On a warm spring evening in 2011, we have gathered for dinner at my house in western Massachusetts. Harry and Sandy have come down from Maine to stay with us. Ned and his wife, Cathy, are staying with Mum and Dad at their retirement community twenty minutes south. Mark has driven out from Boston. The meal is a farewell dinner of sorts. Ned and Cathy leave this week for Islamabad, where Ned will start a new job with an international relief organization. Harry leaves next week for India, the country in which, after getting so sick thirty-eight years ago, he started on the path to becoming a doctor. He’ll spend five weeks of his sabbatical leading a group of medical students through the Himalayan foothills, offering health care to local villagers. It is rare that all four brothers are together. This afternoon, as I mowed the lawn, I felt the anticipatory flutter in my stomach I always feel when I know I’ll be seeing them. With Ned traveling the world and our parents in their eighties, we never know when—or whether—the whole family will be together again.
Mum and Dad sit at either end of the table, canes hanging on the backs of their chairs. Dad turned eighty-seven a month ago. After operations on his back, knee, and Achilles tendon, his balance is iffy, and when he negotiates the kitchen steps, we four brothers hover around him like Secret Service agents around the president. An injured shoulder and a bad hip have left eighty-year-old Mum with a hitch in her step. But neither parent has lost anything mentally. (Dad insists he didn’t have much to lose to begin with.) Mum belongs to two meditation groups, participates in poetry workshops, shows her paintings, and practices tai chi. Dad serves on the retirement community’s fund-raising board, tutors local children, organizes a weekly men’s lunch, and monitors his beloved Red Sox. At home, they are almost always together: weeding in Mum’s Buddha garden; working at their desks side by side in their shared study (Dad paying bills, Mum Googling poems); preparing dinner in the kitchen; holding hands under the covers as they talk in bed at night. Not long ago, Dad, out of the blue, said to me, “Well, your mother and I have been having an awful lot of fun for the last twenty or twenty-five years”—an admission that, for him, was tantamount to Stanley Kowalski bellowing “STELLA!”
As I look around the table, I am, as always, startled to be reminded that my brothers and I are well into middle age. At fifty-eight, Harry is the only one who still has all his hair; he’s also the only one who has gone gray. But his physique is so trim, his face so smooth, and his curly silver mop so thick that strangers often assume he’s the youngest of the brothers. Ned’s hairline has retreated and his face and stomach are a little fleshier these days, but he still turns heads. (My daughter thinks he resembles Gregory Peck.) I have a yarmulke-size bald spot, and no matter how much I exercise I can’t rid myself of an incipient second chin. Even the youngest of us is no spring chicken, his face weatherbeaten from decades of working in the sun. Mark is shorter, sturdier, and stronger than his brothers, but over the years his red hair has turned brown, his freckles have faded, and he no longer looks like the exception that proves the rule. Indeed, the older we get, the more we resemble one another, as if we are converging on some sort of happy Colt medium.
We join hands around the table. Dad talks about how wonderful it is to be together, his voice a little husky, the way it gets when he’s on the home stretch of The Night Before Christmas. Then he launches into his old high school grace: Bless this food to thy use . . . Over spaghetti and salad, we catch up on one another’s lives: Ned’s and Harry’s travels, Mark’s golf game, my new crab apple trees. Ned is about to undergo his first colonoscopy. Harry and I offer him sage counsel on laxative preps. (Where once we reported back to our younger brothers on the teachers they’d inherit, we now report back on cholesterol screenings, PSA tests, stretching exercises, and remedies for cracked heels.)
Then Harry recalls singing in the St. Paul’s choir, triggering a flurry of brotherly memories: the little manila envelopes we got on payday, the black-and-white vestments that made us look like fluffy penguins, the excitement of staying up to sing at midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Ned remembers that on Palm Sunday we’d whip one another with palm leaves all the way home. Mark recalls how, before the early service on Easter, the elderly women of the church served us breakfast in the parish hall, complete with foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and yellow marshmallow bunnies. “What was that song we always sang at Easter?” Harry asks. It comes to us at the same moment and we launch into “RELEASE BARABBAS UNTO US!” in mock-operatic voices, surprised at how much of it we remember. From there, it isn’t much of a leap to the Colt Family Singers and their nursing-home gigs. I recall the time when, in mid-“Kumbaya,” an elderly man cried out, “Would you please SHUT UP!” Mum reminds us of how the women used to weep at the sight of handsome Ned in his lederhosen. “That’s because I wasn’t wearing any underwear,” Ned says.
And the past rushes back. A single name or phrase culled from our fraternal lexicon is enough to set us off: Candy Cobb (the unattainable beauty across the street in Darien, at whose house we first listened to Meet the Beatles); Freddie Miller (Ned’s pop-eyed friend, whose father, it was said, had a bullet or a BB—no one was quite sure which—lodged in his skull after being shot as a peeping Tom); Lumpkins (the bed-and-breakfast near our grandmother’s house in Virginia where Ned kept us in stitches with his fake snoring); Woo Dip Har (the dish Mum always ordered at the forlorn faux-Polynesian restaurant we patronized on special occasions); Mr. Lammons (the father who liked to chase kids through the graveyard and goose them); Miss Zimmer (the dental hygienist on whose pillowy, white-uniformed breasts we’d rest our heads as Dr. Sweetnam drilled into our candy-lacquered teeth). Ned and I talk the most: me filling in details and making corrections, Ned cracking jokes, often at his own expense. But Harry contributes frequently, and though Mark doesn’t remember the earlier stuff, he chimes in as we move forward through the years. We laugh so hard and talk so fast, overlapping, that Mum and Dad can’t catch everything. But they look on, smiling, pleased to have “the four boys” under one roof. Although our wives don’t understand all the references, they laugh along, too. My teenage son gazes from uncle to uncle as he listens, astonished at the evidence that his father had a childhood. At a certain point, however, I’m aware only of my brothers. It’s as if it’s just the four of us again, a world unto ourselves.
* * *
My brothers and I could never have imagined, during our splintered adolescence, how close we would become. Having spread out across the country and around the world, we have all, except for Ned, returned to New England, slowly moving back toward home, toward one another.
After four years in New Mexico, Harry and Sandy took jobs in Wisconsin, where they stayed seven years before heading to rural Maine. Although they left, in part, because their tidy suburb reminded Harry a little too much of Darien, it did not escape Harry’s notice, or ours, that, having moved across the country from his family, he had, over the years, reversed the journey. Their house in Maine sits on thirty-eight acres of meadow and forest that roll down to a lake. Sandy keeps three horses, two dogs, a cat, a rabbit, and a dozen chickens, whose eggs Harry sells at work. Harry spends his spare time tending an ever-expanding vegetable garden. At the height of summer, the hillside, brimming with pumpkins, peppers, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes, is as voluptuous as a Grant Wood landscape. In winter, Harry can ski twenty miles through the woods without seeing a car. He is a long way from suburbia.
