Beauty and the Brain (20 page)

George, although smarter than most human
beings on earth, was probably the least ambitious member of the
Peters clan. Sometimes people equated his lack of intellectual
curiosity as a sign that he was unintelligent. Colin knew better.
The boy was only lazy; perhaps even good-for-nothing. As this
latest escapade of his proved.

“How long do you aim to visit with us,
George?” Brenda asked courteously. Colin was sure she didn’t care
in the least, but was merely being polite. Even he, who didn’t
normally notice people’s faces, could detect the fatigue in
hers.

George shot Colin a hasty glance. “Er, I’m
not sure, Miss Fitzpatrick. This visit was sort of—sort of a
surprise.”

“Unequivocally,” Colin growled. George
looked peeved.

“Well, I hope you enjoy your stay. This is a
lovely place. Perhaps we can all go horseback riding together one
of these days.”

“I’d like that,” George said quickly,
flushing a deeper red as he did so.

This was ridiculous. Colin wasn’t going to
stand here in the middle of the Cedar Crest Lodge’s bar and watch
Brenda Fitzpatrick make mincemeat of his idiot brother.

“I suppose you can room with me as long as
you’re here.” He pitched his voice to a tone he hoped would curtail
further conversation. Brenda needed her sleep. So did he, for that
matter.

Brenda seemed a little surprised, but she
didn’t take him to task for his abrupt manners. Thank the good Lord
for small favors, he thought caustically.

“It’s very nice to meet you, George, but I’m
afraid we’ve had a strenuous day. I think I’ll go on up to my own
room.” She gave him a parting smile that probably finished George
off, blast her. “Good night.”

“G-g-good night,” George stammered,
confirming Colin’s assumption.

Martin said, “Think I’ll go, on up to bed,
too. It’s been quite a day, but we got a lot done.” He was clearly
delighted about it. “Will we see you in the morning, George?”

George hadn’t entirely recovered from
Brenda’s smile, but he did manage to stutter, “Oh, thank you, Mr.
Tafft. I’d like that a lot. I’m very interested in the
pictures.”

Martin nodded, as if he’d already deduced as
much. Everyone in the world seemed to be interested in the pictures
these days, fools that they were. “Good night,” Colin said to
Brenda and Martin, more curtly than he’d intended.

Brenda shot him a curious glance but didn’t
scold him for being a pill. “Good night,” she said in that
beautiful, melodious, albeit slightly New Yorky voice of hers.
Colin wished that hearing her voice didn’t send waves of heat
through him, but it did. Every dashed time. He could just imagine
what Brenda’s voice was doing to his impressionable younger
brother. He and George watched as Brenda and Martin left the bar,
chatting in low voices. George, he, noticed, was gawking after
Brenda as if she were a lifeline and he a drowning sailor.

Feeling out of sorts and very touchy, Colin
whirled around. “All right, George, what’s going on? What’s this
about dropping out of college? And what do you mean by haring off
across the country without even telling our parents?”

George heaved a big sigh. “For the love of
God, Colin, let me at least sit down before you tear me to
pieces.”

He sounded dispirited, and for the first
time Colin wondered if there was something more to George’s
defection than mere irresponsibility. He muttered, “Very well.
Here.” He gestured at the table Brenda and Martin had vacated. They
sat, and George at once began fiddling with an empty ashtray on the
table. He looked around as if with fascination.

“This is a nice place, Colin. What kind of
picture is this going to be?”

“I’ll tell you later. First you tell me why
the deuce you’re here instead of in school where you belong.”

George heaved a long sigh before he spoke,
and then his tone was unhappy. “I didn’t belong there. I didn’t fit
in, didn’t care for my course of study, did a lousy job at it, and
hated every minute of it.”

Colin felt his eyes widen as his fury rose.
“So you dropped out without telling anyone and headed west. Hoping
to seek your fortune in the moving pictures, I presume.”

Although Colin was often abrupt and
untactful, he’d never heard his voice drip venom as it was doing
now. He was surprised by it, although he understood why he felt
George’s defection so deeply, because it was a betrayal of
everything Colin himself had ever valued in life.

