The Half Brother (16 page)

“Football and hockey,” I said.

“Nice kid?”

“I’ve known him since he was an infant. So has May.” Nick waited. “He’s a very good kid.”

“Not nice?”

“Something’s up with him. Gotten tough, lately. I guess.”

“Oh, Charlie,” May said. “He has a tender heart.”

Oh Charlie
.

“I used to babysit him,” May said. “Remember?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, charm is overrated,” Nick said cheerfully.

We crossed the quad and headed down the hill to the cafeteria. Yesterday, at the tea, it had been properly golden and elegiac, roses fluttering in the slight breeze, but it had rained overnight and the tender, clear autumn air was gone. Now it was overcast and muggy, with that weird, shadowless, heavy light. Still, it felt like the first day. Energy and freshness spilling over. I wanted to ask May if she remembered this feeling—couldn’t I ask her that? Well, another time.

I felt how stiffly she was holding herself, how steely her determination. She was damn well going to say
Remember, Charlie?
and make me behave too. She wasn’t going to give an inch, she was becoming formidable. Maybe it was the Florence in her; but I didn’t have to like it, although it would make things easier for both of us.

As we walked, Nick in the middle, I reflected that no one really remembered about May and me. It had been hush-hush, muted further by the speed of Preston’s dying. And the students—bless these kids, as usual. They had no idea. I tried to forget May’s proximity. Instead I tried to bask in Nick’s reflected glow. Beside me, his face was open and happy; he was incapable of self-consciousness, maybe because he didn’t notice attention anymore, maybe because it never ceased.

Candace van Slake glided by. “Hi, Mr. Satterthwaite,” she breathed.

“Hi, Candace.” Nick was good with names. He’d have everyone memorized already.

She blinked, dazzled. I glanced up at Nick, wondering if he would smile, and at the same moment May looked at him too, and May’s and my gazes crossed and tangled; but Nick walked on oblivious, to us, to himself; and May and I saw it all.

Twelve

Mid-September. When the heat gentles and the light is thick gold. The green of the leaves is darkening, still vital, and time hovers, folding up and back, memories thick on the sides of the road, not even mine, not even Abbottsford’s: the wistfulness is general over the world.

And I’ll get confused, because the light is so pure and equalizing, and think it is June instead of September; or that I am driving down a road in the South, not the North; because the light holds all memory; and maybe I am headed to that guesthouse in the trees, or even to some town where I’ve never been—one of the unknown towns of my faceless ancestors; and a little farther down the road, in that light, over the hill, almost visible, almost here, is the home I have always looked for, the white wooden house filled with voices.

I WAS WALKING
down the hall during one of my free periods when I heard a woman’s musical voice, full of confidence and wit, even though I didn’t know what she was saying. It was like seeing someone familiar in disguise.

The voice rose and fell, May’s and yet not. It ascended in a tart question, clearly rhetorical, because the class burst into laughter.

I edged to the open door, peered in at an acute angle. There were
Celia, Zack, Dex, looking up at her, engaged, alight. Zack was smiling, a hint of the old sweetness. Then Celia Paxton saw me, her attention flicking to me and back. I couldn’t look in on May’s straight slim self, her grown-up clothes, her hair swinging as she moved, and I was grateful. Instead I had no choice but to assume my usual preoccupied gait, the one that was expected, and so I clasped my hands behind my back and cast my eyes down, knowing I was unwatched as I continued down the hall and disappeared.

I KNEW VERY LITTLE FRENCH.
In high school, I studied German, in order (I would say later) to read Rilke and Goethe, but really it had only been a decision of useless nonconformity. Eventually I’d realized my foolishness and in college switched to Latin, with an idea of adding a major in classics, but it was far too late for that (I was already a sophomore), I never even got to Greek, and I ended up, as I thought to myself, with plain old English.

What I’d really wanted was an old-fashioned British public-school education, minus the paddling. That breezy assumption of knowledge, that unquestionable canon, already outdated by the time I desired it. It was the sort of learning I’d assumed of, for instance, Preston, and once, when he was still reliably lucid, I had said as much. “An American version, I mean,” I said.

