Sites of Remembrance

Francesca Kazan

Yesterday, June 21, the longest day of the year, the wind blustered under gray skies, sheeting occasional drifts of rain through the London streets. Tomorrow, June 23, my brother would have been thirty. It is seven years and one month since he died, on May 22, 1987.
    My brother died. I have never written those words before.
    We look in so many ways for those we lose. At first, the way everyone
does: suddenly thinking we see them in the empty street, passing us on the downward escalator in the tube, or seeing a flash of them in another’s body, a fleeting expression in a face. This occurs with less and less frequency. These days, I find my brother in dreams: he appears nearly always as a child, and I as I am now, a woman in her forties. Perhaps it is he who finds me.
    For those unprepared, it seems, the news of death inevitably arrives late, in my case the day after the event. It is not just that I was living thousands of miles from my family, in another country, but that a woman phoned. First she hesitated; then she asked, in a foreign accent, for Ashish, the man I was living with. Irritated by her hedging, her refusal to give her name, I assumed she was another of his secret flirtations, so I snapped, “He won’t be back until tomorrow. Try then.”
    When she called the next day, I again was the one who answered. “It’s that woman I told you about, the one who called last night and acted so damn mysterious.” I gave him the phone and left, but noted from the next room his restrained, monosyllabic responses, then his silence after hanging up, a long pause.
    My aunt knew someone had to be with me when I heard the news. She called her sister–in–law in Pennsylvania and asked her to phone Ashish. The mysterious call from a stranger was designed to protect me. “Francesca, come here.” I paused, resentful, then walked in and sat down. “Francesca, your brother’s dead.”
    Odd questions still nag me with their triviality: why didn’t Ashish come to me? He was lying on the small mattress we had placed at one edge of the living room and had lit another cigarette before calling out to me. Was our estrangement so powerful that he could not come closer to tell me of death? It says something about us, the us of then, I suppose, something I would just as soon forget.
    I also realize that his not coming to me created an image that stays with me: I see myself, still wearing a long tee shirt from bed—peachy colored— half naked, crawling away across the floor, bubbling out saliva screams, crying over and over: poorbabypoorbabypoorbaby. Feeling the rough carpet on my knees, sensing the sudden silence in the apartment upstairs as they froze, shocked by the noises I was spewing below.
    There is even a twisted eroticism to the scene: half–naked and crawling, I am a voyeur to myself.
    Since then I have managed to situate myself at the likely moment of Shaun’s dying. I had been to the dentist and was driving home in my blue, rusting Pontiac in a rainstorm that became so violent it blew out my already weak windshield wipers. The hole in the floor beneath the driving seat gushed up water as I slid to a halt. Somewhere outside Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in the fortressed leafy glades of the very rich, I sat trapped, seething, almost hysterical in my inability to leave the scene, not knowing Shaun was at that moment also trapped in a car three thousand miles from me.
    Trapped in a car, dying. In a trap of his own making, a cocoon of poisoned fumes. In a leafy glade along the River Thames. In the car park of a place called A Home for Exiles. God only knows what a home for exiles is. The name has always been too much for me.
    I remained in Bryn Mawr for one, or was it two, more days. Leaden, slit– eyed, pouch–faced. There was no rush: rushing to a deathbed is one thing, rushing to the dead another. No, in this case, rushing was not the thing. I called my mother’s place and said to whomever answered, “Just tell her I know.” In her panic she had insisted on delaying telling me because I was coming home anyway in a week. Ashish was called despite her.
    I remember calling an old school friend in England and babbling it all out, wanting something, anything, from him. But after I arrived there, he did not call, and he did not come to the funeral. Two or so years later, he phoned to suggest meeting for a drink. I said no. But on the airplane over I happened to sit next to a young Lebanese man. He took one look at me and, without asking anything, placed my head on his shoulder and said quietly, “Try to rest.” The close friend I had shared two flats with over the years was the only person I would even let near me at Shaun’s funeral. Recently I came across a book he gave me, Nell Dunn’s Living Like I Do. The blurb says it is an exploration of alternative life styles. His inscription makes me smile: to Fran, happy christmas 1977. Living like we do, Love Cohn.
