My Beautiful Failure Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Chapter 1. She Was

  Chapter 2. New Directions

  Chapter 3. Last Winter: A Memory

  Chapter 4. Last Winter: What Happened

  Chapter 5. What Mom Did

  Chapter 6. Blanks

  Chapter 7. Private Beach

  Chapter 8. Research

  Chapter 9. Headquarters

  Chapter 10. Rule Number 4

  Chapter 11. In My Corner

  Chapter 12. Wrong With You

  Chapter 13. They are Your Friends

  Chapter 14. The Art World

  Chapter 15. Breakfast with Champions

  Chapter 16. Shift 1, November 4

  Chapter 17. Call 1

  Chapter 18. Splashdown

  Chapter 19. Call 2

  Chapter 20. Lowered Expectations

  Chapter 21. Call 12

  Chapter 22. A Dark Side

  Chapter 23. Picturing

  Chapter 24. Beacon

  Chapter 25. Changing Course

  Chapter 26. Last Winter: Red All Over

  Chapter 27. Shift 2, November 8

  Chapter 28. Call 1

  Chapter 29. Calls 2–4

  Chapter 30. Call 12

  Chapter 31. Burgers and Fries

  Chapter 32. Self-Evaluation

  Chapter 33. Plan to Fail

  Part 2

  Chapter 34. Crock or Van Gogh?

  Chapter 35. Last Winter: Night Terrors

  Chapter 36. Apprentice

  Chapter 37. Team Dumb

  Chapter 38. Shift 3, November 11. Call 18

  Chapter 39. Self-Evaluation

  Chapter 40. And I Found Myself Thinking about Her

  Chapter 41. L is for Laughter

  Chapter 42. Think Small

  Chapter 43. Shift 4, November 15. Call 24

  Chapter 44. Outside

  Chapter 45. Director

  Chapter 46. Soaring

  Chapter 47. Shift 5, November 18. Call 29

  Chapter 48. On Hold

  Chapter 49. Life Saver

  Chapter 50. Fractured

  Chapter 51. Muses

  Chapter 52. Meter

  Chapter 53. The G Word

  Chapter 54. Dislocation

  Chapter 55. Shift 6, November 22. Call 31

  Chapter 56. Score

  Chapter 57. Foothold

  Chapter 58. Mom

  Chapter 59. In Other Words

  Chapter 60. Last Winter: Useless

  Chapter 61. Shift 7, November 25. Call 19

  Chapter 62. Call 43

  Chapter 63. Refreshing

  Chapter 64. Call 61

  Chapter 65. Running

  Chapter 66. All-State

  Chapter 67. Last Winter: The Sharp Objects

  Chapter 68. Catalogue

  Part 3

  Chapter 69. Freckled

  Chapter 70. Lost Horizon

  Chapter 71. Last Winter: Treatment

  Chapter 72. Last Winter: Puzzle

  Chapter 73. Shift 8, November 29. Call 57

  Chapter 74. Original

  Chapter 75. Top Ten Reasons I Love Jenney

  Chapter 76. Shift 9, December 2. Call 42

  Chapter 77. Racing

  Part 4

  Chapter 78. Whether

  Chapter 79. Suspended

  Chapter 80. Watchful

  Chapter 81. Dawn

  Chapter 82. The Inevitable

  Chapter 83. Separate

  Chapter 84. One-Man Show

  Chapter 85. Watching Dad

  Chapter 86. She?

  Chapter 87. Shrinkette

  Chapter 88. Together and Apart

  Part 5

  Chapter 89. Shift 10, December 6. Call 45

  Chapter 90. Outside

  Chapter 91. Flying

  Chapter 92. Compass

  Chapter 93. The Ledge

  Chapter 94. Thirty

  Chapter 95. The Door Opens

  Chapter 96. News

  Chapter 97. Hawthorne Woman Found Dead

  Chapter 98. How Did You Help This Incoming?

  Chapter 99. What Could You Have Done Better?

  Chapter 100. What Questions Do You Have Before You Hear Our Decision?

