The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  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.

  Then I realized a girl had been sitting in one of the chairs, at Bankhead’s far side, all along. As soon as she stood up, one of the Visigoth brothers yanked the chair away and began folding it. She looked eleven or twelve, tall but still with a child’s bod
y, and also olive skinned, dark haired, unlike her mother and brothers. A sport. Her family seemed fearfully complete without her. Her brothers, gear stowed, sauntered off full of their careless authority, high-fiving, slapping backs, but she stayed close to Bankhead, slumping away her height. Her face was that of a child just moving into adolescence—bored, impatient, wistful.

  “Charlie?” Salter said.

  “Coming!”

  Then the girl looked up at her father in some silent communication and he looked down at her. As they turned away from the field he put his arm around her and they were suddenly united, and I thought, Ah. She is his.

  I GOT THE JOB, which felt both inevitable and surprising. Suddenly, I had a plan, for at least a year.

  I moved into the first-floor apartment of a two-family near campus, and for several years after that, when I was back in Atlanta to visit, I rather enjoyed mentioning to the Satterthwaites where I lived and watching their faces at the word duplex. But wasn’t I teaching at a private school? Hadn’t I gone to Harvard? I jammed their radar. Living up north, I’d become exotic to them. They’d expected me to come back, and I hadn’t, and now they didn’t know what to think.

  Neither did I, to be honest. I had no agenda; I was twenty-two; I was still thinking in semesters. My mother said, “We’re fine here. Live your life,” and I listened, because she rarely had an agenda either. It was the Satterthwaites who voiced distress about my absence, but this was pro forma. They were a fundamentally generous bunch, and they’d always wanted to claim me; but, as much as I’d wanted to be claimed, I’d never thought that the operation would work. Living far away just made it easier. Besides, they still had Nicky, the child who was really theirs, who’d been born correctly. He would be more than enough.

  MY LANDLADY, ANGELA MIDDLETON, née Siegal, was a cheerful, big-boned blonde, like a former-jock older sister, always carrying at least one kid on her hip—they had three, the youngest an infant. She was a real-estate agent—“very part-time,” she said. Booker, her husband, was assistant head of grounds at Abbott and six-five on a short day. He was African American, with a very dark, square, faintly Asiatic face, and not a smiler. He was in the air force reserves, and every summer he spent a month away training at the base in Chicopee.

  When I first moved in, he said, “You’re from Atlanta.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “My people are from South Carolina.”

  “Ah,” I said. Booker was a broad man. Broad lips, broad cheekbones, broad shoulders. He was as solid as a concrete block, and my landlord, and the conversation was not going to end until he decided it would. We were in the small common vestibule of the house; my door was open—I’d been about to go in. “You ever get back there?” I said.

  “Used to spend the summers there. Which didn’t make any damn sense, when you think about it.”

  “No, I suppose not. But … but you were born up here?”

  “My mother came up when she was two years old. I was born in Boston. Hear you went to school there. To Harvard.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I grew up in Roxbury.”

  “Ah.”

  “You ever get over to Roxbury, Charlie?”

  “I never did.” He nodded, waiting. “I didn’t have a car. I didn’t leave campus much, I guess.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Actually, I never left the library. I was hanging on by my fingernails.”

  He smiled a little. “I don’t believe what you’re saying, now.”

  I thought about myself in college. “It’s the truth.” He was wearing a hat with the insignia from his squadron, and I was desperate to change the subject. I pointed to it. “Do you fly?”

  “Tactical aircraft maintenance.”

  “Ah.”

  He finally relented. “Well. Welcome to the house, Charlie. Welcome to Abbott. It’s a good place.”

  “Yes sir. It really is.”

  He turned to open his own door. I felt like a dog whose leash had been stepped on, then the foot suddenly removed. “My father was a soldier,” I said. “Marines. Enlisted man.”

  He turned back. “Is that so.”

  “He died in Vietnam,” I said. “Before I was born.” It was the story my mother had always told me. I believed my father had been a man (a twenty-one-year-old high-school dropout, just barely a man) named Jimmie Garrett, USMC, PFC.

  Booker regarded me. A long second passed. “I am sorry to hear that.”

  I nodded. This time he let me turn away first.

  I REALIZED HOW TERRIFIED I was of teaching on the night before I was to begin. The next day, beams of adolescent attention trained on me, I was nearly flattened. At first I thought only about survival. But then a stubbornness I didn’t know I had kicked in. Somehow I didn’t undermine myself by thinking about all I wasn’t doing, how unextraordinary I was being; I just clung to a new persona I was making up on the spot, a tweedy, knowledgeable, unflappable self. Pretending to be someone I wasn’t was, in itself, comfortable, or at least familiar.

