My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  “Mama’s last name will still be Catts” was his only observation.

  So Simon, who was being wooed by the thirty-one-year-old preacher, was the last hurdle, but when he came home three days before Christmas, covered with red bug bites and hoarse from camping in the cold, he took this incredible twist to his seventeen-year-old world with true Simon Catts calm, saying congratulations in a barely audible rasp and shaking my hand.

  “I remember you,” he managed to creak out. “You taught me how to swan dive.”

  I hoped to God it was the only thing he remembered from the summer of 74, but was too nervous to worry it, for in the meanwhile, I’d gone to see the lawyer and found out why Myra’s red hair was no longer her primary asset.

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” I repeated. “Michael left me two hundred fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Well, it’s not free capital, is the point, Mr. Catts,” he said, showing me where to sign.

  But I kept repeating, “A quarter of a million dollars?”

  He was very patient, explaining taxes and investment strategies and withdrawal penalties, but I was miles out of my depth, and when he pulled out a prénuptial agreement, full of fascinating legal terms like abandonment and forfeiture, I was hesitant.

  “It’s not like I’m a con artist or something,” I said. Then after a few more paragraphs: “Alcoholism is a disease.”

  The lawyer was tactful. “Of course it is, Mr. Catts, but Michael—Michael,” he sighed, “was a detail man.”

  So I signed and didn’t ask any more questions, figuring if Michael could afford to leave me and Candace a quarter of a million apiece, I probably didn’t want to know how much Myra was worth, lest it strike me impotent for life. But when I left the lawyer and drove over to her house to get her approval for the suit I’d bought for the wedding, I began to entertain real doubts about this thing. I mean, it was clear that no one around here lived on Magnolia Hill anymore, and Myra, who’d always been my superior in many abstract, spiritual kinds of ways, was now incredibly rich. For some reason, it just didn’t sit well with me, and that prénuptial thing—it gave the whole marriage a nasty business taint, making me wonder if all this talk of love and commitment was merely a clever way to die without paying taxes.

  I was still shaking my head about it when I knocked on the French doors with the suit in my hand, and as soon as I saw her, it was suddenly all right again. She was rich, she was beautiful, she might have even grown into a little Sims-like nastiness, but she was still just Myra, her hair unbrushed at ten in the morning, barefoot in December, and when she opened the door for me, I kissed her neck, murmuring, “Here’s the suit. I might have to take it back. I just talked to Peter and now that I’m a partial millionaire, I’m thinking about finding me a nice young wife, one without all those stretch marks and things—”

  She only pulled away and smiled at me, and I finished, “—one that’ll be deathly faithful in marriage, but a little slack on this prénuptial stuff—”

  As soon as I said it, I realized Clayton was standing just around the corner, drinking milk from the jug at the refrigerator, grinning as if he’d heard everything.

  “Hey, you’re about two years too late,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Lori’s done taken.”

  I thought it was the funniest thing I’d heard in a long time, but Myra was not amused and sent Clayton to his room and me back to Mama’s with such awe-inspiring dominance that all my old fears resurfaced. I mean, this wasn’t sweet little Myra Sims anymore. This was a rich, red-headed Baptist widow, and by evening, I was entertaining so many doubts that Mama began to smell defeat and sought to close ranks by describing in great detail the sleazy lingerie Lori and Candace were giving Myra as a joke.

  “They say they’re underwear,” she said, “but they don’t look like underwear to me.”

  So I was hooked, scared but hooked, having to eat Tagamet the morning of the wedding, wishing to God I hadn’t gone bad on whiskey so I could enjoy the comfort of one quick shot. Then, to top it off, Brother Sloan came down with the flu, and Myra’s old buddy Brother Folger—a six-foot-four Knute Rockne type, with a butch haircut and a tight, mean face—had to perform the ceremony.

