Questions

The most irksome thing about unanswered questions is that they tend to remain unanswered, particularly when only one side who was party to the events that gave rise to the questions is still around. My father always said that you can not live in the past, that you can not let your present be dominated by the dead hand of what was, lest you wind up sacrificing your future over events that can't be changed. My greatest failing, perhaps, is that I never really took those words to heart, and perhaps I have mortgaged what future I had to things that are forever unalterable. But there are some things that also demand answers, though the time to obtain them is short and, once the window closes, lost.

I remember a conversation I once had with my mother, during the summer before my Senior year in high school. Not too surprisingly, we had once again been more-or-less at each other's throats, locked in a deadly embrace who's sole purpose, it seems, was to see who could do the most damage to the other. Call it the devolution of an American family, that kind of thing had been going on for years, ever since my father died, the kind of in-fighting that can only happen among families and that put the fun in dysfunction.

This particular time, however, there was a twist, for it was at least a refereed fight. One of my father's old patients and something of a family friend, an ex-Naval officer turned family therapist, was on hand to at least try and limit the amount of psychic blood spilled. Call that one a case of caveat emptor: at one point, I remember being encouraged to "focus" my "rage" by beating the snot out of a sofa cushion, which I thought was the stupidest damned thing I'd ever heard. Always beware of the former psych patient turned practitioner.

From my admittedly biased memory - and how could it be otherwise? - the whole point of that conversation was how I just didn't measure up to my mother's expectations, of what a great disappointment I was to her. Which, frankly, confused me, because I didn't know then and still to this day don't really know what else I could have done. I mean, I was a good student in school, my lowest grade being a B+. I had extra-curriculars out my ass, and I played every sport I could as well. I had an after-school job, the same one I'd had for several years, and while I'll be the first to admit that my friends and I drank too much and did drugs - this was the 1970s, remember - it was out of sight, out of mind. Hell, at least I didn't do it in my house, like my brother did, nor did I try to grow, shall we say, illicit plants in my bedroom, again like my brother did. But, apparently, none of that was good enough for my mother, nor was I. What, exactly, would have been good enough remained conveniently elusive, but I do clearly remember her answer to a rather pointed question our friend asked: "I love him, but I don't like him."

Sometimes, I wonder if, somehow, she didn't blame me for what happened to my father. I was, after all, the one who found his body. Perhaps, in her own grief and loss, she had concluded that if I hadn't done that, he wouldn't have died. Or, maybe, she believed that if only I had gotten up earlier that morning, he could have been saved. Either way, I'll never know, because I never asked those questions and now it's too late, though they're still there, half-remembered, nagging at the back of my mind.

Of course, it's more likely that I had become the convenient target for her own guilt over that day, and the days that came after. Yes, I found my father's body, but I was also the one who had to call the paramedics, who had to call the school and explain why I wasn't going to be there that day, who had to start calling my parents' friends to let them know. I remember waking my mother up and, after she saw the body, her going into a kind of psychic fugue, collapsing into the safety of an unresponsive numbness born of denial.

It took her years to come out of that, and in some ways I don't believe she ever did. I can understand that, but it doesn't erase the memories of all those nights when the screaming would stop and she would retreat into a catatonic shell, unaware of anything as she stared blindly at the ceiling. Yet how often can an adolescent be expected to pick up the pieces, put the psyche back together, at least for a little while, and then carry on as if everything were normal? No child should ever be asked to do that, should be forced to grow from boy to man in the space of an hour. In what world is it normal that a teenager should inherit the mantle of the parent? It wasn't surprising that I drank and took drugs in those days; what was surprising is that I just didn't crawl up into a bottle until it killed me.

In those days, I remember my mother telling me that it just wasn't fair that everyone expected her to be the strong one, to hold things together in the face of my father's loss. About how it just wasn't fair that her friends offered words of sympathy and support to her face while, as she put it, all the time thinking to themselves "Better her than me." Which, to me, was a shocking revelation; perhaps I should know better, but I always thought better of my friends than that. But she was right in that someone had to be strong, or at least strong enough to give the appearance of "holding things together." Yet in abdicating that to her own grief, by default that role fell onto me, putting my own grief into abeyance to haunt me later.

And still I don't know just what it was I could have done at that time to gain her approval. Maybe nothing, maybe something, again maybe I was just the convenient target for her own guilt. Just not being my brother, I thought, would have been a good start, but in that it seems I was mistaken. My mother had a marvellous ability to ignore things that happened within the family, just as long as those things didn't become "public." Something about not airing the dirty laundry, as I recall . . .

It really is amazing just how dysfunctional a family can be when both of the parents are psychologists. Exactly when my brother turned on me is somewhat fuzzy, but it seems to me that it was about when I was six, which would have made him twelve. By the accounts of my parents, when I was an infant, my brother was a devoted sibling. He would, it seems, always want to play with me, carry me around; somewhere, I have photos from an old photo booth of my brother holding me in his arms, a look of absolute pride on his face.

