No One Ran to the Altar

By Don Trowden

"One son walked out the door never to return as another son walked in." So begins the second volume in this trilogy as we pick up this outlandish family saga in the 1970s, recounted through a series of interwoven chapters featuring the many colorful characters.

The story opens with a family tragedy as we see how far the Pendergasts have fallen from their days of fame and fortune. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn what became of Henry, Albert, Eve, Ned, Lucy, and the servants. We observe them facing an endless parade of obstacles, mostly overcome through humor and perseverance.

Much of the novel focuses on the Asperger’s brother, Albert. Albert is intellectually brilliant but emotionally stunted, which presents unique parenting challenges for his mother. With her death, Albert is cast off into the world on his own, until he reaches the point where his siblings must try and rescue him.

The once-idolized father Ned is a drunk living in squalor as he tears through a succession of women. As the narrative unfolds, Henry suspects he came back from the Second World War a rapist. Henry is tasked with caring for his blind father, which he does admirably despite the emotional toll of past betrayals. Henry has succeeded in raising his own normal family, breaking the multi-generational cycle of paternal neglect and abuse. He struggles to play along with the fictional version Ned has created of his life, stewing in resentment as he faces many new disturbing revelations.

The writing intertwines humor with pain throughout. In the end, a tragic betrayal reshapes everything that came before in leaving the reader stunned and eager for more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997913705

Book preview

Author

The Fall

One son walked out the door never to return as another son walked in. Albert, now sixty years old, had been threatening to kill himself for months. This was no ordinary call for attention; in fact, quite the opposite. Suicide was the logical solution to his greatest mathematical problem, the next unknown in a series of unknowns pursued over a lifetime of unacknowledged brilliance and isolation. Ned was slumped on the cat-piss sofa when Henry poked his head inside the house, where mice danced on store-brand butter in the fridge as the old man washed down their poops with Chardonnay from a high-stemmed plastic wine glass. Ned, now blind and ninety-one years old, possibly knew the mouse poops were there but didn’t care. Henry joked with his sister Lucy that mouse poops and cheap wine must be the key to longevity.

What a fall for the Pendergast family! This was what Henry always felt when visiting this house that had never been a home to him. Imagine if Ned’s dead father George could see this. The squalor, Ned hanging onto what little remained: rusty pliers from the sixties that had to be kept right next to the beer; piles of old Science magazines from the seventies stacked under the coffee table; fruit flies feasting on discarded mango skins; the bed sheets and clothes orange from iron in the well water (Ned too cheap to hook up to town water), and piles of pocket-sized notebooks containing his important daily logs and every lousy stock transaction stretching back to 1974. As if anyone would ever read them. But Ned did not live his life for others. He was the most self-centered person Henry knew: a wealthy only-child of divorce raised in neglect, a toxic mix for those kind souls now eagerly offering their help, including the many visiting nurses Ned had sent off in a huff after crossing the line. Henry had suggested not insulting those offering help (many refusing pay from the World War II hero) and this invariably quieted the old man for awhile.

Ned may have been ninety-one years old but other than his lack of eyesight, was pushing on strong, determinedly grinding his way up the same creaky stairs he had been ascending since he and Vicki built this small country home following their exile from Providence. (Yes, both the city and that alleged place above.) Ned never did much of anything with his life but inherited just enough money from subsequent wives to keep a roof over his head and his wine glass full, without ever having to actually work. Those other women were long gone but their children came sniffing around on occasion in disbelief that the old man was still ticking, holding up their inheritance. As is true for us all, but some more than others, Ned had created a survivable fiction that kept him going, although his fiction was more detached than most from any plausible reality. Of course, there were those times when the truth insisted on poking up its nasty little head, as Ned drowned himself in self-sorry and wine, the old man going on and on about what a fuck-up he had been, to which Henry could offer no spoken reply. Because that was indeed the truth. Henry was not sure which made him more uncomfortable: the retrospective delusions of grandeur or the maudlin fuck-up monologues. I need you to find a CEO to take my latest invention to market, which will change the way people heat their homes for generations to come. Henry would writhe in his seat, knowing the invention consisted of combinations of hazardous chemicals that would blow up the first person who turned on the prototype unit tucked away in a corner of the kitchen. I need to make sure no one steals my idea, need to find someone I can trust. Are you sure you can’t leave your job to spearhead this effort? Bah! What do you know about chemistry and science, wasting your time writing fiction.

