by Gordon Lish
I made a promise like that once. It was a long time ago, and the one who inspired the promise was a child. A girl in this case. It was my conceit to think that she would remember what I had promised her, but I don't think she really did. After all, the year was 1944 and she must have had other things on her mind, there being a war going on at the time and her being twelve or thirteen or fourteen (despite a large opinion to the contrary, I am not all that much a student of children, and am especially inferior, I have often noticed, at pinpointing their ages), with all the calamitous worries that seize a child of such an age when its father has gone away. But she always wore a Campbell tartan and a watch much too big for her delicate wrist—and in those days in Devon and those days in my heart, a promise of any sort to a gentle child in plaid (with a weight too great for her to bear) was not a thing I would not want to make. Besides, she had a little brother and always took good care of him, fretting if he were within earshot of a fact too awful for a small boy to hear.
At any rate, I promised the girl a story (I had wanted to be a writer then, and for too long a while thereafter I was one)—and some years later I wrote a story that was meant to appear to be the fulfillment of that promise.
Of course, it wasn't. A writer, especially the sort of writer I was trying to be, can't write stories like that—a pretty story when a child asks for one, a squalid story when this is the favor she asks. What I am paying for now is that I shabbily led this young lady to believe otherwise. I wrote a story, a not very sincere story, nor a very graceful one (the years since demonstrate that the world disagrees with me in this judgment—but all I care about is that the story was mainly made up and is bruised by a very great fracture in its posture of narration), and when the piece was cast into print, I sent her a copy of the magazine sheets with a patch of paper pinned to the first page. I hadn't even the courtesy to set out my one sentence in my own hand, but instead typed the following, after a greeting that consisted of no more than the two lovely parts of her lovely English name: "I always keep a promise—I mean, p-r-o-m-i-s-e." Well, I hadn't—and what I am paying for now is the lie I tried to get by with then.
I often read a Viennese logician who, I think, would go along with such reasoning. And let's not overlook the penalty for too much reasoning. So you see the kind of logic the fellow favored when he lived?
It will presently be clear that I am, however, chiefly paying for my having a brother I love more than I love my silence. It will presently be clear that by publishing—and only by publishing—the little story I want to tell you, can I stop him from doing a thing he believes he must do. It is an act of extreme gravity, of extreme gravity, in all the spheres of spiritual prospect human imagining can consider. Or it is an act of no consequence at all. I am not certain. I am too overcome to rest for very long with a certain opinion. So I choose instead to do the safe thing—to put this story out for print.
All of this, I sincerely promise, will presently be very, very clear. One does not talk about what I am preparing myself to talk about, and talk in defiance of habit, unless one is utterly sworn to being very, very clear. I have sworn myself to the effort to let nothing interfere with clarity of the first order. Not even the sound of one hand clapping must be let to raise a diversion from the sentences I am going to set down—but, reader, reader, how I hear that one hand clapping now!
MY BROTHER WAS AN ACTOR until radio gave out. After that, he tended bar on Fifty-fifth Street and on Fifty-seventh Street, and then he went to Oslo and then he went to Zurich, and when he came home he came home with a wife, a Swiss, a psychiatrist, and in time she proved herself a psychopath. But the time was not soon enough, for by then my beautiful brother and my handsome sister-in-law had a son. They named him, I felt honored to learn, David, called him Chap, and that is what he is called to this day, seventeen years later, fifteen of which Chap and my brother have not, not once, seen each other.
There was a divorce when Chap was two, and his mother, not long after, set up practice in El Paso, reasoning aloud that Chap's asthma would be more manageable there—the aridity—reasoning to herself, my brother supposes, that my brother would be taught what grief feels like.
You have my word for it that my brother did not need to be given the lesson. You have my word for it that my brother did everything short of seizing the office of the mayor of El Paso to force his residence there, close to Chap, close to the largest love then in him. You also have my word for it that my handsome sister-in-law did everything short of hiring ruffians to strong-arm the father well beyond the city limits. It was easy, considering. The woman, you will remember, is a psychiatrist, and a kind of despot therefore. And my brother, as you by and by will see as the facts are by and by disclosed, was vulnerable in a very particular regard.