    In the months following Shaun’s death, I felt as if I were gliding and everyone else was very far away. My eyes were open but seemed closed. Just thinking of it now, even after all these years, creates a floating sensation in me. I tend to close my eyes again and again, even when I am writing, and then my head feels heavy, as if my neck can barely support it. Images bleed into my brain: I watch myself before the funeral, at the funeral, by the hearse, in the cemetery.
    I had refused to see the two dead people of my life in earlier years. I was only sixteen when my stepfather died, and felt so relieved that I was almost afraid he would return to life, were I to look at him. With my grandmother, though I was in my twenties, I was simply superstitiously afraid of the dead.
    This time was different. This time there was no fear, just a sense of dire necessity. I had to get to him. And yet rejecting my usual bridge over the Thames, I chose to take, deliberately, the longest route from home to where he was. My mother walked beside me, saying nothing. The traffic slid by. I was thinking, although it could not be, I am walking across this bridge to see my dead brother. I am walking across this bridge to see my dead brother. I thought death was screaming from my eyes, but no one noticed.     The sign said Saunders Funeral Home: weren’t they once called funeral parlors? He chose the Home for Exiles. Home—the final resting place. The dead are said to go home.
    How many times had I passed this place, walking from the town’s center toward the gasworks of my childhood. At the door we were met by an obsequious, muted man, murmuring his sympathy. I hated him. Inside only a few lamps glowed softly against the polished wood of the walls.
    As we entered the room, my mother murmured to Shaun, “She’s here, she’s here. You’re safe now.” And then I was finally alone with my brother.
    I approached from behind; the top of his head faced me. In a long wooden box he rested, he waited. I circled around. I stared. I reached beyond fear and touched his cold cheek. Nothing happened, and I was wrenched. Poorbabypoorbabypoorbaby.
    I hated the fact that only his head was visible above the wood of the coffin. A decapitation. I insisted that be changed, and later felt more comfortable seeing his hands placed on his breast: his body seemed whole again.
    The dead do not look as if they are sleeping, contrary to popular cliché. Shaun looked dead. Yet there was also an aura about him, a presence quite tangible. Spirit, energy mass, whatever you want to call it, something lingered and was felt. But the face does change within the cooled vaults of the funeral home. The change centers on the closed eyes—they hollow inwards, sink deeper into their mold over time. The hair stays bright and textured.
    I saw his body four times. People sometimes flinch at that, but I think I was psychically willing him over to the other side, letting him know I was there with him, pushing love deep into him, letting him take his time. Making sure he was completely gone.
    Sometimes we come up with the thing that keeps us sane. Even though it may be the very thing that edges us from sanity later. After hearing about Shaun’s death, what kept me wedged in a precarious hold was a ring. A golden ring. I had a secret ring, a treasure, invested by me with powers. As soon as I heard of his death, I knew what to do: I took it from its box and placed its soft heaviness on my finger. Connected to my brother by a band of gold. Now I knew why I had kept it.
    The day before his burial, I walked again to the home. Conscious of the ritual ahead of me, I felt the ring’s comforting weight.
    Perhaps only professionals know how to touch the dead. I was shocked by the resistance of his hand as I took it up: it could not cooperate. I pushed the ring halfway along one finger and could have forced it farther. But I stopped, afraid to hurt him. And there it stayed. Then I knew he was gone; he had crossed over.
    On my last visit I went dressed in the clothes I would wear for the burial—everything cream and white. I placed a few yellow freesias by his cheek and kissed his forehead.     On the day of his funeral, I stood at the window in my mother’s living room, staring at the twohundred–year–old bridge spanning the River Thames. Finally, the black hearse appeared, loaded with spring flowers. I kept repeating to myself: My brother is crossing the river. My brother is crossing the river.
