The Half Brother Read Online Free Page A

impressively. He ascended to the pulpit, looked down at us for a long moment, and began what I later called (for I was to hear it more than once) the Grey boys sermon.
    As I learned that day, the chapel had been the gift of a southern cotton planter who lost both of his sons, Abbott alumni, in the Civil War. After the war was over, the heartbroken and now heirless father sent the remainder of his fortune north too, in a gesture of simultaneous penance and defiance, to build a grand Gothic quadrangle on a rolling green campus in central Massachusetts; but the benefactor, Phineas Grey, died before the quad was completed, as did the money, which was why the chapel stood alone, with its truncated wings.
    There was a plaque, Preston’s main subject, beside the chapel’s wide, arched front doors:
    G REY M EMORIAL C HAPEL
I N MEMORY OF THE SONS OF A BBOTT
WHO MADE THE GREATEST SACRIFICE
TO THE CAUSES TO WHICH THEY WERE LED
BY CUSTOM, CULTURE, AND CONSCIENCE
    R EQUIESCANT IN P ACE
    and then the Grey boys’ names, ranks, and dates.
    “The wording of that plaque,” Preston would say, as he did that particular morning, his voice tinged with deep, if weary, tolerance for the sins and foibles of others, “was wrangled over for years. Finally it was determined by two elderly nieces, one of the abolitionist persuasion, one not. It was difficult to find common ground. So what did they find? They found cus tom, and cul ture, and con science.” He leaned forward over the pulpit. “We all find these. We don’t just find them, we swim in them. But which is more important?” He let the pause reverberate. “What if they don’t agree, those things? What if they’re at war with one another?
    “Custom. Is that an excuse not to think? Culture. Heaven forbid you should upset anyone! And conscience. Probably you’d say that’s the one. That’s the most important. And I concur—but how can we be sure it’s our conscience that’s speaking? What if it’s some other voice? If you listen to the wrong voice, my friends, the consequences can be dire.” He leaned over the pulpit and for a moment the congregation was still. I found myself leaning forward too.
    “So you depend on culture, and custom, and conscience,” Preston continued, “but then you leave home, and let’s say you go to boarding school, and all the sudden you think, This is my chance to make myself from scratch .” He came down from the pulpit then and stood on the chancel step, as though he couldn’t resist us any longer. It was, as I would learn, his signature move. “I never went to boarding school myself, but when I was a young boy my father left us, and I never saw him again. That was my reinvention. I had to decide right then who I was, all on my own, and who I was going to be. In a way it was a freedom—a sad freedom. I had to look at my family, my past, my future, and make myself. Who I’d been didn’t matter anymore. I decided I was going to be new and different.
    “And so here I stand before you today. My own creation. But is that true? Certainly not. I’ve been made by culture, and custom, and I hope not least of all conscience, even though I thought I was completely free of those things.” He smiled broadly. “Or at least the first two.” Everyone laughed, in thrall. “Your time here at Abbott will, I hope and pray, have a little less drama than my experience. But your task here is similar, to decide what to jettison, and what to keep. Whoyou want to be. And it’s to figure out, once and for all, which voice is your conscience. It might be the quiet voice; it might be the least persuasive. But if you are truly listening, it is also unignorable.” He turned away, as though he were finished, and then turned back to us once more, as though he’d had one more thought, just that second. One more flash. As though he hadn’t thought of it all before, hadn’t done the choreography of that little pivot in the privacy of his study. “If you ignore