ONCE UPON A TIME, THEY HAD BEEN BROTHERS. TECHNICALLY, he supposed, they still were, having sprung from the same father and mother.
But once upon a time, they had been brothers—inseparable in their childish adventures and enthusiasms. Once upon a time, they had stalked through the woods out back of their house, hunting wild Indians with their cap guns. Once upon a time, they had sat mesmerized together before the radio, cradling their cups of steaming Ovaltine as the voice with the chilling laugh caged up inside asked its ominous question: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” And then answered itself with another of those fiendish laughs: “The Shadow knows.” And their Ovaltine grew cold because they forgot to drink it.
When George grew up and decided to join the Marines because he knew in his bones there was a war coming and he wanted to be a fighting man and not—as his father would have preferred—some officer pushing paper from one desk to another, Nick, three years younger, had seethed with anticipation of the day he could do the same. “Hope the war isn’t over before I get my chance,” he had told George when George returned from basic training for a brief leave before shipping out for Pearl Harbor.
And George, conscious of Nick’s worship and not above basking in it, had grinned and tousled his hair, knowing Nick hated that, but liked it a little bit, too, and said, “Don’t worry about it, kiddo. I’m sure I’ll see you on the front lines.” Too young and stupid yet to know what he was even talking about, but beaming in the light of Nick’s admiration just the same.
Because they were brothers.
And if they hadn’t been brothers—real brothers—for twenty years now, since that Christmas Day when Nick had stormed into his bedroom and said, without preamble, “You can’t be serious about marrying some nigger!” the truth was that George had always held onto a tattered hope that one day the relationship might be restored. But standing there with the rest home at his back, helpless witness to Nick’s casual cruelty toward his son, toward a boy who had never done a single thing to him, George felt stabbed with a cold certainty.
They would never be brothers again.
Alarmed by this certainty, his conscience whispered warnings and contradictions against his ear. God is love, it reminded him. God is redemption. God is forgiveness. How often had he preached those things? How often had he commended them to some man or woman estranged from a parent or sibling?
And what did Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount?
“Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”
First, be reconciled to thy brother …
But it wasn’t George who had chosen this path. It was Nick. All George was doing—so he told his troublesome conscience—was acknowledging reality, the fact that Nick had just taken that tattered hope of eventual reconciliation and shattered it like a crystal vase hurled against a concrete floor.
No, they never would be brothers again. Never could be brothers again.
He crossed the parking lot hesitantly, even as Cora’s taillights disappeared in the flow of evening traffic. Adam stared after them looking poleaxed, stunned from a blow he never saw coming. Luther’s expression bore witness to his own helplessness. George knew Luther had never been comfortable with the lie he had lived all these years for the sake of his sister and her white husband, and now, to have it blow up right in front of his eyes, what must he be thinking?
But maybe, George told himself with that brand of desperate hope that logic cannot abide and common sense cannot penetrate, it had not blown up at all. Maybe it could be salvaged?
“Don’t listen to him,” he said. The first words that came to mind.
Adam turned as if he had forgotten George was there. “Did you hear that?” he demanded. “What did he mean by that?”
“Don’t listen to him,” repeated George. “He just wants to hurt you.” He put his hands on Adam’s shoulders, looked into his eyes. “Don’t let him do it,” he said. “I’ve told you how they responded when I proposed to your mother. All of them except my father. They hate Negroes. That’s what they learned to do, growing up here, being white. It’s what they were taught by their teachers, their friends, even the church. But you have to believe me, Adam: I never learned that. I don’t know why, but I didn’t. That’s why I was able to see your mother for the treasure she was. It’s how I got the courage to ask her to marry me.”
He was conscious that desperate hope had him babbling. “Don’t let him hurt you,” he repeated, helplessly.
Adam’s eyes were still uncomprehending. “But what did he mean by that?” he insisted.
George caught Luther giving him a meaningful stare. Gently, he shook his head, no, which made Luther grimace. George ignored it. “I have no idea,” he replied.
Luther turned away at that, and George knew the gesture for what it was. Condemnation of an overt lie. But what else could he do?
George disregarded his brother-in-law, instead seeking Adam’s eyes. “I am your father,” he said. This, as far as he was concerned, was an overt truth.
Adam nodded, but his expression remained dubious. George tried to think of what else he might say. He came up empty.
Luther spoke quietly. “We better go,” he said.
George was still watching Adam as he spoke. “Yes,” he said, “I think you’re right.” Adam’s eyes were vacant as a house the day after moving day.
