Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  All the time they had been talking, she had ached to touch him, and now, at last, she thrilled to the feel of his long, slender fingers under hers. But she was timid, her caress was light, and almost instantly she took her hand away.

  At her touch Paul started, stifling a cry. Withdrawing, she paused in mid-air, and then laid her hand back over his. He covered her hand with his free hand so that it was sandwiched between both of his. She couldn't speak, flooded by the sensation of the two of them together, against the rest of the world. Her being surged; in a second she could be persuaded to give up everything if she could have him—flinging palette knives and brushes behind her, goodbye painting! She stared at his mouth; she couldn't help herself. As she raised her eyes to his, she saw him slowly shake his head. Releasing her hand, he declined to kiss her. She would not be asked to give up anything.

  She thought of how her impulse to abandon everything for him was part of a wish for a different life. It was an impulse far from reality—hers or his. The fact was, she sacrificed for art; she didn't sacrifice art. She could see herself living in poverty for the rest of her life before she'd give up painting. The reckless desire which had overcome her so suddenly would never be realized. The question instead was how to use this energy which she derived from Paul, which would otherwise be useless. It was this reality that he would leave her with.

  And it would be soon. Paul snapped his fingers. "I better be going. It's getting late, and I have things to do before tonight's performance."

  "Of course."

  Their movements, rising, jostled the table. The dishes slid, and the check, dislodged, was caught in a breeze that took it away, turning it over and over. They watched in surprise as the check was blown further and dropped, skidding over the fallen leaves, skimming the pavement.

  She looked at Paul, who reluctantly stepped out from behind the table. That was the only move he made to chase after the check, for just then it blew under a car parked at the curb.

  Paul shrugged, amused. "I guess that takes care of that."

  "You mean, just go?"

  He raised an eyebrow, gestured with his chin, and began to walk away from the café. Shrugging in reply, Althea followed him. He kept a straight face; his mouth just twitched once. She half expected their waitress to pursue them, but no one seemed to notice. Still, she felt embarrassed and disillusioned with Paul for having left the bill unpaid. However, she neither lectured him nor went back to settle the bill herself.

  Together they walked to the corner. Facing them, across the street, two storeys up on a building under repair, a large tarp billowed over the scaffolding like a sail, rattling loudly in the wind. There was a sheen on it. It seemed almost alive.

  Althea watched, transfixed. "Look at that. It's like a performance piece, happening before our eyes."

  "No kidding," said Paul, as if he thought she was. The wind blew harder. Fallen leaves danced at their feet, particles of dust irritated their eyes as they craned their necks. The tarp flapped wildly. It had been fastened loosely, and no workers were around. It lunged, slithering, and suddenly caught by the wind, it blew down and landed on the spot where they were standing.

  But they weren't caught in the deluge. They'd escaped automatically, in opposite directions. The curtain had fallen on the sidewalk between them, and this was their farewell. She recognized it, he seized it. "So long, Althea." He waved to her.

  She would have waited, still as a statue, until he disappeared, but he didn't want her to. "Go, Althea," he urged. She hesitated, hoping to see him as long as she could, but he repeated, "Go, go," and this time it was a command she couldn't disobey. "Bye, bye, I hope to see you," she called, as they parted, she heading uptown and he hurrying downtown.

  Chapter 17

  Bryce was surprised by his family's behavior following his uncle's death. First, there was the animosity shown him by his aunt Margaret. Afterwards, when he thought about her and her midnight accusation, he still felt furious, and he also felt fear and dread. Clearly, they'd both been overwrought, but in retrospect it seemed like something worse to him, as if they were secret adversaries, and neither could bear to bring their fight into the open. Thinking of this, his feeling was so strong that he wondered if it might not be hatred.

  Had his aunt resented him all along? he wondered. He had always assumed that she approved of Bill's and his special relationship. In fact, when he was a boy, he had felt freer in his uncle's house than in his father's. Although many years had passed, he had been welcomed eagerly on his return. Now, suddenly, his uncle's house had become off-limits to him. He was haunted by the memory of his aunt's voice accusing him of intending to take from it what was hers.

