A few years ago, Dad told me, in passing, that we probably never would have moved from Dedham had Dad’s boss not invited him and Mum out for dinner in Boston one evening in the fall of 1961. Afterward, they repaired to the Ritz-Carlton for drinks. At some point, Jack Lemmon, whom Dad had known casually at Harvard, walked into the bar. Lemmon recognized Dad and came over to say hi. Dad invited him to sit down. Lemmon had already won an Academy Award for Mister Roberts and had recently starred in The Apartment. Dad’s boss and his wife were impressed. They were even more impressed when Lemmon’s friend Shelley Winters walked into the bar and joined them. The six of them drank and talked for several hours. Not long after that evening, Dad’s boss recommended him for a promotion to company headquarters in Manhattan, and we were on our way to Darien, Connecticut. “We thought we had arrived,” Dad said with a rueful laugh.
* * *
When I was a child, it never occurred to me that Harry, Ned, and I, appearing within a span of four years, hadn’t surfaced into the same family, into the care of the same, unchanging parents. Looking back, of course, I can see that despite our chronological proximity, we were born in three different cities, three different stages of our parents’ relationship, three slightly but recognizably different situations. Yet Harry, Ned, and I grew up with the same familial reference points, the same cultural vocabulary. Even when I was young I could see that Mark, born six years after Ned, was growing up not only in a different place, but in a different time and, in essence, a different family.
Darien, a leafy suburb thirty-five miles from Manhattan, looked a lot like Dedham, except that its houses were larger, its lawns more crew-cut, its automobiles newer and more freshly washed. And yet as we settled into a white clapboard house across the street from a river that glittered through a row of towering maple trees, it seemed as if we had, without realizing it, strayed across an unmarked border into another country. Darien, the real estate agent had proudly informed my father, possessed the second-highest per capita income in the United States—news that in puritan Boston would have been a source of embarrassment, not a marketing tool. It strikes me as ridiculous now, but I remember watching The Beverly Hillbillies on television and feeling a twinge of identification with the Clampetts, who had relocated from the hollows of the Ozarks to the gated estates of Los Angeles. The Clampetts, however, were blissfully oblivious to their outsider status, whereas the Colts were exquisitely self-conscious. The distinctions may have been subtle, but my brothers and I felt them keenly. Our neighbors drove Country Squires, the sleek Ford station wagons with fake wood paneling, next to which our blue 1956 Parklane seemed as bulky and plodding as a prairie schooner. At Halloween, in Dedham we had been content with a single Dum Dum or two penny-size Tootsie Rolls carefully counted out and dropped into our bags; in Darien, we were invited to reach into enormous ceramic bowls filled with 5th Avenues and Baby Ruths—the large, five-cent variety—and remove candy by the fistful. In Dedham, we had taken our trash to the town dump, vast mountains of refuse over which we followed our mother on occasional foraging parties in search of useable bric-a-brac; in Darien, my brothers and I watched from a safe distance as our father slung our garbage bags into the flaming maw of the incinerator, into which they vanished without a trace, making it seem as if we were getting rid of incriminating evidence. In Dedham, on hot summer days, we’d run through sprinklers; in Darien, Ned and I, exploring our new backyard on the sweltering afternoon of our arrival, peered over the back fence and were presented with a sight that was, in its way, as silence-inducing as that first glimpse of the Pacific may have been to Cortez in his Darien—a plump young girl lolling on an inflatable raft in the Windex-colored water of a swimming pool.
Harry, Ned, and I had appeared during the Eisenhower years, when the country (or at least its upper-middle-class citizens) wallowed in postwar abundance. Magazine advertisements touted bulging refrigerators, gleaming washing machines, finned cars as big as tanks. At times the country itself seemed like an advertisement: In the press, the words “United States of America” were invariably followed by “the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.” Our capabilities were, apparently, unlimited. Every day, it seemed some American was going faster, higher, farther: a college student ran an unbelievable 9.1 in the hundred-yard dash to become the world’s fastest human; a test pilot flew his jet at a celestial altitude of sixty-six miles; an unemployed salesman drove a souped-up car 407 mph across the Utah desert. We’d gather around our old Zenith black-and-white TV and, chanting “three . . . two . . . one . . . blast off,” watch another rocket lift off the pad at Cape Canaveral, disappear in a whorl of fire and smoke, then rise majestically above it. We’d witnessed this scene so often over the previous two years, with heroes whose names were as familiar to me as the names of Red Sox players, that orbiting the earth eventually seemed no more extraordinary than sending my Duncan Imperial yo-yo “around the world.”
By the time we arrived in Darien, fault lines in the country’s self-possession had begun to show. In September, a month after we moved in, we listened to the Liston-Patterson fight on the radio. We weren’t boxing fans, but we had been caught up in a morality play in which the sour, menacing ex-con and the deferential, polite gentleman seemed to represent the two different faces of an America we saw only in the pages of the newspaper and on the TV screen. And so we felt a little stunned and uneasy when, with the relentlessness of a schoolyard bully, Liston hammered Patterson to the canvas in the first round. Over the following year, a succession of front-page images insisted that all was not right: Buddhist monks in South Vietnam engulfed in flames; Negroes (as the newspapers called them) flattened by fire hoses in distant southern cities; Gordon Cooper’s Project Mercury capsule losing contact with ground control and orbiting for thirty-four hours before splashing down in the South Pacific. One fall day, my fifth-grade class was reading in the school library when, clapping her hands to pull us away from Homer Price, the librarian, voice trembling, told us that President Kennedy had been shot, news so farfetched that a friend and I broke into giggles. (Already, I was the kind of boy who needed to fill awkward silences.) In Darien, which seemed the apotheosis of the perfection toward which the fifties aspired, these events seemed unimaginable, almost impossible—what would, a few years later, be called surreal.
