Russell Banks: Affliction

THIS IS THE STORY of my older brother’s strange criminal behavior and his disappearance. No one urged me to reveal these things; no one asked me not to. We who loved him simply no longer speak of Wade, not among ourselves and not with anyone else, either. It is almost as if he never existed, or as if he were a member of some other family or from some other place and we barely knew him and never had occasion to speak of him. So that by telling his story like this, as his brother, I am separating myself from the family and from all those who ever loved him.

In numerous ways I am separated from them anyhow, for while each of us is ashamed of Wade and burdened with anger — my sister, her husband and kids, Wade’s ex-wife and his daughter, his fiancée and a few friends — the others are ashamed and burdened in ways that I am not. They are dismayed by their shame, astonished by it, as they should be (he is one of them, after all, and they are good people, in spite of everything); and they are confused by their anger. Which is perhaps why they have not asked me to keep silent. I myself am neither dismayed nor confused: like Wade, I have been ashamed and angry practically since birth and am accustomed to holding both those skewed relations to the world: it makes me, among those who loved him, uniquely qualified to tell his story.

Even so, I know how the others think. They are secretly hoping that they have got Wade’s story wrong and that I can somehow get it right or at least get it said in such a way that we will all be released from our shame and anger and can speak lovingly again of our brother, husband, father, lover, old friend, around the supper table or in the car on a long drive or in bed late at night, wondering where the poor man is now, before we fall asleep.

That will not happen. Nevertheless, I tell it for them, for the others as much as for myself. They want, through the telling, to regain him; I want only to be rid of him. His story is my ghost life, and I want to exorcise it.

As for forgiveness: it must be spoken of, I suppose, but who among us can hope to proffer it? Even I, at this considerable distance from the crimes and the pain, cannot forgive him. It is the nature of forgiveness that when you forgive someone, you no longer have to protect yourself from him, and for the rest of our lives we will have to protect ourselves from Wade. Regardless, it is too late now for forgiveness to do him any good. Wade Whitehouse is gone. And I believe that we will never see him again.

Everything of importance — that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story — occurred during a single deer-hunting season in a small town, a village, located in a dark forested valley in upstate New Hampshire, where Wade was born and raised and so was I, and where most of the White-house family has lived for five generations. Think of a village in a medieval German folktale. Think of a cluster of old and new but mostly old houses and shops and a river running through and hillside meadows and tall trees. The town is named Lawford, and it is one hundred fifty miles north of where I live now.

Wade was forty-one that fall and in bad shape — everyone in town knew it but was not particularly upset by it. In a village, you see people’s crises come and go, and you learn to wait them out: most people do not change, especially seen from up close; they just grow more elaborate.

Consequently, everyone who knew Wade was waiting out his gloom, his heavy drinking, his dumb belligerence. His crisis was his character in sharp relief. Even I, down south in the suburbs of Boston, was waiting him out. It was easy for me. I am ten years younger than Wade, and I abandoned the family and the town of Lawford when I graduated high school — escaped from them, actually, though it sometimes feels like abandoned. I went to college, the first in the family to do that, and became a high school teacher and a man of meticulous routine. For many years, I regarded Wade as a gloomy, alcoholic and stupidly belligerent man, like our father, but now he had gotten into his forties without killing himself or anyone else, and I expected that he would, like our father, get into his fifties, sixties and maybe seventies the same way, so I did not worry about Wade.

Though he visited me twice that fall and called me on the telephone often and at great length, several times a week and usually late at night, after he had been drinking for hours and had sent everyone near him scurrying for safety, I was not moved much one way or the other. I listened passively to his rambling tirades against his ex-wife, Lillian, and his mournful declarations of love for his daughter, Jill, and his threats to inflict serious bodily harm on many of the people who lived and worked with him, people whom, as the town police officer, he was sworn to protect. Preoccupied with the details of my own life, I listened to him as if he were a boring soap opera on TV and I was too busy or distracted by the details of my own life to get up and change the channel.

It would pass, I felt, with the pain of his divorce from Lillian and of her remarriage and departure from town with Jill in tow. Six more months, I felt, would do it. That would put him three full years beyond the divorce, two years beyond Lillian’s move south to Concord, and well into springtime: snowmelt running off the hills, the lakes breaking free of ice, daylight lingering into evening. Maybe he will fall in love with someone else, I thought. There was a woman he said he slept with now and again, a local woman named Margie Fogg, and for the most part he spoke fondly of her. If nothing else, I thought, Jill will eventually grow up. Children often force parents to grow up by first growing up themselves. Though I am childless and unmarried, I know this.

Then one night something changed, and from then on my relation to Wade’s story was different from what it had been before, since childhood. That night willed detachment got replaced by — what? — sympathy? More than sympathy, I think, and less. Empathy. A dangerous feeling, to both parties.

I mark it by the change I heard in Wade’s tone of voice during a phone call he made to me a night or two after Halloween. It may have been the first or second of November by then. He was in the middle of one of his garrulous complaints, and I heard something that I had not heard there before, and for an instant I wondered if I had misperceived my brother all along. Perhaps I had misjudged him, and he was not so predictable after all; perhaps his character and this crisis were not one thing, were instead quite distinct from one another, or the nature of the crisis was such that it would soon make them distinct; perhaps my brother was as real as I, a man whose character was as I understood my own: process, flux, change. This was a new thought to me and not an altogether welcome one. And I did not know where it came from, unless it was from the simple accumulated weight of familiarity; for, without my being aware of it, a subtle balance had shifted, as if in my sleep, so that suddenly I was no longer distantly monitoring my brother’s confused painful life but was instead practically living it. And I despised Wade’s life. Let me say it again. I despised Wade’s life. I fled the family and the town of Lawford when I was little more than a boy to avoid having to live that life. That is only one of the differences between Wade and me, but it is a huge difference.

Wade was making the ex-husband’s complaint about the ex-wife’s infinite capacity for cruelty — the result of some minor humiliation a night or two before. I had not quite got it but had not asked for clarification, either — when suddenly I heard a shift in his tone of voice, a change of register and pitch, little enough to notice ordinarily, but for some reason enough to sit me up straight in my chair to listen to him closely, to gather my wandering attention, and instead of regarding his life as merely a minor part of mine, I saw the man in his own context for a change. It was as if the story he was telling were enlarging and clarifying my story: the chronic toothache he had complained of earlier in the conversation, though worse and significantly different from my periodic headaches, suddenly became a troublesome echo, and his financial difficulties, though described practically in another language than mine, rhymed anxiously with mine, and his ongoing troubles with women, parents, friends and enemies, grotesquely reversed versions of my troubles, gave mine painful articulation.