It was still morning. He washed his face and went downstairs. The two Algerian brothers who ran the hotel nodded to him. “Bonjour!” They seemed somehow honored to have him as a guest. Was it his age? He went to the corner café and sat outside at a small table. The street had been washed and smelled damp and warm. The smell stirred some ancient memory or association with springtime: exhilaration, perhaps abandon. For a moment he was thrilled, and the feeling rose through him to his head, and he felt delightfully free.
He carried with him a new translation of Madame Bovary. He had always wanted to read Flaubert’s novel in France. He opened it at his bookmark and drank tea as he read about Charles and Emma. They talked first of the patient, then of the weather, of the periods of bitter cold, of the wolves that roamed the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not find it much fun living in the country, especially now that she was almost solely responsible for running the farm. As the room was chilly she shivered as she ate, revealing her rather full lips that she tended to nibble when she was not speaking.
Tom took the Métro to the Arc de Triomphe. He stood a long time looking at the great monument. Then he turned and looked across the town and across the river to the Eiffel Tower. It was more odd and graceful and wonderful than he’d imagined it would be. He spent the rest of the day walking slowly down the Champs-Élysées and through the Tuileries and thinking about Brooks. All afternoon on the Fourth he had thought about Brooks. As he had watched his second son crossing back and forth in his motorboat, Tom had thought about their many battles over the years, about the many promises Brooks had made and broken, about the fresh starts, the new deals, the last chances, about how Brooks had never changed even a little, had only gone through the motions, gone to the meetings, worked the steps, carried the literature, and kept right on gambling. He thought of the file of his correspondence with Brooks over almost forty years now that he had recently leafed through. Did the fact that he’d always made copies, some of the early ones with carbon paper, say more about Brooks or about him? There were the proposals, the bargains, the incentives, the attempts to understand, to find common ground, to meet halfway. All of it achingly familiar and similar. Had he never changed, either? And yet there Brooks was, spending the afternoon of the Fourth pulling tubers and skiers across the lake (Tom had wondered how many beers he’d had). Brooks the coach, the scoutmaster, the tutor, the Sunday-school teacher, the ne’er-do-well (“Brooks, you’ve got it backwards; first you find a vocation, then an avocation”). Brooks who somehow cobbled a life together out of plans, schemes, projects, poker games, pipe dreams, ponies, odd jobs, ten-dollar Nassaus on the golf course, occasional employment, workers’ comp, unemployment insurance, and the money his mother had left him, most of which was gone in those same schemes, projects, and pipe dreams but a good bit of which had been gambled away or simply wasted. Living in apartments, moving in the middle of the night, always almost in legal trouble with the IRS or the attorney general’s office but not quite. Old cars, “great deals,” a community college for Charlie and an apprenticeship for Lou, hanging around golf-club locker rooms, surviving on Marian’s meager income as a teacher’s aide and depending always on her health insurance even, especially, when she had breast cancer. Now both boys had jobs, homes, and families, and Brooks had a motorboat that was sure to be repossessed next month (“Hell, the summer’s almost over anyway”). And then there was the time when he got fired and took his whole family on a Caribbean cruise (“What better time for a vacation?”). That was just it; he could turn misfortune and misery into a good story or a bad joke, and pretty soon, almost against your will, you found yourself laughing along with him even if you were shaking your head. Once Tom had asked Marian not quite playfully why she’d stayed with him all these years, and she had said, “You know, Tom, he can always make me laugh, and he’s so good with the boys.” Had anyone ever said that about Tom? Had anyone ever said, “He’s so good with Brooks”? And earlier that very day, when Tom had asked about Marian and Brooks had said, “Cancer-free five years now, thank the good Lord,” Tom had found himself envying his son’s joy and relief. “We just got the results Friday.”
For years Tom took comfort in the fact that Brooks had never stolen from him, never cheated him. But then he tried to get his hands on Tony’s money. Perhaps Julia had distrusted Brooks even before he had; perhaps that was why she had left Tony’s money in a trust and made Tom, to his surprise, the trustee. Otherwise Brooks might have pulled it off. Of course Tony, flattered by Brooks’s attention and proud to be a “businessman,” had blurted it out. “Heart of Gold!” he’d said. “Heart of Gold Inc.!”
“What’s that, Tony?”
“Going through the roof! Going to make a million!”
“Tony, what are you talking about?”
“Going to make a killing, Dad!”
Brooks had denied it, of course. “It’s an investment opportunity, Dad. An excellent investment opportunity. He could double his money. Triple it.”
“Well, if it’s so good, why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“’Cause I knew you’d thwart him. Stifle him like you always do. Hell, Dad, it’s his goddamn money. Why not let him live a little?” Then it had poured out, as sometimes happened when Brooks had had a few drinks. “Because you can’t. Because you have to stifle him just like you’ve stifled us. Ever wonder why Christine is such a goddamn nervous mess? Ever wonder why I can’t pull the trigger on a big deal? If just once you had said, ‘Go for it,’ if just once you had believed in me instead of … instead of …” Tom hadn’t answered, and he had been proud of his restraint at the time, but afterward he had wondered if there was room for pride in any of this.
And then there was Brooks the generous: giving away things he didn’t own, giving gifts he couldn’t afford. Brooks the foolhardy: getting kicked out of high school (Tom’s high school) for smoking marijuana, flunking out of the state university no one had ever flunked out of. Brooks the athlete who could hit a golf ball three hundred yards but who wouldn’t go out for the team because he didn’t like the coach, didn’t want to give up drinking beer, and refused to sign the honor statement saying that he had. Brooks the lover, who had to screen his calls from girls even as a kid, who rolled his eyes and made excuses and broke hearts, who sang Prince’s song “Kiss” in the karaoke bar at Louie’s wedding and had a whole chorus of mothers and daughters laughing, dancing, waving their hands, singing along. Brooks the husband who had somehow chosen Marian and had somehow stayed with her all these years. Beleaguered, world-weary, old-before-her-time Marian, who got teary-eyed at the wedding dancing with her husband. Brooks the salesman who could sell anything but always had bigger plans, wouldn’t show up, was “let go,” but with regrets and best wishes. Brooks the twelve-year-old towhead with more freckles than sense, who would laugh harder than anyone Tom had ever seen, who would rather sit at the dining room table all night and not do his homework than sit there for half an hour and do it, who told his seventh grade teacher that he didn’t do homework because “I like to keep my school life and my home life separate.”
And what if Tom had just let him be, had recognized way back then that Brooks was a self-deluding, good-natured layabout who somehow would get through life without a nickel, a wrinkle, or an enemy—except perhaps his own father? What if when Brooks was nineteen, Tom had allowed him to hitchhike to California or drop out and become a ski bum in Aspen? What would the real difference have been? Perhaps only the distance between the conviction that Tom had caused it to happen and the one he now held that he couldn’t have stopped it from happening. And why hadn’t he ever just let go and relaxed and laughed along? Sitting there on a park bench under a shade tree in the Tuileries in Paris, for heaven’s sake, Tom felt suddenly very old and very foolish, the “tight ass” Brooks had often accused him of being, or James Joyce’s Gabriel, who, so full of puffery and pretense, had missed the point altogether, had somehow failed to love or to