  I’d heard that I should move around while I taught, and so I walked, I paced; I strolled to the window; I lifted mine eyes unto the hills. My classroom was on the second floor, facing west, away from the quad, with a sugar maple right outside the window, and beyond all was openness—rolling green dotted with neat buildings of gray stone and white clapboard, a little farm of learning.

  Sometimes I wished we were facing the quad and its honeycomb of crisscrossing paths, but I developed an appreciation for looking away instead, out beyond to the edges of campus. I wasn’t thinking of escape but of mystery, discovery. And that tree became an anchor. Day after day, I would gaze at that tree, at the autumn sun filtered through leaves gradually transforming. I thought of other bygone teachers watching the same tree. When the sun sank in the late afternoons and threatened to become blinding, I lowered the shades reluctantly.

  And then I’d turn back around. Miss Myrick. Mr. Bratton. Miss Aaron. Miss Rourke. Yes. No. Absolutely. Due on Friday. Good God, do you think that plural needs an apostrophe? Please tell us why. Exactly.

  I thought that if there were any tactics I could use to age myself, then I should use them. I’d copied the formality, the misters and misses, from an old teacher of mine. It held them at arm’s length, but it was an equalizer, too: I was Mr. Garrett; I held them to my own standard.

  I was exhausted by the expansion of myself into these new, sturdier outlines, but I felt myself growing stronger. I allowed myself to believe I’d made this particular new person, who could withstand the force of their energy, all alone, from almost nothing, from bits of cloth and borrowed words.

  Yes, please read, Mr. Bratton. John Donne was quite a sensuous writer. What’s the central image here? Mr. Sprague. Is there more than one type of compass? Sometimes you have to take hold of the end of a sentence and pull. Miss Garard. Mr. Maxwell. Yes, absolutely. See me after. Good work. Today, Miss Hobson, you are on. Mr. DeAngelis, you’re off. Yes. Keep going. Exactly … exactly.

  Every day, I tried to pull it out of them. What? More than they knew they knew. More than they knew they had. I found that I could gather the force of them into reins in my hands, steer, and then let them lead. At the window of my classroom, looking out, I was in the prow of a landship, forging ahead with my new self, built on the scaffolding of these names; then I turned around and my own energy went forth, joined theirs, became something new and larger. I had not expected to feel my own self slowly emerging as I tried to draw out theirs. I had not expected to love anyone, is what I’m saying. Sometimes they looked at me in amazement at what came out of their mouths.

  THE FIRST FULL CHAPEL of the year, Preston Bankhead gave the homily.

  He looked even taller in his robes. His hair seemed to have grown and, while still respectable, flowed over his collar impressively. He ascended to the pulpit, looked down at us for a long moment, and began what I later called (for I was to hear it more than once) the Grey boys sermon.

 
As I learned that day, the chapel had been the gift of a southern cotton planter who lost both of his sons, Abbott alumni, in the Civil War. After the war was over, the heartbroken and now heirless father sent the remainder of his fortune north too, in a gesture of simultaneous penance and defiance, to build a grand Gothic quadrangle on a rolling green campus in central Massachusetts; but the benefactor, Phineas Grey, died before the quad was completed, as did the money, which was why the chapel stood alone, with its truncated wings.

  There was a plaque, Preston’s main subject, beside the chapel’s wide, arched front doors:

  GREY MEMORIAL CHAPEL

  IN MEMORY OF THE SONS OF ABBOTT

  WHO MADE THE GREATEST SACRIFICE

  TO THE CAUSES TO WHICH THEY WERE LED

  BY CUSTOM, CULTURE, AND CONSCIENCE

  REQUIESCANT IN PACE

  and then the Grey boys’ names, ranks, and dates.

  “The wording of that plaque,” Preston would say, as he did that particular morning, his voice tinged with deep, if weary, tolerance for the sins and foibles of others, “was wrangled over for years. Finally it was determined by two elderly nieces, one of the abolitionist persuasion, one not. It was difficult to find common ground. So what did they find? They found custom, and culture, and conscience.” He leaned forward over the pulpit. “We all find these. We don’t just find them, we swim in them. But which is more important?” He let the pause reverberate. “What if they don’t agree, those things? What if they’re at war with one another?

  “Custom. Is that an excuse not to think? Culture. Heaven forbid you should upset anyone! And conscience. Probably you’d say that’s the one. That’s the most important. And I concur—but how can we be sure it’s our conscience that’s speaking? What if it’s some other voice? If you listen to the wrong voice, my friends, the consequences can be dire.” He leaned over the pulpit and for a moment the congregation was still. I found myself leaning forward too.