“Eng.” She jerked back, her complexion turned white as dough. “What has gotten into you?” Moist patches of her scalp were visible under her thin gray hair. Already I could feel the black bubbles Chang’s drinking aroused in my head. But alcohol was not why I grabbed for her again.
“My word, Eng,” Sarah said, smoothing her dress. “Please.” She frowned as if I’d done exactly what she had been afraid I’d do, which was ridiculous, and made me angry, because it was so unlikely that I would have wanted to kiss her that for her to expect it was an indignity. She rose from the couch and walked off to join her sister.
I could feel Chang’s eyes on me. I did not look at him. He put his flask back in his pocket. I could feel the black bubbles. I looked out the window, at the line of mountains. No, alcohol was not to blame for my actions. The sky was getting lighter by this hour; it must have been past midnight. I was too tired to rise from my divan and go to bed. The dusky sky above the tree line winked as birds glided by the moon.
“It cold for this time of year,” my brother said.
I did not respond.
“Don’t worry.” My brother was slurring his words. “Don’t worry.” He rested his hand on the back of my head and started to pat.
“What did you say?” I did not want his sympathy, his compassion based on what he thought I was upset about.
Chang held in another belch, and I felt my own breast churn.
My brother was now as frail as that little kitten, the alcohol having thinned him; he leaned weakly into me. I waited for another tremor from his chest. “So foolish, we were,” he said in a whisper.
I looked at him.
“We had never thought women marry us.” He reached for his flask again. “Remember—years ago? So happy.” Bile thickened his voice. “We had never thought any would.”
“Please, stop talking.” I said.
He shook his head and muttered, “Never thought . . .” His laugh quavered like a sob before he took another gulp. For the first time, I envied him the counterfeit solace of the flask.
Down the hall, Sarah had united with her sister, and snatches of their unintelligible whispering followed. Many years earlier, at the time of our courtship, and even into the earliest days of our paired marriages, I had found the girls’ hushed murmurs appealing. I did not find it so now.
“What you think they talking about?” A chain of suppressed coughs clattered through his body. And mine. “I could put hands over my ears and I still guess,” he said. “One spider asking another, ‘You making enough string for both?’ ”
At last we all went to bed. Chang and I were lying face-to-face on the mattress. Outside rain fell lightly and in the bedroom it was dusky and cold. With Adelaide standing over us brushing her hair in the dark, I was thankful for any movement that yielded a glimpse of her face. Bringing her flax comb through her hair, every lift of Addie’s meaty arm allowed a view of her nose in the crook between her forearm and shoulder. When she turned briefly toward the window, I saw the flash of her profile—her rousing nose, fleshy cheeks, her high hairline. I tended toward her ever so slightly, and my brother, as drunk as I had ever seen him, did not seem to notice our shift forward. The burden of his weight and how unjust it was that I could not touch her face! The impossible mistake of my position.
Adelaide lowered one knee onto the mattress, then the other. She knelt there, a very full woman. But her heft did not affect the line of her chin or cheek or her pretty neck. “Adelaide.” Chang opened his eyes to his wife, his speaking garbled. “Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide—”
The deadweight of my brother falling forward as he reached for her almost pulled me off the bed. Steadying us, I leaned rearward until our shoulders touched the soft of the mattress. I brought my hand to Chang’s shoulder and shook him, but he did not awaken. Drool lacquered his chin.
Chang’s alcohol was percolating in my brain. I felt swoony. “I cannot believe my brother is so drunk,” I said with a stupid laugh.
“It should be obvious to you’all by now,” Adelaide sighed, “I don’t find it hard to believe.” She was facing away from us, pillow under her head and speaking toward the wall.
I allowed myself the exquisite gratification of defending my brother to his wife—knowing what her response would be. “He is witless but kind,” I said.
“That rummy Chinaman?” Her sigh was as long as the Yadkin. “Please.”
“Adelaide,” I said.
Her back made a round lump under the covers.
“Adelaide.”
“What?” she said, still not facing me.
“Adelaide.”
