Sifting through a chest of old letters not long ago, I came across a sheaf of aerogrammes postmarked Buenos Aires and addressed to me in Paris. I had moved there after graduating from college, intending to write poetry in a garret on the Left Bank. I had no clue how I would support myself. Fortunately, a well-connected uncle got me a job with a company that sold cigarette lighters and electric shavers, a job to which Rimbaud surely would never have stooped. By day, I crunched numbers for marketing reports. By night, I holed up in my apartment—not quite the Left Bank garret I’d envisioned, but a decent-size studio in a disappointingly fashionable arrondissement on the Right Bank—and, like Harry in Australia, plowed my way through the longest novels in the English language. I must have written about my loneliness—although I’m sure I wasn’t brave enough to use the word—to Ned, who had taken a year off from college and, through that same benevolent uncle, gotten a job in Argentina.
A month into my stay, the landlord’s wife slipped an aerogramme under my door.
Just got your letter. It sounds like you’re not too impressed with the situation over there. The first thing I want to say, George, as everyone has told you, I’m sure—it’s a bitch the first month or so, language worst of all. It makes the loneliness all the worse (it did for me!). But shit, man, if you let it dwell on you that things are in a bad news way, things’ll go like shit. Just try to find something positive to think about whenever you’re down. Christ, I’ve had it bad here off and on but when I realize how much I could be gleaning from this experience, I get disgusted for feeling sorry for myself.
Ned, who had been in Argentina for six weeks before I arrived in Paris, went on to write of weekdays checking and rechecking budget data, weekends riding horses and eating grass-fed beef at his boss’s ranch in the pampas. I envied how settled he sounded. But it comforted me to know that Ned had gone through some of the same things in his foreign country that I was going through in mine. It felt strange to have my younger brother counseling me, but because he was seven thousand miles away, I was able to listen. I took his cursing to be a measure of his concern, and when, in the midst of those “shits,” he used my name, I was touched.
With the Atlantic between us, Ned and I entered into a sporadic epistolary relationship. I looked forward to finding, when I got home from work, a flimsy sky-blue aerogramme with his familiar, hastily penned, left-handed printing on the front. Ned wrote about his love of Argentina, I wrote about my growing affection for Paris. Occasionally, we talked of family. At Thanksgiving Ned admitted that it was strange not to be home, eating turkey and playing touch football. “I wouldn’t have minded being there,” he admitted. If our correspondence wasn’t exactly Jamesian in its profundity, it was a start. We could, it seemed, stop playing Got You Last and talk to each other—at least if we were on separate continents. Ned had left behind his Marlboro Man sheepskin coat when he went to Argentina. I had brought it with me to France. On cold winter days I wore it as I walked the streets of Paris, and thought of my brother in Buenos Aires. When Ned wrote to suggest we meet in Europe that spring and bum around North Africa together, I urged him eastward. In the end, Ned couldn’t save enough money to cross the Atlantic, although he spent several days casing the docks of Buenos Aires, trying to find a freighter that would take him. So he hitchhiked up through Latin America to Massachusetts. I wandered around Spain and Morocco before flying home. That summer, we met in a bar on Cape Cod and traded travelers’ tales. We talked about O’Neill and Kerouac. We got drunk. As we staggered out into the windy August night, it felt as if we were finally becoming brothers.
* * *
Ned wasn’t the only brother to write to me in Paris. Near the bottom of the chest, I was surprised to find a letter from Harry. After telling me about his first year at medical school, he skipped a few lines and wrote, seemingly out of the blue:
I’m sorry I grew apart from you over the years, George. When I was younger, I’m not sure why, I really had to shut myself off from people—maybe I felt too vulnerable. Anyways, I can’t change what I’ve done or been. But I feel like over the last few years I’ve been getting myself together and I feel real . . .
The next line, obscured by a strip of blue paper where, years ago, the unfolded aerogramme had stuck on its own glue, was indecipherable no matter how I held it up to the light or carefully tried to peel the paper away. What did he feel, I wondered. Lucky? Hopeful? Glad?
The last few lines, however, were clear:
Anyways, I hope we can be closer in the future. I always cared for you tho I never liked to show it.
Much love,
your bro’
Harry
* * *
I wish I could say that these first brave bids for fellowship immediately flowered into unbreakable fraternal bonds. Back home, however, we resumed our separate orbits: Ned in college in Connecticut, Harry in medical school in Ohio, Mark in boarding school in New Hampshire, me in graduate school in Maryland, where, after what turned out to be a glorious year in Paris, I had moved to get a master’s degree in writing poetry.
In graduate school, the chicken-or-egg relationship between poetry and alcohol blurred still further. One night, driving with friends through East Baltimore on our way home from a surpassingly drunken evening, I found myself reciting “When You Are Old,” Yeats’s confession of unrequited love for Maud Gonne—one of the poems I’d memorized freshman year in the Harvard dishroom—to the rusted metal speaker at a Jack in the Box drive-through. “What can I get you?” a tired, disembodied voice crackled, as my fellow poets howled. “What can I get you?” If only I had known.
On graduation day, one of the poets threw a final bacchanal. My head still hurt from a party the night before, so I sipped a Coke and watched things disintegrate around me. One poet crawled off on her hands and knees, moaning, to vomit in the bathroom; a fiction writer staggered from person to person, shouting insults before passing out on the floor; a long-haired poet threw a glass of bourbon at his prostrate friend, prodded him with a boot, and yelled at him to get up; a Coleridge-loving senior on whom I had a Yeats-like crush walked out the door in disgust, saying “Fuck all of you.” The drunken excess that, when I was in its eye, had seemed an exuberant expression of Rimbaudian dérèglement de sens now seemed merely pathetic. The party ended when a Jagger-lipped poet ran outside into the blinding afternoon light, dancing with what seemed to be ecstasy but turned out to be fury as he darted into traffic, screaming incoherently at the cars rushing by on their homeward commute. Another sober poet and I wrestled him, thrashing and ranting, back to his apartment, where his wife sighed and herded him inside.
