She gave one croupy giggle, then leaned against the wall, fatigued. Irma, midwife, clamped a hand over the receiver as if to smother, told Chloe, “Richard’s asking what he can do for me.”
Chloe was wandering around, palms pressed to her cheeks, surveying the remains of her model kitchen.
“You heard right. Go to her, Richard, take flowers. She was so brave. The baby has real lung power. No, have your secretary send the flowers. You get moving.”
Chloe stumbled into the front room and collapsed on the beleaguered chaise. Irma followed, stood looking down at today’s hostess, Grand Master Chloe, rubbing her neck and shoulders, eyes mashed shut.
The twins had dragged Pat Smiley home a few doors down. Abandoned handbags lay scattered under chairs. Cards and party favors, a set of keys, one ashtray smoldering,
“Irma.” Chloe lifted her head. “You’re still standing? Could I ask you for one more thing? That damask tablecloth on the counter, the one that was under her? Would you just maybe toss it into the washer? Put in about a pound of Oxydol. I can clean up the rest later. I’ll just call Fatima and her sister and their whole neighborhood to come over here and work for a solid week. But I don’t think I can quite abide the sight of that cloth just yet.”
“You mean the sheet?”
“Yes, it was a tablecloth, actually. Damask. You couldn’t have known, Irma. It was Grandmother Halsey’s, 1870 or so. Not to fret, darling.”
Irma Stythe leaned back into the kitchen. Cloth’s pattern of wheat sheaves, bounty, harvest home, was now spread with urgent gloss and gore. Mikado trotted after her toward the laundry room. Upstaged all afternoon, antsy for attention, he now rolled over, played dead dog, sat on his haunches, then—tentatively—pranced.
Irma held a tumbler full of bourbon above the chaise. Chloe sniffed, opened one eye. The big house was oddly silent now. A few yards away, some lawn mower hissed and yammered, reassuring. Chloe sat up, took the glass in both hands as a child might, and tossed back three adult swallows. Mikado circled the heaped towels, smelling them. “No,” Chloe called, halfhearted, “bad dog.” But the animal climbed onto the pile, gave a huffy sigh and, head resting on crossed paws, closed his eyes.
“How about a toast?” Irma retrieved the glass. “Here’s to it, to the baby. To the neighborhood’s newest. Some start, hunh? And here’s to our dear ole alcoholic neighborhood, God help us all.”
Then both of them glanced at the closed kitchen door. They’d just decided without words, to go back in and start the cleaning job themselves. It would be wrong to burden the maid and her sister. Those two women had lives and troubles of their own. Besides, this was probably some sort of tribal duty, a task too ludicrous and personal to inflict on anybody else.
Chloe stood with difficulty, then stretched a bit, seemed steadied. “Well, my dear, are you ready?”
Irma nodded, then punched open the swinging door and lightly draped one arm around her friend’s shoulder. They lingered here on the threshold for a moment, two well-meaning white women, childhood friends, lots nearer their deaths than their births. They studied the whole mess realistically.
“You know?” Irma cheered herself. “It’s not nearly so bad as I remembered.”
Then they scuffed straight into ankle-deep debris, waded toward the broom closet, got boldly back to it, got on with it, with life as it is practiced on this particular handsome side street in this particular dwindling country, ladies getting on with business as usual.
WORLD without end. Amen.
1975-76
Breathing Room
Something About My Brother
For Bruce Fraser Gurganus
Craig Morris Gurganus
and Gary Thomas Gurganus
ASTHMA RATTLED in my baby brother. One wooden wall kept his bed from mine. Upstairs and at the far end of the hall, our rooms were democratically identical. Mother read books on ways to reinforce a child’s creative nature. These told how individuality blooms best in private, how the locks on children’s doors should work.
