【英文短篇小说】Goodbye, My Brother（2）

Chaddy came in to play with me. Chaddy and I have never liked to lose to each other. When we were younger, we used to be forbidden to play games together, because they always ended in a fight. We think we know each other’s mettle 1 intimately. I think he is prudent 2; he thinks I am foolish. There is always bad blood when we play anything—tennis or backgammon or softball or bridge—and it does seem at times as if we were playing for the possession of each other’s liberties. When I lose to Chaddy, I can’t sleep. All this is only half the truth of our competitive relationship, but it was the half-truth that would be discernible to Lawrence, and his presence at the table made me so self-conscious that I lost two games. I tried not to seem angry when I got up from the board. Lawrence was watching me. I went out onto the terrace to suffer there in the dark the anger I always feel when I lose to Chaddy.
When I came back into the room, Chaddy and Mother were playing. Lawrence was still watching. By his lights, Odette had lost her virtue 3 to me, I had lost my self-esteem to Chaddy, and now I wondered what he saw in the present match. He watched raptly, as if the opaque 4 checkers and the marked board served for an exchange of critical power. How dramatic the board, in its ring of light, and the quiet players and the crash of the sea outside must have seemed to him! Here was spiritual cannibalism 5 made visible; here, under his nose, were the symbols of the rapacious 6 use human beings make of one another.
Mother plays a shrewd, an ardent 7, and an interfering 8 game. She always has her hands in her opponent’s board. When she plays with Chaddy, who is her favorite, she plays intently. Lawrence would have noticed this. Mother is a sentimental 9 woman. Her heart is good and easily moved by tears and frailty 10, a characteristic that, like her handsome nose, has not been changed at all by age. Grief in another provokes her deeply, and she seems at times to be trying to divine in Chaddy some grief, some loss, that she can succor 11 and redress 12, and so re-establish the relationship that she enjoyed with him when he was sickly and young. She loves defending the weak and the childlike, and now that we are old, she misses it. The world of debts and business, men and war, hunting and fishing has on her an exacerbating 13 effect. (When Father drowned, she threw away his fly rods and his guns.) She has lectured us all endlessly on self-reliance, but when we come back to her for comfort and for help—particularly Chaddy—she seems to feel most like herself. I suppose Lawrence thought that the old woman and her son were playing for each other’s soul.
She lost. “Oh dear,” she said. She looked stricken and bereaved 14, as she always does when she loses. “Get me my glasses, get me my checkbook, get me something to drink.” Lawrence got up at last and stretched his legs. He looked at us all bleakly 15. The wind and the sea had risen, and I thought that if he heard the waves, he must hear them only as a dark answer to all his dark questions; that he would think that the tide had expunged 16 the embers of our picnic fires. The company of a lie is unbearable 17, and he seemed like the embodiment of a lie. I couldn’t explain to him the simple and intense pleasures of playing for money, and it seemed to me hideously 18 wrong that he should have sat at the edge of the board and concluded that we were playing for one another’s soul. He walked restlessly around the room two or three times and then, as usual, gave us a parting shot. “I should think you’d go crazy,” he said, “cooped up with one another like this, night after night. Come on, Ruth. I’m going to bed.”
THAT NIGHT, I dreamed about Lawrence. I saw his plain face magnified into ugliness, and when I woke in the morning, I felt sick, as if I had suffered a great spiritual loss while I slept, like the loss of courage and heart. It was foolish to let myself be troubled by my brother. I needed a vacation. I needed to relax. At school, we live in one of the dormitories, we eat at the house table, and we never get away. I not only teach English winter and summer but I work in the principal’s office and fire the pistol at track meets. I needed to get away from this and from every other form of anxiety, and I decided 19 to avoid my brother. Early that day, I took Helen and the children sailing, and we stayed out until suppertime. The next day, we went on a picnic. Then I had to go to New York for a day, and when I got back, there was the costume dance at the boat club. Lawrence wasn’t going to this, and it’s a party where I always have a wonderful time.