In my own family, too, there were fault lines, which we tried to cover up the way we covered up the rotting floorboards under the rubber mat in our car. Dad’s new job seemed to take more out of him, as he tried to work his way up what he called “the corporate ladder.” (I imagined a horde of men in suits clinging to a wooden ladder like the one Dad propped against the roof to clean the gutters each November.) He was on the road two weeks a month, and when he took the commuter train into “the city,” he came home too late and too tired to play catch. Occasionally, he exuded a faint whiff of what at the time I assumed was a new kind of aftershave, but eventually realized was bourbon. Every Saturday morning, however, he was ours again, wearing his customary weekend attire of frayed high school letter sweater, paint-spattered khakis, and canvas sneakers—frying bacon, joking, tickling, swinging us up to his shoulders. Saturday was allowance day. After breakfast, we three older brothers piled into the car for errands—the incinerator, the hardware store, the liquor store—ending up at Darien News, where, fingering the coins in our pockets, we separated: Harry to the boxes of Topps baseball cards; Ned to the rows of candy bars; I to the comic book rack, which I spun slowly, deciding whether to spring for a Classics Illustrated, whose cartoon versions of A Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Cristo cost three cents more than my usual twelve-cent Superman.
But in Darien, even our Saturday-morning errands weren’t quite the same. One day, I don’t remember why, we gave a ride to someone from Dad’s office, along with his two daughters. The father, a well-built man in a button-down shirt, sharply creased gray flannel slacks, and black hair Vitalised and combed so that every toothmark was visible, sat in front with Dad. Even from where I sat in the way back, I could tell that something wasn’t quite right, that Dad, who got along with everyone, was, for some reason, a little nervous. So was I. The man’s pretty blond daughters were sitting with my brothers and me in the cargo area among the pine needles, grass clippings, and scraps of newspaper. At ten, being in such close proximity to the opposite sex thrilled and terrified me into uncharacteristic silence. Saturday-morning errands, however, were the highlight of our week; I felt we were sharing the best part of our family with these girls, and I assumed they were impressed. And so I cringed with shame when the younger of the two girls, the one about my age, taking in the mess that was so comfortably familiar to me and exchanging glances with her sister, pinched her pale, stomach-churningly cute nose and squealed, “Pee-yew, it smells back here.” I looked at Harry, but he was studying something in the window, his face red.
* * *
Like many women at that time, our mother was beginning to feel restive. Part of her remained a devoted fifties wife. She drank Metrecal to keep her figure in shape, took fashion hints from the pages of Woman’s Day, wore her mother’s old pearls and fox furs to company cocktail parties, and hosted dinners for “people from the office” Dad needed to impress. Harry, Ned, and I loved watching Mum prepare for a party: making her famous grapes-rolled-in-sour-cream-and-brown-sugar dessert, setting out crystal ashtrays the size of frying pans, stacking Kents in the sterling silver cigarette box inscribed with the names of the ushers at our parents’ wedding. Later, we sat on the staircase and watched through the posts of the banister as Dad, cigarette bobbing like a miniature fishing pole from a corner of his mouth, waded into the crowd, brandishing a silver martini shaker, while Mum, looking glamorous in her blue-flowered muumuu, passed a tray of cheese and crackers. As the evening wore on, the party grew increasingly boisterous, and long after Mum shooed us off to bed, our sleep was occasionally interrupted by a shrill burst of laughter. In the morning, as we ate the leftover grapes, our heavy-lidded parents went around the house with a grocery bag, emptying the overflowing ashtrays in silence.
When The Feminine Mystique was published the spring after we arrived, Mum devoured it as if she were starving. (Years later she told me that some of her neighbors read it on the sly; others refused to open it, worried that it might shake up their marriages beyond repair.) Gradually, as Dad clung to the well-ordered fifties, Mum reached toward the first stirrings of the sixties. In the guitar lessons she gave to neighborhood teenagers, the repertoire modulated from “Stewball” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” to “If I Had a Hammer,” “Universal Soldier,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which had come out that May on an album by a growly-voiced twenty-two-year-old named Bob Dylan that Mum played over and over on the record player in the dining room. I looked over her shoulder as—between loads of laundry—she followed the civil rights struggle in its two-steps-forward one-step-back progress in the news. She yearned to be out marching, but didn’t dare stop cooking. There were no black children in our school and, as far as I knew, no black families in our town. The only black person I had ever seen in “real life,” as my brothers and I referred to anything that didn’t take place on the television screen, was Mattie, the woman who came every other Thursday to clean our house, and with whom Mum spent a good part of those days sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and sharing confidences. Sometimes, Mum drove Mattie home to Norwalk, Mark on the seat between them, Ned and I in the back, peering out the window at what we called the “bad part of town,” mentally dividing the faces of the men we passed into Pattersons and Listons.
Exhausted by the demands of tending to four children, dependent on the diet pills she and everyone she knew seemed to be taking, feeling out of place in a town whose social center was a country club we couldn’t afford to join even had we been asked, Mum began to chafe. She recently told me she felt as if she were being “pulled in half.” She’d disappear into the cellar for hours each day to paint pictures of lute players performing in empty, moonlit rooms; lone seagulls wafting into the wide blue yonder; sad-eyed people reaching toward the sky. When she took out books from the library, she’d slide the borrower’s card from its manila pocket and, thinking she might have something in common with the people on the list, daydream about calling them up and making friends. One Sunday, Mattie invited us to her church, and as Mum listened to the joyous, unrestrained gospel singing, she began to weep.
