by Holly LeCraw
“Compensation.” But her voice was light.
Now we had each other. Self-pity on any count was absurd. “I want it,” I said, pointing.
In the picture, May was sitting in a miniature Windsor chair, wearing a green velvet dress with a white collar. Her hair was a short pageboy, ending just at the childish fullness of her cheeks, her bangs martially straight (I imagined Florence wielding the scissors), her child’s hands folded in her lap. It all would have been sort of fatally American Gothic if she hadn’t looked so utterly self-contained, with a hint of exasperation in her dark eyes. Over them the brows were like delicate wings of birds. “Did they try to get you to smile?”
“Of course.”
“And you wouldn’t.”
“Would you have?” Now she was smiling. “Take it,” and she reached forward over the squadron of other frames.
“Oh, no, that’s—” Her hand hit the lacrosse picture and it toppled, taking others with it, in a falling line. I heard her quick intake of breath, although it could have been my own, and then we dissolved into laughter. “See, May-May,” I said, “you can’t upset the gods that way.”
“I don’t see why not,” May said, and turned to me. We left the rest of the pictures fallen, as they were.
“WHAT WOULD YOU BE DOING if I weren’t around?” I said. “How would you be amusing yourself?”
She turned to me. We were naked, in bed. We had been there for hours. We were pretending Preston had no idea. We could do whatever we wanted. “Charlie.” She advanced on me. “Poor sad Charlie.” She climbed on top, straddling me. She leaned close, her breasts swaying, but her knees were pinning my hands. “Poor pitiful Charlie. He is fishing for compliments.”
I stared straight back. “Yes.” I was shameless in my need.
Outside, it was snowing. It was only midafternoon but because of the snow the low light cocooned us. The house was practically silent. Preston was asleep—we knew this because there was a baby monitor on May’s bedside table. Every now and then it lit up and we heard him moan or sigh, one floor below, in the study that was now his makeshift bedroom, since he had quit climbing the stairs. Sometimes we heard the thump and snuffle of Percy rearranging himself on the floor next to Preston’s bed.
May’s room, where we were, had the semi-stripped mien of a place that was in the process of being left. The posters and construction-paper locker decorations were artifacts from high school, still on the wall only because of inertia. Sometimes I scanned them for signs of what May was like before, before, but there still wasn’t enough distance for me not to feel prurient.
But right then I wasn’t looking at anything. The kiss, however, ended before I was ready, May pulling away, and I felt it before I opened my eyes: she’d switched modes, she must be light for a little while, we had been so serious, sometimes it was frightening. Sometimes, she required facts. She wanted to build us a foundation; she was absolutely right; she was erasing a deficit, acquiring knowledge of me, my family, and it had to be a bit of a joke because she knew so little—there was an imbalance. “So tell me,” she said, as she’d said before and would again.
She knew the outlines, even Jimmie Garrett, although I had done my best not to Horatio Alger myself—not to Preston Bankhead myself. But right now she was interested more in my generation. “I thought all brothers hated each other,” she said.
“Of course not.”
“You talk about him like he’s perfect.”
“Well, he’s not. And how is that hating?”
“Not hating exactly.”
“He’s just the opposite of me. He looks like a model. He’s a math genius. He can’t spell.”
“You do hate him.”
“I adore him,” I say. “He’s a slob. There’re always holes in his clothes. Always needs a haircut. Girls call him all hours of the day and night.”
“Lovely.”
“You’ll have to meet him to understand.” There had to be some way to explain. “His charm is untainted. He will always be loved.”
She looked at me and in the half-light her face was sober, almost stern.
I said, “Why did you quit writing me? Last year?”
“Because it seemed hopeless,” she said, without hesitation. “Because I did not want to be a silly girl.”
I reached up to her hair. Her face. She settled down into me.
The light was almost gone. We drank that cup of time, pretending it would never run dry.
Then her voice came. It was nearly dark. “How could you ask that?”
“Ask what?”
“Earlier. How I’d be amusing myself. Amusing myself? Don’t you know?”
