One summer afternoon a few years after we moved back to Dedham, my brothers and I were playing baseball in the backyard. Harry was pitching, using a tennis ball instead of a baseball because a tennis ball went a mile when you connected with it and, more important, it hurt a lot less when you got hit by a pitch. Ned was standing over the T-shirt we used for home plate, brandishing Harry’s old Pony League bat, a Hillerich & Bradsby 29-ouncer with Bobby Doerr’s signature beginning to fade on its barrel. Ned, who didn’t play much baseball, was imitating the tics of players he’d seen on television—tapping the plate with his bat, wiggling his fanny as he dug his feet into the grass—to let us know, in case he struck out, that he wasn’t taking things too seriously. I was in the outfield, needling Ned with a peppy “swing, batter swing,” which, when Ned kept waving unproductively at Harry’s pitches, gave way to a plaintive “Come on, just hit the ball.” Mark, five years old, was standing behind the plate, eagerly retrieving tennis balls as they sailed past Ned toward the garden. It was rare for all four of us to be playing the same game at the same time, rarer still to be playing it without fighting—the peace likely attributable to Mark, in whose worshipful presence we were more apt to behave—and, despite the sweat runneling down my back in the August heat, I felt a lazy, pleasant complacence that was interrupted when Ned swung so hard at a pitch that the bat flew out of his hands and hit Mark in the head, knocking him to the ground. A moment later, Mark’s temple oozed with blood.
I don’t remember whether anyone said anything. I do remember that even as I stood there, not quite believing what I’d seen, Harry ran to Mark, scooped him up, and, in the curiously high pitch his voice assumes even now at times of surprise or strong emotion, shouted for our mother as he staggered toward the house with Mark—who, in his bewilderment, hadn’t yet begun to cry—draped over his arms, the way in war movies soldiers carried their wounded buddies to safety. Ned and I, finally in motion, trotted behind Harry, Ned worrying about Mark but also likely already formulating a defense (it was an accident, it wasn’t my fault, he shouldn’t have been standing so close to the plate), and me watching, relieved I wasn’t the one who had hit him, curious whether Ned would be punished, admiring of how oblivious Harry seemed to the blood dripping on his T-shirt, and a little envious of how quickly he had taken charge. As Harry started up the steps to the back door, Mum came out of the house, her quizzical look turning to one of horror when she saw Mark, limp in Harry’s arms, carried toward her like an offering. “Take him to the car,” she said, then hurried inside to get her purse. Ned and I watched mutely from the driveway as they raced off to the doctor, Harry in the backseat with Mark, who was whimpering by now, across his lap—and even in that moment, I felt a pinch of resentment that Mum had spoken to Harry as if they were alone.
The cut looked much worse than it really was. If Ned had been an inch shorter, or Mark an inch taller, Mark might have lost an eye. As it was, the bat struck the orbital bone over the socket. It took only seven stitches to sew up the wound. (Mark still has an inch-long salmon-colored scar on his temple that turns a shade darker when he laughs.) I remember the incident not so much because of Mark’s injury but because it was the moment I began to realize that my brothers and I filled certain roles within our family: Harry quietly taking responsibility, doing what needed to be done; me playing it safe, neither hero nor villain, watching and waiting to see what happened; Ned creating drama, albeit unintentionally, and—though utterly blameless—worrying about being blamed; Mark the innocent victim. I had heard it said that in times of crisis we reveal our true selves. Is this who we really were? I wondered. Is this who we were always going to be? It would be many years later, when the four of us came together after Mark sustained another, far more severe injury, before I understood how confining these roles had been, how firmly I had come to accept them, and how difficult it had been for us to escape them.
* * *
We had returned to the same town, but nothing was quite the same. Although only six blocks from our old home, our new one lay in a transition zone between the charming two-hundred-year-old colonials of our former neighborhood and Route 1, a gauntlet of car dealerships, fast-food outlets, and discount furniture stores that ran through town on its way from Maine to Florida. Our family was in a transition zone as well. Dad’s new job—fund-raising for his alma mater—didn’t require nearly as much travel and returned him to the social circles in which he felt most comfortable. Once again, there were Harvard football games and weekend trips to the Cape. Mum went to work as an art teacher, enthralling her students with the kind of imaginative projects that had enthralled us when we were children. A few months after we moved into our new house, she began painting the white kitchen walls with lush green jungle foliage. Over the next few years, the jungle would reach up the stairwell, curl around the landing and fill the second floor hall. During that time, Mum, too, began to bloom, with a vitality in direct proportion to the degree to which she had felt repressed. She took painting classes, wrote poetry, composed a folk mass, read underground newspapers, joined the fledgling women’s liberation movement, marched against the Vietnam War, and festooned the back of our car with bumper stickers that proclaimed her causes. On the very day that the Harvard administration, of which my father was a part, was trying to formulate a response to students who had occupied University Hall to protest the war, my mother was escorting a group of her students to Boston Common for an antiwar rally.
Our parents were happier, but they were moving in different directions. Mum, who had married at twenty and had three children by the time she was twenty-five, was, to use the vocabulary of the times, finding herself. In the meantime, she resembled less and less the pliant, adoring woman Dad had married. Sometimes Dad would come home from work a little tipsy, long after we’d finished supper. Mum, the plate of food she’d saved him drying out in the oven, would meet him at the door, and though they’d try to argue quietly so that we couldn’t hear them, their voices would spike with frustration, drawing me from my room to the second-floor landing, where I’d find Harry standing at the railing, one hand on the banister. We’d listen for a moment before turning, in silence, back to our rooms.