Which at some point turned into something else, something ugly, something that proper families just didn't talk about. Yet . . . I have memories, too many memories, of him sneaking into my room at night when my parents were out, of punches to the stomach and to the back of the head. Memories of being pinned to the floor with a pillow over my face or his hands locked around my throat, of not being able to breathe, as he whispered in my ear that he could kill me, should kill me, and that our parents would never notice I was gone, that they would thank him for doing it. Memories of my head being slammed into the wall over and over, until all I could see were flashes of electric-white light, and if I dared to tell, the next nocturnal visit would be the worse for it.

It's a terrible thing to live in fear, to dread the coming of the night while pretending by day that nothing is wrong, like having an itch that you just can't scratch. To know that when your parents are gone, you are at the whim of someone else's inadequacies, that the protection of your parents is nothing but a lie, dependent on their own blindness to what is happening in front of them.

Oh, they knew something was going on, though their appreciation of its extent remains, and will forever remain, open to question. "Sibling rivalry" is what they called it, if that term can truly be stretched to fit the horrors by brother chose to visit upon me. I was a chubby child - hell, I'm a chubby man, now - but I can remember many a night when my brother would come to choke me, to taunt me that I was so fat I was going to die of a heart attack. To the point that, one night when I was nine or ten, I was out having dinner with my father and I truly thought that I was having a heart attack. And when my father asked what was wrong, I had a fit of stupidity and told him, the result of which was a near-concussion a few nights later when my brother came to play handball with my head.

My father, I think, was just incapable of really understanding what was going on. He was the closest thing to a saint that I have ever encountered, and he was devoted to his sons. He could, in truth, just not conceive of the idea that his sons would act that way towards one another. In the end, my father believed in reason, and that he could in fact reason with the unreasonable. He may not have appreciated the extent, but I know he talked to my brother about his behaviour, and that he believed his explicit disapproval would succeed in changing my brother's behaviour. My father attempted to reason, and I suffered the consequences. I remember one day, when I was twelve, after one of their talks, my brother came into my room and, after throwing me into a wall, he destroyed every toy and plastic model I had, poured bleach into my fishtank and reduced my acoustic quitar to firewood, just because he could.

I'm not sure exactly what my father said to him, but it seems that it somehow became my responsibility to mend the proverbial fences. I do have memories of my father talking to me about what was going on, the words always tinged with a profound sadness and the weariness of the grave. "I won't be here forever" and "All I want is for my sons to get along," as if I could change things, as if I were somehow responsible for what my brother was doing to me. Which wasn't what my father meant to say, and I think he would have been appalled by that interpretation, but that message was there nonetheless. By uttering those words, he charged me with a duty, and I failed him in that. God forgives, I do not, and perhaps I am a lesser man because of that.

My mother, on the other hand . . . I've always wondered just how aware of what was going on she was. It goes back to that whole not airing dirty laundry in public thing. But then there came a day when my brother went just a bit too far, lost too much control, and I went to school with a black eye and a split, swollen lip. Oh, yes, the proverbial cat was well and truly out of the bag then, and something had to be done if only for appearance's sake.

Her answer was to throw my brother out of the house. I remember her words well: "I don't care if he winds up living at the YMCA, but he won't be living here." My father, of course, could not abide the thought of one of his sons, no matter what they had done, living as a vagabond, so his answer was to rent an apartment a few blocks from our house for my brother and him. My brother may have beaten me into a bloody pulp, but may father would not abandon him. Again, call it the devolution of an American family.

I remember the Sunday when my father and brother moved out of the house. I remember them loading the truck up with their possessions, and my father looking at me. "Last weekend, everything was normal," he said to me, a look of infinite sadness on his face and infinite weariness in his voice. And there I stood, unable to say anything in return, for his idea of normal had been my nightmare for years, culminating in that event. Words spoken in remorse and disbelief, and they struck me as an accusation, as if all of it were, indeed, my fault. Twelve years old going on eternity, I had destroyed my family and the only words of comfort anyone could come up with was my mother telling me "At least this way, your father will have to see you more."

And perhaps that was why, years later, she could say "I love him, but I don't like him." Our family life was far from Mayberry RFD, but appearances can be a fine substitute for ugly reality. Resentment is a funny thing, and it would seem I was the focal point for more than my fair share of that. If, perhaps, I could have only done things differently, been a better son . . . but what can a child do other than what a child does? I wish I could forgive my brother, as I wish I could have lived up to the expectations of my parents. But as much as I have tried to be a good man - and whether I have succeeded in that or not is not for me to judge - as uncertain as I remain of just how much my parents really knew of what was happening, I am just as certain that there are some lines that should not be crossed, that there are some things that just can not be forgiven. We remember Caesar crossing the Rubicon precisely because it was such an unforgiveable event.

So in the end, all that remains are the questions, unanswerable, lost to time and fate. And, really, who is to say that is truly a bad thing? Some answers come at too high a price, some questions just aren't worth the asking. Better the possibility than the reality, for in the absence of the definite all is possible, while reality merely is. Still, the voices of the past whisper in the darkness, asking that which can't be answered.