* * *
In Dedham, I had wanted so much to be like my older brother that it never occurred to me we might be different. In Darien, under my very nose, Harry seemed to be transforming as suddenly and swiftly as one of those moonstruck horror-movie monsters I watched each Friday night on Chiller Theatre. He shot up several inches; his voice grew scratchy and low; his legs and armpits sprouted hair; his biceps became visible to the naked eye. He took showers, not baths. He spent an inordinate amount of time behind a closed bathroom door, consulting an array of jars and tubes whose names I knew from TV: Stridex Medicated Pads, gauzy white moons that smudged gray when wiped alongside one’s nose; Clearasil, a flesh-colored paste said to “fight” acne, but which left a telltale range of chalky, beige, miniature volcanos on one’s face; pHisoHex, a goopy soap that came in a green plastic bottle and was so expensive only Harry was allowed to use it; Groom & Clean, a translucent gel said to prevent “greasy build-up,” but which left one’s hair looking as if it were covered in Saran Wrap. I didn’t understand Harry’s metamorphosis. Health classes wouldn’t begin until high school, and I had never heard the word puberty. All I knew was that I no longer looked like my older brother.
Against the unfamiliar background of Darien, I began to recognize other differences, differences I hadn’t noticed in Dedham. We both played baseball, but Harry batted righty while I batted lefty. We both loved reading, but Harry preferred the Hardy Boys, while I liked biographies and fairy tales. We both loved Swanson TV dinners, but Harry always chose Loin of Pork while I chose Salisbury Steak. Harry liked his sandwiches cut into rectangles; I preferred triangles. Harry liked lima beans; I hated them. Harry’s favorite color was blue; mine was green. Other differences were less obvious: Harry seemed impervious to what others thought of him; I cared deeply about the impression I made. Harry was reticent and secretive; I was gregarious and indiscreet, eager to hear others’ secrets and quick to share my own. Harry kept his bedroom door closed; I kept mine open, hoping someone would notice me and come in.
Why should these differences have surprised me? Most of the brothers I knew seemed physical and temperamental opposites. Dad was a skinny, sociable jokester, his younger brother a solid, serious bear of a man, so physically imposing that whenever I pinned Ned to the ground and forced him to utter the universally accepted plea for surrender, it seemed absurd that the word should be uncle. Our grandfather was a tall, sardonic, dignified pessimist who buried himself in books and crossword puzzles, his younger brother an ebullient, roly-poly optimist fond of declaiming the Declaration of Independence at his Fourth of July parties. In Dedham, the Clark brothers had lived just down the street: Stephen, the eldest, was responsible, high-achieving, statesmanlike; Johnny, the middle child, used his offbeat sense of humor to keep the fraternal peace; and Timmy, the youngest, could be found at the center of every playground dispute. The brothers I read about in books, too, always seemed so different I could hardly believe they were part of the same family: the Hardys (cautious Frank, headstrong Joe); the Hollisters (dependable Pete, rambunctious Ricky); the Sawyers (mischievous Tom, goody-goody Sid).
Harry no longer seemed part of my world; he seemed to belong to another, wider one. We didn’t ride bikes to school together anymore. We waited for the bus in front of our house, but when we climbed aboard, Harry pushed ahead to sit in the back with kids his own age. Our new school was much larger. At recess I occasionally glimpsed my brother across the playground in a cloud of sixth-graders; on the rare occasions we passed in the halls, I knew from the look on his face not to say anything. (It felt like one of those movies in which the captured soldier has to pretend he doesn’t recognize his old friend, the undercover spy, or he’ll blow his buddy’s cover and they’ll both be killed.) When Harry started junior high and rode an earlier bus to an even larger school across town, I wouldn’t see him at all until late afternoon, when he’d shinny up the rope ladder to Jeff Gegenheimer’s tree house, pull the rope up behind him, and shut the trapdoor. Not that I dared follow him.
Even when he was home, it was as if he had shut a trapdoor and pulled up the rope. At supper, he asked to be excused as soon as he’d eaten dessert, and disappeared into his room. (Mum and Dad had converted the den into a bedroom, and so he was alone on the first floor while the rest of the family slept upstairs.) From behind closed doors we’d hear him playing the first album he bought, the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA, again and again. He came along on Saturday-morning errands less frequently. One Halloween, trick-or-treating along our usual route, a friend and I cut through the woods behind his house to try another neighborhood, and saw hundreds of teenagers milling around on the road, beer cans and bottles in their hands. What were they doing? Why weren’t they wearing costumes? Was Harry somewhere among them? As my friend and I crouched behind the trees, I searched for my brother’s face. But it was dark, the crowd was large, and at bottom I didn’t really want to know.
In Dedham, Harry and I had never fought, but in Darien, our unhappiness rubbed off on each other. It was a matchup as one-sided as Liston versus Patterson. Harry’s ostensibly playful shoulder punches stung for minutes; his double chicken-wing could immobilize me as completely as a set of Pilgrim stocks; the mere brandishing of a noogie-ready knuckle was enough to send me running. On the rare occasions I dared resist, he’d methodically, carefully, almost tenderly pin me on my back, sitting on my chest, the knobs of his knees grinding into the place where my biceps would have been if I’d had any. After writhing halfheartedly for a moment or arching my spine in a pro forma attempt to buck him off, I’d lie still, knowing that the sooner I acquiesced, the sooner he’d release me. Sometimes, irritated by my passivity, he’d purse his lips to produce a pearl of saliva. Carefully lowering it on an ever-lengthening, ever-thinning strand, he’d dangle it above my face, seeing how low he could let it go before yoyoing it up at the last moment. Sometimes he failed to retract it in time. When that happened, he’d let me up right away. “Sorry. That was an accident,” he’d say as I ran into the house calling for our mother.