  Chapter 101. Listener of the Year: Not

  Chapter 102. Blackout

  Chapter 103. In the Cemetery (My Painting)

  Chapter 104. Coda

  Chapter 105. Deadline

  Chapter 106. The Story of Emma P. Braumann

  Chapter 107. Macaroni Yet Again

  Chapter 108. Bearings

  Chapter 109. Improvements

  Chapter 110. And I Found Myself Thinking About Her

  Chapter 111. Below Sea Level

  About Janet Ruth Young

  To volunteers everywhere

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the people who agreed to be interviewed for this book: Lieutenant Kathy Auld and Officer Larry Ingersoll of the Gloucester Police Department, Captain Barry Aptt of the Gloucester Fire Department, Dan Quirk of Beauport Ambulance, Jen Shairs and David Allen, and the painters Ed Touchette and Elynn Kroger. Painter and teacher Susan Guest-McPhail shared her insights with me and reviewed the book for accuracy. Thanks also to my loyal reader/critiquers—Cassandra Oxley, Bridget Rawding, Jan Voogd, and Diane Young. Finally, my appreciation to the people at Atheneum, especially my editor, Ruta Rimas, for their help in shaping and presenting this story.

  Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

  —Winston Churchill

  PART 1

  1.

  she was

  She was a girl talking to me in the dark.

  Everybody knows what happened with my parents. Everybody I talk to when I call.

  “You can turn your life around,” I had told her. “Starting today, you can be free. You can do anything you want. Don’t you see that?”

  I’m down, but I’m not out. I’m a fighter. On my good days, few can defeat me.

  “I admire that about you,” I had told her.

  I remember every compliment you ever gave me. Especially when you said I was strong.

  “I have to go. Will you be okay?”

  I’ll handle it. I always do. Good night, sweet Hallmark prince.

  2.

  new directions

  Where is everyone?” Dad asked when he got home. It was October 25, and he had just come from his therapy appointment. Dad looked good these days, like someone who had a purpose. He shaved in the morning and dressed for work in a jacket and tie and Rockport loafers. He stood straighter and was no longer bony. His felty red hair was cut short, so that it verged on stylish, and he wore a sharp, arrowlike goatee. He worked as a draftsman at Liberty Fixtures, a company that made shelving for department stores. He looked a lot like me, if I were fifty and had accepted that I would always hate the job I needed.

  I was just in from a bike ride. Mom and Linda were making pizza and salad for supper. Dad dropped a bag marked ART SUPPLIES on the dining room table. You could hear the rush-hour traffic going by out back; the highway ran right behind our house.

  Drive past our house: the bright orange door, the brass knocker in the shape of a salamander (unnecessary because we have a functioning doorbell), our name and house number (Morrison 32) painted in black Gothic lettering on a white rock at the end of the driveway—that’s all Linda’s work. And Mom directed a museum. We might as well have a sign outside saying Artistic People Live Here. Right now Linda and Mom were laying the pepperoni slices in overlapping circles to look like a chrysanthemum. The art supplies could have been for almost anyone—anyone
but me.

  “I’m going to paint again,” Dad said. He looked quietly fierce, like a gladiator before the lion is let out.

  “Yippee!” Linda danced around, wriggling and elfish. She switched from teenager mode to little girl mode when she wanted to feel closer to my parents.

  Mom dried her hands and wrapped her arms around Dad’s middle.

  “That’s exciting, honey. But you’ve always painted.”

  “I mean get serious about painting. I want to be in the art world again. I put my art aside. Because of the needs of making a living and raising a family.”

  Excuse me for being born, I thought.

  “That’s a sad story,” Linda said. Linda’s style reworked droopy clothes that had belonged to an elderly person, which made her look younger than thirteen. She came up to Dad’s armpit, and she had a wormy way of sharing his space. Now she slipped her hand into Dad’s, and he held it in the air like it was a prize. I was as tall as he was, so he never looked at me, or my hand, that way.