The invitations that year said to come as you wish you were. After several conversations, Helen and I had decided what to wear. The thing she most wanted to be again, she said, was a bride, and so she decided to wear her wedding dress. I thought this was a good choice—sincere, lighthearted, and inexpensive. Her choice influenced mine, and I decided to wear an old football uniform. Mother decided to go as Jenny Lind, because there was an old Jenny Lind costume in the attic 20. The others decided to rent costumes, and when I went to New York, I got the clothes. Lawrence and Ruth didn’t enter into any of this.
Helen was on the dance committee, and she spent most of Friday decorating the club. Diana and Chaddy and I went sailing. Most of the sailing that I do these days is in Manhasset, and I am used to setting a homeward course by the gasoline barge 21 and the tin roofs of the boat shed, and it was a pleasure that afternoon, as we returned, to keep the bow on a white church spire 22 in the village and to find even the inshore water green and clear. At the end of our sail, we stopped at the club to get Helen. The committee had been trying to give a submarine appearance to the ballroom 23, and the fact that they had nearly succeeded in accomplishing this illusion made Helen very happy. We drove back to Laud’s Head. It had been a brilliant afternoon, but on the way home we could smell the east wind—the dark wind, as Lawrence would have said—coming in from the sea.
My wife, Helen, is thirty-eight, and her hair would be gray, I guess, if it were not dyed, but it is dyed an unobtrusive yellow—a faded color—and I think it becomes her. I mixed cocktails 24 that night while she was dressing 25, and when I took a glass upstairs to her, I saw her for the first time since our marriage in her wedding dress. There would be no point in saying that she looked to me more beautiful than she did on our wedding day, but because I have grown older and have, I think, a greater depth of feeling, and because I could see in her face that night both youth and age, both her devotion to the young woman that she had been and the positions that she had yielded graciously to time, I think I have never been so deeply moved. I had already put on the football uniform, and the weight of it, the heaviness of the pants and the shoulder guards, had worked a change in me, as if in putting on these old clothes I had put off the reasonable anxieties and troubles of my life. It felt as if we had both returned to the years before our marriage, the years before the war.
The Collards had a big dinner party before the dance, and our family—excepting Lawrence and Ruth—went to this. We drove over to the club, through the fog, at about half past nine. The orchestra was playing a waltz. While I was checking my raincoat, someone hit me on the back. It was Chucky Ewing, and the funny thing was that Chucky had on a football uniform. This seemed comical as hell to both of us. We were laughing when we went down the hall to the dance floor. I stopped at the door to look at the party, and it was beautiful. The committee had hung fish nets around the sides and over the high ceiling. The nets on the ceiling were filled with colored balloons. The light was soft and uneven 26, and the people—our friends and neighbors—dancing in the soft light to “Three O’Clock in the Morning” made a pretty picture. Then I noticed the number of women dressed in white, and I realized that they, like Helen, were wearing wedding dresses. Patsy Hewitt and Mrs. Gear and the Lackland girl waltzed by, dressed as brides. Then Pep Talcott came over to where Chucky and I were standing 27. He was dressed to be Henry VIII, but he told us that the Auerbach twins and Henry Barrett and Dwight MacGregor were all wearing football uniforms, and that by the last count there were ten brides on the floor.
This coincidence, this funny coincidence, kept everybody laughing, and made this one of the most lighthearted parties we’ve ever had at the club. At first I thought that the women had planned with one another to wear wedding dresses, but the ones that I danced with said it was a coincidence and I’m sure that Helen had made her decision alone. Everything went smoothly 28 for me until a little before midnight. I saw Ruth standing at the edge of the floor. She was wearing a long red dress. It was all wrong. It wasn’t the spirit of the party at all. I danced with her, but no one cut in, and I was darned if I’d spend the rest of the night dancing with her and I asked her where Lawrence was. She said he was out on the dock, and I took her over to the bar and left her and went out to get Lawrence.
