“I still wish we’d been together.” Cass’s release date, an item every prisoner could remember instantly even if it was eighty years off, had always been January 31, 2008. But somehow Corrections had recalculated it as today in the course of the pardon and parole hearing.
“We talked about it. Couldn’t blow this breakfast off, not when the group set the date four months ago. But I’ll see you for dinner?”
“Still the plan.”
They hung up. He was crying, of course, and groped under his topcoat to get his handkerchief out of his back pocket. The thought of sitting down to a meal with his brother, sleeping under the same roof for the first time in twenty-five years, still seemed beyond easy imagining. They had made no extended plans for the future, purely out of superstition. The idea, as it had been for a quarter of a century, was to get through it, all the way to the end, one day at a time.
Twenty-five years. The immensity of the time settled on him. He could remember the guilty plea, and the day a month later, right after Paul’s wedding, when Cass’s sentence started. Both events retained in his mind the clarity of things that had happened last week, and that of course made the passage of time seem less consequential, especially now that they’d survived it. But twenty-five years was a literal lifetime for each of them when the sentence began. Saying good-bye at that gate, he’d had no idea how he would ever bear it. A year after Cass’s time inside started, he was still jarred every day by the reality that he couldn’t just call his brother, and his heart sparked when he woke up Sunday mornings, anticipating their visits. You had to be a twin, an identical twin, to understand how cruel their forced separation had seemed to each of them.
And now it was over. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, still not sure he’d regained his composure. The penetrating cold reached all the way up to his sinuses. Then he set one foot in front of the other and entered the club. His life, he realized, in the elemental way he had known it at its beginning, had started again.
II
11
Cassian,” says Zeus, showing off as usual, by utilizing the name Cass was given at birth. “So pleased you are with us. Did I see your mother? I must say hello.”
Zeus delivers a tight handshake, briefly summoning all his power and charm as he levels his black eyes. Behind him, Hermione, Dita’s mom, thin and simple like a piece of blank paper, passes by without the pretense of a smile. She has little use for Lidia-and Mickey-and thus for Cass.
Zeus is warmer, although he would never stand to see his treasured daughter with a cop, whatever Zeus might be required to say in public these days. But Zeus is a fake. His genial manner can bloom into bouquets of compliments, but the man Cass occasionally sees with a glass of whiskey in his study is insular, calculating and dark.
Dita is fearlessly outspoken about everyone else in her family. Her mother is “a twit,” consumed by appearances, and she calls her bawdy Aunt Teri, who most people think is responsible for Dita’s own outrageous manner, “entertaining.” As for her older brother, Hal, Dita sees him as basically clueless, but loves him nonetheless.
Yet about Zeus, she says very little. Love and loathing. You can almost hear it like the hum of power lines whenever she is around her dad. Dita says her father has told her one thousand times in private that Hal takes after his mother while she is more like him, an observation Dita clearly relishes. But the looks she aims at her father’s back roil with contempt for his unctuousness and grandiosity and limitless ambitions.
In his white suit, Zeus this afternoon more resembles a pit boss in Vegas than a political candidate, leaving aside his stars-and-stripes tie. Pausing to greet other guests, he is nevertheless headed toward Lidia, who is beside Nouna Teri, with her bleached hair, stiff as straw, and her piles of jewelry. Like his brother, Cass is faultlessly attuned to the nuances of his mother’s moods, and even at fifty feet he catches the baleful look with which Lidia registers Zeus’s approach.
Neither Paul nor he fully understands his parents’ grief with the Kronons. Now that Dita’s dad is on TV so often, Cass’s father, Mickey, won’t turn on the set, even to watch the Trappers. It’s mystifying because their elder sister, Helen, insists that before they were born, Zeus was regarded as the family’s savior. In the mid-1950s, Mickey was so totally disabled by a leaking mitral valve that he could not work, and Teri prevailed on her brother to hire Lidia in his office. She remained there for two or three years until she was pregnant with the boys and the invention of the heart-lung machine allowed Mickey to have valve-replacement surgery. With Mickey good as new, Papou Gianis helped their father open a grocery. Paulie and Cass worked there from the time they were five, when they began stocking shelves, and Cass still recalls the day his father, who always held his temper around customers, threw his white grocer’s apron from the cash registers to the dairy case and yelled out that the store would be moving. He was furious about his lease, which was now held by Zeus, who’d bought up most of the commercial property in the old neighborhood.
“OH GOD!”
Across the lawn, despite the music and loud conversations, Cass suddenly makes out a startled yelp that he knows automatically is his brother’s, and he dashes toward the sound. Arriving, he sees his twin laid out on the lawn with Sofie Michalis hovering over him, both of them laughing like children. A hunk of barbecued lamb and some macaroni are on the ground beside Paul’s ear, along with an oval paper plate. Several dozen people, most old neighbors, have circled around his fallen brother. Once it’s clear that Paul is fine, a number turn away and greet Cass, inevitably asking, “Which one are you?” That question always leaves Cass feeling as if a wire has shorted somewhere in his chest.
The deepest secret in Cass Gianis’s life is how infuriated he is that he does not really match his brother. While Lidia was pregnant, she took great heed of the story of Esau and Jacob, and as a result, instructed Dr. Worut before she was etherized for the delivery to tell no one, not even her, which baby had been born first. Presented with the boys afterwards, she named them simply from left to right, Cassian and Paul, for her father and Mickey’s. No one has ever known who is older.
But Lidia’s intent to be rigorously evenhanded was taken by the twins as an instruction to remain the same. They shared a room, friends, books; they could not turn on the TV without deciding beforehand what they would watch. Every year, they fought off the principal’s well-intentioned effort to put them in separate classrooms, even while they mocked the teachers who thought they cheated because their papers ended up so similar. Their life was like an apple, cut into precise halves, until Cass, in high school, began to suspect that Paul preferred it this way, because it worked to his advantage. The differences between them, no matter how trivial they seemed to everyone else, subtly marked Paul as better-more appealing, smarter, more adept.
Paul was always the more competitive one. Running laps with the tennis team to build endurance, Paul would continue after the session. Cass can remember his fury. Because he had no choice. Paul knew when he set off that he was essentially dragging Cass behind him. In tournaments, Cass always had the better head-to-head record with shared opponents, but he refused to play Paul, even in practice, knowing he would lose.
By college, he was slightly furious every time his brother came into the room. It was very confused. Because he loved Paul so intensely, and longed for him at times every day, once he had moved in his own direction.
Now Cass has been in an extended conversation about the academy with Dean Demos, a sergeant on the Force in Property Crimes, when he sees Dita steaming in his direction.