The Half Brother (3 page)

Then I realized a girl had been sitting in one of the chairs, at Bankhead’s far side, all along. As soon as she stood up, one of the Visigoth brothers yanked the chair away and began folding it. She looked eleven or twelve, tall but still with a child’s body, and also olive skinned, dark haired, unlike her mother and brothers. A sport. Her family seemed fearfully complete without her. Her brothers, gear stowed, sauntered off full of their careless authority, high-fiving, slapping backs, but she stayed close to Bankhead, slumping away her height. Her face was that of a child just moving into adolescence—bored, impatient, wistful.

“Charlie?” Salter said.

“Coming!”

Then the girl looked up at her father in some silent communication and he looked down at her. As they turned away from the field he put his arm around her and they were suddenly united, and I thought,
Ah. She is his
.

I GOT THE JOB,
which felt both inevitable and surprising. Suddenly, I had a plan, for at least a year.

I moved into the first-floor apartment of a two-family near campus, and for several years after that, when I was back in Atlanta to visit, I rather enjoyed mentioning to the Satterthwaites where I lived and watching their faces at the word
duplex
. But wasn’t I teaching at a
private
school? Hadn’t I gone to
Harvard
? I jammed their radar. Living up
north, I’d become exotic to them. They’d expected me to come back, and I hadn’t, and now they didn’t know what to think.

Neither did I, to be honest. I had no agenda; I was twenty-two; I was still thinking in semesters. My mother said, “We’re fine here. Live your life,” and I listened, because she rarely had an agenda either. It was the Satterthwaites who voiced distress about my absence, but this was pro forma. They were a fundamentally generous bunch, and they’d always wanted to claim me; but, as much as I’d wanted to be claimed, I’d never thought that the operation would work. Living far away just made it easier. Besides, they still had Nicky, the child who was really theirs, who’d been born correctly. He would be more than enough.

MY LANDLADY, ANGELA MIDDLETON,
née Siegal, was a cheerful, big-boned blonde, like a former-jock older sister, always carrying at least one kid on her hip—they had three, the youngest an infant. She was a real-estate agent
—
“
very
part-time,” she said. Booker, her husband, was assistant head of grounds at Abbott and six-five on a short day. He was African American, with a very dark, square, faintly Asiatic face, and not a smiler. He was in the air force reserves, and every summer he spent a month away training at the base in Chicopee.

When I first moved in, he said, “You’re from Atlanta.”

“Yes sir.”

“My people are from South Carolina.”

“Ah,” I said. Booker was a broad man. Broad lips, broad cheekbones, broad shoulders. He was as solid as a concrete block, and my landlord, and the conversation was not going to end until he decided it would. We were in the small common vestibule of the house; my door was open—I’d been about to go in. “You ever get back there?” I said.

“Used to spend the summers there. Which didn’t make any damn sense, when you think about it.”

“No, I suppose not. But … but you were born up here?”

“My mother came up when she was two years old. I was born in Boston. Hear you went to school there. To Harvard.”

“Yes sir.”

“I grew up in Roxbury.”

“Ah.”

“You ever get over to Roxbury, Charlie?”

“I never did.” He nodded, waiting. “I didn’t have a car. I didn’t leave campus much, I guess.”

“Makes sense.”

“Actually, I never left the library. I was hanging on by my fingernails.”

He smiled a little. “I don’t believe what you’re saying, now.”

I thought about myself in college. “It’s the truth.” He was wearing a hat with the insignia from his squadron, and I was desperate to change the subject. I pointed to it. “Do you fly?”

“Tactical aircraft maintenance.”

“Ah.”

He finally relented. “Well. Welcome to the house, Charlie. Welcome to Abbott. It’s a good place.”

“Yes sir. It really is.”

He turned to open his own door. I felt like a dog whose leash had been stepped on, then the foot suddenly removed. “My father was a soldier,” I said. “Marines. Enlisted man.”

He turned back. “Is that so.”

“He died in Vietnam,” I said. “Before I was born.” It was the story my mother had always told me. I believed my father had been a man (a twenty-one-year-old high-school dropout, just barely a man) named Jimmie Garrett, USMC, PFC.