In the fall, I moved to New York, where I wrote poems, auditioned for shows, and waited tables. I drank less, but I was drifting and aimless, like a sailboat in irons.
* * *
Not long afterward, a few years since that Christmas in the kitchen with Mark, Dad stopped drinking. For good measure, he stopped smoking, too. He and Mum went into couples therapy and began the long, slow process of getting to know each other again. As my brothers and I watched their cautious reconnection, I think we realized that whatever happened between our parents, we’d have to begin sticking together. I recalled what Mum used to say to us in the old days when we couldn’t stop fighting: “Someday your father and I will be gone and you’ll only have each other.”
* * *
It occurred to me that if my parents could change, I might be able to change, too. I moved back to Baltimore and started work at a magazine. My first assignment was to spend a night at a hospital emergency room and describe what I saw. In my poetry days, I had dismissed doctors (and lawyers and bankers and businessmen) as pillars of the bourgeoisie—they weren’t artists—but as I watched them stitch up knife wounds and comfort feverish children, I was embarrassed by my arrogance. It occurred to me that this was what my older brother spent his life doing. What else about my brothers had I blinded myself to?
Though I went into journalism in order to have what I had always disdained as a “real job,” I found that I loved it. I stopped writing poetry. I wasn’t, it seemed, going to be the next Rimbaud. But I no longer wanted to be. Other changes followed with an ease that made them seem inevitable. I quit smoking, my drinking slowed to an occasional beer or two, and I fell in love with a girl whose vitality and optimism seemed as enviable to me as drinking myself insensate had seemed a few years earlier. On our first date, I found myself sipping a single beer for three hours because I didn’t want to miss a word she said.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that my awakening came not long after my older brother had begun to find contentment himself. Harry loved medicine, and he loved his medical school, an unconventional institution in Ohio where Benjamin Spock, the antiwar pediatrician whose baby-care book had served as our mother’s gospel, had taught for several years. After his experience with AFSC, Harry wanted to work in rural, underserved areas; now he spent his summers with a team of medical students driving from town to town in the foothills of eastern Kentucky, offering blood screenings and rudimentary physicals. Far from Harvard, far from Boston, paying his own way through school, Harry finally felt free of his family. At the same time, he began to find his way back toward us. When he came east on vacation, he was less reserved, more at ease. One Christmas he brought home a nursing student he’d been seeing. Harry seemed a different person around Sandy. He smiled more. He seemed happy—a word I wouldn’t have thought to apply to him since the days we’d played catch with Dad in the old Dedham backyard. As I watched them, I couldn’t help wondering whether this woman knew the real Harry. Had she played Monopoly with him? Had he put her in a half nelson? But the more I saw them together, the more I realized that perhaps it was I who didn’t know the real Harry. My older brother was growing up. I didn’t want to be left behind.
* * *
Backpacking home from South America had given Ned a dose of confidence and a taste for travel. Determined to finish college while spending as little time in the classroom as possible, he embarked on what seemed, from my vantage point, like a series of stirringly picaresque adventures. He acted in summer stock. He delivered boats to the Caribbean. He sailed on a two-masted schooner from Cape Cod to Puerto Rico, studying marine biology and maritime history while learning how to sew sails and steer by the stars. When a hurricane hit just before his ship entered the Sargasso Sea, Ned was one of the few on board not to get seasick. When the students took turns at the helm while checking the long lines, Ned was the only one able to maneuver the 120-foot boat close enough to snare a buoy on his first attempt. Arriving in San Juan Harbor at the end of the voyage, Ned found a job crewing on the Romance, a square-rigger that took honeymooners island-hopping in the Caribbean. Varnishing the gunwales, scrambling up the rigging to release the topsails, drinking rum in palm-shaded ports, Ned felt, for the first time, that he truly fit in. At winter’s end, the captain invited him to stay with the ship and spend a year cruising to the South Pacific. Ned had dreamed of sailing around the world but felt it was his duty to finish college. He reluctantly returned to school, where he made the Dean’s List for the first time. But he sometimes wondered whether he’d made the right choice. Thirty years later, when Ned and his wife went on an eco-tour of the Galápagos Islands, they sailed by a volcanic cliff on which, for more than a century, sailors had painted the names of the vessels on which they passed through these waters. Ned felt a twinge when he saw the name Romance.
* * *
Mark, too, would leave home. When he was thirteen, my parents sent him to boarding school, thinking a change might do him good. Mark wasn’t bullied at his new school, but he was still the smallest in his class, and though he made friends, he felt homesick and a little lost. I returned from my year in Paris in time to attend his ninth-grade graduation. In a snapshot Mum took, Mark looks eager and adoring, while I, sporting a weaselly Fu Manchu and recovering from a bout of dysentery acquired in Marrakesh, look emaciated and out of it. We seem as mismatched as Harry and I in the photo taken just before Harry left for boarding school.
In high school, Mark came into his own. He played on the varsity soccer, ski, and tennis teams. At home, he was finally big enough and good enough to compete in any sport we played. Indeed, he became the best tennis player of us all and spent summers teaching at a tennis camp, where he was a favorite with both campers and counselors. Mark loved working with kids. Around the same time, to my grateful relief, he also found that he loved physical labor—mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and all the other chores I had spent years trying to worm out of. He liked the discipline, as well as the gratification of immediate, tangible results: a closely cropped yard, a freshly cleared driveway. When he was sixteen, Mark spent his spring break pitching hay and mucking manure at our aunt’s dairy farm in Virginia. He counted it as one of his best vacations ever. Mark still fretted that he wasn’t as accomplished as his older brothers, but he worked hard, did well in school, and was prized by the admissions office for being such a persuasive tour guide. At his graduation, we watched Mark receive the prize for sportsmanship and school spirit. As he showed us around the campus, everyone seemed to know him. After the ceremony, Dad took a picture of the brothers—the first picture in many years with all four of us in the same frame. I’m grinning sheepishly; Ned is laughing, looking past us at someone out of camera range; Harry has an arm around Mark; Mark, in his commencement robes, seems exhilarated at being surrounded by his brothers. We look happy.