Sandy works as a geriatric nurse practitioner at a nursing home. Harry works as a family physician: delivering babies, freezing warts, setting broken arms, counseling addicted young adults, helping elderly patients with end-of-life decisions. He also serves as director of the practice’s residency program, helping coordinate the training of thirty young physicians, a task that requires organizational skill and tactful but occasionally firm leadership—attributes not unlike those needed by the eldest sibling in a large family. As a clinician, Harry is known for his sensitivity, bred in part, perhaps, by the medical emergencies in which he nearly lost his wife, his son, and his youngest brother. The young man who spent summers working with disabled children now spends part of his off-time working with underserved populations overseas.
That Harry’s specialty is family practice seems fitting. His house in Maine has become a family gathering place. For many years, until our parents grew too old to make the trip, it is where we celebrated Christmas, observing the familiar rituals of our youth with a new generation of Colts: the singing of carols on Christmas Eve; the frying of eggs and bacon on Christmas morning; the chorus of mock “oohs” and “aahs” as a jar of homemade piccalilli from a distant cousin is unwrapped under the tree (a spruce cut from the woods behind the house), atop which perches Harry’s old construction-paper angel, her cherry-red robe faded to pale pink. There are new traditions, too: Sandy, clothes dusted with flour from baking pies, decorates the windows with candles and pine swags; Harry, wearing the bell-festooned jester hat someone gave him as a joke, leads us on sledding runs behind the barn and skiing expeditions across the snow-covered lake. Harry shudders to imagine what his life might have been like had he not met Sandy at a medical school party more than three decades ago, or had they not had Ian, now a twenty-seven-year-old businessman in Singapore, and Maya, a twenty-four-year old college student in Maine.
Harry still relishes competition, but these days, it’s mostly with himself, whether swimming laps or producing the plumpest of raspberries. Each time he studies for the medical boards, he frets that he won’t do well. Each time he scores in the 99th percentile. (He has always been a good test taker.) When Harry took up growing vegetables, he became a certified master organic gardener, though he pooh-poohs the achievement, observing that if you can say “mulch” with a straight face, you’re well on your way to horticultural competence. He remains disciplined and driven, surely the only Colt brother capable of adhering to a no-dessert policy for more than a single evening. At the same time, the boy who bristled with suppressed feeling has become, if not fully laid back, at least fairly well tilted. Harry’s informality expresses itself most noticeably in his take on fashion. He wears pants till the cuffs are frayed, T-shirts till they are in shreds. The bolo tie he wore to my wedding is, if not the only cravat in his closet, the only one I’ve ever seen on him, and when Dad’s retirement party was held at a jackets-required Boston club, he arrived in an ill-fitting corduroy number he’d bought for five dollars at the Salvation Army on the drive down from Maine. Harry lives simply and wastes nothing, a philosophy that dovetails nicely with his approach to finance. For decades, he and I vied for the title of stingiest brother. Harry has cut his own hair for forty years; I shave with razors till they are as dull as butter knives. But after Harry had a swimming pool installed four years ago—for reasons of health, he hastened to assure us—I believe I took sole possession of the crown. (Our house came with a decrepit pool, but I haven’t opened it in four years, unwilling to spend a cent to fix its torn liner.) We kid Harry about his dangerous drift toward profligacy, but note that he still wears tattered seventeen-year-old swim trunks as he does his laps.
These days, Harry is the older brother I always wanted during the dark years of his adolescence, and of mine. He is the one my younger brothers and I turn to: for medical information, for help in understanding the challenges faced by our aging parents, for advice on career decisions. He’s the one whose guidance I seek along the way stations of fatherhood: from croup and head lice to mononucleosis and tonsillitis; from allowances and the facts of life to teenage drinking and driver’s ed. The brother to whom I was once afraid to talk is now a patient listener. The brother who was once so competitive that he’d quit a game rather than admit defeat now bursts into laughter after a muffed shot on the tennis court. The brother who kept his distance from the family is now the family mediator. At our parents’ fiftieth-anniversary party, it was Harry who not only served as emcee but gave his own heartfelt toast. Once again, I have followed my older brother’s lead: into marriage, into parenthood, into country life, into middle age. Approaching my sixties, I feel safer knowing that Harry is still ahead of me, breaking trail.
Twelve years ago, Anne and I moved to western Massachusetts after twenty years in Manhattan and five years of envying Harry’s life in rural Maine. We bought an old brick farmhouse that overlooks a valley and backs up against a forest. That spring, Harry drove 250 miles with his favorite shovel and an assortment of seeds from his private stock to help me start a vegetable garden of my own. He showed me how to turn the soil, leavening the sandy brown earth with moist black compost; how to plant pumpkin seeds in small hills, four seeds to a hill; how to trace a shallow trough for the tiny lettuce seeds by dragging a finger lightly across the soil; how to pay out the seeds between thumb and forefinger as if dealing from a deck of miniature cards. Sitting in the earth, as we sat in our backyard sandbox so many years ago, we worked hard, pausing occasionally to catch up on each other’s lives while over the course of the weekend the garden transformed from a bumpy, weed-filled tangle to a quilt of rich chocolate rectangles.
* * *
Several years after we married, Anne and I were having dinner with friends when the conversation turned to a movie star who had made the tabloids for inviting a young reporter to have sex with him in the backseat of his car. One of our friends observed that there were two types of men: front-seat guys (the kind women want to settle down with) and backseat guys (the kind they want to fool around with). Julie said I was definitely a front-seat guy. Anne, bless her heart, protested, saying she considered me a backseat guy. But I was, deep down, I knew, a front-seat guy who had tried hard for a time to pass. At the doctor’s office recently, I was asked to fill out a form assessing my current health. One section was devoted to alcohol, cigarette, and drug use. As I reported my intake at one beer every month or two, my years of excess felt so distant that the questions seemed absurd. Where once I aspired to a life of Goofus-worthy dissipation, I have, in the end, embraced my inner Gallant. I look back fondly but quizzically at the eighteen-year-old who, arriving at Harvard, wrote in his journal: “I want to make each minute count.” At fifty-seven, I have the same goal, but a different idea of how to achieve it.
