The Half Brother (23 page)

“I did. And does she love him?”

“Yes.” Out loud, it was solid. “Yes, she does.” I shrugged. “Nicky is Nicky. Nicky gets the girl.”

“Charlie.” She sighed. She couldn’t say
honey
or
sweetie
.

We needed Nick to come back. Anyone. What I wanted to say was,
This is why I can’t be alone with you
. The last thing we needed was to start telling the truth.

“He’s easy to love,” Anita said.

I got up and poured more coffee into my mug. Sat down again. I said, “I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

She shrugged. “Nicky always has people following him around.”

“She’s not like that. She’s not frivolous.”

“All right, son.”

Don’t call me son
. I kept it in, just in time.

She finished her eggs, rather delicately. Mashed the crumbs with the tines of her fork, ate them with her last shard of bacon. She always cleaned her plate. I realized I’d never thought of it until now. She didn’t eat to excess, hardly ever had seconds; just ate what was put in front of her, all of it, without comment. It was the habit of another generation. Such details seemed clearer to me, seeing her in my own kitchen, on this unfamiliar stage.

She said, “I am just not sure. That she shouldn’t know.”

I hated her tentative voice. She was never tentative. “I think you’re missing the point,” I said. “The point is, everything is hunky-dory. Don’t you think, Mother? Haven’t we had a nice couple of days?” She would hear the threat and understand it. Things might be mended, but the joint was unsteady, the glue not set. Rattle the pieces and they’d come apart. “Nicky is really happy right now,” I said. “Everything is going beautifully. Exactly the way it is.”

Her lips pressed in a familiar line: she understood. “So. I am meeting her tonight,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to meet her.”

“I’ll bet you have,” I said, and she half hid a smile, and I took pity and laughed a little, and then we both laughed just a little more, just enough to twitch closed the curtain that camouflaged the absurdity of the whole thing. And I knew our laughter made her happy but that she would also be looking for Preston in May’s face, and she’d see him, and wonder; and she knew I knew, and between us we knew far too much.

She took another sip of her coffee and then her hand slipped down to the pocket of her bathrobe, in a gesture like a madeleine. That searching pat, the almost-invisible look of impatience and agitation, which would always be followed by the click, the flare, the efficient inhale, the hidden relief and satisfaction—

She saw me noticing her patting hand, and stopped. “I thought you quit,” I said.

“I have one in the morning, and one at night.”

I knew she was telling the truth. She possessed that sort of self-control, and also the inability to lie, just like Nicky. So: a decision to make, here. Nick would get upset, would be incredulous. Or, more
likely, she would not have even made the gesture in his presence. But with me she let her guard down. Let it all hang out with Charlie.

I cradled that to me for a moment.

“You could go out on the patio,” I said. “It’s warmer than you would think, out there.” She nodded reluctantly. “You don’t want Nicky to smell it,” I said. And she smiled.

DINNER THAT NIGHT
was at Divya’s. Ram and Anil were home, and Anil’s friend from Thanksgiving, now boyfriend, was visiting again. The two of them were trying not to act besotted, and failing. I was hoping my mother had gotten modernized and wouldn’t mind. The enormous tree was still up and I looked at it and tried not to think about the party, and no one mentioned that night or my exit although I imagined they were thinking of it. But no, everyone behaved. Everyone was just lovely. It was a casual dinner, at the big table in the kitchen. May was wearing a turtleneck sweater that was just too goddamn tight. She and Nick sat next to each other, and it bugged the hell out of me trying not to think about whether or not they were playing footsie. (There was no doubt about Anil and Jackson.) Goddammit. Nick glowed. The table was lit with a dozen candles, half gone from the party. There was a lot of glowing.

Talk turned to my mother’s retirement. “I worked for thirty-five years,” she said. “Altogether. I took some time off when Nicky was little.” Because Hugh wanted her to, I did not say. Because Hugh and she both wanted to believe that the two of them had been transformed, and were embarking on a picture-book life.

“But you went back because you missed it so much,” Nick said, proudly.