    The day was gray, windy, and cold. Cohn was with me as I pressed my body hard against the edge of the pew by the nave, pushing it into the wood for some relief. Cohn held me from the side, pushing his slight frame against me, refusing to let me disappear alone into the wood of the pew.
    As we stood by the black hole in the ground, waiting for the men to lower Shaun, the rain began to pour with a gray vengeance. Then he was gone.
    A close girlfriend of his, Stefania, came over from Italy with her sister for the funeral. The sister, plump, beaming, protective, whose name I cannot bring back, sat in my living room, nestled in the dark blue armchair, the light filtering in from the patio and through the French doors as she chatted away in Italian. Not a language I speak, but slumped in my chair, I picked up a word linked to my name—bambina, bambina. “Where is Frankie’s baby?” she wanted to know. My insides clutched in a spasm of fear.
    When visiting his girlfriend’s family in Italy, my brother, who liked this sister a great deal, had told her I lived in America—which is true—with my small daughter—which is not. Signs such as these are the clues I have to the depth of his fantasy life. That one is especially hard to bear.
    I often wonder how children survive the adversities of childhood and adolescence as they edge and tumble into something approaching maturity. Some of them achieve a tenuous hold, maybe nothing more than that. But Shaun did not make it that far.
    Imagine the last few hours of someone’s life, a human being who knows or determines these hours will be his last.
    In this case, I can only try to reconstruct a history, because several hours are officially unaccounted for. I say officially because Shaun was supposed to be confined—that is official enough. At some point during that long afternoon he was sighted by a neighbor climbing the drainpipe to the window of his home. Oh, that Shaun, she probably thought, up to his foolish tricks again.
    He must have driven around for a while—he had kept his keys. Did he go to familiar places for one last look? Did he just stare into space? Did he cry? What were his last words? Once he had fed the hose pipe in through the crack of the window, how long did he sit there before switching on the ignition? How do you say to yourself, Yes, this is the moment, this is really the moment?
    What is certain is the absence of a note—he must have been too defeated for statements. I know I could not bring myself to go to the station to pick up his cigarettes and matches, his loose change. I wondered, but never asked, what he was wearing. Not hospital clothes I suppose, for these days they let you keep your own. What deviousness enabled him to leave an institution where he was confined, on special watch? Or did he not need it?
    Government cuts and understaffing, laziness of vigil, indifference— whichever, it does not matter. He crossed the barrier.
IN THE DAYS LEADING UP tO the first anniversary of Shaun’s death, I did not know what to do; I just knew I was searching for a way to mark it. I was back in Bryn Mawr, but preparing to leave forever, packing boxes slowly, and engaged in a commute between Bryn Mawr and Manhattan, where I was working freelance, doing research on a friend’s book of photographs. Back and forth, back and forth: it was a surreal and empty summer. I was tense and fearful in anticipation of moving deep into the South, to a place where I did not know anyone within a thousand miles.
    On May 22, 1988, it rained and rained, exactly as it had the year before when I was trapped in leafy glades. Endless, bucketing rain. I got in my car, this one white, hatchbacked, and new, these wipers flouncing efficiently, and drove the few miles to Villanova, near Bryn Mawr. As I entered the vast church—water dripping from my clothes—I remembered the time when I, about seven years old, was dropped off for Sunday School at my childhood church during Lent. The statues of the saints and Our Lady were draped in cloths, the church was empty, and I ran screaming down Sandycombe Road to the safety of home. But this time there was a priest. He looked at me closely and saw my distress.
    On May 22, 1989, I was in New York City, this time with a feeling of recklessness—stubborn refusal or bitter avoidance. Nadine Gordimer was scheduled to read at the 92nd Street Y, and I felt miserable and guilty as I bought a ticket, then went to a bar to wait. It was an odd thing for me to do: I do not sit in bars alone, facing the barman, propped on a high stool.
