People have commented how stoic I was about my brother’s death, how graceful all the sons were about losing the third in line, but most of them don’t realize we were born with genes for fatalism that had been switched on for generations.  On both sides of my family before the emigration here, our ancestors knew little but stress, war, and hard work.

From my mother, we came from a conscripted military member in the Czarina’s guard whose family somehow found their way first to western Europe and then to here, and from my father, who was the first person in his family born on this soil, we descended from peasant farmers who became miners when they arrived in America.

My father fought for the Allies in the trenches in World War I, was awarded the Purple Heart, and came back to a country that allowed him to put himself through medical school by singing opera live on the radio.  Eventually, he was the first person of his ethnicity to be in the state legislature and the first to serve on the city council.

When he wasn’t working at his office in the city building, he saw patients in the front room of our family rowhouse. He was a sincere and serious man who never tempted fate nor left himself open to the effects of the Evil Eye by acting too content, too satisfied, or overly proud of his excellent life fortune, his faithful wife, or his handsome sons.

In spite of my father’s optimistic rise in class, by the time my brothers and I were children, family humor was based in sarcasm.  A fatalistic tone entered into all stories, whether told around the dinner table or out on the stoop, and compliments from parents to children were doled out sparingly because ancient superstition was still alive and well in our early 20^th Century American neighborhood.

“That wasn’t too bad,” my mother would say about a straight-A report card and then point out a flaw.  “Look, for attendance you missed two times.”

“Someday you’ll stand up straight,” she’d begin to my youngest brother, looking spiffy and very handsome on his way to a date, “but not today.”

“You did nearly everything right,” my father said to my brother Ted the day Ted pitched his one and only no-hitter.

They never discussed what Ted had done wrong so that he could improve; instead, a phrase was worded that way was to avoid praising too loudly, which could be construed as being too prideful or happy about an accomplishment.  Then the Evil Eye would be cast upon you by someone that you had thoughtlessly made envious or some god irritated by your pride.

The last consequence anyone wanted was to attract the kind of positive attention that caused resentment, whether in another human being or from some unhappy spirit. Outright compliments were never allowed; perfection needed to be tempered in order to avoid making someone or something a target.

This tradition explains how my parents and their generation viewed the Church, as some kind of amulet that would protect them from danger.  For them, when my brother stepped out of the boundaries of the Church, he put himself in the kind of trouble one can imagine only if he comes from a long line of village dwellers with no electricity, no doctors, no formal schooling and stuck between an East and West that were always at war with one another, trampling community, family, and fortune in the process.

Besides pride and boasting, irreverence or disrespect for authority could also bring on the Evil Eye.  When we were young boys and running around the city up to no good, my lost brother always hedged his bets. Right before he was going to do something he knew was wrong, such as try to vault from one bridge support to another over one of the many streams we encountered in our ramblings, he’d quote Agamemnon’s sealing his own destruction by disobeying the gods by treading on sacred tapestries.

“May no envious glance cast me down from afar!” he’d cry, then jump, landing with a smile on the other side.

He'd quote Shakespeare if he suspected a lie: “Oh, what a wicked web we weave.” When one of us joined a brother in aggression toward another, we’d hear “Et tu, Brute.”

He loudly praised good effort, bragged when he succeeded, greeted strangers with an open smile, and stuck his hand out to shake the hand of anyone he met, no matter their color or background.  He rejected everything about the Evil Eye because doing so made him an American in the classic sense of the word.  He watched our father serving his constituents over the course of his life and had a view of democracy that was wider than the one we experienced in our neighborhood.  If he had a favorite poet, he was Whitman.

My lost brother was smartest of all of us and could not resist lording his quick wit over the rest of us if he thought dropping a quote to show off would give him a psychological edge.  For him, pride was what pushed him to fight back against overachieving older brothers.  He laughed at the Evil Eye and the rest of us for not loudly taking our place whenever we could.  For him that was the American Way.

Two of us four sons became engineers, me and Ted, the youngest, Lawrence, worked as  an actuarial mathematician, but my lost brother was at heart a historian, a misplaced scholar of the Enlightenment who ended up selling Chevrolets, who dismissed the Church, the village superstitions that had arrived wholesale in America, and whatever other curses he earned.