Henry, now a novelist following years of quiet desperation working various marketing and public relations jobs at companies on their way out of business, knew enough to understand that truth is far superior to any fiction. But he needed to play along with the fiction version of his father to have any hope of surviving emotionally. Henry had built his own successful life because he had no other option, had seen plenty of negative role models to inform his own choices. His grandfather’s letter written back in 1969 following the country club fire was never understood by Ned, but Henry took it to heart, knowing everything does indeed come down to you. No one was there to guide him in his wild teenage years of drug and alcohol abuse, but the gods finally intervened in his early twenties and sent Laura, the love of his life, now married thirty years, clearly a Pendergast family record—along with his thirty-five years of employment, which shattered the previous family record by some thirty years. Laura and Henry rescued each other from their dysfunctional upbringings, benefited from therapy, and raised two remarkably well-adjusted children. Henry had been sober for years and worked as hard as he could to provide a modest home and way of life for his family, without any inheritance coming their way. He was always there for his own children: attended their sporting events, drove them to music and dance lessons, enjoyed the challenge of breaking the family cycle by raising happy children. Much of his professional life involved twisting words to keep company secrets under wraps; that is, until his first novel was published when he was forty-eight. The novel didn’t earn much money but an independent filmmaker bought the rights and turned it into a minor movie, which helped with book sales, so now Henry had just enough ongoing royalty income to quit his stressful job as Vice President of Marketing for a Maine tool-and-die manufacturer. He was now free to pursue writing full time. His children had sizeable college loans to repay so he and Laura sold their home and rented a small house on an island off the coast of Maine, both kids now employed and doing well.

When Henry’s phone showed two voicemails—one from his sister Lucy and another from an unknown number—he figured the old man had finally croaked. But no. Albert had marched off for the beach yesterday afternoon and shot himself in the skull, most likely in the wee hours of the night. No one could know for certain when he pulled the trigger. That brilliant brain splattered on the beach. Henry wondered if Albert cried when he pulled the trigger. He had never seen his brother cry. No tears for Albert. He was probably two genes away from being a serial killer: cold, aloof, alone, tyrannical, ridiculously brilliant and, at times, naively charming. As it turned out, the only one he was capable of killing was himself. What a waste. Albert had moved in with Ned three months ago with no other place to go. He had been carefully planning his exit for months, waiting for the right moment, which came when the irritable old man shouted upstairs to him: I didn’t bring you here to ignore me. Where’s my lunch? Apparently Albert had forgotten to make the Grand Duke the grilled cheese sandwich he had promised. His last known words were: Screw you, go find someone else to look after you.

Which meant Henry. Henry walked in and awkwardly hugged his father who sat slumped on the sofa. His father’s life had become like an extra innings baseball game, now well past midnight and unlikely to end anytime soon. Now that Albert had killed himself, Henry felt convinced there was no divine master plan, no God or ancestors pulling strings in Heaven, because his dearly departed mother Eve would never have allowed this to happen if that were the case. Before Albert’s suicide, Henry had thought possibly his dead mother was up there torturing Ned for sport, like a cat toying with a mouse, but that would mean torturing the rest of them as well, which she would not do. She had been generous and done her best to heal her three children in the final years of what was a vastly improved post-divorce life. Ned was clinging to his property and mother’s remaining small trust, which would pass to the children when he died, so allowing the old man to live and Albert to die destitute could only mean life was nothing but a series of random events.

