Saturday, November 05, 2011
If Truth Be Told
If Truth Be Told
By
Phoenix Hocking
“Does it not strike you strange,” said Milton, pulling softly at his graying goatee, “that so many of the graves here are haunted?”
Milton and I sat like bookends, each on our own side of the wooden bench, facing our parent’s graves.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Look around you,” he replied. “What do you see?”
I shrugged. “Headstones, some flat, some upright, some in good repair, some not. That’s all.”
Milton ceased tugging at his beard. “What?” he cried. “You don’t see the spirits, hovering over some of the graves?”
He had always been a little strange, my dear brother. He saw things, heard things that others did not. If he said he saw sprits, then I had to believe that he believed that he saw spirits. But I, being of a more practical bent, and firmly rooted in reality, did not.
“No.”
“Pshaw!” Milton stood up suddenly and brushed the dust from his trousers. “You. Are. Impossible!”
It was going to be another one of those days. Until I agreed that I did, indeed, see foggy spirits hovering over the graves, I would never hear the end of it. He would be the one impossible to live with.
“Ah,” I said. “Do you mean the foggy, wispy things? Well, of course, I see those. I just didn’t realize that’s what they were.”
Milton sat, mollified. “Of course. Do you know what they are?”
“No, Milton,” I sighed. “What are they?”
“Those are secrets that never got told.”
Milton is older than I; a full five years older, to the day. He takes after our mother, fair and fey. My father often said he was the “airy-fairy” type. Indeed, Milton seems slightly effeminate, but in fact is quite asexual. Slender, but not gaunt, he possesses an ethereal, other-worldly quality that puts people off. Milton is a contradiction. On the one hand, he is precise in many outward parts of life. On the other hand, he can foray into the world of fancy as if he lived there, and none of us peons are allowed entrance. If he were not my brother, I doubt that we would be friends. He always seemed so much older than his years, my brother. Older, but perhaps not wiser!
I, on the other hand, take after our father, dark and dreamy. If Milton was the “airy-fairy,” then I was the “artsy-fartsy.” I’ve always loved the arts, and dabble in painting, writing, and good wine. But where I should be the one who lives life with his head in the clouds, I am instead the practical one, while Milton flits about like a spirit himself, seeing things that aren’t there.
Later that evening, as we sat before the fire, enjoying a glass of after dinner port, Milton looked pensive.
“You didn’t really see anything, did you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“At the cemetery. You didn’t really see anything.”
I swirled the wine in my glass and pondered telling the truth or lying through my teeth. I drank the last of the wine and put the glass down on the coaster. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
Milton sighed. “I didn’t think so. I can always tell when you’re lying.”
“You want to tell me what this is all about?” As soon as I said the words, I knew I was in for a night of tall tales and wild ramblings. That’s how it always is with my brother, God love him. Always telling this and that and the other thing, and none of it true or even believable.
But I was wrong.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Milton said. He rose from the chair and placed his glass, barely touched, on the bare table. “Good night, Wilbur,” he said, and left the room. I nursed my own drink, then went to bed myself.
Milton was unusually quiet the next morning at breakfast. He broke open his three-minute egg and scooped out the contents, as usual. He spread orange marmalade on his sourdough toast, as usual. He drank his tea, steeped four and one-half minutes exactly, as usual. But he said nothing, and that was not usual.
It was just as I rose to clear the dishes that Milton spoke. “Wilbur.”
“Yes?”
“How old are you?”
“What an odd question,” I answered. “I am sixty-seven years old, exactly five years younger than you are. Come May, I shall be sixty-eight and you shall be seventy-three. Is your memory starting go, old man?”
Milton rose as well. “Come into the parlor. The dishes can wait.”
The dish in my hand stood still and my mouth dropped. The dishes never waited. Meals were prepared and eaten, and the dishes washed and put away immediately afterwards. Without fail. To say I was confused, and perhaps a little alarmed, would be an understatement.
The parlor is the best room in the house. It has a huge picture window at one end and overlooks the sea. At the other end is a fireplace, already blazing against the morning chill. Books line the walls, and mahogany furniture left over from our parent’s day is placed in strategic areas for reading, playing board games, in front of the fireplace, or to look out the window.
Milton sat in front of the fire, an old quilt my mother had made draped over his arthritic knees.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat across from him. The low table between us seemed a buffer, a protection perhaps, against whatever was coming. “What’s this all about?”
