The Half Brother (10 page)

“Mom’s with him. She’s here for a little while.”

“Oh.”

“I know.”

“Does she know where you are?”

She smiled. “I needed some time to myself.”

I wasn’t going to ask if she was ashamed of me, because I knew she wasn’t. She was just prudent. Just smart. This was only ours, for now, we were keeping it.

Instead I came closer and reached out and took her braids, one in each hand. “What are these?” I said. “Who are you? Gretel? Heidi?”

“Hmm.” She thought. “Your milkmaid.” She tipped her head and simpered.

I let go. In this moment I wanted no role-play, no hints of anything sordid: it was all too new. “Are you feeling young?” I said. I was ready with my guilt.

“No.”

I wanted to touch her again. My hands burned with it.

She said, “I don’t feel young. My father used to like my hair like this. I suppose I did it for him, or something. I don’t even know.”

I saw tears in her eyes. She tossed her head, drove them away. She reached up and pulled the white bands off the braids, raked them apart with clawed fingers until her hair rippled loose around her.

“I don’t feel young at all,” she said. “Come here. Come here right now.”

“
THE HAPPY FAMILY
,” May said. “Fuck that.”

We were at her house, standing in front of the piano, looking at the lacrosse picture.

“I think I’d gone to the bathroom. Anything to get away from the
field
. I was always having to watch someone’s
game
. Or I was just wandering in the administration building, to get warm. I loved it there, when I was little. I pretended it was a palace. Because of that crazy marble floor in the main hall, and the columns. Being alone there, gliding around—I loved that.”

For a child who grew up at a boarding school, May seemed to have spent a lot of time alone, at least some of it by choice. Which I completely understood.

“That picture even went into the alumni magazine,” she said. “Lickety-split. Without me. Did you know that? I think that picture is Mom’s ideal.” She cut her eyes at me. “I know. I’m being self-pitying.”

I pointed at another picture, in another silver frame, of May solo, at about age five. “So what’s that?”

“Compensation.” But her voice was light.

Now we had each other. Self-pity on any count was absurd. “I want it,” I said, pointing.

In the picture, May was sitting in a miniature Windsor chair, wearing a green velvet dress with a white collar. Her hair was a short
pageboy, ending just at the childish fullness of her cheeks, her bangs martially straight (I imagined Florence wielding the scissors), her child’s hands folded in her lap. It all would have been sort of fatally
American Gothic
if she hadn’t looked so utterly self-contained, with a hint of exasperation in her dark eyes. Over them the brows were like delicate wings of birds. “Did they try to get you to smile?”

“Of course.”

“And you wouldn’t.”

“Would
you
have?” Now she was smiling. “Take it,” and she reached forward over the squadron of other frames.

“Oh, no, that’s—” Her hand hit the lacrosse picture and it toppled, taking others with it, in a falling line. I heard her quick intake of breath, although it could have been my own, and then we dissolved into laughter. “See, May-May,” I said, “you can’t upset the gods that way.”

“I don’t see why not,” May said, and turned to me. We left the rest of the pictures fallen, as they were.

“
WHAT WOULD YOU BE DOING
if I weren’t around?” I said. “How would you be amusing yourself?”

She turned to me. We were naked, in bed. We had been there for hours. We were pretending Preston had no idea. We could do whatever we wanted. “Charlie.” She advanced on me. “Poor sad Charlie.” She climbed on top, straddling me. She leaned close, her breasts swaying, but her knees were pinning my hands. “Poor
pitiful
Charlie. He is
fishing
for
compliments
.”

I stared straight back. “Yes.” I was shameless in my need.

Outside, it was snowing. It was only midafternoon but because of the snow the low light cocooned us. The house was practically silent. Preston was asleep—we knew this because there was a baby monitor on May’s bedside table. Every now and then it lit up and we heard him moan or sigh, one floor below, in the study that was now his makeshift bedroom, since he had quit climbing the stairs. Sometimes we heard the thump and snuffle of Percy rearranging himself on the floor next to Preston’s bed.