Booker regarded me. A long second passed. “I am sorry to hear that.”

I nodded. This time he let me turn away first.

I REALIZED HOW TERRIFIED
I was of teaching on the night before I was to begin. The next day, beams of adolescent attention trained on me, I was nearly flattened. At first I thought only about survival. But then a stubbornness I didn’t know I had kicked in. Somehow I didn’t undermine myself by thinking about all I wasn’t doing, how unextraordinary I was being; I just clung to a new persona I was making
up on the spot, a tweedy, knowledgeable, unflappable self. Pretending to be someone I wasn’t was, in itself, comfortable, or at least familiar.

I’d heard that I should move around while I taught, and so I walked, I paced; I strolled to the window; I lifted mine eyes unto the hills. My classroom was on the second floor, facing west, away from the quad, with a sugar maple right outside the window, and beyond all was openness—rolling green dotted with neat buildings of gray stone and white clapboard, a little farm of learning.

Sometimes I wished we were facing the quad and its honeycomb of crisscrossing paths, but I developed an appreciation for looking away instead, out beyond to the edges of campus. I wasn’t thinking of escape but of mystery, discovery. And that tree became an anchor. Day after day, I would gaze at that tree, at the autumn sun filtered through leaves gradually transforming. I thought of other bygone teachers watching the same tree. When the sun sank in the late afternoons and threatened to become blinding, I lowered the shades reluctantly.

And then I’d turn back around.
Miss Myrick. Mr. Bratton. Miss Aaron. Miss Rourke. Yes. No. Absolutely. Due on Friday. Good God, do you think that plural needs an apostrophe? Please tell us why. Exactly
.

I thought that if there were any tactics I could use to age myself, then I should use them. I’d copied the formality, the
misters
and
misses
, from an old teacher of mine. It held them at arm’s length, but it was an equalizer, too: I was Mr. Garrett; I held them to my own standard.

I was exhausted by the expansion of myself into these new, sturdier outlines, but I felt myself growing stronger. I allowed myself to believe I’d made this particular new person, who could withstand the force of their energy, all alone, from almost nothing, from bits of cloth and borrowed words.

Yes, please read, Mr. Bratton. John Donne was quite a sensuous writer. What’s the central image here? Mr. Sprague. Is there more than one type of compass? Sometimes you have to take hold of the end of a sentence and pull. Miss Garard. Mr. Maxwell. Yes, absolutely. See me after. Good work. Today, Miss Hobson, you are
on.
Mr. DeAngelis, you’re off. Yes. Keep going. Exactly … exactly
.

Every day, I tried to pull it out of them. What? More than they knew they knew. More than they knew they had. I found that I could
gather the force of them into reins in my hands, steer, and then let them lead. At the window of my classroom, looking out, I was in the prow of a landship, forging ahead with my new self, built on the scaffolding of these names; then I turned around and my own energy went forth, joined theirs, became something new and larger. I had not expected to feel my own self slowly emerging as I tried to draw out theirs. I had not expected to love anyone, is what I’m saying. Sometimes they looked at me in amazement at what came out of their mouths.

THE FIRST FULL CHAPEL
of the year, Preston Bankhead gave the homily.

He looked even taller in his robes. His hair seemed to have grown and, while still respectable, flowed over his collar impressively. He ascended to the pulpit, looked down at us for a long moment, and began what I later called (for I was to hear it more than once) the Grey boys sermon.

As I learned that day, the chapel had been the gift of a southern cotton planter who lost both of his sons, Abbott alumni, in the Civil War. After the war was over, the heartbroken and now heirless father sent the remainder of his fortune north too, in a gesture of simultaneous penance and defiance, to build a grand Gothic quadrangle on a rolling green campus in central Massachusetts; but the benefactor, Phineas Grey, died before the quad was completed, as did the money, which was why the chapel stood alone, with its truncated wings.

There was a plaque, Preston’s main subject, beside the chapel’s wide, arched front doors:

G
REY
M
EMORIAL
C
HAPEL
I
N MEMORY OF THE SONS OF
A
BBOTT
WHO MADE THE GREATEST SACRIFICE
TO THE CAUSES TO WHICH THEY WERE LED
BY CUSTOM, CULTURE, AND CONSCIENCE

R
EQUIESCANT IN
P
ACE

and then the Grey boys’ names, ranks, and dates.