The place looked a bit cleaner than when Henry had last been there. Albert had achieved a few minor victories in getting the old man to allow him to throw away some of the endless crap. Or possibly he had just gone ahead and done it, although that was dangerous as Ned could sense when treasures like used squares of tin foil and ancient issues of Barron’s went missing. Despite Albert’s final efforts, record albums were flung across the floor and the furniture still smelled of waterlogged smoke from the fire Ned’s last girlfriend, Florence, had set with a dropped cigarette after a night of drinking. Florence, or Bunny as she was known to close friends, was a high-society Kentucky gal, descended from a former president, and possessed an ugly drinking and temper problem, which gave the home the odd feel of a Tennessee Williams’ version of Grey Gardens. The fire destroyed George’s library of first editions and the last remaining old family portrait. Henry sobbed among the waterlogged ashes that somber November New England day, relieved his mother was not alive to witness all this waste. Eve’s last wishes back in 1995 were to make sure Albert didn’t end up on the streets, which is exactly what happened. Literally. Damned good thing she was long gone.

Next to the blind old man was his stack of newspapers and Wine Spectator magazines, which he used to steady himself when he stood to head off for a refill. Ned looked up at Henry through milky dead eyes and said: No one ran to the altar. Henry was struck by the profundity of this statement and knew immediately what his father meant. The old man might have led a mostly wasted life, squandering his inherited money on Caribbean vacations and a life of tennis and sunbathing at the beach club, but he was not without his poetic sensibilities. The altar was Albert’s life work. Upstairs in the study Henry would find math problems on a set of DVDs; were they gibberish or brilliance? Thirty volumes of organ concerti were carefully arranged in the briefcase Albert left behind. Henry would deal with these later.

Ned was wearing the same ball cap he never took off, even slept in sometimes: Sex at My Age is Less Like a Birthday and More Like Thanksgiving. Henry recalled steering the old man wearing this hat through the crowded Stop & Shop supermarket on a Saturday outing to fetch some jock-itch cream following Ned’s rehab stay, after he crashed the old Ford truck into a family of four. And then somehow the state of Rhode Island gave him another license! That jock itch proved as stubborn to go as Ned. Impatient mothers with young children and babies did not appreciate the old geezer in the inappropriate cap as he held up the checkout line, chatting up the teenage girl while fumbling for coins in his woolen hunting jacket’s breast pocket. Henry’s daughter Eliza was in tow for that trip to the supermarket and was unlikely to ever shop again with the old man, even though she did laugh afterwards in sympathetic amusement for her father’s predicament.

It would be two days before Lucy arrived from Nebraska with her new husband Larry, so Henry needed to handle the morning routine for the old man. He would rise before Ned and get his breakfast ready: peach mango tea with two heaping teaspoons of sugar and one capful of laxative. One slice of raisin bread, a whole mango (covered with fruit flies), blueberry yogurt, all placed carefully on the last remaining French Quimper plate from his grandmother’s complete set. Henry was an early riser so typically camped out in the first-floor bedroom (the same one Vicki and Bunny had died in years ago) awaiting the inevitable thumping upstairs of the Captain Bligh cane that guided Ned. The sound of that cane caused a knot to tighten in Henry’s gut. Just thinking about that sound hurt. His father’s gait was now permanently altered by the car accident, which had resulted in a hip replacement that left one leg an inch shorter than the other. His father’s solution was to have a special pair of platform shoes made, which gave him the appearance of a disco dude, a Billy White Shoes Johnson, as he lumbered around the house in high-heeled plastic shoes. The cramped kitchen was filthy and there was a small table where the two of them sat across from each other for the morning pill and eye-drop ordeal.