    I wanted anonymity and solitude, but soon a stranger was buying me my second glass of wine. He said the Queen of England owns half the streets of Manhattan, she’s a rich lady, she sure is. I remembered a time in Las Vegas, when I sat playing roulette, feeling I was acting a part, seeing myself as “Woman Playing Roulette.” This was similar: “Woman Sitting at Bar, Woman Letting Stranger Buy Her a Drink.” Inside I was in turmoil, but he hadn’t a clue. I was angry with myself and the world because I did not know how to mark this day.
    On May 22, 1990, another church service, this time in the bland Catholic campus church at the University of Alabama. Both the service and the church felt sterile, certainly not spiritual or soulful. But I was marking the day, and that felt crucial. I brought my friend Mary, known since the days at Bryn Mawr; I did not want to observe the day alone, but with someone who already knew the story.
    On May 22, 1991, I felt that even the day itself was nervous, uncertain, high.strung, almost crazed. My friend Hendrix picked me up, and we drove in windy dusk and light rain, over the Black Warrior River and down Watermelon Road to a rural churchyard. I held flowers and a jar of water, not knowing quite where I was or what I was looking for. Hendrix had found this place earlier, gravelly paths, a deserted country bleakness, no fences, a small cemetery by the side of the road.
    Walking around alone, I eventually found the spot I needed, a grave that seemed just right—sunken, neglected, and anonymous. The weather had erased even the letters from the sandstone marker. I was filled with certainty and peace as I claimed it for my own, named it anew with the flowers.
    On May 22, 1992, having established a calming ritual, I was sure of my purpose, if not the exact terrain. My friend Nanci and I would drive out, meander toward some site. Both she and my therapist, Allen, asked the same question, independent of each other, when I told them my purpose: “Will you look for a child’s grave?” I was stunned. The sun shown as we drove through the flatness of rural Alabama—a few cotton fields still, scrappy white clutching the brown sticks—the beginning of summer’s remorseless heat. Nanci and I talked about anything, everything: sweeping into my house after some emotional event, she once said, “Now tell me everything. Everything.” With Nanci, everything means exactly that.
    Eventually we came upon a country graveyard and started wandering, searching. I would know it when I saw it:
                        ROBERT M.
                        Son of D. and M.J. Lavender
                        Born Mar io 1873
                        Died Sep 24 1875
    A stone lamb curled around the headstone. I saw no other Lavenders nearby, just grasses waving in the quiet wind. I laid the flowers I was carrying on Robert’s grave to mark this ritual, the meeting of two dead children across an ocean.
    On May 22, 1993, the heat was again already intense. After cutting a bunch of pale green wild hydrangeas from my front garden, I went with Kathy, whose father had recently died, to the Evergreen Cemetery in downtown Tuscaloosa. It is what a cemetery should be, old and weathered, with shade trees and drifting roses, and only a few of those easled contraptions mounted with plastic flowers. We walked and walked, me with my flood of hydrangeas.
    “Frank,” she called, “have you seen this one?”
    I walked toward it, and stared:
                        VIVIAN LOUISE
                        HOOKS
                        DAUGHTER of
                        R.M. and E.L. HOOKS
                        Mar. 24. 1915
                        June 23. 1917
                        Here rests the sweetest
                        bud of hope
                        That e’er to human wish
                        was given.
    “Kathy, this child died on my brother’s birthday, seventy years before he was born,” I said.
    “Oh Frank,” she said, and we both cried.
    On May 22, 1994, I did nothing. The ritual I believed I would always retain did not materialize. I was back in London for the summer, aware that for the first time since Shaun’s death I was just a short train ride from his grave on the anniversary itself. I had visited it many times before, but this time it did not feel true. The day lingered; I let it drift on.
Now, IN TUSCALOOSA, I am conscious of the need to piece together the rest of the story. I begin with a child rushing toward me, captured in black and white, flying in a mad curve through air as his hair sweeps to one side. His hand grips a toy plane. He is five years old.
    When he died, this image of my brother would not leave me. It floated through my head, superimposed upon another: my own self–portrait. I was a repository for icons; I felt they must be visible to those who saw me, attached like wings.
    The photograph of a five–year–old boy. The painted portrait of a fourteen– year–old girl. They haunted me.
