The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  “I imagine she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  He grinned, which involved mostly his eyes. “You imagine correctly, sir.”

  There was another long, companionable, productive stretch. I loved how I was beginning to anticipate his movements, like a surgical nurse.

  Then he said, “You ever talk to May anymore?”

  “No.”

  He nodded slightly. “But you were kind to her.”

  “I was as kind as I know how to be,” I said.

  “Well. It’ll be all right, then.” He stood up, creakily. Contemplated the new treads we had put in. “You know, Charlie,” he said, in the tone that meant he was finished for the day, “you made a real find with this place.” He looked at me. “I mean it.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was an honest compliment—Win made no other sort—and I always remembered it. Sometimes I even said the words to myself like they were lyrics to an old song: You made a find. Although you didn’t know that you were looking. Win never asked what a young fellow like me needed with fourteen acres. Never said or even seemed to think, What are your intentions, Charles Garrett? (As if I were defrauding life.) The empty bedrooms upstairs. Decisions not yet made, life not yet lived. Win believed in doing; he assumed I did too.

  NORMALLY I WENT HOME to Atlanta for a good part of the summer. But this year I decided Nicky could come to visit me. “You need to see my place,” I said to him, on the phone.

  “What about Mom?”

  “She has to work.”

  “That’s what she said,” but then Nicky’s voice trailed off. He hated conflict. He wasn’t going to ask, because he didn’t want to know.

  “Just you and me,” I said. “It’ll be great. We could look at colleges too.”

  “Yeah. I want to come up there for school anyway,” he said quickly, as though he’d been waiting for me to mention it first and now was afraid I’d disapprove. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “See?” I said. “It’ll be perfect.”

  The first night he was at my house, at sunset, he strode to the edge of the patio and threw his arms wide, a yawp to the world. “My God, Charlie!” he cried, as the red boiled up in the sky, and the green of the mountains turned dark. “I love it here! I’m never leaving!” He turned to me, his arms still outstretched. “I understand why you’re here,” he said, and he was taking me in, along with the mountains. “I get it.”

  His reddish-blond hair was shaggy, his T-shirt full of holes, his bare feet dirty as a pilgrim’s. He was still just a twice-a-week shaver, but he’d grown again and was a full six inches taller than I was. He had Hugh’s slender, ropy look; but he was far more golden, vital, thoroughly seventeen. Muscles popped under his skin whenever he moved as if they couldn’t contain their exuberance.

  And despite his dubious personal hygiene anyone could see why girls flocked to him: in his gorgeous openness there was also something unattainable, unreachable. Something fine, that couldn’t be owned; but a challenge was always attractive. His energy flowed out, artless, unchecked.

  People would always reach to touch his hem.

  LIVING WITH SOMEONE AGAIN was odd but not unpleasant. I was aware of Nicky’s presence in the house from the moment I woke in the morning. I would creep downstairs and go out to my front porch, facing east, and feel some mute longing for the possibility of solitude I sensed in the light coming through the trees. And then, of course, a little guilt. He could not have been easier, once he was awake—he was content to be led nearly anywhere.

  The Middletons were down in South Carolina while he was there, but he met Win and Divya and Ram and Anil and fell in love with them all. He walked the labyrinth with a delighted smile on his face, like he was on a ride at an amusement park and genuinely didn’t know where he’d end up: “This is so cool!” He and I drove around to dozens of schools, easy to do in New England, and went, of course, to Harvard, where he wanted to know every landmark of my dingy years there.

  As we walked through the Yard, I told him about my lunch with Hugh at his club, not mentioning the old-fashioneds, and Nick looked wistful. With epic unfairness I, the stepson, remembered him much better.

  “I mainly remember his study,” Nicky said. “I mean, him in it. On that leather sofa, with his feet up. Or behind his desk. Like the president. I thought he was the president.”