Methazolamide and anhydrase inhibitors, two drops in the right eye, one in the left—three times a day. Followed by eight morning pills of various sizes, each pill bottle placed in the exact location in front of him so he could locate it by touch. First he would shake the bottle to see if it sounded like the right one, wrestle off the cap, then swallow with a loud gulp of tea. A great theatrical scene followed with the daunting challenge of the large Vitamin D capsule, which he would insert into his mouth with eyes shut, head tilted back, chin locked in a look of determination as he adjusted the torpedo-pill into position. Anyone else would have thought he was choking, as this continued for over a minute, but then The Great Show would come to its grand finale when the pill would thankfully make its southbound passage, the old man’s dead milky eyes firing open with a startling cheer. Which meant they could move on to the next pill. Henry just sat there and watched silently, bored beyond belief. His father’s pace was excruciatingly slow and inflexible and made the visitor feel like a prisoner in a Sartre novel with no ending. He could not imagine his brother Albert doing this for one week let alone three months. Truly an outstanding achievement in the category of self-flagellation, especially for someone as self-centered as Albert. Henry wished he could watch those previous months on video. Sort of.

Following breakfast (which Henry never ate himself) and the opening pill ceremony, he would help the old man to his sofa seat, the TV remote placed on the coffee table always in the same position, and then four hours of bloviating from an endless parade of CNBC stock market analysts would carom throughout the house, volume set on high. One voice screamed louder than the next, then they would all yell at the same time, so all one could hear were staccato words and phrases: BOTTOM FALLING OUT, SHORT SELLING FLASH TRADING, INVERTED YIELD CURVE, FIXING OBAMACARE (spoken with extra venom), PLENTY OF UPSIDE LEFT IN ENERGY STOCKS, OIL COLLAPSE COMING SOON. On and on and on, everyone with a different opinion but each so confident that they knew the answer, as they shouted over each other. Henry, who suffered from migraines, was always popping extra pills when visiting his father.

Ned would then shave with his old Remington electric, a morning ritual that consumed another hour as Henry sat across gazing in silence. The old man seemed to enjoy the feel of the smooth metal on his sunken cheeks and the steady humming sound of the Remington, twisting his head this way and that as the shaver made small circles on his stubbled face. Henry would then read the newspaper headlines aloud, with special attention devoted to the all-important stock market charts. Henry with his smartphone had instant access to news so the newspaper headlines had all been heard on CNBC and viewed on Twitter hours before. But there was no point trying to explain all this to his father, who was most surely getting slaughtered in the stock market by high-speed algorithms written by modern-day bandits. All of this would get them to…lunch.

Henry was lost in thought. How could Albert truly be gone? They had grown apart as adults and had never been all that close, yet they had grown up together and shared the same parents. The same memories. The same bad match of sperm and egg. Henry realized he idolized his older brother in a way that was unhealthy. There would be no way of replacing Albert, just the memories remained. You lose something of yourself with the death of every loved one. Their death does more than simply remind you of your own mortality. They take a piece of you with them, leaving you less complete than you were. These holes can never be filled. They will scab over but the survivors are never the same. Every lost love adds a new hole to our dissembling selves.

Ned was napping so Henry quietly escaped and marched two miles to the beach to get away and clear his mind. He sat on a wall overlooking the Atlantic and started sobbing. They would spread his brother’s ashes out there somewhere as soon as they got them back from the crematorium and Lucy arrived. But before that, they needed to find a crematorium to pick up the body from Providence, a chore that could wait until tomorrow. The thought of his brother up there in some morgue, face blown off, was just too much. Henry was overwhelmed by emotion and cried uncontrollably for the first time since getting the tragic news, the few passersby looking concerned but leaving him alone. Henry struggled to compose himself but the flood of grief was too much. After a few minutes, he managed to catch his breath and gather his wits, feeling slightly better, just in time to answer his ringing phone. Henry saw that it was his father calling, that familiar feeling of dread reemerging.

Hey, Dad, what’s up? he struggled to sound normal.

Do you know where Lucy hid my tools? They were on the counter beside the fridge but I’ll be damned if I can find anything around here since she and Larry visited last spring.

Henry’s ocular migraine throbbed behind his right eye-socket. Dad, why would you need tools? After all, the old man was ninety-one years old, blind, and living alone.

You never know when you’ll need a hammer!