“It’s a bit of an addiction, isn’t it,” Divya said. “Feeling useful.”

“I don’t know about that,” Anita said.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Divya said, laughing. She was immune to Anita’s Puritanism, and my heart warmed. “I suppose I’m trying to resign myself to the idea of retirement.”

“But you’re not retiring,” I said.

“Oh, but Charlie. I will. Rather soon, too. I have directed my sons to get well-paying jobs in a nice warm climate, and then I will come join them, whether they like it or not.” Ram and Anil looked at her indulgently, but I could tell it wasn’t a fabrication.

“But you love it here,” I said. “You’ve become a New Englander. We’re dug in, Div.”

“Charlie, my bones are frozen. Soon they’ll forget how to thaw. Did you really think I could stand it forever?” She laughed the laugh I loved—the laugh I thought of, in thorough political incorrectness, as wisely Indian: a laugh formed by the ideas of reincarnation, of multiple capricious gods, of our smallness. Of the fecklessness of life.

“But Charlie will never leave,” May said, with a superior sort of fondness.

I shrugged. I felt the shrug in my eyeballs; I needed to calibrate my drinks more carefully. “Who knows,” I said.

“You said you’re dug in.”

“I’m an in-the-moment kind of guy.” I waited for someone to laugh out loud but no one did. “Right, Nicky?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, his warmth automatic. He wouldn’t decide until later that he disagreed, if indeed he thought of it at all.

I could feel Anita’s eyes on me.

I decided I had contributed quite enough to the conversation for the evening.

So from then on I tried not to concentrate too hard on anything much, and whenever anyone gave me a look that might have been significant I ignored it. Instead I watched Anil and Jackson. My mother, I noted, watched them with a benign curiosity, which was a fairly new level of tolerance. But I decided Jackson was blond and Waspy and pretty, and therefore exquisitely boring, and Anil deserved better, and it was all I could do to not lure Divya into a corner so we could talk about him; I wanted to be cruel to a blameless stranger. Meanwhile, Anita watched May, and May in turn was aware of Anita. She held her smile at the ready and whenever Anita spoke to her it brightened. I had never seen either of them try to charm someone.

At the end of the night Anita and Nick and May and I said good-bye together, leaving Divya in her yellow-lit doorway and Anil and
Jackson beginning to entwine on the sofa, and Ram the wry single brother who would head upstairs to sleep alone, and we walked out into the snow to my and Nicky’s cars and our voices suddenly rang in the frosty air and the snow was a rounded cushion on the rooftops and it was all very Currier and Ives.

May was wearing a long red wool coat with black velvet epaulets, a Christmas gift to herself, she said, now that she was back north. “You’re very dashing,” I said.

“Well, thank you, Charlie.” She turned to my mother. “I hope I see you again before you leave,” she said, almost shyly.

“Well, I hope so too.”

“It was
so
wonderful meeting you,” May said, as if she hadn’t already said the first thing.

Anita was skeptical of extroversion and enthusiasm, except in Nick, but now she took May’s gloved hand in both of her own. “I’ll see you soon, May-May,” she said, and I caught my breath. “That’s your family nickname, isn’t it. May-May.”

“Yes.”

“I hope you don’t mind if I call you that.”

“No,” May said, “I don’t mind at all.” Nicky looked on, beaming. “Two more days you’re here?”

“That’s right. And then
I
will go home to thaw.” She tipped her head, proud of her little joke.

“Charlie,” Nick said, “I’m just running May home.”

“Take your time,” I said. “We’ll see you tomorrow.” He began to protest and May looked down at the snowy ground, half smiling. “Tomorrow, bro.” And Anita and I turned to the car. I opened the door for her, helped her in. Walked around, the snow crunching beneath my shoes. What a splendid time. Oh, so well behaved. So many things unsaid! Good night, good night, good night.

AT SIX THE NEXT MORNING,
Anita was at my bedside. Sleep was warm water, pulling me back, but I swam upward—time for school, the morning cold, the windows gray, in my old narrow bed, she’d hold out my clothes, slide on my socks,
Oh Charlie wake up it’s time
. “Mom?”

