Beautiful Kate Page 2

  But as Toni continued to leaf through the pages of the albums, firing questions at us, I realized that it was not decline that fascinated her but Kate.

  “You know who she looks like here? A young Vivian Leigh. Only blond.”

  “No way.” For some reason, the comparison irked me unreasonably.

  “Oh yes she does,” Toni insisted. “She’s got that same—I don’t know what.”

  “Wildness?” Sarah asked. “She was always pretty wild, wasn’t she, Greg?”

  It was not a subject I liked, that of my twin sister, flesh and spirit once so close to mine, so inseverable, that I sometimes lost sight of that arbitrary line where she left off and I began, even to the point where I found myself wondering whether she was half male or I half female. No, that’s both silly and inaccurate, for what we really were together—with Cliff—was something almost asexual, a troika yoked by spirit and empathy, not sex. Not then, anyway.

  “Wild?” I said. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  Junior was laughing, wiping the beer foam from his beard. “I remember she had a name for everybody. Chief Tan Pants for me.” He smiled ruefully at Sarah. “And remember what she called the two of us? Emily’s kids. Which meant, I guess, that she and Greg and Cliff were Jason’s.”

  “Well, we did come along pretty late,” Sarah said. “I really don’t remember that much about her. Except that I always wanted to look like her. And sound like her. And—”

  Her face reddened as she broke off.

  “She was very attractive,” Sarah finished. “Very unusual.”

  Toni was smiling at me. “And she was your twin?”

  “Not identical,” I said.

  “I’d say not.”

  But Sarah would not have me denigrated, even by my lover. She flipped the album to a snapshot of me sitting on the corral. “He was just as attractive,” she said. “And he still is.”

  Continuing to smile, Toni looked me over, like a used-car buyer. “Hmmm, I don’t know—twenty-five years is twenty-five years.”

  “No, it isn’t—it’s more,” I said.

  As the evening wore on, Junior kept at his beer as if he were being paid by the can. And with each one he emptied—and crumpled—he seemed to recover a bit more of that bitchy belligerence he had greeted us with on our arrival, before the sight of Toni in her samurai robe had begun to play tricks with his head. He kept going on about the “trinity” as he called us—Cliff, Kate, and me—and what a drag it had been growing up as a member of “Emily’s family.” And Kate had been so right, he said, dubbing them that, because that was exactly how Jason had always treated them, as if they were poor relations. It had always been “Cliff this” and “Kate that” even after the two of them were both dead and buried.

  “And it really stuck in my craw,” Junior said. “You’d have thought Sarah and I were just some niggers who worked here, somebody who didn’t count, you know? And you—” Looking at me, he sneered openly, not unlike a silent screen villain. “The old man always goes on like you’re his biggest disappointment, you know? Like he hates your guts. But in the next breath he’s mumbling about what an athlete you were and how talented and all that shit, like you could’ve been somebody famous if it wasn’t for your weakness, as he calls it. His word for cunt.”

  I had pushed back my chair, getting ready to leave. But he reached out and took hold of my wrist.

  “Now, come on—stick around,” he advised. “Toni likes all this dirty linen, don’t you, sweetheart?”

  “Sure, I really dig it,” she said, laughing at the look I gave her.

  With my free hand I took hold of Junior’s wrist and squeezed until he let go of mine.

  “See? Just what I said—the great athlete!” He stopped rubbing his wrist long enough to pop another can. “Never mind that Sarah and I’ve been taking care of him all these years, while you just drop in for funerals and spend the rest of your time living off women and pretending you’re a writer. Never mind who keeps this place going and keeps the dudes from burning us out. No, that’s not important. No way. It’s the past, that’s all that matters with him. You and them—a suicide and a lunatic.”

  I did get up then, resisting a powerful urge to punch my little brother’s drunken face.

  “Come on,” I said to Toni. “We’re going to bed.”

  Her face was a pout. “Aw, just when it was getting interesting.”

