Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,14

you do?” She shook me so hard that I couldn’t answer.

Uncle Tom appeared and started arguing with Ma.

“Say, you let him alone. I saw the whole thing from the doorway. Bingo climbed up on the stool, and before I could stop him he reached up and pulled the cup off the counter. He lost his balance. Collie wasn’t anywhere near him.”

“No . . .” Ma spat out her words and releasing her grip on me stood up straight as Bingo wailed in the background. “Impossible. You’re lying, sticking up for him when he doesn’t deserve it. I set those cups back far enough from the edge of the counter so nothing like that could have happened. If that’s what you saw, then Collie deliberately moved them.”

“I suppose he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, too,” Uncle Tom said. “You’ve got a screw loose, lady. You should be ashamed of yourself, accusing Collie to cover up your own carelessness.”

“For God’s sake, I haven’t time to fight with you, Tom Flanagan,” Ma said, pausing once again to bend down, her face next to mine, so close that her hair fell against my cheek. I can still smell the woodsy fragrance of her shampoo.

“This isn’t over. I’ll never forgive you for what you did today to your little brother. Never!”

She told everyone at the hospital what I’d done, and someone, a man in a suit, came to speak to me and Bingo—Ma told me it was the police and to expect a long sentence—and I never knew the outcome of his visit. I was too scared to ask. When I didn’t go to jail, I figured it was an oversight.

After the burn healed, Bingo was left with a white scar shaped like a half-moon on his inner arm beneath his elbow joint, so just in case Ma was ever tempted to forget, she always had his disfigurement to remind her, confirming her view of him as a serious hard-luck case, unlike me. She looked at me in my playpen and saw the president of the World Bank and not the future president, either. The whole time I was growing up, in every conversation between us, Ma acted as if she were sparring with John D. Rockefeller about the merits of socialism.

Bingo was different. He looked like Pop, though he had Ma’s chestnut hair. Everything seemed to go wrong for Bingo, which only increased his irresistibility factor. Nothing Ma loved better than a beautiful victim, since it played so well into her own image of herself.

She used to talk about how people should never stop with one child since it was important to have a basis for comparison, gives a much-needed perspective, she would insist, leaving most people to wonder what the devil she was talking about, though I got the message loud and clear.

Her adoration for Bingo was exclusive, but she made me a critical part of their relationship, casting me in the role of his malicious persecutor. I could never separate her love for Bingo from her contempt for me.

“Your little brother died last night,” Pop said at first sight of me in the doorway the morning after the asthma attack. Hearing him and Tom, the sun rising and rosy, I hopped from my bed and went down to the kitchen, where the two of them were sitting at the table drinking coffee and eating fried-egg sandwiches.

“But like Lazarus, he was brought back to life,” Uncle Tom said, telling me how Bingo turned blue in the hospital, pure Irish blue, he said, “an exotic mix of Himalayan poppy, antifreeze, and the eyes of a Siberian husky.”

“Lazarus, my ass, that low-rent bastard,” Pop said. “Bingo rose up like Jesus himself. Come to think of it, he did better than Jesus. It took Bingo only three hours to resurrect himself. It took Jesus three days!”

“Match that, can you, Noodle?” Tom asked me. “Start by spelling ‘unremarkable.’”

“Where’s Ma?” I inquired, making my way to a plain wooden stool, which I dragged from the counter to the table, one of the poodles tugging at the bottom of my pajama leg.

“She had to be admitted—it was the reaction. She had a heart arrhythmia, according to the doctors,” Pop said casually, sifting through the mail.

“I wasn’t aware she had a heart,” Uncle Tom said.

“What about George?” I persisted. He’d just arrived for a week-long visit.

“Oh well, he’s been called back home. Some kind of problem at the clinic,” Pop said.

“May I have an egg sandwich?” I asked, trying to extricate