May’s room, where we were, had the semi-stripped mien of a place that was in the process of being left. The posters and construction-paper locker decorations were artifacts from high school, still on the wall only because of inertia. Sometimes I scanned them for signs of what May was like before,
before
, but there still wasn’t enough distance for me not to feel prurient.

But right then I wasn’t looking at anything. The kiss, however, ended before I was ready, May pulling away, and I felt it before I opened my eyes: she’d switched modes, she must be light for a little while, we had been so serious, sometimes it was frightening. Sometimes, she required facts. She wanted to build us a foundation; she was absolutely right; she was erasing a deficit, acquiring knowledge of me, my family, and it had to be a bit of a joke because she knew so little—there was an imbalance. “So tell me,” she said, as she’d said before and would again.

She knew the outlines, even Jimmie Garrett, although I had done my best not to Horatio Alger myself—not to Preston Bankhead myself. But right now she was interested more in my generation. “I thought all brothers hated each other,” she said.

“Of course not.”

“You talk about him like he’s perfect.”

“Well, he’s not. And how is that hating?”

“Not hating exactly.”

“He’s just the opposite of me. He looks like a model. He’s a math genius. He can’t spell.”

“You
do
hate him.”

“I adore him,” I say. “He’s a slob. There’re always holes in his clothes. Always needs a haircut. Girls call him all hours of the day and night.”

“Lovely.”

“You’ll have to meet him to understand.” There had to be some way to explain. “His charm is untainted. He will always be loved.”

She looked at me and in the half-light her face was sober, almost stern.

I said, “Why did you quit writing me? Last year?”

“Because it seemed hopeless,” she said, without hesitation. “Because I did not want to be a silly girl.”

I reached up to her hair. Her face. She settled down into me.

The light was almost gone. We drank that cup of time, pretending it would never run dry.

Then her voice came. It was nearly dark. “How could you ask that?”

“Ask what?”

“Earlier. How I’d be amusing myself.
Amusing
myself? Don’t you
know
?”

“Yes. I know.” She sank down, under, I held her, covered her. “I know.” I could barely see her face, the sea-deep eyes, as I curled around her in her childhood bed.

PRESTON INSISTED WE GO
to the Lowells’ Christmas party.

Usually he didn’t like to be left, and at some point I realized this particular instance wasn’t magnanimity but an effort to pretend all was normal. “Why
wouldn’t
you go?” he demanded. We called the visiting nurse service, and didn’t tell him until the woman showed up at the house and it was a done deal. Meanwhile, he sat motionless in his chair, his hands precise on each armrest like a statue. It was almost funny, how the lightning bolt seemed to be materializing in one fist, but then he nodded at her stiffly. “There is a television in the back bedroom,” he said, meaning
Stay away from me
, and the LPN, who knew the drill already, smiled at us to let us know it was all right.

The party was crowded. At the front door, we looked at each other and then stepped apart. We weren’t willing to broadcast ourselves. But as the party went on the distance became more and more titillating and finally I said, “Do you know the best view of the labyrinth?”

“Show me.”

We wove our way, separately, through the people we knew so well, people who must have been wondering, but I didn’t think about that. Divya glanced at us, smiled. I went up the stairs; May followed a minute later. Behind us the noise of the party died away. On the third floor were several pinched, icy maid’s rooms (I heard Divya’s voice:
My God, this house is a British novel
) and then the attic. Straight ahead was a round window that swiveled on a horizontal axis, and when I reached it I pressed open the solid old brass window locks, letting in the cold air, and tilted it up for her. Carefully, she put her
head through; directly beneath us, laid out like a map, was the labyrinth.

People down below were laughing. The sound floated up. May laughed too. “Don’t you feel like they’re little puppets?” she said. “Like you could reach down and flick them along with your fingers?”

“Shh,” I said, and put my hands on her lovely ass in the smooth black dress.

Outside in the cold people bumble and laugh. How Win trims the boxwood. Oh the hours! And Divya with her private smile. The homesick southern wife, so very long ago. I can see past May’s head: snow lay on the dark green, the circle right-angling, giving way to another circle.

Everything is beginning. I believe everything is still beginning. And when May draws her head back in, white flakes melting into her hair, she is smiling.

