My Brother (8 page)

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I was in Miami, a city at the far southern end of North America, and ordinarily the word “Miami,” representing this city, is familiar enough so that I can say it and know what I mean, and I can say it and believe that the person hearing it knows what I mean, but when I am writing all this about my brother, suddenly this place and the thing I am about to say seem foreign, strange. I was in Miami, and if someone asked me a question in regard to my family, I would make frank replies about my family and about my mother. It must have been wonderful in Miami then, but I will never really know, I can only repeat what other people said; they said that it was wonderful in Miami and they were glad to be there, or they wanted to be there. But I myself was in Miami, and I found Miami not to be in the tropical zone that I was from, and yet not in the temperate zone where I now live; Miami was in between, but its in-betweenness did not make me long for it. I missed the place I now live in, I missed snow, I missed my own house that was surrounded by snow, I missed my children, who were asleep or just walking about in the house surrounded by snow, I missed my husband, the father of my children, and they were all in the house surrounded by snow. I wanted to go home. One midday I left Miami, and when I left, it was warm and clear and the trip from Miami to Vermont should not have taken more than eight hours, but Miami is south and the farther north I got, the more temperate the weather turned and there were snowstorms which made air travel difficult and I arrived at my home in Vermont fourteen and one-half hours after I left Miami. In Miami I had taken a walk through the Fairchild Botanical Gardens, and while there I had bought two rhododendrons from New Guinea at the gift shop. The rhododendrons were in five-gallon pots and they were very awkward to carry on airplanes and through airport terminals. Perhaps I looked like a very sensible woman carrying two large plants covered with trumpet-shaped brilliant orange blooms in the middle of an airport and in the middle of January, because everyone I met was very kind and helped me with my plants and my various other traveling paraphernalia. I was so happy to reach my home, that is, the home I have now made for myself, the home of my adult life.

My two children were asleep in my son's bed. When I am away from home they like sleeping together. When I saw them asleep, breathing normally, their features still, they looked so beautiful, not doing anything that I felt was a danger to them or annoying to me, so that I did not have to call their name out loud, as if their name itself were a warning (“HAROLD,” “ANNIE”), or as if their name itself held regret. I stood over them, looking down at them and thinking how much I loved them and how glad I was that I had them, and I bent over and kissed them and they woke up and were glad to see me and begged me to get into bed with them and snuggle with them until they fell asleep again. I got into bed with them, meaning to stay there only until they fell asleep, but I fell asleep also; I awoke because my husband woke me up.

It was six o'clock in the morning, the winter daylight was still mostly silver, it had in it only a little bit of yellow, it had in it only a little bit of pink, I could see this as I left my son's room, standing in the hallway and facing a window.

When my husband woke me up, he said, “Sweetie, come, come, I have to talk to you” (that is just the way he said it). In the dark of the room I could see his face; that isn't really possible, to see something like a face in the dark of a room, but it is true all the same, I could see his face. It was an anxious face, a troubled face; on his face I could see that he was worried about something and I thought that something was himself. I said to him, “What's the matter?” I asked him, “What's wrong?” (and in just that way, using just those words). He would only reply, “Come, come, I have to talk to you.” In the hall where I could see the silvery daylight with just a little pink and just a little yellow, he said, “Dalma just called, Devon died.” And when he said “Devon died” I thought, Oh, it's Devon who died, not one of his relatives, not someone of his, this is not someone
he
has to grieve for. I was so glad about that, so glad at the thought, the feeling that this death, this look of sadness in his face, had to do with someone who was not related to him. He was not going to suffer a grief. My husband is someone I love; it is a love I had not expected or even really knew existed; I would rather bad things or unpleasant things happen to me. I can't bear to see him suffer; in any case, he takes suffering too seriously, too hard; it is better when bad things are happening to me, then I don't have to worry about him. And then again, I believe that I am better at handling bad things than he.

I got the children ready for school and gave them breakfast. I told them their uncle had died. They were not surprised, they had been expecting it; they would go to the funeral, they would go swimming with our friends Bud and Connie; Bud and Connie would take them to the Lobster Pot for dinner. I took the children to the bus stop, I had a nice chat with the other mothers while we waited for the bus to come, I did not tell them that my brother had died. I returned home, I called the travel agent and made travel arrangements; I sat and waited for a woman from a newspaper who wanted to ask me questions about a book I had written and had just published. This woman came and she asked me all sorts of questions about my past and my present, about the way in which I had become a writer, about the way in which my life, with its improbable beginning (at least from the way it looks to someone else now) of poverty and neglect, cruelty and humiliation, loss and deceit, had led to a sure footing in the prosperous and triumphant part of the world, leading to her, a newspaper reporter, being interested in my life. Whatever questions she asked me about anything, it was easy to be without mercy and to answer truthfully: about my mother, about the reasons for no longer wanting to associate my writing with the magazine where I had developed my skills as a writer. For the magazine I wrote for all of my writing life so far was like the place in which I had grown up; it was beautiful, an ideal of some kind, but it had been made vulgar and ugly by the incredibly stupid people who had become attracted to it. I said nothing about the death of my brother, which had actually occurred hours before (though really he had been dead for at least a year before the breath left his body), I had vowed to tell her nothing about my brother and his illness and now his death. If I had spoken to her while he was just sick and even almost dying (though he was in a state of almost dying for a long time), I would not have hesitated to tell her about my brother's illness, to tell her of his impending death (and also to bring up the fact that all of us face impending death). I could not speak to her of his just dying. I could not make sense of it just then. His death was so surprising, even though I had been expecting it; it hung in front of me, not like a black cloud but like a block of something hard and cold and impenetrable. I spoke to her and I spoke to her, she asked me questions and she asked me questions. All the things I said to her were true, all the things I said to her were filled with meaning. The day was cold, it was the middle of January, the sun was shining. For me such a thing is a paradox: the sun is shining, yet the air is cold. And as I was talking to this woman from the newspaper who kept asking me questions and questions and whose questions I kept answering and answering, I looked out a window and I saw that an animal, a deer, had eaten up some especially unusual evergreens that my friend Dan Hinkley had sent to me from his nursery in Kingston, Washington. And the sight of the evergreens, all eaten up in a random way, not as if to satisfy a hunger but to satisfy a sense of play, suddenly made me sad, suddenly made me wish that this, my brother dying, had not happened, that I had never become involved with the people I am from again, and that I only wanted to be happy and happy and happy again, with all the emptiness and meaninglessness that such a state would entail.

