The Half Brother (34 page)

“No, you didn’t.” The wind picked up and I hunched in my coat, my hands in my pockets.

She was speaking very slowly. “To see my mother. To check that box.”

“And did you check it?”

She smiled at the mountains. “Oh, yes. I checked it.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Although I guess it was also checked for me.”

I was eager as a puppy. I was practically bouncing up and down in the snow. I had plans, I had to tell her.

“Charlie.” Her gaze hadn’t moved from the view in front of us. She
still hadn’t looked at me. Her eyes were narrowed against the bands of blinding light. “I need to tell you about this lunch we had.”

She was in shock, probably. I would let her natter on for a while. Where did we need to be? What was the rush? I needed to remember there was no rush. I hadn’t called the funeral home. No one was coming, no one knew anything. We were in this suspended time. The two of us. It was a lot to absorb. Everything I’d told her. I’d known for years, she had known for an hour. When she gave me the chance, I would gently say that, and that we were in completely foreign terrain with no guide.

But for now I’d just listen. “It was in a ladies’ tearoom—can you imagine such a thing?” she was saying. Looking straight ahead. “Did you know such things still exist?”

“Well, I’m not surprised.”

“It was like a time warp, Charlie.”

“I bet it was.”

“You sit across from your mother and you behave. That’s what you do.”

“I expect so.”

“You use all your good-girl training. Every bit.”

“Every single bit.”

She started a little and finally turned her head in my direction, although she didn’t meet my eyes. I thought maybe I’d angered her. But I wasn’t laughing at her—oh no! I was taking it all with utmost seriousness! Her face worried me. A strange softness to it. And also a slight, unnerving curl to her lip. The two things not matching at all.

“But you know about behaving,” she said. “Oh, Charlie, you know all about it too. You know how it works.”

“I suppose I do.”

“No matter what your mother tells you.”

“Right.”

“Or doesn’t.”

“Yes.”

“No matter what your mother says.”

“May-May,” I said. “What did your mother say to you?”

“She told me a story.”

“Tell me, May.”

She nodded. Said nothing.

“May.”

She was still nodding. Absurdity had been confirmed. I went to her chair and knelt before her in the snow. She finally looked up and her eyes terrified me but that made no sense and I kept my voice calm. “Sweetheart, what did she say? Don’t worry. It’s only a story.”

WALLPAPER WITH A BAMBOO DESIGN;
chicken salad, on chinoiserie plates, iced tea in footed glasses: the decorum of ladies who are keepers of old codes. This was where Florence had taken May, a tearoom in Savannah: a good choice for a mother and daughter whose main intention is to behave. But the bamboo wallpaper, the blue-and-white china: some colonialist fantasy? A flimsy gazebo on a tropical river, fluttering white linen: helplessness? Is that what they were meant to invoke? But I don’t know about such things.

May has gone to Savannah. She’s checking the box. Savannah not the place where she grew up—it’s her mother’s home, her grandparents’, yes, but she herself is a stranger in a strange land, made even stranger because her mother has transformed herself back into a native, and her friends, the old childhood friends who have welcomed her back, are surrounded by their southern children who are living lives like their parents, girls May’s age who are married and now the mothers of children in smocked outfits and hair bows. And May strides in tall and olive skinned and speaking French and wishing she were in Paris or Massachusetts or anywhere else. And at the same time filled with that failure, the failure to marry, to have the blond children, to have lunch with her mother every week. But she’s doing it today. Yes, today she is checking the box.

She’s come from Dallas, where it’s just as hot now, in June, but a dry heat, and all the blond ladies have a lacquered edge to them that isn’t here in Savannah. She’ll admit that. She will not admit, though, at least not to her mother, that Dallas feels like a long detour to her, or that she doesn’t love her fiancé enough, that she has tried and failed and that he is not the answer to whatever her overarching question is.

