Short Century (5 page)

As Emily got a little older she started telling Paul that he was mean and that she didn't like him, and every time she did so he looked stricken. I took to encouraging her, though she didn't need much encouragement. Every time she learned a bad word, she used it against him. Once, Paul came home with a bag full of Emily's favorite candy bars. He said, “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas,” even though it was nowhere near Christmas. She jumped up and down as she unwrapped a candy bar, which she then very theatrically dropped, saying, “I don't want candy from a jerk,” as she stomped it into the carpet. Then she ran into her room, and instead of chasing her, Paul grabbed me by the back of the neck and pushed me into the sofa.

“Ha ha ha, she doesn't like you.” I did my best to taunt him while he held me down long enough to grab an apple from the bowl on the glass coffee table, eat the apple, and shove the core into my mouth. Before he let me go, he beat me hard in the back and the chest.

Eventually Emily started mocking Paul by taking a piece of fruit out of the fruit bowl, taking a bite of it, and then dropping it. Sometimes she pretended an apple was too hot to hold; other times she pretended that she was incompetently juggling one pear. Whenever she did this, I was sure to receive a beating later in the day, but I never told her about these particular beatings, partially because I didn't want her to feel guilty but mostly because I didn't want her to stop making fun of Paul.

My father, having decided that Paul's treatment was my just punishment for being who I was, mostly ignored us whenever he would pass. I learned to imitate the thud and sweep of his crutches the way other boys imitate fart noises. Emily did not like it when I kicked fruit into our father's path, and though she would have sooner died than tell on me, she did try on a number of occasions to kick the fruit in a different direction so that it wound up becoming like a soccer game. When our father did get knocked down, he would never let us help him up.

Noble but absurd, absurd but noble, mostly absurd, mostly noble; my thoughts on my father and his crutches have shifted probably tens of thousands of times over sixty years. My mother I did not see much of—she was usually in her room drinking or reading the romance novels that she consumed at the rate of one or sometimes two per day, thus leaving our apartment lined with several thousand drugstore-grade romance novels that shared space with the Latin copies of Virgil and Tacitus that my father had ostensibly read in prep school.

Emily spent a lot of time following me around, asking me what I thought about whatever she happened to be thinking about, gazing at me with the extremely large blue eyes that made her look like a bug (“Ladybug” was her hated childhood nickname, used by everyone in the family except for me). I helped her dance, after a fashion. We watched movies together; we shared a fondness for the 1930s and 1940s comedies, musicals, and gangster films that played on the
Late Show
and the
Late Late Show
. When there was a movie playing at three in the morning that we both wanted to see, we would set the alarm and watch Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire, and then go back to bed just as Paul was waking up. I was always amazed by Emily's intelligence and her lightness of heart. It was impossible to see her in the glow of the television and not think that one day she was going to be a movie star, or a famous writer, or something else wondrous.

Actually, Emily was talking about becoming a writer when Paul almost went too far. Paul had sat down to watch television with us, and Emily said that when she grew up she was going to write a book called “Stupid Paul.” For whatever reason, this silly child's insult set Paul off, and he grabbed her by the shoulder and raised his hand to hit her. I leaped in between them and grabbed Paul's fist. I told her that if he ever hit her, I would kill him. To my surprise he backed off and Emily hugged me and thanked me, and I felt immensely proud of myself for having scared him off, though in fact I think that he scared himself off.

After that, Paul started leaving us alone. I want to say that this was the
result of my having stood up to him, but it's just as likely that he left us alone because he started having girls over, and he seemed to understand that girls wanted to see him treat his two younger siblings well. Emily would sometimes tell these girls that Paul was “mean”—she told one, using a word that was truly shocking coming from a little girl in the late nineteen-fifties, that he was “an asshole”—but the girls tended to think that Paul was a saintly older brother beset with a bratty little sister, and they rewarded him for this saintliness in the only way that saints want to be rewarded: with copious sex. Given the mores of the time the sex was probably mostly limited to handjobs, but there was no telling what those girls were sighing about behind Paul's locked door. If it had occasionally occurred to me previously that I wanted to be Paul—as, after all, it probably had—the thought was there constantly now. If Paul was what girls wanted, then I wanted to be Paul.

