Harry began to find his way back to us by heading in the opposite direction. Through our grandmother, a Unitarian who dabbled in Quakerism, our mother learned of the American Friends Service Committee, a group that sponsored work projects around the globe (reforming American prisons, building African schools), the kinds of things Mum would have loved to do herself if she hadn’t had four children and a full-time job. For Harry, AFSC started out less a way to save the world than a way to get away from home. The summer after his junior year in high school, he hitchhiked up to a small town in western Vermont where, on the grounds of an old tuberculosis sanitarium, he worked at a state institution that housed more than six hundred developmentally disabled children. Harry and twelve other high school volunteers helped them with their “daily living skills,” which, in most cases, meant making sure they didn’t hurt themselves or anyone else as they brushed their teeth, ate their meals, and used the bathroom. Many of the children had been abused or abandoned by their parents. Many had severe emotional difficulties. Harry remembers one seven-year-old boy, the son of a married white woman who’d had an affair with a black man. Not wanting anyone in their small town to know about the boy, the white mother and her white husband had kept him locked in the basement, tossing food down to him and ignoring his cries. Now the boy stomped around all day muttering “Fuck fucking fuck”—presumably the extent of the vocabulary he’d absorbed in his childhood home. For a seventeen-year-old from a picture-perfect suburb, Harry’s Vermont summer was a mind-expanding experience.
Harry’s fellow volunteers were a motley collection of brainy loners, aspiring hippies, proto-socialists, and melancholy folkies from across the country. There was lots of late-night rapping about the establishment, lots of guitar playing. Sometimes they sang for their supper at nearby churches—“Puff, the Magic Dragon,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” and all the other songs Harry had hated singing with Mum on our nursing home missions. Best of all, there was the possibility of sex. After coming of age in an all-boy family and an all-boy school, Harry realized for the first time that his interest in the opposite gender might be reciprocated. Among people he would recall fondly as “outsiders and misfits,” Harry felt at home in a way he never had before. When he returned to Dedham at the end of the summer, the prospect of resuming his old life seemed crushing. He felt he had changed so much, only to come back to a place where nothing had changed. It was at this point, alone in an empty house, that he stood at his bedroom window, wondering whether he should jump.
Ned, Mark, and I had no idea of the exhilaration Harry had felt in Vermont or the despondency he had felt on coming home. When he hitchhiked down to the Cape, where the rest of us were on an end-of-summer vacation, Harry seemed the same slightly prickly older brother who emerged from his room only to dominate us on the croquet pitch or the tennis court. But after his taste of freedom, he was determined to get still farther away. The following summer, he mopped floors at a welding-supply store until he’d saved enough money to travel across the country with a friend. One August dawn I drove him to the turnpike entrance ramp, from which he would hitch to his friend’s house in Delaware. I don’t remember what we talked about on the drive, or whether we talked at all, but I remember the envy and admiration I felt as I headed back toward my less-than-hip job as a day camp counselor and watched my brother, thumb out, recede in the rearview mirror. After his freshman year in college, Harry spent a second summer with AFSC, painting houses for the elderly in rural Michigan, where he fell in love with another volunteer, an olive-skinned, raven-haired girl of such beauty and sweetness that Ned, Mark, and I were stunned into silence when Harry brought her home for a visit. After his sophomore year, Harry worked as a busboy at an Italian restaurant until he’d saved enough to fly to Australia, where he got a job on a ranch in the outback north of Adelaide. He was about as far away as he could get from home and still be on this planet.
Harry had told the ranch owner he knew how to ride; in fact, his equestrian experience consisted of a few half-hour lessons he’d taken as a child. On the first morning, he was too proud to admit he’d never saddled a horse. He watched the other ranch hands, thinking it couldn’t be that difficult. But as he cinched his saddle, he noticed them nudging one another and chuckling. The moment Harry hoisted himself onto the horse, trying desperately to look casual, the horse bolted. (Later, the jackaroos, as Australian cowboys are called, told him that the horse they had given him, the aptly named Tuffy, was so dangerous that no one ever rode him—except greenhorns like Harry.) Unfortunately, Harry hadn’t cinched Tuffy’s saddle tightly enough. It slid under the horse, Harry along with it. Soon, he was being dragged by the foot across the hard ground. Eventually, galloping through a stream, Tuffy shrugged off Harry, who banged his head on a rock and woke up that afternoon in the manager’s home. Years later, when he told us the story, he would laugh. At the time, Harry, who prided himself on never showing weakness, was so mortified that he considered walking away from the ranch and never coming back. Realizing, however, that he was dozens of miles from the nearest town, he stayed. He was given a gentler horse, Old Chester, and he spent the next four months herding sheep and cattle, mending fences, castrating bulls, and hanging out with the foul-mouthed jackaroos. At night, he lay in his bunk, plowing through the fattest novels—Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Moby-Dick—that he’d been able to cram into his backpack.