  It was fairly obvious he was madder than hell about it, but Myra gave too much money to the church for anyone to try to tell her what to do, and the most he could do was glare at me and bite off his words (“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to join this man and woman in holy matrimony—”) with a tight, angry smile that left me feeling pretty shriveled, hoping that with my new-found wealth I could somehow persuade the Southern Baptist Convention to transfer his call to the mission field in the not-too-distant future.

  Aside from that, everything else went pretty well, and though Myra and I were perfectly content to go home afterwards, Candace and Lori insisted we go on some sort of honeymoon. So we farmed the children out and drove down to the Redneck Riveria on Panama City Beach and booked the honeymoon suite of an off-name motel which turned out to be a huge maroon room with no furniture at all other than a king-size bed with a heart-shaped headboard.

  Myra, who had been predicting something of the sort when I told her the price (twenty-six dollars double occupancy), laughed when I opened the door, saying, “Now, this is what I call a honeymoon suite.”

  She went out on the small balcony, letting in a breath of clean December air, while I brought in the suitcases and surveyed the stark room with more than a little unease, for the thing which I feared most was rapidly coming upon me, and when Myra came back inside, I was lying on the bed, rubbing my eyes.

  “Myra, honey, I hate to have to tell you this, but after a week of repression and an hour’s worth of venomous stares from Knute Rockne, I’m not at all sure I’m gonna be able to do this magnificent bed justice.”

  She just smiled and lay down beside me, her hands on my face, and I was prepared for some hideous remark about how whiskey had done this to me, but she was kind.

  “It’ll pass,” she said, as if she’d seen this kind of thing before.

  I opened an eye. “Michael ever impotent?”

  She looked at me with tolerant annoyance, “Michael? Never” and began laughing, but I rolled away.

  “You git away from me—” I said, but she slapped me playfully on the tail.

  “Here. I’ve come on this trip prepared. You haven’t seen my sleazewear yet.”

  I ignored her, lying with my face on the pillow, wondering why these things always had to happen to me, while she rummaged around in her suitcase, laying out a handful of odd pieces of black spandex and ribbon and feathers.

  “I can’t figure these things out,” she said. “Me and Missy tried all morning.” She held one of them up. “Is this the top or the bottom?”

  “That’s a G-string, you hick.”

  She looked at me, “Well, what does that mean?”

  “It means it’s the bottom.”

  “Oh.” She looked at it a moment. “Well, what are the feathers and the whistle for?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said, burrowing back into the pillow. “I’m just a poor, fat, over-educated latent homosexual who can’t even get it up on his wedding night. Call Knute, he probably knows.”

  “Idiot,” she said, but with affection, then went to the bathroom, and after a moment, her voice drifted out. “I tell you what, my butt isn’t what it was ten years ago.”

  Then she started laughing, and I sat up. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see.”

  “No. I look like an idiot. Who wears this kind of stuff?”

  “Please?”

  “I look like a circus horse.”

  “Oh, Myra, come on—”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “I will not.” Then in a smaller voice, “Please?”

  And of course it did the trick. I guess I’d gotten into such a humiliation mode that I could only be aroused by groveling and begging, but who was I to argue? It worked. It more than worked. It was so sweet I didn’t
want to leave the room, even for meals, and by the next afternoon, Myra was whining.

  “I didn’t eat anything but breakfast yesterday. There’s a restaurant in the lobby. We’ll come right back—”

  “No, listen, baby, I’ll go get something from the machines, some Cheetos—”

  “I don’t want Cheetos,” she said. “I want food. I’m starving to death.”

  But she finally agreed to order pizza, and I was able to keep her to myself two whole days, and when we left that ugly maroon carpet and that hideous bed, I felt like I was abandoning a beloved child. And in the meanwhile, a few misconceptions had been cleared up, and I had a better understanding of not only Myra, but of my brother Michael as well.