“What is it?” she looked at me over her shoulder with the grimace of a wearied schoolmarm.
It was at this point I decided to lean across my brother’s body to give my brother’s wife a kiss.
Nothing could have been less rehearsed, nor riskier, nor any more uncomfortable for Adelaide or me. She turned her head away in quick panic. I kissed her retreating ear—smacked my face against the side of her skull, a sweaty taste to her hair. She pulled her whole body away from us in horror now—slid over the bed as far from me as she could. I had never known such longing.
“Are you cracked?” she whispered harshly, again facing away from me toward the wall, wiping her newly wet ear with her hand.
When she looked at me over her shoulder again, a bead of saliva glistened on her heavy lower lip in the dim light of the moon. She shot an anxious glance at her slumbering husband. “Are you gone squirrelly, Eng? I—”
Meanwhile, I could make out Chang’s snoring. I shook him—hard—to test the depth of his sleep. The shake tugged me forward; his head lolled, he gasped slobberingly for breath but his eyes remained closed. He would not wake, that was certain—and just now I did not even care if he did. I was feeling drunk from my brother’s alcohol, but I do not use that excuse.
I was shaking; had I not been lying down, I would have been unable to stand. I rolled myself over my brother and toward his wife, and as she was shrinking from me—I think she may have been trying to get to her feet—I lunged for her shoulder with my free hand, and I squeezed it. Her skin was almost as soft as breath under my squeezing fingers. She did not move. She may have been trying to.
I stretched even farther to kiss Adelaide again, with my brother snoring under me. I kissed her shoulder, and when she turned to me to say something—maybe “Stop,” maybe something more encouraging—my lips touched hers and her mouth opened to mine with a buckwheat taste. I was half above my brother, who was lying between us; Addie’s buckwheat and milk breath spread warmly in my mouth and down my throat. Saliva in the corner of her mouth dripped to wet my chin. There was snuff and buckwheat, milk and fervor in the kiss. My feeling was shock. Two decades of anxiety slipped from my body as a warmth inside my chest emanated out. I was kissing Adelaide over and over in this awkward position, breathing in her scent as she kissed me from over her shoulder; I breathed in the perspiration in her hair. I was unaware of my present state of material being. I did not feel the blankets around me. I did not realize at that moment I had a conjoined brother, and most of all, I did not come near to the thought that I had a wife across the hallway. I did not consider the folly of the situation, nor what would happen next.
Adelaide turned over and inched toward me. She put her arm around me as best she could without disturbing Chang. She got on her knees, leaning over my brother to press her chest into my shoulder, gripping me with sudden agitated confidence, pressing my shoulder to her shoulder as she bent her stomach over Chang’s side, and then she lifted herself higher to bring her face to mine, her lips to my lips, to my throat, and she pulled away to look at me with burning shy eyes.
I could not have withstood her rejection at this point. My longing for her had crumbled into an infirmity. I was more sweat now than flesh. I shifted farther across Chang with a good deal of effort—he was lying directly beneath me now—and I lowered my head into the fat of Addie’s shoulder as if we were conjoined and I kissed her
neck over and over as I began to cry.
“Adelaide.” My heart was emptying. “Adelaide.”
“Shh,” she said. “Shut up.”
Chang moaned in his sleep, his breath ruffled the hair on my chest. Addie leaned against her husband to lift my head, and she kissed me. I had never felt this before, a woman insatiate, and grasping. I tried to pull away for a breath, but she held the back of my head and would not let me move. Her fleshy cheek rested against my slumbering brother’s ear, her lips were a bit rugged and chapped, but they were moist. A whisper of hair above her lip tickled the upper edge of my mouth.
After each kiss I needed one more, and another, until I began to hope for something more substantial. An odd memory hurried through my head—that years earlier the promoter Hunter had called me the child of two fathers.
I rolled back and canted away from my brother, as far as the bond would allow—Chang and I were now nearly side-to-side on the mattress; he was wincing, but his eyes remained closed, his snoring regular. The trace of a frown crooked his lips. I was holding Adelaide’s hand. My heart was pounding madly. She lowered her body onto me, and I felt her. I could not discern her gasp from mine. We lay there like that, not moving, sinfully in place.