  His aunt's attitude was the first indication of the changed scenario that faced Bryce after Bill's death. He wanted to remember his uncle, to gather anecdotes, to reminisce. Estranged from Margaret, he sought out his parents. It seemed possible to him that they might find a closeness in a common regard for Bill. The day following the funeral, at his parents' habitual cocktail hour, he recalled aloud wandering but memorable conversations he'd enjoyed with his uncle, about all manner of things in the world.

  "It seemed to me when I was growing up," he said, "that Uncle Bill transmitted the wisdom of the ages, vast and ancient, but only in passing, in glittering bits that tantalized me. So many things I had never seen I knew from his descriptions: the tundra meadows of the Rockies—'like a skin on top of those mountains,' he used to say—and the maidenhair ferns on the floor of the Grand Canyon. Perhaps I'll never see all he saw, but the images he gave me have stayed with me."

  "He certainly had a way with words," said Mary, nodding. "Sometimes, frankly, he was beyond me. He was brilliant, I guess."

  Bryce felt a familiar annoyance at his mother's way of seeming to praise while actually dismissing. It seemed important to him to be accurate. "Perhaps you found him hard to follow because he was never didactic. To me he was a joy to listen to, because you could never tell where he might lead."

  "That's true. He never could keep to the subject," said Russell somewhat ponderously.

  Mary giggled. Bryce felt stung, as if he were the one being criticized. Still he continued, "When I was young, he symbolized adventure to me, and more. He knew so much about so many things. For example, about the Indians—I mean Native Americans," Bryce corrected himself. "I believed that no matter what I asked him, he'd have an answer, and I was never proved wrong."

  "After the divorce, before he married Margaret," said Russell, "he used to travel out West a lot. He'd drive around by himself. Not my idea of a vacation, but he enjoyed it. That's how he came to know so much about the Indians. He visited pueblos, ruins. You name it, he went to it."

  "He used to sleep in his car." Mary sounded aggrieved. "In campgrounds. Can you imagine? Margaret put a stop to that, and I don't blame her. She insisted on staying in motels when they travelled together. He certainly could afford to."

  That which made his mother indignant had always charmed Bryce. But then, he reflected, he was attracted to eccentricity, whereas his mother feared it. Now he defended his uncle. "But Uncle Bill really preferred his car camping. I remember his story of being somewhere in the Great Plains on a clear summer night. He let down the tailgate of the station wagon and lay down on it so that he was looking right up at the night sky. This is what he said to me, 'An incredible thrill, that bowl of stars all around you. Maybe there will be a chip in that bowl, where there's a big tree, but there are places out there where you can see the horizon all around you. It's a spectacular sight.'"

  Bryce paused, moved by the recollection. How he missed Bill! No one would ever talk like that to him again about such things. He wanted to remember all of it. "The dead live on in those who cherish their memory." These words from the funeral service intoned themselves in his mind. For a moment he was at the cemetery again, staring at the mist and the green grass and the hole in the earth lined with green felt where the coffin was being lowered. The image passed befor
e his parents responded to him, and he noticed the look of boredom on their faces. Then Russell began to speak of Bill's estate. He and Margaret were to meet with the lawyer the next day to read the will. His father was looking forward to it, Bryce could tell. Russell's interest was concentrated on his late brother's affairs. It's the way of the world, Bryce reflected, that the dead must always be dispossessed.

  He sensed that not only were his parents bored with his praise of Bill, they were resentful, as if the elevation of his uncle implied their own lack, simply by omission. Their attitude made him feel defeated. He wished to avoid drawing any kind of comparison, but they would insist on finding one anyway. He realized that he would never get the response he wanted from his parents in regard to Bill. They would never join him. From now on, I'll keep my effusions to myself, he decided. And perhaps it's true, he admitted, that deep down I'm more interested in listening to myself than in knowing what they think.

  It wasn't easy for Bryce to open up. This attempt, he concluded, has been a failure. He resented his parents for what he thought of as their small-mindedness. He realized that they had never loved Bill as he had. Apparently they mostly remembered the ways in which Bill had irritated them.