* * *
Harry and I never talked about Dad’s drinking. In part, this was because he drank no more than most of our friends’ fathers, in an era in which one rarely saw a middle-aged man after five o’clock without a cocktail in hand and a glazed look on his face. But we didn’t talk much about anything. At home, Harry kept to his bedroom under the third-floor eaves, coming down when dinner was on the table or for an occasional episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Sometimes he’d walk to the library and spend the evening browsing the stacks. His room lay directly over mine. At night, lying in bed, waiting for sleep, I’d hear him moving about upstairs and wonder what he was doing. I assumed that it must be something secret and important.
It seemed strange and somewhat perverse that despite my early efforts to emulate my older brother, the more time passed the more different we seemed. Some of that difference was attributable to the vagaries of the pituitary gland. Harry, who occasionally retreated to the basement to lift a set of Joe Weider barbells he’d gotten for his birthday, was sturdy, swarthy, and sufficiently hirsute—he’d begun shaving and had grown an impressive pair of sideburns—that I thought of him as he-man Esau to my feeble Jacob. Not only was I hairless in all the places that mattered, but I was short, skinny, and weak, with wrists as thin as butter knives and arms that wobbled uncontrollably when I tried to hoist Harry’s barbells over my head. Harry recently came across a snapshot of us taken when I was in eighth grade. Standing awkwardly against the car, studiously staring away from each other, we looked, he told me, “like representatives of two different species.”
Harry and I no longer fought—I wasn’t foolish enough to provoke him—but I remained on my guard in his presence. Now, on the rare occasions we threw a ball or got out a board game, there was a ruthlessness in his play that kept me on edge. It seemed desperately important to him that he win. And whether it was baseball, football, Ping-Pong, or Yahtzee, he won. Playing croquet, he sent enemy balls into the bushes even when he was five wickets ahead. Playing Pounce, he wormed his stronger hand inexorably under mine to claim the stack of cards. Playing Risk, he goaded Ned and me into attacking countries in which he had amassed an insurmountable pile of armies. Playing Monopoly, he talked us into deals we knew we shouldn’t make but that he’d convince us were for our own good—that, for instance, even though the rent on the B & O railroad was a tiny fraction of the rent on Boardwalk, there was a higher probability of landing on one of the four railroads than on one of the two blue properties; the railroad rent would accumulate over time, and besides, at $200 a house he would probably never have enough money to build on the blues, and it therefore made sense for you to trade him Boardwalk for the B & O—and, because he was giving you such a good deal, you should probably throw in an extra $500. Harry was so persuasive he could make the utilities sound like highly desirable real estate. And he was so insistent that even when you knew he was screwing you, you’d make the trade anyway. Because if you didn’t, you were subject to a head-shaking “When you end up losing, don’t blame me,” and, after you lost, “I hate to say I told you so but I told you so.” Sometimes, in our desperation, Ned and I would team up against Harry, making sweetheart deals that gave each of us monopolies. This infuriated Harry, but he’d beat us anyway. In the rare instances in which it looked as if Ned or I might win, Harry would reinterpret the rules to his advantage mid-game; if that didn’t work, he’d accuse us of ganging up on him and threaten to quit. Two-person Monopoly was no fun, so Ned and I would give in, voiding our trade to get him back to the table. At some point, realizing I couldn’t beat Harry, I would turn on Ned—I had to beat someone—and as ruthless, in my own ingratiating way, as Harry, systematically attempt to put him out of business. Since Mark was too young to play, poor Ned had no one to beat and, recognizing the futility of his position, often ended the game by overturning the board in frustration, sending houses and money and hotels and small silver top hats across the living room rug.
Although I was frustrated by my inability to beat my older brother, I respected him for his determination. I admired how he spent hours alone at the neighborhood tennis court, perfecting his backhand against the bangboard. I admired the fact that Harry, alone among us, possessed what we called “the killer instinct.” I took pride in the tennis trophies, inscribed with Harry’s initials, that accumulated on the shelves of the glassed-in bookcase in the front hall, next to Dad’s. One summer our parents arranged for Harry to take tennis lessons from an older boy down the road. When Harry came home after the first session, he was troubled. It had quickly become apparent that he was a better player than his instructor, so they had just rallied. This went on for a few more “lessons,” my parents still paying the boy, although everyone knew who should be paying whom. I felt sorry for the older boy, who must have been embarrassed, but I felt a vicarious triumph: my brother was so good he could beat his teacher.
When we moved back to Dedham, Harry had signed up for Pony League baseball. Twice a week he’d come home from practice after dinner with a dirt-stained uniform and the air of having been in the wider world. One night we went to see him play. The game was in East Dedham, literally on the other side of the tracks that ran through the center of town. The field was mostly dirt, speckled with islands of grass, and surrounded by a chain-link fence, which, in turn, was surrounded by compact two-decker houses. We took our place among the shouting parents. Harry was playing second base. It was some time before he noticed we were there. I expected him to be his usual fierce self, but he looked a little nervous—the way I felt when I played baseball, worried I would let my teammates down, hoping the ball wouldn’t be hit toward me. When he came to bat, I assumed he’d hit home runs, like the tennis-ball blasts he walloped over our backyard fence. But he popped up or beat out grounders. He was, I saw, a perfectly decent player, no better and no worse than the others on his team. It was the first time I understood that there were people in the world who might be able to beat my brother. I took no delight in the knowledge. I wanted to beat him, but I didn’t want anyone else to beat him. I didn’t go back to see him play again. In any case, he quit the team after one season.
