The Half Brother (19 page)

“The academy,” I said.

“Right, whatever. I made him talk to me a little, so I had something to go on. He said football’s like a job to him, but skating’s like flying.”

“He always loved to skate,” May said. “I remember him on Abbott Pond, pushing around a milk crate. When he was, like, two. Trying to keep up with B.J.”

“He asked you to write him a recommendation?” I said.

“Senior math teacher, it’s required or something. But I also tried to talk him out of it,” Nick said. “I told him there was a war going on. I told him the military is only gonna think of him as a body. Meat. Fodder.”

“Oh, God, Nicky.” I wasn’t even surprised. I was glad that Salter had gone. “What did he say?”

“Not much. He wasn’t going to listen.”

“You’re not going to sabotage him, are you? To save his soul?” May demanded.

Nick looked surprised. “No, of course not. I told him I’d write the rec. I wasn’t lying.” He grinned at her. “But that’s an idea.”

“I mean it,” May said. “Don’t do it.”

“I mean it too,” Nick said. “I won’t. It matters to him,” he said patiently, “so I won’t.” He looked at her, a little wide-eyed, for another moment and then his gaze shifted to me. “Besides, by the time he’s done there the war’ll be over, right?”

I shrugged. “They’ll think up another one.” Nearby I saw Celia Paxton get up from a table, with a phalanx of friends—Minnie, India, Marina. She was laughing, laughing so hard that her mouth was stretched wide. I’d never seen her so raucous. The four of them were collapsing on one another, bent double with their hilarity, and the whole cafeteria could hear them, but for the moment they seemed not to care, these girls who were pretty and smart but not at the top of the social order, not used to attention, to doing exactly as they pleased. Somehow in this moment, though, they felt an unusual freedom. They picked up their trays and sauntered off, tossing their hair.

I thought about how just a few days before I’d seen Zack steer Celia down the hall by the elbow, like they were long married and old, old.

“Well,” May said, laying her fork and knife neatly across her cleared plate, standing to leave. Divya rose too. “I suppose he can have visitors. I’ll go by and see him later. Maybe speak to Booker.”

“He’s like your little brother,” Nick said. “You really care about him.”

May smiled. “I guess you’re right. He was always my favorite. I used to rock him to sleep. But don’t tell him I said that.”

The limpid gray noon streamed down, the clearest light, casting no shadows; it shone on Nick’s cheeks, raggedy-edged rose, on the red-gold hair flopping in his eyes. He had no idea he was being watched; he was watching the girl.

When May and Divya were gone, I stretched my legs under the table. Nick and I both had frees now. It had become our new habit,
on Mondays, to linger here. As he drank the rest of the coffee I said, “So. May.”

He put the cup down. It looked small in his long hand. “She’s a tough one,” he said.

“She likes the straight and narrow,” I said. “That’s new.”

The cafeteria was emptying. But inside was warm and bright.

“You know that whatever was between May and me could not be more over,” I said. “That is God’s truth.” He played with the food in front of him that he hadn’t eaten. Which was most of it. He hollowed out a roll and balled the soft part up between his palms, examining it with an empirical seriousness, then dropped it on his plate. “What is it?” I said, patiently. “Tell me. Fingers? Earlobes?”

He smiled at me like I was crazy, like he was merely tolerating me, but didn’t meet my gaze. “Whole package. Not that it matters.”

“But I thought it didn’t work that way.”

There was a long silence while he grinned to himself, and finally he said, “Eyes.”

“Ah.”

“They’re blue. I just realized that today. Just now. The way the light shone in.” I nodded helpfully. Father confessor. “They’re so dark— I’ve never seen that color. I didn’t realize.” He was filled with wonder, at May’s eyes, at the shift that had happened, in him, again.

AFTER LUNCH.
After that free. Last class of the day. “Okay, people. Time for an indulgence. I’m going to indulge myself. I’ve been waiting for this one.” They didn’t know it, but I said this every year. Every year, when we had finished
Gatsby
, I read the last page aloud.