  I was glad that Hugh was, in some way, still a hero to him. “I remember his study too—that’s where I always see him first, too,” I said. “Handing me a book.” We spoke of the library as though it were mythical, vanished, but of course it was part of the house Anita still lived in. “He let me read anything I wanted. And of course the first thing I took was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

  Nick looked blank. I had to explain. “But he didn’t mind,” I said. “He said it was a great book. Actually, he said nearly great. Which is accurate. And he said to reread it, when I was older.” I remembered sweating in his study, trying not to mention the part where the gamekeeper makes her breasts swing like bells. And also the flowers in the pubic hair, which I had thought was both the grossest and most erotic thing I had ever heard of. His quietly amused and sympathetic face. “He also said he wouldn’t tell Anita,” I said. “That it would be between us.”

  “I wish you’d call her Mom,” Nicky said. And then walked up the steps of Widener Library, past the plaque to yet another fallen young man.

  A MONTH LATER Nicky was back home and I walked up the hill to the headmaster’s house, to the Labor Day tea, and I walked under the arbor, petals of the late roses falling like confetti, and got a gin and tonic and mingled in the seersucker and the summer dresses and the civilized glow, all of us held there in the garden within the old, low piled-stone walls. There were people missing, but at a school there are always people missing, people always cycle away, and it’s easy to forget how or why. Shocking how quickly the September light was already fading. I knew this slant of light, this ending and beginning. It was familiar, something that would repeat and repeat; there always would be a Labor Day tea; and Win was there, and Divya, and I thought, There are people here I love, and maybe I am lucky.

  Four days later, while teaching his junior trig class, Win had a heart attack, like his father before him. He died on the way to the hospital.

  Divya was the only one I wanted to be with. When I was there, at their house, she was wordless and severe and I played with the boys. She endured a good deal of my presence, and I hope I was a help to her somehow. I hope I was a help because she could be wordless and severe and I expected nothing else. Neither of us would jolly the other.

  She began to pay an absurd amount of money to a landscape company to take care of the labyrinth. “The roof can wait,” she said. “The gutters. I sleep better knowing it is trimmed just so.”

  “I’m glad. Whatever it takes. I’m glad you’re sleeping.”

  She ignored me. “Such lovely absurd order,” she said. “Someday I will do it on my knees like a pilgrim. I truly will.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  “I will let you know.”

  Once I was at her house for dinner. Not right away—several months after Win died. It was winter. I remember that she had said something and I had laughed and then she had laughed, and through a look or a tilt of the head we had silently acknowledged that it was the first laughter in a long time. Then Ram and Anil hurtled through the kitchen; the back door slammed and we listened to their footsteps thundering across the wooden deck and down the steps to the yard below.

  She was standing at the stove, stirring a big pot. I wondered if she was still smiling, looking out the window into the snowy yard, her sons flying across it, the white outlines of the labyrinth beyond, but then she turned to me, without warning. “Oh, God, Charlie. Oh, God.” She looked flattened, overtaken. The long wooden spoon dangled from her hand, dripping stew onto the floor.

  “The sea is finally calm and empty,” she said, “and then a ship sails into view, a
n enormous black rusted-out thing. That’s what I dream of, these enormous things coming at me. They fill everything up. And I can’t breathe.”

  I opened my arms. I wasn’t like Nicky. I was not inviting an embrace, or wanting to drink the world. Instead, for a moment, just a moment, I felt a brute endurance, some new version of myself; and I let the ghost ship sail over me instead and it was weightless and it did me no harm.

  I realized that withstanding its onslaught would be my only accomplishment for a very, very long time, and perhaps it didn’t hurt me because I was already drowning.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” Divya said, and she turned back to the stove.

  DURING HIS VISIT Nicky had asked, “Did you know you wanted to be a teacher when you came here?”

  “Not at all. I didn’t even know it when I graduated. I just wanted a job.”

  “But you’re happy now?”

  I didn’t miss a beat—because, of course, he was asking about my professional life, not any other sort. “Yes. Sheer luck.”