It never occurred to me that Harry’s aura of invincibility might have come at a price. It never occurred to me that he might have crushed his brothers because he felt crushed himself; that he tried to seem invulnerable at home because he felt so vulnerable beyond it; that he might feel self-conscious or insecure, or any of the things I was just beginning to feel myself; that, as the eldest brother, he might have felt the weight of our family discontent more keenly. I had no idea that he no longer made straight As in school, or, more shockingly, that he no longer seemed to care; that he was alone in his room upstairs not because he was working on some important project but because he was lonely; that his remove was a sign not of sophistication but of depression. I wouldn’t know until we were both in our fifties that at one point, alone in the house one summer afternoon, he had stood at his third-floor window and thought about jumping.
Eventually, our parents decided that Harry needed to get away from home—hadn’t he already left? I wondered—and our grandparents paid for him to attend our father’s old boarding school. “If you want me to go, I’ll go,” Harry said. Deep down he knew he needed a change. After a subdued two-hour ride, my father pulled up in front of the school. Harry began to sob. Dad wept quietly. Both of them would have been hardpressed to say why. They sat in the car until their tears subsided. Then, like good WASP men of their era, they shook hands and said good-bye.
A few days after Harry left, I went upstairs. Although I knew he was hundreds of miles from home, I found myself tiptoeing. Most of the third floor was used for storage: the landing stacked with family suitcases and Dad’s old army duffel bags, the extra bedroom cluttered with spare bureaus, lamps, and Mum’s old paintings. Harry’s room, however, was nearly empty. His shelves held few clues to the occupant’s identity: a row of old Hardy Boys books, a collection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, a copy of Robin Hood passed down from our grandfather, a few half-filled stamp albums. There were no posters on the walls, no souvenirs on the bureau. There were few signs of life. It was the room of someone who was just passing through. The gray strongbox that had once held baseball cards and saltines stood on the desk. I wondered what was in it now.
* * *
From a distance, it seems odd that when we returned to Dedham, each of the four brothers went to a different school: Harry to a local private high school, me to a middle school several towns away, Mark to the progressive elementary school where our mother taught. Ned attended our old public school, which, in our absence, had moved from the cozy, three-story whitewashed colonial to which Harry and I had ridden our bikes to an antiseptic, one-story sprawl amid a cluster of new developments on the edge of town. Ned dreaded school even more than he had in Darien, in large measure because he attracted the attention of the class bully, a well-padded sixth-grader named Ricky Ratters, who lay in wait with his henchmen as Ned arrived each morning, punching him in the shoulder, spitting on his jacket and rubbing it in, calling him (among other things) “Neddie Nudie.” Resisting our mother’s advice to ignore his tormenters (It takes two to tango), Ned fought back, with words and, eventually, with fists. Years later, he would confess how disappointed he had been that his older brothers had never done anything to stop the teasing. Harry recalls that he and I went so far as to discuss roughing up Ricky Ratters on his way home from school, warning him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d leave our brother alone. But it was all talk. (I suspect I was relieved. In Ned’s telling, this Ratters fellow sounded pretty dangerous.) Instead, I am ashamed to say that, hearing the unimaginative but irresistibly alliterative nickname the equally alliterative Mr. Ratters had given Ned, I began applying it to him myself.
Ricky Ratters may not have understood it, but part of his grievance against Ned (and, I suspect, part of mine) may have had something to do with Ned’s looks. With his wavy, auburn hair, brown eyes, and symmetrical features, Ned resembled the boys we saw modeling khaki pants and plaid shirts in the Sears catalogue. It was Ned the elderly ladies fawned over during our nursing home concerts, Ned to whom our cleaning ladies gave presents at Christmas, Ned at whom girls found themselves staring, even at an age when they didn’t know why they wanted to. When Ned was twelve, our grandmother, who had been something of a beauty herself and who prized beauty in others, commissioned a professional photographer to take Ned’s portrait. Under strict orders not to bother my brother, I stewed in the house, pretending to read a book as Ned, in a white button-down shirt our mother had ironed for the occasion, posed against the oak tree in our backyard. In the photo, which our grandmother displayed in her dressing room for the rest of her life, Ned wears a small smile that Grandma no doubt found enchanting but that I thought I recognized as the smirk he flashed while getting away with something.
Ned found other ways to get the nourishment he wasn’t getting from his brothers. Over the years he had worked his way through the gamut of childhood pets: plastic-bagged goldfish he won at the school fair and tended for a week or two before they died; silver-dollar-size turtles from Woolworth’s who rarely budged from under their plastic palm tree on their plastic island in their plastic dish; a series of gerbils and hamsters whose names we could never keep straight, who lent his room a faint sour smell, and whom we’d occasionally encounter AWOL in the hallway. Each time we moved, we left behind a cluster of miniature graves in the backyard, marked with twig crosses or pebble headstones.
But all this was preparation for the day a small brown mutt who hadn’t fallen far from beaglehood wandered into our mother’s classroom. No one ever said so, but from the moment we took her in, she was Ned’s dog. He named her Penny, for her color. (I obstinately preferred to think she’d been named for “Penny Lane,” my favorite new Beatles song.) At this time in his life, Ned was a bit of a stray, too, and he and Penny loved each other with a fierceness that betrayed their mutual need. When Ned got home from school he’d curl up around Penny on the living room rug; when Ned watched TV, Penny nosed her way onto his lap; when Ned slept, Penny slept at the foot of his bed. Like Ned, Penny was a risk-taker; her favorite indoor activity was splashing the contents of the trash can, Jackson Pollock–style, across the kitchen floor. Like Ned, Penny craved independence; every so often she dug a hole under the fence and wandered off, an act that galvanized our family, lending us a shared purpose we otherwise lacked. Ned and I would bicycle furiously around the neighborhood, calling her name into the gathering dark. Later, Ned and Mum would pile into the car to continue the search, headlights probing the shadows for that small, familiar shape. We always wondered when we’d get the call that told us Penny had been killed, or when she might roam so far she’d never find her way home. But next morning we’d hear a scratch at the door. We’d let her in and she’d go straight to Ned.