  It wasn't as if he and Bill had never clashed either. While, by Mississippi's standards, Bill considered himself a moderate, Bryce had found his views reactionary in the late sixties and the seventies when his own political attitudes were developing. By an unspoken agreement, however, they had mutually avoided inflammatory subjects. They had never spoken of Bryce's homosexuality, not before Bryce left the South, he thought, for good. Certainly this had driven a wedge between them, as with the rest of his family. But it didn't seem to matter anymore. If I ever resented Bill, Bryce thought, I readily forgave him in the weeks before he died.

  As the days passed, he dwelled on his loss, on thoughts of death. It seemed to him that death was ignominious, arbitrary, that how one died revealed nothing about how one had lived. Death is the great deceit, thought Bryce, and we who go on living are deceived the most, in our illusion that we have escaped. He considered how all those who had stood at Bill's graveside on that misted, muted day could not but think of themselves as having survived. It is the fact of death that creates survivors, Bryce reflected, and that makes eternal survival impossible.

  * * *

  On the day that Russell and Margaret were to meet with Bill's lawyer, Bryce came down to breakfast to discover that his father had shaved off the moustache he had worn for so long that Bryce couldn't remember what he looked like without it. He was shocked to discover that his father not only seemed younger, he actually looked like Bill, whereas before Bryce had seen only the difference.

  Russell was drinking his coffee with an air of nonchalance. He's waiting for me to comment, Bryce thought. He didn't want to disappoint his father. "My goodness, I almost didn't recognize you, Dad. What inspired this change?"

  Russell looked up to meet his son's dark eyes, a contact that both had often avoided. "Oh, I don't know. Just got tired of the moustache, I guess. What do you think?"

  "I'm getting used to you without it. It's amazing—for a moment I thought you were the ghost of Uncle Bill."

  "There was always a family resemblance," interjected Mary, as she approached the table with a plate of piping hot biscuits. "Here, y'all eat them up while they're fresh from the oven."

  "I never noticed it before," remarked Bryce, as he helped himself.

  "Nonsense," replied his mother. "It was obvious." She turned to her husband. "Don't you think so, Russell?"

  "It makes sense, doesn't it," said Russell, splitting open his biscuit and spreading butter on it in his slow, deliberate manner. "We were brothers, after all."

  Perhaps I've been unfair to my parents in assuming that they aren't grieving for Uncle Bill as I am, Bryce said to himself as his mother sat down, and the three of them began to eat. We all have our grief and our means of expressing it. To affect this sudden resemblance is my father's way, and it's my way to be struck by it, and my mother's way to insist that it existed all along. All the same, I wouldn't trade my grief for theirs. Grief, he reflected, is love which can no longer be reciprocated, and perhaps it is just as jealous as love is.

  Indeed, he couldn't help feeling slighted because his father hadn't invited him to hear the reading of the will at the lawyer's office. Mindful of the risk of being accused of too greedy a self-interest, he couldn't bring himself to ask his father to include him. After all, Mary wasn't going, nor was his sister Peggy; and, when he considered it, he wasn't sure he was ready to face his aunt again at so significant a meeting.

  He accepted the situation without comment, yet he would have preferred it had his father consulted him and sought him out as an equal whose opinions were valued. He's forgotten that I'm an attorney, too, Bryce realized, and is only thinking of me as his son, who need not be involved except to be informed. I guess he doesn't need my expertise, nor want it.

  "The bulk of the estate goes to Margaret since they had no children," Russell announced to his wife and son when he returned that afternoon, "and it ought to be enough to let her live free from worry. But Bill didn't forget us either. He left me the entirety of his interest in the Sawyer property that we held jointly. That's the strip shopping center that was developed about fifteen years ago. It's worth quite a bit now. Son, he left you his utilities stocks. And Mary, he left you and Peggy and the girls some maturing government bonds. He also made a number of charitable bequests, some to groups I never heard of, Indian organizations, I guess, out West. He was a well-to-do man, my brother was."

