Trinity Fields (20 page)

After black November there was a drifting that occurred in our lives, Kip's and mine. Nothing happened, everything happened or began to happen.

Unravelings, words, small occasions that seemed important and important ones that seemed insignificant.

I came home one afternoon, and he was sitting on the floor of our little common room carpeted with some material whose color it would be impossible to describe, varied between yellow and gray, but seemed to have been a lima-bean green once. Beside him was a bottle. He had been reading, but the moment I walked in he shut the book quickly and sat on it so that I couldn't see what it was.

The weights and balances of our friendship were in new throes of change. He never had the same nervous system as I. This was something I was coming to learn. He must have felt the imbalances between us. As I became more focused, he seemed distracted, but in an indescribably calculated way.

At night I had work to do, reading and taking too many notes, underlining too many passages. He'd always been reclusive, even antisocial. The year before, during dining hour back in John Jay I would sit and talk with fellow dorm residents; I would say hello to hallmates when I passed them, and though I couldn't be called outgoing, I at least tried to make the acquaintance of various fellow students. Kip forbore such behavior. But now he seemed withdrawn beyond even that. He went out, keeping the same hours he had for those precious weeks when he was working and everything was so promising. Most of the time, I had gone to bed before he returned. It was as if he had begun to evaporate somehow. He seemed never to sleep. It was like he'd become a cat with a raven-black cat soul, one that might pride itself upon crossing your path in an alley. Or an owl, similarly wise and dangerous in the dark.

—What'd you do last night? I asked.

—Nothing.

—But like what?

—Like what? Kip glanced over my head.

—Yeah, like what.

—Like nothing is like what.

I interpreted his expression to mean, Who do you think you are, my father? So I left off, saying, —Never mind.

—Just walked around, he said, after a few minutes. Yes, so catlike, owlish, aggressive and passive, hostile and amicable by turns. —Is that all right with you, Brice?

Maybe it is true that I was becoming angry, finally, despite my admiration for my friend. Under my collegian bustle I thought I'd shrouded it well and that it was hidden, too, by the simple distance our odd, uncoincidental hours created. I was mistaken. Kip knew me as well as I knew him, and his response to my silent anger was going to be anger of a different sort.

—Well, boy? he said again. —Is that okay?

I looked out the filthy window of the room, stared at the vines climbing the brick wall of the building opposite. I felt exhaustion in my head, my back, my joints. Kip wanted to wrangle.

—You be willing to share some of that?

He lifted the bottle in my direction. I pulled it up to my lips, its glass knocked against my teeth, then, drank a little, it tasted terrible, carried it over to the corner where there was a sink, some cupboards, rattling refrigerator, old stove next to our doorless bathroom. Like some prude I began to pour whiskey down the drain.

—What the hell? and he was on me quicker and with more urgency than I'd thought possible, seemed to have sobered up in an instant, at least long enough to stop me. More agile, and much stronger than I, Kip got the bottle away from me after the briefest tussle. He was yelling and so was I. This was a new one. He tore the top two buttons off my shirt when he yanked at me from behind. I saw that when I'd struck out at him I'd managed to produce a pink streak down the left side of his forehead. He threw on his coat, had the bottle clutched with one hand under it, strode past me through the common room, his face crimson, lips white, angrier than I'd ever seen him, and I stood there helpless as I watched him open the door, but managed to get out the words, —Don't you ever call me boy again, you hear me, man? before he turned, said, —I'll never call you anything again, you little bastard, before slamming the door. Our apartment had always seemed so vulnerable to noise, to the city's various voices that chose to creep in through every crevice, funnel up through the floorboards and into the plaster and rugs, glass and air, but for the next hours and days it would seem more impregnable and silent than was conceivable.

