Beautiful Kate (6 page)

When he was gone, she continued to flail away at the water, and finally I saw that she was crying. “Just a bunch of birds!” she got out. “A bunch of goddamn sparrows! And he can’t even do that! He’s too good! Too noble! Well, screw him! Just screw the freaking saint!”

In a fury, she swam back to the dock and took hold of the ladder, preparing to pull herself up. And without really knowing what I was doing. I had followed her there and now took hold of her from behind, on her hips, just as I’d done dozens of times before, to pull her back into the water. Only this time I found myself holding on to flesh—the bare flesh of a woman.

She turned in my hands and brutally shoved my head under water. Humiliated, I pushed off from the ladder and didn’t surface until I reached the center of the pond. By then, she was on the dock dressing.

“I’m sorry, little brother,” she said. “I’m just so damn mad. Why can’t he go along, like he used to? Just the three of us. But he won’t. He’s too weird. Just too freaking weird.”

I could see the tears still shining in her eyes and I guess that was something I was not supposed to see, for she ran off then, swiftly, just like Cliff or me, just like one of the boys.

I don’t know why it is that I remember that night so clearly, whether it was the dark trauma of the bird slaughter or my first real look at Kate as a woman. Either one of those things probably would have been sufficient to fix those hours in my mind, but together I see the two events now—and I see that night—as a kind of dividing line, a wall suddenly flung up across the paths of our lives. During those hours we lost some incalculable measure of innocence, and it seemed that from that point on Kate and Cliff cemented themselves ever more firmly into the positions they had taken then, with the result that things were never again quite the same between the three of us.

I also can’t help thinking of the sparrows, all those doomed birds flying so eagerly toward their destruction, a memory that invariably brings to mind the verses in the Bible affirming that God has our hairs numbered and knows when even a sparrow falls. But I wonder—does He really? Those scores of tiny feathered corpses at my feet, were they numbered and remembered? Or is it that dinosaurs and civilizations pass on, and sparrows and stars and brothers and sisters—and the heavens never blink?

3

Let me describe this place for you. As I said earlier, it is a typical two-story farmhouse, with nine rooms including the one in the basement. The porch runs across the front of the house and is about twelve feet deep, more than adequate for the old chain-hung swing that Kate and I used to fly like a spaceship, swinging it sideways higher and higher until it finally would strike the house at one end of its trajectory and bring Jason storming out of his library to punish us, usually with a tongue-lashing.

The double front doors open into a foyer dominated by the stairway to the second floor. To the left is the living room, which is reasonably spacious and filled with a small fortune in antique furniture. At the rear of the room is the doorway to Jason’s library, a room I once considered the central locus of power on earth, specifically the huge oak desk from which he could look out upon his fields and cattle in one direction and upon his supplicants in the other, spread out over a black leather sofa and two matching chairs.

Returning to the foyer, one enters the dining room on the right and continues past the downstairs bathroom to the kitchen, which is almost as large as the living room, including a pantry that one could stock for Armageddon. There is an antique woodburning stove as well as an electric range and the usual appliances: a refrigerator, a sarcophagus-sized freezer, and so on. One doorway opens onto the side entry porch and another onto the back porch, which is as large as the one in front, but enclosed, a catch-all for a half century of family living. The narrow back stairway (the one on which Sarah almost fell the other day) also opens into the kitchen, making it even more the center of activity and traffic in the house.

The upstairs is equally spacious if equally unexciting: five bedrooms and the one bathroom as well as the “sleeping porch”—the screened-in upper level of the back porch, where Cliff, Kate, and I sometimes slept in the summer, on cots we often used as trampolines.

And there you have it, a brief tour of this place to which I’ve repaired in order to escape the fed-narcs and their fellow inquisitors in the L.A. Police Department. Now, you may wonder what kind of sense this makes, to hide out in one’s ancestral home. But what you don’t know is that after leaving here at eighteen, I had a somewhat unnatural passion for severing the ties that bind. Oh, I wrote to my mother occasionally or called her on the phone, kept her and Jason at least vaguely informed as to where I was and what I was doing. But otherwise—in any documents I signed and in any applications I made—I invariably referred to myself as an orphan, partially because it abbreviated the amount of writing and explaining I had to do, but also because it satisfied some puerile need I had for secrecy and self-dramatization—not to mention revenge. For I believed then, just as I do now, that if Jason had been less a martinet and more a father, Cliff would not have done what he did. But then I don’t want to get into all that now (the sun is still out as I write this and my blood is running scared). Rather I’m just trying to explain why I gathered up Toni and my few belongings and came all this way: not only because the food and lodging are the right price but also because I trusted the sluggard federal functionaries not to trace me here.

In any case, here we are. And here I sit filling the old legal pads. Across the room, Toni is lying on her back in the unmade bed, making a game out of applying nail polish to her toes. Occasionally she sighs and gives me one of her sex-bomb looks or she will twist onto her side to accent the mind-bending curve of her hip in the white Dacron pajamas she’s still wearing, in the middle of the afternoon. For her, sex is becoming a release from boredom, and I wonder if I will even be able to walk after a few more weeks. Forty-three is not twenty-three, but then I don’t want to remind her of that. What’s so great about walking anyway?

Last night, waking at Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite hour, I went downstairs to make coffee and smoke some cigarettes (my own eccentric if unproven formula for getting back to sleep) and found that Sarah had already beaten me to the punch, so to speak—in this case, a bottle of Cutty Sark. As was her habit, she began to tug at her robe and fuss with her hair rollers.

“Well, you caught me,” she said. “The secret toper.”

“Now, that’s a word you don’t hear every day.”

“You mean it’s old-fashioned. Which I’m such an expert at.”