* * *
If, in Darien, I had fallen into an interlude of mild rebelliousness, back in Dedham I rededicated myself to the role for which I was temperamentally inclined: the good boy, the conciliator, the equivocator, the filler of silences, the eater of creamed corn. (There was symbiosis at play: as I saw Mum discipline Ned and sensed how unhappy it made them both, I reveled even more in being the good son, and that, in turn, drove Ned to be even more fractious.) My return to goody-goodyhood was reinforced by the school I attended, a gloomy, wood-paneled old place where the staff maintained hegemony with verbal threats, knuckle raps, and, in rare instances, “chinnies,” a disciplinary technique in which the teacher pinched the tender flesh under a student’s jaw, then wiggled it back and forth until the victim begged for mercy. Modeled on such venerable English institutions as Rugby, my new school more nearly resembled Dotheboys Hall, the ne plus ultra of educational sadism from which Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby rescues the unfortunate Smike. It terrorized me back to my straight-A ways.
At home, I no longer found it difficult to stay on Mum’s good side. In the mid-sixties, I entered adolescence and our interests converged. We liked the same music (the Beatles, the Byrds), the same TV shows (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Masterpiece Theater), the same FM radio station (WBCN: a boss sound in a boss town), the same sad books (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Black Like Me; Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon). Where once I had devoured the literature of male bonding, I now wanted to read about loners and oddballs in far-off places: Tom Wingfield in the alleyways of St. Louis, David Schearl in the tenements of the Lower East Side, Eugene Gant in the hills of North Carolina. I joined the guitar lessons Mum gave on Sunday afternoons in our dining room. I played in the year-end hootenannies she organized in our backyard, at which parents sat in folding lawn chairs, sipping lemonade and listening to their children sing about careless love, the sounds of silence, satisfaction. I accompanied her to teach-ins and antiwar rallies. Like her, I started to keep a journal, to write poetry. Mum’s father, for whom I had been named, was a writer, and I dreamed of being a writer myself. Mum was gratified to find a kindred spirit in the house, with whom she could harmonize on “Mr. Tambourine Man” or discuss the Chicago Eight. She showed me how to do psychedelic lettering. She knew exactly what to get me for Christmas: The Beatles’ White Album, the annotated edition of The Waste Land. Three years after she had refused to let me see Goldfinger in Darien (too racy), she took me to see Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy. If she hadn’t been my mother, I would have had to admit that she was pretty far out.
I read Mum’s books, listened to her records, and accompanied her to peace demonstrations because I was interested in those things myself. I was also aware that my interest pleased her. Was I motivated by Oedipal issues? Sibling rivalry? Both? In any case, as Harry and Ned pulled away from Mum, I moved closer, aligning myself with her to an extent I wouldn’t fully realize until I was in my early thirties, when a therapist suggested that my identity had been shaped, in large measure, by the fact that I was one of four boys competing, however unconsciously, for our mother’s affection. I dismissed the possibility; the therapist pursued it. “There was no rivalry,” I found myself retorting. “She loved me most.” What shocked me was not that I said it, but how instinctive it was—and how, even then, so many years later, it was accompanied by a frisson of triumph.
* * *
By the time I moved on to high school, the sixties were in full swing. Like my mother, I longed to be a hippie, but she was a little too old and I was a little too young. Attending a private school in an affluent suburb didn’t aid my cause, though I consoled myself with the fact that James Taylor had spent a few years at a rival prep school before dropping out. In ninth grade, I glommed on to a small group of would-be hipsters who met in the music room after school, where the smartest boy in the class, a wild-haired kid from Brookline, read aloud from Rimbaud, quoted Lenny Bruce, and played Hendrix and Coltrane on the school record player. Though we didn’t understand much of it, we’d nod, chuckle knowingly, and rail against the establishment, by which we had in mind not the military-industrial complex but our headmaster, a hawk-nosed ex–Harvard football player in his seventies. As the year went on, the Brookline boy’s hair grew longer, his grades fell, and he left for public school. That summer, he wrote me a scornful eight-page letter, daring me to revolt against my preppie, provincial existence. (A year later I heard he’d gotten heavily into drugs and been hospitalized for depression.)
I would have liked to comply. Yet I wanted to have it both ways. I wanted to be Rimbaud, but I wanted to play varsity soccer. I wanted to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, but I didn’t want to look like a dork. I wanted to be Goofus and Gallant. And so my revolution wasn’t very revolutionary. I thumbed my nose at the school’s coat-and-tie dress code by wearing my grandfather’s old smoking jackets and paisley ties, the thick leather moccasins Harry left behind when he went away to school, and a pair of red-white-and-blue-striped American flag bell-bottoms I bought at the Dedham Mall. For the Wiggins Memorial Essay competition, in which each junior was required to write a short biography of a historical figure whom the late headmaster Charles Wiggins II might have admired, I wrote a windy appreciation of John Lennon and dedicated it to “the man who blew his mind out in a car.” I composed a pro–Abbie Hoffman editorial for my history class, but when Steal This Book was published I haunted the rack at Lechmere, longing to obey the author’s imperative, knowing I wouldn’t dare, and finally forking over the $1.95. I scrutinized my mother’s copy of Summerhill, a book about an English school in which there were no grades, no dress code, and no rules, but I stayed at my stodgy old prep school, making sure to keep up my grades so I could get into a good college. I questioned authority, but I ended my questions with “sir.” I heard about Woodstock only after the fact—I’d been away at tennis camp—but even if I’d known about it, my parents would never have let me go. Instead, I bought the dove-and-guitar T-shirt and the Life commemorative issue and saw the movie the weekend it was released, sitting between Mum and Ned at the Chestnut Hill multiplex.
