The Great Wide Open
Contents
About the Author
Also by Douglas Kennedy
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART TWO
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
PART THREE
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Copyright
About the Author
Douglas Kennedy’s previous twelve novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship and The Moment. He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. The Big Picture was filmed with Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve; The Woman in the Fifth with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas.
His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2007 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2009 the inaugural Grand Prix de Figaro. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine and New York.
ALSO BY DOUGLAS KENNEDY
Fiction
The Dead Heart
The Big Picture
The Job
The Pursuit of Happiness
A Special Relationship
State of the Union
Temptation
The Woman in the Fifth
Leaving the World
The Moment
Five Days
The Heat of Betrayal
Non-fiction
Beyond the Pyramids
In God’s Country
Chasing Mammon
For the ever-amazing Amelia Kennedy
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
– André Malraux
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.
Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
– Dorianne Laux, ‘Antilamentation’
All families are secret societies. Realms of intrigue and internal warfare, governed by their own rules, regulations, boundaries, frontiers. Rules which often make no sense to those outside its borders. We prize the family more than any other communal unit because it is the essential cornerstone of social order. When the external world turns harsh and unforgiving – when outsiders who have intersected with our lives disappoint and even maim us – the family is supposed to be the shelter toward which we are magnetically pulled. The repository of comfort and joy.
Given how we venerate this essential primitive construct, idealize its potentiality, crave it to be the one place to which we can turn for the possibility of unconditional love, is it any surprise that the actual reality of ‘family’ is usually such a destabilizing one? All the flaws in the glass of the human condition are refracted one-hundred-fold within our next of kin. Because family is the place where all our grievances with the world begin. Because family is often internecine. Because family frequently becomes a source of confinement and ever-magnifying resentments. To grow up in a family is to discover that everyone has a talent for the surreptitious; that, for all the talk about being among the people who know you best, and who will always watch your back, you are all harboring secrets.
I reread that paragraph twice over, the words ricocheting around my psyche like some out of control pinball, a ding-dong cascade of distressing truths. I lit up another cigarette – my eighth of the day so far, and it was only 3.20 p.m. I crumpled the now-empty packet on my desk, buzzed my assistant Cheryl and asked her to run downstairs to the machine in the lobby and pick me up another pack of Viceroys, as I’d be working late on this manuscript tonight. Last night had been a particularly excessive one on the nicotine front, owing to my distress that we’d re-elected our B-movie actor president for a second term. Staggering in late from a party I’d been invited to in some Gilded Age townhouse off Gramercy Park, I discovered, among the many messages on my answering machine, one from C.C. Fowler. He’s the chairman of the publishing house where I ply my trade. And he sounded like he’d had four cocktails too many as he informed me:
Hello, Alice. A quick thought: we need a fast book on Reagan as political game-changer – because he is now about to become, for better or worse, the most influential president since FDR. Can we discuss this over lunch Thursday?
C.C. always did have his eye on the marketplace. But I couldn’t help but think: who would want to buy a book on a president whom we’d voted back into power with such a thundering second mandate? He won forty-nine of the fifty states last night, letting it be known: his brand of patriotic sentimentality and making money is everything spiel plays big time in mid-eighties America. I hit the button on my phone that put me in immediate contact with Cheryl, telling her to phone C.C.’s assistant and suggest lunch this Friday – ‘as you know I will be leaving early Thursday’.
Cheryl – being someone I could totally trust (and believe me, in a publishing house, someone who keeps a secret is as rare as a happy alcoholic) – already knew why I had to duck out of work at 1 p.m. tomorrow: I was visiting my brother in prison. The fact that he was locked up in a federal facility an hour north of Manhattan was hardly a state secret. His arrest and trial had been major news everywhere.
I’d been paying him weekly visits ever since his incarceration a month or so ago. I got a letter a few days before the election, asking if I might be able to get up to the prison this week as ‘I really need to see you and talk something through’. He was vague about what topic this ‘something’ happened to be, alluding to the fact that he’d been thinking through so much. ‘Soul assessing’ was the curious term he used. His recent letters to me were now peppered with the redemptive language of the newly converted. Maybe I’m being too harsh here. Maybe I am still getting my head around the idea of My Brother the Felon. Maybe his newfound conscience since being sent up the river smacked of convenience … especially since finding God in the joint strikes me as one of those de rigueur outcomes of felonious American life.
Still, he is my brother. And though our world views are seismically disparate ones – how can a family produce, when it comes to basic sense and sensibility, such radically different children? – my stubborn streak of loyalty has made me stick by him. Especially as familial fealty usually comes with a big subtext of guilt.