After a while, however, when he’d dropped out of college and worked in a factory, or when he came back from Korea, I could see he was living with demons, whether or not they came from someone’s Evil Eye.

For the hours after we got the phone call informing us that he had died saving his family in a fire, none of the brothers showed much emotion on the train to the funeral. Neither did my father, though my mother wept constantly for the entire five-hour trip.  We’d gotten a roomette, and two of us would stay with her at a time and watch the world go by on the other side of the window while the other three went to the bar.  Then we’d switch out.

His in-laws had found us places to stay nearby with friends and relatives, and that evening, the night before the funeral, a dinner was catered at their house.  His daughters were sent up to bed early after the meal, but the rest of us stayed up.  Those who could play piano took turns, and family and friends gathered around the piano and sang old songs until midnight.

Most people these days don’t remember when families sat around the piano and sang during good times and bad.  My father’s piano at home had long been piled with boxes and unplayable, but that night with a good meal, nice people, and the joy of music, we sang in spite of the grief we were feeling, even my mother, because singing helped sooth our souls and gave us the harmony of our combined voices as a way of coping with death.

When it came to emotional pain, we did what the entire country had learned to do by then: we stuffed our feelings down.  Only a few times in my life would I face the anguish of my brother’s death face on.  The energy needed to repress the loss became my constant companion and tempered my emotional response to everything until the day I stood in the hospital room while my daughter birthed her first child, and something inside me, some kind of emotional dam, broke, and I wept like a baby for the first time in my life since I’d been a child, not only for the beauty and bravery of my daughter during the miracle of birthing a bloody baby that came out screaming, but also for my dead brother.

I really did not understand the effect that his dying had on me until twenty years later when I was face to face with a new life. Even then, this unexpected feeling was so new , so raw, left me so vulnerable, that the experience came over me again only a few times later, and only when I searched for information about him.  I barely allowed myself to pursue the questions I had about his death. I never got satisfying answers.

When he told me he had bought a lot at a new development called Glen Summit Estates, I insisted he didn’t need to build that new home.  The old one had been constructed only a few years earlier.  At that first house, the lot was plenty big enough for an addition if he wanted to expand, there were dozens of kids in the neighborhood with solid parents, and he already had three bedrooms there, two baths, and a garage.  Why did he want more than that?

He didn’t seem to realize that the girls would grow up and leave and that he and his wife would be left with what would have become, according to his plans for stables, riding rings, and paddocks, a mini estate for two people.  His older was twelve by then, the younger, nine.

And that circular staircase in the foyer, twisting elegantly up to a balcony that served as a bridge between the master bedroom and the rest of the upstairs was simply over the top!  He said a little Italian man he’d sold a car to did the work for him.  For the one Christmas they spent in the house before it burned, he and his wife set up a tree that reached all the way to the second-floor ceiling in the front hall, stopping right below a chandelier.

Why did he need such extravagance?  Why did he want a tree that tall?

I also never understood why everything in the house was off-white, either —the carpeting throughout, the furniture in the living room, the velvet-patterned wall paper, the molding—except that perhaps the color choice had something to do with what Mrs. Kennedy had done to the White House: lay a coating of ivory paint on everything she could find.

He had even created himself a home office with a custom, built-in desk that was shaped like an oval.  He actually called the desk “The Oval” as a joke.

There was a whole-house intercom system in the kitchen with units in each room that could play any radio station they were tuned to, and a person could talk to anywhere in the house from any room.  I guess in a home that big, 4,500 square feet, four bedrooms and four and a half baths with a finished basement, he probably thought he needed a way to communicate from one end of the house to the other.  A person can yell only so loud.

When my brothers and I inspected what was left of the house after the funeral, we saw a smoke-stained, unsigned life insurance application sitting in the middle of The Oval, weighed down by a gritty-looking paper weight painted with a temple garden scene on the inside and stamped “Made in Occupied Japan” on the bottom.  I picked the papers up, looked them over, and returned them to the table even though I wasn’t supposed to touch anything.

The police had let us go in and look around, but they said that everything had to be left right where it was until the fire inspectors signed off.  Only the back part of the house had burned, around the kitchen, which had fallen into the basement. Before we went, my sister-in-law, who was staying with the girls at her parents’, asked us to look around for his wallet, which was missing for some reason.