* * *
The more we began to establish our own lives, the closer we grew as brothers. In the fall of 1980, newly graduated from college with a degree in theater studies, Ned moved to New York to become an actor. He got headshots taken, made hundreds of copies of his resume, and bought an answering machine. He found an apartment share in Hell’s Kitchen. He got a job as a waiter at Steak & Brew, one of those all-the-watery-beer-you-can-drink places of which I had once been so fond. I had been back in New York only a few months myself, sleeping on a friend’s couch on the Upper West Side and trying to be a freelance writer. Neither Ned nor I had any money, so we’d walk the city, talking of Paris, Buenos Aires, and our fledgling careers. Spending time with Ned away from home, I began to appreciate his deadpan sense of humor, his curiosity, his willingness to try new things. He introduced me to sweet Italian sausage from Greenwich Village butcher shops whose floors were furred with sawdust, and empanadas from hole-in-the wall Argentinian joints along Eighth Avenue, where he bantered in Spanish with the countermen. One afternoon in Times Square we watched a tourist get fleeced at three-card monte, and Ned quietly pointed out how the shill hustled up business and the lookouts corralled the marks while keeping an eye out for police. When he came to dinner with some of my friends, Ned was drawn into talking a little about his time at sea. Afterward, my friends all said how great my brother was.
But having spent much of the previous two years on the ocean, Ned found New York claustrophobic and the theater business dispiriting. After playing leads in college, where he’d rehearse a single scene for hours, he found it hard to get accustomed to cattle calls, in which he’d file onstage with nine other actors, get eyeballed for a few seconds by three people behind a desk, and then be dismissed as not the right “type” as another ten actors filed in. When Ned got cast in the chorus of a nonpaying show, he had to drop out after a few weeks to keep his waiting job so he could pay the rent. The restaurant was so filthy that several times he had to position himself as he took an order so that his customers couldn’t see the cockroach traversing the wall behind him. To get to his apartment, he had to walk a gauntlet of massage parlors, porn shops, junkies, and hustlers. (I remember a haggard-faced prostitute hailing us on Eighth Avenue. “Going someplace?” she purred. “Yes, I am, thank you,” Ned replied. She looked at him for a moment and then screamed, “Fuck you, you smartass kid.”) To get to his room, Ned had to negotiate hallways that smelled of urine, a superintendent who was perpetually drunk, and three locks on his apartment door. His bedroom window, which had been painted shut, looked onto an airshaft so narrow he could read the numbers on the digital clock in the apartment across the way. Ned said he felt as if he were living at the bottom of a well. At night, he was kept awake by the crash of bottles tossed down the shaft by his upstairs neighbors.
As the months went by, Ned spent less time walking the city and more time in his apartment, reading pulp novels. His college girlfriend broke up with him. One day Ned and I met for lunch in Central Park, and Ned, talking about his life, began to cry. I put a hand on his shoulder and tried to console him. He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying through his tears. “I’m sorry.”
Not long after that, Ned decided to leave New York. Mum and Dad drove down from Massachusetts to retrieve him. Mum told me later that on his final day in Manhattan, on a last walk through Times Square, Ned played three-card monte and lost twenty dollars.
* * *
While Ned and I were in New York, Mark and Harry were in Ohio. It was surely no coincidence that Mark chose to go to college not far from where his eldest brother was in medical school. Several years earlier, before Mark left for boarding school, Mum had asked Harry to talk to him about the facts of life. Mark, of course, had insisted that he already knew everything he needed to know, but when Harry began quizzing him, he realized that Mark was as clueless as the rest of us had been at that age. (Mark later confessed that what scant knowledge he possessed had been gleaned from sneaking peeks at Mum’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.) Thereafter, knowing how lonely boarding school could be, Harry had stayed in touch. When Mark got to college, he and Harry visited each other, went to concerts together, talked on the phone. When Mark acquired his first girlfriend, Harry listened to him rhapsodize about the ups and counseled him through the downs. When Mark felt lonely and anxious, Harry told him how lonely and anxious he had felt at Mark’s age. Far from home, Mark found something of a second father in Harry. Harry, who may have felt it easier to confide in Mark than in brothers closer to his age, found in Mark another path back to his family. Mark eventually transferred to college back east, but whenever he felt low, he’d dial Harry’s number.
After his summers teaching tennis, Mark knew he wanted to work with children, but he worried that being a gym teacher and coach might not be considered sufficiently ambitious, so he majored in elementary education. He spent part of his senior year on the Zuni Indian Reservation in New Mexico, helping fifth-graders with their reading and writing, and showing them how to hit a forehand on the dilapidated neighborhood court. After graduation, he got a teaching job in the mountains of northern New Hampshire. Mark had always been good with kids, but keeping twenty-six fifth-and sixth-graders in order was a challenge for a guileless twenty-two-year-old. Mark knew no one in his new town, and though he’d never had trouble making friends, he was too busy trying to keep up with his work to socialize. There were happy moments—he coached the high school JV soccer team to the league championship, and each Friday night he treated himself to a beer and a Salisbury steak at the local diner, chatting with the owner and watching the Bruins on the overhead TV. But as winter came on, and his students went stir crazy, and his apartment on the top floor of a rooming house seemed especially cold and bleak, Mark got depressed. He did a good job of hiding it. When Ned and I came for a ski weekend, we were impressed by how grown-up our younger brother’s life seemed. We had no idea that after we left on Sunday afternoon, Mark would return to his room in the gathering darkness, stare at the stacks of papers he had to grade, and worry about how he’d get through the next five days. Often, in those dark times, he’d call Harry, who’d talk him through his anxiety.
