Paterfamilias

Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair.

-Richard II, Act 1 Scene 2

There is another drawer in Richard Stoker’s writing desk that is filled with letters he has never sent.

Happy Birthday, Charlie, the first one says. He writes no further.

The next starts: Hello, Charles. How are you? He has never known how to begin a letter except with some prescribed formula, but there is no precedent for this, and his handwriting is tensely coiled, ugly with compulsion. He wrote it sitting down at the dining room table, one of dad’s fountain pens held in his fist like a grudge, and it shows in every bleeding line.

Dear Charles, the one after that begins, on creamy paper, somewhat more composed,
When you are eighteen years old, you are eligible to leave the Crawford Institute of your own volition. This is crossed out in two thick strokes, followed by of your own free will. This is blotted out and remade, whenever you like. Whatever you decide to do, I want you to know that we love you, and our home will always be–

This is only a draft and yet he does not dare destroy it. The words were already a lie before he wrote them down.

He buries this scrap deep-down, tucked under the others and weighted down by a stack of blueprints neatly copied, and pushes it from his thoughts. The desk was his father’s once, and the task fell on him after the reading of the will to go through its drawers and to sift out cigar-scented contracts and old letters filed away carelessly over the years. His own will is in these drawers, his own love letters, his daughter’s birth certificate is here in its leather frame. When India is five he forces himself to sit down and to read through the typewritten reports and Xeroxed files in their manila folders that the Institute seems to have sent once yearly, and his suspicions are confirmed, that his father never so much as paged through them. They still bear their original paperclips, undisturbed. When he has read his fill of the awful news (awful for being ordinary and unavoidable) he runs them through the paper shredder in twos and threes and makes them into illegible inky peels. Richard still seeks the words which will absolve him.

The days that lead up to India’s birthday ought to be bittersweet in their own right, without the shadow of another childhood’s end to make it all both stale and sour. He ought to be preparing her for the world; he’ll let her go only reluctantly but he knows it isn’t fair to her. But his brother he cannot wait to be rid of; this is the preoccupation that drives him to such erratic action in the days leading up to India’s birthday and his brother’s release from the Crawford Institute.

There’s nothing that says his brother cannot be, if not a good man, his own man. Intellectually he excels, and physically he is – must be – normal as well. But thinking of him as a man, not a dimly-remembered boy, Richard cannot invoke some image of his face with any degree of clarity. He cannot imagine for him a voice, no matter how hard he tries. In his worst fears Charlie looks a great deal like himself, but he is as silent as he ever was in his sullenness; in his dreams he is cold and inert. It’s natural that all his feelings for him circle around those events, around that, and not lemonade sales and picnics; he can forgive himself some lingering unease with the fact of his brother’s existence. The crime has been forgotten around these parts by all except those who saw it happen, but it still casts its long shadow and any reasonable man would allow it. The fear is something less excusable, perhaps. They are not children. The trouble has been identified and his brother has never hurt another living person in thirty years, by all accounts if he is curable then he is cured. Richard wants to believe the cause is not yet lost.

(One day, not now but soon, he will meet his brother in reality instead of just fevered speculation, and he will be young and vital, bright-eyed and smiling-mouthed. He’ll stand opposite a man who grief and worry has made grey and haggard like an old dog. People will say there isn’t much of a resemblance there, insinuating some sly thread of parental faithlessness, and they’ll be wrong.)

Mothers treat their first children like practice, blueprints for the final project, until this became impossible to maintain. His mother has circled shirts in little boys’ sizes from a Brooks Brothers catalogue, the same things she’d have bought for Richard ten years ago, or for Jonathan, and his father has lied readily and gravely about a boy away at school. This goes on until they are too different to uphold it any longer. For Christmas in December of 1985, Charlie receives a set of dictionaries. Richard receives a wristwatch just like his father’s. He clasps it between his hands and his ears can still hear its ticking too clearly.