Later, when an anonymous person mailed the wallet to the dealership that my brother managed, my sister-in-law had wondered if somehow it had fallen out of something he’d been wearing when he’d been in the ambulance, thinking that perhaps one of the volunteer firemen or hospital workers had mailed it back.

I always questioned how his wallet ended up in a package sent to his workplace anonymously from the same town where the dealership was located, which was not the town where he had lived or died, but then again nothing about the tragedy made sense.  The wallet was only one of many details that left me uneasy.

Another question was why he went with aluminum for the wiring.  When he’d called and asked me about it, I said no, aluminum was too soft. I told him I didn’t care what the new building code recommended.  However, he was eager to get into the house and didn’t want to wait, he’d told me, so he was going for aluminum, soft or not.

Unfortunately, during the fire the kitchen area was so destroyed that determining the exact cause of the blaze was impossible.  I read the report, which used the word “might” quite often.  Nothing was definitive.

The author also listed lit cigarette butts dumped in the trash under the sink as an option since the four adults who had been in the house the night before smoked, and the outside wall, the one the kitchen sink had been on, with a big, bay window, was completely gone, leaving a burnt-out, gaping hole in the side of the house that looked out over a birch grove in the backyard.

My sister-in-law said he had helped her clean up after a bridge game and that he had dumped the ashtrays into the trash can under the sink when she usually sat them on the counter at the end of the evening, waiting until she was sure they were completely extinguished before throwing them out in the morning.

Usually, he didn’t help her clean up, she said, but recently they had been playing bridge with friends from their former neighborhood, and that night when he started picking up at the end of the evening, she didn’t argue with him about how to do it.

I’ve had to learn to live with not knowing what caused the fire, but sometimes still I am overcome with the loss, and then I need something to blame.  One of his daughters swore that she saw someone running away from the house through the snow, but I think what she saw in the darkness—the ground bright because of the Nor’easter of the week before—was merely her own sister, down off the roof before she was and running through the deep snow in the cold night toward the neighbor’s house.

We’ll never know if there was a mysterious man in the distance, or not, because by the time the inspectors got there, any evidence of footprints had been destroyed by the water used to put out the fire and the simultaneous trampling by everyone involved with the attempted rescue.

But the wallet bothered me, showing up as it did a few days after he died.

My brother Ted was convinced someone had stolen it and then felt remorse.  None of the contents was missing, according to his wife, not his credit cards, social security number, the annual picture they took of their daughters, not even the wad of cash he was always carrying.  I even had plans to call on one of the volunteer firemen or go over to the hospital where he was pronounced dead and track down whoever might have found that wallet, but I was too overwhelmed in the end and just gave up.

After the funeral, we all just wanted to be back in our own homes with our own wives and families, and who could blame us for not following through on vague suspicions?  I still have questions now, decades later, when it’s simply too late to ask.

I was the eldest of four sons, and he was my favorite brother.  Ted, the one born after me, was so competitive he really didn’t know how to play. He couldn’t just go shoot a few baskets; he’d have to try and bury me.  I was long and thin, taller than he was by two inches, but he was denser, heavier.  If he fouled on me, I felt knocked, and he fouled all the time.

Being a bully was part of Ted’s persona.  Whether we were playing basketball, tennis, poker, or pool, Ted simply had to win, and he usually did, not because I wasn’t as good as he was, but because I didn’t have his drive to destroy the opponent. I’d like to think I was a gentleman athlete while he was a scrapper.  When he did lose, he’d sometimes even pout.

Lawrence was the youngest of the four, and he was most interested in riding the one bike we were all competing for.  Of the lot of us, Lawrence was the least competitive.  I’ve often thought he just gave up early in childhood and learned to content himself with activities he could do alone.  He collected comic books and would hide them under his mattress so Ted didn’t trade them with someone in the neighborhood for something more desirable.

If I had in him a favorite brother, the third of four boys, then my mother did what no woman was supposed to do and chose a favorite son.  He wasn’t the tallest of us—I was 6’ 6’’, Ted was 6” 4’, he was 6’ 3”, and Lawrence held up the rear at 6 feet— but he was the smartest and the funniest.  He wasn’t as interested in sports as much as getting good at whatever Ted didn’t seem to be able to master. Making money was one of them.