Galled by Harry’s invincibility, I enlisted my friend to the cause. We challenged Harry to a fight. With these odds—two against one—I was sure I could finally beat my brother. We arranged to meet in the backyard one afternoon after school. Underneath the spreading branches of the maple tree, my friend and I circled my brother warily. Harry looked dismayingly relaxed, his elbows slightly bent like a gunslinger’s, his face wearing a small, even smile that unnerved me. Not surprisingly (I was a chicken at heart, and, after all, I knew my brother), my friend made the first move, rushing toward Harry in an all-out kamikaze attack. With the grace of a matador, Harry stepped aside, grabbed my friend’s arm, twisted it behind his back, and immobilized him in a hammerlock. Harry eyed me. “If you come any closer,” he said quietly, “I’ll break his arm.” Whether he would have done so or not, I’ll never know, but I was sad to realize I couldn’t be sure. Choked with rage and admiration, I came no closer.
* * *
Looking back, I can see that much of Harry’s withdrawal, inexplicable as it seemed to me at the time, was part and parcel of becoming a teenager. (Even drool, I have learned, is a standard weapon in the adolescent fraternal arsenal.) But in Darien, I began to think that although I was closer in age to Harry, I might have more in common with Ned. In Dedham I had shared a bedroom with Harry; in Darien I shared one with Ned. Ned didn’t like playing sports as much as Harry and I did. He didn’t even collect baseball cards. But he liked to do stuff I never got to do with Harry. We’d build block forts and painstakingly position our army men in massive battles, Ned lying on the floor to get a soldier’s-eye view. We’d discuss the relative merits of Matchbox cars and Corgis (slightly larger vehicles with “torsion-bar suspension,” a phrase we loved to repeat and pretend we knew what it meant). We stood over the toilet bowl, and, in that universal expression of boyhood fellow feeling known as “crossing swords,” aimed our arcs of pee so they’d intersect. With Harry, I had to be on guard; with Ned, I could relax. I feared Harry’s judgment; I didn’t worry what Ned thought of me. With Harry, I tried to act older than I was; with Ned, I could regress. Playing cards with Harry, I’d play Pounce; with Ned, I’d play War. Harry’s jokes often carried a sting. “You belong on the stage,” he’d comment admiringly after I’d said something I thought was witty, “ . . . that leaves in ten minutes.” Or “You’re funny . . . but looks aren’t everything.” These jokes, which Harry had learned in school, were repeated, no doubt, in homes all across town, but because they came from my older brother, I took them to heart. Ned and I often communicated in a kind of gibberish: making up songs and singing them over and over; savoring exotic words like hors d’oeuvres; repeating ordinary words like room or water until they lost all meaning; inventing our own nonsense words, like oolees and looties, and chanting them until Harry threatened to “beat us to a bloody pulp.”
At the same time, Ned was the brother with whom I fought the most furiously and with the least provocation. No matter how engrossed we became in singing a new song, or in maneuvering army men across the rug, or in playing a game of I Doubt It, we’d always end up fighting. We couldn’t help it; we had to destroy the fort, scatter the cards. Perhaps it was inevitable: Harry took out his frustration on me, I took out mine on Ned. Ned, however, had no brother on whom to continue this domino effect, Mark being too young to pick on. And so Ned fought back. Each of us was constitutionally unable to let the other have the last word, the last pinch, the last cookie. At times, our communication seemed to consist only of time-honored preadolescent provocations like “Got you last,” “I know you are but what am I?” “Takes one to know one,” “Same to you and many more, no backs,” and “Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Ned’s face was so angelic, his delivery so deadpan, that even on the umpteenth repetition, I still blundered into his traps. “You know what?” he’d say. “What?” I’d ask. “That’s what,” he’d reply. On car trips, Ned was a genius at finding ways to poke me without our mother catching him in the act. When I’d point out that Ned had “started it” (I was a congenital tattletale), Mum would invariably punish us both, saying, “It takes two to tango.”
Although I was marginally bigger and stronger—given how small and spindly we both were, this is like saying that a salamander is bigger and stronger than a newt—Ned carried into battle an inner fury that was impressive and, occasionally, frightening. (He claims to have chased me around the kitchen with a carving knife. Happily, I have repressed this memory.) Just as Harry pinned me, I’d pin Ned, my knees on his bony arms as he sputtered and squirmed and finally, with a sob, said uncle. Unlike me, Ned never gave up. The moment I rolled off, he’d be up again, swinging wildly, shouting insults through his tears. I’d pin him down anew and he’d promise—cross his heart, hope to die—not to fight again. The instant I let him up, he’d attack. The cycle repeated itself until, exhausted, I’d trudge up to our room and close the door, at which point Ned, with a stubbornness I found admirable, would proclaim victory to the empty living room. Recently, I saw the movie Cool Hand Luke. There is a scene in which the title character, played by Paul Newman, is forced to fight the beefy inmate ringleader. No matter how many times Luke is knocked down, no matter how bloody he becomes, he keeps getting up, until the bully, shrugging, finally walks away, leaving Luke staggering around the prison yard, throwing punches at the air. I thought of Ned.
Fighting, of course, was one way for Ned to be noticed, to clear some elbow room in a crowded family. Another way was to take risks. Of the four of us, Ned was the one to walk out first and farthest on the newly frozen pond, the one to sail closest to the rocky shore. If you dared Ned to do something, you knew he’d do it: ring the neighbor’s doorbell and run, light the firecracker, swallow the milk shake with the phlegm in it. You had to say the word chicken only once, or even venture a tentative clucking sound, and he was at your throat. In Hearts, while I tried to get rid of the Queen of Spades as quickly as possible, and Harry played whatever the situation called for in order to win, Ned would invariably, recklessly, try to shoot the moon. In Risk, Ned would attack no matter how numerous the enemy. In Monopoly, he was always ready to make a deal. (He liked to hide a cache of $500 bills behind his back. Just when we thought he was broke, he’d produce them with a flourish, saying “Hmmm, what have we here, what have we here? . . . Just saving up for a rainy day.”) In Red Light Green Light, Ned would always try for too much and get sent back to the start, while my cautious step or two would carry me to victory. I was frightened of Harry, but Ned certainly wasn’t frightened of me. He didn’t seem frightened of anyone. Not even our older brother. Harry hated the sight of blood, and when Ned got a bloody nose, he’d smear some on his finger and chase Harry around the living room, Harry fleeing like Superman from Kryptonite.