Leaving the ranch that winter, Harry spent a few weeks picking tobacco in New Zealand before setting off across Southeast Asia. Determined to travel as far as he could on a few dollars a day, he made his way through Malaysia, Thailand, and India. Soon after arriving in Delhi, however, he found himself doubled over with stomach cramps. (He suspects the culprit was a half-eaten popsicle he found on the street, which, in keeping with Colt sibling dinnertime strategy, he gobbled up before someone else could gobble it up first.) After five days of misery he was able to get a flight home. From the airport, my father rushed him to the hospital. Over the following weeks, to the horror of our parents and the alarm of his doctors, Harry would lose thirty pounds from his already spare frame, withering away to a skeletal 115. I remember visiting him in the hospital and being appalled—and, I am ashamed to admit, slightly gratified—at the sight of my invincible brother seated, as he was throughout my hour-long stay, on a portable steel toilet, hospital johnny hiked up, unshaven, and vulnerable, speaking in a barely audible croak.
With the help of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the infection was eventually identified as a new strain of shigella, a bacterium resistant to most antibiotics used at the time. After two weeks in the hospital, Harry was well enough to come home. By then, he had made a decision. Before leaving for Australia, he had been a social studies major with vague plans of becoming a teacher or maybe doing something in public health. Now, whether it was the memory of the children he’d cared for in Vermont, the legions of sick people he’d seen in Southeast Asia, or the experience of his own illness, the boy who hated the sight of blood decided to go into medicine. He would be the first doctor in our family for as far back as anyone could remember.
Even when Harry was at home, however, he still seemed 10,000 miles away. That summer, he took organic chemistry, a course he needed in order to switch to the premed track. Friends house-sitting in Cambridge invited him to crash on their couch. But when the owner found out there was an extra person living there, Harry had to leave. Rather than move home, Harry—determined to preserve his newfound independence—spent the last two weeks of summer school sleeping under a fir tree outside the physics lab.
* * *
Harry didn’t talk much about his adventures, and I didn’t ask. Even had he confided in me, I was so preoccupied with my own world I might not have heard. By the time he came back from Australia, I was a sophomore at the same college he had worked so hard to get away from. I hadn’t intended to go to Harvard. Well aware that generations of family members had preceded me, I was determined to rebel—by attending Yale. But Yale refused to cooperate, and I ended up at Harvard, where my father, who worked in the development office, had convinced me to apply. Looking back, I wonder whether I had wanted Yale because I didn’t want to share a college with my older brother. It seems equally possible that I ended up at Harvard because I wanted to keep up with him.
I arrived at college determined to experience everything I hadn’t experienced in high school, and then write poems about it. I vowed to read every book in Widener Library; to drink through all 187 foreign beers on the menu at the Wursthaus; to memorize Yeats’s Collected Poems as I worked the breakfast shift in the freshman dining hall dishroom; to lose my virginity. My first day, in a paroxysm of ambition, I tried out for a play, auditioned for a singing group, signed up to work on a literary magazine, looked into tutoring inner-city kids, took a yoga class, and chatted into the night with a chestnut-haired government major from California I wouldn’t see again till graduation. But having swanned through my provincial prep school, with its graduating class of forty-two boys, I felt lost at Harvard, which seemed populated by intensely blasé Manhattanites who smoked clove cigarettes, subscribed to The New Republic, and knew that George Eliot was a woman. Four days after I’d unpacked my father’s old army duffle—luggage I had hoped would make me seem simultaneously rugged and ironic—I was aghast to find myself in my father’s office, weeping in front of him for the first time since I was a child. Dad listened quietly, assured me things would get better, told me that he and Mum thought the world of me.