Ted had flown fighters in World War Two and Korea and later became a test pilot in the Marines, but as a lifelong soldier, he was limited in how much he could earn by his rank and government service rating.  Lawrence worked for the same company all his life and could not afford to buy a house until years after our brother was dead, with money he inherited from our parents, but the brother who sold Chevies for a living was dripping with cash.

In fact, when I bought my first house, he paid for all the furniture. When my son wanted to go to a ball game, he got a friend to give us tickets to a box behind home plate. The team’s slugger even came up and introduced himself, one of the best memories of my son’s childhood.

The most fun I ever had as a child was with my favorite brother.  Our father was the son of immigrants, but he had become a physician.  As I mentioned, he sang opera on the radio to put himself through medical school during the Depression, a detail I find fascinating. Once he became a doctor, however, he never left his old immigrant neighborhood where only half of the conversations on the street were in English; the rest took place in Polish, Russian, or Slovakian.

Our childhood ramblings took place along old railroad beds, under bridges, and in abandoned lots that we turned into baseball fields.  Every twenty minutes a train went past the back of our house on one of dozens of tracks we were not supposed to prowl because the area was so dangerous, so loud that hearing a train coming was sometimes difficult.  More than once we realized, almost too late, that the whistle behind us was coming from the track we were walking instead of the one next over.

If we followed the tracks to the east, we’d find ourselves out where the bay met the river.  The tugs would be sounding their horns, giant ships at the entrance waiting to be pulled into port.  We’d spend the day with the seagulls roaming the marshes until the sun reached a certain point, and we realized we had to make our way back.  Sometimes if we found a friendly railroad worker, he’d haul us up onto the back of a caboose, where we’d ride back at a steady clip, jumping off when the train slowed down for roundhouse traffic.

At dinner later, when my parents would ask us where we’d been, he’d say, “Oh, just wandering.” They had no idea of the scope of our wanderings

While I might have been the tallest, Ted the most aggressive, and Lawrence the loner, he had the most brains.  He skipped so many grades that by the time he was turning fifteen, the priests at our school said that he needed to go to college the following year in order to meet his advanced educational needs.  They had a special arrangement, they said, with St. Agnes University, and that if my parents allowed him to, he could go there for free and study history.

A lay-priest, Brother Thomas, would be his official mentor and look out for him, as he had for the other academically advanced young men that the school had sent to St. Agnes when their intellectual abilities could no longer be supported at home.

 I was thoroughly against allowing him to skip grades and go off to college at sixteen. Ted didn’t approve either, but mostly because he was jealous. Lawrence didn’t have much of an opinion; he struggled just keeping track of his own studies.

My parents were pulled in both ways, afraid he’d be bored and afraid to let him go away from home so early, but as soon as he had learned he could go to college and study history, for free even, there was no stopping my brother.  He badgered and cajoled until he won.  In spite of his obvious happiness and my own pride in his accomplishment, I was full of unease, perhaps overly aware of the problems that unbridled joy could bring.

I can’t talk about his moving into adulthood without bringing up his acne, which began in earnest when he was eleven. My brother’s face became painful to look at, and he was so tall that there was no escaping his bad skin. When he started moving into puberty, his face became covered with boils, some of which would eventually leave permanent scars.  We didn’t have antibiotics for bad skin then, so he began to slouch and duck his way through life.  He was fiercely attracted to girls, but none of them were interested in him.

By the time I went off to training for my stint in World War Two, when he was in the midst of adolescence, all he did was attend our parochial school, serve at Mass, and stay in his room to study.  College was going to be an escape into the mind.  He wanted to be a scholar.

My mother bought him every home remedy she could find for his cystic acne, but nothing worked. She was pained by the new shyness he had developed, the way he turned in on himself when his countenance no longer pleased the outside world.  He’d gone from being a blue-eyed, blond-haired darling boy with an air of mischievous danger to being an introvert who avoided all social interaction. The letters from him I received during basic training were about Abraham Lincoln and Rosseau, not how the city baseball team was doing or neighborhood gossip.

I’m not sure which acne treatment finally worked for him, whether it was an unfamiliar pine tar soap my mother brought home from the pharmacy one day or if it was a new cream that had been developed—he tried both and wrote me about them— but at some point, his acne cleared up, and he confronted the results of suddenly having a handsome new face.

When I came home on leave the winter before he left for college, I was astounded at the difference in not only his looks but also in his personality.  He was his old self again, even better.

