The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Stefan sees his brother a few days later when he drives out to Bratenahl in his Chevrolet 6. The car’s a bit of a splurge, though it makes a difference for his job. He’s a bigger accountant for the UNA now, does a bit of recruiting and fund-raising, visiting his fellow Ukrainians to impress upon them what the UNA can do for them and what they can do for Ukraine. He finds that people have a little more faith in the UNA when they see that their representative makes enough to own a car, though not a fancy one. They want the organization to be healthy, not wealthy; there’s such a thing as having too much. Stefan doesn’t go to his brother’s house much, thinks back to when the last time was: to visit the baby just after he’s born. Before that is 1928, when he borrows a coworker’s ride to get himself out there, all for the mission of telling Peter, face to face, that he can stop giving him money, that he’s doing all right for himself. That’s great to hear, Peter says, and seems to mean it. Stefan doesn’t realize then that it means he’ll almost never see his brother after that, because the money for Galina starts coming when Stefan’s at work. He doesn’t even know if Peter delivers it himself after that, and Galina never tells him. He’s cut himself out of the deal.

  Stefan arrives at the house in the midafternoon, a fall day, the trees in front of the house on fire from the foliage. Peter is there in the driveway when he pulls up.

  “I heard you coming,” Peter says, and invites him in. The house is all oiled oak and chestnut, covered with Turkish rugs. The sleek couch, the polished end tables. Long, empty walls waiting for paintings or photographs. They’re still putting the house together, even though they’ve been in there for years, but what they’ve done so far has all the marks of people with real money. There’s not a single object in any of the rooms that doesn’t cost more than what Stefan would be able or willing to pay for it. It makes him nervous about touching anything, even the short, elegant glasses on a table next to a few bottles of what looks like some very good booze.

  “Islay Scotch?” Peter says. “We can drink to it being legal again.”

  “Not that it ever stopped anyone when it wasn’t,” Stefan says.

  Peter laughs. “Isn’t that the truth.” Telling Stefan, as if he didn’t know already, just where all his money started from.

  “How’s business?” Stefan says.

  “Business? Business is business,” Peter says. “Just like it always is.”

  “They say it’s bad now.”

  “It’s always bad. Even when it was good, it was bad. And sometimes when it’s bad, it’s good.”

  “You talk like a real businessman now,” Stefan says. “It almost sounds like philosophy, some of the things you people say, except it doesn’t mean anything.” He’s surprised at how pointed it sounds coming out of his mouth. But Peter just laughs again, and Stefan isn’t sure whether it’s magnanimous or condescending.

  “You’ve got us all figured out, don’t you,” Peter says. “That’s the one thing the lower classes have on the upper classes, that they can see right through them. And meanwhile, the upper classes can’t understand the lower classes at all. It’s as if things are only clear when you look up, never when you look down.”

  “More philosophy,” Stefan says.

  “I’m only saying it’s just as hard, or just as easy, to make a lot of money as it ever was.”

  “Once you have a lot of it,” Stefan says. He’s maybe the only person in Peter’s life who’d say something like that, who’d start the class war right in his living room, and Peter likes him for it. Up to a point.

  Peter nods. “I’ll allow that. But now you sound like one of us.”

  “I’ve been paying attention,” Stefan says. Takes a sip of the Laphroaig and remembers, all over again, that he doesn’t like the stuff very much. He doesn’t think he ever will. That mossy, peaty taste the aficionados rave over just reminds him of someone’s basement.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” Peter says.

  “Yes. Excellent.”

  “That’s what the end of Prohibition really means: You can get really good Scotch again. Someday, I think, we’ll be able to get the best in the world, all the time. And you know what? There’s so much more money involved, then.”

  “And if you make enough of it, you can erase the line altogether.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Peter says.

  “The difference between legal and illegal. Enough money, and it doesn’t matter very much.”

  Peter looks at him for a while. “Are you turning into an anticapitalist?” he says.

  He knows enough not to say Communist; it’s that distinction between socialist and communist again, which neither of them will ever forget to make. The socialists are the ones who organized labor, on the South Side and everywhere else, who took a look at the mills and factories, the railroads and the furnaces, and decided that maybe the people who worked there deserved better. When their father was political at all, he was one; if the changes the socialists fought for had come sooner, maybe he would have lived longer. But the communists—well, it’s 1933, and the Ukrainians under Stalin, socialists, capitalists, and everyone else, are all starving to death, starving by the millions, ten thousand a day, on the most fertile land in Europe, which they’ve been farming and feeding the continent with for centuries. It’s all because of the Communists, because of Stalin, who’s forced them off their land, taken away their bread and livestock, exported what harvest they had. He’s made the people eat their seed grain, even though they know what that means, and in time he takes away the grain, too, and has the secret police shoot anyone who tries to take it back. The Ukrainians eat their dogs and cats. A few of them start eating each other, and then die all the same. There are corpses everywhere, in bedrooms, in kitchens, in the street. A band of traveling musicians sent by the government to cheer up the dying—it’d be funny if it wasn’t so horrific—find entire villages empty. No one’s left to play for. At last they find a house with people in it. Two girls are lying in bed, dead. A man’s legs are sticking out of the stove. An old lady, clawing at the dirt floor and ranting, is the only one alive. In another village, a starving man digs his own grave and then lies in it. A father buries one of his children in the graveyard. His other child dies before he gets home. A girl dies in school, in class; she just closes her eyes and dies. Parents leave their children in train stations, send them to the cities, because they can’t feed them anymore. Some of them die on the trains. A brother tells a sister: Mother says that we should eat her if she dies. The final thing she can give to her children.