“I went to a very fine Episcopal school. I was a scholarship boy. Then Sewanee. Scholarship. But I did major in classics. I had Greek and Latin, and then, in seminary, Hebrew and German. I wonder how you knew that.”

“Just a guess.”

“We’re not so different, Charles,” he’d said, and there it had been, a chance to confide in him; but some different instinct, which had surprised and puzzled me, had whispered,
Oh yes we are
.

I thought of this exchange after Preston died, when May had gone back to France and was still writing to me, baffled, disbelieving, and holding out a different canon, temptations that were not herself. Would I come visit? “I promise to speak nothing but French the whole
time. I know you want to read Baudelaire and Mallarmé in the original. And Flaubert, and Proust, and Balzac, and simply
everyone
who matters!”

It was nothing close to her own voice, to what either of us knew. I’d wanted to tell her that I, too, could hardly believe I had the capacity to break someone’s heart.

And now, every morning, there she was! Mended! I should have been used to her. I had been seeing her for years, all the tall girls, the dark-haired girls. With all the false Mays I conjured over the years I’d feel reflexive joy, then hope, then disgust, and finally the numb acceptance to which I’d trained myself—all those things quick, quick, a millisecond, a sequence hardened over time to a diamond I could toss over my shoulder, faster even than the realization that once again it wasn’t May at all. But now, when I saw her, she was real and true, existing completely independently of my imaginings. Now I was supposed to let her become ordinary. Had to: that was my job.

THE DOOR WAS OPEN.
I knocked on the frame. It was late afternoon, the stolen half hour when sports hadn’t ended, conferences were over, dinner was still cooking, over in the big kitchen—still the day, but at a lull. But May was around, and we hadn’t been alone in a room together, and this must be gotten over.

She was sitting at the desk. Her arms lay relaxed on the arms of the chair; her hands dangled down, graceful and still, a pen held loosely, papers spread before her.

She was wearing a different suit today. This one cornflower blue. Not the blue of her eyes. I wondered if Florence had taken her shopping. I wanted to make a joke about a Suit Store. Then I thought that maybe these were uniforms and she didn’t believe in herself, that maybe she was playing a role—but she wasn’t a new teacher, a young teacher, anymore. Another thing I couldn’t get used to. It was just me who thought she was a little girl playing dress up. If I said that to her! What she would do! I almost laughed aloud.

No, this was who she was, she was in a young-Dallas-matron suit.
She’d been engaged there, to a banker she’d gone to school with. Divya, bless her, had been doing reconnaissance, until I told her to stop, that I didn’t need a dossier.

So not married. Still a maid.
Oh Charlie how lovely to see you
. The jacket was draped over the back of the chair. Her blouse was white and pressed. Collar notched and flat. The pearls glowed on her neck and she was neat and clean as a blank envelope and it could have been 1942, or ’52, or ’62, and
who was she?

She looked up and for a moment, before she wrapped the professionalism around her like a lab coat, her face was warm. “What’s up?”

“I don’t want to interrupt.”

“You’re not,” she said. She didn’t put down the pen.

I edged into the room. “I overheard one of your classes. You were speaking French.”

“Yes.” She smiled, and looked like she meant it. “The rumors are true.”

Uninvited, I went all the way over to the window and looked out. Kids were dribbling onto the green; sports must have just ended. “This was Win’s room, for a while.”

“I remember.” Her voice gentled. “You must miss him.”

“I do,” I said. And suddenly time was enormous.

“This all must be strange for you,” she said.

She’d gotten up from the desk and come around to half sit against the front of it. Maybe to signal her openness, her willingness to listen, and also her mastery. She’d taken some seminar. I didn’t want to look at her legs, which were crossed, and long and brown—yes, I could see that from my peripheral vision. Her sensible heels.
Jesus, May-May
. “Yes,” I said. “A little strange.”

