certainly did not appear a hopeless drunkard climbing out of the cab in front of No. 10, leaving his suitcase for Jack or the maid to handle, striding up the walk, with the leather soles of his handmade shoes crackling on the flagstones. He would disappear into his study until late supper was served, when he’d sit at the head of the table and order one of us to say grace.

While we were having coffee, the maid brought in Margo’s three-year-old, Tess, and she looked very sweet sitting on her Uncle Jack’s knee — maybe she thought he was her daddy. After the maid had taken Tess off to bed, Mother and Daddy retired, and the five of us trooped downstairs to our old playroom in the basement, which Jack and Margo had re decorated as a Parisian bistro, complete with zinc bar, café tables, and Toulouse-Lautrec prints.

Jack was the sort of string bean who preferred stretching out on the floor to sitting in a chair. He lay with an elbow crooked under his head, we sat at one of the café tables, and Margo went behind the bar to fix manhattans. Jack said he’d have only a glass of ginger ale. I only realized how thin he was when I saw him stretched out like that. Underneath the mahogany tan, his face was parched, the skin drawn tight on his forehead. I could see veins on his temples, like worms.

Margo was cracking ice in the bucket. “So how did you rate a plane ride home?”

My brother began unbuttoning his shirt. He touched a spot just under his rib cage, on the left side. “Feel this.”

No one else made a move, so after a moment I knelt down. He took my fingers and guided me. I could feel a hardness underneath the skin, and the edge of something round and the size of grapefruit.

Margo had kicked off her shoes, and her feet in nylons made whispering, brushing sounds as she came toward us. Jack took her fingers.
“What is it?” Frankie said.

“See for yourself,” Jack said.