I was walking up and down the floor of my kitchen, the floor was pine, a type of wood that reminded me of my father, who was a carpenter. This man was my brother's real father and not really my own, my father was someone else I did not know, I knew only this man and to me he was my father. He was a man I loved and had known very well, better than his own children knew him (my brother who was dead, my brother who was a merchant in the market on Saturdays, my brother who had almost killed our mother when he threw her to the ground while trying to prevent her from throwing stones at him). My brother's coffin was made of that kind of wood, pine; my other brother, the one who is a merchant in the market on Saturdays, had picked it out. It cost the least of all the kinds of coffins that were on sale at the undertaker's, I paid for it with traveler's checks. As a child I was afraid of the undertaker, Mr. Straffee; as a child, all the furniture I came in contact with was made of this wood, pine: the chair that I sat on at home, the floor that I walked on at home, the bed I slept in, the table on which my mother would place the meal I ate in the middle of a schoolday, my desk at school, the chair I sat on behind the desk at school—all of it was made from this wood, pine. The floor on which I stood that morning that my brother had died was cold and the planks had pulled away a little from each other.

I called all the doctors who had prescribed medicines for my brother to tell them he had died. Their names were Scattergood, Hart, and Pillemer. Only when I had called them, standing by the telephone, did their names stand out to me, as if their names had drawn me to them all along. They said how sorry they were to hear of it. I called the pharmacist to tell him that my brother had died. His name was Ed. He had been very kind and sympathetic, often trusting that I would pay him the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars' worth of medicine that I had charged; no matter how much I owed him, he always gave me the medicines that had been prescribed to ease my brother's suffering and prolong his life. I went to the grocery store in the little village to buy something, and when I told Pete, the grocer, that my brother had died, he told me how sorry he was and he said that he was sure that his wife, Debby, would be sorry to hear it, too. Everyone I told that my brother had just died said how sorry they were, they would say this, “I'm sorry,” and those two words became so interesting to hear: everyone tried to say them with an emphasis that they hoped would convey the sincerity of their feelings; they really were sorry that this person they did not know was dead, that this person they would not have liked at all (I knew this, for they would have found him charming, he was so good-looking, he could remember to have good manners when it suited him, when he wanted to get something, but really in the end he would have found their devotion to the routine, the ordinariness of pure, hard work, devoid of satisfaction, yet he would not have quarreled with them, he would only have done everything he knew how to accentuate to them the futility, the emptiness of the thing called life, the thing called living—they would not have liked him). But these words, “I'm sorry,” which sometimes are said with a real depth of feeling, with true sincerity, sometimes just out of politeness, are such a good thing to hear if you are in need of hearing them, and just then I was in need of hearing those words, “I'm sorry,” “I am so sorry.” I did not love my brother, I did not like my brother, I was only so sorry that he had died, I was comforted to hear other people say that they were sorry that he had died. And I was full of admiration for the people who could say this: “I'm sorry,” for they said it with such ease, they said it as if they were only breathing.

When I saw him for the last time still alive, though he looked like someone who had been dead for a long time and whose body had been neglected, left to rot—when I had last seen him and he was still alive, I had quarreled with him. I had gone to see him one weekend, leaving my family to spend the Thanksgiving holiday by themselves. My brother, the one who is a merchant on Saturdays in the market, had called to say Devon was not doing very well, Devon was sinking, Devon was going down. That was just the way he said it: not doing very well, sinking, going down. For the sickeningly floriferous thrush growing in his throat, a doctor had prescribed something; the pharmacist placed thirty tablets of it into a bottle so small I could hide it in the palm of my hand and the bottle could not be detected; the bottle of that medicine cost so much that I could not pay for it then; nor could I pay for the other medicines I needed, medicines for pain, not medicines to ease pain but medicines to make you not feel anything at all. I could not pay for any of it with cash, I could pay for it only with credit; and in that way, though not solely in that way, his illness and death reminded me again and again of my childhood: this living with credit, this living with the hope that money will come reminded me of going to a grocer whose name was Richards, not the one who was a devout Christian whom later we went to, for the grocers named Richards, whether they had religious conviction or not, charged us too much anyway and then forced us to pay our debts no matter how unable my parents were to do so; my parents had more children than they could afford to feed, but how were they to know how much food or disease, or anything in general, would cost, the future never being now; only it actually comes, the future, later.

And when I saw my brother for the last time, alive, in that way he was being alive (dead really, but still breathing, his chest moving up and down, his heart beating like something, beating like something, but what, but what, there was no metaphor, his heart was beating like his own heart, only it was beating barely), I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead, but constantly with his demands, in want, constantly with his necessities, weighing on my sympathy, at times preying on my sympathy, whichever way it fell, I was sick of him and wanted him to go away, and I didn't care if he got better and I didn't care if he died. That was just the way I felt, that was the only thing I felt just at that moment when he would not die and when he would not live; I only wanted him to do one or the other and then leave me alone.