By the end of his year in New Hampshire, Mark wasn’t sure he was cut out to be a teacher. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he knew he wanted to get away. He had heard there was good money to be made canning salmon in Alaska, so he decided to spend the summer there. Our parents worried that he might not be able to handle it, and though I was impressed with Mark’s resolve—driving across the country to find a job in Alaska was more adventurous than anything I’d ever done—I, too, wondered whether my sensitive youngest brother was ready for it. I remember spreading out a map of the United States on the dining room table and planning a route for him: suggesting campgrounds, giving him the names of friends to stay with, recommending sights not to miss, and surely conveying the message that if only he followed his older brother’s advice, he’d be okay. Feeling guilty that I hadn’t paid more attention to him when he was a child, I tended to be overprotective just as he was trying to assert his independence. One June morning, trying to disguise their nervousness, our parents waved as they watched Mark pull out of the driveway in his beat-up Chevy Nova, equipped with a cheap two-man pup tent, the map I’d annotated for him, an AAA TripTik Dad had gotten him, and a bag of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches Mum had prepared.
Driving all day, sleeping in his car at night, following none of my recommendations, Mark got to Alaska in five days. He found a job in a cannery on the Kenai Peninsula, where he worked eighteen-hour shifts hauling chunks of frozen salmon from the freezers to the cutting tables, using a sledgehammer to break up the fish, hoisting them onto conveyer belts, and boxing them for shipping. At the end of the day, he and his new friends from around the world ate cheeseburgers, drank cheap beer, and listened to bands in local bars before collapsing in their sleeping bags in the tent city of seasonal workers that bloomed on the edge of town. Mark’s routine left him exhausted but invigorated. He was on his own five thousand miles from home and yet for the first time in his life he didn’t feel homesick. He was doing something none of his brothers had ever done and he was doing it without any help from his family. In August, when the fish moved south, Mark and his friends moved too, getting cannery jobs in Ketchikan, where they bunked in a boardinghouse, five to a room. At the end of the summer, salmon season over, Mark drove back across the country with a friend, singing along to the radio, trolling for new stations as they passed out of the previous station’s range, flashing their high beams at passing truckers so the drivers would know when it was safe to cut back into the right lane, and getting a kick out of it when the truckers flashed their brights back to say thanks. I happened to be at home when Mark rolled into the driveway. Stepping from the car, tanned and fit, a thousand dollars in his pocket, my little brother looked like a man.
Mark would remain in Boston. He took a job on the grounds crew at the school for the blind where our father worked as a fund-raiser and quickly made himself an indispensable employee. He worked six days a week, volunteered for extra assignments, rarely used his vacation time, and never took a sick day unless he was practically at death’s door. Outside work, Mark had a circle of devoted friends, and he was the one who made sure they got together—organizing Saturday morning basketball games, golf weekends, dinners out, trips to Fenway Park.
* * *
Mark lived only twenty minutes from Ned, who had gotten a job as a carpenter’s helper. As a child, Ned had always loved building things, and now he found even the “grunt work” satisfying. After a long day of driving nails, caulking holes, and installing drywall, he’d spend the evening building himself a tool box or making a bookshelf for Mum and Dad. Nevertheless, he fretted that he should be doing something more conventionally “important.” It stung when a great-uncle told him, “Don’t worry, you’ll find a real job soon.” He’d always been interested in the news, so he took night classes in broadcasting and, eventually, wangled an internship at a Boston television station. He started out fetching coffee and delivering stories off the wire-service ticker, but in time he was allowed to write short news items and assist in the editing room. By his own admission, Ned had always been easily bored—among the reasons he loved traveling was that he saw something different every day—and journalism offered a never-ending procession of different stories. For six months he worked as a carpenter’s assistant by day and a news intern by night. When he was offered a full-time job at a station in Duluth, Minnesota, he bought an old orange VW Bug for six hundred dollars and drove west, engine light flickering the entire way. He was twenty-six. The station was tiny, the market minuscule, the salary a hair’s breadth above minimum wage, and the climate subarctic. Ned had one decent pair of shoes and an old blue blazer of Dad’s to wear on the air. But he had found what he wanted to do. When I was home for a visit, Mum and Dad showed me tapes of his stories—Ned interviewing old fur trappers and talking with Native Americans about how they harvested wild rice. With his good looks, resonant voice, and insatiable curiosity, he was a natural.
Ned rose rapidly up the television food chain: from Duluth (the 116th-largest market in the country), to Jacksonville (60th), to Raleigh (32nd). In each new place, he followed his customary when-in-Rome policy. In Duluth, he canoed the Boundary Waters; in Jacksonville, he lived near the beach and ate oysters and fried cooter; in Raleigh, he became a connoisseur of barbecue and earned the nickname “Ocean Boy” because, whenever he got the chance, he’d drive three hours to the Outer Banks to windsurf. In 1988, he returned to Boston (the 5th-largest market) to be a reporter at the station where he had interned. When Ned started in television news, he had set a goal: to be in a top-ten market within five years. He had done it in four. Looking back, he admits that part of his motivation was proving to his older brothers that he could succeed. “I always held myself up to you guys at high school,” he says. “You always did so well in academics and in sports.” He and his girlfriend, a producer he had met in Duluth, bought a reproduction saltbox on a quiet cul-de-sac in a Boston suburb. On his days off Ned used his carpentry skills to fix up the house. They got a dog, a mutt named Teddy, who was not much larger than Penny. Whenever they could get away, they headed down to Cape Cod.
