Page 145 - A Little Life: A Novel

potential guardians. Theory two (Brother Michael’s): This was a poor town
in a poor region in a poor state. No matter the public sympathy—and there
had been sympathy, he wasn’t to forget that—it was quite another thing to

add an extra child to one’s household, especially when one’s household was
already so stretched. Theory three (Father Gabriel’s): He was meant to stay
here. It had been God’s will. This was his home. And now he needed to stop
asking questions.
Then there was a fourth theory, invoked by almost all of them when he
misbehaved: He was bad, and had been bad from the beginning. “You must
have done something very bad to be left behind like that,” Brother Peter

used to tell him after he hit him with the board, rebuking him as he stood
there, sobbing his apologies. “Maybe you cried so much they just couldn’t
stand it any longer.” And he’d cry harder, fearing that Brother Peter was
correct.
For all their interest in history, they were collectively irritated when he
took interest in his own, as if he was persisting in a particularly tiresome

hobby that he wasn’t outgrowing at a fast enough rate. Soon he learned not
to ask, or at least not to ask directly, although he was always alert to stray
pieces of information that he might learn in unlikely moments, from
unlikely sources. With Brother Michael, he read Great Expectations, and
managed to misdirect the brother into a long segue about what life for an
orphan would be like in nineteenth-century London, a place as foreign to
him as Pierre, just a hundred-some miles away. The lesson eventually

became a lecture, as he knew it would, but from it he did learn that he, like
Pip, would have been given to a relative if there were any to be identified or
had. So there were none, clearly. He was alone.
His possessiveness was also a bad habit that needed to be corrected. He
couldn’t remember when he first began coveting something that he could
own, something that would be his and no one else’s. “Nobody here owns

anything,” they told him, but was that really true? He knew that Brother
Peter had a tortoiseshell comb, for example, the color of freshly tapped tree
sap and just as light-filled, of which he was very proud and with which he
brushed his mustache every morning. One day the comb disappeared, and
Brother Peter had interrupted his history lesson with Brother Matthew to
grab him by the shoulders and shake him, yelling that he had stolen the
comb and had better return it if he knew what was good for him. (Father

Gabriel later found the comb, which had slipped into the shallow wedge of