Of course I also hated myself for wanting to be like him.

At Yale, he was very much a baseball star; in addition to being an astonishing hitter, he had become an astonishing outfielder, and he had plucked so many would-be-homerun balls out of their natural destiny that he had acquired the nickname of “The Interventionist.” He looked destined for a brilliant career in the major leagues.

On my thirteenth birthday, he came to my room and told me, with a broad just-us-gentlemen smile, that he was sorry for treating me as he had, and that he hoped we could be friends. I told him that I would hate him until one of us died. This did not result in the beating I had steeled myself for; he just continued to smile, said he hoped I would change my mind, and left my room.

I had never really thought of my room as my room until I asked Paul to leave it. Since he had left for college I had mostly felt indignant that I had to stay in my smaller room while he kept the bigger one, even though he was in New Haven most of the time. But now I thought: this is my room. My next thought was that I should shut my door to Emily. I was starting to get a little irritated by my little sister. She was only nine and was not going to understand
The Stranger
, and though I didn't really understand it either, I longed to be left alone long enough to try. She was constantly coming in to tell me about something that had happened with her friends, or some new plotline she had made up for her dolls. It might be fair to say that I was outgrowing her.

Then Paul took a turn. In the spring of his senior year at Yale, he announced that he was not going to pursue the career in baseball that a few teams were trying to tempt him toward, and that he was instead going to become a soldier. My father was not quite delighted—I think he had gotten used to the idea of cheering as his son stopped a home run—but nothing could shake my father's faith that a soldier was a fine thing for a young man to be. I on the other hand couldn't have been happier; I was going to be claiming the big bedroom while my brother shared a bunk bed.

The first truly disturbing incident came in April. He had gotten into a fight with another boy at a bar, and apparently had somehow broken the kid's left arm. The victim's family wanted Paul expelled without a diploma, and since they were more or less exactly as wealthy as we were, my father was truly worried for a while, and his crutches thudded with less alacrity. But he used whatever magic he possessed to turn Paul into a Yale graduate.

Expected to enlist shortly after graduation, Paul decided instead to take the summer off. This seemed completely reasonable, and for the first summer in several he came to Southampton with us. (Emily and I would spend summers in Southampton while my father stayed in Manhattan. Save for the summer before my sophomore year in college, which I spent in Italy, this continued every summer until the summer eight years later that I'll get to sooner than I'd like.) I worried that he would quickly revert to attempting to beat me, and I had even started going to the gym that spring to be able to fight, but I was still a small fourteen, so I knew I wouldn't have much chance. To my surprise, he more or less completely left me alone, instead spending most of his time sitting on the beach outside our house. Once, he grabbed me by the back of the neck and I thought,
Here we go
, but he just turned me around and draped me in his muscular arm and, his face deformed by weeping, he said: “Why can't I feel good, Artie? Huh?” This bothered me so much that I ran away as though I were four rather than fourteen. He didn't chase me, and when I got home, he was gone. He didn't come home that night, and then he didn't come home the next night, and my mother started getting worried.

“He probably went somewhere to be an asshole,” was Emily's guess. My mother scolded her and then tucked herself back into a romance novel.

Paul returned the next afternoon without any explanation and without seeming to have showered or shaved or slept in the interim, but he did all three, and then things were fine for another couple of weeks.

