The Half Brother (2 page)

And then we curve around to the right and there is the pond, the smooth center of it blinding in the sun.

May goes straight to the water and for a second I think she’s just going to walk right in, but she stops at the very edge. There is probably some specific plan, an agenda. She spreads her arms wide. We have no shared memories here so I can’t help, and I think once again how I’m superfluous. But I can’t just disappear. I go down and stand next to her. “Do you love it here?” I say.

“Yes.” She is busy absorbing. Then she reaches some kind of capacity and turns to me. “We used to come here for picnics,” she says, her arms dropping to her sides. “And then I’d come with my brothers and we’d go skinny-dipping. But eventually they wouldn’t let me come with them anymore. Shut out.”

Jesus H. Christ
. “So is that what you came here to do?” I say.

“No.” She’s lying.

“I won’t look,” I say. “I’ll go up there”—and I point to the trees. “Far be it from me to thwart this important rite.”

She looks at me, excited, half-convinced. “You really won’t look? You don’t mind?”

I raise my hand. “Scout’s honor.”

“Or … you could come too,” she says. Her face is as unseductive as a child’s. “It’s really fun.”

I smile with the most avuncular expression I can muster. “No, no. I’ll be right up there.”

I go up the bank to the edge of the woods and, true to my word, sit down with my back to the pond. I imagine I can feel her hesitation behind me, and then her undressing—the whisper of cloth against skin—and also her periodic looks at me, checking. Then I really do hear her, footsteps slushing along in shallow water, and then a splash. “Aaaah!” she cries. “Oh my God it’s amazing! Don’t you want to come in? Oh!” Another enormous splash. She must be flinging herself, full-length, into the water. Silence: she’s sliding along, slick as a fish. All that water, touching all of her body.

“Charlie! It’s okay! Really!”

I think she means I can turn around, so I do.

Her clothes are in a little pile at the shore. It’s true, she’s too far away for me to see anything. She’s swimming out to the middle of the pond. Her stroke is the elegant product of years of summer camp. I think she might go all the way to the other side, but no, she gets to the center and turns around. Without thinking about it, I take a step backward, but she keeps coming in, closer and closer, until she can stand, the water up to her shoulders, and then stops and waves. I wave back. She slides under, springs up, and then begins to cavort, to
gambol
, twirling in a circle and scudding water up with her cupped palms, flipping forward and backward. Her splashes screen her and I try not to look for details but once I see her breasts and then her buttocks, flashes of roundness, nothing more, white where the rest of her is tan. She dives, surfaces, dives again, sharp ankles and pointed toes. Dark head sleek as a seal’s.

Needless to say I am hard as a rock. Sitting there in the shadows.

I did not consider her invitation to join her for one millisecond, and thank God. Besides. My white, flabby self. My completely unsuitable self. She is great armfuls of girl and even if I caught her I surely couldn’t hold her.

Her splashes subside. She dives again, surfaces with only her head showing. I can see ripples where she’s treading water. “Okay,” she calls. “Getting out now,” and I turn back around.

I’m still sitting. It won’t take long for her to get dressed. I am scrounging for every boner-deflating picture I’ve got, a trick I haven’t had to pull off in years, by the way. I think of the time I threw up in
the junior-high cafeteria right across from Annie Stanton. Of enormous hairy nonagenarians with bad breath. Coffins. I even try to summon Hugh, my stepfather, when he was near the end, an image I avoid because it always breaks my heart, but it’s like his very ghost is against me and the memory won’t come, no grief or pathos, nothing … and there’s John Thomas stiff as a soldier. Goddamn you, David Herbert! Flowers winding in the mound of Venus—no!

“I’m ready,” she sings. “All decent.”

I stand up, creakily, but I don’t turn around.

“The water was
glorious
! You should have come in!” Taunting me. I put my hands in my pockets and try to adjust. Desperate measures. Ineffective. “Charlie?” Her voice is coming closer. “Charlie?” I hear her swagger dissipating. “Is something wrong?”

I make my last calculations, whirl around, grab her face between my two hands, and say, “Don’t you ever do that again.”

For a moment her eyes are wide; but she can’t look down and that’s the main thing. “What?” she says. “Take off my clothes? Swim?” She tosses her head a little in my grasp. “Why do you care?”

