Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  When he scooted upstairs, Mona and I drifted in to sit by the fire, as the rain threw itself in curtains at the west windows. Sotto voce,

  Mona told me all the machinations of her three-way contact with Gray and Kathleen. It was Gray apparently who pushed the nun disguise, having heard the intractable squalling in the night from Cora's room. Kathleen, it turned out, had jumped at the chance, a bit of a drag queen herself.

  I lay with my head in Mona's lap, letting her stroke my hair, delighted to think what a crackerjack team we all made. The waiting drew out to an hour, Kathleen upstairs with Susan and Brian, but we didn't mind. Even as I dozed I waxed sentimental, Mona patting me like a big sister. There were never enough times like this. Mostly we ran in and out of the storm, a hasty kiss in passing. But this was all I ever wanted, a lover in my pocket and a best buddy like Mona, so attuned she could finish my sentences for me. A man could get to be very greedy, shooting the dice for time to savor it all.

  When Kathleen came down I sat up, the two of us blinking at her expectantly, but not breathing a word. We let her stroll to the hearth and warm her hands, looking contemplatively into the flames. I was so used to her as a nun now, I could hardly recall the dyke in flannel. As she turned to us her eyes swept admiringly over the fireplace stones, the tiger's-eye paneling, the wrought-iron sconces. Then she looked at us with a deep shrug. "It's up to the two of them now."

  "Did you get them talking?" Mona asked.

  Sister tilted her veiled head and held up her finger and thumb a half inch apart. "A little," she said wryly. "I left them praying. They're good Catholics."

  But here I couldn't tell if she was being ironic or not. I blurted out: "Are you?"

  She laughed lightly, a teacher the student thinks he has stumped. "No, dear. I thought I made myself abundantly clear. I believe in Miss Jesus."

  "What about God?" And why did I sound so earnest?

  "Oh." She rolled her eyes and frowned, as if this was more than she signed on for. "I let God take care of the universe," she said, waving a vague hand at the rain outside, but more dismissive than anything. She couldn't be bothered with the universe. "Me, I stick to taking care of battered women. God has not dropped by lately, unless I was out for coffee." In that moment, the depth of her own estrangement from the church seemed bottomless.

  Yet her ebullient good humor remained somehow intact. "However," she declared vigorously, holding up a triumphant forefinger, "I think I can get her into a group in Minneapolis. Run by some Catholic Workers. Pretty radical types if you're coming from horsey Connecticut, but I think she can handle the stretch."

  "Wait," I protested, scrambling to keep up, "isn't there some way to keep them all together?"

  She shrugged again: up to them. But I saw where her sympathies leaned, to let them split, if only because her own skills lay in the healing of women alone. Still, she pushed no agenda, separatist or otherwise. She was simply here among us, nursing the feelings along, without any judgment call. That was perhaps the least Catholic thing about her—no moral high ground.

  "He talked about you and your father," she said, her voice quickening now in my defense. Correction: she had no problem judging the violence in men. "Sounds pretty awful."

  I neither spoke nor nodded, nothing being required. As Mona laid a quiet hand between my shoulders, I looked into the fire, feeling a small triumph of vindication, just having somebody else know. It also gave me secret pleasure that my brother had been teller of the tale. I had a moment's fix on my father's face, puffed and surly, that endless snarl of racist poison, his all-consuming hatred of everything not Irish working-class. Did I hate him anymore? It didn't compute. I'd sowed his grave so long with salt, a sort of perpetual curse that went on without me, like the Masses of Remembrance my mother used to pay up for thousands of years, mail order from the Trappists.

  "I'd better go see Daniel," said Kathleen, "before he thinks I forgot him. I swear, I feel like a waitress in this outfit." She pulled at the hips of the shapeless blue dress. "When they went polyester, that was the last straw."

  "He keeps it all buried," I said.

  "They all do," she replied automatically. "But I'll tell you one good thing. I used to teach second and third grade. So I know exactly where he is in long division." Actually rubbing her hands together, as if she was getting the chalk off. She tossed her head with spirit, balking at the veil, and moved to the stairs again.