George waved a hand in a gesture that spoke
of weariness and defeat. “For Pete’s sake, Colin, you don’t have to
be so damned heartless.”

“Since when have you started swearing,
George? Is that what they taught you at college?”

“Oh, God.” George propped his elbows on the
table and buried his face in his hands. “If you’ll listen to me,
I’ll tell you what they taught me, Colin. But I don’t want you to
be interrupting all the time. You’re smarter than I am, and you use
words better, and I already feel bad enough about this without you
playing older, better brother and pounding me to a pulp with your
superior wit.”

Scalding words piled up on Colin’s tongue,
and he swallowed them with a good deal of difficulty. He wanted to
spew them out all over George and render him sensible of the huge
mistake he’d made by leaving school without their parents’
knowledge or consent. He knew if he said what he wanted to say,
George would only withdraw from him, however, so he held his
tongue.

Not that Colin cared on a personal basis. He
was so angry with George, he could have beaten him about the head
and shoulders with great joy. But above anything else, Colin
honored their parents, who had reared their children with affection
and great care, and instilled in them—or in Colin, at least—a vast
respect and love for education. Colin believed he owed it to their
parents to get to the bottom of George’s latest regression into the
realm of capriciousness and frivolity.

“Very well,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Tell me what happened.”

George gave another airy, helpless gesture
with his hand. It was a slender hand, with long, tapering fingers.
Colin’s own hands were much more blunt than George’s. He wondered
if that meant anything; if a man learned in such things could
discern a person’s character by the structure of his hands

He jerked himself hack to the present.
George’s problems were of immediate concern. Colin could look into
the representative properties of hands later. “Well?” he urged none
too gently.

George sighed again. “I’m not cut out for
biology and physiology, Colin. Nor for science of any kind. I know
Mother and Father were hoping I’d become a naturalist, but I hate
that stuff. Spiders make me crawl, mice male me sick, and the great
out-of-doors only makes me feel dirty.” He seemed to be searching
Colin’s face for any signal indicating understanding, if not
approval. He didn’t find any

“Oh?” So far, Colin could drum up no
sympathy. There were lots of things one could study, and the mere
fact that George didn’t want to be a naturalist didn’t preclude a
hundred other vocations. “Why didn’t you tell them you wanted to
study something else?”

“They seemed so keen on my becoming a
naturalist. God knows why.”

“Nonsense. They’d have been happy if you’d
ever shown any aptitude or interest in another field.” Colin sucked
in a breath and curbed his biting words. “As I recollect, you never
showed interest in anything but lounging around and reading novels.
But the university offers many courses of study. Surely you could
have found something there that interested you. Even in the
humanities.” He tried not to make the word sound like a curse.

George lifted his head and stared straight
into Colin’s eyes. Colin had the strangest sensation that he was
looking into his own eyes, so alike were the brothers’ ocular
organs. “That’s just the problem, Colin. I—” He stopped speaking
abruptly.

“What’s the problem?” Colin knew he should
probably stop frowning, if only to make George feel, more
comfortable talking to him, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He
was enraged, and there was no disguising it.

George looked very unhappy—as well he might,
in Colin’s opinion—when he said, “I don’t want to study anything
there.”

It was too much. Colin spat out, “For God’s
sake, George, have you no common sense at all? What do you expect
to do with your life if you’re not trained for anything? Do you
expect to be able to make a living by staring up into the blue sky
and counting clouds? Or reading novels? Or do you expect our
parents to support you until they die? Or me? Do you expect me to
carry you around like a sack of oatmeal forever?”

George’s head fell back and he commenced
staring at the ceiling of the Cedar Crest bar. He looked both
frustrated and nettled, and his attitude rubbed Colin raw.

“Well?” he demanded, furious. “What is it?
Or perhaps you’d like to be a common laborer. I don’t suppose a man
needs a college education to work with his hands. You can mow grass
or plant crops. Would you like to go into farming? Of course, you
have no business sense, so you’d certainly not make a go of it, but
the world always needs farmers. Or laborers. You can dig ditches.
There’s nothing innately dishonorable about manual labor. Is that
what you want?”