I have always remembered Dad’s kindness to me that day. What I hadn’t remembered, until the evidence stared up at me from my journal thirty-eight years later, was that before I found my father, I had gone looking for my older brother. I wonder how many years it might have saved us if I had found Harry. I wonder what I would have said to him, what he would have said to me, whether I would have cried in front of him. But he wasn’t in his dorm room, so I tracked down my father instead. I wouldn’t see Harry till we were home for Thanksgiving. Back on familiar turf, in our familiar roles, I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling him that I had needed him. It would be a long time before I looked for Harry again.
* * *
My feelings of inadequacy ran deep. I wanted to be a great poet, but I had the sneaking suspicion that my prosaic background left me nothing to write about. I longed to be a coal miner’s son like Lawrence, a consumptive like O’Neill, an Irishman like Yeats—or just to have been born in Brooklyn. Lacking such bona fides, I did what I could. I devoured literary biographies and back issues of The Paris Review for clues to the writing life. When I read that Hart Crane composed his poems while listening to Ravel’s Bolero, I bought the record and played it over and over as I wrote, until my roommates threatened to strangle me. When I read that Baudelaire smoked a pipe, I bought a pouch of Balkan Sobranie and took to puffing pensively. When I read that Ernest Hemingway wrote “as soon after first light as possible,” I set my alarm and was at my desk by dawn. When I read that James Baldwin wrote after everyone else in his house had gone to bed, I waited till my roommates were asleep, then tiptoed out to the living room to write until I dozed off. Having no idea who I was, I became an amalgam of affectations, like one of those composite characters Mum taught us to draw when we were kids.
From my research, one thing was clear: the most important prerequisite for becoming a writer was an aptitude for unhappiness. Rimbaud, Crane, Kerouac, Thomas, Jarrell, Kees, Fitzgerald, Hemingway—how exquisitely miserable my role models were! The early 1970s were a particularly propitious time for tormented writers. Confessional poetry was at its most loquacious, and the Boston area was especially high-decibel ground. Lowell was teaching at Harvard, in between trips to McLean Hospital; Sexton lived a few suburbs over from my hometown; and Wellesley-bred Sylvia Plath and her suicide had recently been immortalized in The Savage God, a dog-eared copy of which every English major seemed to be equipped.
I longed to be a confessional poet, but I had nothing to confess. I was determined to develop some problems of my own—or at least to exude a pheromone of distress. I cultivated a look of Pre-Raphaelite melancholy and talked blithely about how depressed I was. (When a friend told me I resembled the title character in Henry Wallis’s painting The Death of Chatterton, I swelled with pride.) I abandoned Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro in favor of Munch, Ensor, and Schiele. Like Lana Turner awaiting her destiny at Schwab’s, I sat for hours in the sub-sub-basement of Widener Library, writing poems about cemeteries and gargoyles, waiting to be discovered by the New Yorker. I composed the first seventy-nine pages of a novel about a sensitive young writer overwhelmed by the insensitivity of the world around him. I wrote down everything I did or said or thought in a succession of numbered journals, the current volume of which I carried everywhere and produced whenever I felt even more self-conscious than usual, scribbling in its pale-green pages with an air of sheepish apology, as if I had received an unexpected call from the muse that I just had to take. At one point, believing my genius couldn’t be contained in a single volume, I kept two journals, one a repository of poignant similes, witty aperçus, and other poetic raw material, the other a blow-by-blow account of what I read for class, what I ate for lunch, what I dreamed at night, and other momentous details of my daily life—all of which I assumed would be of vital interest to future literary scholars who, long after my death, would comb through my “juvenilia” for clues to my oeuvre. And I drank.
