The Almanac Branch (15 page)

We stashed the bicycles in a copse at the end of a street next to a monastery. Through the hedges, we could see the holy fathers' retreat. We walked between some houses away from the grounds of the monastery toward Segredo's, hunched over, moving side by side, smiling with anticipation. Berg had brought his camera. This was, if anything, to be at the core of our adventure—to get something on moving film, so that we could look at it later on the projector; Berg knew that there was a good chance little of the footage would come out, since he didn't have access to the kind of infrared film necessary to shoot in the dark, but he was determined to try, anyway.

The lights in the bungalow were on, but it appeared that Mother wasn't there. Segredo's torch blew sparks in an umbrella-shaped shower over the yard. Once we caught sight of him back there, Berg dropped to his knees and told me to get the camera out of his pack, which I did, like a good assistant. The camera produced a humming sound as Berg began to make his movie.

I knelt beside him for a long time, and followed him forward. We were like soldiers in one of the many war movies we'd watched together on television, using indistinct masses of metal to hide ourselves from Segredo, just as the soldiers hid themselves behind big fake boulders on Pacific island beaches, as they made their way toward the gunner's nest, dancing between bullets and fondling the hand-grenade they intended to lob up into the enemy's palm-frond blind. But the more absorbed he became with the splashing sparks (“Some of this stuff'll come out,” he whispered) and Gabriel's front-lit figure and back-lit sculptural monster, the more bold I was in my own intruder's heart. I wanted to go inside the house.

“I'll be back,” I whispered, though I'm not sure he heard me, since he kept his small gray box up to his eye, clutched it with both hands, and held his breath while the film ran—much the same way a marksman holds his breath when firing, in order not to disturb the accuracy of his aim.

The front door was unlocked, and inside the rooms smelled of garlic—their dinner—combined with potpourri. It was a familiar combination, though the potpourri smelled more of perfume here, and less of dead flora. I left the door slightly ajar in case I had to run back out fast, and tiptoed toward the kitchen. What would I do if I encountered her, I wondered; no answer—it seemed that she wasn't here anyway. The kitchen was a shambles, and thiswas not so familiar to me. Encouraged by the silence, and perhaps by the high blood of the escapade itself, I began to rummage around in the cabinets. This indulgence brought me into the possession of a bottle of port wine, half-full, which I saw as a real means to ingratiate myself with my brother. Why not? It was a question that kept answering all my self-rebukes that night, and I had no ready answer to it; I tucked the bottle under my jacket, feeling very much the profligate, and started for the front door. Because of all the lights in the cottage I couldn't see out into the night with the same ease I'd been able to peer in. Another thought came to mind, though. I wanted to see their bed. I wanted to see where they did it. Since I didn't know who my mother was anymore, I'd decided, this maneuver might give me an insight into what she had become.

I knew there was some danger that she would be in the room, but the temptation was irresistible, and so down the short, carpeted hallway I hurried, my hands gone cold against the bottle. The door was shut, and under it there was no light, so I assumed that if she was in the room she might be asleep.

She was both. I saw their bed, nondescript. The light from the hallway poured over my shoulder and angled down over her. Her mouth was open, slack, innocent like a child's with saliva gathered over her tongue and lower lip. She was breathing, my mother, slowly and steadily, and there was in the rhythm of her breath a maturity I'd never seen in her before; for one, she didn't resent Segredo's nocturnal creativity—she slept, and slept with her body to one side of the bed, leaving room for him to come and join her when he was finished. There was a confidence in the way she lay there, her hand draped off the edge of the mattress, which made her a stranger to me, but a stranger I could admire. What was I doing? There was no point in my standing there, I realized, this was her new life that she was living and it hardly involved me. It is difficult to explain, but I sensed that my curiosity was inappropriate, ifonly because there was little or nothing with which she could reward it. This was an instant of surpassing emptiness, and it gave way to a release. She was no longer responsible for me, and I was not to be responsible for her—“even-Steven,” as Berg was fond of saying.