“No!” Something in George seemed to snap,
and he jumped up from his chair. Slamming his hands to the table
and leaning on them, he looked Colin straight in the eye. “No,
Colin, I don’t want to dig ditches. I don’t want to be a farmer.
What I do want is to have my wishes respected for once in my
life.

“Respect,” Colin ground out through his
teeth, “has to be earned.”

“Right.” As if he were a balloon and someone
had just, pricked him, George deflated. He stood back and jammed
his hands into his trousers’ pockets. “And, of course, since no one
in the family ever cared enough to ask me where my interests lie,
none of you knows anything about them.”

“You have a voice,” Colin reminded him. “You
could have spoken up. I never noticed you being particularly shy
about voicing your opinions before now. I’m sure our parents would
have been thrilled to have been spared the cost of your first two
years at college if you’d ever bothered to tell them what you
really wanted to do.” George probably wanted to be a juggler in a
circus, thought Colin savagely. His brother always had been a
frivolous sort of fellow.

“Right. You’re right.” George swung around,
dropped his chin broodingly, and stared at the floor. “It’s because
I was a coward and didn’t tell anyone what I wanted to do. That’s
why nobody ever knew.”

Exasperated almost beyond bearing, Colin
said in a voice gritty with suppressed fury, “Why don’t you tell me
now?”

George turned again, eyeing Colin with grave
misgivings. Small wonder, given Colin’s state of rage, although he
couldn’t feel guilty about it to save himself. George was a noddy
and that was that. “Well? Out with it. Maybe we can salvage
something from this deplorable situation yet.”

“Don’t sound so encouraging,” George advised
bitterly.

Colin only expelled a huff of breath.

“All right,” George said. “I don’t suppose
you know this—I’m sure no one else in the family does—but I’m an
artist, Colin. I’m good. If our parents ever wanted to spend money
on an education for me, they’d have done better to send me to art
school.”

“An artist?”

If there was anything more asinine than
being a juggler in a circus, it was being an artist. That was only
Colin’s opinion, but he judged it a sound one. Artists were
notorious for their penchant for insanity, drugs, and alcohol, and
for killing themselves and making everyone who cared about them
miserable. He clenched the hand resting on the table into a fist.
He wanted to sock his crazy brother in the jaw with it.

“Yes,” George said simply. “I can’t help it,
you know. I was born this way.”

“Good God.” Colin shut his eyes and tried to
calm himself. But—for the love of God! An
artist
? He didn’t
think he could stand it. He was sure their parents wouldn’t have
been able to stand it. It was probably a good thing that George had
come to him instead of going back home with this outrageous story.
When he opened his eyes, he saw George licking his lips and looking
miserable. He ought to look miserable, the damned fool.

“I thought somebody in the pictures might be
able to use me,” George said in a small voice. “I know they use set
designers and people to draw the subtitles. I’m very good at
calligraphy.”

A memory shimmered indistinctly in the back
of Colin’s mind. “Yes. I recollect something of the sort.”

George used to do the titles for the amateur
theatricals the Peters children presented. And he’d painted sets
for school plays. Odd how no one in the family had taken any
particular note of his interest in that sort of thing or of his
talent, which was considerable. Of course, that was because
everyone else in the family possessed some common sense. They knew
better than to consider art as means of making a living. Not
George. Never George. Colin sighed heavily and stood up. There was
no sense prolonging this conversation. Neither brother was up to it
tonight.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you upstairs.
Do you have luggage?”

He could almost see the relief flood through
his brother’s solid body. Funny, no one looking at George would
take him for a booby. He appeared so solid and stable. What a liar
appearances could be.

“Yes. I left a bag with the man at the
desk.” He licked his lips again. “Thanks, Colin. I appreciate you
putting me up for the night.”

“Yes, well, you need somewhere to stay, I
suppose until we can figure out what to do with you.”

“You sound as if you’re having to deal with
a stray cat or a mad aunt,” George said cheerlessly.