I spent the next day in a silent heaven, planning. At breakfast I sat remembering the lovely fullness of her body as she had leaned toward me. And now I barely noticed my brother beside me at the dining table, or Sarah on the other side.
“Not hungry, brother?” Chang asked when I did not touch my hominy. I smiled at him and then at my wife. I was two men, the one seeable by everyone and the shameful hidden self.
In the afternoon, Chang and I and my wife listened as my son Stephen played the violin for us in the living room. He had almondshaped and -colored eyes, and his complexion was the color of sand. But the turns of his mind were utterly his mother’s. He played “I Wish I Was in Dixie,” of all pieces. He might have been Niccolò Paganini and I would not have noticed. I was too preoccupied to hear the singing catgut. Still, I closed my eyes and smiled as if I were a musicologist.
She avoided me all day. That was fine; I would be with her one night hence. I had to find a way to do it again, to get my brother drunk enough so that it could happen. I looked at Chang now, sunk down beside me on the divan, my brother so much skinnier than I was, so pathetically undernourished. My wife sat there as well, fleshy and gray. She hated our marriage, too, but I had no idea of her feelings beyond that.
That night, in bed with Sarah and Chang, I was able to sleep soundly and well. If I dreamt at all, it was probably of Adelaide. I was happy, for the last time in my life I was happy.
It was Chang who woke me—screaming “Up, get up!”—and not the stifling heat. Sarah awakened and screamed and ran from the bed. I had not yet had time to get my bearings when Chang jumped us to our feet, yelling, “Everybody get up! Go out of the house!” Flames streamed up the curtains, jumped to the ceiling, and spread over our heads like water pouring down onto a floor.
He and I were racing barefoot across the hall to wake the children, he doing most of the work of running, hurrying as the thick air got hotter and hotter at our backs, the light behind us shining unsteadily, and my heart was pounding now, my head only beginning to clear as I realized my house was burning, and we ran into the first children’s bedroom and grabbed four-year-old Rosella and five-year-old Hattie out of their bed, the surprisingly undrunk Chang bending to take his little Hattie by the arm and me gripping my Rosella in the same way. Five of our other children slept in the room, too, all of them a few years older than the two in our hands, and we yelled “Up!” as we got little stillsleeping Rosella and Hattie onto their feet, and the girls—maybe out of instinct, or even fear of the double-father in the dark—struggled and jerked in our grasp, but I had the bunched cloth of Rosella’s shirt in my hand. We scooped up the children and began running in the dark, ahead of the smoke and toward the front door, the fire unseen behind our backs, and I wondered, What about Adelaide? Where is Adelaide? as our other, older children hurried screaming by us in a confusion of small scrambling bodies. Chang and I hurried our four mature bare feet upon the floorboards as we carried Rosella and Hattie out past the porch, deposited the kids beside weeping Sarah, and stepped on sharp rocks as we ran back into the house, running up through smoke now and upstairs and across the hall to the other bedroom. We kicked open the door with a double-blow that knocked it off its hinges, but the children had by this time gotten out of this room and I yelled to Chang, “What about your Adelaide?” Smoke streamed into the room. Chang turned and took us down the hall, the thick smoke stinging my eyes as we made our way toward the secondary adult bedroom, arms in front of our faces, the fire cavorting across the wall now. I could not think of anything but Addie in the fire. Her beautiful flesh burning. I did not think of my safety. By the time we got to Addie’s room, my lungs felt filled with bones, each breath brought a sharp pain, and my eyes prickled. The smoke and my tearing made it difficult to see if Adelaide was still in the room, but I opened my eyes wider to the smoke, as if my very anxiety about her, my frantic distress and want, would give me sight. “Adelaide!” I yelled; Chang yelled, “Adelaide!”
“Adelaide!” “Adelaide!”
