The Half Brother (30 page)

But instead I thought about all the times he’d been sick this winter. How he kept disappearing. I thought about his trips to Boston. I looked around the room and it suddenly seemed filled with malice, and I knew that I could look in closets and cabinets and drawers and trash cans and find evidence of an entirely different man. And yet the same. The Nick we all wanted, but there wasn’t enough of him, and he knew it. My brother, my talisman.

I touched him again, gently, on the shoulder before I left, but he was asleep, and didn’t move.

I WENT HOME
and as soon as I walked in I knew she was there. They were in the living room, playing two-handed bridge. “Your mother taught me,” May said. “This afternoon.” Her eyes were red.

“I hope she’s letting you win,” I said.

“Not a chance.” She smiled faintly, without looking up.

“She’s doing very well,” Anita said.

“I went by Nicky’s,” I said. No one answered. I took off my coat, went to the kitchen to see about dinner. I knew I was hiding. Oh solitude. Oh the lost silence. Now bits of me kept being peeled away. All the safety. And today was Friday. Now it was the weekend, two long days.

Then I heard the tapping and they were both there, in the kitchen. I turned to them and said, “Did you know he did this?”

May said, “He told me he didn’t drink because of his father.”

I said, “Do we believe him?”

Silence. Then May said she was leaving. “Don’t go over there,” I said.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. I wondered where she would sleep tonight. I hated myself for wondering.

The front door opened and closed. I said, “I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t either,” Anita said.

“I don’t know how long he’s been doing it,” I said. “I don’t even know what he’s doing.” Oh the cowardice. I didn’t want to know. I was asking her,
Do I have to know?

She tapped over to the table and sat down. “I did what I thought was best,” she said. “Getting him to come here.”

“I know you did.”

“It was a lot to ask of you.”

“He’s my brother.”

“And you let me ask. You let him come. Thank you, Charlie.”

“Don’t be so valedictory, Mother.” Cold, cold. Pushing her away. “We’re still in it.”

She said, quietly, “I had another one today. It’s fine though. I’m fine.”

I pulled out the chair across the table from her and sat down. My legs were trembling, like I’d been standing for hours.

“I try not to worry,” she said. “But I do. I’m not afraid of pain but I don’t think there will be pain.” She rubbed her forehead, as though trying to smooth it. “Aphasia is a concern.”

“In English, please.”

“If I can’t talk.” I remembered Preston’s eyes, wild as he spoke his gibberish.
My mother is Anita Spooner
. “I try not to be afraid, Charlie,” she said. “But that’s the only thing I’m afraid of. If I can’t talk to you and Nicky—”

And I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I reached out and took her hand, and she clung to it, hard, and was there, all of her—fighting, dug in, I felt it. And I felt how the battle was already lost, because that was the nature of battle itself.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me everything you want to say.”

Twenty-two

She was in the town of St. Annes. In the stone church with the red door.

FROM TIME TO TIME.
In newness of life
.

When they knelt to pray it seemed a kind of idolatry. But she was ready to worship a different God.

HIS CAR HAD A RADIO
and he let her find the stations she liked. It was an older car, but he’d taken good care of it. She loved his long, smooth hands on the big polished steering wheel. The chrome on the dashboard gleamed.

When not in his robes, he wore a seersucker sport coat, or short-sleeved collared shirts like a golfer would wear—like the college boy he was. He wore his hair short, no sideburns. He wore white suede oxford shoes.

HE’D HAD TO THINK
of some way to stay in school, to avoid the draft; he’d never thought he’d end up a priest. “I don’t know if I heard a call or not,” he said. “Sometimes I’m worried I made it up. Other times
I’m sure I didn’t.” He nodded, more to himself than to her. “Please don’t think I’m a liar.”

“I don’t,” she said.

SHE WANTED TO KEEP
seeing him only in the neutral fairyland of St. Annes. But he must come to her house in his car, he must pick her up. She wouldn’t let him in to meet her grandparents. “I don’t know what you’re about,” he said.

“I don’t either.”

“It’s not the way I was raised.”

