By Nightfall (12 page)

Their parents—Lutherans, Republicans, members of various clubs—did not torment Matthew, maybe because they suspected the world would torment him sufficiently on its own, or maybe because they weren’t yet ready to abandon the notion that their older son was a prodigy, expressing random if rather peculiar enthusiasms that would solidify, over time, into a significant, remunerative career. Their mother was a handsome, hefty, big-jawed woman, pure Swede, whose profoundest fear was of being cheated and whose deepest conviction was that everyone was trying to cheat her. Their father, handsome but a little blank, unfinished-looking, vaguely Finnish, never fully adapted to his good fortune in marrying their mother, and lived in his marriage the way an impoverished relation might live in the spare room. It’s possible that their mother refused to be cheated out of two healthy, unalarming Wisconsin sons, and that their father simply went along with her. For whatever reasons, they were uncensorious with Matthew. They did not object when he started wearing knickers to school, or when he declared his intention to take up figure skating.

It was left to Peter, then, to torment him.

Peter lacked the focus and ambition of a true sadist. Nor did he hate Matthew, at least not in the purest sense. He did, however, spend most of his early years in an almost constant state of apology. He was loved but he could not, at the age of six, read aloud from their parents’
Collected Poetry of Ogden Nash
, and did not, at the age of seven, write, direct, and star in a neighborhood children’s production of a play, with music, entitled
Man Overboard
, which made their mother weep with laughter. From the very beginning, Matthew absorbed whatever stray molecules of eccentricity or accomplishment might reside in odd corners of the house; whatever wasn’t Matthew was just dark furniture and ticking clocks and a collection of antique cast-iron banks their mother had been accumulating since before she met their father.

Most infuriating to Peter, though, was Matthew’s innocent and untroubled affection for him. Matthew, it seemed, considered Peter to be a kind of pet, trainable but limited. One can teach a dog to sit, fetch, and stay; it would be silly to try to teach it to play chess. When Peter was a toddler, Matthew made outfits for him and paraded him around in them. Peter can’t remember any of that, but there are photographs: little Peter in a bee suit, with goggles and antennae; in a toga made from a pillowcase, with a circle of ivy obscuring his eyes. When Peter was a bit older (he has fleeting memories of this), Matthew devised for him an alter ego: Giles the manservant who, despite his humble origins, was determined to prosper in the world by dint of hard work, which generally involved keeping his and Matthew’s room tidy, performing household tasks for their mother, and running errands for Matthew.

What Peter found most appalling: he liked being Giles. He liked fulfilling modest expectations. He went about his assigned tasks with prim satisfaction, and actually believed he
would
prosper (at what?) if he obeyed cheerfully and uncomplainingly. In fact, though he can’t quite remember, it’s possible that Giles the manservant had been his idea to begin with.

It wasn’t until around the time he turned seven that he began to fully understand that he was the lowest member of the household, and always had been. He was the reliable, unexceptional one; the good-enough boy.

The attempted murder took place unexpectedly, on a bright, cold day in March. Peter was crouched on the flagstone patio in the winter-browned backyard, a tiny figure in a red plaid jacket under an ice blue sky. He had illicitly taken one of his father’s screwdrivers out of the garage, in order to work unsupervised on the gift he was making for his mother’s birthday: a birdhouse from a kit. He was hopeful, but troubled. He suspected his mother didn’t want a birdhouse (she’d never expressed any interest in birds), but he’d been at the hobby shop with his father and had seen the box, which depicted a perfect little gabled house on a field of pale turquoise, encircled by ecstatic cardinals and bluebirds and finches. It seemed to Peter a vision of heavenly reward, and he was struck—he was transported, really—by the notion that he could convey this sliver of perfection to his mother and that in some way both he and she would be changed, he into a boy who could guess her secret desires and she into someone who ardently wanted what he had to give. Peter’s father frowned over the fact that it was meant to be assembled by children ten or older, and before agreeing to buy it extracted from Peter the promise that the two of them would build it together.

Which vow Peter disregarded, as soon as he was home alone. He needed to produce something marvelous, by his own hand. His mother would tear up with joy and his father would nod, judiciously and affectionately—sure enough, our younger boy is capable beyond his years.

