The Brothers K (36 page)

Winifred nodded.

“How long do you suppose it takes?”

Freddy thought about it. “Maybe about as long,” she said finally, “as for a hot bowl of oatmeal to cool down.”

It was the wrong metaphor: Bet put on an extremely grave expression, turned to her sister, and said, “You mean as long as it takes to cool
down
on the table? Or on your head?” Then she burst into hysterics.

“Don’t!” Freddy said.

Which made Bet laugh harder.

“It’s not funny.”

But Beatrice was beside herself. “Did you see the mush go flying?” she howled. “Did you see the bowl on her
bun?
Ha ha ha! Dove right in and tried for that last bite! Hahahahahaha! You can get down now, Gran, that’s a good girl!
Nothing was better for thee than he!”

Freddy never smiled or said a word, but Bet was still trying, through a hemorrhoidal kind of squeezing, to glean a little more escapist hilarity out of the idea—when they both suddenly heard the dripping, turned, and saw the urine, raining down through the wicker chair seat, pooling on the floor beneath. Bet let out a last staccato bark. Then, in a small, very surprised voice, she said, “Gran? Are
you
doing that?”

The body didn’t move. The urine kept dripping. Bet began to quiver.

“I think,” Freddy whispered, “I think they—bodies, I mean—they just do that.”

Bet turned away, and for a long time they were silent. Then, in the same surprised, minuscule voice, Bet said, “I
loved
her, Freddy. I loved her a lot.” And though she never sniffled, never sobbed, just held her head rigid and sat there shivering, tears began streaming down her cheeks.

For a long time Freddy couldn’t speak. She just watched the spilled milk swirl along the borders of the other pool. Finally, though, she said, “I loved her too, Bet. And … and if we really loved her, I … we … I think we’ve got to love her still.”

Bet drew her knees up and clenched them hard to try and slow the shivering. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean”—Freddy shook her head—“I mean she wouldn’t want this. I mean we, I … I think I’ve got to clean her up before we let an ambulance or anybody find her.”

Hearing this, Bet just hid her face between her knees and curled up like a foetus. But she heard Freddy sigh after a bit, then crawl out from under the table, cross the kitchen, and unbutton the never-before-used pink terry-cloth hand towels from the oven handle; heard her fetch sponges and soap from beneath or beside the sink, fill a saucepan with water, return to the table; heard her wipe the surface clean, draw a breath that sounded as trembly as her own, move to the floor, hesitate, then slowly continue cleaning.

When Freddy returned to the sink Bet finally peeked, saw the floor was spotless, saw a pile of clean rags lying beneath the wicker. She heard Freddy dump and rinse the saucepan, run fresh water, wring her towels and sponges, and they were soothing, these sounds: it could have been ’Dawma or Mama just cleaning as usual. But when Freddy recrossed the kitchen, took a stand by the chair, and Bet realized what must come next, she hid her face and curled up even more tightly than before. Then all but the one sound stopped:

This stasis went on so long and Bet had curled so tightly and deeply down into herself that when she finally heard a loud sniff she believed, for an instant, that it had come from Grandawma, and that she was about to get scolded for being under the table. But when the sniff was followed by a sob, then by the broken breathing that accompanies silent weeping, Bet knew it was her sister, knew that her strength had finally come to an end, and knew that no one was going to help them, that no one was coming to soothe them, that the situation was not going to change unless she herself somehow managed to change it.

She tried the easy route first: scrinching up into an even tighter ball, she whimpered, “Dear Jesus.
Help!”

The result was instantaneous: Freddy’s sobs became uncontrollable, half the water in her saucepan spilled onto the floor, and she gasped,
“Bet!”

“Phooey!” Bet said with a sudden strength born, I guess, of exasperation with her fear and helplessness. But even the crudest of prayers has a way of making things difficult to interpret. Take this odd (given the context) utterance, “Phooey!” It appears that Bet either said it to Christ because she felt He wasn’t helping her, or to no one because she was frustrated. But who’s to say her prayer hadn’t invoked Him so fast that both the exasperation and the phooey came from the Christ in Bet as He moved the frightened child in her gently aside, in order to help?