* * *
Where once my brothers and I had been just as happy to spend time apart, we now went out of our way to spend time together. When they were on their home turf, I could see them not just as their childhood selves—people to react against or compare myself with—but for who they were. After medical school, Harry had gone into family practice, one of the least-well-paid specialties but one that offered maximum patient contact and unlimited opportunity for working with needy rural populations. When I visited Harry in Virginia, where he and Sandy had moved for his residency, he had been up all night delivering a baby. It had been a difficult birth, and as he described it I was bowled over by the drama of his work and the matter-of-factness with which he talked about it. Over the years, whether from the suffering he had seen as a doctor, from the influence of the effervescent Sandy, or just from the weathering effects of time, Harry’s sharp corners had been rubbed smooth. I had always prided myself on being the “sensitive” brother, but when I finally gave him a chance, Harry turned out to be a good listener. And when we played a round of golf for the first time in ten years, I found that Harry’s killer instinct had toned down to a mildly competitive proclivity. He still won.
Staying with Ned at his house outside Boston, I admired the shelves he’d made, the dogwoods he’d planted, the sun porch he’d built by himself. Over dinner, we talked about family but also about books, politics, and history, subjects that, in years past, Ned might not have raised with his supposedly more intellectual brother—or that his supposedly more intellectual brother might not have deigned to raise with him.
One fall, my girlfriend, Anne, and I invited Mark on a five-day canoe trip in the Everglades. At the last minute, Anne’s brother dropped out of our planned foursome, so Mark had the difficult task of paddling solo. It was a grueling vacation: nine or ten hours a day of canoeing, sometimes fighting our way across wind-whipped bays scalloped with two-foot waves, sometimes picking our way through mangrove labyrinths while clouds of mosquitos dined on us. Muscular from his outdoor work, Mark was not only a powerhouse paddler but an uncomplaining expedition member, keeping his cool and his sense of humor long after I had lost both. We spent Thanksgiving swaddled in mosquito netting on a tent platform deep in the mangrove wilderness, scarfing down a noodle-and-ham mush. It was one of the best Thanksgivings I’d ever had.
Each June, our parents rented a house on Cape Cod and we gathered for a week or two, just as we had when we were children. At an age when my friends’ parents, facing each other alone across the dinner table now that their children were gone, were drifting apart or divorcing, Mum and Dad seemed to be converging. They still had different interests: Dad had his tennis, his yard work, his men’s club, his Red Sox; Mum, in addition to teaching art and English, now taught Holocaust studies and death education, volunteered with AIDS patients, wrote poetry, organized peace vigils, and meditated. But whether they were showing us photos of a recent trip to Costa Rica or working together in the garden, we could see that there was no one with whom either of them would rather decipher a Spanish menu or dig up a dandelion.
We brothers, too, seemed to be getting a second chance. On the Cape, we played all the games that in childhood had ended in tears or double chicken wings. If there was tension over a close play at home plate or a disputed word in Scrabble, we let it go. If, in the presence of our parents, we began reverting to our old roles, we’d catch ourselves. We admired one another’s areas of expertise. Harry was still the master of any game he played. Ned was the handyman around the house and the captain of the waterfront. Mark was our pool sharp and lobsterman, and, as Dad got older, the substitute breakfast chef. I fancied myself the fisherman-in-residence, if only by virtue of the fact that I spent more time with a line in the water. But whenever one of my brothers pulled in a lunker, I was as happy as if I had caught it. (Almost.) One evening Harry reeled in a striper and brought it to a family cookout. As people oohed over his catch, Harry smiled and shook his head, “George showed me what lure to use,” he said. “He’s the real fisherman in the family.” I felt as if I had been knighted.
On the tennis court, we still tried hard to win, but we realized it wouldn’t kill us if we lost. When a brother fired off an ace or executed a passing shot, we applauded it. On crucial points, I no longer prayed for my opponent to double-fault. Harry and I had mellowed with age, and with Mark in the mix, things could never get too tense. In what seemed a curious refutation of the transitive principle, Harry usually beat me and I usually beat Mark, yet Mark, in a kind of Möbius-strip twist, usually beat Harry. It was as if none of us dared beat our older brother—unless he was so much older that a victory wouldn’t threaten the pecking order. We invited Ned to join us, but he always begged off, saying he wasn’t good enough and didn’t want to ruin our game.
Yet it didn’t feel right when one of us was missing; only when the four of us were together did things seem balanced. Sometimes we’d all cook dinner, chatting, listening to music, moving from refrigerator to stove to table, putting a hand on a brother’s shoulder as we maneuvered around him with a hot saucepan, tossing a spice bottle or a can of tomato paste to a brother across the kitchen, joining in on the chorus as Ned launched into a hilariously over-the-top rendition of “Shake Your Booty.” We always made more food than we needed, as if we were still afraid we’d have to fight over the last drumstick on the platter. We still ate as if we were in a race. Colt girlfriends invariably observed that they’d never seen anyone eat as fast as their boyfriend—until they met his brothers. But we no longer rushed from the table. We lingered, prolonging the conversation. Later, we’d play Trivial Pursuit or shoot pool, as the Red Sox game crackled on the radio. Occasionally, we played guitar with Mum and sang the old songs from our stint as nursing home troubadours.
On our last day, Dad always insisted on getting a picture of “the four boys.” We’d make a show of grumbling, but we were secretly pleased, I think, to gather on the back steps, Harry looking squarely into the camera, me trying to come up with witty alternatives to “say cheese,” Ned surreptitiously pinching Mark, Mark trying not to crack up. It was an excuse for us to have our arms around one another.
* * *
But the undertow had not entirely receded. One summer afternoon, we were playing that classic New England blood sport, croquet. Harry, as always, was several wickets ahead, so far ahead, in fact, that Ned, Mark, and I joked about teaming up against him to make the game interesting. And then we began to do just that, each of us ignoring the next wicket to go after Harry’s ball. We didn’t care which of us won; we just didn’t want Harry to—which, of course, made Harry all the more determined. I remember him sending Ned’s ball down the hill, where it rolled and rolled until it came to rest in a distant patch of poison ivy. The shot was within the rules, but it was executed with the kind of mercilessness we hadn’t seen from Harry in years. We redoubled our efforts, this time without the smiles. The old Harry would have responded by putting his head down and annihilating us. Now, in a voice husky with suppressed emotion, he said that if we were going to team up against him, he wasn’t going to play. Ned shook his head. “Don’t take it so seriously,” he said. “It’s just a game.”