Alcohol was not new to me. When I had gulped down my first beer at sixteen and been infused by a sudden, golden warmth, I had an epiphany: This is what my father found on the way home from work at night. Liquor seemed to have an effect on my self-confidence as immediate and prodigious as that of spinach on Popeye’s biceps. In high school, my friends and I had drunk whenever possible, but the opportunities had been few: a jelly jar of gin pilfered from a parental liquor cabinet, a beer or two drained at the once-in-a-blue-moon party we happened to get wind of. At college, there was an unlimited supply: half-gallons of Almaden at poetry workshops; cases of Schlitz at proctors’ parties; kegs of beer at dances; tureens of sticky sangria at cast parties; buckets of Hawaiian Punch and grain alcohol at fraternity blowouts; tumblers of Black Russians at the alumni receptions for which my a capella group performed; goblets of cognac at final club dinners; bottle after bottle of bourbon, scotch, and vodka in the bars that lined Mass Ave; shelf after shelf of anything I wanted at the package store, which I now knew as “the packy.” As if alcohol wasn’t enough, other culturally sanctioned substances were readily available. By the time I got to college, the sixties revolution I had longed to be part of had ended, but the drugs were still around. With the Vietnam War all but over, and flower power having wilted to a desultory residue of Watergate hearings and aging, burnt-out rock groups, I could no longer justify their use on sociocultural grounds, but I did them anyway, consuming whatever was put in front of me the way an anthropologist in the field doggedly eats every bite of the native fare provided by his indigenous hosts. And, after years of trying to shame my parents into quitting, at the very moment when cigarette packs were first required to carry a label warning that their contents “may be hazardous to your health,” I took up smoking myself. How could I be a bona fide poet without a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other?
I started slowly, but, bringing to bear the competitive instincts honed at the Colt kitchen table, I drank with a certain ambition, as if the alcohol itself had been spiked with the divine afflatus, as if I believed that by drinking like Hart Crane, I might be able to write like Hart Crane. In time, however, the quantity and quality of the poems I wrote decreased in proportion to the amount I drank. Late-night literary conversations became increasingly sodden. The mellifluous vocabulary of poetry (pantoum, villanelle, sonnet, strophe, sestina, anapest, caesura, dactyl, spondee, trochee) gave way to the bruised vocabulary of drinking (wrecked, toasted, wasted, basted, plastered, blitzed, soused, fried, smashed, stewed, pissed, polluted, totaled, bombed, hammered, loaded, lubricated, trashed, fucked up). I had read that the Eskimos had their sixty words for snow; my friends and I had nearly that many for inebriation. Our favorite—a word so redolent of unconscious self-loathing it’s amazing we could bring ourselves to utter it—was shitfaced, whose pronunciation varied according to the amount of alcohol ingested. The more we drank, the more we’d emphasize the second syllable: “Shi’FACED,” we’d suddenly roar in one another’s faces, apropos of nothing. (In its etymological defense, I might point out that shitfaced was a versatile word, capable of being dismantled into its component parts and redeployed with subtly different shades of meaning: getting shitty implied a slightly higher blood alcohol level than getting faced.) I abandoned my plan of drinking my way around the world at the Wursthaus—too expensive, too bourgeois—in favor of downing pints of Guinness at the Plough & Stars, a cozy pub whose Irish overtones seemed far more literarily useful, or draining twenty-five-cent drafts at Whitney’s, a blue-collar hole-in-the-wall patronized by solitary middle-aged men whose silence I assumed bespoke an oracular wisdom and not a pie-eyed stupor as we marinated in the evening light, a tableau vivant I convinced myself was not pathetic but Hopperesque.
I viewed my drinking as a necessary adjunct to my poetry, but it served another, less overt purpose. I had spent my first eighteen years trying to be the good son, the one my parents didn’t have to worry about. I was tired of being Gallant, who, I now realized, was an insufferable suck-up. I wanted a turn at being Goofus—or, as I preferred to interpret him at the time, Rimbaud. But my transgressions were less flights of the imagination than boorish frat-boy behavior: stealing beer mugs from bars; urinating in public; breaking bottles; lobbing trash cans into the street. (Even then, I hedged my bets; before I threw the trash cans, I looked around to make sure no police were in the vicinity.) On a visit home, listening to my mother fret about my brothers, I was suddenly annoyed. “I have problems too,” I blurted out. (I felt a sibling rivalry, it seems, even when it came to dysfunction.) Mum was taken aback. I’m not sure she really wanted to know that her happiest son was unhappy. She asked the right questions anyway. She was ready to listen. But I wasn’t ready to tell her. I aspired to being an enfant terrible, yet I still wanted to be a good boy.
