The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [228]
Zalla
Recently, I had reason to think about Thomas Kurbell—Little Thomas, as the family always called him. Little Thomas fooled the older members of the family for a while because he was so polite as a child—almost obsequious—and because his father, Thomas Sr., had been a genuinely nice man. Ours was an urban family, based in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and Little Thomas’s father’s death reinforced every bit of paranoia everyone had about life in the country. No matter that he actually died of complications of pneumonia, which he had contracted in the hospital as he was lying in traction, recovering from a broken leg, shattered ankle, and patched-together pelvis, suffered after falling from a hay wagon. Legend had it that he’d died instantly from the fall, and this was always invoked as a cautionary warning to any youngster in the family who took an interest in skiing or sailing or even hiking. For the sake of storytelling, Thomas Sr.’s death often dovetailed into the long-ago death of his cousin Pete, who had been struck by lightning when he got out to investigate a backup on the Brooklyn Bridge: wham! With Thomas still sliding out of the hay wagon, there was a sudden bolt of electricity, and Pete, moved to New York City, was struck dead, lit up for such a quick second it seemed somebody was just taking a picture with a flash. I suppose it’s true in many families that some things get to be lumped together for effect, and others to obscure some issue. I was thirty years old before I got the chronology of the two deaths correct. It’s just the way people in our family tell stories: it wasn’t done to mislead Little Thomas.
Little Thomas was a sneaky child. He’d sneak around for no good reason, padding through the house in his socks, sometimes scaring his mother and his sister Lilly when they turned a corner and found him standing there like a statue. His mother always said Little Thomas had no radar. No instinct for avoiding people and things. His going around in his socks made things worse, because if you were frightened and yelped he would become frightened, too, and burst into tears or topple something from a table in his fright. But he wouldn’t wear shoes in the house—to get even with his mother, he said, for making him wear boots to school on days when it wasn’t even raining, only damp—and no amount of pleading or punishment could make him change his ways. As he got older, he deliberately frightened his sister from time to time, because he loved to see her jump, but most of the scares with his mother were unintentional, he later maintained.
Little Thomas’s mother was named Etta Sue. She was five years older than my mother, Alice Dawn Rose. There was a brother in between, who had died of rheumatic fever. Though Etta Sue married a man named Thomas Kurbell, she maintained that Little Thomas was named not for him but for her dead brother, Thomas Wyatt. Little Thomas’s middle name was Nathaniel. “She put that name in because she wanted to include everybody, even the milkman,” Thomas Sr. used to say. Apparently, the milkman was a subject of fond kidding between them: she really did like the milkman, and he became a family friend. He’d push open the back door, come in, and wipe off the milk bottles before putting them on the top shelf of the refrigerator, and then pour himself some tea and sit and talk to whoever happened to be in the kitchen—Thomas Sr.; my mother, on a visit; me. He was Nat the Milkman. One time when I wasn’t there, Little Thomas jumped out of the broom closet and startled Nat the Milkman, and Nat grabbed him and flipped him over, holding him upside down by his ankles for a good long while. This was the reason Little Thomas