Also, every year, I wept. I hadn’t realized the words moved me so much until one year I just teared up, right at
And one fine morning
—After that, I was Pavlov’s dog. I almost looked forward to it. Crying once a year is probably necessary. Not that it was full-on sobbing, not at all. More a welling up. But it was involuntary, almost external, like being rained on, a nourishment, and it made me glad that I could feel that deeply, or had once.

So I read the closing passage.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn
. I read along, anticipating the
tick
, the turn, the switch flipping as it always did—it was outside feeling now: my eyes would suddenly heat, and there we’d be.
His capacity for wonder
. The collective embarrassment would be thick; they’d be thinking,
Is he really crying over a
book
?
But I figured my annual display was good for them. If not your English teacher weeping over literature, then who?

And I always wondered: why did no one ever point out that Fitzgerald wanted it both ways? Which eventually I would do. Show them the time circling. The dream behind him, the future receding in front—which was it? Both?
The orgastic future
—ah, Nick Carraway, ah, Scott, he felt and felt. And the tears would come.

But then, that day, I came to the end. The boats were beating against the current: I held the class in my hand, one more moment;
borne back ceaselessly into the past
. And my eyes were dry.

I paused, and of course they thought I was being dramatic. Their eyes on me—Candace’s, Dex’s, Celia’s. But really I was waiting. Just waiting. Nothing happened. The streak was broken. And that was that.

AFTER PRESTON DIED,
and after May left, I began to have a dream. I’d dream of an ordinary day, and how I was waiting for her, my student. The reality of the present crept in and wound into the past, and time lost all its markers, and I dreamed that I had loved her when she had been a child, that I had seen her in mist and she had looked up and known me, that we had been infants in the same crib. In the dream she was so familiar she was faceless. I knew exactly when she would walk into my classroom and sit down, exactly when she would walk into lunch, and she would float over to me in this dreamworld Abbott and we would take each other into ourselves.

The dream was day after day after day all twined into one. I waited, and then she was there. Over and over, disappearing, appearing, dream, forgetting, remembering.
Is it true? Is it true?
and it always was. As I woke, though, transgression would begin to pollute the softness;
I would start to scream my innocence, but either I was voiceless or no one listened, and when I woke the warmth and the dream and May were always gone.

I WENT TO HER CLASSROOM.
Again I leaned against the doorway, just inside. No, I wouldn’t go farther. Probably ever. “Hi, Charlie,” she said.

“I only have a minute,” I said.

She cocked an eyebrow. For some reason she sensed a joke. And she wasn’t wrong, really. “What’s up?” She smiled. The joke was going to be good. She’d chosen to forget our tension at the game. She took a sip of coffee, as if to fortify herself.

But I had frozen. She didn’t seem surprised. She suffered me the way you’d suffer a child. Tolerantly, she began to chat: She’d been to visit Zack. Out for another week. It was driving him crazy—said he felt fine. Funny how he’d opened up to Nick, wasn’t it? Before Nick ruined it with his hippie talk—and she smiled.

I cleared my throat. “Well, that’s why I’m here. In a way.”

“What is?” she said.

She had leaned out over the labyrinth and laughed. Her face and body had been so clean, unmarked—better than innocent. Instead waiting and confident. Like Nick, like Nicky should be.

“Charlie?”

I said, “You need to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“My brother is twenty-six.”

“Yes,” she said politely.

“And he’s a better man than I will ever, ever be.”

“Oh, now. Charlie.” She smiled a faux-wise smile. Her back was stiffening.

“I’m not just talking about his recent heroics,” I said. “He always has been.”

“Oh, please—”

“Since he was a child. Since the moment of his birth.”

She put down her coffee. I saw her shoulders tense, her fingers
stiffen on the lip of the mug. But oh, I wanted her to be laughing! Howling! I wanted to pick her up and rattle some joy loose! “Why are you saying this?” she said.

“Because it’s something I want you to think about.”

“About how Nick is better.”

I thought of Nick glowing. “Yes. I’m irrelevant.”

“That’s one word for it.” Then her control cracked. “Oh my
God
, Charlie. Spare me the narcissism of your self-loathing.”

“That’s pretty good,” I said. “Have you been saving it?”

“It’s completely accurate.”

I shook my head. “No. You’ve got it wrong.”

“I know what you’re doing. This is absurd.”

“It’s not.”

