The Half Brother (6 page)

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then? / But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

There was the usual chortling at “sucked,” but I held up a hand and it died away.

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
Someone else might have hammed it up, but her voice was steady. I kept glaring, and all was quiet.

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. / If ever any beauty I did see, / Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee
.

I’d been at the Bankheads’ the night before. When I’d arrived the air had felt odd, as though I’d just missed a fight, but Preston was alone. Had he just had a phone call with Florence? Or with a lawyer? Henry?

He had the board set up and was regally, almost impatiently, waiting. The emptiness of the house was a roaring silence, but as usual I was supposed to ignore it. I went to sit down, ever obedient, but as I did I realized he was the person at Abbott around whom I felt the youngest, and that I was sick of it. “Is everything okay, Preston?”

A glare, suppressed. “My boy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You look upset.”

“I am perfectly fine.”

And now good-morrow to our waking souls, / Which watch not one another out of fear
.

We began to play. The silence thickened, grew purposeful. But beneath my concentration was a different current.
I think I’m giving up on him
. Preston remarked that I was distracted. He’d gone back to a solicitous tone, as if he were ready to impart wisdom. But I knew enough by now—this was a revelation too—to ignore it.

For love, all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere
.

After half an hour I heard the back door in the kitchen open and close, and May murmuring to Percy, but she didn’t appear. Preston was beating me but not badly, not yet, and I knew if I concentrated I could hold him off a while longer, but I felt an unfamiliar impatience and found myself thinking of Nicky—of how he took in the board in one gulp, of how he seemed to see the dance of the pieces far into the future, all possible attacks and counterattacks, more brilliantly than any general. Of how, winningly, he still tried so hard to let me win. And I felt one of those infrequent moments of guilt, like vertigo:
What am I doing here? In this foreign land?
I stared blindly at the board.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, / Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown, / Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one
.

And then—not a noise. Mere movement in the air; and May was standing in the doorway. I smiled at her. I began to speak—she pointed to her father’s bowed head and held a finger to her lips, and smiled. I smiled back, helplessly. In the fireplace behind me, a log had popped, and I’d started, and then she was melting away, silent in her stocking feet, going up the stairs.

The classroom was quiet, and I realized she’d finished. I looked up. “Thank you, Miss Bankhead,” I said. “So. What screams Renaissance here? What says Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Columbus? The New World?” A few limp hands went up. “Miss Kellar?”

“ ‘Sea-discoverers,’ ” said Catharine Kellar.

“Yes. More?”

“ ‘Hemispheres.’ ” “ ‘Maps.’ ” The voices began to get a little livelier. “And, ‘worlds,’ like, there’s more than one.” “He’s saying like forget exploring, let’s just fall in love.”

“Well, in a manner of speaking,” I said. “So, all right, what about ‘sucked’? What about ‘weaned’? I’m serious here.”

There was a pause. “He’s talking about like growing up?”

“Um, duh.”

“Mr. Pedersen. A little respect. And, people, I’m going to start charging you for the
likes
. So. These metaphors, they wend their way through the whole poem. Remember what Samuel Johnson said. What Eliot quoted, in the essay we read. Which I am
sure
you recall.” I turned and wrote it on the board. “ ‘Heterogeneous ideas yoked with violence together.’ He was ahead of his time. So what is Donne doing, with these seemingly disparate ideas? Miss Bankhead?”

“He’s talking about becoming yourself. Discovering a person. A person is a world.”

“Yes.”

“ ‘And now good-morrow to our waking souls.’ They’re”—she blushed, but forged on—“they’re waking up together. So they’re, um, lovers. But they’re also awakening—their souls. The explorers are going far away, but he’s going inward, they’re going inward—and outward to each other at the same time …?” Her voice trailed away.

“Yes. Excellent.” Easy now. “Donne loves these paradoxes. It’s the essence of his thought, in a way.” I wrote
paradox
on the board, and under it
in-out, small-large
. “And if you think this stuff is sexy, you’re right.” I said this in my ironical voice, but I came down, perhaps, a little too hard on
sexy
. “Donne was a very sensual writer.” There was widespread skepticism. May’s hand waved again. “Miss Bankhead?”