She would rather take off the ring he gave her, it makes her feel cheap with falseness and subterfuge, but she doesn’t want to discuss it with Florence so for now she leaves it there on her finger, glittering, Texas-sized. Her mother admires it every few minutes: yes, she does, and that doesn’t help, no it does not. Her mother wants to plan a wedding, is talking about lovely venues in Savannah, about the club, this is why we’re members, May, about the best months of the year, March being best, with the humidity low, the azaleas blooming—oh yes lovely, and the boys would be so glad to get out of New England, she can’t believe they all stayed there, March had always been the worst, well that and April, oh and February too, she had barely been able to stand it but it hadn’t bothered Preston, it had been so infuriating—her mother talks of her father lightly now, in this way, and as usual May can’t decide whether she should be annoyed or furious or relieved.

Florence can’t understand why they haven’t set a date; probably this lunch has been designed to address the question. But what’s on May’s mind, along with her failing engagement, is her talk with Adam Salter just a few days ago, the call out of the blue, the remarkable idea that she could go back to Abbott—another thing she will not discuss with her mother. She has many things to keep to herself. Luckily she is a bafflement to her mother and always has been. Florence won’t detect anything besides the usual discomfort. She’ll criticize May for some minor aspect of manners or dress and May will let her, thinking, as always, of her father, to whom she was not a bafflement. As she grew up, his flaws had gradually uncovered themselves, and by the end he was autocratic and absurd—but when the three of them were together, May alone at the mercy of her parents, he had been ballast and safety.

Afterward, May is sure her mother brought her here because she’d known how hard it would be to make a scene. Florence must have known how in this time-warp of a place May would feel the weight of all her mother had ever wanted to be, all her mother had ever wanted
her
to be, how well behaved, how knowable; if she was going to have a daughter then it was going to be this kind; and Florence looked across the table at her, over their iced tea and their chicken salad amandine, and said,
There is something you are old enough to know, you are getting married and beginning a new life and I suppose one needs to know these things, it is part of being an adult, to be very clear on one’s family. No, I have never believed in secrets
.

All right.

I was very unhappy, you have to understand, I was miserable up there. I had found myself about to not be young anymore, I was just—well I hope you never wake up and think, my God, how did this get to be my life?

Yes, that’s exactly what I don’t want.

He’d said he would get a church in the South, we’d have to move around but I was expecting that, my own father was a bishop and I knew how it worked. But then it was not at all what Preston promised, what I’d been led to expect. Your father was not what I’d been led to expect. I am not proud of it. Things happen. You fall into things—but it was a choice, I have to admit that. It is always a choice
.

Mom. What are you saying. Mom.

Did you know his first wife was killed in a terrible wreck? So sad. They were barely married any time at all. A sweet girl. He was beside himself—the strong silent type, you know, but he was beside himself, and I remembered that. And he and I had always liked each other, we’d always had this little zing
—
that happens even when you’re married, you should know that, you meet someone and you know that, well, in another life—You can’t be attracted to just one person. It doesn’t work that way. I’ll do you no favors by not admitting that
.

And he was so different. An outdoorsman, you know, good with his hands—Preston could barely change a lightbulb. We knew it was a mistake, we felt awful. Your father and I were barely speaking anyway. It’s a wonder no one ever knew. In that tiny town where everyone had their nose in everyone’s business, oh, people think southerners are gossips, but a little academic town, you have no idea
—

Please.

Preston is your father. In every sense that matters. He adored you from the moment you were born. He’d always wanted a girl. He’s the only father that matters
.

But—

Win never knew. He never did. I’m sure—it was timing, I won’t get into that, God no. I never did show until the fifth month or so. I was terrified it would be different with you. Because it had been four years and the fourth baby and what if my body had been different? But you cooperated and he never knew. I don’t think he even suspected. And he met Divya and forgot all about me, it all worked out. He was so in love with her he never would have stopped to think. No, I’m sure he never did
.

But Daddy said I looked like his mother. I’ve seen pictures! He said that I looked just like his mother!

I know, it’s funny, so strange how things can work out that way. You do, a little. Your coloring. And she was tall. But Win was always tan. He said his grandmother was black Irish. Who knows
.

