Page 311 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 281

a station wagon filled with pinched widows with serious hair.
“I know you loved him,” Ryan said.
“I know you loved him too,” Sandy Gully said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” he said.
She pulled herself loose from Ryan and ran down the hill toward the
waiting cars.
Ryan stood alone on the top of the hill at the edge of the grave. Behind
him, glorious with Indian Summer, the vast expanse of the Illinois River
wound lazily through green trees bordering cultivated fields. Peoria was a
river town. Thom was born there. Thom was buried there. Ryan vowed he
would not finish his life the same. He shook his head at the irony: it was
the straight brother, not the homosexual, who had committed the cliché
of suicide. Thom had finally upstaged him in the only way he knew. That
was his motive. Ryan didn’t need to find any suicide note. They all said
it was Nam and Sandy and his kids that caused him to do it. They were
right, but they weren’t completely right. They didn’t know everything.
They didn’t know about the night Thom, loaded with Kick’s primo grass,
had stood up from the kitchen table in the Victorian and addressed Ryan
and Kick as if he were making a formal speech.
“You two are like a couple of...,” Thom was too straight to think of
calling them anything else, “kings.”
“Kings?” Ryan said. “Thank God, he said kings.”
Sometimes Ryan talked in front of Thom in the third person.
“You have everything,” Thom said. “You do everything.”
“We go to all the right parties,” Ryan said.
Kick played along. “We take all the right pills.”
“See! See!” Thom had said. “That air of superiority. I can’t stand it. I
can’t crack it. I can’t quote stuff. I can’t make everything a joke.” He had
slumped back down into the kitchen chair. “What I want to know is this.
How can two brothers who start out the same end up so different? One
living with the...well, uh, it’s obvious...most handsome man in the world.
The other well, that’s obvious too....”
Mercifully Thom had left the comparison incomplete.
Ryan looked across the horizon toward downtown. He studied the
gothic towers of the hospital where they had all been born and where
Charley-Pop had died. Delete one father. Delete one brother. He knew
he would not come back to this spot until, sometime in the far-off future,
Annie Laurie died. Or he himself died. He heard the grave diggers clear
their throats. He took one last look down into Thom’s grave and said his
last good-bye.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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