"You make it sound like they might have actually stolen your tools."

"Well, there was some good stuff in there and Larry is a carpenter."

Henry recalled the last time he had seen the old man’s tool box. A rusty hammer from 1974; pliers from 1967; a can of solidified two-speed chainsaw oil from 1980-something; a tire iron from prehistoric man, and an open package of dust masks with mouse poops sprinkled about.

C’mon, Dad. Lucy and Larry did a ton of work for you when they were here and you wouldn’t even buy their food. I sincerely doubt they stole your tools.

Prolonged silence. He dared to forge ahead.

Listen, I can’t see why you need a hammer. I’ll be back in an hour and can help look for it then. They probably moved the tools onto the porch.

After Henry hung up, he texted Lucy:

wtf? the old man is looking for his tools, where did you move them?

lol. I put them under the dining room table so he wouldn’t trip over them. Why does he need tools?

You know. The old man likes to play with his hammer. Sorry.

HA!

Considering Lucy had accused her father of raping her as a young girl, this exchange was insensitive of Henry. Her accusation surfaced in therapy, back when she was in high school and battling anorexia. Henry chose to believe her when no one else in the family would, but he still suspected it could be Freudian fantasy run amok. It seemed better to support her given so many of her issues stemmed from low self-esteem, damage mostly done by their mother. Henry could be sympathetic because he was damaged, too. He would not dismiss the rape claim, especially when during the last week of his mother’s life she had shared stories of the old man’s violence with guns in the house after they were married. He had come back from the Second World War shell-shocked. Eve had been terrified of him and also afraid for baby Albert. But rape his daughter?

Henry returned around three o’clock that afternoon and sat across from his father in silence, watching the old man doze in front of the television. He noticed that the wine glass was empty so started to take it to the kitchen to wash when a hand reached up from beyond the grave and grabbed his arm. Would you get me a refill, pretty, pretty please? His father’s booze sensors detected the glass being removed. Henry sighed, refilled the glass and sat down with nothing to say. Ned broke the silence.

Maybe you should go see if you can get Albert’s car back from the pound.

Henry jumped from his seat, eager to get out of the house again. He would have to walk to the address so he could drive Albert’s car home. He walked down the hill and hitched a ride to the address where Albert’s Toyota Echo had been towed from the beach. The information on the form the police had provided after delivering the news to Ned that there had been an incident, indicated the car had been taken to Sunnyside Towing in Narragansett. Henry always felt discombobulated when visiting his father in Rhode Island. Maine was his home, where he had his own wonderful normal family. Everything about Rhode Island brought back painful memories: the old home in Providence hurriedly sold at a loss after the divorce and now worth a fortune; his stepmother Vicki who would not allow him into the house during his boarding school years; and now his brother’s suicide on one of Henry’s favorite childhood beaches. He just wanted to get as much done as possible and get out of there and back home to Maine, which he planned to do once Lucy and Larry arrived from the Midwest. Henry thanked the young surfer dudes who gave him a ride in their van and walked across the street into an old junk yard that was apparently the correct location. There was no number or sign that Henry could see on the building. A chained pit-bull was foaming at the mouth as Henry searched for a way inside the old warehouse. He knocked on an industrial door around back but no one answered. He walked to the chain-link fence along the side where he now saw his brother’s car parked. It was beginning to drizzle and Henry had not brought a raincoat, so he jogged around the old building looking for another way in. On the other side he found a dented metal door propped open. Henry called out. No response. The garage was littered with manila folders, automotive parts, and motorcycle calendars displaying women in various angles of bawdy repose. Henry meandered warily toward a noise out back and found a middle-aged man glued to Fox News coverage of the missing Malaysian airliner.

Excuse me, I’m here to pick up my brother’s car.

The man had slicked-back hair and was wearing a grease-covered shirt with his name stitched over the pocket: Al. He looked over his shoulder, annoyed by this unwanted intrusion.

"Can you believe the incompetence of these government dickwads? A giant fuckin’ aircraft just goes