“Our parents were good people,” Milton said abruptly. “Good people.”
Startled, I replied, “Well, of course they were.”
Milton was silent. I could hear the waves crashing on the shore below, the sea birds calling, the ticking of the clock on the mantel. If truth be told, I was afraid.
He reached forward and took his pipe from its stand on the low table. He filled it with tobacco, tamped it down and lit it. He drew in, short puffs at first, to get it going, then a long puff he held for a long while before he exhaled.
“I’ve always been strange, you know,” he said.
Trying to lighten the mood, I laughed. “I knew that,” I said, but it came out more strangled than light.
“I’ve always had this,” he paused, “this gift. Call it second sight, or a sixth sense, but I’ve always been able to see things that no one else could see. I know a storm is coming days before it arrives. I know before the phone rings who is going to be on the line. And I knew before you arrived that you were coming.”
“Well, you didn’t have to have second sight to know our mother was pregnant, did you?” I relaxed. Simply another of Milton’s fancies, and I would ride this one out as I had so many others, for my entire life.
“Mother,” he said, “was not pregnant.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mother,” he said again, “was not pregnant. Oh, Wilbur! This is so hard! I never thought I would have to tell you!”
I leaned forward, alarmed. “Dear God!” I cried. “I’m adopted!”
He laughed, a short staccato bark that betrayed his nervousness. “Not exactly.” He paused. “But not not exactly.”
“Then, what? What?”
Milton gazed at me blankly for a few moments, as if trying to make a momentous decision. Finally, he stood and grasped me by the wrist. “Come with me.”
Having little choice in the matter, I followed. We proceeded to the large mirror in the foyer and stood before it. Our reflections looked like yin and yang, tit and tat, dark and light. I had seen us together our entire lives, but rarely had I seen us side-by-side in a mirror. We looked so much alike, and yet so different.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
“Oh do stop, Milton!” I cried. “Be done with all this nonsense and out with it, old man. Out with it!”
“Very well,” Milton said, dropping my wrist. “You want to know? Just straight out, with no foreshadowing? No dancing about the truth? Just wade into the water and let it close over your head? Fine. Then I shall tell you.”
Just at that moment, the doorbell rang. I jumped, but Milton just smiled an enigmatic smile, as if he had been expecting the interruption. “That would be George,” he said.
“George?” I asked. “George Fisk? What is the solicitor doing here?”
There came the smile again. “You’ll see,” he said, and opened the door.
George Fisk was a small man, sallow in complexion, with a beak nose and beady eyes. He looked, unfortunately, exactly like a solicitor straight out of Dickens. In point of fact, however, George Fisk was also a delightful person to be around, warm and funny and just a touch mischievous. We had all been friends in boyhood, but had grown apart with college and our respective lives.
“So,” George said as he strolled into the house, “have you told him?”
“No,” replied Milton. “Not yet.”
“Now look,” I began, “just what…”
But Milton and George simply walked in to the parlor and closed the door in my face.
I paced. I tried to listen at the door, but outside of low mumbles, I could hear nothing. I went back into the dining room, cleared the table, and washed the dishes. I made myself another cup of tea. I paced some more.
Half an hour later, George emerged from the library, tucked his briefcase under his arm, said a quick and falsely jaunty, “Goodbye, Wilbur!” and left.
Milton was at the window, facing the sea. His face was tinged with gray, though his eyes looked red with recently shed tears.
“Do you want to tell me what all this is about?” I asked.
“Not now, Wilbur,” Milton said. “I’m really quite tired. I think perhaps I’ll have a lie down.”
Three days later, once again at the cemetery, I thought about Milton’s last words to me. For indeed, Milton had died peacefully as he napped that day, taking his secret to the grave. “Not now.” No, not ‘not now,’ but never, I thought. I’ll never know.
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” intoned the minister as my brother’s ashes were laid to rest beside my parents. We were a small, somber crowd. My brother had few friends, but I was there, of course. Ricky Small was there and Rosemary Crutcheon and Millie Marks. Ricky had been a business partner of Milton’s, once upon a time, so his appearance was expected. Rosemary sobbed and sobbed and I wondered why. I didn’t know they were close. Millie looked frail and acted as if she would pass out any second. She sniffed a lot, and kept looking at her watch. And George Fisk was there, his beady eyes misting over occasionally and wiping his beak nose with an oversized handkerchief.