I picked up the book Kip had been reading. Thoreau's
Walden
. Why had he hid it from me? What a grand gesture for a small cause, I thought. But then I remembered that when I'd read it a few months earlier I'd carried on about how interesting cranky old man Henry David Thoreau was with his monk's shack and his crop of beans and his endless disdain for the idiotic concessions his fellow man would make in the pursuit of false comforts. He had attitude, the right stuff, like a nineteenth-century beatnik. I guess Kip hadn't wanted me to see that he could learn things from me. I was swept up in sadness that afternoon. Thoreau's best friend, Emerson, wrote in an essay that goodness had to have an edge to it, but I'm sure his own edge was never so sharp as to stab. Looking into my copy of Emerson's essays that same night—funny, Kip had Thoreau and I Emerson, but I guess it makes a kind of sense—I discovered a passage I hadn't read before: “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”

He came back, of course, but only after allowing me to brood for half the week. He just showed up. Acted as if nothing whatever out of the ordinary had transpired. He carried a crisp brown paper sack under one arm and opened the door of the refrigerator, crouched, sniffed, said, —Jesus god, something in here's died some awful death, rummaged around until he found the offending source, an orange blotched deep green with mold, removed it, and proceeded to empty the paper bag of its contents, bottle of fresh milk, can of coffee, packet of bologna, mustard, chocolate bars. I believe he muttered, —Goodnight, before heading to his room where he lay on his bed and fell into a heavy sleep. He hadn't looked me in the eye, though if he had, I wouldn't have known, since I wasn't able to look him in the eye, either. He didn't seem to notice that his
Walden
was there on the floor in the middle of the room, right where he'd left it. The book disappeared next day and, just as I'd never seen it before, I never saw it again.

The week after that, Kip joined ROTC—the corps that had its office in Hamilton Hall, officers' training corps—just at the time when I had befriended some fellow classmen who were the precursors to the Students for a Democratic Society, and one of whom, a kid named Epstein, had persuaded me to consider coming to some of their meetings, hearing what they had to say, learning a little about the lies that are used, as he put it, to glue together the fabric of our society as it exists now. Epstein was my guide into this new world, and I was tentative about it because while I did have strong beliefs about the valuelessness and dishonor of war, I didn't yet have whatever it took—nerve? strength of will? courage?—to make a commitment. And commitment, said Epstein, was all that mattered. Commitment was consequence in and of itself.

—Make the commitment and already you will have changed the world a little bit, he told me, and I felt myself being drawn in to this idea. Epstein said, —Everything else is bullshit.

Kip's uniform lay on his bed and the manual was on our kitchen counter. Kip had set them there, I am sure, in part for himself and in part for me. I responded, as he'd have predicted.

—Rotsy? I said. —Are you kidding me?

Kip was curt with his response, —Tell you what. I'll do what I want to do, you do what suits you. Let's don't talk about it.

—Rotsy, I said. —I don't believe it.

—You hear me?

—What?

—Did you hear what I said?

—I heard you, Kip. I heard you.

Commitments were now being made. The drifting was over.

Dusty millers, petunias, and geraniums in a pot on the porch. The pot is one of the same pots that stood on the porch of the old Sundt house where we grew up. Extraordinary that it escaped destruction all these years—the pot, I mean, for the Sundts have all but one been demolished. Yet this nondescript clay pot endures. Leave it to Bonnie. Nothing new under her sun. Not if she can help it.

This is why my sister possesses the capacity to strike terror in me, I think. It is because rather than leaving, she accepted and accepted again. Then, after she was done accepting she began the process of preserving. The flowers my mother raised are those you would find in Bonnie Jean's garden. The afghan coverlet in septagonals of different colored yarns that her mother used to crochet while outside the snow fell and frost made ice ferns on the windowpanes, this was just the selfsame afghan my sister in the winter would make to spread on her children's bed. The chicken and dumplings, the mincemeat pie, the ham loaf prepared from Mrs. Norris Bradbury's recipe, with bread crumbs and brown sugar, cloves and apricot halves, she probably served to her family with the same bit of doggerel verse our mother used to recite when serving it to us—

Some hae meat and canna' eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

But we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

Like mother like daughter, it was uncanny how perfectly Bonnie imitated with the slightest will to
emulate
so many of our mother's tastes, her choices, her way of doing things. As I got out of the car and strode up the walk to her front porch, pushing my hands down into my pockets and then pulling them out again, I wondered whether she'd be smoking a white clay pipe and sipping a glass of straight gin.