Draperies matched my bedspread: the locomotive’s evolution from its early toylike phases to solid modern-day models. Charts showed the silhouette of every name-brand dinosaur. Collections weighed the bookcase I’d spent five days sanding, then enameled red. Bird feathers I found were crammed into the narrow necks of jars. From one milk-of-magnesia bottle, very blue, mementoes of a bobolink, a swan, goldfinch, and crow all sprouted into one unlikely fan. Quartz rested, solid at eye level—some pink or bluish, others clear—and faceted as randomly as ice. Our mother had survived a convent education. She believed true knowledge always involved Latin. So, to the undersides of everything I owned from nature, I taped labels, carefully inscribed with chubby script. The holy names of local things: “Tailfeather (May 5, Crystal Lake). genus: Passer / family: Ploceidae. English Sparrow. Male, I think.”
OUR HOUSE’S outer walls were very thick. Quilted silver stuffing sandwiched between well-made slats. Each joint and corner carpentered to keep out weather, pollen, noise, and moths that might make lace of adult tweeds.
But walls inside, ones that showed where rooms would start and stop, these divided only space from space, us from us, and were appropriately flimsy. So after midnight, when outdoor birds and insects settled into thin brief sleep, when the chugging laundry room and Mother’s wailing hair dryer and Father’s baritone electric razor rested, as I hid chin-deep under quilts and printed trains, my brother’s troubled breathing lifted up out of the darkness. It stayed the leading sound all night as I lay listening.
Breaths must be consecutive to work. Bradley’s seemed to forget this, then at the last moment, recall. Breathing, when it’s sick, is such a sound … it causes you to reconsider everything. I inhaled quietly. I was older, with an eighteen-month head start in atmosphere he seemed allergic to. I vowed I’d listen till the other sounds revived at dawn. I thought of how, come morning, they might find him, quiet finally and cool under his bedspread’s clipper ships.
Mother’s books said, Kids need secrets, secrets thrive on privacy. But my bed was totally unfortified. Breath zigzagged through our mutual wall. It claimed and sectioned off my private space, tore into my territory surely as if ripping strips out of a paper map.
Brother’s sickness riffled through my shelves, puzzled why I was so healthy, all tucked in and still. An inside job, his sickness snooped through everything I owned. It counted shoes and sandals on the closet floor. It overturned quartz, read Latin names, guessed which collected things were favorites. It poked into all hiding places, found the fossiled rock I’d stolen from Bradley then slipped inside a box under my bed. That rock, with its sketchy prehistoric minnow, grew incandescent now, glowed through tissues wrapping it, shone along the seams of the cigar box I’d taped shut.
Sometimes safety, in the blockish silhouette of our real father, stumbled up the stairs when I most needed help and living company. He’d arrived home slightly drunk and sentimental now at three a.m., tiptoed to my room, his arms out, feeling for the desk chair he’d once tripped over. Father leaned against my bed’s far end; it creaked as he stared down, as I played dead, arms wrapped around myself to keep from shaking—with the privilege and jitters of pretending. If I woke now, would I get hugged or lectured? I knew he didn’t want to talk. He just came upstairs to stand here, to appreciate my safety in a bed he’d bought. Once I’d heard him call me his “little soldier.” So now I couldn’t flinch and disappoint.
But when he got this close, this far into the morning, I wished I were the baby. Then I could whimper, fake a nightmare, cry aloud so he’d bend down and tell me, There there. That everything was fine, that he was here, our house was locked, the war was done, and not to worry. But Father turned, stalked out of mine and into Bradley’s room. The door unlatched and brother’s standard noises sounded new to me and worse than usual. I opened my eyes, shivered wildly as I wanted, counted to sixty, slowly, once then twice. I timed his visit. I had to know if brother’s sickness held
our father longer than my unintentional good health.
Early next morning, sunlight woke me. I sat up, frightened, then heard Bradley peeing in our sunny bathroom: music, and a credit to my vigil. I thanked myself. No one else would. My attention alone had kept him rasping on till breakfast. Then other sounds resumed responsibility. Over eggs, we again became good-natured enemies.
HE DIDN’T SEEM to understand he was a sickly child, attuned to perils as a lightning rod. He let others worry for him. He wanted to do everything and at the regular pace. His enthusiasm seemed a simple eagerness to die, but he was four years old and wholly ignorant of how, at any moment, it might happen. Privately, adults told me that along with other things, Bradley was allergic to the sting of bees. As for fiercer sharper wasps, those went without saying: one bad bite might do him in.