The east fog was thick and wet, and he was alone on the dock. He was not in costume. He had not even bothered to get himself up as a fisherman or a sailor. He looked particularly saturnine 29. The fog blew around us like a cold smoke. I wished that it had been a clear night, because the easterly fog seemed to play into my misanthropic 30 brother’s hands. And I knew that the buoys 31—the groaners and bells that we could hear then—would sound to him like half-human, half-drowned cries, although every sailor knows that buoys are necessary and reliable fixtures 32, and I knew that the foghorn 33 at the lighthouse would mean wanderings and losses to him and that he could misconstrue the vivacity 34 of the dance music. “Come on in, Tifty,” I said, “and dance with your wife or get her some partners.”
“Why should I?” he said. “Why should I?” And he walked to the window and looked in at the party. “Look at it,” he said. “Look at that …”
Chucky Ewing had got hold of a balloon and was trying to organize a scrimmage line in the middle of the floor. The others were dancing a samba. And I knew that Lawrence was looking bleakly at the party as he had looked at the weather-beaten shingles 35 on our house, as if he saw here an abuse and a distortion of time; as if in wanting to be brides and football players we exposed the fact that, the lights of youth having been put out in us, we had been unable to find other lights to go by and, destitute 36 of faith and principle, had become foolish and sad. And that he was thinking this about so many kind and happy and generous people made me angry, made me feel for him such an unnatural 37 abhorrence 38 that I was ashamed, for he is my brother and a Pommeroy. I put my arm around his shoulders and tried to force him to come in, but he wouldn’t.
I got back in time for the Grand March, and after the prizes had been given out for the best costumes, they let the balloons down. The room was hot, and someone opened the big doors onto the dock, and the easterly wind circled the room and went out, carrying across the dock and out onto the water most of the balloons. Chucky Ewing went running out after the balloons, and when he saw them pass the dock and settle on the water, he took off his football uniform and dove in. Then Eric Auerbach dove in and Lew Phillips dove in and I dove in, and you know how it is at a party after midnight when people start jumping into the water. We recovered most of the balloons and dried off and went on dancing, and we didn’t get home until morning.
THE NEXT DAY was the day of the flower show. Mother and Helen and Odette all had entries. We had a pickup 39 lunch, and Chaddy drove the women and children over to the show. I took a nap, and in the middle of the afternoon I got some trunks and a towel and, on leaving the house, passed Ruth in the laundry. She was washing clothes. I don’t know why she should seem to have so much more work to do than anyone else, but she is always washing or ironing or mending clothes. She may have been taught, when she was young, to spend her time like this, or she may be at the mercy of an expiatory 40 passion. She seems to scrub and iron with a penitential fervor 41, although I can’t imagine what it is that she thinks she’s done wrong. Her children were with her in the laundry. I offered to take them to the beach, but they didn’t want to go.
It was late in August, and the wild grapes that grow profusely 42 all over the island made the land wind smell of wine. There is a little grove 43 of holly 44 at the end of the path, and then you climb the dunes 45, where nothing grows but that coarse grass. I could hear the sea, and I remember thinking how Chaddy and I used to talk mystically about the sea. When we were young, we had decided that we could never live in the West because we would miss the sea. “It is very nice here,” we used to say politely when we visited people in the mountains, “but we miss the Atlantic.” We used to look down our noses at people from Iowa and Colorado who had been denied this revelation, and we scorned the Pacific. Now I could hear the waves, whose heaviness sounded like a reverberation 46, like a tumult 47, and it pleased me as it had pleased me when I was young, and it seemed to have a purgative 48 force, as if it had cleared my memory of, among other things, the penitential image of Ruth in the laundry.
But Lawrence was on the beach. There he sat. I went in without speaking. The water was cold, and when I came out, I put on a shirt. I told him that I was going to walk up to Tanners Point, and he said that he would come with me. I tried to walk beside him. His legs are no longer than mine, but he always likes to stay a little ahead of his companion. Walking along behind him, looking at his bent 49 head and his shoulders, I wondered what he could make of that landscape.