With Harry away at boarding school, I felt more leeway to be different than I would have otherwise—it’s hard to imagine that with my older brother at home I would have dared flash the peace sign and utter the word groovy so indiscriminately—but I still went only halfway. (It was, of course, coincidental, but somehow not surprising, that I finally reached puberty only after Harry was gone.) I dreamed of singing in a rock band; instead, I sang Rodgers and Hammerstein in the school musical. I dreamed of drinking absinthe in Montmartre; instead, my friends and I shared cans of Budweiser in the Dedham graveyard. I dreamed of roaming the streets of Greenwich Village; instead I haunted the Plaza, a strip of desultory shops along Route 1, three blocks from our house, where I’d sift through the record bins at Lechmere, sneak peeks at the high school girls outside Friendly’s, and check the magazine rack at the Liggett Rexall drugstore for the latest issue of Rolling Stone.
I lived for Rolling Stone. It was my umbilicus to the real world, its arrival an event so vital to my continued existence that I usually walked down to the drugstore three or four times hoping it had come in, before it actually did. That night, after I’d finished my homework, I’d head upstairs, past the bedroom where Ned communed with Penny, past the den, where Mark and Dad watched a Bruins hockey game, past my parents’ bedroom, where my mother graded papers for the English classes she’d added to her teaching load, and, pushing through the strands of yellow-and-black beads I’d hung in my doorway, I’d lie on my bed under my Jefferson Airplane poster and imagine for a few hours that I was part of a world where people ran away to San Francisco, danced un-self-consciously at rock festivals, used the word reefer without blushing, and, most important, had sex—or in the strangely dreary way the Rolling Stone writers were wont to describe it, “got laid.” Then I’d brush my teeth, stack three or four records on the seventy-dollar stereo I’d gotten for Christmas, and listen to Neil Young as I watched the lights of passing cars accelerate across the ceiling until I fell asleep.
Although the Colt brothers seemed to have retreated into separate lives, in the aggregate we constituted a critical mass of overwhelming maleness. The wicker hamper on the landing overflowed with dirty socks. The back hall was a midden of bats, balls, shin pads, and hockey sticks. The TV room in the basement doubled as a knee hockey arena. Certain key areas in the house smelled like feet. No matter how many times our mother cleaned it, the cramped second-floor bathroom we shared with our parents was a mess: the sink streaked with Oldenburgian blobs of toothpaste; the Crest tube capless and squeezed from the middle; the shower curtain bunched and dripping on the wrong side of the tub; the bathtub drain clogged with a medusa of hair; the toilet paper unfurled to its cardboard tube; the toilet seat, despite our mother’s pleas, down. (Recently, at my parents’ house, my father and I commented on a peculiar smell, and my eighty-one-year-old mother, no less transported than Proust by his madeleine, observed, “You don’t know what smell is unless you’re a woman with four sons who never lifted the toilet seat before they peed.”) Dinnertime was a fraternal free-for-all over who got the biggest piece of chicken on the plate, the last Nilla wafer in the box. Brotherly talk revolved around sports, TV shows, and bodily functions. The amount of intellectual energy devoted to the subject of flatulence was mind-boggling. The simple conversation starter “Who cut one?” could kick off a ten-minute series of ripostes ranging from the elementary “He who smelt it dealt it” to the more linguistically and philosophically subtle “He who revealed it concealed it,” with an occasional detour into foreign languages, as in the interrogative “Qui a coupé le fromage?” Earnest fraternal colloquies took place on the relationship of volume to smell—whether, in fact, SBDs really were, as folk wisdom had it, more mephitic than percussive “rippers.” Against this creative barrage, our mother’s attempts to persuade us to describe our farting as “dropping a rose” didn’t stand a chance.
Poor Mum! At school, her students adored her. Wearing her Indian-print shawl and her bangle earrings, she talked with them about the war, about the new Joni Mitchell album, about their problems with their parents. (Meeting us, her students would gush, “You’re so lucky—you have the coolest mother!”) At home, trying to get dinner on the table after a long day of work, Mum struggled to keep the peace among four restless boys who didn’t want to talk about their feelings, who saw her as the force from which they struggled to free themselves. Four decades later, Mum would laugh at the notion that we could have thought her so confident and powerful when, as a young mother of four, she herself had felt “like a deer caught in the headlights.” And yet, even though everyone, including me, had always assumed that she had had four children because she kept hoping for a daughter, she told my wife that she had been glad to be the only woman in the family: “That way, I got more of the attention.”
* * *
Growing up in a house with a 5:1 male-to-female ratio, of course, led to a good deal of confusion about girls. Part of the problem was technical. Neither of our parents had ever talked to us about sex, although Mum had tried. When Harry was fourteen, she attempted to get him to sit still for a facts-of-life chat, but was able to corner him only long enough to say, “Don’t ever get a girl pregnant” before he fled. (In an illustration of the truism that it’s easier to parent other people’s children, a few years later my mother would be acclaimed as an extraordinarily sensitive teacher of seventh-grade sex education.) If the Brady Bunch was any indication, one’s brothers were a potential source of information. But I didn’t dare ask Harry, and, even if I could have suffered the ignominy of consulting a younger brother, I was sure Ned would make merciless fun of me (Could you kiss her? Could you marry her?).