  “But maybe you were intuitive,” Nick said. “Maybe you knew what you were doing all along.” He always wanted to give me credit.

  After Win died, I decided he might have been right. Teaching began to be quite literally the only thing making me get up in the morning. I’m not sure there exists any other job that could have functioned in the same way: my mind needed to be outside myself, to be centered on others’ thoughts and work, and I needed objective evidence that I was being useful. To that end I could see students progressing, mostly under their own steam, but still I could feel a small measure of utility. Finally, I needed to be dealing with people who were far more interested in themselves than in me and yet couldn’t be faulted for it—in other words, high-school students.

  I endured the loveliness of all of them. All of them, even those nature hadn’t favored, even the ones without silky eyebrows and flat stomachs and effortless muscles—they were changelings, they were becoming. Sometimes there were kids who were simply born to be thirty, or fifty, or seventy; I could see their unfinished teenaged faces overlaid with the transparencies of their aged selves and had to resist telling them so—that the maturity they wanted was going to happen, that someday they would look as completed as they felt, in their fleeting, truest moments. That someday they would be magnificent.

  Others, seemingly fortunate, were at their peak at seventeen. All their physical edges were already smooth, they rarely had acne, their hair seemed to keep itself cut. Their fate was to go no further.

  And sometimes there was a girl, or boy, whose beauty was both dewy and odd. He might stick out; she might be invisible. But there was some clarity there that was so finely drawn it was easily missed, until one day it all melded and became striking. Of course I am not speaking of only physical beauty. And I tried not to think of May.

  Every morning I was met with their energy. They were full of their dramas and their innocence and there were some who might be president or queen or martyr and some who might ruin themselves—but there was still time for them to turn back, still time for us to save them. And did they care if I had a personal life? If I did anything besides teach them? No, bless them, they did not.

  Every day I gave them what I had. Poured it out onto them, my pitiful measure of oil. Gave them all my treasure, anointed them: go forth. Then went home, read, graded papers, slept, woke, did it again.

  On Saturdays I was alone and liked it and thought I was resting and recovering, well deserved, and I would fix something around the house or mow the meadow or putter around the tired old apple trees or maybe even plant a new one, but by Sunday I would be panicky with lack of schedule. So I went to church. I didn’t go because of Preston, surely, who had failed me, in ways I still couldn’t absorb; or because of my mother, who’d been raised in a little country church with hellfire and prophesies, and who had failed me too; but instead because of Hugh, who had knelt with such gravity, who’d held his mouth open for the wafer in the old style, a waver of palms, a receiver of ashes, ready every Sunday morning with his eyes red and watery, bourbon on his breath—but off we would go and he didn’t miss a word.

  So years later I too went to church without fail and stood and knelt and sang and said the same words over and over (indeed resented when some eager-beaver young theologian got modern and mixed them around) and never thought about whether I believed them or not, because I understood, like Hugh, that there were things you had to cling to, that belief was a luxury, belief was beside the point.

  LATER—YEARS LATER, when Divya was no longer wordless and severe, at least not usually—she said, “Charlie, are you going to stay at Abbott forever? Because you can leave, you know. There are other schools. Other jobs. Other much larger towns.” I don’t know what my face looked like, but I could guess because she said, at once, “I’m not trying to get rid of you.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, and it was true, I wasn’t hurt; it was more that I couldn’t comprehend what it would be to leave. I was like some primitive islander who had no idea there were other lands past the horizon. But I didn’t much care.

  “The thing is,” I said, after a longish pause, “I still haven’t finished the house,” and Divya rolled her eyes and smiled. Because I would never finish the house. Because its surfaces and innards were vast, and even though they weren’t infinite they might as well have been, because whenever something was done, something else that had been done broke. It was a joke between us, and we felt Win’s ghost and his ghostly capable hands and his silent laughter, and though I knew a house was, in a way, like a life—that it was constantly changing and decaying, that despite all efforts to shore it up for good it eventually would have to be left in an unfinished state—I knew now was not the time.