As one who liked to play it safe, I secretly admired Ned’s daring. I’d do things with Ned I’d never risk on my own. One late-winter afternoon, we were playing by the Five Mile River, using sticks to prod the huge cakes of ice that drifted by on their way to Long Island Sound. It was Ned, I’m sure, who suggested we board a floe, and I, waiting until he had stepped onto one of the icebergs, who gingerly followed; Ned who then stepped across a thick ribbon of ink-black water to another floe, and then another, until we were several yards from shore, balanced uneasily on a car-size cake of ice, slowly drifting toward the point where the river emptied into the Sound. It was the kind of adventure I was always reading about in books. But I wasn’t exhilarated, I was scared. And just as I’m sure it was Ned who got us out there, I’m sure it was I who insisted, at a certain point, that we had gone far enough and headed in, and Ned, only because I threatened to tell on him, who followed me reluctantly, floe by floe, back to shore.
Ned may have taken risks because he felt fearful in other areas. He was struggling in school. Most mornings for the first several months, he complained of a stomachache, and while Harry and I rode the bus, Mum drove him in later. In the hallways, just as Harry had ignored me, I wouldn’t acknowledge Ned, not when my own position among my classmates was so tenuous. Ned, whose need for our mother seemed the greatest, fought with her the most. (In a way, we were lucky; Ned served as a lightning rod that diverted Mum’s attention from the rest of us.) While Harry’s battles with her were lengthy sieges, full of reproachful silences and closed doors, Ned’s were tearful, high-decibel duets, operatic in scope and volume, often ending in a spanking. One evening, Ned refused to finish the pool of burned creamed corn on his dinner plate. Mum told him he couldn’t leave the table till he ate it. Harry and I finished our meals, ate our desserts, ferried our plates to the sink, and went off to do our homework, leaving Ned staring at the yellow puddle on his plate as Mum cleaned the kitchen around him. Half an hour later, I invented an errand to take me through the kitchen. Ned was still there. He was still there when I went to bed. The following day Harry said that at nine thirty, Mum had come downstairs and told Ned, sitting at the table, creamed corn untouched, to go to bed. Not long afterward, Mum announced that each of us was allowed to choose three foods we could refuse to eat.
Every few weeks, we’d hear Ned dragging a suitcase down the stairs. “I’m running away,” he’d declare. When he got no answer, he’d say it again, in a slightly louder voice, as if speaking to the hard of hearing. “Are you sure you want to?” Mum might respond, looking up from her book. A long silence. “I’m really going—right now,” the voice would insist, a little smaller, a little less certain. “All right,” Mum would say. “Good luck.” Another long silence. “Send us a postcard,” I might call after him, cruelly. We’d return to our books, to our homework. Once or twice Ned went so far as to open the front door. Eventually, we’d hear him dragging the suitcase back upstairs. Nothing more would be said about it. I always wondered what he’d packed in that suitcase, or whether he’d packed anything at all.
* * *
During those querulous years with my brothers, in which it seemed the only intimacy we shared was when, figuratively and sometimes literally, we had our hands around each other’s throats, I longed for the kind of brotherhood I read about in books: King Arthur’s knights swearing oaths and trotting off in search of dragons; Howard Pyle’s pirates divvying up plunder from yet another captured galleon; Robin Hood’s Merry Men roaming the forest, shooting arrows, feasting on venison, and generally engaging in what was then called knavery or derring-do but centuries later would be called male bonding. Even in the books, the ersatz brothers always seemed more brotherly than the real thing. How much more gallant were Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, who lived in a hollow tree and battled Captain Hook, than the hopelessly square biological brothers Michael and John, who, even after being exposed to the rough-and-tumble paradise of Neverland, chose to return to the saccharine purgatory of their London nursery? How much more chummy was Tom Sawyer’s frog-catching, rat-trapping, cat-swinging buddy Huck Finn than his simpering, tattletale, flesh-and-blood half-brother Sid?
In Darien, I found my Huck in Billy, the boy who had teamed up with me in my would-be conquest of Harry. A freckle-faced, pumpkin-haired fellow who lived in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac just beyond our back fence, Billy was my first real best friend. Like me, he was one of four brothers. Billy and I played every day after school and on weekends from the moment my mother allowed me to race up the path to his house, where his mother, still in her nightgown, was smoking her first cigarette of the day as she set out cereal boxes for her sons while their father slept off the previous night’s dinner party. (“Why doesn’t that boy ever spend time at his own house?” I once heard her say to her husband.) Like Harry, Billy loved sports, but he wasn’t a dishearteningly better athlete than I. Like Ned, he thought up cool games, but not every game ended in a fight. We played Russian Fumble, an offshoot of Russian Shmuck, whose rules evolved as we went along; we refought World War II in the woods behind his house, taking turns being “the dirty Krauts,” as they were referred to in the movies we loved; we watched New York Giants football each Sunday afternoon on TV; we drew battle scenes, Rat Finks, and Alfred E. Neumans on manila paper in school whenever the teacher’s back was turned. We got into trouble together, we stood up for each other, and if one of us was made to stay after school, the other stayed, too. Why couldn’t my real brothers be like Billy? Why couldn’t Billy be one of my real brothers? (I overlooked the fact that Billy fought just as furiously with his brothers as I did with mine.)