After Susannah was born, Anne and I tried to have another child. Following three years of miscarriages, infertility, and adoption discussions (during which time we turned often to Harry and Sandy, who had gone through so much to have their own two children), Henry’s birth, nearly six years after Susannah’s, seemed something of a miracle. I had been secretly hoping for another girl. I loved being father to a daughter, and, having grown up in an all-boy family, I knew too well what could go wrong with sons. Now, of course, I’m overjoyed to have a daughter and a son, though when Henry tracks mud into the kitchen or leaves his pajamas on the bathroom floor, I cannot fathom how Mum survived four of us. I sometimes wish, however, that Henry had a brother (or three), or Susannah a sister, so they could know what it’s like to have a same-sex sibling. I would have preferred to have more children—despite the Sturm und Drang, I’m glad I grew up in a large family. But thanks to my waffling, Anne and I got started late, and by the time the second arrived there was no time left to try for a third.
Because of the age and gender differences, Susannah and Henry’s sibling rivalry is minimal. They coexist peaceably. (I recall a spring evening seven or eight years ago when I couldn’t find them at dinnertime. A knot of worry tightening in my chest, I searched for them outside, and discovered them behind the barn, lying in the grass, watching bats zigzag across the sky. The Colt household rarely saw a scene that pacific.) But sometimes I miss the ambient bedlam in which I grew up. At the same time, remembering how my brothers and I squandered our brotherhood when we were young, I want my children to realize how lucky they are to have a sibling, and when I catch them in a rare moment of discord, I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Someday your mother and I will be gone and you’ll only have each other.”
My own competitive instincts have faded with age. I no longer reflexively measure myself against every man I meet, although I experience a twinge of satisfaction when I beat a younger cousin in tennis; when I lap the fellow in the next lane at the college swimming pool (until he gets out of the water and I see he is the white-haired emeritus professor of philosophy); or even when, donating blood, I squeeze the rubber ball so hard that my pint bag fills before that of someone who was hooked up before me. When our dog barks and I tell him to be quiet and he barks again and I tell him to be quiet again, I am reminded of Ned and me in childhood, each unable to let the other have the last word. I still strive mightily to beat my brothers in tennis or golf or Cranium, but when Harry lands a seven-letter gem on a triple word score in Scrabble, when Ned finds five times as many quahogs as me in half the time, or when Mark outswims me to the orange buoy, I feel that in some way I partake in their achievements. When Ned was named Distinguished Graduate by our high school a few years ago—and rated a glossy spread in the alumni magazine, headlined “Journalist, Mentor, Global Citizen”—I considered it a feather in our fraternal cap, although, unlike William James, who refused election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters because his brother Henry had been elected several months earlier, I would readily accept the honor if it were to come my way, too. A few months ago, when Harry, signing a communal sixtieth anniversary card for Mum and Dad, pretended to write, “I love you more than my brothers do,” we all laughed.
When I was young, I wondered why my biological brothers couldn’t be more like my friends. Now, when I hear someone describe his buddy as “the brother I never had,” I feel lucky. I have a brother. Three of them. Five years ago, when Anne was diagnosed with breast cancer, their response was immediate: Mark offered to take care of the children while we were in New York for the surgery; Harry volunteered to come down on his week off to stay with us while Anne recuperated; Ned phoned from the Middle East to offer his support. Over the following months, Harry called regularly and listened to me vent about oncotype scores, radiation dosages, and hormonal therapy options. He made an occasional judicious comment, his honesty far more comforting than the nervous reassurance I’d hear from well-meaning friends. After we talked about Anne’s treatment, he always wanted to know how I was doing. Mark visited often, and his emotional and physical warmth was no less helpful, though I worried that, in his joy at seeing Anne postsurgery (a new procedure that was more than a lumpectomy but less than a mastectomy), he’d hug her so hard that he’d dislodge her hundred-plus stitches. Ned kept in touch by e-mail from around the world, and merely thinking about the cataclysmic events he witnessed in his work helped me keep my problems in perspective. My three brothers were, I realized, not unlike the tag-team wrestlers of my old fantasy, each with his own strengths, each ready to step in and help out.
Eighteen years after Harry and I hid in his kitchen during the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, the Boston Red Sox played the New York Yankees for the American League pennant. The Sox lost the first three games, then stormed back to force a game seven. That night, there was near-constant phone contact between my house in western Massachusetts, Mark’s house in eastern Massachusetts, and Harry’s house in Maine, where Harry was watching with Dad. Even as the Sox took a big lead, we reminded each other not to get our hopes up, that there was still a lot of baseball to be played. (Nine-year-old Henry, wearing his Red Sox cap, crossing his fingers and making sure I crossed mine, didn’t understand why, at crucial moments, I kept disappearing into the kitchen, unable to watch. “You’ve got to believe, Daddy,” he’d say. “We can do it.”) Even after it was 10–3 in the bottom of the ninth, I didn’t dare relax. When Pokey Reese threw to first for the final out, Anne couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t jumping for joy; I was, of course, waiting for the umpire to announce that the game would have to be replayed because the Red Sox had won.
I called Mark. His phone was busy. I called Harry. His phone was busy, too. I learned later that they had been on the line with each other from the eighth inning on—and that, still later, Ned had called Harry and Dad from Malaysia to celebrate. The telephonic round robin would repeat itself a week later when the Red Sox won their first world championship since 1918.
* * *
A few years ago, when Ned was home for a visit, I asked him whether he ever thought about settling down. He shook his head. “I don’t want to be someone whose main goal in life is mowing the lawn and waiting for the mail to arrive,” he said. In 1992, two months after marrying the TV producer he’d met in Duluth, Ned and his wife headed to Eastern Europe, where Ned spent five years as a freelance radio and television reporter covering the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The brother with whom I used to play Civil War was now risking sniper fire to cover a real civil war. One night, when my six-month-old son had croup and I was dozing on his bedroom floor in a haze of humidifier mist, with the NPR station on low, I was awakened by a familiar voice describing some new atrocity in the Balkans, against a background of crackling gunfire. “ . . . This is Ned Colt reporting from Sarajevo,” the voice concluded. The contrast between our lives seemed unreal. Yet Ned was still Ned. One day I got a letter in which he had enclosed a snapshot of a dingy-looking store over whose door a sign read “LOOTIES.” The word was, Ned informed me, Slovenian for “crazy.”
