Short Century

by David Burr Gerrard

  The summer that my mother was pregnant with Emily, when I was four, I spent many afternoons in the bleachers at Paul’s baseball games, held aloft by my mother and doing my best to avoid putting my feet on her pregnant stomach, resulting in a lot of swinging of my feet. Paul was so large and so intimidating that the twelve-year-old outfielders always toddled back awkwardly when he stepped up to the plate. Sometimes he would turn back and smile at the observers, who ate it up. Sometimes he would point at me and wave, and the crowd ate that up, too, the baseball prodigy treating his baby brother so solicitously. But there was no love of my big brother in me, at least not then, and all I felt was a hatred too big for my body. I didn’t want to see him bat, so I would wail and try to wriggle free, but my mother would not have it; for the most part she was the most passive and confused person I have ever met, but to hold me up was a clear directive, and the more I tried to get out of her grasp and reach for a seat on the bench, the more holding me up made her feel like a firm, serious parent doing her motherly duty. So whether I wanted to or not I watched Paul. I was delighted when Emily was born and my mother had to hold her, leaving me to sit beside the two of them in the stands, staring either straight ahead, at sat-on suitcoats, or up at pink, squished-face Emily and her tiny, flickering hands.

  As Emily grew bigger, Paul kept shoving apple cores down my throat. He also started discarding fruit on the floor, leaving it for my mother or our maid to pick up. (I do not remember any maid clearly, since, at least compared to our friends, we had a high turnover rate.) I recall a crawling Emily putting her hand on a damp pear and dissolving into tears. Our mother told Paul and me “not to play rough while Emily is around,” but that hardly stopped Paul; in fact, he seemed to relish an uncertainly mobile audience member. The apartment always smelled of terrible juices from discarded fruit.

  Apart from some embarrassment that my humiliation now had a witness, I didn’t notice Emily very much when she was very small, as I was much too distracted by my hatred of Paul. One of the few things that I believed myself to have over him was my ability to sleep late, as my father awakened him for baseball at five in the morning. Very often I would make myself get out of bed just so that I could barge into the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth and taunt him that I could go back to bed, after which I would run back to my room and try to lock the door before he could reach me. More often than not he would outrun me and slam me headfirst into my bedroom door before dribbling some toothpaste on the top of my head. Whatever the outcome, I enjoyed these games. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of fighting back. This would generally wake Emily up, but I didn’t care.

  It was when Emily was three or so that I figured out that, for whatever reason, she preferred me to Paul. She grew obsessed with an illustrated storybook called The Princess of REDACTED, which recounted the (obviously racist, in retrospect) tale of a young European princess who has been kidnapped by a Moor and taken back to the kingdom of REDACTED, and who through various plot machinations involving a kindhearted maid, an evil Mohammadan Priest, and a brave Prince Valiant lookalike disguised as a merchant, is rescued from her bondage. Sometimes Paul picked up the book to read it to her, but she would snatch it away and say: “Arthur read!” This left Paul confused and frustrated, and of course anything that frustrated Paul delighted me. Even when he wasn’t around, she begged me to read this book to her, over and over again, and when I got fed up with reading, she would relieve me of the book and then pretend to read it, reciting the story as best as she could remember, or just making up a new story entirely.

  Occasionally she would stray from the book and devise plotlines of her own, which she would then enlist me in acting out. She usually played the role of a beautiful princess from an evil kingdom, and I would play her brother, whose main role was usually to tell her that she had been abducted as a baby, and that she was actually a princess from the good kingdom. Then I would play the prince from the good kingdom, whose job it was to marry her. Sometimes I said that that didn’t make any sense, since if she was actually a princess from the good kingdom and I was a prince from the good kingdom, then we were brother and sister and couldn’t get married. She told me that that was stupid, and then we would continue playing with the dolls. There were other times when I would play the evil prince, the oldest one—whom she, to my amusement, called “Bastard.” But she would always come back to The Princess of REDACTED. She said that the princess was stupid for not wanting to stay in REDACTED, because REDACTED was the most beautiful kingdom in the world. Even more than the story itself, she loved to look at the pictures, the drawings of REDACTED Palace, which seemed to extend for many, many acres. “Let’s move to REDACTED!” she said. “I will be the princess and you will be the prince.”

  A young graduate student I dated very briefly in the nineties—one of the few people to whom I have even mentioned that I had a sister—told me that this book was racist, and the fact that my sister loved it so much proved she was racist as well. I dumped her on the spot. She got her revenge a few weeks later, when she emailed to say that she had discovered that not only did my sister like an arguably racist book (although it really was obviously racist, I knew that even if I couldn’t admit it to the graduate student), but my grandfather had written an inarguably racist book. This is, unfortunately, true. Arthur Huntington II was a devotee of the infamous early-twentieth-century eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and sometime in the late 1920s my grandfather wrote a book called The Color of Our Destruction, published by a small imprint that was either a vanity press or an imprint dedicated to racist publications. My grandfather’s suicide note also included a lot of bile about the destruction of the white race; he wanted to “get off the earth before the colored races take it over.” The book, the suicide note, and my grandfather all have one thing in common: they all have nothing to do with me. To hold me accountable for my grandfather’s actions is fairly explicitly anti-American.

