The Half Brother (7 page)

Years later, when I met Preston and Florence Bankhead, of New Orleans and Savannah, I knew immediately they were of the same ilk as the McClatcheys and the Satterthwaites. I believed I could tell them their own history. I could see Preston gripping a log bridge with his bare toes, and scuffing through the sweet funk of fallen, decaying leaves, and braiding sharp, sun-hot pine needles, and running home to a white house full of family when he heard the dinner bell ringing, and sitting at a table set with mellowed family silver, and getting treats in the kitchen from the maid, whose favorite he was. Even after I knew his father had abandoned them, I was sure he’d emerged unscathed, materially and in every other way. I thought I knew Preston right off the bat, and I hoped, and feared, he would know me too.

ONE DAY I SAW
a small blue velvet box on my mother’s dresser. It held a ring. We contemplated it together. “Why aren’t you wearing it?” I said.

“Well. Mr. Satterthwaite thought maybe I should let you get used to the idea.”

I could imagine him saying that, and realized how implicitly I trusted him. “That’s okay,” I said. “You should put it on.”

A faint smile crossed her face and I thought about how she was good-looking. I suppose I had always thought her pretty the way little boys think their mommies are pretty, but now I felt a new, adult, not unfriendly distance, and I looked at her dark-red hair and the rise of her cheekbones and the arch of her brows and approved. She put the ring on and then held her hand out for us to look at, but not in a showy way. My mother hardly ever wore jewelry.

Then I realized. “Where’s your other ring?” I said. “From my dad?”

Her eyes were fastened on the diamond. Then she abruptly closed her hand and looked up. “I put it away, Charlie,” she said. “A while ago. I guess you just didn’t notice.”

After that, the changes came thick and fast. We moved into Hugh’s big, underfurnished Tudor house around the corner, on Peachtree Battle Avenue. I went to a new school. My mother quit working. We had a maid, named Rosetta. And I suddenly had grandparents (Big Hugh and Bobo) and aunts and uncles and cousins, or at least I was assured they were mine. I was even now related to the McClatcheys.

The Satterthwaites had nearly despaired of Hugh getting married, of finding happiness, and so their gratitude to Anita and me was outsized, even embarrassing. They acted as though all the benefit had been to Hugh and treated us not like interlopers but royalty, which perversely made me feel even more like a fake. And then Nicky came along. He was born in the trough between the clump of first cousins and their offspring, the only baby in sight. He was the dauphin, the tsarevitch in his sailor suit.

I think Hugh and my mother were happy for a little while; I do. I
know Hugh was. Beautiful wife, baby son, and he made me feel like I was a bonus.

Hugh was an unabashedly devout Anglican. He loved the smells and bells, the Midnight Mass, and every now and then at dinner would announce it was the feast day of Saint This or That, but the thing he seemed to like best was the long stretch after Easter, Ordinary Time—no events, no drama, redemption accomplished. I remember him saying it at the beach, where we now went for regular vacations, his paler-than-pale self parked under the umbrella, his white feet, skinny as rulers, digging into the sand: “Ordinary time. Isn’t it wonderful?”

That’s all he wanted, St. Hugh. The ordinary. He’d never expected to have this life. Perhaps he thought he didn’t have a talent for it, or didn’t deserve it. And then he lost it. A chicken-and-egg proposition.

Even so, it was Hugh who kept me in the orbit of the family, at least for a while, Hugh’s manly, leathery, book-lined study where I felt the most at home—maybe because there I was an acknowledged guest, it was out in the open. In the rest of the house I was supposed to feel like an average citizen, with equal rights. No one seemed to notice that I tried to be as neat and unassuming as a maiden aunt grateful for a bed. I was a pimply teenager; I was the son of a vanished man named Jimmie Garrett. The deal had been struck with Anita long before that I would not ask too many questions, and in return she, hunter-gatherer style, had procured Hugh, and this house, and my new school, the tennis court in the backyard, the new books that lined my shelves—and now a brother. Still, I felt that anytime this Buckhead caravansary could collapse.

AN AFTERNOON AT A MYSTERY HOUSE.
That is, I don’t remember whose. Gracious people, maybe from church, friends of Hugh’s, probably—people he’d grown up with; there were a lot of those, a lot of friends who wanted to get to know my mother and me, who were full of goodwill. Bobo and Big Hugh were there too. Someone said it had been such a nice summer, but there was still August to go. So it’s July.