After the box had been lowered and the dirt tamped into place, the small group mumbled their condolences and left to go on about their lives. I sat on the bench that now overlooked not only my parent’s graves, but my brother’s as well.
George sat next to me, replaced his hat. “I’m sorry for your loss, Wilbur,” he said. “Milton will be missed.”
“Thank you.” I said. I mean, after all, what else does one say?
“May I stop by this afternoon?” George asked. “I think you will be interested in Milton’s will.”
“Oh!” I hadn’t even thought of a will. I had gone through the last few days in a whirlwind, trying to make all the arrangements, and above all, trying not to feel the loneliness my brother’s abrupt departure left me. “He left a will then?”
George stood up quickly. “Yes, he left a will. I’ll come by about 3:00.” And he was gone.
I stayed for a while, silent in my grief. And it seemed, sometimes, as if I could actually see faint, foggy, wispy things hanging over my brother’s grave.
At 3:00 precisely, the doorbell rang. George stood at the threshold with his briefcase in his hand. “May I come in?”
“Of course, of course.” I stepped aside. “Come in to the library; I have the tea ready.”
I poured the tea and we made idle chitchat. Yes, it was a nice service. Yes, the weather was lovely. Don’t Millie and Rosemary look well for their age?
Eventually, like a toy train that has lost its battery, we ran out of things to say.
George took a deep breath, and opened his briefcase. “Your brother left everything to his son,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Milton didn’t have any children.”
“Yes, he did,” George pulled out an ordinary white envelope and handed it to me. “This will explain everything, I think,” he said. I recognized Milton's spidery handwriting immediately. The familiarity of it caught my heartstrings. I shook the tears from my eyes, and began to read:
Dear Wilbur,
I don’t know how much longer I have, so I cannot put this letter off any longer. I've known for many months now that I was dying. I’ve been so tired, and I am looking forward to the end. Death holds no terror for me, but I have business that needs finishing, and that business is you.
Before I go any further, I must reiterate that our parents were good, good people. Mother especially was as close to a saint as any woman I can think of, alive or dead. She bore the scandal with an uplifted chin and an attitude that practically dared anyone to say anything to her about it. And Father…well, you shall see in a moment what kind of man Father was.
You remember I recently told you that Mother was not pregnant before you were born. You thought you’d been adopted and I said, “Not exactly, but not not exactly,” if you recall. The time has come for me explain that.
Back when I was about 13 years old we had a maid who lived with us. She was a lovely lass, with long dark hair and eyes the color of rich chocolate. Father took quite a fancy to her, as did I. Truth be told, so did every other fellow in the neighborhood. She had a beautiful figure and an infectious laugh. I think we were all a little in love with her. Her name was Rosemary.
At some point, Rosemary stopped laughing so much. She started being ill in the mornings, and it wasn’t long before she started to show. Rosemary refused to say who the father was; she said she didn’t know. Back in those days, being pregnant outside of wedlock was scandalous. Father went to Mother and told her the child was his and that Rosemary was willing to give the child up when it was born so that it could be taken care of properly.
Mother was devastated, as you can imagine, but she agreed to raise the child as her own. I think you will agree that you never felt as if you were not Mother’s natural born child. And Father loved you as much as he could love anyone.
I went away to Boarding School, then to college. We didn’t have much to do with each other growing up, you and I, until I returned after our parents were killed in that car accident. It was my duty to care for you and I like to think that I’ve done so to the best of my ability.
Mother was wonderful. She took in a child that many women would not have wanted to have around at all. And she loved you. She loved you with all her heart. And the storm that resulted from Father’s admission was something that they weathered together.
And if Mother was wonderful, then Father was even more so. Because, you see, he lied. Father said the child was his, though he knew better. The truth would have been even more traumatic for everyone concerned, so he sacrificed himself for someone that he loved even more than Mother or their reputations.
He did it for me. You see, Wilbur, Rosemary was not carrying Father’s baby. She was carrying mine. You are sixty-seven years old, but I am not seventy-three. I’m eighty. And you are not my brother. You are my son.
And now, when George reads the will, it will say that I am leaving all of my worldly possessions to my one and only son.
Finally, there is a peace in my soul that hasn’t been there for all these years. I believe I can die in peace. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
Love always, your Father, Milton
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