Here’s a napkin
.

The powder room is that way, May-May, if you need it
.

What you should remember is how much your father loved you. I’ve always felt bad about leaving you alone with him but also I knew you would have that time. Just the two of you. I suppose I thought it balanced things out
.

You’re an adult, and I thought you needed to know this. But it seems I should have kept my mouth shut. Stop that and drink some tea
.

May-May
.

No, thank you, we are just fine. Nothing right now. Oh, she’s okay, aren’t you? Thank you so much. No just the check. We are just fine. No, really. We are just fine
.

Daddy was only seeing what he wanted to see, May says. In despair.

Sweetie. Sweetie, people do
.

Twenty-five

The house was empty, for the first time since before Christmas.

I had longed for solitude, and now I had it.

The power was still out—they were saying a day or two more, out where I was. But the generator chugged, the phone was back, and I had made all my calls. Deferential men who moved with near silence had come with a gurney and a van from the funeral home, an ambulance but not quite, and had wheeled my mother away.

Divya didn’t want to leave me alone. “I’m okay,” I said.

“Come over for dinner.”

“That’s all right.”

“I’ll bring you something, then.”

I knew I would never convince her. “Tomorrow, okay? I would love that tomorrow.”

“Nicky’s with you,” she said, not a question.

“He’s in and out.”

“Is he all right?”

“I don’t know.”

I would deal with that tomorrow, too. The storm had given me cover.

“Charlie—”

“Tomorrow, Div. Please. I need to sleep.” And that
was
the truth, and it would also be impossible.

May had the envelope. All the evidence. I had handed it to her, that
morning, before she left. She had said she had to leave and I had said all right. She had said Charlie I can’t stay and I said I know. She had said I just have to go I just have to leave and I could not read her face, not at all, and then she had embraced me. Or rather just stood in my arms. It was a purely formal gesture. I was sure she was, like me, at the end of astonishment. Everything was ended, everything thoroughly, thoroughly over.

And I had left her alone to deal with what was in the envelope. I had left her alone for more shocks—unchivalrous, if nothing else—this was just occurring to me—May sitting in the rooms I’d never seen, sitting on some sofa, at some table, the letters spread out in front of her, knowing she’d lost Nick, that she’d never had him, we’d all lost the Nick we’d imagined we had, the Nick we had created. How destroyed it all was.

I had been sitting for hours by now, in front of the fireplace, the ashes paled to gray. I’d drunk two whiskies for my supper. I had no idea what time it was. I was sitting where my mother had died. I let myself fall onto the sofa, my head where hers had been.

Ghoulish and strange but I felt covered, for just a moment or two, as if a blanket had drifted down over me. And then I was abruptly cold again. Perhaps the generator had stopped—but the lights were on, fool, fool.

I began to wish I had agreed to Divya’s invitation after all. I wanted to walk into that front hall, see the colors, the stairs going up, remember Win’s hands on every piece of that house—as he had touched mine, that very mantel, there—we had stripped it and sanded it down, he and I.

Then I’d have to come back home to my own empty house. But I would have to get used to that again. Abundance had been temporary.

I got up and went into the kitchen to look at the clock: midnight. And there were evening and morning, the first day. The wrong order, that was. But at any rate the first day nearly over, the first day of Anita’s death—could you say that? The moment of her dying, of the storm, had seemed endless. But now we had moved along into the period of my mother’s death. Now this was ordinary time.

I took my keys from the hook by the door.

SNOW COVERED THE LABYRINTH.
In the path it was up to my knees. The boxwood was invisible. All white.

The sky was clouded over too; good. I put my hand out to guide me.

But even though it was night I could feel the temperature rising. Every now and then a thud as snow slid off a branch. Fog was gathering, low to the ground, as I moved close to the center, then back out, the maddening pattern, enforced patience. Win trimming the green. Oh the hours. Where had Zack pushed through? Over there? Maybe he’d thought, as he broke the green down to the root,
I am not playing this game anymore, and I am destroying the board
.