Mystery fiction; Trials (Murder) -- Fiction; United States -- Fiction
And he remembered the evening after his mother's commitment was made
definite. Jack had been home for several days, his presence helpful in
the confusion, the curious desolation like and not like a death; Jack
would be returning to college in the morning. Terence had gone to bed;
Jack was about to, lazily delaying. "How honest shall we get, Terry? Are
you, inside of you, relieved? I am." Half undressed, Jack stood over
Terence's bed, smoking, in ever-observant kindness.
"I guess I am."
"Bad, the last few months?"
"Each day a bit stickier. The moods. No--no way of _talking_ to her.
Every remark turned upside down. Like trying to see a room in a twisty
mirror.... Jack--"
"What, kid?"
"Does it mean we shouldn't marry?"
"No." His brother's quiet hand waved away smoke from between them, and
the question too. "It's probably not hereditary. Anyway your children
get half the endowment from _their_ mother. Marry a mattress type,
Terry, brains optional. No, come to think, you couldn't get along with a
clothhead. Make it a mattress type _with_ gray cells; they do exist.
Might have to hunt around a little. Testing mattresses." Jack sat down
and spread his left hand light and warm on Terence's chest, frowning off
at the window, saying to it: "Got a kid brother with social conscience
yet."
It was, at sixteen, the first time Terence had encountered the full
revelation of love for another, seeing that other as a complete human
being all the more beloved for his separateness. He said only: "Not
hereditary--how can you be sure, Jack?"
"Nobody's sure--just the best educated guess. I saw this coming more
than a year ago. Had to study into the thing for my own sake, Terry:
books, talk with one of the Psycho faculty up there who seems to be able
to tell his ass from a barrel of flour, useful accomplishment. I had to
answer that question you asked, and others. Like for instance asking a
character I saw in the mirror: How about you, Jack, you going that way
too one of these days? Studying it seemed to be the only method of
meeting it head on."
"That why you switched to premed courses this year?"
"Partly. Would've anyhow, I think. Mother's brains began to get hurt and
kicked around when she was small, I think--but not by the genes. Wish
we'd known Grandpa and Grandma Kane. They seem to have been a lovely
pair of pious frauds, probably started raping her wits as soon as she
could talk. Uh-huh, Terry, I've got every intention of marrying and
plowing a few seeds into that interesting furrow. You will too, my
guess."
Terence had felt then a hunger to talk bawdy and blow the lid off in
words; wondered also if he would cry, because of the secret inner fire
that held no name in the language: happiness was not the name, and the
new-discovered love for his brother was only a part of it, an opening
of a door. "Got something all lined up?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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