He laughed, he joked, he stood up taller, and the girls who previously ignored him surrounded him like ants on honey.  The introvert who hid in his room was nowhere to be found. He had become widely popular with both the women and men his own age, having developed a charismatic charm that was irresistible to both the old and the young.  The rest of us were rather dour, but he was lit up by an undeniable inner flame.

At the time I was finishing up basic training, Ted was still at home, gearing up for basic training himself, where he’d go as soon as had he finished high school.  He hoped to be a fighter pilot, and at the dinner table our lost brother would harangue him about the Age of Enlightenment and quote Franklin at him from old copies of Poor Richard’s Almanac.  When he’d say he was going to be a fighter pilot too, Ted mocked him for being too skinny.

“You’ll never take the G’s,” he would say.

Each would complain about the other in long, weekly letters.  No one made a long-distance phone call then unless someone had died—and even then, a telegram was often used for emergencies instead.

That spring after basic, I hadn’t yet shipped off overseas and was waiting for my assignment to begin. I’d been accepted into transport training for the C-47, on leave till the next session began. Because of the timing, I had a few weeks off, so I went back to my folks’ house.

I’d be wearing my uniform and would sit on the front stoop with my mother after my father’s office hours were over, before she went in to start dinner, and from the time school let out until we sat down to eat, clusters of girls would walk past our house giggling on their way to the ice cream counter at the drug store, looking for a glimpse of my brother.

I marveled at how much could change in just over a year.

That fall while I was waiting around on base to hear about my assignment overseas in the war, he attended his first semester as a sixteen-year-old history major at St. Agnes.  In the first letter from him once he had started college, I was struck by how much like a teenager he still was even though he was writing from a dormitory room.

In one paragraph, he was complaining about how, on the weekends he went home, Lawrence hogged the bicycle, and in the next he’d be discussing how Napoleon destroyed the people’s revolution by establishing a constitutional monarchy.

He'd complain about my mother’s constant badgering that he write home to them regularly, even though he was just on the other side of the city and then jump to discussing his preference for Locke over Montesquieu in the conception of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

He crabbed about his daily life like any teenager would—and then he’d soar above my head with all he was studying and thinking, both delighting me because of his intellectual abilities and dismaying me because of his emotional immaturity.  I did not think he should be at college.  I thought he needed to be with people his age, that his new found popularity would give him an opportunity to catch up socially in a world where he had been behind.

No one had listened to me, however, so after my initial protest against his going, I had given up and now, half way across the country and on my way to Europe, I would only read about the outcome from afar.

I’m sure that one of the reasons he wanted to go away was that my mother was showing the signs of what eventually would have been called by today’s language a “hoarding problem.”  While my father was born in the United States soon after his parents emigrated, my mother and her younger sister arrived here when she was sixteen, accompanying her father, a stepmother, and two very young half-siblings.

She rarely discussed her early life in English and even though the older of us was bilingual, we still were missing most of the pieces of her early childhood.  We knew that her father had been conscripted from his small village to join the Czarina’s guard and had married a woman of minor nobility that was staying at court. Together, they had my mother, who was born in 1902. Her younger sister arrived eighteen months later.

Her father had been chosen for the Guard because he fit the physical requirements of guard members: he wasn’t Russian, but he was handsome and stood  at least 6’4”, with blond hair and blue eyes.  How he rose to Captain we don’t know, but according to my mother, he saw the writing on the wall with the Czar and had his first wife, his two daughters, and himself smuggled out of Russia in a carriage with a false bottom right before the Revolution.

What her family did in Europe before they arrived here is unknown, but by the time they stepped off the ship onto American soil, the Czar and his family had already been executed. My grandfather was middle age by then, but he still worked as a laborer from the time he arrived until he died, having gone from riding on a horse with a sword to digging a ditch with a shovel, my mother having grown up riding in carriages adorned with little colored flags still flapping in her memory, now in a cold water tenement with a stepmother who made her watch the new children and scrub floors.

She couldn’t wait to escape, and when the beautiful young woman met the rising young doctor on a boardwalk one summer, she did.

My mother’s father had strange-looking toes that appeared progressively more underdeveloped the further away they were positioned from the big toe, a birth defect carried over from the limited gene pool of his childhood village.  Every single one of his children acquired the defect, in varying degrees, even the two children from his second wife.