“Yes. I know.” She sank down, under, I held her, covered her. “I know.” I could barely see her face, the sea-deep eyes, as I curled around her in her childhood bed.
PRESTON INSISTED WE GO to the Lowells’ Christmas party.
Usually he didn’t like to be left, and at some point I realized this particular instance wasn’t magnanimity but an effort to pretend all was normal. “Why wouldn’t you go?” he demanded. We called the visiting nurse service, and didn’t tell him until the woman showed up at the house and it was a done deal. Meanwhile, he sat motionless in his chair, his hands precise on each armrest like a statue. It was almost funny, how the lightning bolt seemed to be materializing in one fist, but then he nodded at her stiffly. “There is a television in the back bedroom,” he said, meaning Stay away from me, and the LPN, who knew the drill already, smiled at us to let us know it was all right.
The party was crowded. At the front door, we looked at each other and then stepped apart. We weren’t willing to broadcast ourselves. But as the party went on the distance became more and more titillating and finally I said, “Do you know the best view of the labyrinth?”
“Show me.”
We wove our way, separately, through the people we knew so well, people who must have been wondering, but I didn’t think about that. Divya glanced at us, smiled. I went up the stairs; May followed a minute later. Behind us the noise of the party died away. On the third floor were several pinched, icy maid’s rooms (I heard Divya’s voice: My God, this house is a British novel) and then the attic. Straight ahead was a round window that swiveled on a horizontal axis, and when I reached it I pressed open the solid old brass window locks, letting in the cold air, and tilted it up for her. Carefully, she put her head through; directly beneath us, laid out like a map, was the labyrinth.
People down below were laughing. The sound floated up. May laughed too. “Don’t you feel like they’re little puppets?” she said. “Like you could reach down and flick them along with your fingers?”
“Shh,” I said, and put my hands on her lovely ass in the smooth black dress.
Outside in the cold people bumble and laugh. How Win trims the boxwood. Oh the hours! And Divya with her private smile. The homesick southern wife, so very long ago. I can see past May’s head: snow lay on the dark green, the circle right-angling, giving way to another circle.
Everything is beginning. I believe everything is still beginning. And when May draws her head back in, white flakes melting into her hair, she is smiling.
I’D LIKE TO SAY that dying brought out the best in Preston. I’d also like to say it brought out the best in me. Both would be lies.
One night after dinner Preston said, “Goddammit, when’s lunch?”
May and I exchanged a look. She said, “Daddy, we just ate. Do you want a snack?”
“Do not patronize me!”
He’d also said, in recent days, “Fred Hueffer wants me on the fucking steering committee,” and, one afternoon, sitting in front of a history documentary on TV (the only kind of show he’ll consent to watch), “I am just not going to get the sermon written, and that’s final.”
Once, May left the room and he leaned in to me. “I’ve been faithful to Florence throughout our whole marriage. Completely faithful.”
“I admire that, Preston,” I said.
“It was mostly out of my own pride,” he said, and then May came back and he shut up.
I pondered that one awhile, but never told her.
Quietly, it was agreed that someone should be with him at all times. He only ever wanted May, but sometimes, during the week, I stayed at the house while she ran errands. By then I was regularly staying overnight. She was vague about all this with her family. “They’ve never really thought I’d do anything interesting,” she said. “I don’t think they’d even notice us. If they were here.”
One afternoon, when I was with him, he was fidgety and petulant, refusing music, TV, me reading to him, a nap—and then all at once he smiled and said he would set up the chessboard.
I half expected him to ask for a drink; he’d become increasingly belligerent about habits and routines, and if he remembered that he usually started his game with a scotch on the rocks by his side, we’d be in trouble; but instead he moved his pawn, tipped his head coquettishly at me, and broke his cardinal rule, which was no chatting during play. “Charlie,” he said, “I like to know about people, and I realize I don’t know your middle name.”
He didn’t seem like Preston at all, but like an actor, a character. A genial nursing-home resident I could josh around with. “You’re asking after all this time? Well, I don’t know yours either,” I said.
