Four years later, Keith and I were married and living in New York City, and Jordan was no longer a “young bullock without blemish.” He still had his issues with school, and Mom and Dad transferred him from the suburban public high school the rest of us had attended to an elite all-boys private school. During his senior year, he was driving Dad’s car late at night when he hit a tree at a deserted intersection. No one was in the car with him, and he was unharmed, but Dad’s car was totaled. Dad told me about a conversation he had with the parents of one of Jordan’s classmates. The police were tipped off about a party and arrested the man’s son for drug possession.
“How could you not know that your son was using drugs?” Dad told me he had asked the boy’s parent.
The other father had looked at him in the eye. “People in glass houses,” he began, and paused meaningfully.
“What do you think he meant?” Dad asked me.
“You know what he meant,” I said.
But he did not want to know.
Jordan came to visit us in New York. I didn’t know what to do with him. We had almost nothing in common. He wasn’t interested in visiting museums or going to plays or taking long walks through the city. His obsession was comic books. He dreamed of accumulating a valuable collection.
I found his foul mouth upsetting. He couldn’t speak a sentence without a curse word. “Don’t you know you are a difficult person to get along with?” I told him.
I didn’t think Jordan would shock me, but he did. He told me a story about how he bought a stash of cocaine with some high school classmates and figured out a way to sell it so he made all the profit.
“So you’re not only selling drugs, but you’re cheating your friends?”
“That’s not the way I see it,” he said.
I didn’t like it, but what made me even more uncomfortable was the extent to which Jordan led a fantasy life. He seemed to believe that Keith and I could be his cool, permissive parents instead of the parents he had. The way Jordan glamorized us upset me. He thought Keith and I were not who we really were, which was a graduate student and writer-teacher struggling to survive in a difficult and dangerous city. I wondered if the lure of us was behind his decision to attend Columbia. I was reminded of the phrase in Carson McCuller’s ‘The Member of the Wedding’ that Frankie Addams uses to describe her brother and his fiancée: “They are the ‘we’ of ‘me.’” Keith and I did not want to be the “we” of Jordan’s “me.”
I wondered how Jordan would adapt to college. All of his life, he’d managed to avoid school as much as possible. The one time he went to summer camp, he returned home early because he didn’t like it. He was used to having his own way.
His first act at Columbia was to get out of having a roommate. Unlike his four sisters, he’d never had to share a room, and he didn’t intend to start at the age of eighteen. He went to the office of the Dean of Freshmen and proceeded to burst into tears in front of her. Only when she agreed to let him switch to a single did he calm down.
“You actually cried in front of the Dean because you’d have to share a room?” I was dumbfounded.
He nodded. He didn’t appear ashamed in the least.
I went to see his dorm room. It was in a new high-rise building just east of campus, overlooking Morningside Park. After going to so much trouble to get it, Jordan hadn’t done anything to fix it up. His dirty clothes were strewn all over the floor, and the bed was unmade. The walls were bare, and there was an unpleasant smell of unwashed laundry.
“It’s depressing,” I told Keith that night. “He just doesn’t care.”
I wondered if it was because Jordan, unlike the rest of us, had never had to do any housework that he was so clueless. I offered to meet him at Woolworth’s to help him shop for his room. It was a tortuous process. Jordan insisted on examining multiples of every item and calculating price comparisons and unit costs where applicable. He wrote it all down in a notebook in his minuscule handwriting.
His indecision tested my patience. “You’re putting too much time into this,” I told him. “There’s not that big of a difference in the prices.”
I helped him carry his purchases back to his dorm. On the way, we passed the local branch of the post office. “Come inside with me for a few minutes,” I said to Jordan. “I need some stamps, and there’s someone I want to introduce you to.”
A few minutes later we stood together at the window. “Dale, this is my brother, Jordan. He’s a student at Columbia. And Jordan, this is Dale Earnest. He was born and raised in Tuscaloosa.”
I had been transacting business in the post office one day soon after I moved to New York when Dale and I recognized each other’s accents. He was biracial (as I soon learned), and I was white, but being from Alabama created an immediate bond between us.
“Pleased to meet you,” Dale now said, reaching over the counter to grasp my brother’s hand. “You need anything, you come right here.”
“That’s a kind offer,” I said.