“Charlie,
I didn’t come back here because of you
.”

“I believe you.”

“I know you wanted my father, and not me. That was pretty clear. Weird, but clear. To me. Eventually.”

And I didn’t protest because it fit, fit perfectly, so I’d deny it at my peril, or hers. Instead I said, “I told Nick it was all right.”

“I don’t need your fucking blessing!”

She realized what she’d said.

“I just don’t want you to think he’s underhanded,” I said. “That’s all. He’s the finest man I know.”

The anger in her eyes was white-hot. “I don’t need some kind of consolation prize, either.”

“I know you don’t!” I snapped. Nicky as consolation? I could be angry too.

There was a long pause. On her face, feelings fought to surface, were quelled, mitigated, transformed. It was like looking out the window of a speeding car: the scenery was almost homogeneous in the blur, details were impossible to discern, and yet the progression, the fact of it if not the substance, was unmistakable. You began on the mountain, ended in the cool green valley. She fought the journey, fought this destination I’d suggested. I knew though that if the idea had not also been her own, she never would have moved an inch. Would
not have arrived where she did, which was considering it. Considering Nick. In spite of herself.

I was seeing Preston in her now, too. A haughty, highly defended frailty. Maybe I’d exacerbated that quality in her—although I didn’t want to claim that kind of influence. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe I sometimes looked the same, had that same set of shoulder. Who can see essences? Who can see himself?

“You should see him when he talks about you,” I said.

She was silent for a long time. Her face had finally gone completely still, the current of thought now deep, deep. Oh, I wanted inside her mind. All the doors opening and shutting. The maze she was in. I was sorry, I was sorry. But Nicky—beautiful Nicky! Here he is!

Finally she said, “Is that all?”

“That’s all.” When I left, I closed the door behind me.

AT THE OLD,
unlovely Atlanta stadium, years ago. Nicky is five. It’s the summer before I go to college, the summer after Hugh has died. I’m leading him down to our seats, ten rows above home plate. In those days, you had your pick.

There are many stories I could tell to explain myself. This is only one.

I say that Hugh brought me here, and then feel an irrational fear that Nicky will envy me this knowledge of his father—irrational because for one thing, Nick’s too young to make that kind of connection, and for another I already believe that the capacity for envy is not part of his nature.

I tell him everything I know about baseball, which is not much. But Nick looks at me like I’m a genius. I say, “Your daddy knew a lot more than I do.”

He gives me a serious nod, because what greater truth could be spoken, and then turns to the game. His stare is straight ahead. His feet don’t touch the ground. “Hey, you want a Co-Cola?” I say, like Hugh, old Atlantan with his few, gentle affectations. “I’ll get us a couple of Co-Colas.”

I also buy peanuts, hot and dusty. I show Nick how to shell them. He barely believes me when I say we can drop the shells right at our feet. A few minutes later I buy hot dogs. He holds the food stiffly in each hand. “Are you hungry, Nicky?”

“Okay, Charlie,” he says, answering a different question altogether.

Every time a hawker goes by, I raise my hand. Nicky watches me without surprise: grown-ups (and to him I am a grown-up) do this around him. I buy Cracker Jack, and a hat, and a souvenir pennant. A deluxe commemorative program. Cotton candy. I scan the crowd for anyone selling anything and pay attention to the game only if I hear the crack of a hit. I will leave no junk unbought.

Anita watched us leave earlier this evening. She’d stood in the doorway as we went down the front walk to my car, me holding Nicky’s hand, and I’d felt that with every step I was shouting
Don’t worry, don’t worry:
not about this particular night, or my driving, or muggers, or that Nicky might get beaned with a fly ball or anything as mundane as that, because my mother was not a worrier—no, it was that Anita, and we, were on a ship, an ocean liner, enormous but empty, devoid of crew, a situation we’d grown accustomed to, and now Nicky and I were rowing away in a leaky dinghy. Maybe we were seeking provisions; maybe this was a practice run; or maybe this was what we would have to do, now or someday, to rescue ourselves. And my mother didn’t care about being left, or being alone or even wasting away, once the hardtack and water were gone; she just wanted to know that I would never abandon that tiny vessel, tonight, ever.