He fears what they may have in common, all of the men of the Stoker family line; this sort of ancestral hangover is not uncommon among men of a particular age, from all he’s ever heard, but between these names and faces carries especial bitterness. Richard hunts for similarities and is remorseful when he finds them.

They are both products of a certain place and time; only at times does Richard ever consider their childhoods as something strange, and has long since ceased considering their childhoods as special. His family will not be strange; they will be safe, comfortable, insulated from the ten thousand shocks of the world as it is. He loves this house and he knows no other home. Richard knows he has not been the most warm, the most effusively loving, but he hopes he’s done one thing right.

They are both, in their respective senses, only children. There are no other young people at the Crawford Institute. Richard never lies outright and says he has no siblings, even when it would smooth matters over significantly, but it’s another thing entirely to fail to tell the complete truth. He prays they can forgive him for that. He thought of telling Evelyn on their wedding night – on their first anniversary – when India was born – when India was grown. But the notion is a Daphne du Maurier plot twist from hell, so macabre as to spoil the scene even to think of it. In his heart is maintained the strange equilibrium between I should tell her and I can never tell her, ensuing that neither is likely to happen within his lifetime. Evelyn stands to gain nothing by the knowledge that this house is a tomb to lost happiness. It’s a sinkhole for lost time.

Who it is for whom he fears most, India or his wife, he doesn’t know. God help them both.

(There is a folder in Richard Stoker’s desk drawer that holds the brochures: one for a boarding school for girls in rural Vermont, one for a private Christian day school located in the nondescript Midwest, both with maroon sweaters and smiling faces. Evelyn won’t hear of it. The local high school never did her any harm, she says with self-conscious remoteness, never mind that they are not in sunny California in the early 80s, and that she has never had a thing to say about her own school days that is not laced with venomous dislike. There is a folder in his desk drawer full of glossy paper maps depicting campuses India will never visit.)

Sometimes work calls him away from their little estate, across the country or abroad, and in his blood he feels a self-conscious echo of his own father’s absences, grey suits and suitcases. His own father was never very invested in offering explanations for where he went and with whom; on occasions Richard would catch the narrowest thread of a suspicion, some doubt that no one in the house could put a name to, and knew right then that that was not the sort of man he’d like to be. He has forced himself to be present, not absent, to live in the moment with the ones who love him well, but it’s struggling against the current, every day. When he comes home he will take Evelyn dancing, he will take India out to dinner. When India’s older, they’ll sell the house and move somewhere warmer.

It’s not for him to say whether he’s done well. He’s taught India as much as he can, and the world now lies open to her like it never was for him – she’ll grow up and leave, go to school and get married and find her own home somewhere. She will grow where he did not, but if she stays here, she will die. Perhaps he’s overly optimistic in hoping that this brother of his can thrive anywhere, after so long alone in strange places.

Richard can hear every tick of the clock.

He assembles a sort of portfolio along with the car insurance documents and the auto manual, a human life carefully curated in business cards and pressed between plastic sleeves. A credit card in his own name. A passport, in the same. He cannot get Charlie a driver’s license in his own name, though according to the institute he’s fulfilled all the prerequisites, but he can facilitate the same for his brother if he would like it. Truth be told, he doesn’t know what Charlie will want to do after he is released, so he tries to prepare for everything, every thing his brother might conceivably have need of or might make an excuse out of lacking. If he’s failed him before, this is his opportunity to make up for it. (Richard is a private man but he’s not a fool; if Charlie wanted to find him again, even if they moved out West or anywhere else, he could do it. Richard Stoker cannot be the one to disappear but he must capitulate, as much as any man can, to such demands as conscience allows. Conscience does not allow him to give India away.) The telephone number of a good tailor is in there (not Richard’s own), a frequent-flyer account with a half-dozen airlines, a health insurance card and all the necessary documents. If Charlie should decide to re-enter care, at Crawford or anywhere else, this much will be possible for him, so long as he sends no more letters to his brother’s daughter.