The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  “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.

  AND THAT DAY, that first day, when I’d seen May beside the bright green playing field, in the mist?

  They took a picture that day, the Bankheads. It turned out to be one of those fortuitous snapshots that acquires a distinct identity and function over the years, or so May told me. Someone would say, “In the lacrosse picture …” and everyone knew which one that was, although there were a lot of lacrosse pictures. And in this particular lacrosse picture, there wasn’t even much visible lacrosseness, except for Laird’s uniform, which was mostly hidden by others’ shoulders, and Laird’s sweat, which had glued his hair in a perfect tousle.

  The three boys and their parents: William, who was already in college, and who refused to answer to Binky anymore, do not call me that; Henry, the youngest boy, the sweetest; Laird, the best athlete; and then Preston and Florence flanking them, the frame fully filled with their five faces, the day’s flat light perfect, making the colors bluish and poignant. You can see why that picture survived, why it ended up as an eight-by-ten on the grand piano (which no one played) in the living room, along with more official portraits of weddings and graduations and christenings: by some trick of light, some alchemy of chance, they all look relaxed, with themselves and even more unusually with one another.

  They look like a family that laughs every night around the dinner table; Preston looks like a father whom the sons consult regularly, respectfully, gratefully—a father who takes long walks with each son in turn, scuffing through fallen leaves in a pretty, civilized wood. Florence looks like a mother who rules with a firm but fair hand, a taskmaster of the domestic who’ll make you fold your laundry and set the table and write prompt thank-you notes, a woman whose price is far above rubies. Her head is flung back with both satisfaction and gratitude: her sons are nearly grown, look what she has wrought! And the boys look solid, full of good humor and fondness. It is exactly, perfectly the picture that should be on the piano in the rectory of a boarding school.

  Their youngest member, however, cold and bored, had wandered off, trying to escape yet another of her brothers’ games. But they’d taken the picture anyway, and so, for that captured moment, it had been as though May didn’t exist.

  “The happy family,” May said to me, years later, as we stood in front of the photo, her hand in mine. “Fuck that.”

  Three

  Henry Bankhead, the one in the center of the lacrosse picture, was the only son left at Abbott when I started teaching there. Binky was in college, and Laird had just graduated. Henry was a senior, and so to both my relief and slight disappointment wouldn’t be my student, as I was teaching freshmen and juniors. As it turned out he was a popular kid in a way I could appreciate, not much of a jock, instead sort of ramshackle, with a tendency to resist the system, which I saw in his occasional columns for the school paper (“The Tyranny of Lights-Out,” “Why Can’t Ultimate Be a Letter Sport?”). I hoped I might get to know him a little. May was then still too young for Abbott.

  After Christmas break, though, I didn’t see Henry around. Finally I asked Divya Lowell about it. “Oh, Charlie, you are out of the loop. He’s gone to St. Luke’s. In Rhode Island.”

  “But he’s a senior.”

  Divya looked at me with what I could only call a sympathetic glare. “Drugs. All handled quietly. It would have been different …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Is Preston okay?”

  She looked at me with surprise. “Probably not. I haven’t talked to him.” The bell would ring soon for the next class. “You can ask Win about it,” she said. “Will you come on Friday?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to get sick of me,” I said, happily.

  “Nonsense! We’ll talk then.” The way she said it, I knew she didn’t think the situation so important. But to me it seemed the first chink in the finely wrought Bankhead armor.

  DIVYA AND WIN LOWELL LIVED near campus, in a big, drafty, very old house on a double lot. They, and the house, were famous, as I’d recently learned, for their annual Christmas parties, and also for the boxwood labyrinth in the back forty, as Win said, which had come with the place. On the street side, the house had an enormous Greek Revival portico. “I didn’t expect to come north and find Tara,” I said to Divya.

  “Nor me living in it,” she said, winking.

  Since school started, they’d been having me over for dinner nearly every week. Sometimes there were other Abbott people there, and sometimes it was just me. I was pretty sure they felt sorry for me,
but I didn’t care. “There’s not much to do in a tiny town like this,” Divya said, shrugging, and then she would put me to work with some simple task I couldn’t screw up, like draining pasta. We would sit at the big table in the kitchen, with their two young sons, Anil and Ram, eating at lightning speed and then zooming off somewhere, leaving us with our wine. I’d been legally drinking for mere months at that point, but no one ever mentioned that. As it got colder, sometimes we would go to the living room after and sit in front of the fire.