  For one thing, I understood his phrasing when he remarked that Myra would lie still when he wanted her to. At the time, I thought it was factory slang for copulation, but after a few nights with a sane Myra, I knew why she’d made Michael take her out to the river when she decided the walls on Magnolia Hill were too thin because, let me tell you, she did about everything but lie still. I mean, till I got used to it, it just beat all I’d ever seen. It wasn’t that she’d fight against me or dominate the act, but she sure enjoyed herself, and by God, laughed more in the act of sex than any woman I’d ever heard of. And while the blank, smiling Myra of 1974 who gave in with such easy passivity had never struck me as abnormal, it was a far cry from this woman who talked and laughed the whole time without missing a beat.

  The more I considered it, the more I marveled that Myra could enjoy sex at all, much less with such abandon, for it was on our honeymoon that she commented on, for the first and last time, any aspect of her physical relationship with Michael. It came in the form of an offhand, late-night remark that this honeymoon was better than her first one, but it hadn’t been Michael’s fault.

  “I was just scared to death. I don’t mean shy, red-cheeked scared. I mean crying, puking, calling-for-my-Mama scared.”

  It was dark in the room when she said it, the sound of the waves hitting the beach barely audible through the open window, and her voice picked up an echo of their mournful sweep.

  “I just didn’t want him to touch me. I mean, I loved him, I wanted to marry him, I just couldn’t stand him to touch me. I thought it’d ruin it, ruin everything. I cried the whole wedding, and everybody thought I was so sweet, the nervous little bride, but listen, there wasn’t nothing sweet about it. It was sheer disgust.” She paused a moment, then sighed. ‘And poor Michael, we only had two days, then right back to Sanger he went.”

  I could feel something wet on my chest and knew she was crying, but that was all she offered, for she kept her relationship with Michael very private and never told me how long it took him, how many nights of patience, how many years of relentless faith, to get her to the place she was now, where sex was reclaimed from the voiceless abyss of incest and restored at last to a talking, kissing, laughing, natural act of love.

  Chapter

  16

  So the deed was done, the prenuptials signed, the post-nuptials begun, and it would be convenient to Gap the rest of my life to my death and chronicle how heartbroken Myra was, how she wept, but I am a historian by trade and feel a certain obligation to fill you in on the small matter of a few years’ worth of daily living in between.

  I suppose if I had one ounce of decency, I’d give the do-gooders of the world a little satisfaction by admitting I wasn’t as thrilled with my wife or my new life as I thought I’d be; that the rats of self-doubt, of boredom and ill-ease gnawed me in the heart of the night, and I secretly longed for freedom from the very thing I had so long pursued, for such is the nature of man. However, I believe I’ve not only mentioned, but by now have succinctly documented my profound lack of the most common shreds of human decency, and with all honesty and shamelessness must confess that—what can I say?—it was fun.

  I loved my life, I loved my wife, and most conveniently, I loved her children: Sim, who reminded me not as much of Michael as Daddy, struggling with a dominant idealism and a Cissie Catts recessive pragmatism; Missy, a sane Ira Sims, whose only concern in life was her orange hair and freckles, both considered a curse by local standards of female beauty and a considerable thorn in her fifteen-year-old flesh, until I had a stroke of genius and gave her all the Anne of Green Gables books for her birthday and turned it around a little, so she had some hopes of growing to be a handsome auburn-haired woman.

  And then there was Clayton, little Clayton, who had to be kin to me in some form or fashion, for we were so very much alike. Except that he was thinner, his hair darker and not so cowlicked, he could have been my double at age twelve: lazy, easy-going, only contrary when annoyed, then lapsing into such a biting sarcasm that I could not punish him, but like Mama, only go to the bathroom and put my face in a towel and laugh, which was just as well, for Myra would have let me take a straight razor to her before she’d have let any stepfather, even a blood-related one, lay a hand on her children. I’d seen the writing on the wall pretty early on and knew that no man would ever be as dear to her as the children she’d taken such risk to bear. Not me, not Knute, not even Michael. It was just not her nature, and I knew instinctively that if the grim reaper ever showed his face at our door and demanded a soul, she’d send me downstairs with a kiss and a prayer and that would be the end of that.