Suddenly, Harry and Ned were shouting at each other—Harry arguing that ganging up on him wasn’t fair, Ned that Harry was too competitive. Mark and I, standing among the wickets, mallets in hand, were dumbfounded. There hadn’t been a cross word among the four of us in years. That it was between Harry and Ned was astonishing. Ned’s teenage battles with me were the stuff of family legend, but Harry and Ned had hardly seemed to be on each other’s radar when we were growing up. And yet thirty-two-year-old Harry and twenty-nine-year-old Ned had turned on each other with the abruptness of dogs who, frisking happily, suddenly go for each other’s throats.
I could see that our teaming up against Harry carried behind it the accrued frustration from all those childhood losses at football and Pounce. I could also see how watching his brothers unite against him might have provoked Harry’s old feelings of being an outsider in his own family. And how Harry’s seemingly effortless dominance in croquet that day might have tweaked Ned’s old feelings of frustration at not being as athletic as his older brothers. I had never seen Harry that angry. Indeed, all through adolescence, Harry had kept things so tight inside that I had never really seen him lose his temper. It was what I had always been most afraid of. “Come on, let’s deal with this right now,” Harry kept shouting at Ned. For a time, Ned shouted right back. But then he shook his head and began to walk away. “It’s not worth it,” he kept saying tersely. Harry followed right behind him: “Come on, let’s do it, don’t be a chicken, let’s get it out right now.” Harry later told Mark and me that he meant he wanted to talk things out with Ned, to get at the source of the tension between them. At the time, Mark and I assumed he wanted to fight—and we knew Ned had never been one to back down from a challenge. Indeed, as Ned strode across the field toward the water, I thought he was leading Harry farther from the house so they could punch each other where our parents couldn’t hear them. Mum, who was making a cup of tea in the kitchen, remembers hearing the shouts and worrying it was the end of us as a family.
Although the yelling seemed to go on forever, it may have lasted a minute or two. In the end, Harry and Ned went off in opposite directions to cool down. The tension dissipated, like a hurricane that suddenly veers out to sea and spends itself.
* * *
The croquet incident was so unexpected because by then some of us had started families of our own and the dramas of our childhood seemed progressively distant. Harry recently told me he had always reckoned that Mark or I would be first to marry because we were “the least screwed up.” But Harry ended up leading the way, as usual. One evening in 1982, he called to tell me he and Sandy were getting married. I was pleased but not surprised. I was surprised, however, and very pleased, when he asked me to be his best man. That summer, in the backyard of Sandy’s parents’ house in the foothills of Santa Fe, I stood at my brother’s side. Like the bride and groom, the celebration was low-key (Harry went jacketless), homey (Sandy’s mother served turkey casserole), and nontraditional (a mariachi band). It was a measure of Sandy’s gameness and Harry’s affection for his family that the newlyweds spent the first night of their honeymoon camping in the mountains with the groom’s parents and brothers, an expedition aborted when a lightning storm of biblical intensity forced us to flee to a motel whose name—the De Anza Motor Lodge—still triggers laughter at family gatherings thirty years later. Graciously insisting that the bride and groom take one of the two available rooms, the rest of us squeezed into the other, talking happily through the evening in a scene that struck me as a kind of fulfillment of my Darien-era vision of fallout-shelter bonding.
Marriage changes the geometry of a family, altering the angles of each relationship within it. Merely by requiring time and attention, it can cause siblings to drift apart or even drive a wedge between them. (A friend told me that he and his brother hadn’t spoken in five years, ever since he’d criticized his sister-in-law’s parenting skills. During our entire conversation, he never used his brother’s name, referring to him, when syntax demanded, only as “my former brother.”) Sandy, a quintessential caregiver, brought us closer. One of five sisters herself, Sandy liked large families, liked her husband’s brothers—although she’d been a bit nonplussed when, the day she met us, Ned accidentally steamrollered her in a game of touch football—and we liked her. Her lack of competitive fire had a mellowing effect on our own contentious tendencies, and her mere presence helped lower the testosterone level at any fraternal gathering. Indeed, having a sister-in-law gave us a hint of what it might have been like to have had a sister when we were growing up.
Two years after the wedding, Harry called to tell us that Sandy was pregnant. After his residency, they had moved to New Mexico, where Harry had taken a job with the Indian Health Service on the Zuni Reservation. Sandy was in her twenty-sixth week when her water broke. The regional hospital said not to bother bringing Sandy in. There was nothing they could do for a baby born that early. If Sandy could stay pregnant one more week, they would see her. The alternative, they said, was to have the baby at the local hospital and bring him or her home to die. Harry made some calls. He found a hospital in Phoenix that had had some success with very small preemies, though the odds were still bleak: a 50 percent chance that the baby would survive and be normal, a 25 percent chance he’d survive but be severely impaired, a 25 percent chance he’d die. Harry helped Sandy into their car and sped three hundred miles to Phoenix, where Ian was born, his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He was twelve inches long and weighed one pound, fifteen ounces.
Sandy took a room in a nearby boardinghouse so she could be with Ian every day. Each weekend, Harry drove five hours to Phoenix, where he and Sandy stood vigil in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, gazing down at their son in his heated plastic isolette, a tube in his throat connecting him to the ventilator that enabled him to breathe, a ganglion of lines tethering his shoe-sized body to a bank of monitors, a cacophony of alarms ready to sound if his heartbeat, his temperature, or his blood pressure dipped or spiked. Harry and Sandy’s medical skills were of no use; they weren’t even allowed to hold their son until he was ten days old. Harry called Mum and Dad frequently. All his life he had prided himself on his independence, but as he started his new family, he needed his old one.