I called the prison and put my name down on the visitors’ list for Thursday at 4.30 p.m. As before, the official I was speaking to reminded me to bring some form of photo ID and warned me that I could, at the discretion of the prison, be body-searched – and he read me, as before, the list of proscribed items (guns
, knives, prescription and illegal drugs, pornography, and that dangerous substance known as chewing gum). When asked by the official if I understood what was not permitted I told him:
‘It’s my fifth visit, sir. I always play by the rules.’
‘I don’t care if it’s your twenty-fifth visit. We always have to read you this list. Are we clear about that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘See you Thursday, Miss Burns.’
On the train north through the suburban somnolence of New Jersey I continued work on the manuscript I’d just bought from a Harvard Med School professor and psychoanalyst on Families and Guilt. It’s a subject which just about everyone sentient can relate to; a book that might just break wide on the bestseller lists if I can curb Dr Gordon Gilchrist’s tendencies to veer into hyper-shrink vocabulary. Transference is something we can relate to – especially when it comes to all the fun stuff bequeathed to us by dear old Mom and Dad. But start hitting the reader over the head with cathexis/decathexis, or Signorelli parapraxis, or the wonderfully labyrinthine realm of counterphobic attitude, and you have them feeling intellectually cowed and overwhelmed by terminology that can only be understood with an Oxford English Dictionary to hand. I’ve spoken to Gordon about this – and how, if he can scale back his cerebral gymnastics, he has a good shot at being next season’s must-read So You Think You’ve Got Problems? tome. But even though my red pen was boxing out big chunks of far-too-technical text, I felt a sharp stab of objective identification when I happened upon the paragraph that started:
All families are secret societies. Realms of intrigue and internal warfare, governed by their own rules, regulations, boundaries, frontiers. Rules which often make no sense to those outside its borders.
Was my brother now musing on the secrets that had so underscored our family life and helped create the culture of secrecy that eventually landed him in jail? We are not just the sum total of everything that has happened to us, but also a testament to the way we have interpreted all that has crossed our path. The music of chance intersecting with the maddening complexities of choice – and how, in the wake of bad judgment and self-sabotage, we so often rewrite the scenario to create one that we can live with.
‘Prisoner’s name and number?’
The distended voice crackling through a small speaker mounted in Plexiglas at the entrance to the federal correctional institution in Otisville, New York. A brick gate, lightly barbed-wired. Concrete walls. A hint of low-lying dormitory buildings within. Beyond these features – and the sign informing you that, verily, this was a prison – there was little very oppressive about the look of the place. Bar the fact that you were incarcerated there for as long as the criminal justice system had decreed you deserved to serve your debt to society.
I spoke his name. I also had a little notebook open and ready in my left hand, and read out the number he’d been assigned when first processed through here: ‘5007943NYS34.’
‘Relation to the prisoner?’ the voice crackled back.
‘Sister.’
Moments later there was a percussive, telltale click and the heavily reinforced door opened. I entered and walked down a short open-air corridor: no roof, the gray November sky above clearly visible, two seven-foot-high breeze-block walls keeping you on the straight and narrow route toward a second security checkpoint. Here I had to show identification, and wait as all the contents of my bags were emptied out and inspected. I also had to submit to a pat-down by a woman officer. Once it was determined that I wasn’t armed and dangerous, that the two bags of Oreos my brother had asked me to bring were, indeed, those honest, humble schoolroom favorites, and there were no hidden razor blades in the jars of peanut butter also accompanying me, I was directed into a waiting room. A bleak place, painted state-hospital green, with gray plastic chairs, fluorescent tube lighting, cracked ceiling tiles, scuffed linoleum. Even though this was one of many recent pilgrimages up here I still found the place unsettling. A prison is a prison – even if your brother has been offered the opportunity of piano or Spanish lessons as part of the rehabilitative process.
‘Alice Burns?’
My name was being called – by a compact Hispanic gentleman in a blue prison officer uniform just a tad too large for him. I stood up. Another further inspection of my bags, then I was ushered into a small room, fitted with a desk and two upright steel chairs. How I wanted a cigarette right now. How two or so Viceroys during the fifty minutes I’d be allotted with my brother would make the agony of it all a little more manageable.
I sat down in one of the hard chairs, awaiting the arrival of Prisoner Number 5007943NYS34, my eyes slammed shut for a moment’s respite from such institutional creepiness.
‘Hey there, sis.’