  In 1933 you don’t know any of that from reading The New York Times because its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty—who’s won the Pulitzer for his coverage of the Soviet Union the year before—has decided to ignore it all. The Western intellectual left loves communism right now. Malcolm Muggeridge from The Manchester Guardian visits Ukraine and calls it like he sees it. He loses his job and can’t find another one. Gareth Jones, on his own dime and against Soviet law, goes to Ukraine for three weeks and reports, in the Hearst newspapers, on what he calls famine on a colossal scale. Everyone is swollen from starvation, people tell him. We are waiting to die. Duranty attacks that report. A big scare story, he writes. There is no actual starvation. There is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. It’s just what the Soviet press censor told him to write, after a night of vodka and celebrations. But there are still reports if you know where to look. William Henry Chamberlin in The Christian Science Monitor reports on it. And so does Svoboda, the UNA’s paper, maybe more than any other publication in North America. They publish letters from people in Ukraine. Here in the village there is not a chicken, nor a duck, nor a pig, nor a cow, only hungry people. They have cleaned us out, as if with a broom. It’s the headline story for months. Ukraine on the brink of death from famine. Bolsheviks execute hungry people. There’s an editorial in December 1932 that once again sees right through what S
talin is doing. Even the Bolshevik sympathizer from The New York Times—they mean Duranty—admits that this winter two-thirds of Russia’s population will have nothing to eat. Today they are not blaming the government but the peasants. Is it possible to blame here the serf living in Soviet slavery? Who can possibly believe that?

  A lot of people do. But Peter and Stefan don’t, and in that shared understanding of where their people came from, for just a moment, Stefan sees the South Side boy, the older brother he grew up with, lean and strong, who protected him not with his money, but with his hands. He smiles, then. But Peter doesn’t return it.

  “I didn’t mean to turn this into politics,” Stefan says.

  “You didn’t,” Peter says. “We’re brothers. We can talk about anything.” He chuckles. “I just might not answer you.”

  Now Stefan’s angry, because Peter can and will always talk to him like that, and Stefan can’t do it back. They’ll never hit each other again like they did when they were kids, because there’s too much money now. It’s all about money, it always will be about the money. It’s all right that Peter has so much more than him. Stefan can live with that; he’s comfortable, he has nothing to complain about. These days, he feels lucky. And he’s seen enough of the business world to know that what you have to do to get that rich isn’t worth it to him. But it’s also that Peter gave him so much for so long. Stefan thinks, again, about how Peter’s the reason, the only reason, that he could go to school all the way through, go to college, get a job better than the one his father had. It was a gift, the biggest Stefan’s ever gotten, but because Peter’s the kind of man he is, it’s also a muzzle. Peter tells Stefan they can talk about anything, but they both know that’s not true. If Stefan pushes back too hard, he’ll just be acting ungrateful, disrespectful, to the man who changed his life. But Peter can push as hard as he wants, and does.

  The truth, dear reader—and Stefan can feel it a little, in the edge on his brother’s voice—is that Peter now hates his brother a little. He doesn’t resent giving Stefan the money; he resents that what Stefan has is enough for him. He’s not married, doesn’t have much in the way of prospects for a wife. He can hear, in his mind, the way the women in Tremont talk about him. He’s a little on the feminine side. Their brows furrowed, one hand lifted, the fingers wiggling. But he has the little house, the job with the UNA, a ton of friends in the neighborhood, who he and Peter grew up with and who are like family to Stefan now; Stefan’s making them into the horde of cousins people always say they must have back in Ukraine, if they only knew for sure where their parents came from, though their parents never told them. Peter can see how all the decisions Stefan’s made about his life are coming together now into something cohesive, something real. Where he lives, who he works for, who he knows. Stefan is Ukrainian; in the past few years, that word has gained a lot of power, and it makes Stefan powerful, too. Peter imagines Stefan strolling down Professor and running into twenty-five or thirty people he knows. It takes him a half an hour just to walk a few blocks, and it’s a few blocks of constant conversation, asking for and doing favors, catching up on small talk. I’m so glad your sister’s feeling better. Please say hello for me. Listen, I was wondering if you could help out a friend of mine. He has four children and needs a job and he’s a really dependable worker, I can vouch for that. Oh thank you, he’ll be so grateful. Yes, yes, I think there’s a chance a loan can be arranged. How much do you need? Let me talk to the office and we’ll see what we can do. He’s even reclaiming the language, which Peter almost can’t remember, so that he doesn’t talk like a child, but the man he is. It all makes him wanted, needed—Peter’s thoughts go all the way to the word loved—a part of the community that you can’t take away without losing something. If Stefan were to die tomorrow, the funeral would be gigantic. The wake would last for two days. They’d fill St. Peter and Paul for the service, and afterward the party would go for hours. And if Peter were sitting there in the house, he’d hear nothing but great things about his brother. The jokes he told. His kindness, his willingness to help. His faithfulness. All the great things he did for the neighborhood, for the community, for Ukrainians. There’d be talk, maybe, of putting his name on a bench somewhere, or on a plaque in the church. Something so that fifty, a hundred years from now, people would see his name and know it, even if they didn’t know what he did. They’d talk like that in the living room and the kitchen, on the front porch, in the street in front of the house. And Peter would be sitting there on one end of the old couch, wearing shoes that cost more than all the furniture in the room, one of the most powerful businessmen in Cleveland, and nobody would know or care who he was. That is, until they knew he was Stefan’s brother, and then they wouldn’t care about anything else; it’s all they’d need to make him part of the family, too.