At school, rather than risk being branded a “homo” (or, in the more sophisticated but no less odious variation applied to one luckless classmate who wore glasses and couldn’t throw a spiral, a puella—Latin for “girl”), I pretended I knew what people were talking about. When my Brookline friend played us a recording of Lenny Bruce’s “To is a preposition, Come is a verb” monologue, I nodded knowingly; when an eighth-grade classmate placed a spoonful of butterscotch pudding in his mouth, massaged the flesh of his throat between his thumb and forefinger, tilted his head back at an ever-increasing angle and, finally, spat the pudding from between his pursed lips, I howled along with the others at the lunch table; when a friend lent me a copy of Playboy and I happened across a (scrupulously nongraphic) photo of a man “going down” on a woman, I assumed he was administering the male-on-female version of a “blow job,” gently puffing into her vagina, in a kind of sexual CPR; when I encountered the word clitoris in a novel by John Updike, I assumed that it rhymed with the name of the mouthwash—Lavoris—we saw advertised on TV. (Either way, I had no idea what it was or, even after I knew, where to find it or what to do with it.) When a mustard-yellow volume with the dismayingly clinical title Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex—But Were Afraid to Ask appeared on the bookshelf in my parents’ bedroom, I devoured it in brief, furtive study sessions when no one else was at home, one ear listening for footsteps.
But even after I’d learned how the word clitoris was pronounced and—at least hypothetically—the general area in which it was located, I had no opportunity to apply that knowledge. I had no idea what girls were like or how to act around them. I sang along with Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” as if I knew what he meant, but I had no clue. Part of that came from growing up surrounded by brothers. I had no sister in whom I could confide, no sister to whose friends I could practice talking. At my all-male school, the only members of the opposite sex we encountered were the librarian, the secretaries, the elderly women who served us lunch, and the school dietitian, who, it was rumored, spiked the shepherd’s pie with saltpeter to dampen our libidos—to no apparent effect, given that in the locker room, the entire eighth grade, like soon-to-riot inmates in a prison movie, periodically erupted into feral chants juxtaposing the name of a nearby girls’ school with a grunt into which was poured a world of desperate, inchoate longing: Dana Hall-UNH. Dana Hall-UNH. Dana Hall-UNH.
At a time when (if Rolling Stone was to be believed) everyone in the world under the age of thirty was engaged in a nonstop orgy, my sex life was limited to scrutinizing a friend’s Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass album cover on which a dark-haired woman was buried up to her ample breasts in an alp of whipped cream; ogling leggy “bachelorettes” perched on stools as they smoothed their miniskirts during episodes of The Dating Game; copying a particularly alluring photograph from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue into my art class sketch pad, erasing and redrawing the woman’s bikini to make it smaller and smaller, in hopes, I suppose, that I could eventually—magically—get a glimpse of what lay beneath. On Saturday trips into Boston with friends, the part I looked forward to most was not Jack’s Joke Shop, with its whoopee cushions and puddles of plastic vomit, but the walk from the subway station, which took us along the edge of the Combat Zone (as the city’s red-light district was piquantly known), past windowless brick buildings in whose dusty display cases were taped black-and-white publicity shots of outlandishly buxom women wearing cardboard stars on their nipples as they bent over to adjust a stiletto heel. From these clues, I learned that sex, like masturbation (the only carnal activity in which I regularly engaged), was something done quickly, in secret, and with an overwhelming sense of shame.
I was desperate to have a girlfriend, but I was terrified of girls. (It didn’t help that I arrived so mortifyingly late to puberty.) I wrote poems in my journal about girls who barely knew I existed. I wrote letters to girls I’d seen from afar, hoping they’d write back, so I’d have tangible evidence that I wasn’t a total loser. (If they wrote back at all, it was a gently pitying brush-off I ripped into pieces so small that Ned couldn’t possibly reconstitute the evidence of my ignominy). I wasn’t picky. When the Beatles’ Revolver came out, I told myself that I would have loved Eleanor Rigby, as long as the face that she kept in a jar by the door wasn’t too hideous. (In my imagination, of course, Eleanor was one of those librarian types you see only in movies who eventually take off their glasses, unpin their suddenly voluminous hair, and turn into Barbara Stanwyck.) When Tiny Tim, the stringy-haired, beak-nosed, ukulele-playing falsetto crooner, appeared on The Smothers Brothers with his fiancée, a surprisingly cute girl he called Miss Vicki, I thought: If only I’d met her first. Paging through my Life special issue on Woodstock, I kept thinking that if only I’d been there, I could have gotten laid. (In the unlikely event that I ever got the chance, I told myself I wouldn’t “get laid,” I’d make love, thereby rendering girls helplessly pliant in the face of my extraordinary sensitivity.) But this was all theoretical. A friend, disgusted by my ineptness, knowing that I wrote poetry—and with a vehemence fueled, I realize now, by the fact that he was only slightly less inept than I—hissed the cruelest insult he could imagine: “You’re going to end up just like Emily Dickinson.”
My ineptitude was all the more galling when contrasted with Harry’s and Ned’s seeming expertise. They had no need for Dr. Reuben’s sex book, I felt sure. In Darien, Harry used to sing a line, over and over, from one of his favorite Herman’s Hermits songs: I’m leaning on the lamp post at the corner of the street in case a certain little lady comes by. On such slim evidence I’d credited him ever since with a certain savoir faire, picturing him, James Bond–like, in a pool of light on an otherwise dark and empty street, occasionally consulting his watch, looking up with a debonair smile at the sound of footsteps. In Dedham, Harry sang the Yardley Black Label aftershave commercial (Some guys have it—some guys never will) into our faces with such intensity I grew up assuming that Harry had it and I never would. (I wasn’t certain what “it” was, but I suspected it had something to do with Stridex Medicated Pads.) Harry was so good at everything he did, I assumed he was good at this, too. My suspicions were confirmed when he came home one day with a pack of friends that included a quiet, dark-haired girl whom he matter-of-factly introduced to us—as if bringing home a girl were an everyday occurrence in our house and this weren’t, in fact, the very first time—as Fern, a name that not only brought to mind the heroine of Charlotte’s Web, an early literary crush of mine, but seemed redolent of an earthy sixties sexuality. Harry and his friends stayed only long enough to pick up some of his clothes. We never saw Fern again. But those few minutes of having a girl in the house had lent the air an electric charge.