  Our room upstairs once had been the guest room, where Jason put up all the cranks and phonies who shared his passionate views on organic gardening, agrarian populism, and the vital importance of securing elective office for Jason Kendall. In the forties Governor Stratton had appointed him to fill a vacancy in the state senate, but when he ran for the same office two years later he was soundly defeated in the primaries. He was similarly slaughtered in a bid for a U.S. congressional seat, the main reason being his generously expressed contempt for all politicians and “public leeches,” whether Democrat or Republican. This sorry political record seemed to have no effect on his houseguests, however, who through the years doggedly addressed him as Senator, possibly because his mail still went out under the letterhead of Illinois State Senator Jason Cutter Kendall.

  In time, though, their visits became increasingly infrequent—why, I never knew. Perhaps they tired of the master-slave relationship favored by Jason, or maybe like most people they prospered sufficiently during the boom years of the late forties and fifties so that the old causes no longer seemed quite so important. In any case, as the room stood empty more and more, Cliff and I campaigned to get it for our own, not only because it was larger than the one we had then but also because it had its own private door to the upstairs bathroom. It was a change Jason would not hear of, however, not until Kate began to work on him with her considerable weaponry. And all she demanded from us in payment was two weeks free from milking the three cows we kept on the farm. So Cliff and I got the room and had it until the end. And now, with so many rooms in the house vacant, it once more had been designated the guest room, and thus was mine again, mine and Toni’s.

  As the two of us came in here that night, after Junior’s drunken show of belligerence, she promptly began to pump me about Kate and Cliff: what had Junior meant about their being “a suicide and a lunatic”?

  “He’s just smashed,” I told her. “Who knows what he means? They were in a car crash, like I told you. Cliff crawled out and made it home before he died of loss of blood. I guess he thought Kate was already dead. But she wasn’t. She died in the hospital some time later.”

  It was not the truth of course, or at least not the whole truth. But then I had never been able to talk easily about their deaths with anyone—not Jason or my mother or any of my lovers and wives over the years—so I saw no reason to start now, with Toni. If I have anything in me like a soul, I figure that it resides in my memory of the two of them, Kate and Cliff. And if I have any religion it is simply not to profane that memory. So I lie or change the subject.

  “Let’s take a bath,” I said.

  “Together?”

  I made like Charles Boyer. “But of course.”

  “The bed’s softer.”

  “Don’t argue. I’ll punch you out.”

  In the bathroom, naked but still dry, we kissed and fondled and did other unspeakable things until the tub was full and then we slipped into it. With Toni, the basic problem in sex is simply in trying to make the damned thing last, like a kid with the most delicious ice-cream cone ever fashioned. The inventive little things she does with her body—that perfect ass and those sinewy legs and high small incomparable breasts—I’m sure would turn even the Pope into a red-eyed ravening monster of lust. And I’m no Holy Father. So in a short time—too short a time—we were lying there together in the tub, twined and sated, indifferently soaping each other, occasionally kissing. Finally Toni spoke.

  “Where do they get their money?”

  “What money?”

  “What do they live on—Sarah
’s salary?”

  “I suppose so—that, and bank interest. Jason used to have a nest egg in the bank. That’s what we lived on, not farm income. The farm never made a dime, as I remember.”

  “How much of a nest egg?”

  “It earned five or six thousand, something like that.”

  “And he’s kept it in the bank all this time? With inflation and everything?”

  “How do I know? I haven’t been home for over ten years, remember?”

  Toni was frowning, drumming her fingers on my hip. “Five or six thousand—then, that must mean about a hundred thousand nest egg, right?” I couldn’t help laughing, she was so transparent in her greed. “You want to heist it?” I asked, nibbling her ear.

  She rolled onto me, straddling my waist and leaning down so we were eyeball to eyeball, in the Defense Secretary’s deathless phrase. I’m sure I blinked.

  “Part of it will soon be yours anyway, won’t it?” she said.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether it even exists. On how long he lives. And on whether he leaves any of it to me—which I seriously doubt he will.”