Through it all, I convinced myself I was having a good time. Indeed, in my journals, moments of exuberance surface through the fog: walking home from Boston jazz joints in the rain after the subway shut down for the night; singing with my friends in the echoey bowels of deserted parking lots; dancing to Motown in the off-campus apartment we called Xanadu, the top floor of a four-story rattletrap that visibly swayed during our parties like the joint-is-literally-jumping sharecropper shacks in 1930s cartoons; rappelling down the side of a friend’s dormitory at dawn as a milk truck clattered by. At some point, however, I went from wanting to have problems to having problems. I can’t pinpoint the moment when this metamorphosis occurred. Perhaps it was the night when, at the end of a long, bibulous evening, a friend drove a carful of us the wrong way through a one-way underpass, and, while the other passengers screamed at him to turn around, I cheered him on. I called myself a poet but I couldn’t even see that this nihilistic escapade was a metaphor for my own unraveling life. Drinking had started out as an adjunct to the poetry; over four years of college, poetry had become an excuse for the drinking. If, as I began to suspect, I couldn’t write like Hart Crane, at least I could drink like Hart Crane. Senior year, I was invited to be part of a reading sponsored by a local literary magazine that had accepted one of my poems. It was a big opportunity for me. At a Kentucky Derby party that afternoon, I drank so many mint juleps that by the time I took the stage that evening, I could barely make out the words on the page.
Deep down I knew that my drinking had nothing to do with poetry. I had arrived at Harvard determined to feel everything, and I convinced myself that alcohol would assist me in that task. “Only connect!” I had written in my journal after reading E. M. Forster freshman year, and as I wandered from place to place, person to person, party to party, I thought I was doing nothing but connecting. I see now, of course, that I was doing everything in my power to keep from connecting. Harry had gone ten thousand miles to get away; I stayed close to home but found another way to remove myself. At some level, I must have understood this. My poetry—more confessional than I realized at the time—was, I see now, all about missed connections: estranged brothers, distant fathers. (Curiously, I never connected my downing drafts at Whitney’s with my father downing cocktails at the end of the day; if I had, I would have had to admit that I was drinking far more than he ever did.) I only knew that as long as I was holding a bottle, the night seemed to hold possibility. Eventually, however, the bartender shouted last call, the music ended, the dancing stopped, the lights came up, and the night always ended the same way, as I observed in my journal, in a rare moment of honesty: “And once again I find myself cold and alone, wandering the three o’clock streets.”
The connection I most wanted to make, of course, was with the opposite sex. I was mortified beyond measure that, despite embarrassed makeout sessions with girls who were almost as nervous as I, I was, technically, still a virgin. In my desperation, I made reconnaissance missions across the river to those establishments whose pinups I’d found so alluring in high school and watched bored strippers and baggy-pants comics on the stage of the erotically-if-oxymoronically-named Pilgrim Theatre, telling myself that I was bearing witness to the last remnants of traditional burlesque and my visits, therefore, had something of an educational component. On a college glee club tour of Europe, after evenings spent singing Renaissance motets in ancient cathedrals, I’d search out the city’s red-light district as if I were a sociologist conducting cross-cultural research, eyeing the prostitutes hungrily but never getting closer than the far side of the street. After a summer digging ditches in Southern California, I took a bus to Tijuana, determined, at last, to lose my virginity. But after patrolling the streets for several hours, trying to decide which dingy bar might yield the most accessible options, I couldn’t find a bank that would cash my traveler’s checks on a Sunday, and had to take the bus back to San Diego in my still-uncorrupted state. I told myself that if things went on this way much longer, I’d go to New York and audition for Oh! Calcutta!, and somehow, with all that onstage nudity, I couldn’t help getting laid. Or I’d join a cult—one of those loosey-goosey ones in which even the ugliest people were permitted to take part in the orgies. In the end, I was spared such lengths. One night at a party at Xanadu, an older woman (maybe even as ancient as twenty-four or twenty-five), a friend of a friend, who was at least as drunk as I, was waiting for me when I went to bed. Though grateful to have lost my virginity, a week later, after a visit to the college health services, I learned that I had gained a case of the crabs—a fact I noted casually in my journal as if it were just another occupational hazard of the writing life. But the whole business left an enduring residue of shame.