Ned seemed even more precocious in the ways of the flesh. Back in third grade, at a classmate’s party, I followed a crowd of kids out to the garage, where, at the birthday girl’s suggestion, they began to play what I recognized with excitement to be a bona fide game of doctor. As our hostess wriggled out of her shorts, I stood in the back, feeling like an anthropologist who has stumbled on a sacred ritual he’s heard rumors about but has never quite believed really existed. The spell was broken when I noticed Ned on the far side of the garage, taking in the scene as if it were nothing unusual. Fortunately, we were called inside for cake before I found out whether Ned intended to take a more active role in the proceedings. I myself, of course, would never have dared.
As Ned grew older, he became a natural magnet for the caliber of girls I secretly aspired to but failed to attract. (I knew this because while I was ogling those girls, they were ogling Ned.) In summer, the only time of year when we came in contact with the opposite sex on a regular basis, the prettiest girl on our town beach was clearly smitten with my fourteen-year-old brother. No matter how fast I swam, no matter how wittily I joked, no matter how adroitly I put him down, she had eyes only for Ned. In high school, while I was joining every club imaginable, Ned, two years younger than I, seemed to have far more experience in the only two extracurricular activities that really mattered: parties and girls.
It never occurred to me that my brothers might have been just as clueless as I—and were working just as hard not to show it. Years later Harry would tell me that Fern was just a friend of a friend, and that he had considered going to Vassar instead of Harvard because it had just gone co-ed and, with only a handful of males there, he’d have a decent chance. Ned would tell me that despite appearances, he, too, had felt awkward and insecure around girls. All three of my brothers would tell me how socially crippling it had been to grow up in a house with all boys. If only we could have confided in one another! But that would have been too mortifying.
* * *
As Harry, Ned, and I followed each other into adolescence, the age difference between us and Mark seemed even wider. In some ways Mark was like an only child, but he got none of the perks that come with that distinction. Mum and Dad hadn’t had time to keep a baby book to mark his arrival, as they had for the rest of us, and by the time he was born, they had stopped sending out photos of the Colt boys at Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Harry, Ned, and I hung up store-bought stockings of thick, burgundy-colored corduroy, identical save for the rickrack trim with which Mum had customized them; Mark’s was a baggy carrot-colored bootie she’d stitched together. No doubt she had tried to make it especially capacious and distinctive, but it looked nothing like its siblings as it dangled next to them from the fireplace mantel. We were too old to be interested in Mark’s favorite TV shows, so he’d watch The Mod Squad or The Wild Wild West with us, or we’d find him in the basement alone, watching reruns of the shows of which we’d watched the originals—Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, My Three Sons. By the time Mark came along, Morgan Memorial had already inherited the clothing that had been passed down from Harry to me to Ned. In the fraternal pecking order that had Harry beating me up and me beating Ned up, Mark not only had no one to beat up but was too much younger than Ned to be considered fair game, and thus didn’t receive the noogies, punches, and ritual humiliations that were at least a sign of brotherly connection. Consequently, he seemed to lack the protective callus produced by fraternal friction. At the dinner table, a Darwinian free-for-all over food and floor time, Mum would have to call for silence so that shy, soft-spoken Mark, who had been quietly trying to say something, could be heard. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d say, embarrassed, in the momentary calm before chaos resumed.
If the four Colt brothers had been depicted in one of those children’s puzzles in which you’re instructed to “find the one that doesn’t belong,” you’d pick Mark. He was no less handsome, but while Harry, Ned, and I were variations on a theme—tall, brown eyes, brown hair—Mark was compact, with wavy, copper-colored hair, blue eyes, a blur of freckles, and fair skin that burned easily. We wondered where those looks had come from, until we came across a photo of our father’s father as a dashing young man. He looked exactly like an older version of Mark.
At school, Mark was a determined worker, but reading didn’t come easily and homework was a struggle. (Looking back, I find it hard not to believe that Mark didn’t have what, years later, would have been routinely diagnosed as some mild form of ADD. But the psychologist to whom my mother took him for testing in the fourth grade told her that Mark was merely a sensitive, anxious child whose feelings were always close to the surface.) I would learn many years later that, like Ned, Mark had been teased by a few of the elementary school BMOCs. Unlike Ned, Mark lacked the temper that might have driven them off in search of more tractable victims. At sports, Mark was game but undersized—like Ned and me, he was for many years one of the smallest boys in his class—and he hadn’t had the benefit of the nightly games of catch that Harry and I had gotten. Although we included Mark in our activities when we could, Harry was away at school, and Ned and I, busy with extracurricular commitments, usually didn’t get home till after dark. Mark’s most enduring athletic memory from elementary school is of the time when, after sitting on the bench for most of the hockey game, he heard his coach bark “Fourth Line!” and, determined to make the most of his big chance, clambered over the boards. Rather than swiftly skating off as he’d imagined, he stumbled, fell to the ice, and struggled to rise as play swirled on around him, his teammates yelling “Get up! Get up!” Mark, who in the intervening years became a fine athlete, tells the story with a laugh now, but also with an intensity that suggests how humiliating it was at the time. (It didn’t help Mark’s credibility on the rink when our mother, thinking it would please him, surprised him by painting his hockey gloves with psychedelic flowers.)
