29

When I was eight years old my mother told me a family secret.

I remember the afternoon perfectly, because my mother had taken the unusual step of spreading a picnic near the arbor. Both my parents thought the property to be larger than it really was, and they had constructed a trellis and a woven-stake arbor, only to finally celebrate sunny afternoons in a garden where there really wasn’t room to do very much.

My mother shook an afghan out on one of the well-manicured rectangles of lawn, and we sat there, the two of us. She said that she would tell me something very serious, a secret, and that after she was done telling me I could ask any question and she would answer me. Having said that, she left me with a plate of tomato and cheddar sandwiches, a family favorite, and went inside for lemonade. I had time to wonder what was coming.

We lived only a few blocks from the house I later shared with Connie, years of my life in the same neighborhood of stately, college-town homes, live oak trees and occasional outcroppings of native stone. The large boulders butted from certain gardens like the heads and shoulders of giant champions, and I think I had felt a little let down by the fact that my boyhood home had not possessed an up-thrust boulder of its own, only a garden of gladiolas and a lawn of bermuda hybrid with a sprinkler system.

The sprinkler was on a timer. Throughout my childhood, my young adulthood, my university years, except in the heart of the rainy season, every predawn at four o’clock the sprinkler came on. It was a satisfying, lulling music, the deep calm one always gets from water flowing just beyond one’s sanctuary, a feeling of cozy security.

I recall this long moment, waiting for my mother to return, as the peak of my childhood, an afternoon I look back on with nostalgia, but with no desire to relive the events again. I do relive it by seeing it so clearly in my mind, and given the opportunity to reinhabit the past I would decline. I am no longer that boy, finding a lawn moth, cupping it, letting it go. I squinted at my mother as she approached with a pitcher of something pink, not lemonade at all. I was glad; it was raspberry Kool-aid, which I actually preferred, at that age, to real juice.

She told me this: before I was born my mother and my father had wanted a baby. They had a baby, a little boy. But this little boy had not been strong, and he had needed help my mother and my father could not give. The child lived now in a hospital near Santa Rosa. I recall finding the word “hospital” strikingly out of context. A growing boy, older than myself, would not like a hospital. My father had shown me around Herrick and Alta Bates many times and I associated such institutions with brisk people carrying clipboards, slowly efficient people pushing gurneys of dirty laundry. And people too weak to crawl out of bed, watching television, expressionless, arms dangling.

It was important for me to know this, my mother said, because my brother had finally gone to sleep. It was hard for my mother to tell me this, and even harder for me, in my pained confusion, to shape what I imagined to be an entire range of sensible questions an older child or an adult would ask. Instead, the only question I could think of was, “What was his name?”

In my present state of experience, I know that an adult would be only a little better equipped to comprehend the hardship and loss my mother’s story involved. And that a name, Andrew Morris Stirling, is as much as many of us ever have of each other.

And so I entered the prime years of my pre-adolescence with the opportunity to mourn a brother, to resent my parents for keeping him secret, to wonder at the nature of a handicap so severe the love of a younger brother, and two parents, would be meaningless.

It was a wisdom I would carry into my adulthood, and it colored my decision to study law. Love cannot struggle far up the steep foothills. Understanding, hope, delight—they all grow weary. Something about life baffles each of us, and only under the protection of experts with hands and habits like gardeners can some of us survive.

I believe that I fell at the end. It was a graceful fall, and I did not hurt myself.

When I outwardly resembled a human being again I was on the ground, on a walkway of crushed gravel. It took me some time, but the effort was a pleasure, recalling fragment by fragment the recent joy. A fountain trickled, and I recognized the neighborhood, one of the more exclusive neighborhoods of San Francisco, upper Broadway, housekeepers and security guards.

I gathered myself from the fine, hard points of stones, calculating my fingers, my teeth, assessing myself as a new creature, one that was like a man only in the most superficial way.

Someone beyond a hedge was walking slowly, a flashlight beam breaking through the wall of green. I tried to estimate the hour, but all I could tell was that there were still stars above, and that only toward the east did any of them seem to be growing dim.

The flashlight swept the gravel walkway. I had many miles to go before I could join Dr. Opal. I would not be able to make that journey tonight—or any other night. Now that I understood my own nature I could not stay with my old friend. I could not play out my nights in a mock-human existence, passing the nocturnal hours in the same routine thoughtlessness with which human beings spend their days.

I knew now what I was able to do, and I would not turn from this new course, this new responsibility I had undertaken in my heart.

In the growing dawn I found a swimming pool under a blue plastic cover. The cover was littered with pine needles. The needles rolled gently as I stirred them, slipping into the dark water.

Sleep. My mother said my brother was asleep, and I knew what she meant without question. It didn’t even strike me as euphemism, merely an alternate way of saying what we knew to be true. That death was a kind of sleep, and that oblivion could be cruel, but was by no means the greatest evil.

My body drifted downward, and I stretched out on the bottom of the pool.

And slept.