Naturally, the birdhouse, when taken from the box, proved to be made of dull brown fiberboard. It came with exactly the required number of silver screws, a single sheet of instructions printed on pale green paper, and—somehow, most dispiriting of all—a small cellophane packet of birdseed.

Squatting over the pieces, which he’d laid out on the flagstones, Peter struggled to retain his optimism. He would paint it some brilliant color. He might decorate it with pictures of birds. Still, at the moment, the components—two gabled ends and various rectangles meant to be walls, floor, and roof—were so inert and unpromising he found himself fighting off the urge to go inside and take a nap. The pale, biscuity brown of the fiberboard might have been the color of discouragement itself.

Nothing to do, though, but begin. Peter matched a gabled end with a wall piece, put a screw into the predrilled hole, and turned it.

“What are you making?” Delivered from above and behind, with the faintest hint of an Oxford accent.

It couldn’t be. No one was home.

Peter said, without looking up, “What’re you doing here?”

“Mrs. Fletcher is sick. What are you making?”

“It’s a surprise.”

He glanced back at Matthew. Matthew’s face was flushed with the cold, which gave it a cherubic incandescence. He wore a bright green scarf knotted around his neck.

“Is it a present for Mom?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Peter returned his attention to the pieces of birdhouse.

Matthew leaned in close, behind him. “Look,” he said, “it’s a little house.”

It’s a little house. Four innocent words. But when Matthew pronounced them, with lilting precision, some vortex came whirling down around Peter, some funnel of soured air that sucked the breath out of him. He was trapped here, pinned to these cold stones and this sad little project; there was no chance for him, no hope, he who enjoyed being a manservant, who was without brilliance, who contentedly ran the most trivial errands. He had been caught by Matthew in the act of making
a little house
and he was humiliated forever, he was a foolish small thing and would always be.

He will prefer, later, to remember it as an act of pure rage, unthinking, barely conscious, but in fact he passed over into a state of white-hot clarity in which he understood that he could not be there at that moment, he couldn’t survive Matthew watching him and saying, “Look, it’s a little house,” but there was no way to escape and so he needed to take the screwdriver and gouge a hole in the air around Matthew, through which Matthew would disappear. Peter turned and leaped up with the screwdriver in his hand. He caught Matthew on the temple, an inch above his left eye. He would be grateful for the rest of his life that he had only scarred his brother, and not blinded him.

Although nothing as dramatic as the screwdriver attack ever occurred again, it did seem to subtly but permanently alter Peter’s domestic reputation. It established him as dangerous, possibly unstable, which was on one hand discomfiting and on the other an improvement. He had, at the very least, demonstrated to everyone that he was a bad pet. The game of Giles the manservant was abandoned without comment.

He and Matthew lived together for several years afterward as a supposedly tame fox might live with a peacock. Matthew was for the most part nervously gracious to Peter. Peter for the most part pressed his new advantage. It had not occurred to him until then that a single act of brute violence—with a
screwdriver
, something anyone could do—might inspire in his brother, in anyone, a lasting attitude of fearful and grudging respect. Peter became by slow degrees a seven-year-old general, friendly in a knowing, cheerfully threatening, almost courtly way, as if friendliness were a temporary concession he made to a brutal and duplicitous world.

Three years passed in the reign of Peter the Terrible.

Matthew at fifteen.