  As Emily got a little older she started telling Paul that he was mean and that she didn’t like him, and every time she did so he looked stricken. I took to encouraging her, though she didn’t need much encouragement. Every time she learned a bad word, she used it against him. Once, Paul came home with a bag full of Emily’s favorite candy bars. He said, “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas,” even though it was nowhere near Christmas. She jumped up and down as she unwrapped a candy bar, which she then very theatrically dropped, saying, “I don’t want candy from a jerk,” as she stomped it into the carpet. Then she ran into her room, and instead of chasing her, Paul grabbed me by the back of the neck and pushed me into the sofa.

  “Ha ha ha, she doesn’t like you.” I did my best to taunt him while he held me down long enough to grab an apple from the bowl on the glass coffee table, eat the apple, and shove the core into my mouth. Before he let me go, he beat me hard in the back and the chest.

  Eventually Emily started mocking Paul by taking a piece of fruit out of the fruit bowl, taking a bite of it, and then dropping it. Sometimes she pretended an apple was too hot to hold; other times she pretended that she was incompetently juggling one pear. Whenever she did this, I was sure to receive a beating later in the day, but I never told her about these particular beatings, partially because I didn’t want her to feel guilty but mostly because I didn’t want her to stop making fun of Paul.

  My father, having decided that Paul’s treatment was my just punishment for being who I was, mostly ignored us whenever he would pass. I learned to imitate the thud and sweep of his crutches the way other boys imitate fart noises. Emily did not like it when I kicked fruit into our father’s path, and though she would have sooner died than tell on me, she did try on a number of occasions to kick the fruit in a different direction so that it wound up becoming like a soccer game. When our father did get knocked down, he would never let us help him up.

  Noble but absurd, absurd but noble, mostly absurd, mostly noble; my thoughts on my father and his crutches have sh
ifted probably tens of thousands of times over sixty years. My mother I did not see much of—she was usually in her room drinking or reading the romance novels that she consumed at the rate of one or sometimes two per day, thus leaving our apartment lined with several thousand drugstore-grade romance novels that shared space with the Latin copies of Virgil and Tacitus that my father had ostensibly read in prep school.

  Emily spent a lot of time following me around, asking me what I thought about whatever she happened to be thinking about, gazing at me with the extremely large blue eyes that made her look like a bug (“Ladybug” was her hated childhood nickname, used by everyone in the family except for me). I helped her dance, after a fashion. We watched movies together; we shared a fondness for the 1930s and 1940s comedies, musicals, and gangster films that played on the Late Show and the Late Late Show. When there was a movie playing at three in the morning that we both wanted to see, we would set the alarm and watch Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire, and then go back to bed just as Paul was waking up. I was always amazed by Emily’s intelligence and her lightness of heart. It was impossible to see her in the glow of the television and not think that one day she was going to be a movie star, or a famous writer, or something else wondrous.

  Actually, Emily was talking about becoming a writer when Paul almost went too far. Paul had sat down to watch television with us, and Emily said that when she grew up she was going to write a book called “Stupid Paul.” For whatever reason, this silly child’s insult set Paul off, and he grabbed her by the shoulder and raised his hand to hit her. I leaped in between them and grabbed Paul’s fist. I told her that if he ever hit her, I would kill him. To my surprise he backed off and Emily hugged me and thanked me, and I felt immensely proud of myself for having scared him off, though in fact I think that he scared himself off.

  After that, Paul started leaving us alone. I want to say that this was the result of my having stood up to him, but it’s just as likely that he left us alone because he started having girls over, and he seemed to understand that girls wanted to see him treat his two younger siblings well. Emily would sometimes tell these girls that Paul was “mean”—she told one, using a word that was truly shocking coming from a little girl in the late nineteen-fifties, that he was “an asshole”—but the girls tended to think that Paul was a saintly older brother beset with a bratty little sister, and they rewarded him for this saintliness in the only way that saints want to be rewarded: with copious sex. Given the mores of the time the sex was probably mostly limited to handjobs, but there was no telling what those girls were sighing about behind Paul’s locked door. If it had occasionally occurred to me previously that I wanted to be Paul—as, after all, it probably had—the thought was there constantly now. If Paul was what girls wanted, then I wanted to be Paul.

  Of course I also hated myself for wanting to be like him.

  At Yale, he was very much a baseball star; in addition to being an astonishing hitter, he had become an astonishing outfielder, and he had plucked so many would-be-homerun balls out of their natural destiny that he had acquired the nickname of “The Interventionist.” He looked destined for a brilliant career in the major leagues.

  On my thirteenth birthday, he came to my room and told me, with a broad just-us-gentlemen smile, that he was sorry for treating me as he had, and that he hoped we could be friends. I told him that I would hate him until one of us died. This did not result in the beating I had steeled myself for; he just continued to smile, said he hoped I would change my mind, and left my room.