When Ian was two months old, Dad and I flew out to Phoenix. Although he had gained more than a pound, Ian was still so small that he could wear only the Cabbage Patch doll clothes Sandy bought at a nearby toy store. His arms and legs looked as brittle as twigs. His skin had the translucence of wax paper. I tried to keep my eyes on my nephew and not on the blinking lights or squiggly lines of his heart monitor, which, every few minutes, beeped loudly and made my own heart jump. Ian was eerily still, except for the nearly imperceptible swell of his chest with each breath and the occasional flicker of his raisin-sized gray eyes. As we stood by his isolette, I couldn’t help thinking of the incubator Harry, Ned, and I had watched so hopefully when we were children. On the last day of our visit, I put on a mask and gown. Sandy placed Ian, swaddled so that only his face was visible, in my arms. He felt like a small wounded bird.
Ian was in the ICU for four months. Even after Harry and Sandy brought him home, he would be tethered to an oxygen canister and an apnea monitor for three more months, and there would be years of worry over whether he had been brain damaged (no) or was developmentally delayed (no). Ian’s homecoming happened to coincide with Mark’s senior-year teaching stint in Zuni. Mark lived in a trailer down the street but spent most evenings at Harry and Sandy’s, playing backgammon, watching baseball on TV, cradling his nephew in his arms, and giving Harry the kind of reassurance Harry had always given him. By the following June, when we gathered on Cape Cod, Ian was out of the woods—a smiling eight-month-old baby whose uncles competed to fuss over him. Two years later, after Sandy nearly lost her life during an ectopic pregnancy, she and Harry adopted a baby girl, naming her Maya.
That same summer I brought Anne to our family reunion. I had met Anne when she interviewed me over lunch for a job at a magazine. I ate a lot of tekkamaki and I took the job. Though I had been immediately attracted to her omnivorous intelligence (not to mention the mesmerizing kissability of her lips), I was still getting over a long relationship with my Baltimore girlfriend. Anne and I became friends. I brought her to Cape Cod because I knew that while I might not be ready for a relationship, it might be in my best interests to keep her close until I was. I wanted Anne to approve of my family and, perhaps even more, I wanted my family to approve of her. (I don’t think I could have gotten serious about someone who didn’t get along with my brothers; at the same time, I couldn’t imagine someone not getting along with my brothers.) The two-way vetting was a success on both counts. Anne, who has one brother, to whom she is uncommonly close, knew how important siblings can be. Coming from a small family, she found the rambunctious clamor of our large one invigorating, though she didn’t believe me when I told her we’d fought tooth and nail when we were young. She teamed up with Harry in Trivial Pursuit and crushed the rest of us (he had sports and science sewn up, she had literature and film); she helped Ned chop onions for his famous bouillabaisse; she took long hikes with Mark, picking ticks off the backs of each other’s legs as they talked about the idiosyncracies of their respective families. Later, Anne would joke that going out with me was like getting four brothers for the price of one.
A year later, Anne and I spent a few days with Harry, Sandy, and Ian in Zuni. It was October 1986, and we arrived just in time to see the Red Sox play the Mets in game six of the World Series. Boston led three games to two—one more victory and they’d be champions for the first time since 1918. When the Red Sox took a one-run lead in the seventh inning, Harry and I, too nervous to watch, retreated to the kitchen, where we listened, fingers crossed, from what we thought was a safe distance, while Anne and Sandy stayed in the living room and shook their heads at the foolishness of men. When the Red Sox manager pulled Roger Clemens after the seventh inning, we begged him not to; when the Mets tied it up in the eighth inning, we groaned and pounded the table; when Mookie Wilson’s routine grounder found its way through Bill Buckner’s legs in the tenth inning to win the game for the Mets, we nodded understandingly through our tears. It had been too good to be true. Later, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard Harry in Ian’s bedroom, talking quietly to his two-year-old son, telling him about the Red Sox: summarizing their benighted history, touching on the near misses of 1967 and 1975, invoking the names Yastrzemski, Conigliaro, and Fisk, and explaining that although the team had lost, there would be a seventh game and they would try again. It was important, Harry told Ian, to keep trying.
Perhaps because I am a middle child, I have always had a hard time making choices. Despite the Colt family’s seal of approval, I dithered unconscionably before asking Anne to marry me. But our visit to Zuni helped me see what marriage and fatherhood could look like. Indeed, I might never have gotten around to either had it not been for Harry’s example. Eventually, I proposed. On the other hand, like all my brothers, once I make a choice, I commit to it wholeheartedly. I persuaded Anne that, approaching our mid-thirties, we should try to start a family right away—like a few seconds after we got engaged.
When it came time to choose a best man, I didn’t hesitate. I chose Harry and Ned and Mark. (I even added a fourth, my cousin Henry, who is also one of my closest friends.) At the rehearsal dinner, Harry, Ned, and Mark joined Mum and Dad in singing a toast to Anne. Mark played guitar, Harry banged on a tambourine, and Ned threw in some solo do-si-dos that brought down the house. The following day, I stood in a corner of our Manhattan loft and watched each of my brothers walk down the makeshift aisle escorting a bridesmaid—Harry jacketless, bolo-tied, frizzy-haired, Ned looking like a Brooks Brothers ad in his crisp pinstriped suit, and Mark, eyes already welling up, in a blue blazer. They were followed by the ringbearer, four-year-old Ian, and the flower girl, two-year-old Maya. And then Anne walked down the aisle, three months pregnant. As I saw her tummy bulging ever so slightly beneath a specially fitted flapper-era gown, my happiness was complete.