    I take her now, in her silver frame, and place her against the tall Chinese lamp base, so she is beneath the light. She lies on yellowed paper, the bottom left corner torn and folded, the top corners pinholed, all the borders worn. I study her hard. She holds many secrets, some I know, some that are waiting to be released here.
    I hold her in my hand. I close my eyes, and my hand shakes a little, because I know she wants to open up to me. She is naked, this girl, with uplifted, full–nippled breasts. Her stomach curves, and the sex beneath fades into the inner fold of her thigh. Her face is framed by dark hair: two smudges for eyes, a soft scrape of the brush to suggest her mouth, a barely discernible blur for a nose. Her face is a filter for absence.
    She is painted in brush strokes of olive green and deep red, with strokes of brown here and there. Olive green and deep red, the colors of the room she now inhabits. A coincidence, or so I think.
    I try to reinhabit the room she called her own thirty years ago. Upstairs in the house on Cadbury Road, that crazy, cruel house; the room where her cat died suddenly from feline flu; the room where she would retreat into her own silence, where she would refuse her present.
    Here one day she closed her door, undressed, picked up her paintbrush, and stood naked in front of a mirror. She stood naked looking for her self.
    For years I have had no clear idea why I painted myself at the age of fourteen. I cannot be sure even now. But I remember the experience itself, being sure that I had to do it. The paper, brush, and paints were ready. I worked swiftly, once I found my position: it probably took twenty minutes or less. Then I put it away, somewhere secret I imagine, and examined it occasionally. It has been with me since, often stuck between the leaves of a book. It only surfaced when Shaun died.
    This I know: at the time I painted this image, my mother was pregnant with my brother. For the first three or four months, only she and I knew— she’d had three abortions with my stepfather, Simon, and somehow this time found the resolve to make a decision on her own.
    After the first abortion she and I walked back to the flat on Kings Road in Richmond. I was eight years old. “Frankie, Frankie, is blood running down my legs?” she said, staring stiffly ahead, afraid to look herself. It wasn’t. The second time I waited outside a hospital room in Barcelona. This was, I believe, on our long trail back from our months in Morocco. The doctor came Out bearing a swab, offering proof, I suppose, to Simon. The last time, a woman came to the house where we lived on Thames Street and accompanied my mother to the bathroom.
    Finally, she’d had enough, she would keep this baby. We would keep this baby. . . wouldn’t we?
    My last memory of my brother: the top of his head facing me, a boy not quite twenty–three, lying in a wooden box. My last memory of him alive is when I went in to see him before getting on a plane to return to America.
    Sleepy and grouchy, lying in bed with early morning face and stubble, he kissed me goodbye.
    In terms of the physical, there is so little of him, his, left. In my writing room here in Tuscaloosa is an acrylic paperweight, trapping nuts and bolts inside its transparent cube; a calculator I use all the time; a small pottery container Shaun made in school when he was about eight years old. The press– marks of his fingers are quite visible and on the bottom, the initials S.B., are awkwardly etched. In other rooms of this house, there are: a rose necklace on a green silk thread; four brass goblets on a small brass tray; three Victorian sherry glasses—there used to be four. He had a knack with gifts, was deeply serious about them.
    Then there are the other things I have kept, taken from his room in Richmond—fragments of writing, notecards counselling himself, notebooks.
    In front of me now are two small books, one covered in blue silk decorated with birds and flowers, with a spine of deep red leather. Inside the cover is thin paper, also edged with birds and flowers, and on the back page is stamped, Shanghai, China. The other is a tiny, plain notebook, two inches by three, with a picture of a flying heron on the front.
    I open them to try to find him; I have been trying to do this for days now; I feel brutalized by sadness.
    Inside the blue silk book is information on various countries—India, Africa, Australia, trips he never took—along with lists of items to take. Interspersed with the technical information are notes to himself.
    Low compression pistons allow running on low grade fuel.

