Free Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg

breath he can barely speak. I raise the subject with Junior, saying that we should get the old man to a doctor and find out what’s wrong with him, but my little brother only makes a face and dismisses the idea.
    “He’s getting old, that’s all. He’s been this way for years.”
    And when I try with Jason himself, suggesting that he have a checkup, I get even less.
    “What if they said I was dying? What would you do then—run? Take off for Hollywood? Send us postcards?”
    “You look terrible, Jason. And you shouldn’t be so short of breath, not even at your age.”
    “So sue me. And you don’t look so hot yourself, you know. You look soft. You, with the physique you had.”
    “We’re talking about you.”
    “And I say no doctors. I’ve been getting along fine without them all these years, and I can do it for a few more.”
    “I hope you’re right.”
    “Sure you do,” he says. “A loving son like you.”
    Thus I am able to sit here at my desk more freely now, knowing that no one wants me elsewhere. I work for a while, writing and rewriting such lines as these, and then I light up a cigarette or pace the room or look out the window at the snow and the cold, sometimes staring so raptly that the stumps in the yard magically begin to climb upward as though in time-lapse photography, becoming again the giants of old. And as clearly as I see the blacks walking to and from the barn, I watch her playing with Cliff and me in the snow, making angels or building a snowman or having a running snowball fight with us, her laughter ringing like cymbals in the brittle air. Like some old actor, some inveterate lachrymist, I feel my eyes growing moist and I sink helplessly into great warm pools of nostalgia and amniotic sentimentality. The self-mockery stops the tears, you see. But it also stops the truth. For if I know anything about myself and about this life I’ve lived, it is that the love I had for Kate and Cliff was real, even before that last summer, a love so natural and constant that I never even knew of it until they were gone, just as I now prize the California sun.
    So I sit here and I remember. I remember a Sadie Hawkins Day dance when Kate and I were high school freshmen and Cliff a sophomore. For some reason this turnabout—girls asking boys—drove Kate high up the wall, especially when she learned that Cliff and I had been invited by the Mandelbaum sisters, Judy and Joan, a pair of very dark, very well-developed Jewish mercantile princesses. Since I was just then beginning to push into puberty, with a cracking voice and a furze of hair sprouting above my perpetually tumid little dick, I was overjoyed at such good fortune, having a date with a girl like Joan, whose “jugs” dated back to the fifth grade at least, making her not just a woman of the world in my eyes but virtually a woman of the streets as well. I looked forward to a truly crushing “stone-ache,” our word for the testicle pain resulting from unrelieved evening-long erections, and about all I could realistically hope for. Cliff as usual played it cool, not admitting to any of the lascivious dreams of glory that were already seriously cutting into my study time. Whenever I saw Joan at school, and especially during the one class we shared, I seemed incapable of a sustained thought that did not relate in some way to her wondrous breasts, which were huge and conical, and about as firm as kneecaps, I imagined. Occasionally my gaze would stray to her thick black hair and her pert smile and nice dark eyes, but never for very long. And I ignored entirely the fact that she was somewhat short in the leg. At fourteen, I was definitely not a leg man.
    Sometimes we spoke, not unlike boys who would be playing against each other soon in football. How could I admit to my lust? I would have been straitjacketed and put away somewhere, force-fed on vast quantities of saltpeter. At home, I spent most of my time pumping Cliff about The Great Night: What did