  I had never really thought of my room as my room until I asked Paul to leave it. Since he had left for college I had mostly felt indignant that I had to stay in my smaller room while he kept the bigger one, even though he was in New Haven most of the time. But now I thought: this is my room. My next thought was that I should shut my door to Emily. I was starting to get a little irritated by my little sister. She was only nine and was not going to understand The Stranger, and though I didn’t really understand it either, I longed to be left alone long enough to try. She was constantly coming in to tell me about something that had happened with her friends, or some new plotline she had made up for her dolls. It might be fair to say that I was outgrowing her.

  Then Paul took a turn. In the spring of his senior year at Yale, he announced that he was not going to pursue the career in baseball that a few teams were trying to tempt him toward, and that he was instead going to become a soldier. My father was not quite delighted—I think he had gotten used to the idea of cheering as his son stopped a home run—but nothing could shake my father’s faith that a soldier was a fine thing for a young man to be. I on the other hand couldn’t have been happier; I was going to be claiming the big bedroom while my brother shared a bunk bed.

  The first truly disturbing incident came in April. He had gotten into a fight with another boy at a bar, and apparently had somehow broken the kid’s left arm. The victim’s family wanted Paul expelled without a diploma, and since they were more or less exactly as wealthy as we were, my father was truly worried for a while, and his crutches thudded with less alacrity. But he used whatever magic he possessed to turn Paul into a Yale graduate.

  Expected to enlist shortly after graduation, Paul decided instead to take the summer off. This seemed completely reasonable, and for the first summer in several he came to Southampton with us. (Emily and I would spend summers in Southampton while my father stayed in Manhattan. Save for the summer before my sophomore year in college, which I spent in Italy, this continued every summer until the summer eight years later that I’ll get to sooner than I’d like.) I worried that he would quickly revert to attempting to beat me, and I had even started going to the gym that spring to be able to fight, but I was still a small fourteen, so I knew I wouldn’t have much chance. To my surprise, he more or less completely left me alone, instead spending most of his time sitting on the beach outside our house. Once, he grabbed me by the back of the neck and I thought, Here we go, but he just turned me around and draped me in his muscular arm and, his face deformed by weeping, he said: “Why can’t I feel good, Artie? Huh?” This bothered me so much that I ran away as though I were four rather than fourteen. He didn’t chase me, and when I got home, he was gone. He didn’t come home that night, and then he didn’t come home the next night, and my mother started getting worried.

  “He probably went somewhere to be an asshole,” was Emily’s guess. My mother scolded her and then tucked herself back into a romance novel.

  Paul returned the next afternoon without any explanation and without seeming to have showered or shaved or slept in the interim, but he did all three, and then things were fine for another couple of weeks.

  And then the attack finally came. Emily and I had gotten into a fight, because she wanted me to walk her to the movie theater and I told her I just wanted to read; Emily and I essentially had no one else to talk to in Southampton, so the atmosphere could become stifling and the air could get a little thick with Little Girl. But any time Emily was mad at me, I felt terrible and felt like I should apologize. The upshot was that I had difficulty concentrating on what I was reading. Paul had gone out, and returned with a bag of apples (we had stopped keeping fruit around after he discontinued his regimen). As soon as I saw the bag in his hand I started to run. He dropped the bag of apples, letting them roll down the vast tiles. He grabbed me before I could open the glass door, but I could see Emily walking on the beach as he dragged me back to the sofa and pushed me down, face-first. With one hand, he bent my arm and I couldn’t escape. With his free hand he picked an apple up off the floor and ate it noisily, though I couldn’t see it, and in fact couldn’t see anything because he was pushing my nose into the sofa. Finally he turned me around and shoved the apple core down my throat, so far that I felt certain I was going to vomit, and I started to wonder whether he was actually going to kill me. He punched me three times in the gut, and I was absolutely certain that I was going to vomit, but
somehow I did not. Finally he took the apple core out of my mouth and I said “Paul is King!” before he had even asked me to, though I was crying too hard and was too close to vomiting to say it distinctly.

  He left me alone and I lay on the Persian rug sobbing, hating myself. I was not thinking much of anything until I heard Emily screaming.

  I ran across the broad white-tiled living room, and finally out the door. All I could see were two blond creatures wrestling in the blond sand, but immediately I knew that I had to save Emily.

  She was facedown in the sand and he was straddling her back; with one hand he was pushing her head down into the sand and with the other he was pummeling her back. They were at the tidemark, and as I ran toward them the ocean water washed up to Emily’s nose and receded. Fear and anger battled in my heart and left me numb and strong. I leapt onto Paul’s back and bit into his ear and there was soft-hard flesh between my teeth. He screamed, and with a push I knocked us both off of Emily. He picked up a rock and brought it down quickly and heavily on my knee. The pain was excruciating, though not as excruciating as the pain that came as he brought down the rock several more times, cracking and bloodying my leg. Then he raised the rock above my head, and if I were to live for a thousand years I doubt I would forget watching his eyes as he pondered the question of whether to kill me. He must have decided in my favor, because he finally dropped the rock and continued down the beach. Emily, her forehead bloody, ran into the house to call for help and fetch some bandages. I was not going to take my eyes off Paul in case he doubled back, but he just kept walking under the clouds like a young man off to meet a great destiny.