There were the dunes and cliffs, and then, where they declined, there were some fields that had begun to turn from green to brown and yellow. The fields were used for pasturing sheep, and I guess Lawrence would have noticed that the soil was eroded 50 and that the sheep would accelerate this decay. Beyond the fields there are a few coastal 51 farms, with square and pleasant buildings, but Lawrence could have pointed 52 out the hard lot of an island farmer. The sea, at our other side, was the open sea. We always tell guests that there, to the east, lies the coast of Portugal, and for Lawrence it would be an easy step from the coast of Portugal to the tyranny in Spain. The waves broke with a noise like a “hurrah 53, hurrah, hurrah,” but to Lawrence they would say “Vale, vale.” I suppose it would have occurred to his baleful and incisive 54 mind that the coast was terminal moraine, the edge of the prehistoric 55 world, and it must have occurred to him that we walked along the edge of the known world in spirit as much as in fact. If he should otherwise have overlooked this, there were some Navy planes bombing an uninhabited island to remind him.
That beach is a vast and preternaturally clean and simple landscape. It is like a piece of the moon. The surf had pounded the floor solid, so it was easy walking, and everything left on the sand had been twice changed by the waves. There was the spine 56 of a shell, a broomstick, part of a bottle and part of a brick, both of them milled and broken until they were nearly unrecognizable, and I suppose Lawrence’s sad frame of mind—for he kept his head down—went from one broken thing to another. The company of his pessimism 57 began to infuriate me, and I caught up with him and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s only a summer day, Tifty,” I said. “It’s only a summer day. What’s the matter? Don’t you like it here?”
“I don’t like it here,” he said blandly 58, without raising his eyes. “I’m going to sell my equity 59 in the house to Chaddy. I didn’t expect to have a good time. The only reason I came back was to say goodbye.”
I let him get ahead again and I walked behind him, looking at his shoulders and thinking of all the goodbyes he had made. When Father drowned, he went to church and said goodbye to Father. It was only three years later that he concluded that Mother was frivolous 60 and said goodbye to her. In his freshman 61 year at college, he had been very good friends with his roommate, but the man drank too much, and at the beginning of the spring term Lawrence changed roommates and said goodbye to his friend. When he had been in college for two years, he concluded that the atmosphere was too sequestered 62 and he said goodbye to Yale. He enrolled 63 at Columbia and got his law degree there, but he found his first employer dishonest, and at the end of six months he said goodbye to a good job. He married Ruth in City Hall and said goodbye to the Protestant Episcopal Church; they went to live on a back street in Tuckahoe and said goodbye to the middle class. In 1938, he went to Washington to work as a government lawyer, saying goodbye to private enterprise, but after eight months in Washington he concluded that the Roosevelt administration was sentimental and he said goodbye to it. They left Washington for a suburb of Chicago, where he said goodbye to his neighbors, one by one, on counts of drunkenness, boorishness 64, and stupidity. He said goodbye to Chicago and went to Kansas; he said goodbye to Kansas and went to Cleveland. Now he had said goodbye to Cleveland and come East again, stopping at Laud’s Head long enough to say goodbye to the sea.
It was elegiac and it was bigoted 65 and narrow, it mistook circumspection 66 for character, and I wanted to help him. “Come out of it,” I said. “Come out of it, Tifty.”
“Come out of what?”
“Come out of this gloominess. Come out of it. It’s only a summer day. You’re spoiling your own good time and you’re spoiling everyone else’s. We need a vacation, Tifty. I need one. I need to rest. We all do. And you’ve made everything tense and unpleasant. I only have two weeks in the year. Two weeks. I need to have a good time and so do all the others. We need to rest. You think that your pessimism is an advantage, but it’s nothing but an unwillingness 67 to grasp realities.”
“What are the realities?” he said. “Diana is a foolish and a promiscuous 68 woman. So is Odette. Mother is an alcoholic 69. If she doesn’t discipline herself, she’ll be in a hospital in a year or two. Chaddy is dishonest. He always has been. The house is going to fall into the sea.” He looked at me and added, as an afterthought, “You’re a fool.”
“You’re a gloomy son of a bitch,” I said. “You’re a gloomy son of a bitch.”
