While Jeff Torrance does the driving, Danny Brogan wonders if it was the house that had been the root of the problem. The original sin, the worm in the apple. Danny’s grandfather, Old Dan Brogan, had made a lot of money selling land to the University of Wisconsin back in the 1930s, when they were originally establishing the Arboretum, now over 1,250 acres of forestry and horticulture tended to resemble the original wilderness as it would have been before white men arrived in Wisconsin. Pre-settlement Wisconsin. A vision, a dream of Eden. Old Dan kept back a plot of land on which his own house stood, running between the track that would become Arboretum Avenue and Lake Wingra, and enclosed the grounds in a dry-stone wall with high iron gates to front and rear, and retreated inside and drank himself to death while his wife raised Danny’s father, Dan Junior. The house came down through Dan Junior, who in due course pulled much the same kind of exit as his father, to Danny, who bought his sister Donna out and moved in when he and Claire married. It was the only dwelling for a couple of miles. The university had initially tried hard to persuade Old Dan Brogan to relocate but he was reclusive and ornery and had come out to the unsettled West Side to get away from people in the first place and refused to move. And however each successive Brogan male differed from his father, they resembled each other in this, at least: the Brogan house was a part of the woods, and there it would stay.
But Danny knew that if it hadn’t been for the daily charge of Brogan’s Bar and Grill, he would have gone mad out there himself and plugged steadily into the same arrangement as his father and grandfather before him. Maybe he was starting to go that way anyway. Maybe the house was haunted with failure and self-pity, and worse. Maybe that’s what had caused Claire to pine for her old life. Not that he would know. One of the things he and Claire shared, along with an unfashionable dislike and distrust – disdain, even – of technology, was an equally unfashionable discomfort with full and frank conversation. It wasn’t that they wanted to keep secrets from one another, more that neither felt their marriage vows entitled them to be told anything the other didn’t feel like telling.
So Danny had never asked Claire about her relationships in Chicago, and she had never asked what he had got up to while she was away. They had both agreed: the problems in a marriage come when there’s no mystery, no distance, no otherness to the loved one. Familiarity breeds, if not necessarily contempt then certainly a level of disrespect. Their reticence with each other would help keep things alive. And their diligence in this respect was rewarded: the problems in their marriage, when they duly came, had the distinction of not being the ones they had guarded against.
They had headed north on I-39 for about fifty miles last night and stayed in a bed and breakfast place that didn’t quite call itself an ‘Inne’ but may as well have; there were pieces of lace over every available seat back and the antique furniture looked like it was going to buckle if you breathed on it. They rose before dawn and left without waiting for breakfast, partly because they wanted to be at Oxford Federal Correctional Institution by eight a.m., but mainly because the proprietors of the Inne that didn’t call itself an Inne, Larry and Jennifer Pyke, a man and woman of uncertain age and appearance, appeared starved of human society. It had taken Jeff and Danny three-quarters of an hour to get away from the Pykes the previous evening, such was their determination to share details of their past lives in Chicago and New York, where they may or may not have achieved great things in The Theater. Danny found it almost impossible to focus on what they were saying, so fascinated had he become by the look of the couple: Larry thin, almost shrunken, but still vigorous, with a vermilion ascot, a quilted smoking jacket, gray pants, patent leather shoes, a plume of dyed black hair and what looked very much to Danny like eye shadow; Jennifer an overly made-up, golden-haired ex-beauty, like a late-period Gabor sister, or Ginger Rogers in her talk-show phase, coquettish and predatory and grotesquely overweight in black and gold Chinese robes and tiny little red high-heeled Dorothy slippers. Jeff was in no great rush to abandon the conversation, admittedly, which ranged across subjects as various as Ronald Coleman, the Dolly Sisters, the films of Mitchell Leisen and Hollywood actresses who portrayed nuns as opposed to those who became nuns, and would have happily sat up drinking tea with them into the night, thereby slaking his taste for the bizarre and relish of the absurd, not to mention his general preference for the company of old people.
Danny looks across the table at Jeff now. He is so much more reliable than he lets on; even Danny forgets it now and then. It’s like a front he keeps up to fend off the world: the stoner, the slacker, the wastrel. They have found a Denny’s for breakfast, the best they could do, and are on their third refill of coffee. It may be Monday morning but it’s Columbus Day, so they had the place to themselves at six; it’s filling up a little as it approaches seven-thirty. Everyone who comes in, male, female or indeterminate, takes a good squint at Jeff, which is the way it’s always been. He’s looking good as ever as he approaches fifty: his blond hair has not yet faded to gray, and he still wears it just long enough on the curve between youthful and delusional, pushed back from his chiseled, lean, tan face; he has always favored a hippyish, Native American look, with random beads and braids and strips of leather and even, in his hair, a couple of ribbons. At six-four, in Levis, black western shirt and cowboy boots, Jeff looks very well indeed, and you don’t need to take Danny’s word for it: if Jeff spends a night in Brogan’s and goes home alone, it’s because he’s tired, and Danny usually has to commiserate with more than one disappointed customer wondering how she played her cards wrong.