“The wording of that plaque,” Preston would say, as he did that particular morning, his voice tinged with deep, if weary, tolerance for the sins and foibles of others, “was wrangled over for years. Finally it was determined by two elderly nieces, one of the abolitionist persuasion, one not. It was difficult to find common ground. So what
did
they find? They found
cus
tom, and
cul
ture, and
con
science.” He leaned forward over the pulpit. “We all find these. We don’t just find them, we
swim
in them. But which is more important?” He let the pause reverberate. “What if they don’t agree, those things? What if they’re at war with one another?

“Custom. Is that an excuse not to think? Culture. Heaven forbid you should upset anyone! And conscience. Probably you’d say
that’s
the one. That’s the most important. And I concur—but how can we be sure it’s our conscience that’s speaking? What if it’s some other voice? If you listen to the wrong voice, my friends, the consequences can be dire.” He leaned over the pulpit and for a moment the congregation was still. I found myself leaning forward too.

“So you depend on culture, and custom, and conscience,” Preston continued, “but then you leave home, and let’s say you go to boarding school, and all the sudden you think,
This is my chance to make myself from scratch
.” He came down from the pulpit then and stood on the chancel step, as though he couldn’t resist us any longer. It was, as I would learn, his signature move. “I never went to boarding school myself, but when I was a young boy my father left us, and I never saw him again. That was
my
reinvention. I had to decide right then who I was, all on my own, and who I was going to be. In a way it was a freedom—a sad freedom. I had to look at my family, my past, my future, and make myself. Who I’d been didn’t matter anymore. I decided I was going to be new and different.

“And so here I stand before you today. My own creation. But is that true? Certainly not. I’ve been made by culture, and custom, and I hope not least of all conscience, even though I thought I was completely free of those things.” He smiled broadly. “Or at least the first two.” Everyone laughed, in thrall. “Your time here at Abbott will, I hope and pray, have a little less drama than my experience. But your task here is similar, to decide what to jettison, and what to keep. Who
you want to be. And it’s to figure out, once and for all, which voice is your conscience. It might be the quiet voice; it might be the least persuasive. But if you are truly listening, it is also unignorable.” He turned away, as though he were finished, and then turned back to us once more, as though he’d had one more thought, just that second. One more flash. As though he hadn’t thought of it all before, hadn’t done the choreography of that little pivot in the privacy of his study. “If you ignore your conscience,” he said, “that still, small voice, you will regret it the rest of your life. That is always true. Till the end of time.”

And then we were singing the school hymn. “In wisdom, stature, love for man …”

After chapel, Preston made a point of greeting everyone at the door, like a regular parish priest. As I waited, I absorbed the medieval kitsch of the chapel: soaring vaults, carved friezes, and every face in every stained-glass window solemn, with dark-ages circles under the eyes—but I was ready to love it all. All around us, the names engraved in the stone blocks of the walls—the unfortunate young dead, captains of industry, do-gooders, past headmasters and their wives, a couple of senators, and, by the door, the Grey boys—bore silent witness to the sturdiness of the past, to virtuous productivity, and, if one lived long enough, the accolades waiting if one followed certain scripts thoroughly and well. If one listened to one’s conscience, at least some of the time.

When it was my turn to be greeted, the directness of Preston’s gaze, his effortless simulation of affinity, enveloped me. “I didn’t know that about your father,” I said, which of course was asinine because I didn’t know anything about him. “That he left.”

“A difficult thing.” He’d taken my hand to shake it, now covered it with his other one, a gesture that felt provisional rather than warm. “It was a long time ago.” He cocked his head at me, a polite nudge.

“Charlie,” I said. “Charles Garrett. English department. From Atlanta.”

“Of course. A fellow countryman.” He smiled his saddish smile and gave my still-enclosed hand a tolerant pat. I didn’t know yet that
he exuded intimacy only from far away, in the pulpit. “A long time ago,” he repeated. “We survive, don’t we? Ah, and here’s young Mr. Bratton,” he said to the boy behind me, with the same consuming recognition, and the large, dry hand was withdrawn.