And then the attack finally came. Emily and I had gotten into a fight, because she wanted me to walk her to the movie theater and I told her I just wanted to read; Emily and I essentially had no one else to talk to in Southampton, so the atmosphere could become stifling and the air could get a little thick with Little Girl. But any time Emily was mad at me, I felt terrible and felt like I should apologize. The upshot was that I had difficulty concentrating on what I was reading. Paul had gone out, and returned with a bag of apples (we had stopped keeping fruit around after he discontinued his regimen). As soon as I saw the bag in his hand I started to run. He dropped the bag of apples, letting them roll down the vast tiles. He grabbed me before I could open the glass door, but I could see Emily walking on the beach as he dragged me back to the sofa and pushed me down, face-first. With one hand, he bent my arm and I couldn't escape. With his free hand he picked an apple up off the floor and ate it noisily, though I couldn't see it, and in fact couldn't see anything because he was pushing my nose into the sofa. Finally he turned me around and shoved the apple core down my throat, so far that I felt certain I was going to vomit, and I started to wonder whether he was actually going to kill me. He punched me three times in the gut, and I was absolutely certain that I was going to vomit, but somehow I did not. Finally he took the apple core out of my mouth and I said “Paul is King!” before he had even asked me to, though I was crying too hard and was too close to vomiting to say it distinctly.

He left me alone and I lay on the Persian rug sobbing, hating myself. I was not thinking much of anything until I heard Emily screaming.

I ran across the broad white-tiled living room, and finally out the door. All I could see were two blond creatures wrestling in the blond sand, but immediately I knew that I had to save Emily.

She was facedown in the sand and he was straddling her back; with one hand he was pushing her head down into the sand and with the other he was pummeling her back. They were at the tidemark, and as I ran toward them the ocean water washed up to Emily's nose and receded. Fear and anger battled in my heart and left me numb and strong. I leapt onto Paul's back and bit into his ear and there was soft-hard flesh between my teeth. He screamed, and with a push I knocked us both off of Emily. He picked up a rock and brought it down quickly and heavily on my knee. The pain was excruciating, though not as excruciating as the pain that came as he brought down the rock several more times, cracking and bloodying my leg. Then he raised the rock above my head, and if I were to live for a thousand years I doubt I would forget watching his eyes as he pondered the question of whether to kill me. He must have decided in my favor, because he finally dropped the rock and continued down the beach. Emily, her forehead bloody, ran into the house to call for help and fetch some bandages. I was not going to take my eyes off Paul in case he doubled back, but he just kept walking under the clouds like a young man off to meet a great destiny.

I woke up in a hospital bed to see my mother sitting beside me, streaks of gray in the hair tangled against her cheek.

“I'm sorry I let the roughhousing get a little out of hand,” she said. When I laughed out loud, she lowered her eyes. She rubbed my knee. This hurt, so she rubbed the underside of my foot. I told her that that hurt, too, though it did not, and then she started crying a deep, heaving cry. “I'm proud of you for standing up for your sister,” she said. Crying was a fairly cheap ploy, one she ferried out whenever the miserableness of her parenting became too obvious to ignore, but as it always did it made me feel bad, so I told her it was okay. She said no, it's not, and I said, yes, it is, and she said no, it's not, and I said, yes, it is, and this continued until we let the subject drop. Then she told me that Paul would be spending the rest of the summer in Manhattan, while we would stay in Southampton.

Over the next weeks, Emily took it upon herself to nurse me back to health. She was ten years old, but already a surprisingly accomplished baker, and she made delicious oatmeal raisin cookies that she would bring me several times each day, along with tea. She asked me to read to her from
The Princess of
REDACTED
. Just for old times' sake. I didn't want to, but saying no seemed silly, so I had no choice but to say yes.

She asked me if I had heard about bombings against the British in
REDACTED
. I had, and I had also heard horrible stories about the
REDACTED
army castrating rebels, but I didn't think that either was appropriate to mention to her.

One day I heard a splashing noise, followed by a little yelp, and I called down to her to ask whether anything was wrong. She quickly called out, “No,” in a very cheery voice. When she came upstairs, I saw that her long, thin ten-year-old's fingers were red, and I asked whether she had spilled boiling water. She said no, and I had to ask several more times before she admitted that yes, she had burned her fingers. When I asked why she had lied, she said that she didn't want me to feel guilty. She was such a sweet girl, and somehow these memories are mostly untainted; the bright, adoring, devoted, grateful ten-year-old does not occupy the same place in my mind as does the obviously brilliant, frankly sexual girl of a few years later. No Humbert, I.