And I kiss her, hard. I didn’t even realize I was planning it. I am brilliant! Of all the diversionary tactics! I’m bending forward from the waist; she can’t get anywhere near my groin. It’s ridiculously awkward and so I pour everything I can into the kiss, making her mouth and mine the only real estate that counts. She’s startled at first and then she begins to loosen and warm. I have to keep my hands on her face as ballast but I am beginning to lose myself too.
May-May, it’s you. It’s you
. I’ve woven my hands into her hair and under my fingertips I feel her humming and growing, feel the
fact
of her, and I know I could give up, step forward, admit myself, she’ll feel it all—but, no, she’s twenty years old, headed off to some Paris
quai
, some slick new life, and so I will myself to stay rough. I fight her tongue with mine. Our teeth knock together. It’s all strategy. A battle. This is war.

But she doesn’t seem to realize. Her hands are cradling my face now too. “Mr. Garrett,” she murmurs. “Charlie Garrett,” and I gentle, I’m softer than I meant to be, this could go on forever, and I pull away and stalk back down the trail.

I realize that, aside from my greeting back in the cloister, I haven’t said her name at all, in any form.

I’ve put myself into a kind of shock but I’m also listening for her, and soon I hear her behind me, no more the jolly tramping. I consider stopping and waiting for her; I slow down, but she stays well behind me. Shame begins to seep in. Also, terror. I’ve declared myself, finally, but maybe she doesn’t even know. Maybe she just thinks I’m a monster. The upside—or not: my erection is thoroughly gone.

We reach the trailhead. My car is the only one in the little unpaved lot. I start toward it and then I realize she’s not following me anymore, and when I turn around I see her, a few yards from the end of the path, still definitively in the woods.

Her face is uncertain, but also stubborn. There’s a brief standoff. I feel now that I’m only error and all I can do is compound it. Then, from these twenty paces, I see her sigh, and she puts her hands on her hips, and that’s that. I walk back to her. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“You are?”

I kiss her again. It’s a proper, medium-length, generic kiss that doesn’t say much. She knows it, and steps away before I do.

Then we get in the car and I drive her back to her house, and the whole way we don’t say a word. I pull up at her front walk but leave the car running. There’s a silence and I wonder if she knows I am just taking in her warmth, her smell, the way she fills the space next to me. Then she’s reaching for the door handle. I want to stop her, but I don’t.

She gets out and slams the door, not too hard. Then she leans down to the open window. She rests her folded arms on the frame. Settles in. Won’t let my eyes go. I can see the rings of near-black around the dark blue of her irises. Her lashes are still wet, clumped into tiny points. She considers me one more moment, then gives me an enormous smile, like I’ve just spoken aloud, and she’s gone.

Two

I had come to Abbott seven years before. Teaching English there was my first job, right out of college. I’d driven out to my interview, two hours from Cambridge, in a haze of unreality and anxiety; I was still in school then, a senior surrounded by seething ambition and limitless confidence, but for me the idea of being employed at all, at a job that entailed skill and responsibility, was unreal, ludicrous. The only time I felt even slightly proficient at life was when I was holding a book in my hand. Thus, this interview.

It was my first one and I was proud of securing it on my own, without any connections or string pulling, especially from my enormous, eager stepfamily, the Satterthwaites—although how they, back in Atlanta, could involve themselves I couldn’t imagine.

That day I met with the department head, Strickler Yates. He was finishing his twenty-eighth year there, he told me (long-termers are not unusual at Abbott). He said, “Harvard. Good man. Class of fifty-six myself.” We discovered a shared admiration for the metaphysical poets. Then he declared that literary criticism was “hooey,” and asked if I agreed.

“Absolutely,” I said, jettisoning four years of college posturing in one fell swoop.

“Those people don’t love literature,” he said. “If you want to find
a bunch of literature haters, go to a college English department.” I noticed he said “littrature.”

“That makes me feel better,” I said. “Because I was wondering if I should get a PhD.”

“God no,” he said. “No, this is the place for you. A naïve, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who’s never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth.
That’s
the fun of it.” Then he released me to the care of an assistant dean, to show me around.