  “I never stopped you,” Mom said. “I never told you you couldn’t paint.” Like Linda, Mom worked to separate herself from the run of humanity. She wore her black hair perfectly straight, wore dark lipstick, and owned only necklaces that were one of a kind. Usually they were made for her by someone noteworthy, such as a blind sculptor, a poetry-writing shepherd, or a male nun.

  “Of course not, sweetie,” Dad said. He crinkled his eyes at Mom, like he was winking to make her admit a lie.

  “Don’t forget, Bill, I fell in love with you over Inverted Horizon.”

  “I’m not forgetting.”

  Inverted Horizon was the ocean-on-top sunset painting of Dad’s that was shown by a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery in New York City when Mom was in graduate school and Dad was working at a paint store. He ended up selling that to a collector, as well as his vertical sunset painting Perpendicular Horizon. He once told me that they were the best things he had ever done—part technical exercise, part making fun of the sunset cliché, and part, he said, “Just something great to look at.”

  At the opening reception, Mom stood in front of Inverted Horizon for a long time. A tall guy in an army fatigue jacket and tuxedo pants came along and stood beside her, and without his saying anything, she knew he was the painter. Although I don’t like to view either of my parents as a love object, I always felt that was a good way to meet someone: nothing flashy or obvious, just a meeting of the minds and a sense of being immediately understood.

  “Well, for the record,” Mom continued, “I completely support your painting. As of today, as of right now, and for the future. Completely.”

  “I completely do too, Dad.” Linda scurried away from Dad and emptied the bag: tubes of paint, brushes, brush cleaner.

  “Why all of a sudden?” I asked, leaning on one end of the table. I didn’t touch Dad or his art supplies. I knew enough to see that he had about three hundred dollars’ worth.

  “Dr. Fritz and I talked about it. Art is my missing piece.” Dad pointed to the paints, then tapped a spot somewhere between his heart and his gut. “The missing piece of my emotional puzzle.”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I finally said.

  “Why not?” he asked. A distinctive painting of a chicken, done by someone at Mom’s museum, hung on one wall. Anytime people came for dinner, they commented on the chicken. Dad’s gaze drifted to it, then back to me. A year ago he fit into my clothes. Now he had put weight on, even had a little belly forming.

  “I would hate to see you get all excited and set yourself up . . .”

  “Set myself up?” Dad pressed. Was he challenging me to say it?

  “He’s fine now, Billy,” Mom said.

  Dad spoke at the same time. “I painted thirty years ago.”

  “I don’t want you to get too involved in it and then get upset. That’s all.”

  “What would upset me? And even so, why can’t I get upset?”

  Mom and Linda wouldn’t say it. But I didn’t want a repeat of last winter.

  3.

  last winter: a memory

  I’ve brought a new friend home after school. It’s only two thirty, and I see Dad’s car in the driveway. He must have come home early. I walk into the living room with my friend, expecting to introduce him to Dad. Gordon is so superb that I really want to impress him. He’s new in town, and though some of the other new kids are snobby, Gordon isn’t. He plays French horn and has played on the White House lawn with the All-State band. He seems confident and relaxed in every situation, and his hair seems exactly the same length every time I see him.

  I hear Dad moving at the other end of the house, and call his name. In the past he’s always had a story or joke for my friends. Sometimes he’s played an aria from his collection of opera CDs. But this time he doesn’t come.

  “Just a minute,” I tell Gordon. Finally Dad walks into the hall, but he doesn’t look at Gordon or me. He goes past us, toward the den, rubbing his hands and whistling tunelessly. Now he’s coming back again.

  “Dad, stop a minute. I want you to meet someone.”

  “Are you looking for something, Mr. Morrison?” Gordon asks. “Can I help you find it?”

  Gordon watches Dad with that game smile: relaxed, confident. But I begin to realize that Dad’s walking and his whistling are involuntary, that some kind of worry is driving Dad from one end of the house to the other.

  After a few minutes Gordy also realizes something is very wrong, something I haven’t told him because I didn’t know and I wouldn’t know how to explain it if I did. He walks back to the bus stop with his instrument case and his backpack, and that is the last time I bring a friend home.

