by Kia Corthron
Their days and nights are blissful, and yet there are times when she glimpses him, when he’s at his bedroom desk alone and doesn’t realize she’s awake, or even when he’s sleeping, and a terrible affliction crosses his face. Some torment from his past he cannot escape.
They are recently married and Paulina very pregnant when Orville comes home with news: Surprise! His long-lost brother has shown up.
“You buyin?”
The man from behind the counter.
“You been here half an hour, you can’t jus—” Randall, sitting on the floor cross-legged, looks up and the man trips back. “Oh! Sorry, you okay? You need somethin?” Randall is confused, then realizes what he is feeling must be registering on his face. He looks down at the journal, turning to the front cover. $5.50. He pulls out his billfold, hands the cashier a ten.
“I can get the change on the way out.” His voice is quiet.
“Yes sir.” The man nods and walks away.
Something in Orville’s wild eyes as he tells his wife that his brother is about to walk through the door, coupled with Orville’s silence on the matter of his family, frightens Paulina. And yet her heart pounds with a certain eagerness: her first in-law! A window to Orville’s past! And at dinner Edmund is courteous, even warm. Soon afterward Paulina retires for the evening, leaving the brothers to themselves. She lies awake a while, something bothering her, haunting her, despite Edmund’s cordiality, perhaps because of Edmund’s cordiality, which doesn’t seem to correlate with Orville’s secrecy. Then she’s in a room surrounded by monsters, men in men’s clothes with grotesque faces. At one point in the dream she recognizes the gait and gestures of one of the monsters as those of Edmund’s, and she’s afraid, but the dream doesn’t truly kick in to a nightmare until she is suddenly aware that Orville is among the monsters, his presence is palpable, and she’s not distressed that he’s a monster per se but rather that she can’t discern which monster, she doesn’t know who he is, going from one beast to the other in a panic, trying to pull off their masks except they aren’t masks so they won’t come off.
The next morning Paulina sits up in bed reading a magazine. He stumbles in, having pulled an all-nighter with his brother, seeming to be sleepwalking, and he tells her he would like to nap just five minutes, that Edmund had stepped out a moment, and Orville places his hand on Paulina’s stomach and is about to ask a question about the baby, his hand signing the question, but before he can complete his thought he has conked out.
Something intrusive and inexplicably sinister when his brother slowly pushes their bedroom door wide, and proceeds to have a private chat with Paulina. Edmund has a confession to make.
Randall claps the journal closed, trying to steady his breathing. The pages are now damaged, sweat and tears, so he feels it’s only right he has made the purchase. He slowly opens it again.
Edmund tells Paulina that when he was in high school he got into a fight with another boy over a girl. The girl finally chose the rival, and although Orville warned his younger brother to let it go, Edmund could not. He hunted down his enemy and stabbed him to death. Reform school till twenty-one.
A cry escapes Randall. He holds the periodical tight against his chest, eyes closed. He’s certain everything he has read up until now has been fact, and he whispers to his sister-in-law his relief for this single departure from the truth: “Thank you.”
The dog days of summer had descended upon them when Paulina accompanied Orville to the clinic. She had told him, It’s nothing, It’s nothing, her hands still inadvertently speaking the words over and over even after he had been taken in for examination and she was sitting in the waiting room. She looked around at the others. Many of them would receive bad news, and she selfishly prayed to be among the few winners in this game. She was returning from the bathroom when she saw the doctor standing there, staring at her. His face. He turned, expecting her to follow, but her legs were frozen, her body stuck. She had not yet heard anything devastating, she would stay here fastened to this moment, in this moment safe.
Sitting with Orville in the ambulance transporting him to the hospital, her hands were aflutter. That Dr. Alvarez has said the patient survival rate had improved in recent years, that Orville had been otherwise healthy, didn’t smoke, rarely drank. Orville nodded without responding. When the nurses asked Paulina to step outside the room as he underwent a procedure, he asked her to go home, to open his lower desk drawer and find the superintendent’s contract he had signed and to bring Felix, her old lawyer friend from Gallaudet, to see him. As the two men discussed his pension, how it would go to her, and Orville was being advised on the drafting of his will, she was burning with fury. She would not jump to the worst-case scenario. They only needed to find a donor.
The problem was family would make the best match, not to mention would be most likely to volunteer, and his parents and sister were all dead. And his brother. When they had exhausted every possibility for a bone marrow donor Orville still refused her pleas to contact Edmund. In desperation she finally stooped very low, suggesting that his feud with his brother had taken precedence over his love for his daughter, that in clinging stubbornly to the grievances of his past he was apparently more than willing to allow his daughter to grow up fatherless.