Did I remember how he swole all up last spring when he’d tried collecting bees in a glass jar? Remember how his eyes were piggy little slits for days and how he had to drink through a clear curving straw, like a thermometer with liquid ups and downs, and how the doctor came and everybody said that this was really serious? I nodded. After all, who was his one brother and self-appointed keeper?
Sunlight had been stanched and smothered behind the draperies’ blue clipper ships. Bradley’s door stood half open. Downstairs in the foyer, Dr. Satterfield mumbled technicalities to Mother. I stepped over, tilted into the shadows, “Hey, Bradley?”
“Huh?”
“Can I come in?”
“Uh-huh.”
I could hear myself talking too loud but couldn’t help it. “I’ve been trying to see you. She wouldn’t let me. Boy, you sure are puffed up. Does it hurt?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t say words, can you?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Momma just told the doctor that your face has gone down some. How big was it?”
From under the covers, his swollen hands lifted. Ten white fingers stubby as toes stopped inches beyond either cheek: This big. Above quilts, a head large as Father’s, features creased within deep folds. His rounded face and neck gave off a sheen in this blue light, looked brittle as some vase propped among the pillows. I thought of a piñata we’d ceremoniously shattered at school. A painted ram, papier-mâche. Its belly dented, then cracked jaggedly, and out like gore leapt candy, trinkets, drenching other kids who laughed and jigged under this downpour. I hid behind my desk.
I’d been hoarding news for him. So much can happen in a week outdoors. But seeing Bradley, fat with poison—one bee’s worth—I forgot my gossip. I only recalled how vast our woods seemed with just me in it. On trees, new blobs of amber sap made me think of him. Through our undergrowth, heavy-bodied rodents scuttled toward their burrows.
Nothing to say. Brother couldn’t ask a question, his throat swollen shut. So I edged toward the bright door. “Oh. You remember your fossil, that missing one? Well, I think I can get it. I’m sure I know the kid that stole it. He heard you were sick and all and he thought it might help cheer you up to have that back, for keeps.”
Bradley lifted one hand off the nautical bedspread and held it out to me. I eased over.
Light from our hall showed his true color, white as roots.
“Viie,” Bradley moaned.
“Bye,” I told him quickly, pleased to understand. I touched his cool palm, ashamed of fearing it and him. I grabbed his plump fingers. I gripped, in proof of loving him, and tried to press right through this bloat and underneath.
He hissed. That hand slowly pulled away from me. It fisted and slipped under coverlets. I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I backed toward the door. But just then his face did something, jack-o’-lantern slits widened. I’m sure he hoped to make me feel better. I went over and leaned across his bed, looked eye-to-eye right at him. The puckered folds all stretched, tightening.
“You’re smiling, aren’t you?”
He nodded, still doing it.
“Okay. Well, good. Get better, all right? Bye, Bradley.” I hurried to my room next door. Fully dressed, I crawled under my covers. In this muffling tent of quilts stitched by Grandmother’s own dead mother, I could think about him and even cry, but quietly. He mustn’t hear. If he just lived, I swore to God, cross my heart and hope to die, I’d guard him so much better than before.
Somehow he shrank back to regular, to the way he used to look. Then everybody said with new conviction, He’s a beautiful beautiful child—and silently I began to notice what they meant. Adults told me, Bryan, when you’re out with him, outdoors, keep bugs away, son. You must. All kinds, or he may die. We can’t know what he’s allergic to until it bites him. We must look after him, and carefully. “We” meant “me.” I nodded, solemn with the seriousness of my brother’s complete condition.
FROM OUR thick-walled house, I heard and saw the waiting choirs and chorus lines of danger. Huddled in the thorny twigs of every hedge, lumped under the eaves of each garage we passed, hidden hives buzzed, thrumming with malevolence. Bugs. Brittle and mobile and every one rigged with a stinger. Bradley, here beside me now in June, wore just a short seersucker sunsuit.