  4.

  last winter: what happened

  Dad stopped sleeping, then eating, then working, then talking. I can tell you how long it lasted because I counted the days: 128. October to March.

  5.

  what mom did

  When Dad got better, Mom’s boss at the Brooksbie Museum resigned, and Mom practically moved in. Mom was director now, and she could ask the other workers, even the unpaid ones, to do more than they wanted, the way Pudge had asked her. She was all about the museum, dedicated to the history of the Massachusetts leather industry, with rarely a sentence about anything else. Her promotion became a shiny new scooter, her guilt about what happened to Dad the Mom-style sneakers that propel her forward. When I questioned her she said, “He’s fine now.” When I questioned her further she added, “Isn’t he?” and went back to reviewing slides for the museum.

  In the summer the four of us went camping in two tents beside a New Hampshire lake, and Mom and Dad told Linda and me, while we sealed cheese sandwiches in foil and dropped them into the fire, that the trip was to thank us for our help over the winter. After that we didn’t say “depression” anymore. We mostly said “last winter.”

  6.

  blanks

  The day after Dad decided to paint again, I watched from the front door as his car pulled up. He unloaded twelve canvases from the trunk. That must have set him back two hundred dollars.

  Linda and her friend Jodie burst impishly from the house. Jodie was pale and soft, with flimsy hair that was always shedding its ornaments. Jodie had the backbone of a ramen noodle. She did everything Linda did. I suppose if Linda ever died, Jodie wouldn’t be able to give the eulogy because she will have died too. Most of her time was spent doing crafts at our house: pounding brown leaves in the bathtub and calling them paper, or baking clay poops in the oven and calling them ceramics.

  Dad had the girls carry the canvases into the utility room right off the driveway—a (strangely) underutilized room that housed our furnace and some sports equipment, cleaning supplies, and tools.

  “What’s the plan?” Linda asked, stepping over some cross-country ski poles.

  “This is going to be my studio,” Dad said. He pulled the chain on a light above his head. “I’m going to actualize every major idea I’ve had since leaving art
school.”

  “A studio,” Jodie said. She stacked the canvases against one wall. “I love the sound of that.”

  “That seems ambitious, Dad.”

  “Billy. I didn’t see you there.” I had followed them in. I was wearing socks without shoes, and my feet made no sound.

  “‘Ambitious’ is no longer a dirty word in my life,” Dad said. “It was for a while. And I’m sorry if it is in yours. If so, that’s my fault, because I haven’t shown you what’s important.”

  Dad’s ancient suitcase, full of miscellaneous small hardware pieces, sat on an old table that had belonged to Grandma Pearl. I loved running my hands through the pieces when I was little. The churning metal made the same sound as beach stones being rolled back and forth by a wave.

  “I’m ambitious, Dad,” I said, rumpling the metal for old times’ sake. It wasn’t like Dad, the old Dad anyway, to be so serious and to speak in long paragraphs. I didn’t get why everything he said these days had to have such a point to it.

  He motioned to me to move the suitcase to the floor. “How are your grades? Are they ambitious grades?” he asked.

  Jodie made an O at Linda, as if they had caught me getting yelled at.

  “I told you, they’ll be up. I have high hopes for this year. I just need to get focused.” I hadn’t told my parents, but school was for me like Dad’s job was for him: the thing I needed but hated.

  Dad slid a stepstool from beneath the old table. He reached for a shelf set high into the wall and pulled out a heavy box. As the box came forward it tipped, but Dad caught it.

  “God, look at all this,” he said, taking out old sketches, textbooks, and photographs. A few framed paintings were in the stack as well. He brought down more boxes, and Linda and Jodie piled them near the cleared-out space by the canvases.

  “I want to see what’s in these,” Linda said.

  “We want to see everything,” Jodie added.

  “No.” Dad closed the boxes, and his voice got low. “I’ll go through these on my own. Lots of good memories here. You girls go back to what you were doing. Thank you.”