I got a glass and sat down, pouring myself a few fingers of the scotch. “No, that’s not what I meant,” I told her. “I meant it’s a good solid old Anglo-Saxon word, which most of us unfortunately are too inarticulate to use.”

“But not me.” She toasted herself. “The English teacher. The Burnout of Combat High.”

“Burnout?”

“That’s what we pedagogues call it, when you can’t take it anymore. When you just give up and draw your salary and let ’em graduate illiterate. Most of my juniors couldn’t read Dick and Jane, but they can push you around. And they can stab you. We’ve had one teacher stabbed and two beaten up just in the last semester.”

“That bad, eh?”

She made a gesture of futility and tipped up her glass again. “Which is one of the reasons for our vote tonight. Your little sister is now on strike.”

This was the first I had heard of any strike and I asked her why she hadn’t told us about it earlier, when she came home from the teachers’ meeting at the school. She shrugged and said there was no particular reason, except that she seemed to have a hard time getting a word in edgewise lately.

“No matter what I say, no one seems to hear anymore,” she said. “Everybody just looks right through me. Like I wasn’t there.”

“Oh come on, Sarah,” I protested. “That can’t be true.”

“Oh no? Listen, when your Toni’s around, I might as I well crawl in a hole. Which is exactly where I wish I were most of the time.”

I pretended to be indignant, insisting that when I was with the two of them, I was just as aware of her as I was of Toni, and probably more so, because her interests were broader and she had more to say on a wider variety of subjects. But this only made her pat my hand indulgently.

“Good try, Greg,” she said. “But I know what I am—boring and dowdy. Which is okay. I’m used to it. And I could live with it—until
she
came here.”

“Toni doesn’t mean anything, Sarah. She—”

“She just
is
—yeah. And that’s the tough part. She probably doesn’t even know how she looks at me.”

“How’s that?”

“Like I’ve been in a car wreck.”

“Oh, come on. You’re exaggerating.”

She poured more scotch into our glasses. “Maybe so. But then there’s Junior—the way she’s turned him into a lap dog. The surliest bastard in Woodglen is suddenly all sweetness and smiles. Tell me—do you worry how much time he spends with her?”

“When I’m busy, what else is there for her to do?”

“That’s no answer.”

“All right, then—no, I don’t worry. Toni likes to work the audience. She always has. But she’s straight.”

“Good point.”

“How so?”

Sarah smiled impishly. “Because our dear brother ain’t.”

“Ain’t what?”

“Ain’t straight. As in ain’t heterosexual.”

“No kidding.”

My reaction obviously disappointed her. “You don’t seem all that surprised.”

“I had an inkling.”

“That’s odd. He’s usually so careful to hide it. Afraid Jason will find out, I guess.”

“Why? Don’t you think the old man would approve?”

Sarah laughed at that. “No, not hardly.”

“Well, how’s he kept it from him all these years? I would assume it isn’t a recent aberration.”

“I don’t know. In fact, I didn’t know it myself until a few years ago. He doesn’t exactly flaunt it. I guess he was what you call a closet—well, you know.”

“Queen.”

She shrugged. “Somehow the word doesn’t fit him.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“And yet I guess that’s why he’s stayed here all these years—because of all the boys around. All the
black
boys.”

“Could be.”

She sat there for a time smoking and sipping at her drink. Finally she stubbed out her cigarette.

“Greg,” she said, “would you mind if I took off for a while? Say, a week or so?”

“Of course not. But where would you go?”

“Miami, I think. I’ve got some money saved. And I figure the strike will last for months. Maybe all year. We want a twenty-five-percent raise and the district is broke. So you figure it out.”

“You’d go alone?”

“Sure. Alone I can handle. But this house I can’t. Not right now anyway.”

“I see.”

Again she reached for my hand. “Oh listen, it isn’t you. If you’d come back alone, you know I wouldn’t leave. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Sure, honey. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us.”

“Well, I will worry—about you, anyway. And Jason. If you’re gonna eat, Junior will just have to let loose of some of his shekels for a change and buy the groceries.”

“Junior?”

“Sure. You didn’t know he’s the family moneybags?”

“Can’t say I did.”

What she told me then I found more than a little surprising. It seems that as far back as the seventy-four recession. Jason had convinced himself that the western world was going to suffer an economic collapse and that Woodglen Estates was going to become even more a jungle than it already was. His fear of the neighborhood blacks was such, Sarah claimed, that he had not set foot out of the house in over three years. And because he believed that Junior “had a way with them,” he begged him to stay on. But Junior, never a slouch at divining his own best interests, would not commit himself until Jason finally agreed to meet his price.

“How much?” I asked.

Sarah shook her head. “All I know is that Jason’s savings are gone. And I think he cashed in some Krugerrands he had too. I guess Junior got every one of them. Each year, as the old man got more paranoid, Junior must have simply raised the ante.”

If the house had not been so still, I probably would have whistled, so impressed was I by my little brother’s mendacity.

“But where do you come in?” I asked.

Sarah gestured at the walls around us. “The house. This decrepit old turkey. I guess it goes to me. And you—I’m afraid you only get his best wishes.”

“That’ll be the day. But then I never expected anything. At the same time, I don’t like the idea of little Tan Pants winding up with it all either. And at your expense.”

She shrugged indifferently. “He considers it income. His pay for staying on with us. And maybe he’s right. I’m not sure Jason and I could have carried on here alone. I don’t think the old man would’ve ever slept. Even now he worries all the time about being burned out.”

It would have been nice if the conversation had ended there, but it did not. Sarah said nothing for a time, just sat there staring down at her drink. Then, with a pained smile, she finally looked up at me again.