Abbott is in north-central Massachusetts, near the Vermont border, at the top of the Metacomet Ridge, soft mountains younger than the Berkshires. On that day, the air was thick with a fine, chill spring mist. Heavy silver drops hung from azaleas and cherry blossoms, and the flat glow of the overcast sky made the new greens of the grass and of the tiny-leaved trees almost fluorescent. As the dean, Adam Salter, and I walked away from the main quad and past the dorms, the land dipped and rolled, and the green opened and flattened out, as did the abundant white sky; the mist accumulated and draped itself beneficently over the tops of trees.

Salter, a thirtyish, earnest guy with a red flattop haircut, had done me the favor of assuming I was athletic, and we were headed to the lower field to watch a lacrosse game. At the field, mist shrouded the players; the spectators looked like huddling druids. Salter said he was going to introduce me to a few people, but when we stopped at the sideline he couldn’t tear his eyes from the field. There were three minutes on the board. “We could wait till the end,” I said, and he looked at me with outsized gratitude.

“This is our biggest rival,” he said. “Essex. Very important game. Tendency to play dirty, if you ask me, gotta keep an eye on them. Do you play? Well, no matter—what a shot!—almost—oh, hey. Charlie. That’s Preston Bankhead over there.” He gestured vaguely to a tall, graying man on the sideline, down near the Abbott goal. “Southerner like you. Chaplain. Beloved. Beloved man. Jeez, look at the size of that guy—hey, whoa! Slashing!” There was a whistle. “Finally,” Salter said, and then he turned to me for one quick, focused moment. “I’ll introduce you in just a sec. He’s an institution,” he said. “Bankhead.”

Then play started again. “No problem,” I said. I looked down the sideline at this Bankhead. Middle-aged, fit, tall; patrician nose, assertive chin; graying hair receding in front, longish in back. Abbott was a nominally Episcopal school, and under his all-weather jacket the man wore a collar.

Then he turned slightly in my direction, and though I didn’t yet know him, I immediately recognized him—not in any specifics, but instead in his general, privileged mien, the Scotch-Irish narrowness of his face, the lean, symmetrical features and high forehead. It was, collar aside, the fortunate face of southern lawyers and businessmen, of proficient golfers and casual hunters, of my late stepfather. I knew dozens of faces just like this one, back in Atlanta.

Hugh, though, when I had known him, had never been so vital. Bankhead was an exceptionally square-jawed, vivid version of the type, whereas Hugh had been wispier to start, and had gradually dwindled down to a red-eyed shade. But this Bankhead—and the collar, the chin, the slightly artistic hair—held a certain glamour. His eyebrows were on their way to bushiness, which always seemed to accompany a piercing gaze of wisdom. I was susceptible to such gazes.

He was standing with two teenaged boys with his height, but vivid blond hair, and a woman I assumed to be his wife, petite but formidable—she was another type I knew. Thin lips, thin eyebrows, thick straight hair (blond like her boys’) incapable of being mussed. In a moment, we’d be introduced and she’d look into my eyes and be so pleased to meet me, and dismiss me. The boys—all three: as the family cheered, I realized there was another son on the field—would be, like their mother, able to recognize fellow tribesmen at fifty paces. They wouldn’t recognize me.

I thought, as I so often did, of my brother, Nicky, who was only nine then, but even so would have approached with his glowing, open face, stuck out his gentlemanly little hand, won them all.

And then I realized that if by some miracle I got this job, I’d be the boys’ teacher, and maybe my tribe, whatever it was, wouldn’t matter. I would have a different authority. I would be different.

The final whistle blew—Abbott won 11–8—and I assumed my most promising interview expression: open, flexible, go-getter, trouper. I’d
be ready for this Bankhead, maybe even for the wife! But as I watched, the family rapidly gathered itself together. Umbrellas, collapsible chairs. Amid the busyness Bankhead stood straight, aloof, until the wife said something to him, her pretty face sharp as a blade. “Hmm,” Salter said, watching them, sounding both concerned and unsurprised. “Maybe now’s not the time. Oh, there’s Divya Lowell. You
have
to meet her. She’d be in your department.”

I noticed now a small sag at the corners of Preston Bankhead’s lips. The deep lines around his eyes suggested a sort of ontological disappointment. What oppressed him? The seeming perfection of his little clan? Or maybe his faith was fraught. Maybe he sighed in the mornings as he fastened the collar around his neck.