Of my brothers, only one of us did not get some version of the curled under toes.Ted. Lawrence had toes so compromised that he was awarded 4F status by the draft board. All of my own children have them, and the feet of the other grandchildren are a mixed lot.

By the time we were all teenagers, my mother waddled around on sore feet and had acquired an inability to resist a sale at Bradlee’s. First, she started with just clothing, buying slips and sweaters and blouses not just in her own size but in others too—because they were a good deal. She stacked packages in her dressing room until the room was ringed waist high with hat boxes, petticoats, coats folded up into department store bags with handles.

Little by little, as we were growing through puberty, adolescence, and eventually young manhood, she began to fill the rest of the rooms in the house and even the hallways with purchases as well.  We ate off chipped plates in the kitchen though stacked in the corners were brand-new sets of China.  Brightly colored new towels lay unwrapped somewhere in all the piles, but the ones that we used in the bath were ripped and stained.  She was “saving” the good stuff for future use in some imaginary scenario that would never happen.

The more she acquired, the less we invited anyone in.  The front part of the rowhouse was austere.  When you climbed the stoop to enter the door, the first two rooms you came to in the long hallway that ran the length of the building were my grandfather’s waiting room and his office, with just a few chairs, his desk, bookshelves, and the materials he needed in his medical practice.  My mother wasn’t allowed to store any of her acquisitions in this part of the house.

Eventually, however, she took over the entire first, second, and even third floor with her boxes and bags. By then, no one came to visit us but family; any entertaining my father had to do as part of his practice or government work had to be done elsewhere, at his office in City Hall or in a restaurant over a meal.

His exhortations and pleas for her to straighten up, purge the house of everything we didn’t need, were ignored.  We all knew she couldn’t help herself, no matter how she was badgered or humiliated by our drawing the problem to her attention.  My father even hired a man to impersonate the Fire Inspector and tell her she simply had to clear out the house or the property would be condemned.

That ruse happened when I was in flight training.  When my father wrote me about it, he was disappointed that his plan had not worked.  My mother had merely shuffled a few things around but gave up within a few days, too overwhelmed to take the project on, too attached to what she had bought to allow anyone else, such as a hired person, to go through the hundreds of boxes for her and make decisions.

When my brother went off to St. Agnes at sixteen, he planned on never returning to the family home. While the rest of us managed to overlook the mess, he was both anguished and incensed.  She was not allowed in his room—he even began locking the door—because if he didn’t take control of his space before he could stop her, she’d have piled something in there.

He swore in a letter written from his dormitory that he would never go live at Richmond Street again: I leave behind the storing of animal fat in cans lined up in the icebox, her scooping the cream risen to the top of the milk bottles with two fingers and licking them before she pours, her buying dishes for dinner parties she’ll never host or shoes on sale that won’t fit her feet.  I renounce the rule where you can’t give a compliment without criticizing at the same time.

What could I argue?  I felt the same, just not as deeply. I accepted how things were; he was oppressed by them.

For that reason, I was surprised when two years into his studies at St. Agnes, while I was flying transport planes in Europe, he quit college, got a job in a factory, and moved back home.  He was done with everything: college, the Church, his plans to be a scholar of American History.  Within two months at his new job, he was the floor manager at the factory, and he reached the highest level he would reach for another twenty years there unless someone retired or died.

My mother and father both wrote separately about how worried they were about him.  He went to work, drank at a bar near there though he still wasn’t old enough, came home, ate, and locked himself in his room.  Except for the alcohol consumption, which was for them a new behavior, he carried himself exactly as he did when he had bad acne and was caught up in the throes of adolescent depression.  The beer and whiskey had them worried—my father had a brother who became what they described as a “falling down drunk” and was estranged from the family.

Was my brother taking on that mantle, they wondered?

I thought I knew where the drinking started, however, though I never told them.   One time on leave I had gone to visit my brother at St. Agnes University.  In his letters to me, he was excited about his classes and his mentoring relationship with Brother Thomas, who sometimes cooked for him and the other boys in the program.  He bragged that Brother Thomas even gave them beer to drink in his apartment though they were underage.