As the war came to an end, NBC offered Ned the job he’d always wanted: network foreign correspondent. Over the next dozen years, he lived in Hong Kong, Beijing, and London, covering wars, revolutions, and natural disasters in more than eighty countries. (In my address book, Ned’s crossed-out entries take up six or seven times the space of those of his more sedentary brothers.) For much of that time we saw Ned only on our television screen, walking toward the camera in a tan shirt, khaki pants, and, often, a flak jacket, microphone in hand, face focused in an expression of concern as he detailed the latest international disaster against an ever-changing background: a bombed-out street in Afghanistan, a coastal settlement washed away by a tsunami in Sri Lanka, an earthquake-scarred village in Kashmir, a bullet-pocked city in Iraq. Over the years, the boy who worried he couldn’t live up to his high-achieving older brothers has, in many ways, outstripped them. He is certainly the best-known of us. He has made (and spent) the most money. In childhood, Ned was often identified as Harry’s or George’s brother. Today Harry and I are proud to be known as Ned’s brothers—though I was a little hurt when, at my twenty-fifth high school reunion, a faculty wife on whom I once had a crush draped herself over me until she realized I wasn’t Ned.
The adolescent who worked hard to separate from his family now works hard to be part of it, faithfully calling our parents every Saturday, calling his brothers on every birthday (and after every crucial Red Sox game) whether he’s in Baghdad or Borneo, sending postcards from so many different places that at one point my daughter had a not-too-shabby international stamp collection. Ned gets back for the holidays when he can; when he can’t, we’ll get a call on December 25 and hear him, ten thousand miles away, launch into his inimitable rendition of “I’m Dreaming of a Lean Christmas.” Each summer, Ned organizes our family reunion on Cape Cod, arranging his vacation so he can drive Mum and Dad to the house and get them settled, often after having taken three flights for sixteen hours across eight time zones. Whenever Ned comes to the States, his luggage contains an international bazaar of gifts: shirts from Bali for his brothers, knockoff Cartier watches from Singapore for his nieces, rugby shirts from Hong Kong for his nephews. Ned is the least parsimonious of the brothers, whether saving business-class travel kits for his nieces or helping fund the college tuition of a young Afghan he met on assignment in Kabul. Ned sends mail-order delicacies on Dad’s birthday, flowers on Mum’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. The mother and son who once fought so furiously have had an online Scrabble game going for years, Mum from her study in Massachusetts, Ned from his hotel room in Amman or Moscow or Jerusalem. Mum told me it used to seem as if their relationship always went back to the day she thrust Ned into a cold shower, but no longer. The last time she said good-bye to him, she told him that if something were to happen to her before they saw each other again, it was okay because she felt fully loved by him. Ned told her he felt the same.
Several years after his first marriage ended, in part because their jobs kept them away from each other so much, Ned met the woman who would become his second wife, a beautiful, well-read, tennis-and-Scrabble-playing TV producer who relishes adventure almost as much as he does. (They celebrated Ned’s fiftieth birthday by swimming with great white sharks in South Africa, Cathy’s fiftieth by swimming with whale sharks in the Philippines.) Although Ned doesn’t have children, partly because he’s been on the road most of his adult life, partly because he felt his own childhood was sufficiently difficult, he has been a virtuoso uncle, in some measure because he has remained a bit of a kidhimself—dropping to his hands and knees to play with my daughter when she was a toddler, patiently answering my son’s questions about the relative firepower of rocket launchers and bazookas when Henry was in his military hardware phase. When Henry’s fourth-grade class was asked to write about their hero, Henry chose his uncle Ned, and was delighted when Ned declared his favorite subjects in school to have been Recess and Lunch. As one of Henry’s godfathers, Ned is responsible for the provision of cool presents—Henry is surely the only one in his class with a T-shirt that reads “Fallujah Fire Rescue”—and spiritual guidance. “I lead by example,” Ned tells Henry. “Whatever I do, you do the opposite.” But Ned takes his charge seriously. When ten-year-old Henry was in tears over grounding out in a baseball game, Ned told him about the time in fourth grade he’d gotten so frustrated after striking out yet again that he had stood at home plate and sobbed, “I can’t play . . . I can’t play.” When Henry was eight, Ned gave him a remote-controlled motorboat named, according to the box in which it came, the Fast Lady. We rowed out to the middle of a lake for her maiden voyage. Henry carefully placed her in the water, but no matter how he manipulated the joystick, the boat went in circles. The Fast Lady, it seemed, had a fatal design flaw even Ned couldn’t fix. Henry’s face fell. But Ned saved the day, launching into a verbal riff that made the Fast Lady’s failure seem heroic: a maritime calamity on the scale of the Titanic, a historic disaster we’d been exceptionally privileged to witness.
The boy who never turned down a dare remains the most adventurous of us, the only one who has bungee-jumped, scuba-dived, played elephant polo, fired an AK-47, walked barefoot over hot coals, or owned a motorcycle. When we go fishing, he’s the one who gooses the throttle on the boat and takes the waves head-on; when we go hiking, he’s the one who wants to bushwhack through the woods, catbrier be damned; when we go mountain biking, he’s the one who invariably takes a jump too fast and ends up sailing over the handlebars. Age has begun to temper Ned’s penchant for derring-do but not his stubbornness. Passing an electric cattle fence the last time we were in Cape Cod, Ned put a finger on the wire, just to see how strong the current was. (Very.)
It’s not so much that Ned loves taking risks but that he’s so inquisitive. The less-than-avid high school student is something of an autodidact—the most likely of us to look up a word in the dictionary, a butterfly in a field guide. (And yet when he went back to school at fifty-four, earning a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the boy who hadn’t gotten into Harvard thirty-five years earlier came within an A–of getting straight As.) Where once he shied away from family word games, he has become an expert crossword puzzler and a voracious reader, thanks in part to all those eighteen-hour plane flights. A few summers ago, we went hiking along a stream near my home. Ned was curious about everything: stepping into the woods to sniff a fern; wondering why one mountain laurel bush had bloomed while another remained entirely green; stopping to help a pudgy black caterpillar off the path and asking whether it would become a moth or a butterfly. While our wives sat on the bank, Ned and I waded out through the cold water and clambered onto a rock. As we talked about what kind of fish might be swimming past us, Ned picked up a stick that had gotten caught in the current and tossed it back in. “Let’s see how far it gets downstream,” he said.
Ned is the most sophisticated of the brothers. He knows where to find the best cannoli in Boston’s North End, how to order unlisted house specialties in Chinese restaurants, what obscure microbrewed IPA we might like to try on our next get-together. On a recent family trip to Poland for our cousin Henry’s wedding, Ned drove us all over the countryside, guided Dad’s wheelchair over the dirt paths of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and tracked down obscure provincial restaurants where, using the pidgin Croat he’d picked up covering the war in the Balkans and more hand signals than a third-base coach, he managed to make a parade of local delicacies appear on our table. Ned is also the most practical—able to fix a leaky faucet, repair a window sash, build a shed. The boy who loved pushing Matchbox cars around the sandbox has taught himself to drive a tractor, operate a forklift, and run a woodchipper. At family reunions, he’s the brother covered with poison ivy rashes and tick bites, tramping through the woods with a chain saw and a fully loaded workbelt, pulling down the tree-devouring bittersweet and nailing up bat houses.