They piled into the car and Luther backed out, then piloted the old Buick into traffic. “Can you put me up tonight?” George asked him. “I promise, I’ll find a hotel room tomorrow. I had intended to stay at our family house since it hasn’t been sold yet, but it turns out Nick is there with Cora, so that wouldn’t be such a hot idea.”
“Sure,” said Luther. “No problem. Now, you want to tell us what happened in there?”
George sighed. From the day they first met, Luther had always been straight to the point. There was no subtlety in the man, no artifice. Some days, that gave him a bracing and refreshing honesty. Other days, it just made him insensitive and brusque. George couldn’t decide what it made him today. What he did know was that Luther was pushing him—hard—toward a truth he had no wish to confront.
“I’m sure you can guess,” he said. “You saw enough.”
“I think we rather hear it from you,” said Luther.
This brought another sigh. Luther was determined not to take the hint.
“Think we deserve to hear it from you,” added Luther behind a sidelong glance.
George had had enough. “We argued, okay? Same as we did twenty years ago. Same as we did when my mother died. Nick, he’s …” A pause. George breathed, trying to settle himself, then began again. “He’s like so many other people, down here especially—but in a quieter way, up North as well—who think their skin color makes them special, puts them on a high shelf above everybody else. It’s hard not to think that if you’re white. The whole country exists to help you think that. Of course, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“So you argued,” prompted Luther. The city was flying by their window. They had left behind the canopied streets. The houses and lawns were again growing small.
“Yeah,” said George. “We argued. Cora cried. My father yelled at us to stop it. He told Nick he was ashamed of him.”
George fell silent, struck now, as he had been in the moment, by the wounded look on his brother’s face then. What a thing, he thought, to have your beloved father say to you from his deathbed.
“Can’t imagine your brother liked that too much.”
George shook his head. “No, he didn’t. And the worst thing? Papa was clear. You know, you said he has moments when he’s still really sharp and other moments when he’s not all there? This was one of those moments when he was sharp. He knew exactly what he was saying and who he was saying it to.
“He told Nick, ‘You feel you have the right to say these things because you think you are white. Well, when I came to this country, December 12, 1895, nobody thought I was white.’ He told Nick the story of how he stepped off the boat in his shabby clothes, and how people called him a dirty foreigner, a bohunk. It’s a story he’s told us for years. And when he asked someone what that word meant, they said, ‘It means you and me are one step below the micks and one step above the niggers.’”
George glanced over at his brother-in-law. “Sorry,” he said.
Luther shrugged and George couldn’t tell whether he was indifferent to the word or the apology. “What else he say?” asked Luther.
“He told him how he spent years trying to make himself white, how he did things he’s still ashamed of, until he finally decided it was more important just to be a good man, just to try and live in peace with other men. He said, he only had one regret—that he wishes he had done a better job of teaching that to Nick. And that’s when he started to weep. You know my father. He never weeps. But lately, as he’s gotten older, his emotions are right near the top.
“Cora and I, we told him, ‘Don’t cry.’ She patted his back, but he ignored us both. He looked at Nick square in the face and said, ‘So I suppose I take some responsibility for how cruel and selfish and hateful you are. But you are an adult man, thirty-eight years of age, so you must take some responsibility, too, and it makes me sad that I see no sign of that.’”
Luther gave a low whistle. “Damn,” he said.
“Yeah,” said George. “And that’s when he said it. Still looking Nick dead in the eye: ‘I am ashamed of you, my son.’ Just like that: ‘I am ashamed of you, my son.’”
“That’s when ol’ Nick come flyin’ out of there?”
“Like somebody set the place on fire,” said George.
“You hear that?” Luther was looking at Adam in the rearview mirror. “His daddy told him off. That’s why he was mad.”
“But what did he mean by what he said?” asked Adam, and George knew his son would not be deterred. “How could he say he never met my father?”
“I told you,” said George. “He was angry. And he’s a bigot. He was trying to hurt you, that’s all.”
Luther implored him yet again with a sidelong look. And yet again, George ignored it. “Anybody want something to eat?” he asked. “My treat.”
Luther shook his head. Adam didn’t respond.
They ordered catfish and French fries from a stand on Davis Avenue, the main commercial strip in the Negro section of town. The street was busy and loud, traffic flowing up and back, a boy on a bike weaving in and out around the slower-moving cars. From the speakers over the doorway of a record store, “Stop! In the Name of Love” by the Supremes pulsed against the night. Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops was singing, “Baby, I need your loving,” when their meals were served up in grease-stained brown paper sacks. Luther drove two blocks down before turning into the alley that ran alongside Youngblood’s Barbershop and pulling into the parking lot behind.