I’d gone to a dinner there at Brother Thomas’s place, brats and sauerkraut, but during the course of the evening, I decided I didn’t like Brother Thomas at all. The food was greasy and smelled a little spoiled, and even the beer he gave me tasted funny.  There was something off about his attitude toward the precocious young teenage scholars I met there. I drank a few sips, set the bottle down, and never picked it up again. As soon as I could, I got my brother out of there to go play some pool.

When we were at the apartment, I noticed my brother had swilled his beer down, first one and then another, but even then, I could not understand why he threw up in the middle of the street right before we boarded the bus, or why he still appeared drunk after having purged himself of the beer.  Something didn’t sit right.

Back overseas months later, I learned in a letter from my father that he had dropped out and gone to work in the factory.

By the time I was discharged after World War Two and he was nineteen, he had realized that besides providing him with some money, the factory would lead him nowhere.

The big war was over, Korea not yet begun, and I was going to take advantage of the new GI Bill and study engineering.  Somehow, I convinced him to go with me, that he could use the Bill to frontload his education and then afterwards do military service as an officer in order to fulfill his obligation to the draft.

I had big dreams about all we would do together in college, but once we got there, he found his own friends and a girlfriend. By the time we graduated, I felt I had hardly seen him, that when I did, I’d had to force him to get together with me and the woman that would become my wife. He was separating himself from his past, almost inventing himself anew, but I didn’t recognize what he was doing then or why.

On what seemed to me the spur of the moment he married his college girlfriend in a small ceremony at her home.  Her family were Unitarians. I intended to go there for the wedding, but my parents insisted no one was allowed to go because he was marrying outside the Catholic Church.  He was undertaking what was called a “mixed” marriage at the time, and by our attending, the priest had told my parents, we would be condoning his leaving the Church.

Not one member of our family appeared at the wedding.  The father of his best man stood with him in the photographs I saw later.

With graduation for college and subsequent military service in sight, my brother decided he would be a Navy fighter pilot.  The midshipman program was set to be canceled, and in May of 1950, the Navy announced that aviators would be drawn instead from Annapolis and Navy ROTC or OCS programs, a stroke of luck for him since only fifty from the midshipmen program would be retained and college boys like him made up the rest of the recruits.

I even went to visit him in Pensacola for his last couple of days in the program.  I wanted to be there for his graduation but arrived a little early so we would have time to spend together.  I spent thirty-six hours on a train to see him, and when I laid eyes on him at the station, he seemed the happiest he had ever been.  He had one more day of training and would get his wings in a ceremony held on the weekend.

Unfortunately, he never finished his training.  On his final flight as a student, he passed out because of the G’s, and his instructor had to bring the plane down.  He had washed out.

“Don’t tell Ted,” he asked me that evening, when the events of the day were still sinking in.  Ted was by then flying fighters for the Marines.

“Just come out with it,” I advised. For me, bad news was good news to the Evil Eye.

We still had to attend the ceremony and watch the rest of his class get their wings, however, and before we left the house that day, I heard him speak in a clipped voice to his new wife that she had somehow not ironed his dress whites correctly.

The next morning, I had to get back on that train, but I didn’t want to leave him. They both seemed stunned. To make it worse, they had acquired a parrot while they were down there, and he accidently stabbed the parrot while he was trimming its wings, killing the poor bird.  He’d dug a hole in the backyard while his wife sniffled in the kitchen.  By the time I boarded for my thirty-six-hour ride back to my new job at Sylvania, he had his orders to go to Korea and be the number two man on an LST. I wondered if someone had cast the Evil Eye and won.

At the beginning the American landing at Blue Beach during Inchon, the Commanding Officer of the LST my brother served on threw himself on the floor, wrapped his head in a burlap sack, and became catatonic for the rest of the battle.  My brother was left in command of the LST.  Not only did they successfully land and drop off their cargo of men and tanks, but before they backed away from the beach under fire, with a few others under his command, he rescued dozens of men from an LST that had taken a direct hit, some with bleeding wounds and bone breaks, others with massive burns, all of them in shock.

Later, he received the Navy Cross for his heroism.

Ted had faced other fighters in the air and anti-aircraft fire from below. I would occasionally get a whiff of a body we were transporting somewhere, but of the three sons who saw battle, only he fought on the ground.  There, I imagine that God seems further away than the mere heavens where we were flying, found in the silent black vacuum of outer space where your prayers are either answered or not.