I led him quickly past the clover, its sweet lethal scent banked into damp corners where hornets and bees convened. In summer air, I waved away the merest mayfly. I even snatched at gnats, hovering—mid-evening—in granular atomic clots. Bradley hardly noticed. Being but a baby, and wanting to do everything like anybody else, he forgot their scary lectures. I remembered for him. For myself. Till the two of us, crossing a weedy field, seemed an entire group, an entire kindergarten outing, disorganized and all in danger. Vigilance is exhausting. Finally, I ached to simply arch right over him, to settle like a jar with air holes and enough floor space so he’d not be bored. Then he could see out but be immune from bad things. I scanned the woods we walked through, hand in hand. I saw only a diagram of pitfalls, harmful nests, occasions for the artificial respiration I’d memorized from charts.
Bradley failed to grow tough like others. He wasn’t even tough as me. He had only his ringlets to protect him. He was just a precious substance peeled and left exposed for air to darken, for any flying thing to find and fret. I watched the way his elbows bent in two deep doughy folds, the way his neck was plump and met his shoulders all at once. And how, instead of knuckles, his fist dimpled five times, like a newly poked and planted garden row.
It made you doubt he’d make it. So many things not even fully pressed yet into view: thick catalogs of threats awaiting each. Nature ought to pass a law against so much susceptibility in a single creature. Bradley made me think of damage as the world’s one constant. Even bees, which some consider lyrical, are really martial in their readiness for anything. So all the honey in the world, dense amber vats of it, is balanced and offset by one microscopic duct of poison.
I carried a leafy twig and, like attendant to a dauphin, brushed off any stone he might perch on, wiped the wooden swing seat with my shirttail, scoured away a ridge of piny sap a bee might glue itself to and then sting straight up, through summer seersucker and into one white buttock.
I imagined how we’d be quite far from home, in our best tunnel and deepest hidden camp, in the one cool fringe of woods the suburbs had not eaten yet. And how Bradley would reach up to grab a coffee can we kept club dues in, and how the Bee would be there, sunning on the warm tin rim. Bradley would howl and hold his hand and fall back into our cave, not knowing what was what. And then he’d simply say, “A bee, Bryan, a bee again.” And I would haul him from the hole we’d dug together, I’d drag him quickly as I could through weeds neck-deep, back toward where our smooth lawn started suddenly. He would be swelling up with what I knew the poison did to him, and I’d be calling out for help, expecting none, but pulling home my younger only brother. Blaming myself and hauling him by two chubby wrists, his weight snapping a trail of weeds. I would be wailing, head back, as the softer of us puffed and maybe died. Nothing I could do about it now. Wailing for our mother so she’d greet us where the weeds ended
, wailing to prepare her for the sight of what had happened when, for one selfish second, I had looked the other way.
HERE AT the big kitchen table, my favorite artist’s studio, I control a piece of vast white paper; in easy reach enough peeled crayons to map a war. I am ready to commit myself to the drawing of those persons I know best, I know too well. Today each will get not a color—because white people are not, colored, or are they?—but, one shape apiece:
MY RINGLETED brother is a small choice circle, like a target made of palest tissue paper, drawn drum-tight, and waiting.
MY MOTHER, Helen, our mother, lover of contract bridge and needlework and Daphne du Maurier’s many books, Mom says “actually” often. That must make her oval. “Actually” sounds oval. Mother wears her hair pulled back at her neck’s fair nape, pulled no-nonsense to the usual oval. Her face is shaped Pilgrimishly upright but can go so suddenly friendly, it stops your air, her beauty. The face is dear as good new round-edged hand soap, guest soap, scented, “not for every day, boys.” Yes, the perfect ample oval, doodled solemn on my page. So ripe and forlorn in her lonely madonna kind of geometry. Makes me sad but good-sad, sitting here, to see the shape I drew for being her.
MY FATHER, son of the brooched socialite, son of the big-eared sun-cured farmer that this socialite so unaccountably adores, my father is the medal-plated minor hero of a major foreign war. This makes Father a rectangle mostly, but one set, disciplinary and royal, on its tallest end. He is a shape you must look up to, sheer rock-facing, you must look it up as you’d look up a number over and over in the phone book, say, forgetting it between. The head end of the former pilot swims so far up in air. Shortstuff, go ahead and signal so he’ll see you—and consider landing—even consider landing on you, way here far below.