  "Kathleen—thank you—"

  "Oh, don't even try," she retorted, striking a languid pose across the banister, gazing heavenward. "It is my mission, after all. And besides—" She grinned down at me slyly. "I've already got it figured how you return the favor. A small command performance for my girls."

  "It'll be easy," said Mona, the pat on my shoulder suddenly getting awfully chummy.

  "My drop-in group," explained Kathleen, "except I call it the dropped-on. I'm always trying to teach them how to be angry. You're the perfect thing."

  With that she floated off to her next consultation, knowing she had me trapped, tit for tat. Mona sat there like a mouse, figuring I might blow a piston. But I couldn't have been more equanimous, trusting Sister's instincts. I already had the gig figured as a sort of USO show, like Mona's beloved Miss Dietrich performing for the combat troops. "We'll do it some Monday night," I said, because AGORA was dark Mondays.

  Mona nodded, in a slight daze to find me so amenable. "You really are in love," she remarked, as if I'd had a conversion.

  But I was somewhere else. "Just when you guys arrived, Brian was standing there naked."

  "Please—don't think we didn't get a good look."

  "I realized something today. I spent fifteen years trying to find that exact body and drag it into my bed." I happened to be looking at the jigsaw David, spread out before us on the coffee table, but the full-blown Brian flooded my mind, more real than the men I groped to recall. "Teddy Burr, for one. Those same big shoulders and flame-red hair. It didn't even matter that we lived on different planets. He did every drug he could get his hands on, and screamed at me and had tantrums. But for a little while there, it was like fucking Brian."

  I shook my head in wonder, touched by a finger of self-disgust like ice along my spine. "Welcome to my dysfunction."

  Mona laughed ruefully. "But he is beautiful," she insisted. "Who could blame you for mixing that up with love? Hey listen, Daphne's my cousin Amy, right down to the nipples."

  I sighed. "It takes so long."

  Mona sighed even bigger. It sounded like a contest. "At least you found someone."

  "Perilously close to the finish line."

  She didn't try to answer. We stayed curled up for another long time, waiting to see who would come down next. When the footfalls came, I recognized Brian's step. Without a signal Mona was up and hurrying toward the kitchen, as if she had something burning in the oven. As I turned to smile at my brother I was surprised to see the windows already dusky, throwing back the firelight. The days just flew and vanished, I thought, with an ache that wanted to hold them still, all my double family, letting nobody leave. Brian came to stand behind the sofa, wearing a sweater from Cora's closet, something old of Gray's. I could smell the camphor. I couldn't read his face.

  After a moment of fire watching, he said, "Thanks for calling Sister Kathleen. We're so far from..."He left it unfinished, but I could see the sturdy Gothic spire, the monsignor in his picture hat, the long slope of graves behind Saint Augustine's, the Fordham brothers cheering. God, in a word.

  "She sees a lot of families," I observed, not wanting to blow Kathleen's cover, unsure how much she'd revealed.

  "They'll leave Monday for Minneapolis," Brian announced calmly, and I felt a stab of failure sharper than anything I could remember. Not Kathleen's fault, though I'd hoped she'd turn it around; and surely not mine. But there was a flaw we shared as a family, all the way back to my dad's old man in the wheelchair, drooling like a bulldog—a lack of faith that anything would ever come out right. The onl
y hope, the only unqualified triumph, was Brian on the ballfield. And that was packed in mothballs long ago, jittery and flickering as the old eight-millimeter strips of film, recording shutouts and touchdowns. Otherwise we were a clan of losers.

  "Will she let you see him?"

  "Sure, but I won't." His voice was tough as a staff sergeant's. "Not for a couple years anyway. I want them to get settled up there like I never existed. Or else they're always gonna be running from my name." All thought through, completely unemotional. I could even tell his strength was coming from acting strong. "Fuck, if I survive two years out there," he said, gesturing with a vague hand at the storm outside, where he'd howled like Lear. "Hey, who knows? Maybe we'll live happily ever after."