One afternoon when I was eleven, a pack of kids gathered to play tag in a neighbor’s yard. I got there late. When I arrived, I realized that I had walked in on an argument between Billy and Ned, something about a missing wallet of Billy’s, I believe. My brother and my best friend began to shove each other in an experimental way that suggested neither of them really wanted to fight but neither of them wanted to back down. I’m sure my motives were not entirely pure. Perhaps I worried that my own status would suffer if my brother lost the fight. Perhaps I was angry at Billy because I felt a kind of sibling rivalry with him, too. Perhaps I was stirred to action because the beauteous Cobb sisters—who, I was even then aware, seemed more intrigued by my blond-haired brother than by me—were in attendance. But though I had fought Ned hundreds of times; though I must have put Ned down in front of Billy hundreds of times; though I had constantly compared Ned, however unconsciously, with Billy, and found Ned wanting—nonetheless I suddenly found myself stepping in front of Ned to face Billy.
The fight didn’t last long and no one was hurt. I don’t recall who won, but I was, at heart, a coward, quick to call others chicken because I suspected I was one myself. I’m sure I extricated myself at the earliest remotely honorable opportunity, and retreated, panting, with a covering fire of muttered insults. My intervention didn’t change anything between Ned and me. By dinnertime we were back fighting each other over some minuscule, long-forgotten matter. And the next day Billy—bless his heart—and I were back playing Russian Fumble and poring over Famous Monsters of Filmland. I haven’t been in a fight (such as it was) in the forty-six years since that afternoon. Yet even at the time, I recall that it wasn’t really a choice. Billy was my friend, but Ned was my brother.
* * *
I told myself that I was happy, but the evidence contradicted me. The straight As I’d received in Dedham plummeted to Bs and Cs in Darien. The word underachiever was brandished in parent-teacher conferences. I mouthed off in class, and more and more often found myself clapping erasers in detention while the other boys and girls slung their book bags over their shoulders and rushed out into the green afternoon. Darien had a library, but I don’t remember using it. I had given up books in favor of MAD magazine, which, with its nose-thumbing at the status quo, served the kind of liberating function for me that The Feminine Mystique served for my mother. I went on a small-scale crime spree: matter-of-factly stealing dimes from my mother’s purse, pilfering monster magazines from a classmate’s desk, swiping Nestlé Crunch bars from Arnold’s, the variety store to which we rode our bikes after school. I was the pettiest of thieves—my biggest heist involved a jelly doughnut, which, under its glass dome, seemed as desirable and inaccessible as the Hope Diamond—and I would never have dared blossom into a full-fledged “juvenile delinquent,” in the phrase that horrified parents and titillated kids. I suspect that even at the time I knew my thefts weren’t only about the candy. I’m sure, too, that at some level I wanted to be caught. Certainly Mr. Arnold, a balding, bespectacled gentleman shaped, as I recall, something like a jelly doughnut himself, must have detected my crime—the confectioner’s sugar on my fingers was a damning clue—but he kept his silence.
At bottom, I still wanted to be a good boy, still wanted to smooth things over, still wanted to fill the silences at the dinner table. But I couldn’t help myself. Once, after having my mouth washed out with soap again for sassing my mother, I raced up to my room and, in a clear illustration of Freud’s theory that depression is anger turned inward, stomped on all the toy soldiers I’d amassed over several Christmases and birthdays, snapping off their bases so they could no longer stand. That would show her. Another time, after I’d spoken rudely to her in the cellar, Mum, furious less at my rudeness than at my importing it into the one place she called her own, smacked me hard on the back of my legs. I stamped upstairs. In the family room, I passed an oil painting Mum had recently finished: a woman leaning out a window, an elbow on the sill, a look of bone-deep sadness on her face. Mum had worked on it for months; it was one of the most delicate and technically accomplished paintings she’d ever done. Quivering with self-righteous rage, I placed my thumb on the woman’s still-wet nose and twisted it, rendering her faceless.
When I came downstairs the following morning, I was relieved that Mum wasn’t angry. But even the most energetic spanking would have been less painful than the look of weary disappointment on her face as she turned away from me, a look I realized was rather like that of the woman in the painting.
* * *
My brothers and I were so involved in our own troubles that none of us had time for Mark, who, in memory, I see only through the mesh squares of his playpen as he held on to the red plastic rail and watched us pass through the living room on our way to someplace else. (Occasionally Ned and I might pause to test out new nonsense words, circling the playpen like children at the zoo, repeating looties or oolees—the winner being the one whose word elicited the biggest reaction from our baby brother. Mark’s face would light up; he’d grip the rail tighter and bounce on his toes.) It surprises and shames me that I can’t remember his first step, his first word, his favorite toy. Instead I remember the afternoon he fell on the flagstone patio, after which his baby teeth turned pewter-gray. I remember the afternoon when, sitting alone in the driveway, he was bitten on the head by a neighbor’s dog. I remember his lone playmate, the skinny older girl next door with a worm-colored scar on her throat where, my mother told us, doctors had once cut a hole to help her breathe. She bossed Mark around; grateful for the attention, Mark did her bidding. And I remember the afternoon in the car, as we drove through town on some dreary errand, in those precarseat days, when Mark, a toddler at the time, slipped off the seat and began falling through the rusted floor of the Parklane before Mum reached over and pulled him back from the gray asphalt that rushed past below.
* * *
Looking back, I wonder why my brothers and I didn’t close ranks. Why didn’t we watch out for one another? We were, I suppose, too busy fending for ourselves, struggling to fit into a new town, to make friends in a new school. We weren’t in a position to help, even if we had known how to ask for help or how to accept it if it were offered.