I don’t know. I suspect only fools understand prayer. All I know is that after uttering hers, Bet said “Phooey!” then unfolded herself, crawled
almost angrily out from under the table, stood up across the chair from her undone twin, tried to picture Peter’s inner mountains and lakes, failed utterly, tried to smile at Freddy, failed utterly, but finally reached, nevertheless, for the towel in the saucepan. All I know is that, after wringing it out with weak, trembling hands, she began, ever so gently, to cleanse the bowed head, the withered neck, the steel-gray hair. All I know is that this somehow enabled Freddy to start helping too, and that when the ambulance and Mama arrived a half hour or so later, our grandmother was lying on the floor neatly wrapped in a blanket, dignified, dry and spotless.

“Quit yo’ foolishness,” she said, “before I knock the living Jesus out of you.”

—Flannery O’Connor

For we are saved by hope
.

—St. Paul

O
ne thing you inherit when you’ve got three older brothers are a lot of threadbare, holey-elbowed, pill-collared, hand-me-down shirts. Another thing you inherit are teachers. All my teachers at McLoughlin High had taught at least one of my brothers; some had taught all three; most of the latter, by the time I got to them, were in about the same sort of shape as the shirts.

When it came to sheer aptitude, Everett was an excellent student, and in a better world than this one might have earned straight A’s. This being the world it is, though, Everett kept spotting all these enormous improvements
that people ought to be making on it—and it is a rare high school teacher who enjoys seeing their world being enormously improved upon by youths.

There are natural leaders and unnatural leaders; most public school teachers fall with a thankless thud into the latter category. Everett, on another hand entirely, was a natural ringleader. Add to that his short temper, tall IQ, fearlessness, good looks, great gifts as a mimic, and addiction to regaling all comers with kamikaze comedy routines, and what you get is a kid with power. Everett drew a certain kind of giddy teen following the way dog-doo draws flies. And when a mere kid is endowed with both power and followers, the very least of the problems likely to result is a checkered academic career.

Everett’s, for example, had only two B’s in it. All the way through high school he nailed down either A’s (for Aptitude) or C’s and D’s (for Contentiousness and Dissidence). Then there were his suspensions: as a freshman he earned his first for getting into three fistfights in two weeks (all three times with towering seniors, who merely wanted to initiate him with the traditional red lipstick, but to their amazement kept finding their own lips or noses dripping red instead); as a sophomore he nabbed a second for crawling up under a stage at a football game and standing a chocolate milk shake on the throne of the Homecoming Queen an instant before she sat back down; as a junior he managed two, the first for talking three-quarters of his class into walking out on a right-wing American History teacher’s lecture in praise of George Armstrong Custer, the second for borrowing a friend’s compound bow and four genuine obsidian-tipped arrows (courtesy of the collection of Marion Becker Chance) and doing a Little Bighorn number on the same teacher’s tires after he awarded Everett’s “Crazy Horse Was a Greater American than Lincoln” essay an F.

“You’re doing just great, son!” Papa told Everett somewhere along in there. “Just pick the college of your choice—and kiss it goodbye! I hope you like working at Crown Z better than Roy and me do.”

He got the message: as a senior he moved to the top of the honor role despite his Valley Forge wardrobe by simply avoiding those teachers whose politics he couldn’t stand. He then put his natural ringleadership, fiery eyes and eloquence together to achieve one of those bizarre triple coups conceivable only in public high schools when he was: (1) elected president of the student body, (2) appointed editor-in-chief of the school paper, and (3) voted “Prettiest Eyes” in the Senior Class Hall of Fame.