Ned retains some of his youthful self-doubt. He says he gets especially anxious when he’s working on deadline or ad-libbing on camera. To me, he seems remarkably cool under pressure. Several years ago, he and I were trolling in the bay when my line snagged on a lobster pot. A few tugs on the rod didn’t free it, so I grabbed the line and yanked. The line slipped through my hand, whereupon I made the breathtakingly stupid mistake of wrapping it once around my hand and tugging harder. We were in a rip and, though the engine was off, we were drifting rapidly away from the lobster pot, the line tightening around my hand. Embarrassed—I was the alleged fisherman—I said nothing to my brother at the helm. The line gnawed into my skin, the flesh whitening around it. In a matter of seconds, the line was going to slice into my hand like a wire into cheese. I finally said something to Ned, who, taking in the situation at a glance, turned on the engine and slipped it into reverse. The line went slack. My hand was free. Cathy says that in a jam, she’d rather be with Ned than anyone.
People who know Ned only from TV say he seems rather serious—not surprising, given that he’s usually talking about earthquakes and revolutions. But he’s the funniest of us, the one who can make us laugh so hard we can’t breathe, whether he’s crooning the worst songs of the seventies (“Sky Pilot,” “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” “Delilah”) as if they were Gershwin ballads; reading faux fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants (“You’re a loser”); or playing Scattergories, a game in which contestants guess their teammates’ answers to a particular category (Ned, to “Things I Keep in Suitcase,” responds, without skipping a beat: “Inflatable Nude”). In his fifties, Ned is still a prankster: pinching swimmers’ feet from below, making us laugh in church, then eyeing us sternly and hissing, “Please keep your voices down, this is a sacred space”; pretending to exchange his five-dollar bill for Mark’s twenty as the collection plate goes by. At last year’s Christmas Eve service, our octogenarian mother, in an attempt to forestall such mischief, insisted on sitting between Ned and his brothers, just as she did a half-century ago. On the tennis court, Ned, who has become something of a fanatic and now joins us for epic doubles matches in any fraternal permutation, is capable at any moment of bringing the game to a halt by breaking into the “Funky Butt,” a celebratory dance that involves waving his fanny from side to side while bobbing his arms up and down like an epileptic stork.
Several years ago, Ned suggested to his brothers and several cousins that we join forces to build a kind of time-share vacation house on Cape Cod. Although Harry and Mark couldn’t afford to be part of the group, Ned and I and two cousins went ahead. (Harry and Mark would contribute in other ways: poring over the blueprints, weed-whacking the site, donating coffee tables and kayaks.) Ned was an ideal leader, using the organizational and diplomatic skills he’d developed over two decades of reporting to ride herd on—and get along with—a battalion of carpenters, painters, masons, plumbers, and prickly conservation board members. Much of the time, Ned had to oversee the project from halfway around the globe. In Islamabad to report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he arranged a conference call to discuss the placement of the bedroom windows on the architect’s proposal. When construction began, the former Frank Lloyd Wright of Lincoln Logs came back to help dig trenches and hammer decking. The boy who was the most visibly unhappy of us as a child is the man most responsible for building a house to which we four brothers will be able to return year after year.
* * *
Of the four of us, Mark stayed closest to home. He has worked for twenty-five years at the school for the blind, where, as recycling coordinator, he instituted a prizewinning program. It is a physically demanding job, for which Mark is on his feet all day, collecting and sorting bottles, cans, and paper from each building on campus, then distributing packages and mail. Mark works with a focused intensity that enables him to get twice the work done in half the time. Co-workers tell him he can never quit because it would take three people to replace him. Mark, who has described himself as a blue-collar worker in a white-collar family, still enjoys physical labor. But he sometimes frets that he should have been more ambitious. He loves cooking and at one point spent a year attending culinary school at night with an eye toward becoming a chef. In the end, he stayed with recycling and moonlighted at a friend’s barbeque restaurant. After all the upheaval in childhood, Mark is a creature of habit.
Mark hasn’t gambled in twenty years, though he is the first to admit that what he calls his “addictive personality” has turned to less-destructive pursuits, like exercise, antiques shopping, and real estate browsing. His two-bedroom home outside Boston is furnished with captain’s chests, mahogany tables, and Oriental rugs painstakingly chosen from the auction houses, crafts shows, and flea markets he frequents. His walls are hung with works by a handful of little-known twentieth-century New England artists he’s come to admire. Many of them depict images of home: a farmhouse with a plume of smoke curling from its chimney; a front porch lined with wicker chairs; a slice of pie on a china plate. Mark’s own home is snug and meticulous: shoes and sneakers aligned at the edge of the rug in the front hall; books in a glassed-in case in the living room; family photos angled on bureaus; towels crisply folded on their racks.
Mark may be the least competitive of the brothers. He wants to do well, but he wants everyone to do well. Golfing, he roots for his opponents to sink their putts even when his own aren’t dropping. At auctions, he’s more excited when a friend comes away with a find than when he does. Yet whether grilling a steak, bidding on a tiger maple nightstand, or running a marathon, Mark never does anything halfway. Several years back, he cut his foot swimming the first leg of a minitriathlon. Ignoring the pain, he completed the swim, biked ten miles, ran three, and finished a respectable fiftieth out of 250. When he took his sneaker off, his foot was a bloody mess. He ended up in the emergency room, where the doctor gave him five stitches and said he didn’t understand how Mark had continued the race.
Commonly described as “the nicest guy I’ve ever met,” Mark may be the most popular of the four brothers. He puts thousands of miles a year on his Pontiac Vibe visiting friends across the Northeast, hosts an annual summer reunion for his friends and their families on the Cape, and gets together with his college buddies for golf weekends in Florida and Vermont. If someone needs a ride to the airport or help lifting a couch, Mark is the first to volunteer. Each fall, he rakes the leaves for the elderly widow who lives next door; each winter he shovels her driveway. When Anne and I moved to Massachusetts, Mark helped us unload; when a half-cord of wood was dumped in our driveway after I hurt my back, Mark stacked it for us. Several years ago, a century-old Norway maple in our front yard was destroyed during a storm and had to be cut down, leaving a large bare spot on the lawn. When Anne and I returned from a vacation, we were amazed to find that Mark had driven out from Boston, graded the lawn, and planted grass seed.