I closed the door, as gently as I could, and walked, almost ran, back through the front of the house, and around the side. Something had gone wrong with our plan, because when I got there, Berg was gone, and Gabriel was nowhere to be seen, either. A light went off in the cottage, and I crouched down. I had left the front door ajar upon leaving, the same way I had when I'd been inside—maybe Berg would want to go in to shoot some film indoors where he'd said he had the best chance of getting something to develop, I didn't know, it was a mistake, and now Segredo would surely notice. I backed away into a row of bulky bushes, making more noise than intended, and found myself in the neighbor's front yard. A dog barked, and then another. It was just like in one of the Fugitive scenarios, though now my empathic heart raced for myself. Where was Berg?

“Berg?” I whispered, raspy-throated. Nothing. I decided to go back to the monastery.

Both our bicycles were where we left them, and I decided that the best thing to do was to sit down and wait for my brother. I was glad that I'd lifted the bottle of port, because at least if Berg accused me of having deserted him, I'd have this to appease him. I could still hear the dogs, though the wind had picked up in the trees, and the moon had passed apogee and begun to drop in behind them. The stars were going strong, fattened and turned pink by the thin, high mist, and out in Coecles the steady clanking of rigging hardware against the metal masts gave a sweet percussive ground to the buoy bell that clanged, deep and voluminous, farther out in the water, northeast toward where Scrub Farm was across the inlet. Berg, I thought, come on—I wanted to get on the bike and go home, I wanted to be asleep, as our mother was, in my bed. It wouldhave been fun if the flare man could have come to talk, but he seemed more distant than ever. It occurred to me to taste the port, because that's what they did when they got cold in the movies, they had a slug off a bottle, and that cured them, but when I uncorked it and smelled the wine I knew that it wasn't for me. The leaves in the trees gently hissed overhead.

When Berg did show, he was incredibly agitated. “You won't believe this,” he said, full-voiced, and I shushed him for fear that he would get the dogs going again. “Come on,” he half-yelped, half-whispered, and I pedaled home in the darkest night air behind him, the cold wind off the ocean along the causeway helping me to keep my eyes open. I didn't understand a bit of what he was yammering about. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow.

As I fell asleep at home, in my bed, I remembered that I had left the bottle of port in the bushes. Let the monks drink it. They love that jazzy vinegar.

What made me change toward Desmond I can't say, exactly. Sometimes, if Djuna would let me, or if she'd gone to the carriage house for the night and I could get away with it by keeping the sound low on the box, I slept downstairs in the library, on the couch. Desmond didn't come there. His branch was on the other side of the house.

What was a rape, if not this unquestioning, mute, overwhelming force that fell upon me at its own whim, its own chosen moment? The way Desmond more than assumed I was willing to have him—more than assumed, or perhaps less than assumed, given he made no display of needing to know one way or the other about what my wishes might have been—that was rape, wasn't it? It's like a disease with the dead, this not inquiring about the living, their desires, what they need. The living have so often gone to such lengths to take care of the dead, setting them forth on theirjourney into the so-called last night in seven caskets each of different material, like what those French did for Napoleon sticking him inside seven different boxes made of seven kinds of metal and wood, or bedecking them with hammered gold jewelry and silk clothing and appointing their crypts with fancy objects that their souls may delight in during lulls in their long night (there must be a lot of lulls, for those who have left life), and even going so far as to leave wine and food and condiments there with them in the tomb, lest the poor men come back to life and find themselves thirsty or hungry. But what courtesies do the dead show the living?—not that Desmond's visits weren't necessary for me, but as time moved on, as time does, I wondered whether he was aware of what he continued to ask from me, even while in return all I ever wanted was to be with him again.