There were pleasant brotherly times, I’m sure, but I recall them only in general terms: reading the backs of cereal boxes at the breakfast table and wondering what riboflavin was; trading candy on our way home from the News store on Saturday mornings; jumping in the pile of leaves we’d help Dad rake on Sunday afternoons; basking in the eye of the storm as our car inched forward on the chain belt through the car wash, soapsuds swirling on the windows all around us; racing to the front door to meet Dad as he returned from a business trip and produced, from his worn leather briefcase, a miniature cardboard suitcase filled with Howard Johnson lollipops. The few specific memories I have of brotherly bonding during those years are unsettling: chewing popovers in the dining room of the Harvard Club as our parents argued their way into silence on a long-awaited family trip to Manhattan; getting pinworms and lining up by age for scalding showers (Dad manning the faucets and handing us towels, Mum boiling our quarantined underwear in the spaghetti pot); watching a snake die as it choked to death on a too-fat toad on the floor of the garage one summer afternoon; sitting up with Mum after she got a chilling anonymous phone call in the middle of the night when Dad was out of town; watching President Kennedy’s funeral on TV, disturbed less by the death than by the riderless horse as it pranced nervously down Pennsylvania Avenue, empty boots facing backward in the stirrups. I don’t remember us ever gathering in what the real estate agent had called “the family room.” I remember us in our own worlds: Harry in his room, listening to his records; me in the family room, reading the World Book Encyclopedia; Ned on the floor of our bedroom, setting up his soldiers; Mark in his playpen, watching. We were engaging in what, years later when I had children of my own, I would learn was called parallel play.
I recall poring over a photograph in Life magazine of a family posed in its fallout shelter. The Cold War was at its height, people talked about what would happen if the Russians “dropped the Bomb,” and when the alarm sounded in school, we’d stop reciting our times tables to crouch beneath our desks (sneaking peaks at the girls’ flowered cotton underwear as their skirts scrunched up), so we’d be prepared in case the Russians decided to drop the “Big One” on Darien—which, to my impressionable mind, seemed entirely likely, Darien possessing, after all, the number two per capita income in the entire country. (Mum, asserting that anyone within a two-hundred-mile radius of the target was a goner anyway, said that if the Bomb was coming she wanted to be standing on the bull’s-eye, ready to catch it. I pictured her in our backyard, peering into the sky, settling under some distant, plummeting object, like Mickey Mantle under a fly ball.) The Life photograph made the fallout shelter seem cozy. The crew-cut father held a collapsible shovel; the mother, an indulgent smile on her Donna Reed face, sat at a foldout table in front of a wall of canned food; the son knelt on the carpeted floor behind a transistor radio and a flashlight; the elder daughter perched on a folding chair, a pile of blankets in her lap; her sister sat cross-legged on the floor, one hand on a stack of board games and books. They looked as if they were posing for their family Christmas card. If only my family had a fallout shelter, I thought. I imagined the sirens sounding, Dad herding us into the backyard through a door in the ground, down to a silent, windowless world, in which we’d eat Dinty Moore beef stew from a can, play Parcheesi, and, when the lights were out, talk quietly until we fell asleep. Let the Bomb fall—we’d be a family again.
There was one place Harry, Ned, and I came together peaceably: a small, windowless second-floor alcove furnished with a legless sofa and a black-and-white Zenith television set the size of a toaster. (We may have been the only children in Darien who had to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in black and white.) Here, in a setting as spare and purposeful as a chapel, we sat side by side, hour after hour, in silent devotion. Although our mother referred to television as “the boob tube,” whenever she was fed up with our fighting we’d hear her yell from the kitchen, “GO WATCH TV!” Ned and I, in particular, spent so much time “glued to the set,” as Mum put it, that we might as well have run an intravenous line from the TV into our forearms, through which we could absorb even more directly the strange allure of Barbara Feldon’s cross-eyed smile in Get Smart; the waterfall rustle as the tiles revolved on the Jeopardy! game board; the manic ardor with which contestants careered shopping carts down grocery store aisles toward the canned hams on Supermarket Sweep. Indeed, much of my conversation with Ned was adopted wholesale from television commercials. “It’s chewy, Louie,” I’d opine at the dinner table. “It’s dandy candy,” Ned would respond. Or Ned, arranging plastic animals on the bedroom floor, might announce, apropos of nothing, “Charlie says, ‘Love my Good and Plenty,’ and I’d answer, “Charlie says, ‘Really rings the bell!’” as automatically as—and far more devoutly than—I answered the minister’s “The Lord be with you” with “And with thy spirit.” (Even now, nearly a half-century later, long after we’ve forgotten what exactly happened in 1066 or how to calculate the area of a triangle, Ned and I, while doing the dishes or walking on the beach, are liable to break out, to my children’s bewilderment, in a spirited a capella rendition of “Honeycomb, Texas treat Post Honeycomb for your own.” Indeed, the advertising encomia of the sixties seem so firmly imprinted on my frontal cortex I suspect that when I’m on my deathbed, children and grandchildren gathered around to hear my last words, the only thing I’ll be able to remember is “When your cat alarm sounds, send for Little Friskies.”)