One of my nephews stood at the screen door. Which one is he? I wondered. Their names are what?—I should have planned this with a little more care. Charlie and Sam, but which one's the younger? Shall I make a guess? Shall I really say, Hey, nephew—it's your uncle Brice? and hope for the best? I could run back to the car and be gone before he even knew what happened.

“Mom, there's somebody at the door,” he announces, and saves me from either dubious choice.

“Bonnie?” I call into the darkened house through the screen.

I hear nothing, then I hear her say, “Ask what he wants, Sam.”

“What do you want, mister?”

“Sam, don't you recognize your uncle Brice?”

My nephew looks me up and down. He has quite the crop of acne, doesn't he, I think. Must come from Charlie Sr.'s side of the family. We were always dry-faced and dry-footed. Eczema and cracked calluses were more our problem. How old is this child? I wonder, and calculate. Ten, eleven.

“Who is it, Sam?” Bonnie Jean calls again from another room.

“He says he's my uncle.”

More silence. I smile at the boy who doesn't smile back.

“Well, tell him to hold on a minute, I'll be right there.”

“Hold on a minute—”

“—she'll be right here,” I say.

The boy stares at me without moving, then says, “You really my uncle?”

“Why would I pull your leg about something like that. Sure I'm your uncle. I brought you a present to prove it.”

He brightens some. “What present?”

“It's in my car.”

He opens the screen door and comes outside. “Let's see.”

Where is my sister? I wonder. “All right, come on.”

We walk to the car and I produce a Yankees baseball cap for him. “Thanks,” he says and tramps toward the house.

“Hey, wait, aren't you going to try it on?”

“Okay,” he says.

The cap is far too big for his head. I have another, a Mets cap, for his brother, Charlie Jr. I'd bought them both on a last-minute impulse at La Guardia, and now I'm glad I did.

“You'll grow into it, if you eat your greens,” I say.

“What are my greens?” he asks.

“You know, like collard, kale, spinach.”

I'm speaking in the singsong voice of an uncle. He doesn't know what I am talking about and stares at me with an open mouth.

“You know, like salad, lettuce?”

“I hate salad. You know what?”

Despite myself I look heavenward, close my eyes, say “What?”

“If I put this hat in really hot water it'll shrink and then I can wear it right now.”

“You're sure that won't wreck it?”

“Yes,” says he, turning his hat in his hands round and round, picturing it—I assume—the perfect size.

Then Bonnie finally emerges onto her porch.

The day Kip brought Jessica Rankin over was the most momentous since our flight to Chimayó. Yet for all the consequences of her entry into our lives, and for everything we would come to mean to her, the occasion didn't seem so laden with possibilities at the time. After all, by that April—April 1965—we had been gone from Los Alamos through nearly three-quarters of our tenure at the university, and Jessica was by no means the first girl Kip had brought around. Some had been more suited to him, some less, some lasted weeks, some only a night, and I'd watched not without awe how he attracted them. A waitress, an aspiring actress, a teaching assistant. His reclusive days were over.

—You're like catnip, I said once. He didn't react to the little provocation, other than to raise an eyebrow, which notified me to keep my opinion to myself. But I couldn't resist, and a few weeks later said it again, —Just like catnip to kittens.

To which he did respond by saying, —Listen, you nun you, you lily white wimple. If you want to be purer than the blessed virgin, go right ahead, but don't be jealous of those of us who aspire to be fallen angels.

—If you'd stop flapping your wings in my face maybe I could see the light, I answered.

That April day, Kip came in, cheeks aglow, eyes alight. One glance at him and I knew he was in love with this girl who was holding his hand, a little awkwardly, at his side.