  For the first time I picked up the frisson of excitement as he contemplated being on his own, out there. Nothing could convince him he wasn't a marked man. Yet there was a perverse relish about the cat-and-mouse, dodging the hit squad he'd unleashed, dispatched by the bad characters he'd been in bed with. Who knew, maybe he was right. In my mind he was already running, hand to mouth and off on the next train. But what struck me just now was how much he wanted to earn his family back. Somehow, being a wandering nobody was a sort of quest to come home.

  "Whatever I can do," I offered, feeling less than useless. "I'm in love with your kid. He's the best."

  "I'm sure you know the feeling's mutual."

  Well, yes. "Will you leave right after they do?"

  "Couple days."

  He was standing directly behind me now, one hand resting lightly on the back of the sofa. As I lolled my head to the side his hand was magnified, grizzled with red hair and coursed by rippling veins, massive as the warrior on the table before me. I leaned toward him and touched his wrist with my forehead, rubbing against him gently. For a moment he didn't move, accepting the contact shyly. Then, returning the intimacy, he shifted his hand and rested it lightly on my head, sheltering me.

  I was overcome with feeling, to think we had tamed together the brother who used to hurt me so indifferently. I had no illusion about what lay ahead. We both still had miles to go, out there in remorseless weather—but no longer reeling under one another's baggage. Brian and I were home free.

  "We should talk about us some time," he said, "before I go."

  "You mean before I go," I retorted, teasing him with my demise, almost playful.

  "You know what I used to think? That I made you gay. Like it was all my fault." He spilled out a soft self-mocking laugh, and his fingers rustled my hair. "Like I tempted you."

  I would have spoken. I would have laughed with him. But something in me had suddenly drifted, and I was blank. And yet not quite the same as before, since I'd never noticed these episodes till they were over—two minutes lost, five at the most. This time the blank was in my body and not my head. I was still completely present, hanging on my brother's words, nestled in his hand, but my nerves were shut off and my limbs like driftwood. I lay in a slump against the back cushions, frozen.

  At first I didn't even panic. More than anything I was embarrassed that I had no words to answer Brian. Yet he didn't seem in the least troubled by my silence. After all, as he'd just finished saying, we could talk about us anytime. I could feel him twirl a lock of my hair between finger and thumb, no inhibitions. Then he turned away, leaving me to doze by the fire.

  Only now was I swamped with a wave of terror, unable to cry out, locked in the cell of my body. I started to shiver, despite the heat from the fireplace. Sweat sprang out on my forehead as I tried to scream and nothing came.

  A stroke, just like my father. I could see his specter in the flames, the horrible sag of his right cheek, as if his face were melting. The slurred speech and the groping hand, a man drowning from inside out. I strained to move, frantic now, feeling the blood pound in my head from exertion. Some muscle must have twitched in response, for my shoulder shifted on the cushion, pitching me down prone on the sofa.

  And when I felt my brain begin to flicker too, I thought,Let it be over now. Death being better than the vegetable state of the last long year of my father, or Teddy Burr in a shriveled coma, only able to blink his eyes to tell us he wanted to go.

  For a while there I was already gone. Though I heard Kathleen come down the stairs, laughing with Daniel, it was happening on another plane entirely. My eyes were fixed on the fire, the substance of me all mercurial, transparent as the flames. From very far away Mona's voice joined them. A small pinprick of my brain still attended their human interchange. Time for them to depart, said Kathleen. Time! The very idea was so frail and poignant, nothing to do with me anymore.

  Then Mona came close, and I knew she was standing above me. "Should we tell him we're leaving?" she whispered.

  "No, let him sleep," hissed Kathleen in reply.

  Yes, by all means. Let me get out of it easy as this, like falling off a log. I had already left the husk of my body, or seemed to be sitting on the edge of it, like the kid who used to read himself bleary in the loft. Gently Mona unfurled the afghan and lay it across my motionless form, curling it under my chin. Go now, I thought, before I start missing you.

  Good old Miss Mona, always does what she's told. She grabbed up her bag and hurried away, a last whiff of Blue Angel floating in her wake. Then total silence, once the two women had left the room. Now, I told myself, go. As if I needed that one more push to slip off the edge and be under the ocean, all the storms behind me.