“Nor me.” She said it like a lady, looking out the window, her back straight.

She felt the pull of him beside her. She was sure he knew it. She terrified herself.

They went down Main Street and she watched everything familiar go by, looking flattened and dusty, beaten, unlike St. Annes, which was where she would see him, in her mind, for the rest of her life. “I’m from a town just like this,” he said. She didn’t answer. “Only worse.”

“I thought you were from New Orleans.”

“I was born in a town like this.”

She turned to face front, glancing at him only quickly. “I don’t think I would say worse,” she said.

“Anita, we’re the same,” he said.

HE LEANED DOWN TO HER
and there was a familiarity in the tilt of his head and then in the pressure of his mouth.
How many times has he already touched me?
and she felt the sudden whirling loss: she should have been counting.

“
CHARLIE, IT’S LIKE HE WAS ME
,” my mother said. “Nothing he said surprised me. Everything was familiar. I know that doesn’t make any sense.” She was quiet awhile. “It was just falling in love. But I didn’t know that.”

HIS FIANCÉE WAS THE DAUGHTER
of a bishop. “But I can’t marry her. I can’t do it.”

Anita understood, fully, how she had been wronged. She understood exactly who and what the other girl was.

“Anita, I have to tell you who I am,” he said.

“Tell
her
.”

But he told Anita instead. He told her how one day his father had laid his hand, warm and heavy, on the top of Preston’s head, and looked with him with a kind of disbelief, and then disappeared.

Preston and his mother went back to New Orleans then to live with her family, the Broussards. It was such a large family that there were members he rarely saw. Some of these were cousins with dark skin and kinky hair. Yet they were his cousins. He had other cousins too, with light, straight hair and blue eyes, who were merely tan. Not much was said. Nothing was explained. But he understood he had a responsibility not to take his luck for granted. He also understood, now, the disbelief in his father’s eyes. “You’re no different, son,” his mother said. “You’re the same person you ever were.” And he tried to believe her.

ANITA SAID SHE DIDN’T CARE.
Of course she didn’t. How could she? “I don’t even know who my father is,” she said.

But once they were bare to each other, known, the same, she fell to his own level, the level of the bastard, the mistake, the level he could not accept.

At the end of the summer, he went back to Virginia, and the blond, blue-eyed daughter of the bishop.

SHE HAD SUSPECTED
before he left but had prayed she was wrong. Had prayed not to be punished. Finally though her situation was clear, and she wrote and told him.

He wrote back. He enclosed a check. He’d asked around, and
thought this would be enough to take care of it. Since she was a nurse, he wrote, she might know someone.

She knew gathering the money and asking around hadn’t been easy. She felt an enormous pity for him. Which was almost harder.

SHE SAW JIMMIE GARRETT
every now and then in town and their glances still held the truths of high school: she’d been smart and had graduated; he’d been handsome and wild and had not. They rarely spoke. But one day, in the dime store, he swaggered over as she stood in line. He had a way of stopping not directly in front of a person, so you were forced to turn to orient yourself toward him. “Anita Spooner. I thought you got the hell out of here by now,” he said. He slid his eyes sideways at her, and back. “Beg pardon.”

She paid and headed for the door, not inviting him to follow but not dismissing him. They stopped together on the sidewalk. The November light was white and thin. It was colder than it looked. She said, “I’m leaving in a month. When I’m done with school,” and she knew it was true as soon as she said it aloud. She’d be four months along. Not showing, if she was lucky. Preston’s check in the bank.

He regarded her with hooded appraisal. “Me too,” he said. “Gittin’ out of here. Vietnam.”

She looked around at the storefronts she’d been walking past all her life and she thought how people would see them standing there together. People might be impressed that Jimmie Garrett was even giving her the time of day or they might wonder why she was talking to white trash, but she didn’t want them to think anything. She began to walk. Again he followed her. They went half a block and she said, “Are you scared?”

“Naw. Shitty little war in a jungle.” His eyes slid lazily to her, and away. “Beg pardon.”

“Have you always wanted to go to war?”

“Sure,” he said. He smiled an inward smile. “Glad they thought one up in time for me.”