  Nine

  Without any help from Hugh, except from beyond the grave, Nicky got into Harvard. Maybe he couldn’t spell, but he was either president or captain of everything, and besides, he was born fluent in numbers; he saw patterns laid out as clear as maps, although couldn’t explain any of it to me.

  Whenever I went to visit him at school and we walked through the Yard, or went out for a meal, the parade of people greeting him would be endless. Once he was having a particularly hard time during finals, and I drove in to make sure he was eating. But despite his dishevelment—he was unshowered, hair matted, his teenaged three-day beard patchy and soft—or maybe because of it, one girl and then another just happened to stop by our table to say hello. A preppy girl, and then one with piercings and black eyeliner. A guy with black eyeliner. A rower. The blessèd, the cool, the meek. He and the guys exchanged complex handshakes. The girls all touched him—his shoulder, his arm, his filthy hair. As for the rest of us, we managed half a conversation, and then he said he had to go study. “Where do you hide?” I said.

  He grinned. He was much more cheerful, I had to admit, than he had sounded on the phone. He’d turned punchy. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he said.

  “Get some sleep,” I said.

  “Overrated.”

  He graduated summa in math. He was awarded a prestigious post-grad scholarship to England, but at the last minute he turned it down (and dumped a girlfriend of two months, who’d already bought her ticket to follow him). He said, “Math at this level is really just like conceptual art or something. It’s beautiful. It just doesn’t have any point.”

  “Beauty is its own point,” I said. “Very few people can do what you do. See what you see.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he went to Haiti.

  He was supposed to be handling an NGO’s computers but organization was loose, and he ended up teaching math to elementary-school kids, in a cinder-block school with no plumbing. He sent pictures of himself, very occasionally, tall and golden brown, his hair and seemingly his teeth bleached by the sun, surrounded by children, pressed around him as close as they could get.

  He lived in a cold-water apartment with three roommates and many more roaches. (Rather gleefully, he also se
nt me pictures of those.) He seemed to feel elementally comfortable in privation. Maybe it seemed to him to offer the possibility of purity, of a straight and radiant path. Anita called and asked what we should do. “Nothing,” I said.

  You would not believe this place god the shittiness but it is gorgeous it is paradice and people live with both those thinges, he wrote. there is way more bullshit sometimes litteraly (cows ha ha) but also less I don’t know if they need me here althogh I am working my ass off I probably need it more.

  He continued to fall in love constantly. His letters were riddled with girls’ names. I see someone on a bus. I see the back of someones neck. Or their crossed legs sitting down when a bus is crowded and you cant see what belongs to who, just peices of a person and I see some girls calfs something clicks. Thats it. There were Marie-Jacques and Toinette and Claudine, and Catherine, an American, and older women, other Americans cycling in and out of the country, whom he mentioned frequently without quite admitting anything.

  There were guys too. Its something to experience love is good right? I wrote back immediately that yes that was fine but he damn well better be taking precautions, all around. Im not stupidd jeez Charlie also on balance as they say I like women more so Calm down Charlie.

  He’d told me before that he promised nothing to a girl, or boy, ever. No point. Things here change to fast. I restrained myself from telling him he’d grow out of it. I imagined him facing one person, then another, with his clear, utterly honest eyes. Thats it. If he broke hearts, it was through no fault of his own. He never mentioned drama.

  I saw him once a year or so, when he came home to Atlanta, and I made myself go there to see him. I watched him with his high-school buddies, and when they talked about old times—drinking at Collier Park, stealing the Big Boy and putting it on the roof of the gym, Oh holy shit remember? remember?—he laughed as loudly as all the rest but I could see that he didn’t really remember, that he had no access to that self anymore, and that their wistfulness baffled him. They were all in real estate or banking or law, and that baffled him too.