    On this trip have a real purpose, maybe to make money to find a
    place to live, make people I meet as happy as possible, me as well
    of course. DON’T EXPECT ANYTHING.
    Are there universal parts for BMW?
    No doubt I’ll feel dejected at times, hopefully only at beginning of trip, but just force yourself to go on.
    Put plastic tubing packed with grease over tyre valves, etc. Soap eases tyre rims.
    Pleasure wouldn’t be pleasure without pain intervening now and then. They could be the same thing. It’s all the same fucking day MAN!
    Argentinia—Horse country.
    You should never feel lonely if you try and be one with everything.
    (‘At Home”). Think of what you can do with what you’ve got.
    Shaun Birchett. Great Britain. (Poem. Childhood revisited.)
    He did travel to Morocco, and at the back are addresses and names of some of the people he met there, greetings from them in Arabic script. One, written in English, but in a foreign hand, reads:
    Dear friend, I with you good holidays and a good end as well.
    In the small book, with the flying heron on the cover, I find this:
    Men and women think men are bastards this is why.
    Women haven’t realised that you can’t supply caring on request.
    Women are ignorant of this and so treat men obscurely.
    Men don’t care because women are ignorant of this and so men
    because they are innocent and because women are always needing caring can’t care.
    Men can’t care because they are innocent of the ways of women.
    I want to care for you 1 haven’t cared in my life I want you to teach me (it may not be possible but let’s try). (PLEASE)
    Maybe God does help us all the time but to keep LIFE from fucking everything up we must thank him, to keep life from intervening.
    Sympathy for (the devil) EVIL
    that’s what this modern world with no purpose is doing.
    There are scraps of paper filled with his thoughts and admonitions:
THE WORLDS TROUBLE: Human–beings naturally are caring & thoughtful
    What has happened is that people have started solely, to think
    of themeselves their ego’s—utter rejection of rejection through fear & so on. Soon you encapsulate yourself in your own world & so
    only become aware of yourself which is totally destructive, negative.
WE ARE NOT MACHINES, as in this state is plainly obvious as all your faults and inadequacies keep on hitting you in the face, & so you go mad!
    We have to think of others. Instead what we are doing is
    dissapointingly try to cope with self–awareness. FASHION is one, to the extent of transvestites etc. All they are doing is channeling
    their self–awareness by acting to be something else (somebody else, not neccesarily a person an image will do). And so they hide their
    selves in being auare of trying to be somebody else. IT’S A
TEMPORARY CURE.
    On a notecard I find a list of names divided into girls and boys—perhaps a plan for his imaginary children. It seems a quirky list, for example: Martine, Bridget (Bridie), Hazel, Jezebel, Nikki, Lola, Christina, and Sonja; Sebastian, Xavier, Julien, and Zebadiah.
    Then there are a few letters from me, and a drawing of himself, portrayed as a storklike bird running at full speed off the edge of the page. The title is: This is Me When I’m Running Away from Love.
    There are notes on a telephone message pad, no date:
    Maybe I should stay amongst sinners to help them, and also to strengthen my faith.
    But I will meet sinners wherever I go. Therefore the question arises yet again to go, to stay? I was born here maybe I it.as meant to stay.
    Ask yourself constantly is what I’m doing or saying good or ba4 (Arrogant or Humble).
    It takes lots of training to become G 00 D. Maybe till you die, and further.
    I try to find Shaun in his words, but there is so little for me to get hold of after these years. I had left home for university when he was five years old, and many of my memories are of coming home at Christmas, Easter, and over the summer. For a few years I was working in London and living nearby. Then I left England, essentially for good, when he was about fifteen years old. Our relationship developed beneath the shadow of my constant crossings and recrossings of the Atlantic. I try to find him, but all I really know is that in the last few years of his life he became frighteningly troubled, self–destructive, laden with depression. He heard voices.
    Beginning that final weekend of his life, he was hospitalized, for his own protection and for his mother’s. Things had become very rough, very damaging. I was not there and have no way of knowing the despairing reality of that period. I try not to judge.