“Charlie.
Charlie
.” Her voice catching, containing something I’d never heard there before. It was fear.

I sat up, in my bed in Massachusetts; she was gripping the door frame with both hands; one leg was drawn up, all the weight was on the other, and I knew she’d waited as long as she could to wake me.

Eighteen

When I was four years old, my mother drove me south to meet her grandparents, who’d raised her. There was a long car ride, hours and hours, the hot wind roaring in the windows, my cheek stuck with sweat to the vinyl seat where I lay down; and outside endless fields, corn, cotton, peanuts, and drunken shacks on the side of the road, corrugated roofs listing, wood silver gray, entire houses sliding down from civilization into something almost wild.

At the end, there was a town, and a big house, all white, porch, shutters, siding—or it once had been; now it was flaking, disintegrating, the most leprous house I had ever seen. We went inside, and a woman who was my great-grandmother gave me ginger ale and showed me a bobbing glass bird that drank water from a cup. At first the bird fascinated me, but then it bored and then frightened me, because it would not stop, because its will and its thirst were endless. Its pointed red beak dove down to the water, again and again.

These were the days of
yes ma’am
and
no ma’am
and spankings and
don’t sass me
and
I’ll wash your mouth out with soap
—codes and punishments that shifted and softened, later, when Anita married Hugh, and which by then didn’t affect me that much anymore; but when I was small and Anita was closer to her old life, they were simply part of the world, part of what I knew, just as I had known these people existed, these two old people, people who had nothing to do with us
and yet were at our heart, my mother’s and mine, and now here we were. I had known that this hot little town existed too, had divined it somehow from my mother whom I watched so closely, whose breath I listened to without realizing it, all the time; and, finally, I knew that my father had been a soldier and had died in Vietnam. There was Vietnam on the TV and grown-ups seemed to accept it as another given, and my mother had told me about this father, not at any time I particularly remembered, but had simply given me the knowledge, before memory, to absorb with my child’s osmosis. All these truths were somehow a structure, they were of a piece.

The old man’s eyes, my great-grandfather’s eyes, were pale and hot at the same time. He had not yet come close to me. I told him this absolute truth, that yes I did too have a father, and about Vietnam.

He looked at my mother and said some boy wanted some before he shipped out and the apple don’t fall far. My mother stood up and the old lady said,
Oh Nita, please don’t leave
. I was sent out to play.

Outside was a wall of heat, and insects singing with a weird primordial urgency, and the gray beards of old men hanging from the trees. I had told the truth, a fact at my core, but somehow it had been talking back, acting ugly, telling a story: I had miscalculated. Now I’d been exiled, and was waiting for whatever was coming.

But then we left the big white house—I don’t remember the good-byes, I was done, what child remembers good-byes?—and there was no punishment. Now my mother was in charge again and we would go back to ourselves. The sun had lowered, the heat had lessened, a small edge of mercy.

We drove, just a little ways, and then we were outside a church. It was a child’s drawing of a church, a white box with a steeple. Long shallow steps along the front. I don’t know if my mother said then, “That’s Granddaddy’s church,” or if she told me later and the knowledge seeped backward, or if she’d told me before and I already knew.

Even inside the car I felt like we were being watched, and we probably were.

Up until then, the pictures from that day are muddled to me, malleable. I know I’ve arranged and enhanced them: the sloughing white paint; the bird and the ginger ale; my great-grandfather’s pale eyes;
the Spanish moss; the flat yard with gray sandy soil I was banished to, that I still see as enormous, stretching away and away, when really it could not have been, because it was in the middle of that town, in the middle of streets. And me wandering in it, sifting the small, crackling, fallen brown leaves of what must have been live oaks through my fingers. I had begun to feel I had to get closer and
closer
to things, all the time, see their astonishing
thingness
as thoroughly as I could. There was a reason and order in deep hiding—although now I felt a new confusion:
all I did was tell the truth
. And I was still limp with relief, because a large punishment had been coming, but it had passed me by.