After we left the post office, Jordan expressed his enthusiasm for Dale. I was glad. It was hard for me to know what to do for Jordan. It turned out that Dale was the only friend that Jordan made in New York.
* * *
Mom asked me to keep tabs on Jordan, but I didn’t know how and I didn’t want to. I figured he deserved his own college experience, and I was relieved that he no longer seemed to idolize us. Even though he lived less than a mile from us, we rarely saw him, and I was surprised and pleased when he accepted Regina Behrman’s invitation to come with us for dinner at her apartment on a Saturday night in mid-March.
Regina was a journalist and television writer whom we’d met through my maternal grandmother when we moved to New York. Not only was Regina Grandma’s friend, but she was a cousin of Grandma’s sister-in-law, our great aunt Amelia. Aunt Amelia lived in Louisville, Kentucky, where our maternal grandparents were from, and she was the widow of Grandma’s youngest brother Jerome, who had suffered a fatal heart attack two weeks after Jordan’s bar mitzvah.
That was six years ago. Three years ago, Grandma died of cancer. She liked to bring people together, and she would have been happy about this dinner. Regina liked to say that she and I were “kissin’ cousins”, and ever since she had found out about Jordan, she had been eager to meet him. Aunt Amelia’s visit to New York provided the incentive.
On a rainy Saturday night, we met Jordan at the bus stop on Broadway and West 110 Street to go across town to the Upper East Side. Jordan was only wearing a sweatshirt. The hood was pulled low over his forehead, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. He was already wet.
“Don’t you have a raincoat?” I asked him.
He didn’t bother to answer but stared down at his big feet in scuffed sneakers. When we got off the bus, I gave him my umbrella for the walk to Regina’s apartment and shared Keith’s. Regina lived in an Art Deco building in the East Seventies. The lobby’s curving walls were decorated with mosaic tile, and her one-bedroom apartment had a sunken living room and enough space in the kitchen for an office.
Regina was a tall, handsome woman in her early sixties with an aquiline nose, dark eyes, and a white streak in her black hair, like Susan Sontag. She had lived in her apartment since the 1950s, and it was rent-controlled. She fussed over us, hanging our wet raincoats from the shower curtain rod in her bathroom. Impressed by her umbrella stand, I thought about getting one of my own.
She ushered us into her sunken living room, where Aunt Amelia and her friend Theodora Fanshawe were already ensconced on the couch. We soon learned that Theodora was visiting from London and that Aunt Amelia was planning to rent a flat in London for the summer and maybe the fall as well. She and Theodora intended to go to Wimbledon together.
“You know the little old lady in tennis shoes?” declared Aunt Amelia. “That’s me.”
I had a sudden vision of the three ladies as birds. Regina was a Little Blue Heron, dark, elegant, and purposeful, inclining her long neck gracefully. Aunt Amelia was a pigeon, with bright, beady eyes and a cooing voice. At first glance, she looked gray and ordinary, but there was a delicacy about her. Theodora Fanshawe in her tweed jacket resembled a Mistle Thrush with a speckled breast, a common sight on an English moor, but exotic in New York City. All three were independent, talkative, and opinionated
Regina had furnished her apartment with mementos from her travels. On her coffee table a brass tray from Morocco held little bowls of salted peanuts and pretzels. A set of coasters printed with London attractions waited for our drinks. Regina’s bar was set up on a wheeled cart with two mirrored shelves, and she invited her guests to mix their own. Aunt Amelia declared that although she came from the land of bourbon, she was fond of Scotch and milk. Theodora took her Scotch with soda. Keith drank Scotch on the rocks.
“When I was a journalist, I had a wooden leg,” said Regina, “and I could frequently drink male colleagues under the table, but these days I stick to a glass of wine.” I joined her, but Jordan would only drink a glass of water.
I remembered how, not too long ago, Jordan told me that when it came to drugs, he’d “try anything.” I thought his abstemiousness was a pose. It seemed to me that he was always pretending, to see what kind of reaction he would get.
Regina was telling us stories about her treasures. On her sideboard was an alabaster demitasse set she had bought in an Istanbul bazaar. Above the sideboard was a framed photo that she had taken from a bus of Elvis graffiti carved into an Irish hillside. In her dining alcove was a framed poster Man Ray had signed for her when she interviewed him in Paris in the 1960s.