She had that hyperalert look kids have when they’re
getting
it, in real time, right in front of you. “And the ‘hemispheres’ are their eyes,” she said. “Like the globe, the explorers, only they’re seeing each other. In the globes of their eyes. The small is enormous. Infinite. Like you said.”

And makes one little room an everywhere
. I could have stood up, left the board, the fire, Preston, gone into that kitchen. Sat down with her
under the white globe of the hanging light. Her long brown hands stroking the nicks and grooves in the pine table. The house quiet around us. Only her voice. I’m lost for a moment, I can see it, hear it, think it happened.

“They’ve transformed,” she’s saying. “They’ve”—she grins a little, showboating now—“they’ve landed on the shores of their new selves.”

“Yes, May-May. Exactly.”

The silence was like a door slamming. Everyone froze, and I realized what I’d done.

Of course I couldn’t look at her but at the edge of my vision she was motionless too, sitting very tall but with the triumph gone out of her. I had betrayed her utterly. I saw glances exchanged, hidden grins. Everyone was certainly awake now. Catharine Kellar looked like she’d just been given a present. The patter welled out of me, pure autopilot: “Landed on the shores. The exploration of the self. What are some other oppositions here? What is this ‘mix’d equally,’ what about ‘true north’? What do you think Donne means?” I turned to the board again, felt the eyes on my back.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls
.

I wanted to sing it. Instead I wrote it down. “So scan this. What’s the meter? Easy one.” I marked the feet with the chalk,
ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM
.

May-May, May-May, May-May.

“It’s like music,” May said. Her voice was frightened and determined. I could not turn around.
Yes, that line has sung in my brain ever since I first read it and you knew that
. She was saying
It’s all right I know
and I was shouting
I am blameless, I have done nothing
. The chalk clicked. I took a dramatic step back, examining the words.

“What we need to think about,” I said, without turning, because I could not turn—
because I do not hope to turn
—no, because I had to protect her from myself, “is how the Renaissance idea of individual consciousness was very different—how groundbreaking Donne was—Eliot said, ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility’—do you remember that? From the reading? I knew you would …”

By the time the bell rang, the charge had dissipated. I made a point
of looking several kids directly in the eye. Nothing seemed amiss. Still, as everyone was leaving, instead of standing next to my desk as usual, I sat down behind it. I hardly ever sat at my desk. It was good thick oak, solid as a ship, and I shuffled my knees under its bulk. “Bye. Next is George Herbert. The pages are up on the board. More God. Up on the board. ’Cause we’re all guilty of dust and sin, that’s why. Bye now. Papers next Monday. Bye.”

Everyone was clattering past and then she was there. I couldn’t look up. But I knew they were her hands in front of me, those long fingers twisting together. Stopping here was a huge risk to her. Miss Kellar would say something, for instance, or file it away; Miss Kellar let nothing slide. And then May would have to answer. To laugh at herself, or me. I hoped she would laugh at me.

But instead of her protector I felt younger than she was, a schoolboy with wet-combed hair. She was still there. I was going to look up. Her eyes would be dark blue and I looked up and they were dark blue, hemispheres of ocean and sky, and I was sailing over them using only the old knowledge of the stars.

YEARS LATER, MAY SAYS,
“Do you remember that?”

“Of course I do,” I say.

“I thought I was going to die.”

“It was a mistake. I wasn’t trying to send some signal,” I say.

“I know.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I know.”

“Not on purpose.”

She smiles. “I know.”

Five

When I was born, my mother brought me home to a small apartment in a complex near the public city hospital, where she worked as a nurse. She’d come up to Atlanta, already pregnant, from her hometown, deep in south Georgia. The apartment was a run-down place in a run-down neighborhood, and I remember it only because we drove by it once, years later, and she pointed it out to me. “I didn’t know any better,” she said, half to herself, and shook her head. “I was lucky to get any job at all.”

