I mean at best. Doubly, trebly incensed, our mother did not discharge her offices at all. She turned her back on her husband’s person and smote the offerings of his hand.
You’ll never destroy them, I once said to her, they are too well-made.
She stopped what she was doing — what she was undoing — let the adzes and axes with which she’d been laying about her fall to the ground, and shook her head at me. A slow, sad shake. Not becoming in a woman who had put on too much weight, whose jowls rattled and whose cheeks flapped. And not flattering to me either, because it implied there was much I didn’t grasp and probably never would.
She repeated what I’d said. Too well-made. If you mean by that, made to last for ever, she said, then I couldn’t agree with you more. Look at the brute permanence of the things. Have you ever seen anything more monstrous? Look!
We were a demonstrative family. Look! (Look at him, your baby brother… Look!)
I looked.
Over a narrow shallow stream that we could wade across in three strides my father had thrown — no, had erected — a bridge wide enough to accommodate a whole legion of marching angels. The trunks of at least a dozen trees — Tabor oaks, carobs, pines, pistachios (all named by me and therefore mine) — were lashed together with braided bine and ivy sufficient to crochet a ladder up to God and back. Although there was not the remotest possibility of their moving, a pile of boulders secured the logs on each bank. And then more felled trees boxed in the boulders to secure them. Anyone passing — any of those strangers who secretly peopled our imaginations — would have supposed he had come upon the fortified dwellings of a pair of infuriated dinosaurs waging war across a rivulet.
I could see that it would not be easy to argue for my father’s bridge, using beauty as a criterion. The difficulty of crossing, because of all the timber and masonry in the way, steered me off the issue of utility as well.
It looks extremely safe, I said.
My mother shook her head again, more in anger than in sadness this time. And at the bridge rather than at me. It will be here in another thousand years, she said. Here for a thousand years and no doubt another thousand after that. Without beauty, without use, just… just here.
I had thought she was going to say, just… just like him.
A man can’t win, I confided to Abel when we were alone. If he made things that fell apart in a day she would still complain.
I got no answer from him. And didn’t expect one. From something like his second year to something like his seventh (while his beauty was maturating), Abel put himself into a trance, ignoring all quarrels and contention, and gave over his every waking minute to sitting in the dust, spinning shells. Nothing could distract him from this. Not hunger, not thirst, not fatigue. Sometimes he would have as many as a hundred shells of all sizes spinning together. He followed their revolutions minutely, relating the length of time they kept going to their shape and weight, to their degree of transparency and concavity, to their colour and crustation, crying at last with dizziness and exhaustion, but screaming if anyone attempted to stop him.
It didn’t matter how hard a skin his fingers grew, by the end of each day they were bleeding from the friction. He was covered in cuts and dirt, calcareous splinters having embedded themselves beneath his nails, in his ears, in his nostrils, in his scalp, in places unknown even to my mother. By nightfall the joints of his body were locked in a position from which they had not moved since morning.
My mother’s custom of bathing him began from this time, when he had to be carried, bawling and bloody, from his shells. Only her hands, lovingly lathering, could quieten him and make him flexible again and send him to sleep. But I could tell from the movement of his eyelids as I crouched over him, that he was still spinning in his dreams; and when I awoke in the morning, there he would be, up before any of us, already in the dirt, already rigid, already crying, with his carapaces whirring.
Had he been able to sustain this preoccupation beyond early childhood it might have been better for all of us. There was safety in his spinning. But although he was to remain withdrawn in temperament, capable at any time not just of feigning deafness but actually of becoming deaf when things were said which he preferred not to hear, Eve’s appreciation of his appearance awoke him at last to himself.
She had never been sparing in her praises of him. Even on those early bath nights when she gathered him up, kicking and giddy, there was always some preliminary rhetorical marvelling over his loveliness. Look — isn’t he beautiful! she would sing. Look how his skin shines. You can almost see yourself in him! Look how he sparkles in the dark, like a star. My little star!
He had resisted it all then. Fought against the coddling and the exhibiting. Not a good idea to be held up and shown like this, a sound instinct warned him, especially in the presence of a father whose labours went unappreciated and a brother who… sat up at night listening to heart-beats. But as he grew older he began to give in to the delicious sensation of exciting compliment. When my mother drew attention to the slender bow of his neck, or to the wheels of yellow hair that appeared to complete circles whenever he moved his head, it was as though she lit fires beneath his transparent skin. He didn’t flush; never once, not even in moments of crisis, did I see my brother, living, stained red. There was always white in his colouring, always something ghostly in his pigmentation; but you could see the flickering of warm lights, and you could smell distant burning, like sweetmeats roasting, the centres of self-esteem — the heart, the stomach — turning nicely on their spit.
What a lovely boy you are, my mother said to him, kissing him behind the ears or rubbing her nose into that place between the shoulder blades where, had he been an angel, he would have itched unbearably. I could eat you, she would say. I could eat you all up for my supper.
He no longer squirmed on her lap. He had lost his embarrassment with his milk teeth. He gazed up at her, older than his years, playing younger than his years. All of me? Even my nails?
She put them to her lips, one by one. Ten little fingers. Ten little toes. Every bit of you, she assured him. Even your nails.
His smile was furtive. He had only one smile and it was always furtive. My mother’s was the same. And mine too. No matter how much we meant to smile, no matter how little concealment we intended, we all betrayed some sneaking satisfaction, some minuscule and unworthy triumph, over and above. As though, like a well-treated slave or a pickpocket come into an inheritance, we had to take, even where we had been freely given. It was a gracelessness passed on down the family through the female line. A mark of our plebeian origins. Errand boy’s lip. Help meet’s mouth.
Only my father was free of it. The first and worst of architects, engineer of constructions whose uncouthness and deformity defy description almost as successfully as they defied decay, he at least possessed a smile — that’s when he smiled at all these days — that was harmonious. It went with what occasioned it. It went with what he felt. It went with himself.
He was lucky. It is not pretty to be disfigured by the one sign all men take to denote pleasure. And to my eye, Abel was never less pretty than when he was pleased.
My mother neither.
Rather than smile like that — rather than smile like us — it is better not to smile at all.
*
But let me tell you, if you can bear it, how she bathed him.
All right, let me tell you if I can bear it…
FIRST, smoking ashes packed around the scalloped rock wherein we washed, to take the chill, whether there was chill or not, out of the circumambient air.