“Home, sweet home,” he said.
“Good,” said George, forcing a grin, “the smell of that fish was driving me crazy.”
He looked back to Adam for confirmation that the food smelled delicious. Adam looked right through him.
They climbed the stairs, George lugging his own suitcase, Adam making no move to help, and Luther let them into his small, neat living space. He turned on the television and they ate their meals sitting on the couch. And the night grew old. Perry Mason became Password became The Baileys of Balboa became The Defenders. All of it washed over them without leaving a mark. Somewhere during a commercial break—Mrs. Olson pulling her ever-ready can of Folgers coffee from her purse—George recalled Thelma once telling him that Luther didn’t even watch television outside of news programs and ball games. He considered the rest of it stupid beyond endurance.
But on this night, all three of them sat there before the flickering blue light. They watched without watching, but they watched because it was there—and because watching filled the time, helped to ward off the silence that otherwise loomed over them like unpaid bills. In a way, George supposed it was exactly that.
Once upon a time, impulsively, romantically, ridiculously, he had stood in a segregated park on Christmas Eve and proposed marriage to a Negro woman he knew mainly from correspondence. Her son, not yet two years old, watched as he did it.
And somehow, they had both agreed—did they ever even speak about it?—that Adam would take George’s name, that he would raise the boy as his son. Because to tell the baby the truth—hard enough for her even to admit that truth to herself—was simply unthinkable. If the truth was too crushing for her and she was an adult woman, how could she allow it to fall on a toddler, a baby with pudgy cheeks who pointed at a toy train and called it a “choo choo”?
It had seemed natural, it had seemed easier, it had seemed right for the boy to simply call George “Dad.” Because George was his father and if biology did not agree with that, well, even George himself had forgotten this somewhere along the way. He suspected Thelma had, too. They were a family. She was his wife and Adam was their son and that was all there was to it.
But it turned out—and he knew now that they should have understood this all along—that they were only piling up that unpaid bill, mortgaging tomorrow’s peace of mind to pay for today’s. Now, somehow, tomorrow had arrived. And with a few hateful words from the embittered man who once had been his brother, the bill had come due, and George had no idea how they would pay it. He had no idea if they could.
“George.”
He glanced over. Luther was pointing at the television. Dazed, George looked back at the screen. He blinked in surprise. Somehow, without his realizing it, The Defenders had ended. Now there was a man in glasses and a conservative suit reading the news from a sheaf of paper.
“… has died,” he was saying. “Following Sunday’s melee on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, he had come to Alabama from Boston in response to the call from civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for a march by clergy in support of his campaign to get voting rights for Negroes. He was transported to Birmingham University Hospital after allegedly being set upon by a gang of white toughs. Three suspects have since been arrested. Reverend James Reeb was thirty-eight.”
Luther pointed. “Ain’t that the guy—”
George cut him off. “Yeah,” he said. He hung his head, closed his eyes. “Yeah, that’s the guy.”
“I’m sorry,” said Luther.
“Me too,” said George. He felt exhausted, wrung out by these last two miserable days. “Fellas,” he said, “would you mind if we shut it down for the night? I could use some sleep.”
Luther agreed that that was a good idea. He retrieved some bedding from a closet, then said good night, went into his room, and closed the door. George brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink, then stripped to his boxers and lay down beneath a quilt on the pull-out. Adam took a pillow and a blanket and sacked out on the floor. He hadn’t spoken unprompted for hours.
George turned off the lamp and the room went dark. “Good night, son,” he said. Chancing it.
There was a moment. Then Adam said, “Good night.”
And that, at least, was something.
George closed his eyes, thinking it might be difficult to fall asleep. When he opened them again, the darkness was beginning to lighten and he was startled to find that it was morning. He had to pee, but he held it, luxuriating in the stillness and the warmth.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he glanced down at Adam’s pallet on the floor. It took George a moment to process what he saw: the covers thrown aside, an empty space where Adam should have been. George sat up straight, a sudden foreboding pulling him down, like waters closing above a drowning man. His eyes searched the small space, living room and kitchen, for movement. But all was still. He got up and crossed to the bathroom, pushed the door open, but the small chamber was empty and dark.
And that’s when he knew it for sure.
Adam was gone.