  "Your share amounts to over a hundred thousand dollars," Russell told Bryce later that evening, when they found themselves alone together. "The stocks have doubled in value in the past three or four years. I didn't want to make a big deal of it in front of your mother. Her bonds are worth much, much less, and you know how she's apt to get her feelings hurt. No reason why she should, really. After all, she'll share in the property with me, and Bill knew it. All the same, I don't want to look for trouble. I guess Bill thought a lot of you."

  "I'm grateful," Bryce said simply. "I thought a lot of him, too." At last my father's confiding in me, he thought. "What did Margaret say about all this?"

  Russell shrugged. "Nothing really. The lawyer did all the talking."

  "What about the Indian pottery and all the curios and souvenirs from his travels?" Bryce, normally so circumspect, dared to ask.

  "The house and all its contents are Margaret's. But I'm sure she'd give you a keepsake if you asked."

  Bryce wasn't at all sure, but he didn't want to say this to his father. One hundred thousand dollars! He hadn't expected so much. The impulse to calculate love in terms of money was hard to resist. "How much was the property worth that he left you?"

  "Two or three hundred grand. That was a good investment. We bought the property for fifty thousand dollars twenty years ago, and its value has increased tenfold. I'm thinking of selling off a parcel to help me buy a little vacation home down in Florida, like I've always wanted. Do a little fishing, relax." He smiled, pausing, as if waiting for Bryce's approval—a new sensation for Bryce, for his father had never seemed to want it before.

  "Why not?" said Bryce. "You deserve it."

  He was feeling more lenient and forgiving towards his parents. He sensed a truce between himself and them, while he lived with them as their long-lost son. He had succeeded in curbing his formerly scathing comments. In their eyes he led a blameless life. Even the symptoms of his disease seemed to have blessedly disappeared. As he entered the house one afternoon, he overheard his mother confiding to her weekly bridge club that her son was becoming reasonable at last.

  The comment annoyed him, but he was able to shrug it off. He could now see that his parents had been afraid of him when he was growing up because they hadn't understood him. He hadn't suspected that then; in fact, he'd felt beleaguered, which had caused him to be even more critical and unsparing. Wh
en he had developed multiple sclerosis, he'd had to endure his parents' pity, and then, when they realized that he was homosexual, their shame. His parents were happiest, he decided, when they could overlook these truths about him. In the past he had felt betrayed by their attitude.

  At twenty his defiance had been his defense. "You disagree just to disagree": how often he had heard this complaint levelled at him, and felt he was being belittled, his opinion dismissed and reduced to a reflex of antipathy. His unregenerate airs hadn't made him popular in Meridian. He had escaped to New York, where he hadn't foundered as his critics had predicted. He hadn't set the world on fire either, but then it had never been predicted that he would win glory.

  When he was growing up, he had seen his father frequently shake his head over so unstraightforward a son. In return, he had seemed to become more convoluted, mysterious and mazelike even to himself. This was a normal course of adolescence, and most of his peers had experienced it, too, but they, unlike Bryce, had turned into adults who had made a clean breast of things and only looked back in deprecation. Yet for Bryce it had seemed that the abnormal came from within him to claim him forever.

  Years had passed since then, and whatever he was he had become without his parents' approval. He still felt frustrated by their lack of interest in his life, but he now realized that their apparent incuriosity masked a profound fear, an intense desire not to know. The lesson of his past was the uselessness of confronting them. The relationship with his uncle had been happy not only because they had succeeded in avoiding most areas of conflict, but because they had taken delight together in so many things. With his parents, on the other hand, there had been failed expectations on both sides, criticism, and mutual disappointment. It seemed to him that his uncle's greatest immaterial bequest was his example of tolerance. Bryce believed, although his mother certainly would have denied it, that his parents in some dim way understood this, and, however fragilely, were trying to internalize it. His aunt was a different case altogether, but for the moment he couldn't bear to think of her. For whatever reason, his parents weren't being as critical of him as formerly, so that he in turn didn't feel so defensive or aggressive. When he had first arrived in Mississippi, he had been better able to endure their attitude of indifference precisely because he had a life away from them. But that life had seemed to slip from him so quickly, in the phone calls and letter that went unanswered. He had been afraid then, and so he had procrastinated. The sense of being needed by his uncle had made it easy for him, during this season of death, to put his life on hold.