My brother—I shall call him by a different name here—my brother Smithy would return to New York with a sick heart, and when its sickening had worsened, he would go back to El Paso to cry out at the gates of the city. My mother tells us that these weekly, then monthly, pilgrimages went on for almost four years and were then gradually abandoned as the facts proved unmoving, unalterable, permanent. I was living in New England then, kept in very random touch with family, and—it will be no surprise to them if I admit it—discouraged them from doing other than returning the discourtesy. You see, at the time I was still dominated by the pretension of writing, although I was well past the point where I had fled from doing it in public. But, of course, I did hear from my mother and from my sister—and, when Smithy had moved back to New York from Switzerland, from Smithy himself-—that he had taken a second wife, a Swiss again, a woman somewhat older than the first and anything but a psychiatrist. This sister-in-law, whom I have not seen to this day, had banking as her profession, and still has it.
I do not need to see her to know that she is handsomer than the psychiatrist, for her photographs show up in the magazines and in a newspaper that is regularly attentive to very handsome and very active women, and my mother clips and forwards every single picture through an agent who has long given excellent service as an intermediary. And Smithy, who telephones often now that I have devised a truly private line, never fails to remind me that I am the brother-in-law of one of the world's most admired women.
But I do not need Smithy's reminding, nor my mother's clippings, to know how breathtaking Margaret must be—for the child of her marriage to my brother I have five times seen in the flesh, and he is the very word of loveliness, in this as in all things.
The boy's name is Rupert—and he is the child of all our dreaming.
If I say more about Rupert in regard of his unearthliness, I will not be for long free from confusion. I will—what I want to tell you will—fall victim to the disorder of sentiment, and I have promised you clarity. I have also promised someone squalor. I now intend, in all scruple and with haste, to keep both promises—and to save my brother, and everyone else, in the bargain.
Rupert will be five on his next birthday. This is the last I will say about my brother's second golden son, comma purposely omitted. The next voice you hear will be Smithy's, and I can make no boundaries for him. His italics are entirely his own.
"STOKE UP A CIGARETTE; this is going to take a long time."
"I quit smoking. Snuffed my last butt the tenth of October. If Mom would tell you anything, she'd tell you that, and you promised me you were going to start listening to Mom, remember?"
There was a silence—not a good silence.
"Smithy? Hey, buddy, you there?"
"Please don't buddy me right now, Buddy. Please. And please don't kid around. I've finally thought the thing out, and what I've got to do—Buddy, dear God, I cannot believe I am saying this out loud—I am going to kill my son."
I did not shift the receiver to my other ear. I did not do anything that I can especially remember. I think if I had had a cigarette handy, I would have lit it. If there had been cigarettes in this house, I would have smoked them all. If I could have asked him to wait a hal
f hour, I would have gone into town and bought a carton. Anyway, I did nothing—and I said nothing—because it was progressively occurring to me that I did not know which son Smithy meant, and that maybe he did not know either, and that if I said something that suggested one boy or the other, the suggestion might tilt my brother in one direction or the other.
Have I told you that my brother has twice been away? I know I haven't—because that is a fact that would certainly mislead you, and the one thing this piece of writing must not do is mislead you. But when one has a brother who has twice been away and who married a psychiatrist, one can oneself be misled by such facts. You cannot read enough of the Viennese logician to escape certain facts, and these may be among them.
"Buddy? Buddy, did you hear what I said? You want to go get a smoke now, big brother?"
And then he started crying, sobbing wretchedly. I had always imagined men could cry like this, but I had never heard it. It went on for a long time, and I was glad it did, because I believed that whatever had given it to occur would wear itself out this way and that would be that.
But it wasn't. Smithy stopped his weeping as abruptly as he'd started it, and when he began his first new sentence, it moved to its period with austere dispassion.