  She shook her head thoughtfully, summoning all her thespian talents. “God, I get scared, Greg. I mean, what if the police do trace you back here? What if they say you were in on the deal too? You could serve time.”

  “You think so?”

  “And what would I do? Where would I go?”

  “There’s always Dandy.”

  “Screw Dandy. I’m talking about my man, not some lousy agent.”

  “So what do you suggest?” I asked, though of course I already knew. A cretin would have known.

  “We’ve got to get our hands on some money, Greg. We really do. We’ve got to get the hell out of here. Go to Florida or someplace. You know it’s gonna be winter here soon?” She enunciated the word as if it meant certain death for us.

  “Some money, huh? Like whose?”

  She saw then that I was laughing at her, and that was all it took. Immediately she was scrambling out of the tub and fighting off my hands. In her fury, she even swatted my cock, which had grown hard again under her weight. She began to towel off.

  “That’s it, buster. You’ve had it. It’s gonna be a cold day in hell before you get me into the tub again. Or anywhere else.”

  “Deny me anything but that,” I mourned.

  “Yeah, you’ll see.”

  She angrily flounced out of the bathroom, leaving me with the vision of that splendid tush, as though to rub it in, all that I would be losing.

  “Hey baby,” I called to her. “I’m sorry. I really am. I see things more clearly now.”

  Later that night I lay awake in the too-soft brass bed, with Toni sleeping soundly against me, her right leg draped over mine. And in the penumbral dark, the room seemed slowly to come alive around me, partially lit by the same old farmyard polelight, its rays slanting past the edge of the window shade, forming that remembered pane of whiteness in which even the swimming dust motes were not of now, like the ceiling water stains and the mythic figures I had always seen in them and saw again: Otto Graham passing the football and the even more formidable torso of Anita Ekberg, both having waited all these years just to be seen again by me, to be freed for one more night before melding back into the stains that even Kate had never been able to see as anything other than what they were.

  Often she would sneak in at night and join us, in summer sitting on Cliff’s twin bed or mine, but in winter diving under the covers to stay warm, oblivious of any turmoil such proximity caused us.

  The time I am thinking of, she was thirteen and just beginning to develop, as Cliff was, at fifteen, both of them late bloomers, in sexual development anyway. (In my own case the magic occurred at fourteen, which meant that though I was not as tardy as they were, I was still behind them by a full year—a year that I remember now as the most painful of my young life, a sort of training ground for later. Suddenly the two most important persons in my life, and with whom I had hitherto shared that life as an equal, now treated me as the little guy, the snotnose, and it made me preternaturally nasty. All it would take is one wrong word or condescending look and I would tear into them, trying to reassert my lost equality.)

  But getting back to that particular night. It was shortly after Cliff and I had gone to bed when Kate came slipping in, from the bathroom, as was her habit. And this night, it was my bed she sat on.

  “We gotta do something,” she said. “We just gotta do something.”

  “About what?”

  “Him, you jerk! Your brother. Don’t you know what Jason’s been doing to him?”

  “What about me?” I protested. “Jason’s been working my butt off too.”

  “Bull!” she said. “He’s always got Cliff doing more. And now there’s the book work besides.”

  I shrugged. “It’s his own fault. It’s your own fault, ain’t it, Cliff.”

  Cliff was lying there with his usual look of battered noblesse oblige, a boy who was not just a good scout but an Eagle Scout, so unfailingly generous and noble and right-thinking that I often wondered how he could make it in the world without Kate and me to protect him.

  “I guess so,” he said. “But I still think it’s important what Jason’s trying to do—teach us the stuff we don’t get in school.”

  Kate looked to the ceiling for strength. “Sweet Jesus, Cliff, it ain’t just the French and Russian Lit—it’s the freaking farm too. Look what he’s got lined up for you there—a few summer chores, he calls it—and it’s more damn work than him and Stinking Joe have done in five years.”

