Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

All of this, I sincerely promise , will presently be very, very clear. One does not talk about what I am preparing myself to talk about, and talk in defiance of habit, unless one is utterly sworn to being very, very clear. I have sworn myself to the effort to let nothing interfere with clarity of the first order. Not even the sound of one hand clapping must be let to raise a diversion from the sentences I am going to set down — but, reader, reader, how I hear that one hand clapping now!

MY BROTHER WAS AN ACTOR until radio gave out. After that, he tended bar on Fifty-fifth Street and on Fifty-seventh Street, and then he went to Oslo and then he went to Zurich, and when he came home he came home with a wife, a Swiss, a psychiatrist, and in time she proved herself a psychopath. But the time was not soon enough, for by then my beautiful brother and my handsome sister-in-law had a son. They named him, I felt honored to learn, David, called him Chap, and that is what he is called to this day, seventeen years later, fifteen of which Chap and my brother have not, not once, seen each other.

There was a divorce when Chap was two, and his mother, not long after, set up practice in El Paso, reasoning aloud that Chap's asthma would be more manageable there — the aridity — reasoning to herself, my brother supposes, that my brother would be taught what grief feels like.

You have my word for it that my brother did not need to be given the lesson. You have my word for it that my brother did everything short of seizing the office of the mayor of El Paso to force his residence there, close to Chap, close to the largest love then in him. You also have my word for it that my handsome sister-in-law did everything short of hiring ruffians to strong-arm the father well beyond the city limits. It was easy, considering. The woman, you will remember, is a psychiatrist, and a kind of despot therefore. And my brother, as you by and by will see as the facts are by and by disclosed, was vulnerable in a very particular regard.

My brother — I shall call him by a different name here — my brother Smithy would return to New York with a sick heart, and when its sickening had worsened, he would go back to El Paso to cry out at the gates of the city. My mother tells us that these weekly, then monthly, pilgrimages went on for almost four years and were then gradually abandoned as the facts proved unmoving, unalterable, permanent. I was living in New England then, kept in very random touch with family, and — it will be no surprise to them if I admit it — discouraged them from doing other than returning the discourtesy. You see, at the time I was still dominated by the pretension of writing, although I was well past the point where I had fled from doing it in public. But, of course, I did hear from my mother and from my sister — and, when Smithy had moved back to New York from Switzerland, from Smithy himself-that he had taken a second wife, a Swiss again, a woman somewhat older than the first and anything but a psychiatrist. This sister-in-law, whom I have not seen to this day, had banking as her profession, and still has it.

I do not need to see her to know that she is handsomer than the psychiatrist, for her photographs show up in the magazines and in a newspaper that is regularly attentive to very handsome and very active women, and my mother clips and forwards every single picture through an agent who has long given excellent service as an intermediary. And Smithy, who telephones often now that I have devised a truly private line, never fails to remind me that I am the brother-in-law of one of the world's most admired women.

But I do not need Smithy's reminding, nor my mother's clippings, to know how breathtaking Margaret must be — for the child of her marriage to my brother I have five times seen in the flesh, and he is the very word of loveliness, in this as in all things.

The boy's name is Rupert — and he is the child of all our dreaming.

If I say more about Rupert in regard of his unearthliness, I will not be for long free from confusion. I will — what I want to tell you will — fall victim to the disorder of sentiment, and I have promised you clarity. I have also promised someone squalor. I now intend, in all scruple and with haste, to keep both promises — and to save my brother, and everyone else, in the bargain.

Rupert will be five on his next birthday. This is the last I will say about my brother's second golden son, comma purposely omitted. The next voice you hear will be Smithy's, and I can make no boundaries for him . His italics are entirely his own.

"STOKE UP A CIGARETTE; this is going to take a long time."

"I quit smoking. Snuffed my last butt the tenth of October. If Mom would tell you any thing, she'd tell you that , and you promised me you were going to start listening to Mom, remember?"

There was a silence — not a good silence.

"Smithy? Hey, buddy, you there?"

"Please don't buddy me right now, Buddy. Please. And please don't kid around. I've finally thought the thing out, and what I've got to do — Buddy, dear God, I cannot believe I am saying this out loud — I am going to kill my son."

I did not shift the receiver to my other ear. I did not do anything that I can especially remember. I think if I had had a cigarette handy, I would have lit it. If there had been cigarettes in this house, I would have smoked them all. If I could have asked him to wait a half hour, I would have gone into town and bought a carton. Anyway, I did nothing — and I said nothing — because it was progressively occurring to me that I did not know which son Smithy meant, and that maybe he did not know either, and that if I said something that suggested one boy or the other, the suggestion might tilt my brother in one direction or the other.

Have I told you that my brother has twice been away ? I know I haven't — because that is a fact that would certainly mislead you, and the one thing this piece of writing must not do is mislead you. But when one has a brother who has twice been away and who married a psychiatrist, one can oneself be misled by such facts. You cannot read enough of the Viennese logician to escape certain facts, and these may be among them.

"Buddy? Buddy, did you hear what I said ? You want to go get a smoke now, big brother?"

And then he started crying, sobbing wretchedly. I had always imagined men could cry like this, but I had never heard it. It went on for a long time, and I was glad it did, because I believed that whatever had given it to occur would wear itself out this way and that would be that.

But it wasn't. Smithy stopped his weeping as abruptly as he'd started it, and when he began his first new sentence, it moved to its period with austere dispassion.

There's something else I have not told you. If he wanted, my brother could give the Viennese logician cards and spades. Smithy is very, very smart, endowed with an intelligence unsurpassed in our family and as statuesque as any I've come across. Moreover — and this is why I am not sure I am doing the right thing but only what I, like our Smithy, am convinced I must do — Smithy's unyielding custom is rationalism, all the way to the gallows if this were his destiny. There has never been anyone who could break him of the habit, and this goes for our older brother too — who could, just mentionably, break anyone of anything if he wanted to, and who would not flinch over breaking himself into nineteen pieces to do it. Except Smithy of his rationalism, of course.

But our big brother never had a very long run at it.

Anyway, Smithy's next sentence, and all the sentences that came rushing after that one and that I would not have dared to interrupt even to assert Fallacy of the Middle! were proportioned and stately in the organization of their argument. And this is what my brother said — and why my brother has concluded that he must kill his son — and why I am publishing what the reader may apprehend as a "story," but which Smithy, ever the rationalist, will understand is a disclosure one step short of my informing the police and a step quite far enough to stop him in his tracks.