Even after all the moments she had ascertained that unnamed misery in Orville’s eyes, she had never seen anything like the anguish she had provoked now, and it broke something inside her. And at that moment Jade came running in, followed by Paulina’s babysitter friend Nina who stepped out to leave the family alone. If Paulina could never bring herself to believe Orville would leave her, then she certainly couldn’t suggest such a thing to their child, but Jade’s father had become weaker with each visit, the tubes in his arms, coming out of his nose, and suddenly the five-year-old seemed to understand everything. She burst into tears, holding her mother, her back to her father. And then he asked her what shade of purple she would like her room to be. This was a subject that had been dropped since his illness had consumed the family, and the child turned to him, showing new interest. She asked him what purple he liked. And he told her a story that he had never before shared with Paulina, of being a youth in Alabama, and his jealousy when his only brother had suddenly found a new friend and, Orville had felt, abandoned him. There were days when Orville would go alone to a field of heal-alls. The violet wildflowers could grow two feet high and he would sit, only his head above them, and he would be calmed, finally fully comprehending the plant’s namesake.
The babysitter came for Jade. When they were alone Orville gazed at his wife, a tenderness in his eyes. She was certain he was reconsidering contacting his brother. But then he fell asleep. She vowed to ask him again as soon as he woke, but in his slumber he acquired an infection which put him into septic shock, and he was rushed to intensive care.
So without his permission she wrote to his brother. For the rest of her days she would have to live knowing her last desperate words to her husband had been so deeply hurtful, and that with her next deed, in going directly against his expressed refusal regarding Edmund, she had betrayed him. She never heard back. They had not been in touch since Edmund’s visit, and for all she knew he may have moved and never received her request.
In intensive care Paulina put her unconscious husband’s hand into hers and her fingers spoke to him. Jade asked for a haircut. We argued, and she won. Actually it looks quite cute. She said she can’t wait for Daddy to see. Oh when you come home you’ll be surprised. We have completely rearranged the living room furniture! Then Jade decided she wanted to hide plastic Easter eggs—in August! She hid the whole dozen but there was one I couldn’t find, and she couldn’t remember where she hid it. We turned the apartment upside down and finally I told her it was alright, but she began to bawl. And bawl, and bawl, and bawl, I could not get her to stop.
Her husband’s breathing was quite shallow now. She sat back in her chair gazing at h
im. She dozed. In her dream he held their daughter on his knee and opened her favorite book, the child seeing it through his signs and hearing it through her own voice, the story she loved to hear but that he never could.
In an old house in Paris
that was covered with vines
lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
She had not been asleep more than two minutes. When she awoke, momentarily she forgot everything and decided this summer the three of them would go to the South Carolina beach she used to enjoy with her parents and siblings when she was growing up. Why had she never thought of that before? And then she realized Orville was gone.
Eighteen years in New York, and he had never made strong bonds outside of his wife and daughter. Who would present the eulogy?
By happenstance on the corner of 43rd and Ninth she ran into Clifford Manz, a former student of Orville’s from his sign-language teaching, who expressed his sincere sorrow. Learning sign had led him to find his wife, a deaf woman. If there is anything he can do. Paulina replied instantly: Can you deliver the eulogy? You only need read it and interpret it for the deaf. The young man was naturally taken aback, but he hesitated only a moment: It would be an honor.
The day Orville had told Jade about sitting in the patch of heal-alls, which was the last time he had seen his daughter, his last conscious hour, Paulina had taken Jade to the paint store to buy the violet she had requested. Two days after Orville had passed, the evening before the funeral, Paulina was in their bedroom making final edits to the eulogy, glancing at Jade who was asleep in her mother’s bed as she had been the last six weeks since her father’s admittance to the hospital. Paulina walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water and happened to pass by the can of violet paint, which she had forgotten about. It was only then that she began to cry for the first time and she didn’t stop bawling until dawn.
Although Orville tended not to become close to people, he had touched a great many and they came in droves to pay their final respects. Clifford Manz stood when he was introduced to read the eulogy. He looked down at the paragraphs Paulina had written, and he spoke them with his hands, never uttering a word.
Randall stares at the cover of the journal, his eyes fixated on the word: FICTION. Wishing to garner from it some remnant of hope but, at last, he knows. After three long years of searching, five since B.J.’s passing, someone, perhaps their mother, had intervened, bringing Randall this gift of closure, that he may finally begin the process of mourning his brother. And, as a sob suddenly escapes, he realizes he can also now truly grieve his son. He would tell Monique, and she would be relieved, and he would move back upstairs and they would go back to being a family again. Minus one.
It occurs to him that B.J. must have died within eight months of Benja. Randall had gone to his sister’s funeral, arriving just in time for the final viewing Tuesday night, staying for the service Wednesday morning, and then he was gone. It had been his first time back to Prayer Ridge since he’d left seventeen years before. Monique did not accompany him. There with his relatives he’d felt like he was sitting in a room full of strangers. He’d leaned over and kissed his sister in the casket goodbye. And now the clarity of B.J.’s passing. There was no one else left in the world who could understand the joy and the pain of growing up with the Evanses of Prayer Ridge, circa 1940.
He starts to walk out of the shop when the cashier reminds him of his change. Randall waits as the man opens the register.
“May I have a bag please?” Randall is not sure why, but suddenly he feels the need to wrap the journal in something. Protection.
The man is pulling out the sack when the phone rings. “Yeah, the latest Rolling Stone should be in,” absently glancing in the direction of MUSIC. When he hangs up, holding the change and magazine in its bag, he realizes his customer is gone.