  Divya’s living room—“It’s her house,” Win said, “I just live here”— had bright white walls that stretched up to eleven-foot ceilings. She had painted the ceilings pale blue. “It must be delightful up there, with all of the heat,” she would say, drolly. Stretching all the way up the walls, above the abundant yard-sale furniture and odd Lowell heirloom, were paintings, vaguely representational, done by various friends, Anil and Ram, and Divya herself, in the colors of kings and queens: cobalt and canary and verdigris, ruby and sable. She had a fondness for canvases with the paint layered on until it rose in little topographical drifts, and every now and then she would let her hand hover dangerously close to the surface of one, as though she might read it like Braille. “I wish I could stroke them.” She looked to either side, in high espionage mode. “Sometimes I do,” she whispered.

  If Win caught her, she would move her hand away. “I think it would be good for them,” she said defensively. “Good for them to feel our electricity, to remind them that they are made things. Like us.” Win rolled his eyes. “He is not allowed to touch them,” she said severely.

  “I don’t want to,” Win said.

  “Exactly.”

  The story of the labyrinth was that it had been put in by the house’s original wealthy owner, to cure his homesick Mississippi bride. It was boxwood, thigh high and forty feet square, and was a copy of one on the plantation where the wife had grown up. If I ever called it a maze, Win would correct me. “A maze, you get lost,” he said. “A labyrinth, you don’t.”

  He had turned himself into a garden historian to restore it and keep it up. He liked to complain and talk about the vegetables a plot that size could produce, how they could feed the town on it. But countless times I found him out back, planting replacement cuttings, or trimming away at a hedge that was already marvelously squared-off and smooth, humming to himself.

  “Do you know if it worked?” I asked once. “For the homesick wife?”

  “No idea.”

  Win’s own first wife had died when they were both young, in a car crash, and he said he’d nearly given up hope (in what, he did not specify) before he met Divya, who was now in her mid-thirties. He was a decade and a half older than she was. She had come to America to study literature, and then, when she came to teach at Abbott, “I snapped her up.”

  He wore plaid flannel shirts and ancient tweed trousers, and a graying buzz cut. He seemed like the kind of man who would know how to fix your dishwasher or your car or your furnace—the old-time, Greatest Generation kind of self-sufficiency, although in point of fact he’d served in Vietnam, something he rarely mentioned. She often wore saris, although she was not above wearing a fleece vest on top, to stay warm in their leaky house. Inside, Divya was often barefoot and Win, grudgingly, in slippers, his boots at the door, at the perpetual ready for mud season. He was, of course, from Vermont. Their sons had Divya’s wide dark eyes and Win’s square jaw. His hands were big and calloused but he touched the tops of their dark, glossy heads gently.

  That night I asked about Henry Bankhead. “Pot in his gym locker,” Win said shortly.

  “Seriously? How stupid can you be? Who found it?” I said.

  There was a pause. “I did,” Win said.

  “Oh.”

  I supposed Win had known Henry his whole life. I imagined Win confronting him. Imagined him standing there with the baggie in one of those big hands, shaking his head. “Even though it was a first strike …?”

  “It wasn’t. Thing was, he was dealing too.”

  “My theory is he wanted to be caught,” Divya said.

  “You realize that once this would have been nothing,” Win said. “Or not much. Used to be sex was the boogeyman. Drugs all over the place when I first started here. I was a dorm master for years—believe me, we looked the other way. All the time. Not now, though.”

  “Why did you say he wanted to get caught?”

  Another pause. I felt complicated currents of hesitation flowing between them. “Preston has had his troubles,” Win said.

  Divya raised an eyebrow and I knew instantly that—no surprise—she disliked Florence. She said, “It’s not always a happy house.”

  I seized on the not always. Meaning sometimes it was. It looked happy to me. The Bankhead house, the physical house, looked ideal in fact, if a slightly less quirky ideal than the Lowells’ multicolored behemoth: it was a big Victorian, a couple of shutters missing, paint on the front steps worn away, piles of sports equipment on the porch. When the garage door was open, you could see a sculptured heap of bikes and camping gear, and in the side yard were tomato cages with dried vines left over from the summer. A little sloppier than I would have expected from a woman like Florence, but I chalked up the disorder to the boys, who were still in and out on weekends, and to a cheerful ethos of industry, of numerous projects in various states of completion.

