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From Scarsdale

By Dan O'Brien
From Scarsdale by Dan O'Brien digital book - Fable

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I saw him first: stumbling around the side of our house, no jacket, no shoes. Was he barefoot? The seat of his jeans, the shoulders and back of his blue wool sweater, his mussed blond hair, all matted with snow, melting against the glass of the storm door as he struggled to open the front door. The pineapple-shaped brass knocker glinted with each jar. As we pulled into the driveway I pointed him out to our mother.

She followed him inside. He sat slumped at the breakfast table in slanted winter sunlight, crying—no, he was sobbing. Convulsively. I’d never heard these sounds before. She knelt with her hand on his knee. “What did you do?” she asked him, over and over. Then to me without looking: “Take your sister upstairs.”

Pam was away at college; this was her vacated attic bedroom where I sat on the floor beside my sister Carrie as she played with her dolls. Then how much time passed? Peter appeared out of nowhere, holding baby Timmy in his arms: “Chris jumped off the roof,” he said, as if sharing some delicious gossip, and our mother was taking him to Dr. Whitten.

But the roof? How could he have even climbed up there? He must have been sick. I’d seen him coughing through his tears, his chest and neck straining for breath; suddenly I was certain I would get sick too, would catch his disease, whatever it was. On the way up the stairs I had noticed that the window in our father’s attic office was open—gone, in fact, removed from its quarter-moon frame and laid on the floor against the wall. A screwdriver and a few screws were scattered across the desk, next to a note scribbled on loose-leaf: “Dear Mom: Looks like you’ll finally get that playroom you’ve always wanted.”

She’d been pressing him for months to move up to the attic. Her second-born, her eldest son, had grown into such a disappointment that it seemed like she wanted only to forget him, to exile him to the room where I was now, unaware that I might never truly leave this room again, might never stop trying to understand what was happening to my brother and to us all.

That night, when my mother came home, I led her up to the attic. Our father was at the hospital still, the same hospital where we’d been born; Chris had been “shaking like a leaf” when she left his bedside, Mother said. I handed her the note and watched her read until she collapsed crying in my arms.

“This is a secret,” she whispered, her breath warm in my ear, “we must take to our graves.”

...

When I was forty-two years old a softball-sized tumor was cut out of my colon. This has been a long time coming, I thought as I lay in the hospital bed. Perhaps the cancer had been growing in me since that Tuesday afternoon in February in 1986 when my brother had tried to kill himself. He was seventeen and I was twelve. I’d had symptoms since then, brought on by stress. My mother’s reassuringly dismissive diagnosis—“spastic colon, the curse of the O’Briens”—had kept me from the doctor sooner. (Though of course the blame, if there must be blame, is mine.) Had the tumor been growing for thirty years, fed by my ambition, my masochism, even my writing? Had it metastasized like a singularly scarring memory I could not or would not forget?

Six months earlier my wife had been diagnosed with mid-stage breast cancer. Our daughter wasn’t yet two. I knew now was the right time, perhaps the only time, to begin to tell the truth of my childhood. To understand why ours was such a sad family. To try to cure myself for my family—my family now, my wife and daughter—by writing the story of who I am and where I’m from, with honesty, insight, and something like forgiveness. To try to leave the old place behind.

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About Dan O'Brien

Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, librettist, and essayist whose recognition includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art and the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh Poetry Prize. True Story: A Trilogy of O’Brien’s plays was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2023, and in 2021 his collection of essays, A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas, was published by Dalkey Archive in the US and by CB Editions in the UK. His poetry collections are Survivor’s Notebook, Our Cancers, New Life, Scarsdale, and War Reporter. His plays include The Body of an American, winner of the PEN USA Award, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, and the Horton Foote Prize, and The House in Scarsdale, winner of a PEN America Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.

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