He wants to take me out to lunch, but I don’t want to go out into the snow. He looks a little relieved, and is happy when I bring him a plate of cheese and crackers to have with his Scotch.
“I got a letter from your father,” he says, reaching into the breast pocket of his worn corduroy jacket.
I read it. It’s a lot like the letter he sent to my mother, and the one he sent me. He has a nine-pound son, named Louis. Just like that.
“He wrote your mother, too.” He says it so I know he thinks such letter sending is insane.
I go into the kitchen and get the rest of the brick of cheese. It is a one-room apartment and from where he sits, Sebastian can see me.
“It’s nice of you to put up with me,” he says.
“It was nice of you to bring me a present.”
When he came, he brought with him six photographic postcards from the bookstore in the Square where he works. He knows that I like Walker Evans photographs; I won’t mail any of them.
We sit, eat cheese, and fall silent.
I remember a night when my parents went dancing. It must have been the same year she had the abortion. Sebastian came to baby sit. He came upstairs, barefoot, and we didn’t hear him. He found Joseph in my bed. “What are you two doing in bed together?” he said. He put the light on, and our eyes blinked — we couldn’t help looking funny. That was the first time I knew there was something strange about it. Joseph must have known, because somehow, long before, he had gotten me to understand that I wasn’t to talk about it. When Sebastian spoke, I knew that what he was asking about was something sexual. I thought about sex for the first time, though I didn’t know the word then, or even what sex was.
Today, Sebastian isn’t having much to drink. Usually by this time he’s high, and the visit goes more smoothly.
“I wish I had been your uncle,” he says. “I always liked children.”
“You were like an uncle.”
“Then I wish I had been a rich uncle. Then you really would have liked me.”
“When did we ever care about money?”
“You never had any. Your mother was always complaining because your father had quit his job in the city and they were stuck in the country with no way to do anything, or buy what she wanted.”
The house, in those days, had broken-down furniture, and we sat on pillows on the floors instead of in the old chairs with bulging springs, long before sitting on floor cushions was fashionable. My mother inherited money when Grandma died, and now there is new furniture, and a lot of the old pieces have been mended and refinished by Curtis.
“This is a very nice place,” Sebastian says. “It’s not easy to find a place this clean in the city.”
The year I was nine Joseph and I stopped sharing the huge upstairs room. It was nobody’s idea but my mother’s that I have my own room. I got the small room at the back of the house on the first floor. A bureau was moved in, and a bed, and she hung white curtains and put a straw mat on the floor that she had bought that summer at an auction. I missed Joseph — though long before, he had stopped telling me the stories. He still told stories, but they were full of bravado, stories that were about things that didn’t amaze me; he had hit a home run; he had carried Andrew’s little sister home when she broke her foot diving off the dock. In the stories, he was always the hero. I didn’t want my own room, but I suspected that my mother would have been angry if I had said so. Everybody else I knew had her own room, or shared one with her sister. After I moved into my room my mother would come in, once or twice a month, and sleep in the bed with me instead of with my father. I was a little embarrassed to have my mother in bed with me because I thought sleeping with your mother was childish, but something told me not to say anything about that, either.
I remember when my father left — the summer before Joseph left, to go to Vietnam. I remember that she was angry at first, and then so sad that Sebastian seemed always to be at the house.
“Your mother never really warmed up to me, in spite of the fact that there was nothing I wanted more. But you know that already,” Sebastian says.
I reach out and put my hand around his hand, on the glass. He was always there, so I could go off and sulk and not worry about my mother. He was there the next summer, too, working in the garden, the day we got the news that Joseph had been shot.
It seemed that the winter would never end, and that I would never be able to read all the books I was supposed to read for my courses, when suddenly, at the end of March, there was a day as warm as summer. Nick showed it to me first, having been awakened by the children who had gone outside early to play. The house in which I rented the apartment was across the street from a playground. He shook me gently by the shoulder and pointed out the window, at the bright day. I got up and leaned on my elbow, and looked at it: sunny, beautiful, the trees so still that there must not have been the slightest breeze.
Nick and I had breakfast, and although he was in his first year of law school and worked constantly, didn’t even question that we would leave the apartment. We had coffee, then walked to his car. Our plan was to drive to the North Shore to climb the dunes and walk on the beach. But the plan got changed to going all the way to my mother’s house. It was Friday, and we could spend the weekend. Nick loved the house. More amazing, Nick loved me. He had been living with a girl named Anita when I met him, but a few months before, he had called it off, come to my apartment one day and made it plain that the scene with Anita had been a bad one. He had come, but he wouldn’t look at me for a long time. “You didn’t come cheap,” he said.
We stopped for more coffee, but even that plan changed. Inside the restaurant, with the windows open, coffee was too much a winter drink. We sat on stools at the counter and drank cold chocolate milkshakes.
When we got there, Sebastian’s old white Buick convertible — top down — was in the drive. He was the first to see us, from where he was digging in the side yard. I gave him a hug and Nick shook his hand. “Great minds with a single thought,” he said to me. Whenever he could take a day off, he would leave the city and go to New Hampshire. He was planting a little evergreen. Nick and I went around to the back of the house, where my mother and a woman who had moved into the LaPierre house next door and Curtis were talking. My mother stood and rushed across the lawn, happy to see us. She had on a sundress, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and looked young.
It started out as such a happy day that what happened seemed even worse than it might have, because no one expected anything. We had all gone down to the beach (Sebastian was talking to the new woman, who was a widow; I was hoping that she would like him), when Sebastian mentioned Joseph. For months it had been all right to talk about him, so there was no reason why it hit her wrong. I guess that it was such a perfect day that we had all been thinking of him: he thrived in the warm weather, bought tulip bulbs and planted them in the rocky side yard every spring, sailed from the dock that we were now walking past every day that it didn’t rain.
“I might try to fix the boat,” Sebastian said, as much to himself as to any of us. Except that he must not have said the boat, but Joseph’s boat. And it was my brother’s boat. He had bought it, and my mother and I had hardly ever rowed out in it alone.
“Why do you have to mention him?” my mother said, her mouth quivering. “What do you have to talk about Joseph for?”
Then she put her hands over her face and ran, without lowering her hands, like a person running from an explosion.