Never did I feel shaken from the conviction my brother loved me. Nevertheless, in my mid-teens, his visits developed into a pattern of slow, musing violence that would trouble me long past the night he died this sort of second death. Given my abiding conviction of his love, however, I never denied him. The very few times when I suspected I might be making the whole damn thing up were when he'd get the most crazy, or else cold. I have learned that when something wondrous or peculiar or impossible that you've believed to be real comes under a sudden scrutiny that tells you it may be your own projection you're responding to with such innocent enthusiasm, that's the moment the phenomenon can most take control. I did allow myself, whenever he appeared at the sill and traveled through the glass into the bedroom, the choice of being either happy to have him there with me, or fearful of what was about to occur. But I didn't have the wherewithal to deny him, or at least I thought I didn't. I knew it wasn't right. Every time it happened, no matter whether he was rough, or was tender, I began to wish a little more that it would stop.

I wouldn't allow myself to think bad things about Desmond for long, though. What could cruelty possibly mean (if cruelty was the word for Desmond's way of acting toward me) to someone who'd experienced the crudest truth of all? If he knocked my head against the floor while loving me, who was I to suggest he did it on purpose, who was I to complain—the pains I felt could never match what he'd gone through.

So, yes, as I say, whenever I look back on Desmond and what we did together when we were children, I wonder how I managed to keep the ravishments a secret, a part of my independent thought-world. Desmond never swore me to secrecy about himself (as he had that once down by the osprey nest), or what we did those nights. If I ever did tell, however, that would be the moment he'd have to leave me. It was a prospect that, as I got older, attracted me more and more. I didn't so much mind carrying the weight of our secret around with me, but I did begin to wonder whether someday some man besides Desmond might fall in love with me, and then my brother would be in the way.

“You just stay home like you're supposed to, you look after Faw because look what's gone on with him—you don't want something like that to happen to you do you?” Desmond presented me with a warning one evening. “If you stay here you'll be safe from falling in love with anybody else. You think Erin is happy?”

“No,” I answered, though the image I saw while standing near her for those silent moments while she slept belied this.

“No is not the word for it,” said he. “She's miserable over there, I've seen her with him and she's miserable. Listen, you want to go swimming?”

“It's too cold!”

That night, the night of the first snow of the coming season, he made love to me in the most gentle way, and after he kissed me good-bye and went back out into hisother world, I found myself questioning whether because he had been so tender I should trust his words more, or less.

This much I can say, this much I know for sure. Desmond was eleven when he died, in 1965. I turn thirty-three this spring. I've lived three times as long as he did, and yet he still feels older, more able, stronger, and in some ways even wiser than I will ever be. Though you can outlive everyone in experience or years, whoever was older than you when you were growing up will always seem older, and will keep for themselves the prerogatives and powers you give them for having been older, no matter what.

Even when Desmond had been dead so long that I could hardly remember what his voice sounded like, or the feel of his face in my lap—not to mention that extraordinary moment in which he tried to enter me as a spirit that would want to be reborn inside a womb that was willing but unable to shelter him—I thought of him any number of times during the week. The anniversary of his death never passed without my private homage. It was the least I could do. He didn't come anymore, I didn't want him to anymore, so this was my token substitute. Inspired I think by the image of the woman in the window of the church, I'd light a candle in the morning, performing a secular Yahrzeit, and by the end of the day it would gutter out. I knew that no one would be overly sympathetic to a grown woman burning a white candle, by herself, maybe having a little Irish whiskey and fingering the same half-dozen photographs of her brother she'd looked at on this day so many times before, so I kept the ceremony to myself. I had my own little religion with its personal pantheon; the flare man, who was like Tiresias or St. John, kind but scary; the zigzag tongue man was surely a devil; Samantha and Jeannie were White Goddesses. And Desmond? Desmond was Eros. He still burned somewhere: not in my imagination but in some other hidden place or places, burned in places that were dark and quiet. But, in truth, he was gone now,as was Mother, as was in his own way Berg, who would set off into a decade of utter absence from my life, as would we all, finally, in our own ways.

For me, the greatest proverbs—like, architecture is frozen music, or familiarity begets contempt, or, opposites attract—I have always tried hardest to escape. You only live once. I never had reason to run from that piece of wisdom. But after the night of the first snow, I knew that here was another proverb gone awry. Desmond was gone with it, having proved it wrong. The morning after his last visit I looked out into his tree and could see it had changed. It was physically different in a way I cannot explain.