I’m the only teenager there. The adults take an inordinate interest in every aspect of my life. They ask questions, seem fascinated. This attention never used to happen. I don’t understand such an anxiety to be polite. What I absorb is that I am difficult to like. That my attractions are sparse.

Nicky, on the other hand, is the star, the only baby as I am the only teenager. There are toddlers there, the children who will become his friends, the ones he’ll grow up with, but he’s the only one still crawling, cherubic. And there’s something else: I don’t know if all babies have this light, or if it’s only Nicky. His red-gold curls draw the sun. When my mother holds him in her lap, her arms curl around him. When she looks at him, her hand goes to his cheek. Everyone calls to him, everyone wants to hold him. He’s oblivious, of course. He doesn’t know he’s Abel, Jacob, Joseph.

Meanwhile Hugh has a glass of bourbon in his hand and I know it’s not his first, and that I’m supposed to watch him; my mother has already given me a look, enlisting me. But he seems so relaxed, in his element, here on this green lawn beneath old trees, that I don’t want the job.

Instead I excuse myself and go inside and after a perfunctory use of the facilities I linger, drifting from room to room, watching the afternoon light playing on the smooth worn banister, on the creamy heavy paint on door frames, on the antique rugs thin at the edges. But then I hear the voice of the hostess and another woman as they enter the kitchen. If I could stand here long enough, maybe a layer of the mystery on the surfaces of these lives would be peeled away, but if they find me I certainly won’t be able to say that, and so I slip out through a French door to the side yard.

As I walk back around I hear cheering, and when I round the corner to the wide circle of chairs in the green grass I see Nicky, in the middle of the circle—walking. They’re his first steps. He’s stiff kneed, a miniature lumbering giant. His face is full of surprise and he stops, swaying, and laughs. Laughs! And everyone around him laughs too. And he looks all around him and takes in all the adoration, swallows it whole, as is his due.

And then sees me. And makes a beeline for me. His face is clean with joy and I crouch down and he lurches into me, his fat hands splayed on my knees with unthinking ownership. Everyone else loves him but he’s chosen me, and I feel myself giving in, as helpless as the rest.

THE DECLINE WAS GRADUAL.
Nicky was at least three before I noticed how I’d quit relying on Hugh—that he was often literally unavailable, in his study with the door closed. Sometimes he even slept there. He was such a gentle drunk, never ugly or belligerent; he would just gradually disappear, over the course of an evening, the smile on his face delicate as paper, and half an hour, an hour after he slid away you’d finally notice he was gone.

But it turned out he was still paying a little bit of attention, and there was still something he wanted to do for me.

He asked me to meet him at his town club for lunch, which I’d never done before. It was hushed and male and famous for, of all things, hot buttered homemade saltines, which were absurdly good. The waiter knew him and seemed uncommonly fond of him. “We haven’t seen you for a while, Mr. Hugh,” he said. He brought Hugh a double old-fashioned without asking. Every black person there called him Mr. Hugh. The white men at the front desk called him Mr. Satterthwaite.

As Hugh gestured with his glass, he explained that the men in his family had always gone to Harvard, “and I want to do that for you, Charlie.” I didn’t ask how. The Satterthwaites were humble, affable, down-to-earth, but things often got done with undue ease, bypassing the usual channels; it was a different time. Calls could be placed. Cousins turned up in useful positions. Someone had been someone else’s best man and I remember your sister so fondly, and don’t say another word.

I wasn’t principled enough to resist his offer, but, more important, I couldn’t resist Hugh. As we spoke and I tried not to eat all the saltines, and the waiter quietly brought him fresh drinks, I realized in
my dumb seventeen-year-old way that he was following a script in his head with immense, heartbreaking care. Old courtesy, old order.

“Maybe you should slow down?” I said, when the fourth drink was set in front of him. With just the two of us, and the clairvoyant waiter, I couldn’t help counting as the glasses appeared and disappeared.