His two-fisted tenure as president and editor-in-chief was a yearlong
nightmare for the McLoughlin High faculty, but for the college-bound students it may have proven a useful primer for the last three years—the blitzkrieg years—of the Sixties. Though the great causes of Camas’s Class of ’66 were usually what Everett called “measurement issues” (such as what length of hair, length of skirt or length of kiss should be allowed on school property), he imported terms like “petition,” “student rights,” “boycott,” “free speech” and “solidarity” all the way up from exotic Berkeley, California, and managed to forge a place for them in a student lexicon hitherto dominated by such American Gothic terms as “rumble,” “rack,” “boss,” “cheater,” “skeezer,” “PG” and “knockers.” His presidency and editorship also helped bring him an unlooked-for economic and karmic windfall when, coupled with his prodigious SAT scores and a couple of passionate letters by teachers impressed with his turnaround, they offset his mangled GPA and suspensions just enough to win him a modest but feasible work/study scholarship to the University of Washington.

“One down!” Papa shouted the day the whole family saw Everett off at the Vancouver Greyhound station.

“Five
to go,” Mama groaned.

P
eter posed an entirely different sort of problem for the McLoughlin High faculty. Known to some of his friends as “Stanley Einstein” (a combination of Musial the Hitter and Albert the Thinker, though something along the lines of “Ramakrishna Clemente” might have been more to his liking), Pete was, at first glance, the Perfect Scholar. He never missed an assignment, aced every test, never rioted, seldom made wisecracks, raised his hand before speaking, and so on. But in his scholarly way he could be a source of teacherly stress surpassing even the Natural Ringleader. The problem, in his case, was sheer voracity of intellect. The public school teacher’s modest but worthy goal has always been to drum a modest but measurable quantity of knowledge into the largest possible number of student heads, and to twice a month receive a modest but measurable paycheck for doing so. But my immodestly bright number two brother had no interest in any such process. Peter didn’t want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it. He wanted to know everything there was to know about everything, and in this quest an instructor’s head was just a grapefruit to be sliced in half and squeezed remorselessly dry. Since very few students could even begin to understand him, there was no danger of Peter attracting anarchistic followers. For days, even weeks, he’d just sit there in his studious mode, sponging
up the disheveled lectures while knocking off homework for two or three other classes, or reading a novel or philosophical tome in German or French. But should his curiosity be fully piqued by something a teacher said, should some scientific quandary or epistemological conundrum galvanize his normally dispersed powers of thought, Peter’s cheeks would flush, his pupils dilate, his voice rise, and the questions would leap from his mouth like hounds from the back of a pickup, crashing through the fences of the topic at hand, smashing aside the course description, dragging everyone off on a panting, plunging intellectual coon hunt that almost invariably ended with the poor instructor treed, or at bay. Perhaps one pedant in ten respected him for this. Perhaps one in twenty could gracefully deal with it. The rest dreaded or loathed him for it.

W
ith the Iconoclast Chance and Genius Chance out of the way but four Unknown-Quantity Chances yet to be endured, some teachers had fled to other school districts, others had shed hair or teeth or broken out in eczema, and still others had fortified themselves with their bottle of choice, be it booze or Maalox, when into their rooms galumphed the Inculpable Chance—the blue-eyed, incessantly beaming, intrepidly affectionate Irwin. Toting a First Day Bouquet for his lady instructors, or a four-bit cigar for the gents, he would sometimes launch his year with a disclaimer than ran something like “Don’t worry, Teach. I’m nothin’ like my big brothers. I listen hard, be nice, try my best, and end up with C’s anyways …” But I doubt that disclaimers were needed: teachers are just people, and most people fall in love with Irwin at first sight, and stay fallen. For this very reason, though, Winnie too tore a chunk from his teachers. In his case it happened all at once, in early June, on the day he packed his dimpled cheeks, Grecian musculature, guileless baby-blues and puppy’s heart up with his books and pencils, gave ol’ Teach a last hug, promised he’d be back to visit, and strolled off down the hall forever, blissfully unaware of the piece of their hearts dragging along the linoleum behind him.