My eyes snapped open. My brother was in front of me, looking around three pounds lighter than when I’d seen him last week. I stood up. We exchanged an awkward hug, as I couldn’t match the enthusiasm with which he gathered me up in his arms, and embraced me as if he was passing on some spiritual life force.
‘That’s quite some hug,’ I said.
‘Pastor Willie told me I’m the biggest hugger he’s ever encountered.’
‘And I’m sure Pastor Willie knows a thing or two about forgiving hugs.’
‘You going ironic on me, sis?’
‘Seems that way. How’d you lose the weight?’
‘Exercise. Better diet. Prayer.’
‘Prayer can make you shed pounds?’
‘If you start looking on high-calorie stuff as the Devil’s temptation …’
I hoisted the bag of goodies that I had brought him.
‘Then why did you request all this highly un-nutritious junk food?’
‘A little treat every day is no bad thing.’
‘Whereas eating ten Oreos in a row is the work of Satan?’
‘You’re getting that tone again.’
‘Didn’t sleep much last night – and I find this all rather stressful.’
‘As you should – given how badly I behaved. I ruined many lives. I brought shame down on us all.’
I held up my hand, like a cop directing traffic.
‘You’ve apologized enough to me.’
‘Pastor Willie says you can never apologize enough for past sins; that the only way you can redeem yourself is by walking the walk of righteousness and atoning for the past.’
‘A lengthy prison stretch strikes me as plenty of atonement. Did you vote on Tuesday?’
‘Can’t. One of the many downsides of being a prisoner: you lose the right to vote. You lose the right to do just about everything.’
He started pacing up and down this narrow room – that old anxious habit of his which he repressed for years until he was marched away in handcuffs and forced to do the perp walk in front of the assembled media. Seeing him now I understood a painful truth: despite all this born-again talk of newly acquired inner harmony and redemption, despite putting a brave face on the sentence imposed on him, despite being assured by his lawyer that he would be out in three years, my poor brother was still coming asunder inside these low-security walls. Putting myself in his path I took hold of his two hands and led him back to his chair as he intoned:
‘I’m so sorry, so sorry, so … ’
That was another side effect of his out-of-body stress: his need to repeat, over and over, the same phrase. I gripped his hands tightly.
‘Stop apologizing. What’s done is done. And I am glad to hear you angry.’
‘But Pastor Willie tells me anger is toxic. And until I practice forgiveness … ’
‘Pastor Willie has not lost everything. Pastor Willie is not locked up in a prison. Pastor Willie wasn’t made a public example of by a district attorney on the political make. What the fuck does that evangelical know about your anger?’
‘Pastor Willie told me last week, during our private prayer session, that you are a shining example of “sisterly solidarity”.’
‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t me
ntion the unfortunately named Pastor Willie again. It’s natural that I’m here for you.’
‘Would that my brother had been so charitable.’
His brother. My other brother. Now in hiding, a morass of guilt and stubborn moral superiority. Incommunicado to us.
‘He’s not a happy guy about all of this,’ I said.
‘Bless you for sticking by me, and not writing me off as scum as he did.’
‘You’re hardly scum,’ I said.
‘Mom said the same thing to me last week. You guys still not talking?’
‘I haven’t slammed the door, but she is still blaming me … ’
‘I’ve told her to stop doing that. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘In her eyes it’s always my fault. I was always the daughter she never wanted, as she told me on three too-many occasions.’
‘We all need a great deal of healing.’
‘Oh please … ’
‘I know you think this is all touchy-feely. It’s time we start becoming honest with each other.’
‘That must have gone down well with Mom. Imagine if you’d said that to Dad … ’
A long silence ensued after my comment. My brother stared at the floor, his distress evident. Eventually he reached over for a bag of Oreos, tore open the top, and grabbed three of the cookies, wolfing them down quickly.
‘I’ve wanted to talk about Dad with you for a while,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry I brought him up.’
‘Never be sorry about bringing up Dad. But … ’
He hesitated for a moment before saying:
‘I now need to discuss with you some truth I’ve never told you before.’
‘I’m not sure I want any truth this afternoon.’
‘But this is something that needs to come out.’
‘Why now?’
‘I have to share it.’
‘I hear the voice of Pastor Willie behind this need to share … ’
‘He did tell me that until I confessed this transgression –’
‘“Transgression” is a big, loaded word.’
‘Will you hear me out, please ?’
Silence. A very long silence. My brother kept his back to me, his gaze fixed on the wall. Finally he started to speak. And when, almost a half-hour later, he finished recounting his tale I found myself in vertiginous territory; the ground beneath my feet brittle, about to give way.