Henry has something to say, in the interest of balance
He took me in, but I can’t say it was a comfortable fit. I was a wreck, I won’t deny that, but he wasn’t exactly Gibraltar. When Joanne first left him, all I could think was, good riddance. No, that’s not exactly it. The first thing I thought was, ding-dong, the witch is dead, but I kept that to myself. When you’re trying to throw yourself and your family and a city of three million off the scent of your shameful, hell-courting, man-loving ways, you keep the Wizard of Oz references to a minimum. I had always thought Joanne was a hen who pecked and pecked in search of some seed of fulfillment she would never find. Not that I saw him as the cock of the walk, but there they were — birds of a feather, stuck together. That’s the picture I had developed, without much thought or insight, during my limited contact with them — limited, I’ll admit, to a dwindling number of holiday dinners I was unable to avoid despite tales of office emergencies that required my immediate attention or the weddings of close friends I could not miss. You would be shocked at the number of Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving-weekend weddings I claimed to attend, how many dear college chums I said had chosen me their best man just so I could deliver one of my famous tear-jerking, marriage-launching toasts.
God, where was I? Birds of a feather, which was a cruel thing to say about my own brother, given my low opinion of his wife. But it was also a terrible thing to say about Joanne. To me, she was always just my brother’s wife. I suppose I could have made an ally of her, someone from outside the family who might have seen inside my heart and taken my side in the inevitable blow-up — assuming that I had ever been brave enough and self-aware enough to take that step. From the beginning I had the niggling suspicion that Joanne might have been just a bit more perceptive than my brother or my parents, but she was never what you would call warm, so who’s to say she wouldn’t have been the worst about it? I’ll never know, and that’s my fault, my loss. I never made the effort the get to know her as anything more than a category — the Wife, the In-Law. And maybe I was never any more to her than the Brother, the confirmation that the whatever blank spots and broken pieces she found in her husband weren’t just personal failings, but were hardwired into him by his screwy family.
It would be arrogance beyond measure for me to think that I could be such a master of deceit and yet believe that my brother harbored no secrets from his wife. I don’t imagine his secrets were the same as mine, but if he was half as closed-off as I was, that would have been enough to shut Joanne out of his life. What I saw as a harpy’s talons lashing his undeserving hide may have been a desperate woman clawing at the door that once opened onto love, and was now closing her into a dark cell with nothing to keep her company but her severed heart. She knew it would only get worse, so she scabbed over the raw, hot wound and met the world armored by her anger. I have to give her credit for that. I’ve certainly never learned how to do it.

6

  

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