  Against his will, Peter thinks of his father: Pa would be so proud of Stefan, I know it. What would he think of me? It forces him to dwell the things he’s done and why he’s done them—and not the little why, but the big why. For Peter, the question of why is almost always a question about strategy, about what can be gained, in money, power, influence. His brain, it seems, is very good at doing that kind of math. He makes decisions fast and doesn’t look back, and it’s served him well, well beyond what most people dream that they’re capable of. But when he steps back from it, at the thing he’s made, he doesn’t like what he sees. It’s a creature, a predator, made of lies and disguises, with murder at its heart, so terrible that he has to hide it from everyone who’s not caught up in it themselves—most of all his family, even though he uses it to give them everything they have. His stomach flips when he thinks of it. He wonders what would happen if the thing ever got loose. Whether it would eat his family whole. He wonders how he could ever kill it without losing everything he has. And he thinks then about his own funeral, the precious few people who would go. How would they have anything to say about him afterward? No one’s ever seen the beast, not even Caroline. No one knows what he is. And then the final awful thought: Do I know?

  “I brought some things from Ma,” Stefan says.

  “I was wondering what’s in the box,” Peter says.

  “It’s just a few things. Some photographs of us as children. Some of her and Pa. A few other things from around the house, from growing up.”

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t keep them?” Peter says.

  “No, no,” Stefan says. “She told me you should have them. Made me pack the box in front of her.” So you won’t ever forget who your mother is, or where you came from, he wants to say. But won’t, ever; he knows that it’s cutting too close, too far in. “Are Caroline and Henry here?”

  “No. They’re out with her family,” Peter says. He can’t help but push that last word a bit, hopes it hurts a little. But Stefan doesn’t seem to notice it.

  “Listen, Peter? I wanted to tell you something,” Stefan says.

  “Anything.”

  “I want to be a bigger part of Henry’s life. Henry and any other children you have. I’m their uncle, after all, and I want to be an uncle to them. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.” Though the way Peter says it makes Stefan think his brother has no idea what he’s talking about.

  “Could I talk to Caroline about it? Maybe find a time when I can come visit Henry?”

  “That sounds like a perfect plan,” Peter says, and gives him a quick nod. With that, the last meaningful conversation Stefan will have with his brother is over. Stefan knows it even then, that when their mother died, the last bond between them was broken. He wonders if Peter knows—if he’ll never know, or always knew. If he cares enough to worry about it. Stefan worries, though, and so a few months later, on a day when he’s sure Peter’s away, he comes to the house to call. Caroline answers the door with Henry, still small enough for her to carry him on her hip.

  “Good morning, Stefan,” she says. “How can I help you?” Pleasant and wa
ry.

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you,” Stefan says.

  “Of course,” she says. The same tone of voice as her husband. So that’s where Petro got it, Stefan thinks; God help him, he just can’t think of his brother any other way, after all this time. Peter and Caroline have been swapping each other’s phrases for a while now. Caroline just happens to mean it. They end up talking for three hours. It begins and ends with the baby, who’s already standing and is working on walking. But it goes everywhere in between. Caroline learns more about her husband’s family right then than Peter’s ever told her. The death of the father, the nonexistent stepfather. And Galina, Galina, so much about her. I should have gotten to know her better, Caroline thinks. The regret threatens to overwhelm her; then she pushes it back, clears her head, because Stefan is telling her something else, about the time he and his brother went to Whiskey Island when they were kids. They were going to dive for bottles—or steal them from the men who lived in the shantytown there—to sell back to the bootleggers. The story takes Caroline all over the island, from the loading docks and the cranes to the ships coming across Lake Erie, to the houses made from scrap lumber and pieces of old billboards. Two chases, first from the men who lived there, then from the police who thought they were thieves, or working for the bootleggers—now they’re contracting out kids, the police must’ve thought, Stefan says, and laughs. Caroline laughs too, incredulous all over again that her husband grew up that way.

  On the carpet, Henry stands, takes a step, and falls; stands, takes two steps, and falls. Walking is still two months away.