What Mark didn’t get from his brothers, however, he began to get from his friends, a loyal group drawn by his sweetness and his enthusiasm, with whom he did all the things we used to do: toss a football, sing in the choir, play tag in the graveyard. But if we weren’t paying much attention to him, he was clearly paying attention to us. Asked by the psychologist whether he wanted be like his three older brothers, Mark’s face lit up: “Oh, yes.”
* * *
Not long ago, Mark told me that when he was young, he thought of his older brothers as gods. If only he had known how mortal we were! Away at school, far from the family, Harry resumed his high-achieving ways: top student, captain of two sports, student council leader. I pored over his school newspapers and yearbooks, secretly proud of his success. When I was a high school junior, my tennis team traveled to Rhode Island to play his. I was low man on our ladder. Although I beat my opponent, I was far more concerned with the match between my brother, the number one player on his team, and our number one, a classmate of mine I’d once overheard referring to me as a doofus. I was pleased when my brother easily beat him. It was as if Harry had dispatched a playground bully on my behalf. (I had a momentary urge to run up to my vanquished classmate and crow, “My brother kicked your ass!”) When I saw Harry, all I could say was “Good match.” When he came home for Christmas vacation, quiet and preoccupied, I reverted to a more muted, careful version of myself.
At Harry’s graduation, on a sunny June afternoon, we watched as he was awarded prize after prize—so many that the audience began to chuckle when his name was called. On the long ride home, we oohed over his triumphs. Harry was quiet. Halfway through a celebratory dinner, he excused himself from the table and went upstairs.
* * *
As we grew older, Ned and I eased into a kind of unacknowledged truce. We attended the same high school now, but other than carpooling to and from campus each day, we had little contact. Looking back, I can see that in my adolescent self-absorption I pulled away from Ned no less completely, and no less inadvertently, than Harry had pulled away from me.
All the while, unbeknown to me, Ned was finding his own niche. As an adolescent less inclined to sports or good grades, areas of expertise to which Harry and I had already staked our claims, he spent much of his time on stage, where, abetted by his voice—in a family of singers, his rich baritone stood out—he flourished, getting from the audience the approval he didn’t get at home. His favorite sport was one Harry and I had never tried: rowing. He began to move away from the family, not, like Harry, by going off to boarding school but by spending as much time as he could at our grandparents’ house on Cape Cod. He felt far more at home on the water than on land. While Harry and I spent hour after hour on the tennis court, Ned sailed. Back in Dedham, he developed a tight circle of friends with whom he attended rock concerts, went to parties, and got into teenage scrapes. One night, after watching Ned perform in a play, I drove him to a nearby town where a friend of his was throwing a cast party. It was a wilder party than I’d ever been to, with a seemingly unlimited amount of liquor. One of Ned’s classmates vomited on the lawn. Another drove down the driveway at forty miles per hour and hit a lamppost, totaling the car. Somebody called the police; Ned and I raced home before they got there. I looked at my brother with new respect.
Senior year, I coached intramural hockey. Though I worried that Ned might challenge my authority, as he did so reflexively at home (I imagined him responding to my Lombardiesque exhortations with I know you are but what am I?), I chose him for my team. He worked hard, made not a single caustic remark, and became my most indispensable player. One evening after practice, as I watched him walk away from the rink with his friends, I realized that I had always seen Ned only as the younger brother I had to keep in line. Without my noticing, he had made a life of his own.
I think both Ned and I wanted to be closer but neither of us dared let our guard down. As the older brother, I knew I should be the one to reach out, but I couldn’t show weakness to my younger brother, I couldn’t give him ammunition. In any case, by then it seemed too late. It was Ned I thought of one Friday night when, watching TV, I stumbled across What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a melodrama in which Bette Davis and Joan Crawford play murderously rivalrous sisters. In the final scene, Bette learns that her lifelong persecution of Joan has been based on a misunderstanding. She turns to her dying sister, those moony Bette Davis eyes glistening with sadness and wonder. “Oh, if only I’d known,” she says tenderly. “All this time, we could have been friends.”
* * *
One spring afternoon, I was surprised to see our green Ford station wagon barrel up the school driveway. My mother was behind the wheel, distraught. Penny was in the backseat. She had wriggled under the fence, wandered into the road, been struck by a car and killed. My mother had been driving around aimlessly, not knowing what to do, but knowing she had to tell Ned. She searched the campus but couldn’t find him. That evening, after school, Ned and I were carpooled home by a friend’s mother. As I sat next to him, I burned with my secret. After we were dropped off, Ned opened the gate to the backyard and started toward the house. Even as I called his name, I knew I should let our mother, just inside the door preparing dinner, tell him. But I couldn’t stop myself. “There’s bad news,” I said quickly. “Penny was hit by a car. She’s dead.” Ned whirled around and looked at me. “If you’re lying, I’ll kill you,” he said quietly.
I may have justified my act by telling myself that someone had to prepare Ned before he got home. I may have justified it by telling myself I was taking responsibility, the way Harry had when Mark was hit by the baseball bat. But even as Ned disappeared into the house, I knew I’d told him because I wanted the power; I wanted to be at the officious center of things; I wanted, perhaps, to play a particularly cruel form of Got You Last. The moment confirmed something I’d suspected all along: that no matter how many dishes I washed or how many times I said “sir,” I wasn’t really a good boy. And I wasn’t a good brother.