“He was taciturn, even gloomy,” she recalled. “It was hard to get him to talk. But he gave me the poster as a souvenir.”
Jordan was taciturn, too. He retreated into a rocking chair in a corner of the room and responded in monosyllables to any question directed to him. After a while, the ladies left him alone and kept up a lively conversation without him. Tension arose when he declined to join us at the table for dinner and refused the dinner Regina had prepared of meatloaf, roast potatoes, green beans and almonds, and green salad. I could see Regina was taken aback, and I regretted he had come. All he would accept was a bowl of cut-up fruit, which he ate seated by himself in the rocking chair. He also refused dessert.
Yet, as disagreeable as Jordan was, I think in an odd way he enjoyed himself. Even though he appeared to be indifferent, he rather liked the old ladies to make a fuss over him. All his life, older people had doted on him. Despite his morose appearance, his broken-out skin, and the lock of greasy hair falling into his face, a half-smile danced across his lips, near where his dimple used to be when he was a chubby little boy.
He left before Keith and I did. After he was gone, we all discussed him. “Detached,” was Aunt Amelia’s word for him. “I’d like to see him in a year.”
“He’s reacting against his earlier self,” I suggested. “When I asked him about his birthday, he said, ‘Birthdays are bullshit,’ but when he was younger, he used to send out birthday lists of what he wanted, numbered and annotated.”
“I remember how he used to eat half a pound of bacon in one sitting,” said Keith.
“Now he says he’s ‘working on vegetarianism.’ It would be better if he ate a balanced diet. A bowl of fruit won’t do.”
“He’ll come around,” predicted Regina. “They usually do.”
I found their general attitude of tolerance reassuring. By the time we left, it had stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. After Regina’s overheated apartment, the cool moist air on our faces and the swish of traffic on the avenues were like a balm.
“I doubt Jordan will stay in New York long enough to graduate from Columbia,” I said to Keith as we headed toward the bus stop.
One night a few weeks later, Keith and I ran into Jordan on Broadway, and when Keith asked him how he was, he pressed his lips together and smiled a fake little smile, then nodded his head emphatically.
“What’s going on, Jordan?” I demanded.
He kept on nodding vigorously and smiling his sickly smile. It was an indication to me of his pleasure in trying to torment me.
“I’m not in the mood for mime,” I said, and we separated rather quickly.
“The family joker is now silent as the dead,” I remarked to Keith later. “It’s enough to drive me wild, but I don’t want to be his mother in absentia.”
* * *
I wasn’t in touch with Jordan the rest of the semester. I left a couple of messages for him, but he didn’t return my phone calls. That spring Lois graduated from the University of Michigan and moved to New York. While planning the move, she and a college friend stayed with us, sleeping on the foldout couch in our living room. In two days, they had rented an apartment in the West 80s, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, and found jobs, Lois as a publicist for a major book publisher. I was proud of Lois. She was practical and resourceful. She was one sibling I didn’t need to worry about.
Years before, when Mimi and I went to college, I to the East Coast and she, a year later, to the West, we vowed never to return to Alabama. We were both unhappy in high school and imagined we would be better off elsewhere. But when Jordan left for college, Mimi changed her mind and moved back in with our parents after eight years in California. Thus began a pattern, to be repeated for decades, where Mimi would live with Mom and Dad for months or even years. Then she would make elaborate plans to venture out on her own. However, things would invariably go wrong. She would discover it was all a mistake, and she’d move back.
Once she bought a house in the neighborhood where we grew up, just a few miles from Mom and Dad. Another time she moved, sight unseen, to a planned community in St. George, Utah. But no matter where she went, whether near or far, it never worked out. The neighbors near the house on Faring Road had dogs. Although she put in a six-foot-high chain-link fence to keep them out, their barking still disturbed her. Because she had poor circulation in her hands and feet, the climate in St. George, Utah, was too cold for her. There was always a reason why a situation that she thought would be ideal turned out to be wrong.
When Mimi came home to live with Mom and Dad as an adult, the family dynamic changed. She commenced a second childhood with our parents, this time as an only child. She jealously guarded her closeness to them. Mimi’s concerns monopolized their attention. Only for Jordan, Mom perhaps might have put Mimi’s needs aside. But he turned against her.
Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