All the time I was wandering around Cambridge in confusion, Harry was buckling down to his premed program. He and I were not only at the same college, we were, after his year in Australia, in the same graduating class. Though we lived only three blocks from each other, we might as well have been on opposite sides of the world. What little time Harry didn’t spend in libraries and laboratories he spent playing chess with his roommates and working as a bartender to save money for medical school. (He rarely drank himself.) I spent my time editing literary magazines and singing with my all-male a capella group, whose members constituted a posse of substitute brothers. I was still a little intimidated by my real brother. Harry had worked with disabled children, hitchhiked across the United States, herded cattle in Australia, traveled across Southeast Asia, nearly died in India, and been awarded conscientious-objector status during the war—just the kinds of experiences I dreamed of being able to cite in the author’s biography I envisioned on the back of my first book of poems, under a photograph of the brooding author. By contrast, I had taught suburban summer-campers to make lanyards, crossed the United States by Greyhound bus, toured Europe with my college glee club, and been enormously relieved when, nine months after I registered, the draft was abolished. But there was something more. Harry and I had gone to college to try on new selves, and now we avoided each other, as if our shared childhood was a secret we didn’t want anyone else to stumble upon. Friends who found out I had a brother couldn’t understand why I never invited him over, why I never mentioned him. How could I? Harry knew who I really was beneath my literary camouflage—after all, he had heard me chant the word looties, heard me sing the Beverly Hillbillies theme song twenty times in a row, seen me writhe under the pressure of a surgically applied noogie. In any case, after searching for him the first week of freshman year, I never walked the three blocks to see him again. Instead, I wrote poems about the distance between us.
One night during sophomore year, on my way to meet some friends at a bar, I saw a man with a familiar-looking mop of curly black hair studying the notices on a bulletin board. It was Harry. Telling myself I shouldn’t keep my friends waiting, I kept walking. Was I worried I’d be embarrassed by him—or that he’d be embarrassed by me? Senior year, I ran into Harry on the street near his dorm. We talked. According to my journal, “I tried to explain some things to him.” What things? That I was drinking too much? That I felt lost? That I didn’t understand how we had grown so far apart? That despite the distance between us, I still felt inexplicably bound to him? One afternoon, I saw the movie On the Waterfront, and when I heard Brando say, “You was my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit,” I found myself tearing up. A few months later, we graduated, and Harry was off to Alabama to work in a mental hospital, and I was off to write poetry in Paris.
* * *
Little did I know that Ned was no less lost than I. When I started college, Ned had three more years of high school, years he wouldn’t have to share the campus with me. But our mother began teaching there, and her shadow was far larger than mine. She was not only a wildly popular art instructor, but a Pied Piper to the idiosyncratic, the quirky, and the confused—words that might have described Ned at the time. Seeking guidance from his teacher-mother, however, was the last thing Ned was likely to do. Ned joined the outing club, rowed varsity crew, starred in plays, and sang in the glee club and the a capella group. Girls melted over his McCartneyesque solo on the Beatles’ “If I Fell.” But he still felt something of a failure. “Looking back, I think I unconsciously decided that since I couldn’t succeed as much as my older brothers, I was going to go the other way—and not be successful,” he says now. He gravitated toward a group of similarly disaffected classmates whose motto was “Fuck it.” Friday nights, wearing the old green canvas jackets they’d bought at the Army Navy store, they’d wait outside the packy for someone over the age of eighteen willing to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for them. Taking it to a friend’s house, they’d drink, smoke pot, and listen to music until someone passed out.