“Get your fat face out of mine,” he said. He walked along.
Then I picked up a root and, coming at his back—although I have never hit a man from the back before—I swung the root, heavy with sea water, behind me, and the momentum 70 sped my arm and I gave him, my brother, a blow on the head that forced him to his knees on the sand, and I saw the blood come out and begin to darken his hair. Then I wished that he was dead, dead and about to be buried, not buried but about to be buried, because I did not want to be denied ceremony and decorum in putting him away, in putting him out of my consciousness, and I saw the rest of us—Chaddy and Mother and Diana and Helen—in mourning in the house on Belvedere Street that was torn down twenty years ago, greeting our guests and our relatives at the door and answering their mannerly condolences with mannerly grief. Nothing decorous was lacking so that even if he had been murdered on a beach, one would feel before the tiresome 71 ceremony ended that he had come into the winter of his life and that it was a law of nature, and a beautiful one, that Tifty should be buried in the cold, cold ground.
He was still on his knees. I looked up and down. No one had seen us. The naked beach, like a piece of the moon, reached to invisibility. The spill of a wave, in a glancing run, shot up to where he knelt. I would still have liked to end him, but now I had begun to act like two men, the murderer and the Samaritan. With a swift roar, like hollowness made sound, a white wave reached him and encircled him, boiling over his shoulders, and I held him against the undertow. Then I led him to a higher place. The blood had spread all through his hair, so that it looked black, I took off my shirt and tore it to bind 72 up his head. He was conscious, and I didn’t think he was badly hurt. He didn’t speak. Neither did I. Then I left him there.
I walked a little way down the beach and turned to watch him, and I was thinking of my own skin then. He had got to his feet and he seemed steady. The daylight was still clear, but on the sea wind fumes 73 of brine were blowing in like a light fog, and when I had walked a little way from him, I could hardly see his dark figure in this obscurity. All down the beach I could see the heavy salt air blowing in. Then I turned my back on him, and as I got near to the house, I went swimming again, as I seem to have done after every encounter with Lawrence that summer.
When I got back to the house, I lay down on the terrace. The others came back. I could hear Mother defaming the flower arrangements that had won prizes. None of ours had won anything. Then the house quieted, as it always does at that hour. The children went into the kitchen to get supper and the others went upstairs to bathe. Then I heard Chaddy making cocktails, and the conversation about the flower-show judges was resumed. Then Mother cried, “Tifty! Tifty! Oh, Tifty!”
He stood in the door, looking half dead. He had taken off the bloody 74 bandage and he held it in his hand. “My brother did this,” he said. “My brother did it. He hit me with a stone—something—on the beach.” His voice broke with self-pity. I thought he was going to cry. No one else spoke 75. “Where’s Ruth?” he cried. “Where’s Ruth? Where in hell is Ruth? I want her to start packing. I don’t have any more time to waste here. I have important things to do. I have important things to do.” And he went up the stairs.
THEY LEFT for the mainland the next morning, taking the six-o’clock boat. Mother got up to say goodbye, but she was the only one, and it is a harsh and an easy scene to imagine—the matriarch and the changeling, looking at each other with a dismay that would seem like the powers of love reversed. I heard the children’s voices and the car go down the drive, and I got up and went to the window, and what a morning that was! Jesus, what a morning! The wind was northerly. The air was clear. In the early heat, the roses in the garden smelled like strawberry jam. While I was dressing, I heard the boat whistle, first the warning signal and then the double blast, and I could see the good people on the top deck drinking coffee out of fragile paper cups, and Lawrence at the bow, saying to the sea, “Thalassa, thalassa,” while his timid and unhappy children watched the creation from the encirclement of their mother’s arms. The buoys would toll 76 mournfully for Lawrence, and while the grace of the light would make it an exertion 77 not to throw out your arms and swear exultantly 78, Lawrence’s eyes would trace the black sea as it fell astern; he would think of the bottom, dark and strange, where full fathom 79 five our father lies.
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade 80 his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate 81 truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent 82 and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.