Although we’d watch just about anything, we were drawn to shows about happy families (and in those days, all television families were happy), especially to those, like the Cleavers and the Douglases, that revolved around sons. In television families, brothers might clash—never physically, of course—but they always ended up reconciling, and I’d melt a little as Wally Cleaver, for whom Harry was such a dead ringer that our mother sometimes called him Wally, ruffled the Beave’s hair, or Chip Douglas shot gullible, buck-toothed Ernie an exasperated but affectionate glance. This was how brothers were supposed to be—high-spirited and competitive but supportive and loving—and I assumed that every set of brothers in the world was like that, except us. The TV brothers we most resembled, however, were the Three Stooges, who seemed unable to go more than a few seconds without pulling one another’s hair or poking one another in the eye. Though I would never have dared tell him this, Harry reminded me of Moe, the eldest brother—omnipotent, unpredictable, and capable, it seemed, of sudden acts of violence. (I grew up with the irrational fear that someday Harry might put my head in the vise on the cellar worktable and turn the crank.) Ned was Curly, the attention-getter, the mischief-maker, the clown who absorbed the most punishment but possessed a certain creative genius. I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was Larry, the bland, frizzy-haired milquetoast. A few years later, a fourth Stooge appeared. Like Mark, Shemp seemed an afterthought, an add-on. We were surprised to learn that Shemp was, in real life, Moe and Curly’s older brother. Larry, in fact, was the outsider. We laughed at these grown-ups who acted even more like children than we did, but the Stooges’ perpetual distress hit uncomfortably close to home. It horrified me to think that when we were fifty and balding, Harry, Ned, and I might still be bopping one another over the head and giving one another noogies.
The apotheosis of fraternal perfection appeared on Sunday night at nine, when an old-fashioned map of Nevada appeared on the screen, a fire burning outward from its center; a rat-a-tat guitar strum sounded (Harry shushing Ned and me as we sang, with more pure joy than we brought to any other brotherly activity, “Bun-un-un-un-un-un-un-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NAN-za!”); and the Cartwrights galloped toward us. Harry, of course, was Adam, the eldest brother, a lean, laconic, sideburned fellow who dressed in black from his hat to his boots and hovered around the edges of the family adventures. (Indeed, after a few years, at the same time Harry was pulling away from our family, Adam disappeared without explanation. At the time, I wondered whether the responsibilities of being the eldest brother had overwhelmed him. The real reason, I learned eventually, was that, in a sign of the changing times, the actor playing Adam had decided the show was misogynistic and racist.) I longed to be Little Joe, the handsome, insouciant, shaggy-haired youngest Cartwright, but even then I knew the role belonged to angel-faced, devil-may-care Ned. Which left, by default, the gentle man-mountain of a middle child, Hoss, to whom I was no fit in strength or size (I might well have been able to fold myself underneath his ten-gallon hat), but with whom I shared a certain eagerness to please and a desire to make peace. Like the Cleavers and the Douglases, the Cartwright brothers might quarrel among themselves, but they always rode to one another’s rescue against the outside world, pooling their strengths—Adam’s brain (he had been to college back east), Hoss’s muscle, Little Joe’s daring—to make an invincible fraternal team. You never saw Adam sitting on Hoss, pinning his arms to the ground, drooling on his face. You never saw Hoss and Little Joe rolling around on the floor, shouting “Got you last.” Yes, they might have brief spats over an impetuous remark by Little Joe or a well-intentioned blunder by Hoss, but they would eventually settle them, giving each other sheepish, forgiving grins and playfully punching each other’s shoulders before gathering for a nourishing meal cooked by their Chinese housekeeper, Hop Sing. (Many of the TV families we watched were motherless, unless you counted surrogates like Hop Sing or Uncle Charlie on My Three Sons, both of whom seemed always to be emerging from the kitchen, wearing aprons and irritated frowns, to the fond teasing of the ersatz sons they served.) As the Cartwright brothers moved across the flickering TV screen, the Colt brothers sat side by side by side on the couch, closer than we’d ever wittingly allow ourselves to be anywhere beyond this alcove without pinching each other, staring straight ahead.
* * *
We spent three years in Darien. One day Mum gathered us in the kitchen and said that Dad had taken a new job, and we’d be moving back to Dedham. It wouldn’t be until years later that I learned that Dad had been passed over for promotion. The well-dressed man whose daughters had disliked the smell of our car got the job instead, and was eventually named president, leaving my father stuck on a middle rung of the corporate ladder, with no real future in the company. One August morning we packed up the Parklane and followed the moving van out of Darien.
* * *
Two decades later, driving with a friend from New York to Boston, I decided on a whim to turn off at the exit for Darien. The ramp from I-95 delivered us into a hushed, wooded world. We drove past Darien News, where the heraldic wooden pediment still arched over the mullioned glass doors, past the Sport Shop, where the manifestly Caucasian mannequins in the display windows still wore Top-Siders and khakis; past the train station, where the late-model cars in serried ranks awaited their owners’ return from the city. We drove past the elementary school, past the street that led to my old friend Billy’s house, down Five Mile River Road, the setting sun gilding the river, the automatic sprinklers anointing the newly mowed lawns whose thick green swaths lay as crisp and straight as the stripes on an American flag. At the time, I was living in Manhattan, the city to which my father had journeyed each morning, and I was shocked at how little Darien had changed, and how beautiful it was. How could we have been so unhappy in this place?
It was evening by the time we got to my old house. There it was: the black shutters against the white clapboard, the mailbox where the school bus had picked us up, the tree under which Harry and I had fought, the patio on which Mark had fallen. There were no cars in the driveway. Emboldened, my friend and I pulled over, got out, and walked cautiously into the backyard. I wanted to show her the neighbor’s pool, the path to Billy’s house through the woods, the garage where my brothers and I had seen the snake swallow the toad. I wanted to show myself how far I’d traveled from this place. Suddenly the porch light came on. The screen door opened. “Who’s there?” a man’s voice called. “Is anyone there?” We ducked behind the forsythia bushes along the far edge of the property. “Is anyone there?” the man repeated, stepping out onto the flagstone terrace, peering into the darkness. “Is anyone there?” I was twenty-eight years old, but I was a child again and I didn’t say a word.