Ned was happier in the summer, away from home, when he cleared out a room for himself in the barn of our grandparents’ place on Cape Cod and worked at the local fish market, unloading trucks, prying open quahogs, filleting striped bass. It seemed an extraordinarily cool job to me, the kind Kerouac would have had if he’d had a job. At night, Ned and his friends found as much excitement as they could in a quiet resort community: stealing bottles of parental booze; tossing cherry bombs; executing tire-squealing, sand-spraying 360s on the beach at night in Dad’s ancient Comet, which was known to Ned’s friends as the White Bomb, not for its velocity but for its decrepit appearance. (Years after Mark had nearly fallen through the rotting floorboards of our old Ford Fairlane, Ned discovered that the holes in the floorboards of the Comet made a handy emergency disposal chute for joints whenever a police car hove into view.) One summer morning we looked out the window of our grandparents’ house and instead of the familiar Stars and Stripes flying from the flagpole we spied a red-and-yellow McDonald’s banner—plunder from one of Ned’s nocturnal exploits. Another morning we came down to the beach to find BONZO DOG BAND scrawled in red paint on a boulder, words that to our grandmother, as she came down for her morning swim, must have seemed as inscrutable as the words mene mene tekel upharsin had seemed to Belshazzar. The handiwork of a drunken friend of Ned’s who had felt compelled to immortalize the name of his favorite rock group, the words would resist Ned’s scrubbing and more than a decade of salt spray before they faded.
I had always suspected that beneath our old reflexive strife Ned and I were more alike than we cared to admit. But on visits home, we moved warily and politely around each other. At his high school graduation, I read what friends had written about him in his yearbook, below a photograph in which he sat cross-legged on the bow of a boat, brandishing a beer. Their commentary was a farrago of allusions and in-jokes, none of which I understood. I didn’t know my brother. I didn’t have a clue.
Ned applied to Harvard because he felt he was supposed to, because his older brothers had, but his grades weren’t good enough and he wound up at a small Connecticut college with an acclaimed theater program. During his freshman year, I drove down to New London with my parents to see him in The Madwoman of Chaillot. At the height of my suffering-poet period, I envied Ned the dark, dreary, down-at-heels city where Eugene O’Neill, one of my heroes, had been so miserable. (Unbeknown to me, Ned loved O’Neill, too, and later told me that while I had been drinking twenty-five-cent drafts at Whitney’s, he had been drinking twenty-five-cent drafts at the Dutch Tavern, an old O’Neill hangout.) Ned had traded in his army jacket for a sheepskin coat that, with his new mustache—much thicker than my own painstakingly cultivated weedy strip—made him look like a younger version of the Marlboro Man. Though Ned vowed to work harder in college, he spent a good deal of his time at parties. One night, after an evening of drinking, he and his friends broke into the kitchen of the downtown hotel in which, coincidentally, O’Neill’s older brother had spent his last years at the bar, and stole several tubs of ice cream. They were gulping it down when Ned noticed a potted palm he thought might look good in his dorm room. He began dragging the heavy container across the lobby, but when he tried to maneuver it through the revolving door, it got stuck. The night watchman came running. Ned was too drunk and too stubborn to retreat without his prize, and the guard punched him over and over before he was able to crawl out to the car in which his friends were waiting. When he came home for Christmas, Ned still had a black eye that, he explained to our parents, he had acquired in a fall. When he told me the real story, I was impressed. Ned was a far more authentic enfant terrible than I.
A few nights later, Ned came home with the other eye black, too. He and a few friends from high school had been drinking in a dicey part of Boston when they’d been hassled by a group of young men. Ned’s friends had fled; Ned had taken refuge in a phone booth, which his attackers rocked until it tipped over. I felt chastened. One black eye seemed a badge of honor; two seemed a little sad. Ned spent much of the vacation in his room, the shades drawn.
Not long before going back to college, Ned had a fierce argument with our mother. Ned retreated upstairs, and I followed. I urged him to talk to Mum, to repair their relationship. He shook his head, trembling, trying to hold back tears. “It’s too late,” he said. “It can never be fixed.” He added, bitterly, that ours was the most screwed-up family he knew. I protested that ours was no worse than some, and a lot better than many. I said that at least we brothers got along. Ned eyed me as if I were crazy. “Brothers are supposed to look out for each other, they’re supposed to be close to each other,” he said. “We’re nothing like that.”