  Can you really make yourself die, by sheer force of will? If so, then why had all my friends gone out with such ghastly protraction, flailing and eaten up, every exit walled up but the last groveling hole? All I can say is, for a few moments I thought I'd got through it painlessly, a Houdini escape from my body's broken vessel. I'd already passed through the flames. I was waiting on the other side, patient for the bus to heaven.

  Then my line of sight to the fire was severed. Someone was blocking the way. I didn't want to focus, didn't want to come back, but I could see it was Daniel. He slouched against the sofa, careful not to wake me, but I could tell he wanted to be in my orbit, as if I was some kind of safety zone. And as soon as I realized that, I wasn't dead anymore. I was locked again in a body that didn't work, struggling again to scream.

  Daniel turned. Even I could hear the low toneless wail coming out of me. "Are you okay?" he asked, then leaned down to peer in my face. "Uncle Tom, why are you crying?"

  I kept screaming in my head, and the thin wail continued. Feeling began to thud into my arms and legs, like the blood unfreezing, horribly painful, the bends of reentry. I must have reached out a hand like something climbing out of a grave, because the boy stepped back fearfully, not knowing what to do. I could hear myself blubbering now, and a great writhe ran through my body.

  "He's sick," said Daniel urgently to someone I couldn't see.

  I clutched my hands in front of my face like a prayer, stunned and still disoriented, my nerves going every which way. Then Gray was by my side, wrapping his arms around me. "It's okay, it's okay," he said. "I'm here."

  At last the cry broke from me, a wail of release that sounded like coming. My unbound arms seized him around his neck, and I could feel my body lift as he drew me deep into his embrace. I was sobbing with relief, gulping in life like air, though the dark still beat against the windows, wanting in.

  "I couldn't—" I gasped, but there was no verb big enough to encompass all that had been robbed from me. Gray rocked my torso, making a hushing sound, as if he understood it all without my saying. My face was against his neck, kissing and crying and holding on. "Don't—leave me," I choked out, desperate, a child too scared to go back to sleep.

  "I'm not going anywhere," he whispered, soothing me down, one hand stroking my head.

  And when I finally took a real breath, I was looking over his shoulder. Daniel stood against the table, still too frightened to move, the desolation in his eyes enough to break your heart. I reached out a hand, and that was all he needed. He threw himself a
gainst us, gripping us both and burying his face, burrowing like a dog in a thunderstorm. Now we could let all the tears be his. His boy's grief was something else, of course, but right now all that mattered was his letting it out. For here was the crux of the difference between my nephew and me: that I had been the crybaby of Chester, and Daniel Shaheen the hero's son had never shed a tear.

  We made a most peculiar threesome, I daresay, Gray and I holding each other's eyes across the sobbing figure of the boy. Did his mother and father hear it all and lean over the stairwell to see what was going on? Did it make Susan flinch that he hadn't come to her? And was this what the Coalition of Family Values meant, when they talked about queers recruiting children? Surely I was a special case, Lazarus raised from a sudden grave. In any event I only wanted one thing for Daniel—that he learn to cry when he lost something, or how would he ever be sure he truly had it, or know what to look for again.

  The oldest wish of the race, that the child should have it easier. So: let him not grow up among people who learned too late how to feel. I knew about this, down to the marrow. I looked across into my lover's eyes, flashes of amber in the firelight, knowing it could be stolen at any second, the next time pitching me all the way down, broken on the sand.

  Not that I had any regrets for the life that brought me here, not a minute of it. The slightest turn might have diverted me from the perfect balance of our three hearts. At last, to feel everything down to the marrow. If it only lasted a moment more, it had come to me in time.

  FIRST THING IN THE MORNING I CALLED THE DOCTOR. Overnight the storm had mostly cleared, the early sky pillowed with white clouds rolling off to the east. As I stood in the booth at the Chevron, the brittle morning air was so cold I could see my breath. Sometimes the bite is as sharp as the Oregon coast—or even Maine, where my father used to drag us for a week in June, doubling up with our mick cousins while the uncles wallowed in beer. I left the accordion door open, so as not to feel cut off from Gray, who waited a few feet off in the pickup. His eyes never left my face, his untroubled smile a magic circle of reassurance.