I see now that my brother’s rejection of me began after Korea. Once he was out of the Navy, I was able to get him employment at Sylvania. When he took the job, Arlene and I thought they would move into our same subdivision, that we’d raise our children together, as comfortable in each other’s houses as we would have been in our own.

He chose a different neighborhood to live in.  Soon he had even quit the position and was headed back to his wife’s family, where he had a job waiting for him as general manager of his brother-in-law’s Chevy dealership.  We saw each other once a year after that.

We still wrote each other letters, though, and when I bought a new house, an upgrade that could finally accommodate my four children, I joked in one of them that we’d have to wait a year to buy furniture because I couldn’t afford anything more.  He’d sent me a check in the mail that paid for us to furnish the entire house anew.

The last time Ted saw him, Ted was picking up a used Volkswagen Beetle from him and described our brother bragging about having sold a car at top dollar to a rich, old woman that he had charmed into making a purchase she didn’t need.  He claimed our brother was all puffed up about the new house that was just about completed.

They were near the dealership, standing in the parking lot outside a bar. Ted was headed back to a hotel so that he’d be right on the Interstate when he left the next morning, and our brother was headed home. They said goodbye to each other there.

Our brother seemed too drunk to drive, and when Ted asked him if he was all right, he’d answered yes, then threw up on his own shoes before he got in his own car and drove away.

The next time Ted heard word of him, there’d been a fire. He was dead.

My last experience with my brother was quite different. When his new house was finished, he invited me, my wife, and my kids to come up for the week before Christmas.  Our older children were mature enough to babysit the younger ones, so we went out to dinner.  As we were seated and expecting the waiter, the bartender brought over a drink and placed the glass in front of my brother, saying that someone wanted to treat him.

My wife and I had seen this happen to him before—wherever he went, people sent over drinks to him, usually women, not caring if he was with his wife or not.  He always shrugged and took a sip, his wife sitting there, saying nothing.  However, this time he refused the drink, said he was okay with the beer he was having, and sent the Stinger back.

Over the meal, he told us he was going to get a master’s degree in American History.  He was talking to the college, he said, and they’d be flexible with his schedule so that he could work full time.  He was holding off on telling his business partner until he was sure of the details.

Sitting across from my wife and me, he appeared content. He’d always been proud of his mind, pleased with the money he had earned and the house he had built.  However, he didn’t seem to enjoy himself in his old way anymore.  I could tell by the way he said the words “college professor” that he was sure about his new life direction, that he was finally maturing.

He was dead within weeks, his house burned, their possessions damaged or destroyed, his life insurance papers unsigned on The Oval.

Even at my age, I still have more questions than I have answers.  After three decades of having no contact with her, I called her and it was the last time she and I spoke. Within a few years after the fire, she had married again.  She and the girls moved with her new husband to another state, far from the home that had burned.

When I made that call, I had just witnessed the birth of my grandchild, and something inside of me was on fire.  More than anything, I wanted to see my dead brother again and tell him what I had experienced when I watched that baby crown. Before that moment, I’d never understood what women went through; I’d always taken mothers for granted.

I was vulnerable that day, as raw as I’d been when he died, but instead of repressing my feelings, I wanted to share my suddenly reborn sorrow, wanted to talk to the woman who, like me, had loved and lost him.  She had born his children.

She became angry with me.

“Don’t idolize him,” she said, her voice crackling on the wire.  I could hear the television in the background.  “He wasn’t the pure soul you’re grieving for.”

Insulted, I ended the conversation quickly and hung up, alone in my study, my wife asleep upstairs.

Talking to his wife had made my skin crawl, leaving me still with my unanswered questions.  I moved around the room, looking at the photographs of my successful career and family life, an image of my sons on a camping trip, one of my wife and my girls by the shore.

After the fire, why was his wallet sent anonymously to the dealership, with no note, nothing to identify the sender?  What exactly caused the fire?  Who did the daughter think she saw running away?

I straightened the frame that displayed my honorable discharge on the wall, boxed in glass with an American flat and my service medals.

Had his failure in pilot training caused negative long-term effects?  Had Blue Beach changed him forever?

I looked at the photograph of the bridal party, taken inside the church where my wedding was held, him as my best man.

Why had he abandoned the Church, St. Agnes University, and the other cultural origins of his childhood?

A man with his gifts perished in his prime. Was that just bad luck or the Evil Eye?