* * *
While the rest of us were pulling away from the family, Mark was longing to pull the family together. But with Harry and me at college and Ned spending as much time out of the house as possible and then going off to college himself, Mark was, in essence, the only brother still at home. After years of not being able to get a word in edgewise at the dinner table, he was alone with our parents in a suddenly quiet house. In some ways, Dad, whom he adored, was the closest thing Mark had to a brother at the time. Dad and Mark tossed a ball in the backyard, entered parent-child tennis tournaments, went to Harvard football games together, and watched the Red Sox and the Bruins on TV—all the stuff Dad had once done with Harry and me. When Dad came home from work with a few drinks under his belt, Mark tried to ignore it. With his brothers gone, Mark relied even more on his pack of friends. Every Saturday morning after breakfast, they’d gather in someone’s backyard for all-day nerf football games, breaking for interludes of street hockey or walks down to the Plaza to hang out over milk shakes at Friendly’s. When I was home, Mark and I would kick a soccer ball or play knee hockey, and Mark’s delight at being included was palpable. Preoccupied with my “problems,” however, I’d cut short our game to return to Cambridge, in case there was a party I might be missing.
* * *
If only we had spent more time together beyond the gravitational forces of home, my brothers and I might have acknowledged one another’s fitful evolution. But on the rare occasions we were all in one place—Thanksgiving, Christmas, a few days at the end of summer—we quickly, unwittingly, resumed our familiar roles: Harry the loner, Ned the rebel, Mark the baby of the family, me the peacemaker. Even as I worked so hard to become someone new myself, I wouldn’t allow my brothers to change. There were good times: playing table hockey, laughing at old jokes, sharing popcorn at a movie. But for the most part, we remained in our own spheres. We no longer fought, or even argued much. It might have been better to have had that contact than none at all. But while I lamented the distance between us—“I think there should be no relationship closer than that of two brothers,” I wrote in my journal—I did nothing to bring us together. “When it came time for me to leave,” I wrote after one visit, “I had the sensation of blowing it—not getting down to the mind-bending conversations I know we could and should be having.” The summer after Harry and I graduated from college, our grandfather died. We met for the funeral on a drizzly July day in the small Rhode Island town where he had grown up. After the service, as my brothers and I shouldered Gramps’s coffin through the church, it struck me how united we must have seemed to the people we passed. Outside, we slid the coffin into the hearse, and scattered to our separate lives.
* * *
Christmas was the one time we tacitly agreed to be a family, to let the comforting rituals lull us into recapturing some of our early happiness: trimming the tree with Mum’s hand-painted ornaments, crowning the top branch with Harry’s angel; listening to Dad read “The Night Before Christmas” in his gravelly voice; standing shoulder to shoulder as we sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” at midnight mass; walking home together through the sleeping town. At seven on Christmas morning, Mark, the only one of us still young enough to want to get up early, would knock gently on our doors: “It’s time for stockings,” he’d say. Harry, Ned, and I would groan, but we’d trudge into our parents’ bedroom to open the stockings Mum had filled by the fireplace. Afterward, the smell of bacon lured us down to the kitchen, where Dad was fixing a scrambled-egg-and-English-muffin breakfast. We grumbled good-naturedly about the family tradition that said every last dish had to be washed before we were permitted to file into the living room for presents. Led by Harry, we joined in fraternal choruses of exaggerated oohs and aahs as each box was opened. Clearing away the wrapping paper and ribbons, we agreed that even though Mum had declared it was going to be a “lean Christmas” (triggering fraternal singalongs of “I’m Dreaming of a Lean Christmas” à la Bing Crosby), it hadn’t been lean at all.
* * *
One Christmas morning, when I was twenty-one, we gathered in the kitchen, where Dad was cooking our traditional eggs-and-bacon breakfast. The previous evening, Dad had been at a party at a neighbor’s house. He had come home late, slurring his good nights, clearly incapable of accompanying us to midnight mass. Now he stood at the stove, thick-voiced, heavy-lidded. No one said anything. Mum quietly folded napkins and slipped them under the forks on the table. Harry, Ned, and I leaned against the counter. For years, we had ignored our father’s drinking, as one might ignore a low-grade fever, and now we pretended, as we always did, that nothing was wrong. I think we might have gone on pretending forever if Mark—at thirteen the youngest, the smallest, the sweetest, the one who found it hardest to make himself heard, the one to whom our father was closest—hadn’t spoken through his gathering tears. “Dad,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “You drank too much last night and it makes me so sad when you do that.” Our father continued arranging lines of bacon on the paper towel as his eyes filled.
It would be several years before he quit drinking for good. But that moment in the kitchen was, I think, what persuaded him to stop.