There's something else I have not told you. If he wanted, my brother could give the Viennese logician cards and spades. Smithy is very, very smart, endowed with an intelligence unsurpassed in our family and as statuesque as any I've come across. Moreover—and this is why I am not sure I am doing the right thing but only what I, like our Smithy, am convinced I must do—Smithy's unyielding custom is rationalism, all the way to the gallows if this were his destiny. There has never been anyone who could break him of the habit, and this goes for our older brother too—who could, just mentionably, break anyone of anything if he wanted to, and who would not flinch over breaking himself into nineteen pieces to do it. Except Smithy of his rationalism, of course.
But our big brother never had a very long run at it.
Anyway, Smithy's next sentence, and all the sentences that came rushing after that one and that I would not have dared to interrupt even to assert Fallacy of the Middle! were proportioned and stately in the organization of their argument. And this is what my brother said—and why my brother has concluded that he must kill his son—and why I am publishing what the reader may apprehend as a "story," but which Smithy, ever the rationalist, will understand is a disclosure one step short of my informing the police and a step quite far enough to stop him in his tracks.
And, of course, the boy Chap will have his fair warning.
It is the least a loving uncle who has made his fortune (and his misfortune) writing can do. He can write as he is able. He can write a "story" that no one but the ones who most matter to him will quite be certain is true. I do see now that it is only through the miracle of the falsehood of fiction that I can catch up the people I love from the truth and consequences of what they might do. The cost to me is very slight in comparison—the exception in a habit for silence (Are you smiling now, dear dead brother, master of ceremonies in all my deliberations?) and the reinstatement, for a time, of the shame that covers me whenever I play the thief of hearts and come like a highwayman to the unsuspecting page.
Speak, Smithy! I am the instrument by which you may submit your supreme reasoning and the dark circumstance that stirred it to unfurl its awful syllogism. And when you have stated your case, I will return for a parting courtesy to the reader, a gesture I swear to be greater than that to which I proved equal when I wished to say the right thing to soothe that splendid girl of Devon. I am thinking I owe a very particular politeness to the reader—who, for the purpose before us, and as do his mother and father, I call Chap.
Listen, Chap. The father of your body is speaking to you. Will you recognize his voice? You were not much more than two years old when you last heard the peculiar American resonance that made your dad a regular on Rosemary of Hilltop House and When a Girl Marries, a kind of choked vibrancy that must have softened when he blessed you to sleep and drew the covers up to just under your chin, high enough that not one whisper of cold would chill your breast, but not so high that your restlessness would slip the blanket higher and impede the glorious song of your breath. This is the father of your body whose voice you are going to hear. Will it be at all familiar to you after fifteen voiceless years? Will it frighten you to hear a silence broken? Certainly the speech he makes will seem frightening—for it is a statement in support of his decision to secure your death. But it is, nonetheless, a reasoned argument, and if you are your father's son, Chap, you will see he has a point.
Listen, boy! A brother I love like life itself, your true father, on the fourth day of November, by long-distance telephone, just after the dinner hour, his voice all repose, his heart deranged, in tumult, said this:
"I HAVE A PAD AND PENCIL here, and it's all worked out, that thing you know I do with columns, this on one side, that on the other. Buddy, can you grab a piece of paper and something to write with? I think it'll help—I think it'll help if you make notes as I go along. I mean, it's just that I want you to know how it happened. Most of it has been happening for years. I think it has always been in the back of my mind since Pert was born. Maybe even before that, in a crazy kind of way. Maybe it dates back to when I kissed Chap goodbye and could never get back to kiss him again. In any case, I don't want you to think this wasn't among the premonitions that always go on in my head—because the head will do these things, Buddy, and you just can't, you know, stop it. Aren't you the expert in this subject? I'm rambling; I'm sorry. All right, I'm going to pick it up from what I've got written here. By the numbers, okay, big brother?
"About two weeks ago—hell, I know the exact day, who am I kidding?—Scharfstein told me I've got it bad. Wall-to-wall cigars and three packs of Raleighs a day for almost twenty-five years, and I get cancer of the goddamn spleen. I've always agreed with you that Scharfstein is a bastard, but his medicine is the best. Anyway, he sent me over to Sloan Kettering that afternoon, and by the next morning they'd confirmed. Three to six months with routine measures, maybe another three to six with heavy antiprotein therapy. But that's it—that's tops.