Mark is especially attentive to our parents: driving Dad to the grocery store, helping Mum plant trees in the yard, escorting them to church on Sunday. The day after Dad’s back operation, Mark brought a radio to the hospital and sat by his bed, listening to the Red Sox game with him. When Dad had cataract surgery while Mum was on a weeklong Buddhist retreat, Mark used his vacation time to move in with Dad, cook for him, clean for him, and administer his eyedrops four times a day. Several years ago on Cape Cod, the family was walking home through the woods when I heard a crash. I ran ahead in time to see our father, bleeding from his chin, hobble away. “Be careful, Harry, why are you going so fast?” Mum called after him. As he disappeared down the path, Dad called over his shoulder, “I don’t want anyone to see me like this except Mark.” At the memorial service for Dad’s sister Ellen, it was Mark who helped Dad up the steps to the lectern, where Dad read Psalm 121.
When Mark was younger, he had a series of attractive, accomplished girlfriends to whom he was devoted but whom, in the end, he didn’t marry, wondering whether there might be someone even more perfect out there. He’d like to have a family but worries that the older he gets, the less he’ll be able to change his ways. His mantel is lined with photos of his brothers’ and friends’ children. When Mark’s nieces and nephews were younger, they knew him as the uncle who was always willing to play with them; now they know him as the uncle who will always listen when they need to talk to a grown-up who isn’t their parent. Over the years, Mark and his godson Henry have spent hundreds of hours throwing frisbees, kicking soccer balls, and shooting baskets. Mark attends as many of Henry’s games as he can; when he can’t, he calls Henry afterward for a recap. Mark has even made the ultimate godfatherly sacrifice and taken Henry to our local amusement park, where the terror-stricken uncle closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and rides the Mind Eraser with his wide-eyed, exultant nephew beside him. Mark, who lacks a younger brother, and Henry, who lacks an older one, fill these roles for each other every time they play pool, race their bikes, or razz each other across the Ping-Pong net.
Several years ago, when Mark saw a mid-size black-and-tan mutt whimpering in a corner of a cage at his local animal shelter, he took the dog home and named her Carly. She had been found on the streets by rescue workers after a South Florida hurricane. I cannot help thinking that Mark, who had survived something of a storm himself, recognized a kindred spirit. (A bumper sticker on his car bears the silhouette of a paw and the words: “WHO RESCUED WHO?”) He and Carly were soon inseparable. At work, she rides in his truck, head peering out the window, as he makes his rounds—she has quickly become a favorite among the blind children, who love to bury their faces in her thick fur. Carly still whimpers during thunderstorms and sleeps every night wedged under Mark’s bed, but under his care, she has become more confident. When Mark and I go hiking, Carly runs ahead to explore, but she looks back every so often to make sure her master is still there. And when Mark calls her name, she races toward him, bounding and leaping, performing arabesques of pure joy.
The brother who, because of his age, seemed the most peripheral member of our fraternal foursome growing up is in some ways the center of it. He’s the one who knows all of his brothers’ phone numbers by heart, and who calls often enough that we can discuss not only the big questions of life, love, and mortality, but also the state of our lawns, the previous night’s Bruins game, or the nuances of preparing the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. He’s the one who, by example, taught us to say “I love you” at the end of every phone call and to hug every time we say good-bye. Mark’s hugs are Olympian clinches in which he squeezes for several seconds, as if, now that he’s got us, there’s no reason to let go.
* * *
Not long ago, I was in Dedham for a funeral. Before the service, I walked around our old neighborhood. The backyard where Dad used to throw the ball so high I thought it would never come down looked barely big enough for a sandbox. The garage from which Harry and I planned to run away was so small that the current owner had to park his SUV on the street. The chestnut tree on Chestnut Street was gone. The jail that once housed Sacco and Vanzetti now housed the retired parents of our boyhood friends in luxury condominiums that started at $600,000: $581,300 more than Mum and Dad paid for our old house in 1958. The jailfield had become part of someone’s well-manicured backyard. But the swamp still looked invitingly forbidding, and the only change in the cemetery seemed to be the number of new gravestones.
I have known my wife for thirty years. I have known my closest friends for forty-five. I have known my brothers for almost sixty. We are the only witnesses to one another’s rapidly receding pasts, a vanishing world whose giants are disappearing: Soupy Sales, Pumpsie Green, Gump Worsely, Floyd Patterson, Harmon Killebrew, Moe Howard, Haystack Calhoun, Gorilla Monsoon, Fess Parker, Y. A. Tittle, Captain Kangaroo, Andy Robustelli, Joanie Weston, the Fabulous Moolah. A few years ago, after playing tennis with my brothers and me, a cousin said, “I think I’m beginning to understand your language.” It is a language in which only four people are fluent.
In adolescence, as I struggled to carve out my own niche, I saw my brothers and me in terms of our differences. In middle age, I see how alike we are: our frugality, our gluttony, our work ethic, our sportsmanship, our Manichean notions of right and wrong, our love of the outdoors, our fear of being taken for suckers. After all the effort we spent trying to be different, I’m delighted when someone, seeing a photo of the four of us, remarks on how much we resemble one another; when a friend hears Ned’s voice on TV and thinks it’s me. The two years between Harry and me that once seemed an eternity now seem an instant, as do the six years between Ned and Mark—even if, when asked about my brothers, I reflexively describe them in descending order of birth. I sometimes think of the four of us as a living Venn diagram, each overlapping in various ways with the other three: Ned and Harry share a vigorous social conscience and a love of travel; Mark and I are homebodies who tend to live more cautiously; Harry and I are parents. And so on. Although I know it’s not genetically possible, I sometimes feel as if I am composed of one part Harry, one part Ned, one part Mark, and one part myself. Even when I don’t know exactly where my brothers are at a given moment, I feel connected to them as surely as if there were an artery—or at least an extra-long, extra-strong strand of drool—that ran from my heart to each of theirs.
* * *
On a Tuesday evening in late May of 2004, I arrived home to find Anne waiting for me at the door. She told me to come upstairs. She had something to tell me out of the children’s hearing. Leading me into the guest room and shutting the door, she said, “Ned is alive and not injured.” I knew immediately what came next—it was what we worried about whenever Ned was reporting from Iraq—but I couldn’t bear to hear the words. I couldn’t bear even to think them. Ned had been kidnapped.