Six months later, Anne and I brought Susannah home from the hospital. As we experienced the blinding fear and humbling ignorance of new parents, convinced that each sniffle was the harbinger of pneumonia, I felt new respect for Harry and Sandy, who had gone through a genuine life-and-death struggle with their first child and never complained. (I also instantly forgave Mum and Dad for any and all errors they might have made when I was a child, thunderstruck by the realization that they had gone through this four times, all when they were far younger than Anne and me.) When Anne and I discussed whom to ask to be Susannah’s godfather, the choice, again, was simple: there was no one we trusted more than Harry. Over the following months and years, during each new crisis—real or imagined—I turned to Harry, who, as a doctor, father, and brother, gave me advice medical, parental, and fraternal. Harry could reassure me that when Susannah spat up her dinner or skinned her knee, it wasn’t the end of the world. And when Susannah developed a truly serious illness, when it really did seem as if it might be the end of the world, it was Harry I called time after time.
* * *
One April morning in 1990, seven months after Susannah was born, I was at my office in midtown Manhattan when my father called. Mark had been in an accident. Shortly before dawn, while he was on his way to work, his car had gone off the road and hit a tree. A passing motorist had called 911. An ambulance had rushed him to the nearest hospital—the same hospital in which he had been born twenty-eight years earlier. Mark had suffered what the doctor called “severe internal injuries” and was about to go into surgery. Accustomed to taking notes for my job, I transcribed, on a bright yellow While You Were Out message pad, some of the words I heard over the telephone: “lacerated kidney,” “crushed pancreas,” “may lose spleen.” Looking at the pad, I couldn’t bear to think these words had anything to with my brother.
The surgery, which, as the doctor delicately phrased it, put Mark’s internal organs “back in their proper places,” was successful. It was performed by a man who had been a few years ahead of me in high school, a bluff, good-natured fellow who had rowed crew on a boat I had coxed. He had gone on to become one of those “uncreative” doctors I’d once scorned. Now I thanked God for the fact that he hadn’t chosen to be a poet instead. Although he predicted that Mark would be hospitalized for up to three weeks, Mark was out in five days. The staff was amazed at how fast he recovered, attributing it to his great physical condition.
* * *
A few days before Mark was released, I got a call from my mother. There was more news. In a tearful conversation in his hospital room, Mark had told her that he had a gambling problem.
Mark would tell us later that he had started gambling when he was a sophomore in college. He had worked the breakfast shift in his dormitory kitchen, and one morning the cook had shown him and several other students how to place bets on sports events with a bookie in a neighboring town. Mark had enjoyed the adrenaline rush of risking a few bucks. Over the following eight years, however, what had started as a lark turned into a habit. After a hard day at work, he’d go home to his apartment, place small bets on a few games, then stay up and watch them on TV. With money on the line, even the most insignificant contest between also-rans took on the intensity of a World Series game seven. Gambling, Mark told us, gave him confidence and helped keep his anxiety at bay. “Gambling was something I thought I was good at,” he says. “And that could mask that I felt a failure in other parts of my life.”
It seemed impossible to us that Mark, who wore his emotions on his sleeve, had been able to keep his gambling a secret. I recalled a few occasions on which he had spoken with surprising intensity about some obscure game between West Coast basketball teams he’d stayed up late to watch. But he had always loved watching sports, ever since those childhood evenings in the den with Dad. Mark’s gambling, like Mark himself, had been careful, well-organized, and informed by the characteristic Colt frugality. (Part of the reason we were so shocked was that we couldn’t imagine ourselves risking even a dollar or two, even on a sure thing.) Mark never bet large amounts, always paid his bills on time, and never got into debt. Later, his therapist told him she had never seen such a thrifty gambler. But gambling had gradually consumed his thoughts until he was rushing home every night to scour the sports pages and call his bookie to bet on a game in which he otherwise had no interest. Just as I used to think drinking made me feel more alive when in fact it had only helped me avoid life, Mark believed that gambling gave him control when, in fact, it had made him so anxious and distracted that he had lost control of his car.
When Mark entered therapy, it became clear that the forces that had led to his gambling involved all of us. I was reminded of our childhood games of Crack the Whip. The boy at one end could be running slowly, even walking, but when he changed direction, the centrifugal force grew as it passed through each person; by the time it reached the whip’s end, it was so strong that the last one in line, running too fast for his legs to keep up, spun off and tumbled to the ground.
At the suggestion of Mark’s counselor, the six of us entered family therapy. Three or four times that spring, Harry flew in from Wisconsin, I took the shuttle up from New York, Ned drove in from Boston, Mark came from work in Watertown, and our parents drove over from Dedham to meet with a psychologist in a suburb not unlike the ones in which we had grown up. In the morning, lying in bed in SoHo, Anne and I read Babar aloud to Susannah, who was on the verge of saying her first words. In the afternoon, sitting in a semicircle in an office with wall-to-wall carpeting and Winslow Homer reproductions, my brothers, parents, and I sorted through layers of misperception, unspoken hurts, unvoiced accusations, and old wounds so deeply buried it seemed impossible they could ever heal. It was as if we, too, were learning to speak a new language.
I had assumed that I was there to help Mark, to help fix things, to be a sensitive listener, to be, perhaps, something of a therapist myself. Then, one afternoon, as we were discussing our peaceful early years in Dedham, I began to talk about how close I had felt to Harry and how confused I had been at the gulf that had opened between us. I was surprised to find myself unable to stop crying. Harry explained that his pulling away had nothing to do with me. He talked about how, as a teenager, he had just been trying to survive, and to do that, he’d felt he had to distance himself from his family. I’d had no idea how much Harry had hurt because he worked so hard to conceal it. He told us that when he had been moved up to the third floor at the age of nine, he had felt exiled, not promoted.
It was at this point that my father reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and unfolded the ancient, crumbling photograph of Harry and me, taken when we were children. And it was at this point—in a moment so fraught with symbolism that I wondered later whether it had really happened—that the snapshot split in two and fluttered to the ground. At the time, I thought it could only mean that our family had been irreparably fractured. It did not.