"Maggie knows, of course. I didn't tell Mom or any of the rest, although I promise I will just as soon as I can figure out how I want to do it. And maybe you can help me with that. For the time being, all I am doing is getting my life in order, squaring away my affairs, as Maggie would call them. Everything's pretty shipshape, actually—all the durables. There's plenty of money and there's nobody better than Maggie at managing. Then there's Pert—and that's, of course, clear sailing too. He could be the President of the United goddamn States, or change the theory of zero, and this won't stop him. My being dead, I mean—my dying. Pert could be anything, do anything. You know him; you've seen the probability in him for yourself. You just have to take one look at Pert to know.
"Except there's this one thing—and that's Chap. And if you don't mind, Buddy, I think I want to refer to Chap as David from here on out. There's David—he's the one thing. There's my son and there's my son—and that's the whole of mathematics of it for you there! Are you following me? Because you better be doing it.
"What David's mother has done lots of divorced women do—I know that. Except I think she's done it better. But I'm only guessing, of course—because for fifteen years the evidence has been withheld from me. Can you believe it, Buddy? With people who feel about blood the way we do? Not one word, not one touch, in fifteen years? Jesus God, the woman is a trained analyst. If she can unravel a synthesis, I guess she can ravel a good enough one up. Can you just imagine what she's probably achieved with that boy? It's not just a job of contamination we're talking about—it must be more like the making of a system refined to a single principle. Or do I mean aim? Anyway, I'm only guessing—but that's where my imagination takes my reasoning—and what else do I have to go on?
"I believe in David's rage. Let's just say it's an a
rticle of faith with me—and with me dead, that rage will logically get pinned on Pert, don't you see? Loathing, envy, spite, you name it—and all of it susceptible to even greater intensity when David actually finds out what Pert is. I mean, what I see happening, when I'm gone, when all the rest of us are gone, Margaret and you and Mom and me and that woman—Buddy, I just can't say her name, not even now—I see a world with just the two of them in it—an openness named Rupert, who owns all my heart, and a man named David with a heart with such a lot of hate in it. What would Rupert ever know of what his brother must feel for him? How could Rupert ever imagine? No boy could—no boy like Rupert—and, Buddy, you know what Rupert is like. He is all light—a lightness, this one diaphaneity.
"Pert would never guess even. But I can. More than that—I know. David will wait, he will wait his time—like his mother, he will be patient, deliberate, a fury waiting for his chance. All right, perhaps I'm imagining too much. Perhaps it will never come to this—something violent, an injury, a killing, who knows? Perhaps instead it will be a civilian act, but decisive, devastating—David sitting on some committee that Rupert happens to be petitioning, David behind the interviewer's desk for some job Rupert must have, David installed at a judicial bench before which Rupert pleads his case, David standing with gloved hands while Rupert lies beneath him, chest swabbed and bare to the scalpel—hell, I don't know, Buddy, but I know it'll be something. Some way none of us can predict, my firstborn will stalk my second, find a way to hurt him because my death robs him of chance to hurt me.
"Look, there's nothing fishy in this, but I don't want to talk anymore—and besides, I'm calling from home and, with Maggie in the house, it's making me jittery—and I right now can't risk being jittery. I'll telephone tomorrow—around noon—so, for Christ's sake, be there. Because I gave Scharfstein my promise I'd come in and see him in the morning—the jerk thinks he can teach me how to die—and I plan to fly up to Hanover in the afternoon. I guess Mom wrote you that David started Dartmouth this fall—all the way from Texas to my brother's backyard! Buddy, he writes these letters to his grandmother that I cannot believe and do not believe—like a geometer, as if a geometer made them. It gives me the willies to see them, but Mom always makes sure I do. He writes to her! Does he write to me? Does he answer one goddamn letter? Anyway, that's where he is and that's where I'm going tomorrow to get it taken care of. Jesus, man, I've got to choose, don't you see—and I choose Rupert!"