I’D LIKE TO SAY
that dying brought out the best in Preston. I’d also like to say it brought out the best in me. Both would be lies.

One night after dinner Preston said, “Goddammit, when’s lunch?”

May and I exchanged a look. She said, “Daddy, we just ate. Do you want a snack?”

“Do not patronize me!”

He’d also said, in recent days, “Fred Hueffer wants me on the fucking steering committee,” and, one afternoon, sitting in front of a history documentary on TV (the only kind of show he’ll consent to watch), “I am just not going to get the sermon written, and that’s final.”

Once, May left the room and he leaned in to me. “I’ve been faithful to Florence throughout our whole marriage. Completely faithful.”

“I admire that, Preston,” I said.

“It was mostly out of my own pride,” he said, and then May came back and he shut up.

I pondered that one awhile, but never told her.

Quietly, it was agreed that someone should be with him at all times. He only ever wanted May, but sometimes, during the week, I stayed at the house while she ran errands. By then I was regularly staying
overnight. She was vague about all this with her family. “They’ve never really thought I’d do anything interesting,” she said. “I don’t think they’d even notice us. If they were here.”

One afternoon, when I was with him, he was fidgety and petulant, refusing music, TV, me reading to him, a nap—and then all at once he smiled and said he would set up the chessboard.

I half expected him to ask for a drink; he’d become increasingly belligerent about habits and routines, and if he remembered that he usually started his game with a scotch on the rocks by his side, we’d be in trouble; but instead he moved his pawn, tipped his head coquettishly at me, and broke his cardinal rule, which was no chatting during play. “Charlie,” he said, “I like to know about people, and I realize I don’t know your middle name.”

He didn’t seem like Preston at all, but like an actor, a character. A genial nursing-home resident I could josh around with. “You’re asking after all this time? Well, I don’t know yours either,” I said.

The old, the real, Preston would have bristled. This one smiled indulgently. “I am Preston Broussard Bankhead,” he said. “Preston from my father’s mother, and Broussard from my mother’s mother. A family tradition.”

He was formal as a paper doll, and it was at that moment that I realized, once and for all, that Preston was dying. That sooner rather than later, he would not be there. He would be merely an absence. A space, nothing.

And I further realized that he wasn’t in his right mind, and I could say whatever I wanted. I could—not to put too fine a point on it—just make shit up. It was cruel and, in the moment, made complete sense to me. “I’m Charles Satterthwaite Garrett,” I said.

Which was untrue. My middle name was Spooner, my mother’s maiden name. How could Preston have known so little about me? How had my name never come up in conversation? He seemed to know everyone’s middle name. It was the sort of detail Preston Broussard Bankhead used to suss out on his own, climbing up people’s family trees to inspect the view.

I waited for him to call me on it, to furrow his brow and wonder aloud if he was confused. But he didn’t.

I was aware that
Spooner
would not impress him, might be a detail he actively disliked. Maybe I was protecting my mother from him. And protecting myself. Maybe I was seeing that hot little town she came from, where she took me only once, and even then I had no desire for Preston to sense any of it in me, to smell it on my breath.

I was protecting something that I hadn’t entirely figured out. It was, in the purest sense, none of his business.

He was waiting, I realized. “Satterthwaite’s from my father’s side,” I said, “an old name,” and I’d told another lie that felt like play and protection at once.

“I’ve been thinking about these things. I have a great deal of time to think now,” he said, waving a hand magisterially. He sat back in his chair, the game forgotten. “It’s important to know who you are. To know who’s around you. Because I’ll tell you.” And then, all of a sudden, he’s launching into the Grey boys sermon.

Always the same phrases, the same arc. “So, do we have relativism?” he intoned. “Isn’t
one
the most important? But what if it’s tainted?
Cus
tom, or
cul
ture, or
con
science? Or all three? Because I’ll tell you, friends. Someday you’ll wake up and you’ll be on a different ride at the fair. You’ll be alone at the top of that Ferris wheel. You’ll be looking down at the landscape below. Little tiny people like ants. You’ll be alone but not lonely. You’ll realize how
powerful
you are, and that you
never knew it
.”