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.
What I thought I might have learned from Desmond, what I would take and keep for myself out of all this was this: by avoiding the normal paths of love there is an effective way to scale its stranger heights and emerge into a world where mere union may be the least of love’s delights. But, of course, any celebrant of the flame knows that even the simplest of rituals are best performed with eyes closed, such as during a prayer, or at least under the blanket of sightless stars. Dark hours are the holy hours. In the dark blindness does become a virtue, and the heart can provide a tempo by which the flesh’s music may be played. Like the Sufi poet Rami, I would sooner consume flame-shaped garlic, though, than any of your manna or celestial meat, or ground walnut mixed with spirits of wine, which Foucault suggests will ease a headache, and which goes to show how little he knew about such matters.
I pulled the curtains shut, went back to bed, and for the first time in my life pretended to have a migraine. Djuna offered to read to me, but I was too old for such things anymore.
Berg showed me the footage. Everything was shrouded in gray. The sparks looked like a white flower. The imagejostled because Berg had moved closer and closer to where Segredo had been welding. I was surprised how close he’d dared to get. Indeed, toward the end of that first part of the footage, it appeared that the shower of white was coming down directly on the viewer.
Then, the screen was black for a moment—you could see that there was something Berg had tried to shoot, but in the dark it had been underexposed—and afterward it was gray, and we were peering in a window, someone was moving around in the room, Segredo, and he was naked! I recognized the room, then. It was the same room I had been in, and though the camera was occasionally jiggled, so that the image blurred, I could see her there on the bed, still lying there, but awake. Segredo was talking. Since there was no sound he looked a bit silly, his mouth moving. He was pacing.
He went over to the bed and sat down, and I could see her put her arms around his waist and move her head over so it was in his lap. He was looking down at her, my mother, and even though the film was grainy, and jostling, and dark, I could see that the look on his face was one of contorted mirth. Maybe he was just happy, but to me this all seemed evil.
I didn’t want to see any more of the film. I think that Berg called me a big baby. I didn’t care, I went outside, and down to the osprey nest. Like most frustrated dreamers, I wished I could fly.
I began to live a back-and-forth life, after Berg was sent away to a private school. It was inevitable that we would eventually get caught, because Berg’s boldness seemed to grow by exponential degrees with every fresh adventure. Faw promoted his interest in cameras and projectors, and took him several times a year along on business trips. Canisters of eight-millimeter black and white stock began topile up on the shelves in his bedroom at Scrub Farm, and indeed his whole room had been converted into a warehouse for tripods, lights, old still cameras he got from who knew where, a burgeoning closet of costumes, drawers of cheap jewelry and other paraphernalia. More than once I’d been coerced to play not just the lead but different minor characters in one of his silents. I’d worn a bear suit that stank of mothballs and urine and chased an old woman—I also played the old woman, with wig and overcoat—and never caught her because, of course, both figures could never be in the same frame at once. I had rowed into the waves like an Inuit princess, I’d run through the orchard as the harvest moon rose, a sheet over my head and my arms powdered white with flour, as part of his great Gothic romance, the most ambitious of all his precocious efforts, and the one about which he had sworn me into solemn confidence because of certain scenes he had in mind for me to play that would involve my doing “grown-up things.”
I probably would have been able to do those grown-up things, and with less fear than he might have presumed I would show, had Faw not shown up unexpected one night to find him down in the library, looking at those skin films he was supposed to know nothing about. I’ve never seen Faw more angry. Even when he had come down the stairs after having read the note Mother left, there wasn’t such a stridency about him, nor such a sense of betrayal of trust. I know now why Faw erupted with such unwonted violence, and my knowing why is part of the reason I am obliged to set all this out straight for myself, for all of us really—but then, that day, when Faw shouted, “That’s it, I’ve had enough of you, I’ve done everything I can do with you,” I was crying confused tears.
“We’re all going down into the same hole, marines,” Berg said, “it’s just the matter of when,” and then stood there, stoic criminal that he was, and stared hard at me with his mouth cramped shut. Don’t admit to anything, was what his eyes were warning me, echoing “Don’t complain,don’t explain.” And when Faw asked me if I knew anything about what Berg was doing, I lied. This may have been the only time I lied to him. But just as the truth seems to be the only way to save all three of us now, a lie seemed the only way to save us then. Faw didn’t want to hear me tell him I had been as involved with Berg’s escapades as much as I had. Berg didn’t want him to know, either.
After my brother departed for the academy up in wester
n Massachusetts, I found myself alone. I lacked whatever mad energy is required to carry on Berglike adventures on my own, and his camera equipment, most of which he was forced to leave behind at Scrub Farm, I didn’t know how to work. He agreed to write me letters from up there, but after I had sent three or four and never got any back, I gave up on him, and withdrew into my usual pastimes until Faw told me, one Sunday soon after, he had decided that it would be best for me to move back in with him in New York. The schools were better there, and we could have more time together that way, he said.
We journeyed this time not in a borrowed and beat-up truck, but on board a sailboat. This mode of transportation might have been as eccentric as that pickup had been, and even less practical—it took us all day, tacking back and forth in the gusty slate waters of the sound—but watching him, one hand on the rudder, one controlling the mast, made me realize once more what a figure of solid centrality my father was in my life. As invisible, most of the time, as the wind that plowed into the sail canvas, he was a powerful force, one I couldn’t help but respect.
Faw’s new place in the city was grander by far than what we as a family left in 1964. The decade had worked to his advantage, clearly, in all sorts of ways. We were up higher than any tree could grow, so the chances that the flare man—who by now seemed quite a remote phenomenon—would return were few. (Indeed, that he seemed to me a phenomenon rather than a being, a man of light, was proof of how far away I’d grown from my early, almost supernatural experiences. Try as I might, and sometimes I had tried, out at Scrub Farm, to will the flare man back, to conjure any of the light people, I failed. As much as they had terrified me, and as linked as they had been to the megrims, I felt a profound disappointment at my inability to attract them. The Greeks knew of tree-spirits—every tree had its own little resident deity—which were to be feared and worshiped, their boughs were the subject of adoration and beneath them there was orgiastic dancing and ritual sacrifices were made, so I knew that whatever I’d tapped into had some justification, however deep or unconscious it might have been. No Minoan, no Samantha or genie, however, I had become a helpless apostate. I closed my eyes, I opened them. Nothing. There was a clear sense, first, of abandonment, just as I had felt abandoned by the family. Second, as I got older, I began to realize that they hadn’t forsaken me as such—it was I who had lost my powers, I, who was emerging as an adult, who lacked the child’s freedom to create these visions.) I looked down from the twentieth floor, and saw the trees as meaningless brown and reddish blurs in the park and nothing more. An occasional migraine might come over me, like a squall cloud, running over the sea very low, hitting the island with a hot shower, the rain popping in dirt roads and making instant puddles and rivulets everywhere, and then blowing away just as quickly; and it would be oppressive and keep me indoors just like a squall does. The aura, the icicle hair, every portentous, foolhardy, mysterious consequence of the megrim seemed to be lost. And, yes, I was sorry these were lost, given that even in their most extreme manifestations, of which I must admit Desmond as lover might have been the most extreme, they were often the reward for the pain part.
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