I called the number at NBC that Cathy had given Anne and was put through to a man named David, a senior vice president for news. I identified myself as Ned’s brother. “Ned has three brothers, right?” he said. I felt unaccountably pleased; Ned must have told him this. Now David passed along what he knew. Ned had arranged to interview Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah. En route, he, his cameraman, his sound man, and their Iraqi driver had been pulled over by two cars full of armed men, who blindfolded them and took them away at gunpoint. NBC was almost certain that the captors were local Iraqis, not al-Qaeda or one of the other militant Islamist groups responsible for the rash of recent suicide bombings and kidnappings. This was good news, relatively speaking. NBC had notified the commander of the U.S. forces at Camp Fallujah, but David urged us not to discuss the situation with anyone outside the family. The network didn’t want it on the news lest it “stir things up.” David said journalists in Iraq had been kidnapped before and released, unharmed, often the following morning. He didn’t want to give us false hope, but everything led him to believe that things would turn out fine.
I called Harry. In some irrational way, I hoped that as the eldest brother, and as a doctor, he could somehow make things right. He couldn’t, of course, but the steadiness of his voice was reassuring. It was too late to call Mark, who would be working an early shift the next day and had already turned off his phone and gone to bed, so I left a message on his work phone asking him to call me. After saying good-bye to nine-year-old Henry, who wanted to show me his new yo-yo tricks, and fourteen-year-old Susannah, who knew something was up but not what, I kissed Anne and drove, shivering uncontrollably, to my parents’ house, where they were watching the Red Sox game. Mum put her head in her hands. Dad’s face reddened and his eyes watered. They had been worried. They hadn’t heard from Ned on Sunday, when he always called, and he hadn’t been on TV for several days. “Now I know how my parents felt when I was missing,” said Dad, who had been MIA behind enemy lines for six weeks during World War II. It was the first time I’d ever heard him bring up the subject on his own.
I stayed another few hours while we stared numbly at the baseball game. What none of us said but all of us were thinking was that anti-American sentiment in Iraq was especially high. It had been only two months since mobs in Fallujah had killed, mutilated, and burned four American security guards and hung two of their charred corpses from a bridge; one month since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals, on which Ned had reported; two weeks since a young American businessman had been kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist militants.
That night I lay in bed, unable to sleep. After midnight, I went downstairs and rummaged through the living room cabinet for a photo of Ned. The first one I came across was of the two of us wearing wetsuits, sticking our bellies out, mugging for the camera. Eventually I found an old shot of him nuzzling his four-month-old godson Henry. I propped it on my bedside table.
The following morning, a chilly, drizzly, late spring day, I returned to Mum and Dad’s. Mark arrived at noon. I felt an infinitesimal bit better; being with one of my brothers brought me a step closer to Ned. Mark lit a candle and placed it on the windowsill. He said he would take time off work and stay with Mum and Dad as long as was necessary.
Over the next few days, we lived a strange, hermetic existence in the living room of the retirement home Mum and Dad had moved into the year before. There was nothing we could do but wait for the phone to ring. We wanted the phone to ring because it might be good news. We didn’t want the phone to ring because it might be bad news. Whenever it rang, our hearts lurched. Sometimes it was a friend of Mum and Dad’s. My parents, trying to sound normal, hung up as quickly and politely as possible. It was usually David at NBC, keeping us posted. Ned and his crew had not been hooded or tied up, and they were being fed. Local sheikhs had vowed to secure their release. NBC had asked the media not to run the story lest it jeopardize negotiations. According to David, all the right people were saying all the right things.
Several times a day, we’d talk with the small circle of people who knew: Harry, Cathy, and Ned’s friend Fritz, an NBC colleague who lived near Ned and Cathy in Hong Kong and had worked in Iraq. Occasionally, just to do something, Mark and Dad walked to the mailbox or drove to the supermarket for a half-gallon of milk. Mark and Mum made sandwiches, but no one ate much. I felt a constant queasy feeling in my stomach. To pass the time, we’d spend the afternoon watching one of Mum’s Zen-themed foreign films. Each evening, I’d go home to have dinner with Anne and the children, and the hour-long simulacrum of normal life—shooting baskets with Henry, asking Susannah about her algebra quiz—was strangely soothing. Afterward, I’d rush back to Mum and Dad’s, where we’d talk and wait for the phone to ring. At ten, I’d go home again and try to sleep.
Each morning, I’d put on one of the NBC T-shirts Ned had given me. I’d drink a cup of Lapsang Souchong, the smoky tea Ned had introduced me to, from the Japanese mug Ned had given me with the 3-D carp on the side. Whenever our dog ran to greet me, I thought of how much Ned loves dogs and they love him; seeing Susannah read on the couch, I thought of how Ned, pretending to be a pinching lobster, used to chase her around the house when she was a toddler; playing Life with Henry, I thought of how Ned used to hide his Monopoly money behind his back, then produce it with a flourish at the last minute. One night, when Mark fell asleep on the couch, Dad said aloud what we both were thinking: there was only one person in the family with a louder snore. I reminded Dad that Ned always thoughtfully provided earplugs for anyone sharing a room with him on vacation.
When I thought of Ned, I couldn’t stop seeing him at age five or so, in his robin’s-egg-blue pajamas with the padded feet, his blond hair cut short, an impish grin on his face. I reminded myself that Ned was a forty-eight-year-old journalist who had been in dangerous situations before—though none, I knew, as dangerous as this. I pictured Ned and his colleagues sitting on the floor against the wall in a shabby two-room house. I tried not to let my imagination go any further. We agreed that what we wanted and prayed for most was that Ned not feel hopeless. Stray, sad images of Ned in despair—the time he wept in Central Park, the time he was immobilized with anxiety after moving to Duluth—floated through my mind. We worried that Ned might be singled out; that they’d let the others go, one by one, and Ned would be the only one left. I couldn’t bear the thought of Ned being alone. We never talked about what could happen if things “didn’t go well,” as we put it, but we all knew what it would mean. Whenever my mind started to wander in that direction, I’d pray: Please please let Ned and his crew come home safely. Please help him to be strong. At times, driving in the car or walking around the house, I’d hear myself say aloud, like a petulant child, “I want my brother.”
I craved contact with my other brothers. Spending each day with Mark, talking each night with Harry on the phone, was not only comforting in itself but the next best thing to being with Ned. Harry reminded us that if anyone would do well in this situation, it was Ned; even when we were kids, he had always been fearless. (Mark and I admitted that in the same position we’d probably crumble.) Ned was a risk taker, Harry said, but he always did the right thing in difficult spots. This encouraged us. But we also worried that Ned’s stubbornness might get him into trouble.