“She is not here!” And I walked us blindly toward the bed, and when we reached it we tripped into it, and onto it, and like attached swimmers we flailed in the sheets as if they were the waves of the ocean, and in the smoke we gasped for air the way divers do. Addie was not in the bed.
Feeling our way, we made it back into the hall. My heart was thrashing and my lungs wheezing. I could feel the heat from the fire on the walls on either side of us. Eyes closed and teary, Chang and I ran to where we thought the stairs were. Once there, we tripped and fell down them.
I bounced and crashed down the stairs with my brother. As we tumbled I could feel his breath in my hair with each groan. We picked up speed, barreling downward. Our spongy exposed band slapped against the wood of the steps at the underside of each rotation, my brother’s little mouth emitted a staccato cry that sharpened with every impact, with each crash of his skinny body, and I worried for his health.
We lay there at the bottom, exhausted and bruised. The heat had become onerous, and I had trouble breathing, though it was less smoky here on this first floor. I opened my eyes, and though my lids still felt like they were burning, I could see—Adelaide, coming from the living room and running by our supine bodies and out the door; she was holding the dirty little cat she’d adopted. Sarah was running past her sister at the front door, and once inside, my wife hurried by us toward the living room.
“Get up and help us save things.” She did not look at us as she passed.
Chang and I managed to lift ourselves off the floor and scramble to the well across our property, away from the smell of burning wood and into the abundance of evening primrose and farm grass to count our children, and raising a dust cloud as we went. Chang and I got a bucket to put out the fire, but before we had filled it, we realized it was useless. If our wives had not worried about saving things, we might have been able to save the house.
Sarah and Adelaide rescued most items of worth, and placed our valuables beside them on the grass. The girls were standing before the fire with our children, Chang’s Christopher, Nannie, Susan, Victoria, Louise Emeline, Albert, Jesse, Margaret Lizzie, and Hattie; my Stephen, James, Patrick, William, Frederick, Robert and Rosella. They all stood in front of the house, crying.
We could see the bright light in the house rising and falling, slowly, the fire having the same movement as a sleeping man’s back glimpsed through a strange window. Some glass was heard to shatter inside the house and something else made a thunderous crash, then it was quiet. I was expecting at any moment for the sky all at once to be infused with light and color shooting toward the vault of heaven in some drawn-out, twisting eruption, dramatic and earsplitting, that would eclipse the moon. That is what I thought the destruction of our house deserved
. And I expected neighbors, having seen the fire, to come around to offer help from out past Trap Hill. What did happen, however, was that our home burned to the ground slowly and quietly and with almost prudent confinement.
Had a candle caught on the curtains? Perhaps, but I was sure I’d blown out the wick that sat beside the bed. Even if it had been left lighted, that candle had not seemed close enough to the curtains to do any damage; it was the mystery of our lives, and I did not think we would ever answer it.
Following the blaze, after crowding our now-bickering families for a fortnight into the old slave quarters, Chang and I borrowed money from a New York banker named Babcock Young, taking a loan against any earnings from two tours we set up in haste. And so, as soon as Chang and I had this little money in our pockets, my brother sat me down with our wives and explained in a strained voice that he had a plan that would help us “get along better.” He said he thought it would be best, considering the squabbling that had been going on lately between our wives and children, to split up into two residences. “Each wife have her own house, for her and children,” he said. Chang and I spent three and a half days in each residence, and I was forced to keep to a strict rule: when I was calling upon my brother’s home, I, as a “guest,” did not speak unless spoken to, and affected invisibility. Chang followed the same dictum in my house. That way, each brother could approximate unconjoined life fifty percent of the time. That was the goal, in any case.
Both Sarah and Adelaide thought it a grand idea. Adelaide especially seemed enthusiastic about it, and actually looked relieved. “Yes, you boys could spend half a week in each house,” she said. (Was it not longing but tedium I had noted in her eyes all these close-lipped years?)
“Why?” I could feel myself swallowing repeatedly. And why won’t you look at me now, Adelaide?
“Oh, hush, Eng.” Sarah was clapping softly. “It will be so nice to have more space, won’t it now?”
Chang and Eng Page 33