  “I think perhaps Florence imagined something different,” Divya said. Win radiated silence. “She’s from some very old family, down south. And what’s her father again? Win?”

  “He’s a bishop. In Virginia.”

  So Florence Bankhead had had thoughts of something bigger: a grand rectory somewhere, visiting dignitaries. And southern warmth. Instead she was stuck here, ninety miles from Boston, at the Abbott School—a place genteelly clinging to the second tier, New-England-boarding-schools-wise. A place I already loved, but maybe she did not.

  I wanted to ask more, but I resisted, and Divya, seeming to sense my restraint, reached for my plate to give me seconds, whether to reward me or fortify me I wasn’t sure. “It’s not a big mystery,” she said. “I just think they’re not as well matched as they seem to be. Those two.” She handed me back my plate. “Henry will be happy,” she said, as though I’d asked. “Don’t worry.” The eyebrow again. “There are far worse things than being kicked out of one preparatory school and going to another one. My God.”

  “So there’s just the daughter left,” I said.

  “May.”

  “Poor kid,” Win said. “I wouldn’t want to rattle around in that place with Preston and Florence, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Winship.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” he said, and Divya looked obscurely pleased.

  I had just about given up on figuring out Preston’s purported magic. Sometimes, during a sermon, especially if he was quoting, say, Eliot or Auden, I felt a tingling of uncanny inspiration, a nerdy mind-meld that made me giddy. Now I have something to tell him. But up close, he seemed surprised that anyone, including me, would feel a claim to him.

  Now, in the hallway beyond the wide living room door I saw, and heard, the boys whiz by. Ram wore a crown and a cape; Anil, in a cowboy hat, was whacking at him from behind with a thing that I thought was a sword but then realized was a wand, tipped with a silver star. “I have turned you into a toad!” he howled. “Quit running! Quit running!”

  “I’m hopping!” Tremendous thumping up the stairs.

  “How was your vacation, Charlie?” Divya asked. “How was Atlanta?”

  I told them a little about the enormous Christmas dinner (table for twenty, multiple forks) at Bobo and Big Hugh’s, my step-grandparents’, one of the usual command performances that no one seemed to mind but my mother and me.

  “You’re a regular southern gentleman,” Divya said.

  “I guess you don’t know many southern gentlemen.”

  She tilted her head. “Do you feel like a foreign person there?”

/>   I felt a familiar shame: I needed to appreciate what I had. “It’s where I was born and raised. So that wouldn’t make any sense, would it?”

  “It’s very hard to go home,” Divya said.

  “Div knows what that’s like,” Win said. “But you came here knowing you wouldn’t go back, didn’t you, Div?”

  “Ha. I was forced to stay,” Divya said serenely. “I was cajoled.”

  “You wanted to be cajoled.”

  “So wise, Win Lowell,” Divya said. “So wise.”

  Her voice lilted along. I loved that voice. I wanted to ask her to read me a bedtime story.

  The flames of the fire licked and rose; the childlike paintings glowed on the walls. I thought of Divya’s palm hovering. Win ignored her, or seemed to, but happiness moved, nearly imperceptible, like a slow ocean swell over his face.

  ONE DAY I RETURNED home to find Angela Middleton in the driveway unloading her minivan, the baby clinging precariously to her hip, the two older kids in full tantrum, and a bag of groceries scattered on the ground. “Oh jeez,” I said, “let me help you,” and bent down to grab a can of chicken noodle soup.

  “Could you just take him?” she said, and without waiting for an answer she thrust the baby at me.

  “Sure,” I said, but he was already in my arms. He was heavier than I expected, and I slid both arms under his padded butt. “Hi, there,” I said. “Hi, little baby.” The other two were screaming so loudly that no one would hear a thing I said, except for the baby, Zack, himself. Who wouldn’t tell.

  I hadn’t held a lot of babies but whenever I did I thought of Nicky, still a vivid physical memory—he’d been a trusting, soft-spined lump on my hip, requiring two arms. I remembered that. And always the smile of joy, as though he’d been waiting for me. How when I took him the responsibility was suddenly fierce: he made no babyish efforts to disguise his dependence. And why would he?