Tall fey figure walking with ardent steps past the brick and stone housefronts of Milwaukee, books held to his chest. Inexplicably optimistic, much of the time, though as he grew from childhood to adolescence he had the good sense to develop irony. Taunted by the local goons but not with the venom and devotion you might expect. Peter has always believed that Matthew possessed some aspect of the immaculate. Although there was nothing in any way saintly about him he did have an innocence of purpose that must have been evident in the more modest saints. Matthew was so entirely himself, so enraptured by his interests (by age fifteen: movies, the novels of Charles Dickens, skating, and the acoustic guitar), so harmless, so cordially indifferent to everyone but the two girls who were his only friends, that although he was teased occasionally and smacked around exactly once, by a gaggle of seventh-grade boys looking to establish a reputation, he was never the object of the prolonged campaigns of annihilation some of the boys waged against the handful of true unfortunates. Matthew was also, surely, kept at least relatively safe by his skater’s body, with its implication of coiled power (though he’d have had no idea how to punch anyone), and by his friendship with Joanna Hurst, a celebrated beauty. Whether it was calculated or spontaneous, he had been since the fifth grade the friend and confidant of a powerful, desired girl, and so somehow, in the admittedly rather rudimentary local estimation, was able to pass as an athlete (skating, but still) and a boyfriend (no scintilla of sex between them, but still). If Matthew was quite possibly the most effeminate person in Milwaukee, he was increasingly possessed of what Peter can only call a precocious grandeur. Peter’s aspect of nascent threat, unsupported by any further attacks, had by then solidified into what was generally regarded as cantankerousness, which his mother further diminished by calling him Mr. Grumpy whenever he was in a mood. His skin erupted, his hair went lank, and he found himself, to his surprise, a member of a small boy-band of malcontents, geekily devoted to rock music and
Star Trek
, neither admired nor derided, simply left alone. Matthew, on the other hand, was prominent. Glamorous, even. He was clever, rarely argumentative, never snippy or petulant, and even the most dour and threatening boys seemed to find him entertaining. He became a school mascot, of sorts. As he swanned his way through adolescence he treated the other members of the family, including Peter, with a sweet-tempered if occasionally weary, wised-up patience, like a noble child sent to live with common folk until he was ready to assume his true position. As he grew into himself it became possible, in his presence, to feel like a crusty but good-hearted dwarf, or a kindly old badger.

With an uneasy truce declared between them, once Peter had been stripped of his dangerousness, he and Matthew began having brotherly talks at night. Their conversations were wide-ranging but oddly consistent. Decades later, Peter can patch together a meta-conversation, made up of bits and pieces from hundreds of them.

“I think Mom’s just about had it,” Matthew says.

“With what?”

“Everything. Her life.”

This is semiplausible. Their mother can be brusque and short-tempered, she carries about her an almost constant air of incipient exasperation, but she’s always seemed, to Peter, to have “had it” not with her life but with endless particulars: her sons’ domestic lassitude, the dishonest and incompetent mailman, taxes, governments, all her friends, the price of just about everything.

“Why do you think that?”

Matthew sighs. He’s invented a long, low, sloughing sigh; something of woodwind about it.

“She’s stuck here,” he says.

“Yeah . . .”

I mean, we’re all stuck here, right?

“She’s still a beautiful woman. There’s nothing for her here. She’s like Madame Bovary.”

“Really?”

Peter at the time had no idea who Madame Bovary was, but imagined her to be an infamous figure who presaged doom—he had in all likelihood mixed her up with Madame Defarge.

“Do you think you could talk to her about her hair? She won’t listen to me.”

“
No
. I can’t talk to Mom about her
hair
.”

“How’s it going with Emily?”

“How’s what going?”

“Come on.”

“I don’t like
Emily
.”

“Why not?” Matthew says. “She’s cute.”

“She’s not my type.”

“You’re too young to have a type. Emily likes you.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“And it would be a bad thing if she did? You’ve got to stop underestimating your own charms.”

“Shut
up
.”

“Can I tell you a secret fact about girls?”

“No.”

“They like kindness. You’d be surprised how far you can get with a lot of girls if you just walk up to them and say, ‘I think you’re great, I think you’re beautiful.’ Because they’re all afraid that they’re not.”

“Like you’d know.”

“I have my sources.”

“Right. Did, like, Joanna tell you that?”

“Mm-hm. She did.”

Joanna Hurst. Light of the northern sky.

A more impossible object is difficult to imagine. She is slender and graceful and heartbreakingly modest; she has long, roan-colored hair which she flicks occasionally out of her eyes. She has a way of lowering her head when she listens to others, as if she knows that her beauty—her wide-set eyes and lush lower lip, the creamy glow of her—must be withdrawn slightly if anyone else is to have any chance at all. She has recently begun dating a senior boy so popular and athletic and generally accomplished he doesn’t need to be cruel, and their union is as celebrated as would be the betrothal of an heir apparent to a young princess from a powerful, wealthy nation of uncertain loyalties. Joanna would be out of Peter’s league even if she weren’t three years older, and already taken.