    What I am frightened to write, what I am struggling to write is this: the locks had been changed on the doors of his own home. When that neighbor saw him climbing the drainpipe to his window on the afternoon he went missing, he was not up to his foolish tricks. It was a desperate clawing to get home.
    I try to imagine what that must have felt like, and fail. I can only ponder how it is we lock people out of our lives, all of us. How do we choose who to allow in?
    I have his death certificate:
    Entry Number 127. Asphyxia due to carbon monoxide poisoning
    car exhaust fumes. He took his own life while suffering from a severe natural illness.
    So, schizophrenia is considered a “natural” illness.
    NOW, MANY MONTHS AFTER I began this essay, I think back to that June 23. In the afternoon the intemperate, blustering rain gave way to weeks and weeks of bright, polluting heat, causing people throughout the city to drop from asthma, choking and coughing. Others focused entirely on Wimbledon and the World Cup. Everything was framed by the endless rail strikes. Endless. That day my phone stopped working—a fault on the line the engineers said— and stayed that way for three days.
    I lived an enforced solitude that I nurtured over the weeks: I would wander out, drink coffee somewhere, and watch the crowd; after sitting an hour or so, I would come home to my flat and form some of these sentences.
    I began by acknowledging in writing that Shaun had died—something I had never truly done before. Since then I have been writing his death. Now I must face the present.
    I cannot imagine my brother older than twenty–three: his shape, his stance, his smile, the dimming echoes of his voice are frozen there. But as the gap widens between our actual experiences together and my memories of those experiences, my angle of perception shifts. Though some memories fade, the overall picture—him, me, our lives in time—does not so much diminish as it evolves into new and shifting patterns.
    I understand now what Joy was prizing from me as she looked at the naked girl’s thighs.
    “Were you heavy as a girl?” she asked.
    “No . . . not really. Though . . . I seemed always to have breasts, I mean. . . they developed early,” was my answer.
    “Well, I think those thighs have been imaged to bear children.”
    Now I cannot see them in any other way.
    I remember taking Shaun on tubes, on buses, people often assuming I was a young mother and both of us noting it, liking it, our secret. They were wrong, but that was the fun. And I remember at twenty or so fantasizing that I could really take my brother and bring him up as my own child. I was engaged to be married at the time, and felt it would make for a better life; everything would be smoother, easier for everyone. In the middle of a major family bust, as plates cracked in fury and small tables skittered through the air, I told my mother what I would do: “I’ll just take him and leave, damn you. Yes, we’ll take him.”
    I think this crazy dream began with a mistake my mother would very occasionally make when she slipped and referred to Shaun as my son. This made me deeply uneasy. I had read about dysfunctional families, I had read R. D. Laing, and once in an especially dark time I even thought there might have been a family conspiracy, a family secret so deep it was even kept from me: maybe he was my son. Times must have been really dark then, even by our standards.
    And now, having tried to face his death, having tried to seek him through his own words, I find that I am left with other memories, memories that stand clear and clean—away from the murkiness of analysis, away from the darkness of pain.
    I like to remember a fight when I stood and screamed and dashed a plate of spaghetti bolognese against the wall. The red strands stuck there for days, everyone being too stubborn to remove them. The story of this battle became a family joke: now and then, Shaun would interrupt the conversation over dinner with a group of my friends, hoping to embarrass me or at least amuse them by rendering this tale, then cracking up in peals of laughter. Laughing at all of us: at my extravagant rage, at everyone’s determination not to give in.
    On another occasion I had returned to London from America with Ashish. For some years I had been notoriously unforthcoming about my personal life, something that irritated both Shaun and my mother, so they had no idea what to expect. I went first alone to see them, then announced that a friend was staying with me.
    “A friend? Hmm, d’you hear that, Mum? She’s brought a friend with her,” Shaun said. “Well, what’s his. . . I mean, what’s the friend’s name then?”
    “Ashish,” I answered. “It is Ashish.” They looked at each other across the kitchen table, trying to decide who would respond first.