The old, the real, Preston would have bristled. This one smiled indulgently. “I am Preston Broussard Bankhead,” he said. “Preston from my father’s mother, and Broussard from my mother’s mother. A family tradition.”
He was formal as a paper doll, and it was at that moment that I realized, once and for all, that Preston was dying. That sooner rather than later, he would not be there. He would be merely an absence. A space, nothing.
And I further realized that he wasn’t in his right mind, and I could say whatever I wanted. I could—not to put too fine a point on it—just make shit up. It was cruel and, in the moment, made complete sense to me. “I’m Charles Satterthwaite Garrett,” I said.
Which was untrue. My middle name was Spooner, my mother’s maiden name. How could Preston have known so little about me? How had my name never come up in conversation? He seemed to know everyone’s middle name. It was the sort of detail Preston Broussard Bankhead used to suss out on his own, climbing up people’s family trees to inspect the view.
I waited for him to call me on it, to furrow his brow and wonder aloud if he was confused. But he didn’t.
I was aware that Spooner would not impress him, might be a detail he actively disliked. Maybe I was protecting my mother from him. And protecting myself. Maybe I was seeing that hot little town she came from, where she took me only once, and even then I had no desire for Preston to sense any of it in me, to smell it on my breath.
I was protecting something that I hadn’t entirely figured out. It was, in the purest sense, none of his business.
He was waiting, I realized. “Satterthwaite’s from my father’s side,” I said, “an old name,” and I’d told another lie that felt like play and protection at once.
“I’ve been thinking about these things. I have a great deal of time to think now,” he said, waving a hand magisterially. He sat back in his chair, the game forgotten. “It’s important to know who you are. To know who’s around you. Because I’ll tell you.” And then, all of a sudden, he’s launching into the Grey boys sermon.
Always the same phrases, the same arc. “So, do we have relativism?” he intoned. “Isn’t one the most important? But what if it’s tainted? Custom, or culture, or conscience? Or all three? Because I’ll tell you, friends. Someday you’ll wake up and you’ll be on a different ride at the fair. You’ll be alone at the top of that Ferris wheel. You’ll be looking down at the landscape below. Little tiny people like ants. You’ll be alone but not lonely. You’ll realize how powerful you are, and that you never knew it.”
This was different. This was new. I leaned forward, in spite of myself.
“The notion of reinvention will seize you. You will excavate some larval form of yourself, some sixty-year cicada. Some ugly, horny bug! Do you hear me?”
Why couldn’t I give him one last chance, in this addled, unguarded state? To impress me, enlighten me? I’d been waiting for that, expecting it, since I met him.
“You’ll venture forth with wet wings and no baggage. These ideas will destroy your sleep, but you won’t care! The world finally knows who you are, you’re destroyed—rebirth is all you will have left! Be GRATEFUL!” He shook his head, and I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that in his mind he was stepping down from the pulpit, coming down to the chancel step. “Be grateful,” he whispered. “That’s what they say. Be grateful.”
I heard the back door open into the kitchen, but I didn’t turn around. I sent a silent prayer that May wouldn’t call out. I wanted the spell unbroken.
“The days will speed up. You’re in an ecstasy of possibility. You will have unspeakable choices before you—you’ve been expecting enlightenment—you’ve been bursting with hubris! But no—”
May was behind me now. She touched my shoulder and I covered her hand, pressing her quiet.
“—the brightness begins to fade. The grimy details are reappearing. The Ferris wheel … lowers.” I wanted to laugh but he was so utterly serious, holding us with a fierce whisper. “Everything is rotten. Autumn that year is rainy and the leaves are knocked off the trees before their time and the light is never properly golden and then one day you wake up and you shit blood.”
“Oh, Daddy,” May said, her voice catching.
It was done, over. That final, minor performance, capped by that last, grotesque, and ultimately false detail—because, while the cancer had spread to his bones and, clearly, to his brain, I knew it wasn’t in his bowel. Although I was glad beyond measure he had no idea I knew such things.
