The Half Brother: A Novel by Holly LeCraw

Author:Holly LeCraw [LeCraw, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53196-2
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2015-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

AFTER LUNCH. After that free. Last class of the day. “Okay, people. Time for an indulgence. I’m going to indulge myself. I’ve been waiting for this one.” They didn’t know it, but I said this every year. Every year, when we had finished Gatsby, I read the last page aloud.

Also, every year, I wept. I hadn’t realized the words moved me so much until one year I just teared up, right at And one fine morning—After that, I was Pavlov’s dog. I almost looked forward to it. Crying once a year is probably necessary. Not that it was full-on sobbing, not at all. More a welling up. But it was involuntary, almost external, like being rained on, a nourishment, and it made me glad that I could feel that deeply, or had once.

So I read the closing passage.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn. I read along, anticipating the tick, the turn, the switch flipping as it always did—it was outside feeling now: my eyes would suddenly heat, and there we’d be. His capacity for wonder. The collective embarrassment would be thick; they’d be thinking, Is he really crying over a book? But I figured my annual display was good for them. If not your English teacher weeping over literature, then who?

And I always wondered: why did no one ever point out that Fitzgerald wanted it both ways? Which eventually I would do. Show them the time circling. The dream behind him, the future receding in front—which was it? Both? The orgastic future—ah, Nick Carraway, ah, Scott, he felt and felt. And the tears would come.

But then, that day, I came to the end. The boats were beating against the current: I held the class in my hand, one more moment; borne back ceaselessly into the past. And my eyes were dry.

I paused, and of course they thought I was being dramatic. Their eyes on me—Candace’s, Dex’s, Celia’s. But really I was waiting. Just waiting. Nothing happened. The streak was broken. And that was that.

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