  Cliff did not protest. He was too tired. From ten that morning till after dark the two of us had been bucking hay, tossing the filthy heavy itchy bastards up onto the hay wagon and then unloading them into the barn—while Stinking Joe, the hired man, drove the tractor and Jason himself sat in his air-conditioned library preparing our daily tests in Beginning French and Russian Literature. The difference between us was that Cliff sat in bed now with his light on and Menard’s French grammar propped on his lap.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Kate said, “you’re really gonna study it. Can’t you for once go in there like we do and just tell him. Sorry, father dear, but I just didn’t have the time.”

  “He won’t take that from me.”

  “Because you never make him, dumbo!” Kate said it loud enough to wake the house.

  “It’s important,” Cliff insisted. “We should learn French. We should know it. We should be grateful we have a father who can teach it to us.”

  To keep her head from exploding, Kate pressed her hands over her ears and fell back onto the bed. She was wearing a pair of Cliff’s outgrown pajamas, with a button missing in front, which prompted me to scrunch down as low as I could get, hoping for a glimpse of one of her budding jugs, as we elegantly called them then. Though I think she sensed what I was up to, she ignored it—Greg after all was still just a snotnose kid.

  She sat up again, wagging her head. “Okay, that’s it. Cliff is so keen on all this, that’s his business. But me and Greg, we just don’t give a dog’s turd about French or The Brothers Karamazov. And we sure ain’t gonna do the freaking chicken house on top of it.”

  This was another of Jason’s summer projects for the three of us: scraping and repainting a superfluous chicken house that he intended to turn into a “theater” in which we were to perform those same ancient French plays we refused to study.

  “We just ain’t gonna scrape all the paint off that thing,” Kate said. “And we ain’t gonna scrub it and repaint it either. And above all, we ain’t gonna convert the freaking place into—what the devil does he call it?—a theatuh in the round! Who for, I’d like to know? Stinking Joe and Emily’s kids? I’m not sure they’re ready for Tartuffe.”

  Cliff tried to explain, pointing out how few visitors were dropping in to see Jason now, and consequently how much time he had on his hands.

  “Fine,”
Kate said. “Then let him paint the damn thing. We’ll conjugate his precious French verbs.”

  Cliff could barely hold his eyes open. “Please leave, okay?” he asked her. “I still gotta go through my vocabulary.”

  Kate shook her head and sighed. As she got up I copped the peek I wanted, the bottom curve of one of her tiny jugs. At the bathroom door she stopped.

  “Just let me say this, mes frères. Old Jason’s gonna have to make a choice this summer. His theater or his français. He ain’t gonna get both.”

  I had no idea what she had meant by that pronouncement until a few days later, when the two of us were busy scraping paint off the chicken house in ninety-five-degree heat. Cliff was out mending fence with Stinking Joe, Mother was busy with “her” family, and Jason as usual was involved in some vital intellectual pursuit in the air-conditioned comfort of his library. Because the day was so muggy and hot and the labor ahead of us so long and tiresome, I had tried to “turn off my head,” which was how I thought of it then, the task of trying to outlast agony. So I was not really aware of what Kate was up to until she was well along with her plans. I did know that she was not scraping her share of the paint, but I didn’t know why, not even when a line of laying hens began to file past me, clucking and pecking at the ground as they spread out into the barnyard. I immediately ran around to the front to see how they had escaped from their pen, which adjoined the building. And what I found was Kate crouched inside the wire walls, herding out the last few stragglers. She shushed me with her finger.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Just watch.”

  With all the chickens liberated, I followed her from the pen into the small building. On a platform against one wall six cans of white exterior paint and two gallons of turpentine had been stacked. Kate picked up one of the bottles of turpentine and emptied it onto some bales of straw, also stacked against the wall. She recapped the bottle, put it back on the platform, and repeated the process with the second bottle. By then I knew what she was doing, but I didn’t say a word, possibly because it was so damned mesmerizing, standing there watching a girl, my twin sister, casually going about the business of doing what I would never have had the guts to do, not even if I’d had a hundred chicken houses to paint. Finishing with the turpentine, she pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one.