He was shaking his head, slow and mournful, ignoring us. Lately he’d refused both haircuts and shaves. His eyebrows were gray thickets. I thought of bearded Moses out on some crag, looking down on the Promised Land, forbidden to enter. Perhaps I’d say this to May. Perhaps not. We were both still, waiting for a coda, which made no sense because it seemed like he’d said his piece.
But as we sat in the stretching silence I felt my senses open. Someone had dropped dinner by earlier; I smelled roast chicken. Beside us, the fire crackled. The lamplight in the corners of the room reflected off the thick old woodwork, the creamy walls; Percy was asleep on the sofa; the Christmas tree in the corner glowed. May and I had decorated it a few days before—she insisted. She’d come around now to sit on the floor next to my chair, leaning, just barely, on my leg, and I felt a rising giddiness, a happiness so distilled it was almost painful, which surely could not be right, could it, with this old man disintegrating in front of me?
“Charlie,” he said, “do you believe life is infinite?”
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely. Yes.” Oh the abundance.
And he pounced. “Charles, you of all people. Do you think I’m waiting with bated breath for the many mansions? For the streets of gold?”
“No,” I said, willing to believe for another moment that I would like what was coming next. “Not literally.”
“Not literally,” he minced. “Oh, but we do believe life goes on. And on and on. That we never stop learning, or some other highfalutin’ version of immortality. Like the gods of Olympus! Or perhaps we come back! As a king the next time! A movie star! Sheer egotism! That is what I’ve realized. Terror at the thought of the world without one. Without one’s miraculous uniqueness! That is the infinity.” He looked down at the board, suddenly aware of it, and moved his bishop out to the middle, foolhardy, a move Ram would make. “Oh, why ask you, Charles, my metaphysical friend,” he said. “I think all is glorious to you, right now.” May moved closer. Preston saw, and smiled—and I felt a rush of relief. Yes, finally. Name it! Tell the world! Truth and love!
I looked at him ready for the warmth I never stopped expecting, a
nd maybe his blessing (oh we’re fools), and met instead a strange, off-kilter glint. “I think you are waist deep in the present right now,” he said. “Or should I say cock deep?”
“Daddy.” May stood up. Preston gave me a triumphant smirk.
“Am I wrong?” he said, turning to her. “Are not you and young Mr. Garrett here buried deep in the glorious mud of the mundane? Wallowing in the peccata mundi? The exquisite flight of young love, etcetera, et cetera? And you think that it will always last? That you will live forever? Making the beast with two backs?” He wheeled back to me and raised his arm, pointing a long finger. “Charles Satterthwaite Garrett. You shoeless piece of trash. Do you think I do not know what goes on in my house?”
It was like a fairy tale, a myth, where the name is the locus of power, the true name, and the good guy literally disarms the bad guy by calling it out—or vice versa. But I, of course, had gamed the system.
I started to speak, but May was ahead of me. “That’s not even his name,” she snarled. “You don’t even have his name right.”
He looked at me, caught off guard. “It’s true,” I said mildly. “I’m Charles Spooner Garrett.” I shrugged: It’s all right, old man. “Not Satterthwaite. That’s my stepfather.”
“You said … stepfather?” He looked from May to me. “Spooner?”
“After my mother. Anita Spooner. It’s a family tradition.” I glanced at May, saw the tears standing in her eyes, and stood up. How was I actually happy, just moments ago? “Come here, sweetheart,” and she came inside my arm, close to my side.
“May-May.” He looked back and forth, between us. His face was oddly askew. Out of the corner of his mouth, a thin string of drool. Back to me. “You said. You said you said.”
“Maybe we should get you to bed, Preston,” I said.
And then his arm comes down on the board; the pieces fly. “Do not patronize me!” he roars, or at least I think that’s what he wants to say, to bellow; but it’s gibberish, and all the words that come next are gibberish too except for May-May, May-May. She goes to him but his arms are still stretched past her. For a moment, I even think he is reaching for me. One hand is a claw, his mouth drooping, and as May sinks to her knees, her arms around him, I go for the phone. “Daddy, it’s okay. It’s okay,” she croons, but over her shoulder, his still-wild eyes on me, he is shaking his head.