I usually understood her non sequiturs. In this case she meant that the luck of a job, in her condition, had made this place near the hospital both inevitable and an afterthought.

But then she found the “good” side of Atlanta—the north side, the white side—got a job at a different hospital, and found the first home I truly remember. Technically, it was a guesthouse, although its parent wasn’t a mansion, or at least what would have been thought of as a mansion in Buckhead. It was, instead, a comfortable colonial, gracefully ordinary, owned by the McClatcheys, a nice family with a mother and a father and a son and a daughter. The guesthouse, which my mother rented, was down at the end of the steep driveway, cantilevered over a little ravine—suspended in the trees, a dream of green. Two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. It was a womb, a cradle, out of time.

From my earliest memory I felt layers to life that I didn’t understand. Atlanta seemed to me a place that had recently been a small town; a miasma of familiarity was in the air. The ghosts were thick. We lived in an established, old-Atlanta neighborhood, but the lots were large and nature barely held at bay, and in the trees around our house I could feel many eyes, benign mostly, layer upon layer of creatures who knew the land as though their own bones were the limbs of the tulip poplar trees, their fingers redbud branches, their blood made from red clay, creatures at home.

There were other houses visible through the trees but the little valley behind us was a serene and quiet bowl. The area was dotted with historical markers documenting every move of the troops during the Battle of Atlanta, on that very soil; there was one at the corner of our street. It was easy to picture blue and gray flung down behind the ridges and hillocks, easy to hear in my mind the contrast of birdsong and gunfire, and even to go farther back and imagine the Creeks and Cherokees before they’d been hounded away. But now the land felt so gentle. The tree canopy was high, and little creeks, and big ones, ran everywhere, and it wasn’t hard to find a waterfall or a fallen log crossing a stream.

Up the hill the McClatchey kids were teenagers, and I could see the son playing basketball with his friends in the driveway, and the daughter having car doors opened for her by her dates. The McClatcheys had a patio in the back and we could hear their dinner parties and barbeques and laughter when it was warm out. Down the hill, my mother and I never had parties, but I think we both drew some kind of vicarious satisfaction from all the activity and jollity.

Hugh—Hugh Satterthwaite, Mrs. McClatchey’s brother—went to our Episcopal church (or we went to his), and starting when I was eight or nine he often dropped by on weekends to say hello to my mother and me. He wasn’t married, although he was the same age as Mr. McClatchey; they had all grown up together in this very neighborhood. He was tall and thin and balding, courtly and a bit stooped, with sadness ringing his eyes.

At some point I said the magic combination of words to Mr. Satterthwaite: “father,” and “soldier,” and “dead.” He had always been
kind, but after that was even kinder. Whenever we crossed paths he did little-kid things that I loved for their predictability. He’d pretend to steal my nose. He always had gum in his pocket. Even at my age I thought these seemed like carefully learned tricks, but that made them, and him, only more endearing.

He told me that, as a boy, he used to find minié balls and arrowheads in these same woods. I was susceptible to the romance of history, more of Mr. Satterthwaite’s imagined childhood than of the war, and so several times I dutifully went looking, but I never found any.

Long before he became Hugh to me, I viewed him, and his family, as the real article. When he told me about the minié balls it was like he was giving me his own memories, his rootedness. For a long time, I thought the McClatcheys were letting us live in their extra house just because they were nice. Perhaps there’s an element of truth to that. And when Hugh finally became my stepfather, I discovered that my other suspicions had been true: that there did exist people who had grandmamas and granddaddies and great-granddaddies who lived down the street, whose names were on road signs or buildings or both; who had cousins; who had a great web of people spread wide and sticky over Atlanta; and they did the things they did and had the jobs they had and went to the schools they went to and married the people they did because all that great web had figured out the best way to live and showed them how. These people were supremely, effortlessly legible to themselves, and I waited, in vain, for the effect to spread to me.