I Think About Richard

I think about Richard in the basement of the house on Pearl Street playing “Don’t Tell Your Monkey Man” on an old upright piano. Richard in the darkroom he built down there processing photographs he took of shadowbox dioramas he made by arranging dollhouse furniture, silverware, plastic toys, doll parts, darts and old toothbrushes into cartoon scenarios with the script cut out of magazines and glued on cardboard clouds suspended by piano wires. I thought he was a genius. He always was elusive and evasive and he had a secret life, but back then it seemed to me to be a magician’s secret, the power of the mystery, the deep meaning of dark shadows. And maybe there was something I missed, some time I could have done or said something that would have changed the way the story went, or maybe the story was always true, maybe he was already turning in a dark, crooked spiral, I don’t know. I don’t know, and for all the times I’ve run the movie backwards looking for clues, I still don’t even know when the floors stopped shaking from the piano’s walking bass runs, when his secrets turned sinister, or more personal and guarded and dangerous. I remember him staying out late and often. I remember a broken bottle in the driveway. I remember Richard in the basement, not making a sound. When he left to join the service, there were postcards, and when he came home the postcards stopped. The grown man in person was distant, dark and moody with dirt ground deep in his fingerprints. And when he moved to California, it was a perfect sleight of hand. He just disappeared. He slipped away and I let him go. I knew by then that he was a nasty drunk, and the rest I guess I didn’t want to know.

But the night the phone woke me at 4 am I jumped up as sure as if I had been waiting for that call. It was Betsi’s voice coming through the handset, almost unrecognizable, Richard lost and found face down in an alley, all his dark secrets undefended, the mechanics of his magic spilled out for all to judge and demean and decry and mourn, Betsi cried on the phone a long time while I remembered once years ago when I found Richard’s shadowbox dioramas set out for the trash and ruined by the rain, how I cried to see them stripped of their power and art and subtracted back into a pile of useless and meaningless broken parts.

After we hung up the phone, I went outside to sit on the step and shiver underneath a million cold stars. I could hear the horses stamping in their stalls and far away a car throwing gravel on the curve. I wished for a blanket around my shoulders, or for someone to talk to, but it seemed like comfort I didn’t deserve. And then slowly the stars faded, the sky grew bright and the sun came up, warm and strong and clear like absolution. But it was still dark in California, and I couldn’t remember if there had ever been a time when I didn’t know the ending of my brother Richard’s story.

I have a photograph of Richard bent over the piano keys, at once a haunted genius maestro and a parody. He could really play piano but he never could take himself seriously.

©2004 Annie Gallup

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