On Thursday morning, the third day since Ned and his crew had been taken, David called. Negotiations were still under way; there would be another meeting that afternoon. The four men, they had been told, were being kept together, and were being treated humanely. David was hopeful that they might be released in a few days—maybe three, maybe four, maybe sooner. I couldn’t help recalling that at first he’d been hopeful it would be over by morning, then it was a day or two, and now it was three or four. And I shook when, for the first time in our conversations, David used the word hostage. Dad said he feared that if the situation continued much longer, the marines might attempt a rescue, which would bring its own set of dangers.
At 2:42 on Thursday afternoon, while Mark was out biking and Dad was getting the Camry’s oil changed, the phone rang. “Good news,” said David. The captors had agreed to release Ned and his crew, although the “handover” wouldn’t take place till morning—ten hours from now—because it would be too dangerous at night. David cautioned that it wouldn’t be over till the marines had Ned and his crew safely in their hands.
Shortly after midnight, the phone rang. “It’s all okay now,” said Fritz. “It’s over. Ned’s safe.” I called Mum and Dad and Mark. Cathy and David had already reached them. I called Harry. “Thank God,” he said. At 1:30, Ned called Mum and Dad. It was just like Ned to spend most of the twenty-second call telling them how sorry he was to have put them through this.
Late Sunday evening, the phone rang. “George-aay . . .” said a familiar voice, saying my name the ridiculous way he—and only he—always does. “It’s Ned-aay . . .”
* * *
When Ned flew home for a visit a week later, we would learn that the experience had been a little more harrowing than we’d known. Their original abductors had treated Ned and his colleagues relatively well. Although they had questioned them on videotape and accused them of being spies, they had given them tea, fed them from the best shish kebab stand in Fallujah (always serving them first, according to Muslim tradition), and even discussed politics and religion with them. They had made Ned and his crew wear the traditional white robes called dishdashas and not the orange jumpsuits that had taken on such sinister connotations since Abu Ghraib and the execution of the American businessman. But their relatively benevolent kidnappers had eventually passed them along to more-militant, less-accommodating mujahidin. Four times, Ned and his colleagues were hooded, surrounded by men with AK-47s cocked, and moved to a new location. Several times they were told they would soon be freed, but nothing happened. Ned and his team had no idea where they were or whether anyone even knew they’d been captured. They felt fortunate that they were kept together and that they were able to whisper to one another. They agreed they wouldn’t try to escape or resist unless it was clear they were going to be killed. For comfort and support, they held hands. At night, they huddled next to one another and got what sleep they could. We had worried that Ned’s instinct to fight back would get him killed. In fact, it sounded as if Ned had been admirably levelheaded: cautioning his fellow captives to be firm but not confrontational, squeezing the hand of a terrified younger colleague to give him strength, acting like an older brother.
On their last night in captivity, a new man came in to interrogate them, a high-ranking Saudi militant. He shouted that there must be no infidels in Iraq. He repeatedly threatened to behead them. “Are you ready to die?” he kept yelling. “You raped our wives and children—now who will weep for you?” Ned was frightened, but he challenged a few of the Saudi’s remarks, deciding that if he was going to die anyway, he didn’t want to die scared, begging for his life. After several hours of haranguing them, the Saudi left. At dawn, Ned and his colleagues were driven to the outskirts of town and released.
We wouldn’t hear this till later, and then only in bits. Ned didn’t like talking about it. He reminded us how insignificant his experience had been compared with what soldiers and civilians in Iraq endured every day. We realized how easily things could have turned out differently. On the day Ned was released, two Japanese journalists were killed when insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at their car just south of Baghdad. Over the following three months, nearly one hundred foreigners would be abducted in Iraq. In 2004, twenty-three journalists would die covering the war.
The morning after Ned was released, Mark and I, in the car on our way to the supermarket, talked about how unreal the whole incident now seemed. Ned had been in captivity for four days and three nights, but it had felt like months. Cautiously, we began to discuss some of the fears we hadn’t dared mention earlier. “I can’t imagine ever being without one of my brothers,” Mark finally said. “I can’t imagine that we four brothers could ever be three.”
* * *
For several years, my brothers and I, along with my son Henry, have gathered at Harry’s house at the end of August for a long weekend of biking. Each day, we take a thirty-mile ride up and down the hills of central Maine. At night, we swim in the new pool, drink beer, eat a lot of vegetables from Harry’s garden, and talk trash about the day’s ride.
We don’t race, but we pedal hard. In the early going, we breeze along in our five-man peloton, joking about Mark’s new lime-green bike shorts or discussing such arcane topics as the subtle but vital distinction between breaking the wind and breaking wind. Gradually, we fan out. Ned, whose taxing work schedule allows him less time for exercise, tends to fall behind on the uphills—and then, just as we’re wondering where he is, he’ll zoom past us on the downhill in a comically exaggerated tuck position, head down, fanny up, like Lance Armstrong heading down the Col du Tourmalet in the Tour de France. Mark is a companionable rider, dropping back or speeding up to chat with a brother, gee-whizzing at the beauty of the countryside, keeping an eye out for antiques stores and yard sales. Eventually, he’ll sail ahead with Henry, who, at fifteen, likes to push the pace. Harry may be the best biker of the brothers, but he takes it easy, making sure no one falls too far behind, calling out when cars approach, acting as a kind of fraternal shepherd, just as he did when we pedaled to elementary school five decades ago. When Ned tires, Harry slows down to keep him company; when we approach a farmhouse where a mean, bike-chasing mutt is known to reside, Harry, knowing I’m frightened of strange dogs, pulls up and rides between me and the house. I cruise along with Harry and Ned for awhile, but when Ned urges us ahead, I take off after Mark and Henry. I can’t catch them, which I will later not-so-subtly hint is because my bike has fatter tires. But I keep charge of the map, which not only satisfies my need to feel important but ensures that no one can get very far ahead of me.
As always, our vacation goes too fast. Now, on the last afternoon, our quads are a little sore and our spirits a little dampened, knowing that tomorrow we will disperse in four directions. Mark and Henry, as usual, are in the lead, but as we head into the home stretch, they slow down a bit so Harry, Ned, and I can catch up. For a few miles, we ride together in the late-afternoon sun.
Then we turn onto Harry’s road. As we approach the final hill, without saying a word, we pick up the pace. The only sound is the rhythmic chuff of our breathing and the click of shifting gears. Suddenly we’re going all out, straining at the pedals, thigh muscles burning, rising from our saddles as we head up the hill. Fanning out across the road, we push hard, fighting to be first. Mark and Henry are a little ahead, but Harry and I are coming on strong and Ned is right behind us. I’m reminded of the opening of Bonanza, when the Cartwright brothers ride into view. For a brief moment we’re all even. And then suddenly—panting, laughing—we all ease up at once and coast home.