She nodded like a doctor who was pretending to be solicitous but really was just thinking of her next patient; or lunch; or how your case was hopeless and uninteresting. But had she noticed that her Camelot jacket was hanging not on one of the ancient slat-backed oak chairs (I still sat in one in my room) but instead one of the snazzy new mesh-seated models? Had she noticed the whiteboard? (I fought to keep my blackboard, they’d sighed and let me.) Was she, in short, seeing all the
tiny things that had changed since she was last here? Because I could see them as though they were outlined in fluorescent paint, but she seemed to feel not a whiff of strangeness.

I turned again to the window. Nicky was crossing the quad. Heads turned; quickly, he was besieged. “There’s my brother.”

“You must be so happy he’s here.”

“Absolutely.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Of course. I just said I was.”

“You know, I saw him before school started,” May said. “In the post office. Standing in line. I thought he was a PG. Isn’t that funny?”

A postgraduate. “Nicky will always be young,” I said. “He will never not be young.”

“He looked familiar to me. It was so strange.”

“You must have remembered pictures.”

“You never showed me a picture.” A veiled rebuke. Our time together had been short; I’d failed. “No, it was something—here.” She swept a hand across her eyes. “That reminded me of you.” I gave her a look of darkest skepticism, but she just smiled. “I was so relieved when I ended up meeting him. That I wasn’t crazy.”

Her smile was full of friendliness. We seemed to have jumped to some different category. “He asked about you,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Right after you met. After the thing. The tea. He figured out that we … already knew each other. I said I was the bad guy,” I said. “I made that clear.”

“I was clear on that,” she said.

I was supposed to look wryly amused. I gave it a go.

“I was surprised, though,” May said. “When you introduced us.”

“Why?”

“I could tell he’d never heard my name before.”

I didn’t answer.

Her eyes were steady on me. “If I had had a sister, I would have told her everything. Over and over.”

“May-May—”

“No.”

There was a long silence. I should leave now. “May. Why did you come back?”

“To your school?”

“It’s not my school.”

“No, Charlie, it’s not.” She sighed. “They offered me a job. And I didn’t like Dallas.”

A dangerous moment. Because there was a hint of humor in her voice, a hand reached out, because she knew I’d hate Dallas too. “All right,” I said. Moment over.

“Do you believe me?”

She’d said she was never coming back and I had believed
that
. What I felt now was duped. I couldn’t say this, of course. “Yes.”

“Good.” Of course I couldn’t mention the ex-fiancé. “I came to the point where I needed to see the place that formed me,” she said primly. My God. Her twenty-year-old self would be howling!

Finally I said, “You could have visited.”

“I need to be here.” Her expression was pleasant, and completely closed.

I glanced again out the window. On the quad, someone was trying to get Nick to play hacky sack. He probably would. “In a few weeks it’ll be dark by now.” I looked at my watch. “By five o’clock.”

“Oh, Charlie.” In her voice was a vast sisterly relief. “Don’t be gloomy.”

“I’m not. Right now is the golden time.”

I seemed to be stuck at that window, watching that petri dish of character down below. All those kids believing they could make themselves from scratch. Didn’t we all once believe that? “Charlie,” she said, and I turn back to her. “You can consider the box checked.”

It was a dismissal, and I was relieved she’d done it.

But when I left and crossed the quad myself—unaccosted—I did think I’d fulfilled a small duty. And that I’d been bested; and I was glad about that too. And glad also, I couldn’t stop myself, that she remembered my essence, she still knew it, enough to detect whatever infinitesimal resemblance existed between Nicky and me.

Later I thought that’s when I should have told her, straight off: that my half brother was bare as a green peeled stick. But I didn’t think I had to tell her. Why would it matter? Why would she need to know Nicky? And besides, she’d known him when she saw him; she’d seen some essence. I thought she knew all she needed to know.

I KNEW THE DAY
she was thinking of, the day she’d first seen him. When she’d known and not known him.

He and I had been unpacking boxes in the August heat in his new apartment. He didn’t have an air conditioner; he said he didn’t need one. He’d been bare chested, I could count his ribs—and then he puts on some T-shirt full of holes and saunters off, to buy stamps, because our mother liked letters, still letters, never mind that e-mail, but really he’s falling in love with Abbottsford and wants to go be part of the citizenry, he wants to scatter his light as he walks, it is new and strange and quaint and what he loves best is a new place, a blank slate.