The Half Brother Read Online Free PDF Page A

good humor and fondness. It is exactly, perfectly the picture that should be on the piano in the rectory of a boarding school.
    Their youngest member, however, cold and bored, had wandered off, trying to escape yet another of her brothers’ games. But they’d taken the picture anyway, and so, for that captured moment, it had been as though May didn’t exist.
    “The happy family,” May said to me, years later, as we stood in front of the photo, her hand in mine. “Fuck that.”

Three
    Henry Bankhead, the one in the center of the lacrosse picture, was the only son left at Abbott when I started teaching there. Binky was in college, and Laird had just graduated. Henry was a senior, and so to both my relief and slight disappointment wouldn’t be my student, as I was teaching freshmen and juniors. As it turned out he was a popular kid in a way I could appreciate, not much of a jock, instead sort of ramshackle, with a tendency to resist the system, which I saw in his occasional columns for the school paper (“The Tyranny of Lights-Out,” “Why Can’t Ultimate Be a Letter Sport?”). I hoped I might get to know him a little. May was then still too young for Abbott.
    After Christmas break, though, I didn’t see Henry around. Finally I asked Divya Lowell about it. “Oh, Charlie, you are out of the loop. He’s gone to St. Luke’s. In Rhode Island.”
    “But he’s a senior.”
    Divya looked at me with what I could only call a sympathetic glare. “Drugs. All handled quietly. It would have been different …” Her voice trailed off.
    “Is Preston okay?”
    She looked at me with surprise. “Probably not. I haven’t talked to him.” The bell would ring soon for the next class. “You can ask Win about it,” she said. “Will you come on Friday?”
    “I’m afraid you’re going to get sick of me,” I said, happily.
    “Nonsense! We’ll talk then.” The way she said it, I knew she didn’t think the situation so important. But to me it seemed the first chink in the finely wrought Bankhead armor.
    DIVYA AND WIN LOWELL LIVED near campus, in a big, drafty, very old house on a double lot. They, and the house, were famous, as I’d recently learned, for their annual Christmas parties, and also for the boxwood labyrinth in the back forty, as Win said, which had come with the place. On the street side, the house had an enormous Greek Revival portico. “I didn’t expect to come north and find Tara,” I said to Divya.
    “Nor me living in it,” she said, winking.
    Since school started, they’d been having me over for dinner nearly every week. Sometimes there were other Abbott people there, and sometimes it was just me. I was pretty sure they felt sorry for me, but I didn’t care. “There’s not much to do in a tiny town like this,” Divya said, shrugging, and then she would put me to work with some simple task I couldn’t screw up, like draining pasta. We would sit at the big table in the kitchen, with their two young sons, Anil and Ram, eating at lightning speed and then zooming off somewhere, leaving us with our wine. I’d been legally drinking for mere months at that point, but no one ever mentioned that. As it got colder, sometimes we would go to the living room after and sit in front of the fire.
    Divya’s living room—“It’s her house,” Win said, “I just live here”— had bright white walls that stretched up to eleven-foot ceilings. She had painted the ceilings pale blue. “It must be delightful up there, with all of the heat,” she would say, drolly. Stretching all the way up the walls, above the abundant yard-sale furniture and odd Lowell heirloom, were paintings, vaguely representational, done by various friends, Anil and Ram, and Divya herself, in the colors of kings and queens: cobalt and canary and verdigris, ruby and sable. She had a fondness for canvases with the paint layered on until it rose in little topographical drifts, and every now and then she would let her hand hover