He smiled sadly, as though I had just stumbled on a great, inevitable, adult truth that he had wanted to keep from me for as long as possible. Before him his water glass brimmed full, untouched. He didn’t seem any more or less inebriated than usual. “Son,” he said (he’d asked long before if he could call me that, and of course I’d said yes), “don’t worry about me. Fruitless endeavor. You worry about yourself, now. Eat up. Have another cracker.” He handed me the linen-lined silver tray. “There’s a couple you missed there.” And then he said, “Charlie, I love your mother, and so I love you. Simple as that. You didn’t do a thing to deserve it, but that doesn’t negate it. It just is.”

So I got into Harvard, which I had assumed I wouldn’t, even with Hugh’s help. When it was too late, I was ambivalent. Suddenly I had grand ideas of independence. And of course I was also scared. I took Hugh at his word and worried about myself, decided I’d been well behaved for long enough, kicked and screamed a little, slammed a few doors, was briefly, theatrically moody—and have regretted it ever since. I never told him thank you. Then, several weeks before my high-school graduation, on a day he’d actually made it into his office, he got a stomachache so painful that he took himself to the emergency room, thinking he might have appendicitis. It turned out his organs were shutting down, one by one. He was gone in three days. I hadn’t known people really could literally drink themselves to death, but they can.

Near the end of our lunch that day, he’d said to me, “Charlie, you need to know something.” His face had suddenly sagged, as though he’d been holding his breath through the entire meal and was finally letting it go. “I have known exactly who I was, who I am, my entire life.” He waved vaguely around at the dining room, the black waiters in their white coats, the city outside that was his. The wave nearly threw him off balance. “And it hasn’t done me a damn bit of good.” His right hand made a fist, and then, driven more by gravity than passion,
came down heavily, muffled on the thick tablecloth. His silverware rattled faintly. “Remember that, Charles Garrett. Son of no one. Count your blessings.”

I WENT TO HARVARD,
on my dead stepfather’s recommendation, and on his dime. I could not have felt more like a fraud.

In his honor, I did as well as I could, which was not well enough, and drank very little.

And then, all of a sudden, graduation was approaching. And, surrounded as I was by seething ambition, I began looking for jobs, although I had no idea about that larger thing, a career. Nevertheless, I’d do it on my own. I didn’t involve my mother or, God forbid, the Satterthwaites, although once again what I said or didn’t say turned out not to matter.

IN EARLY MAY,
that year that I was twenty-two and graduating from college and deciding where in the world to go, my mother, Anita, was at Hugh’s parents’ for Sunday dinner. After Hugh died, the family was more often there, on a Sunday, than at the club—even by then, when he’d been gone for four years.

In the town where my mother grew up, there had not been a single house like the Satterthwaites’, or like the one she now lived in. She’d been raised by her grandparents, who believed in hell; if they were still living, they surely believed she was going there. She didn’t know her father’s name. As it was every Sunday, at the Satterthwaites’, she believed her job was to not let on to these facts, and not to forget them herself.

She’d escaped to the empty formal living room. At times, she needed a moment. Everyone forgave her these moments. The Satterthwaites loved her, as they liked to love most people, but were a little intimidated. This was not, by the way, an uncommon reaction to my mother.

The living room had antique china in niches by the mantel, maps of Civil War–era Atlanta on the wall. In front of her, on the coffee table, magazines were carefully fanned, no doubt by Bobo’s maid,
Willie Mae, who was Rosetta’s sister. My mother’s fingers twitched because she wanted a cigarette, but her smoking was the only thing the Satterthwaites frowned upon, and since she agreed with them, her hand didn’t go to her pocket, and she didn’t get up and go outside to some isolated grassy corner. Instead, she picked up the magazine at the top of the fan, which was an alumni magazine from a place called Abbott. Hugh hadn’t gone there; he had gone to a day school in Atlanta, the place I was also sent. Anita didn’t know a thing about this other school.

When she opened the magazine, she saw green rolling fields and white buildings, a chapel of gray stone—foreign but familiar, like scenes from a picture book or travel guide, peopled with teenagers as white toothed and smooth browed as the Satterthwaites. She was always encountering things like this magazine in the Satterthwaites’ houses. They were documents in a language in which she would never be fluent. She didn’t know how ordinary, in its own way, Abbott was.

It was around then that Bobo came in and sat with a companionable sigh in the wing chair across from my mother. “That Nicky had three pieces of pie,” she said. “Two apple and one pecan. It’s Willie Mae’s pecan pie and you know how it’s so rich. I told him he would get a stomachache, but then I just let him.”