Given the fact that Jeff has never held down a job it’s maybe surprising that he should have kept in such shape. He has lived at home with his mom, a wealthy widow who adores her son and always thought it completely unnecessary for Jeff to go out and work when he didn’t have to. In his twenties, Jeff thought this an excellent plan, since having a job would interfere with his other pursuits, namely smoking pot and staying up all night watching videos and playing computer games and reading three- and six- and nine-volume science-fiction sagas.
For a few years, after Claire left for Chicago, Danny hooked up with Jeff and they lived in a kind of dedicated drift, steadily adding stronger drugs and alcohol into the equation and dallying the while with the kind of women who were sufficiently under-motivated themselves to believe that such a plan was indeed excellent. The Torrance estate was happy to bankroll it all, as long as Jeff agreed to eat dinner with his mother every other night and to simulate a desire to ‘be creative’ in some non-specific artistic or literary way without going to the trouble of producing any actual work.
Then Danny’s father died and Danny stepped up to manage Brogan’s, which meant an end to aimlessness, for him, at least. He stopped taking drugs, even stopped smoking weed, which neither he nor Jeff considered the same thing at all. Jeff saw no need to follow suit, and continued on his merry, aimless way. There was never any shortage of aimless wastrels in Madison to accompany him, each with their own, invariably spurious, ‘creative’ alibi. Jeff’s was writing, not that he did anything so vulgar as actually write.
This was the life Jeff led: the drinking and the smoking, the reading and eating dinner and listening to music with his mom, the sleeping with other men’s wives and girlfriends (because single women, dazed with awe by the scale of Jeff’s lack of ambition, always gave up on him as a potential partner-for-life, but often returned for respite, sometimes for years afterwards). And of course, the letting Danny know he would always be there if and when Danny needed him, because the reason Jeff ended up doing a three-year stretch in Fox Lake and not dead is because Danny helped him out, and someone else is dead and not Jeff. Danny didn’t need to know what Jeff had done; the fact that he needed his help was enough. It was money Danny helped him with, mostly, money Jeff didn’t want to ask his mother for, and Danny had always had enough money, although of course he doesn’t any more.
Jeff looks him in the eye now, and despite the strain Danny’s under – he slept heavily for about three hours and then lay awake from four a.m., fretting, and planning and, truth be told, crying, just a little, kettle-boiling-over kind of tears that quickly subside and get mopped up – he can feel himself about to lose it, and Jeff grins and says, quietly, ventriloquizing the fluted, fruity voices of their hosts, half Hollywood-Raj, half white-shoe country-club, ‘We of the theater, you see,’ and Danny cracks up. Jeff could always make him laugh at the best of times, simply by catching his eye, and he’s an excellent mimic.
‘Isn’t that extra-ordinary? You came from Cambridge, and here you are in Oxford!’ Jeff arches a lazy eyebrow in tribute to the baroque eccentricities of their hosts at the not-Inne. ‘You are among us here in Oxford, but you are lately of Cambridge! Do not think us strange: we are of the Theater, you see, the Theater.’
Jeff is an old hand at showbiz impersonations, adept at capturing the preposterous bullshit actors spout on chat shows, and Danny has always been a sucker for it. He has wondered in the past if some of his laughter has its roots in anger – anger towards Claire and what he sometimes feels are her illusions about her illustrious past, her talent, her wasted potential. She can still, watching a movie, be moved to tears of what Danny knows is not empathy with the character but envy at the actress, and it’s always an actress, always of Claire’s age, and a quiet couple of days will follow, and while Danny sympathizes, and never says anything, sometimes he just wants to shout, ‘It was never that great to begin with, and it’s over for good now. Do you think you’re the only one whose dreams haven’t worked out?’
He never does, and he’s glad, because this is not how he really feels – or at least, not unless he’s got half a bottle of Jack inside him, and if a man acted on all the things he feels when he’s drunk on whiskey, he’d be dead or in jail. And because it would be unkind, and make him less of a man. And what dreams, exactly, did he have, aside from marrying the woman of his dreams?
‘Rosalind and dear Audrey, portrayed nuns, but June Haver, having been a Dolly Sister, actually became a nun. Or at least, a novice. Before finally finding lifelong happiness with Fred McMurray.’
Danny’s laughter is helpless, back-of-the-class stuff, like a mind-altering drug. If he can’t get this release by letting himself cry full-on, maybe laughter is the way to go. If only Jeff had been around in junior high, Danny thinks. In fact, Dave Ricks was very like Jeff: easily as funny, as fine a mimic, with as acute a relish for the absurd. All he and Dave seemed to do was laugh together in, absolutely, the back of the class. Until that Halloween, when the laughter dried up for a time. When it came back, it was never quite the same. But Danny is sure Jeff would have known how to defuse the Bradberry situation. Even at the time, in the midst of his panic and his fear, Danny remembers thinking it was just dumb that it got so out of hand, and his friends were no help, apart from Gene Peterson, of course, but Gene had always been a stand-up guy.
Or at least, Danny had always thought so, until the past suddenly erupted out of a family barbecue, relentless and unalterable, ready as ever to destroy him. But Danny Brogan is not going to let himself be destroyed. Danny Brogan is going to fight back. And the first round in the fight is visiting Jonathan Glatt in jail.