  Our first colossal battles were in this department, one over Missy’s shoes for the Sweetheart Banquet at Welcome, one over what Myra considered my corruption of Clayton’s morals. Both occurred within two days of each other, and for a while there I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, certain that by Easter my marriage would be nothing more than a cause for head-shaking among my fellow Baptists.

  Come to think of it, that was the first skirmish after all. Not Missy and her ninety-six-dollar magneta-blue pumps, or Clay and Hearts and Minds, but my presence (or absence, as it were) at Welcome Baptist Church. It happened on my first Sunday back, five days into the marriage, when everything was still looking pretty sweet, and I was foreseeing a life of uninterrupted bliss in my dear brother Michael’s house. I was even toying with the idea of finishing the book I’d left a dozen years before, that Michael had never thrown away, never even bothered to take off the walls of the servant’s quarters, the maps still hanging there in diffident silence, mildewed and curled and mostly pinless, but still intact.

  With the rest of the week given over to adjustments like learning the furniture business at the hands of Sam McRae (I found myself chairman of the board, a courtesy title, I am sure, but I wanted to do it justice if I could), I decided Sunday mornings would be the perfect time to set aside for the Cause and was upstairs early that morning, painstakingly rearranging pins in Sharpsburg when Myra came to the door, dressed except for her shoes, her hair in hot rollers.

  “Gabriel?” she said. “It’s nine-fifteen. You better get a move on. We don’t live on Magnolia Hill anymore. We live ten miles out.”

  I looked at her. “You need me to drive you in?”

  She returned my look. “No, I don’t need you to drive me in. Come on, I’ve got your suit laid out. Where’re your shoes?”

  It finally dawned on me that she was planning to fit me back into the family pew at Welcome, and with a lifetime of Sundays at stake, I sat her down on the narrow bed (same one, incidentally; sheets may have been the same for all I know) and tried to be reasonable.

  “Sunday mornings are the only time I have for my book, and there’s a good market for it now, a lot of interest in reenactments. I need to strike while the iron is hot—”

  “You can borrow Sim’s if you can’t find yours—”

  “No, listen, honey,” I said, still maintaining my patience, “I’m Espiscopalian. The pants to that suit are too big. Brother Folger hates me—”

  “I took the pants up last night,” she said, standing, and I pulled her back down.

  “Myra, listen. I attended Welcome Baptist three times a week the first seventeen years of my l
ife. I’ve been saved, I’ve been baptised, I’ve been rededicated every time they preached hell. I know every hymn by heart, I can quote more of the King James than Jerry Falwell, and I will gladly give whatever percentage is the going rate in tithes, up to and not exceeding ten percent. Okey-dokey?”

  She went to the door. “I can’t find your socks, either. They must be in the shoes.”

  When she was gone, I decided my best defense was no defense and went back to Sharpsburg a few more minutes, till Clayton came in all dressed up, his hair slicked back with water.

  “Mama says to come on. We’re all ready.”

  “I’m not going, son,” I said. (This was, incidentally, another courtesy title. I was finally to the age where I could son any male under twenty, and boy any white man—or any black man if I didn’t mind losing a few teeth.)

  He looked at me out of his Michael Catts eyes. “Are you saved?”

  I sighed and repeated my defense and when I was finished, he said, “Oh.”

  Then he went back downstairs, and I thought I’d have another round with Myra, but with great relief, heard them drive away, leaving me to recreate Sharpsburg with only a few adjustments, then wander back to the house around twelve to see what was on for dinner. What I found was a cold kitchen and an even colder oven, and I wondered what kind of Baptists these people were, going to church without a roast in the pot?

  But there was nothing for it, the house was empty, the television full of rattling fundamentalists, so I occupied myself as best I could, returning to bed with the Democrat, my eyes going back to the clock every few minutes, and being relieved when twelve-thirty finally rolled around.

  By two I was sweating, by three, calling the highway patrol, and I was riffling through the desk, looking for the Mercedes registration number, when I heard the key in the back door. With lightning speed, I ran back upstairs and hit the bed, so when Myra came in, she found me yawning over Safire, lifting my face for her kiss, asking how the service went.