1983
1
May 14, 1983
Dear Uncle Dwight,
How are you?! I can’t believe how long it’s been!
All’s well here. I just completed my finals and am looking forward to graduation next week. (Thank you again for the check!) I did well overall, 3.6 average. I know that I fluctuated for quite some time, but in the end I settled on Poli-Sci with a minor in Black Studies, a pre-law schedule. Yes, I’m following in the footsteps of my “esteemed” parents!
But I would like to live life, to learn a little about the world and myself before heading back to academia. An old dormmate of mine has been in Togo a year with the Peace Corps and has invited me to come over and visit him. Say no more—I bought a one-way ticket! (That took care of the credit card I had just been bestowed . . .) My plan is to work and save money over the summer (and learn French!), then to fly to Lomé, stay a few weeks or months with my friend to be of use in any way I can, and then do a little traveling around the continent.
Regarding the summer job. Sadly with the recession many full-time positions have dried up. (Did you know it’s been predicted by the end of the year more banks will fail than during the Depression?! Thank you, President Reagan . . .) So I feel very fortunate, having applied for internships with law firms all over the country, to have been offered three! The one that speaks to me most is Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco.
Corporate law? you may ask. Eliot’s son??? Haha! Well, I can’t see myself spending the rest of my days there, but MoFo will certainly look impressive on my résumé when it comes time to apply for law school.
This is a long way to say—Uncle Dwight, might I stay with you for the summer? I know that’s a lot to ask! But I promise I’m neat! My internship starts June 1st so I’m flying into San Fran May 31st (TWA, arriving at SFO 2:08 PM) and the job ends August 30th so I would depart September 1st. (Flying to Africa that evening!) If this seems huge, then perhaps I could stay just one month? June? That would give me time to find another place for the rest of the summer, a youth hostel if nowhere else, and a first paycheck or two to offer for it.
I hope I haven’t put you on the spot. I had to ask. As The Judge always says, “Nothing beats a fail but a try!” And if it’s not possible, I completely understand. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’m sure I can drum up somewhere to crash.
But please at least consider my request, Uncle. Because the truth is I chose the San Francisco job so I would have an excuse to spend some time with my father’s brother. It has been way too long!
I hope you are well, Uncle Dwight—healthy and happy and thriving.
Love,
Your Nephew,
Rett
Dwight sits at his drafting table, absently caressing Carver on his lap, the early morning sun flooding through the east-facing picture window. He reads the neat four-page letter for the twentieth time since its arrival three days ago. Not a scratch mark, meaning Rett is either very self-assured in getting it right the first time or very meticulous in having written a first draft prior to what was sent. Dwight doesn’t remember his nephew writing to him since high school, and he hasn’t seen him since the boy was in the second grade. The last time he remembers even talking with him on the phone was when Rett had first started college, the fall of ’79. Soon after Dwight lost control of his life again.
He looks at the balled-up papers in front of him.
He looks out the window, the bay in the distance, then stands, Carver hopping to the floor, and turns around to gaze at the loft-like space called his living room, the dining area on the other end and beyond that the kitchen, with doors along the north walls leading to the two bedrooms and bath—his bright, spacious, quiet apartment. Keith’s apartment. Dwight walks over to Keith’s two paintings on the south wall, each two and a half feet wide by four. One a self-portrait, the other titled Dwight, 1960, both somewhere between post-modernism and abstraction. Dwight didn’t think it was ego that made him feel the piece representing himself was Keith’s greatest artistic triumph. By no means was
it the only time he had rendered Dwight on canvas, neither could Dwight say the composition brought him any joy, but Keith, for the only time Dwight could remember, had clearly worked without the burden of self-conscious adherence to some convention or to some approved unconvention, had instead simply followed his instincts and depicted with astonishing precision the rage and torment Dwight was undergoing at the time. Because he so recognized himself in the work, upon its completion a year after the date in the title Dwight had snarled to its artist that it belonged in the garbage. Given the unrestrained shouting match that ensued, he assumed Keith had followed his instructions to the letter, and for good measure had also tossed any other likenesses of Dwight Campbell he had been fool enough to waste his time on. So Dwight had wept when he found the piece in Keith’s collection posthumously. He’d hung it as a reminder of what he was and never hoped to be again, and as a tribute to his closest friend.
Dwight sits at the drawing board again. After a few moments he carefully reaches for his pen.
He studies the note one last time, bites his lower lip, and seals the envelope.
He dishes out a wet canned breakfast and pours fresh water for tan Carver and her black brother Banneker, cleans the litter box, and by quarter to seven leaves his apartment to walk the three blocks to the school. He is fifty-four and slim, wearing one of his three identical gray jumpsuit uniforms. On the way he passes the mailbox. He pulls down the trap, and sees a little woman hanging inside. It’s Tiny, Uncle Sam’s mother, the one the whites lynched. She’s freshly dead, the noose around her neck, head tilted lazily to the side. Then she comes back to life, lifting her face to look at Dwight. “Sure you wanna do this?” He drops the letter in and shuts the door with her still hanging, then heads off to work.