HIS FINGERS WERE ROUGH
and smelled of lye soap, like Memaw used for laundry, and for just a moment she saw him washing before he picked her up, leaning over a tin sink, with an earnestness that she hadn’t thought of. She tried to feel passion, reminded herself she knew now what it was like; she let him do more than he expected he’d get, she was sure. But it felt unreal to her, and she knew that, for the first and last time, it didn’t matter.

“Anita Spooner,” he said slowly. “Little Anita.”

When he had driven back to town and was idling in front of the big peeling white house and she was reaching for the door handle, he said, “I’m leavin’ soon too. In two weeks.”

She nodded politely.

He said, “But you know, I can’t be with a girl who acts that way.” Her hand froze at the door. She nodded again, amazed at herself and at this new sin but also at a new, detached compassion:
Poor boy, he thinks this has anything to do with him
.

“I’ll get me a wife when I come back.” He seemed to be waiting for a challenge, but when she said nothing he went on, “But that is not what a man wants. A woman who done what you did, tonight.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said, and got out of the car.

SHE TOLD HER GRANDPARENTS
she was going to Brunswick, twenty miles south, to see about a job. Her clothes were getting tight. She had no more time. Early the next morning she got in the car she had paid for herself and drove, not south but north, six hours, to Atlanta.

She had had no idea what a city was like. She drove around and around, and the city kept going. When she finally stopped she was in front of a post office, with an impressive granite facade.

It was lunchtime and the line was long. As she stood in line, she understood that she was not known. She let her back sway, her belly protrude. Was it visible? She’d had to buy a bigger skirt. She was not known.

A man waiting behind her glanced in her direction, and she pretended not to notice. She put her bare left hand in her pocket. That was something to take care of.

At the counter, she asked for stamps. When the man handed her the sheet, she carefully tore one off, licked it, and stuck it in the top right corner of her envelope. Then, with her right hand, she handed it to the man, who had gray hair and laugh lines. “It’s to my grandparents,” she said. He smiled with approval and told her to take care now.

As she walked out of the post office, she smiled straight into all the faces she did not know.

Twenty-three

Saturday was quiet. My mother slept more than usual. I tried not to hover.

At one point she said, “ ‘He never met a stranger.’ Do you remember?”

“I remember,” I said. That was what Hugh used to say about Nicky. Who would toddle up to anyone and beguile them. Whenever Hugh said that my mother and I would look at each other and silently agree:
We’ve met
lots
of them. We
are
strangers
.

“He’s a person who is going to be alone in the world,” she said.

“No. He has us.”

She smiled, and said she was just tired.

I UNDERSTOOD I COULD ASK
her no more about Preston, not now. She was spent. Everything she’d rolled up and put away years and years before, laundered and put in a brown paper sack, stuffed in the deepest of drawers—she’d gotten it all out and given it to me. And now she was lighter, but unsteady. She had to get used to me knowing.

“
IS THERE ANYTHING
you want me to tell Nicky?” I said. “He said he’s coming. Soon. With May.”

“No.” A few minutes later she said, “He needs to hear things in a particular way.”

Oh favored son.

She was dozing on the couch. Her head sank back. Then she straightened and said, “I burned that letter up.”

“What, Mother?”

But she was asleep.

WE DIDN’T GO
to church Sunday. Nicky finally came over, with May, in the late morning.

It was gray and raining, just above freezing, dreary. When he came in he shook off his wet, hatless head like a dog and wouldn’t answer questions. He looked thin and strangely radiant. “I just want to see Mom,” he said.

“I need to know how long you’ve been drinking.”

“That was bad, what you saw, Charlie,” he said. “But I don’t drink. It just—I was desperate. Don’t you get it? I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to see that. I don’t do that.”

May went into the living room and sat down, her back to us.

“Where’s Mom?” Nicky said. “Why isn’t she downstairs?”

“She’s resting.”

“It’s the middle of the morning.”

“It’s a good day for a nap,” I said. “She knows, by the way. She’s worried about you. So you can go explain it to her.”