    “Hashish, now that’s funny. Hashish. All right then.. . is he black?” Shaun was really beginning to enjoy himself.
    “What is it about you, Frankie?” He grinned, loving it. “Well, when are we getting a look at him then? This Hashish.”
    “Just remember this, Shaun, when you meet him, it’s Ashish, OK?”
    I also have a photograph of him holding my friend Sue’s new baby—he must have been around fifteen. The infant is couched in his arms, while Shaun dangles a small crocheted toy I believe he had made. His expression is one of total absorption, total pleasure. When I look at this image now, I know my brother was two–thirds of his way through his life.
    So little remains.
    The day after my brother’s funeral, I stumbled to seek sanctuary with Joy, the woman who had helped me years before. Everything was different this time—no lying on a couch, no detachment: this time we looked clear into each other’s eyes; this time we touched, we breathed deep, we talked to each other.
    “I am haunted by two images,” I said. Later I sought them out and brought them to her.
    “Were you heavy as a girl?” she asked, looking at my naked portrait. We tried to piece together the shards.
    This was near the end of my time in London; I knew I must return soon to America. By now Shawn had been dead for over a month, and I was panicking about leaving. I was terrified. I did not know if I could even pretend to cope. I sensed that my masking, generally so reliable, was failing me.
    “Could you try and paint another? Do you think you could do that?” Joy asked.
    “You mean. .. like the one before?”
    “I mean, whatever you want. But yes, a portrait. Could you try?”
    I walked home along Sheen Road, through the town’s center, until I came to the small artist’s shop I had never before entered. Dark, decrepit, and comforting, it held bursting clumps of sable brushes, naked wooden easels waiting to be dressed, and drawer after drawer full with paints, all kinds. I knew I wanted the same as before—Kryla Paints.
    I chose three thick, plump oils, the plate, the receptacle. Two brushes— one slim, one fat. The old man who served me looked serious and sweet as he carefully parcelled my goods in brown paper.
    I have only vague recollections now, but I must have undressed, and stood in front of a mirror. For the second time.
    So in front of me now—all these years later and thanks to Joy—is another image, this one dated and marked: 1:27/7/87.
    A figure in blue, this one, with dashes of green and brown. With no evasion, no shifting of her body’s contours, she faces the viewer head on, direct. In some way she is a more difficult figure for me to confront. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is because she is nearer to me in time.
    She is naked, legs slightly apart, arms slack at her sides. Her sex is a burst and does not fade into her thighs. The breasts are full and heavy, large and darkly nippled. The brush strokes create large, dark eyes, shadowed beneath. Her mouth and nose are fully defined. This time, hair frames a face that is present.
    She is sturdy, almost stocky, she stares straight at her self. Her expression is desolate, though willed: I am trying to be here.
    I have placed both naked images, the girl of fourteen, the woman then in her thirties, where they belong: the young one above the older, but closely connected. They hang on a deep red wall, both framed by silver and encased in glass. I look at them from time to time, and when I am away they occasionally come to mind. Perhaps, with them, past, present, and future will finally connect.
IT IS NOW ELEVEN YEARS since my brother died. Last night I dreamt about my brother: he was perhaps twelve years old, and I was the age I am now. In the dream I had not seen him in a long while, and I knew he was going to die. Not by illness, not by accident, but in the way he did die. He was dressed in what appeared to be a nightgown; I approached him with longing.
    I held him close, knowing that there was nothing to be done, he was going to die. We both knew. We clung to each other, swollen in the certainty of our loss, and I whispered how I loved him. We held on to each other, and we both cried. I wish I could remember what he said, but that’s where the dream—this gift of a dream—left me.

Francesca Kazan lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and London, England. The essay in this issue is the final chapter of her memoir In Deep; the first chapter, "What's in a Name," appeared in the Spring 1996 issue of The Gettysburg Review. She is grateful to the University of Alabama, where she teaches contemporary literature and autobiography, for a summer research grant that enabled her to complete this essay.

“Sites of Remembrance” appears in our Autumn 1998 issue.