My Brother, the Writer

Summer 1974: This was always going to begin here, in a blue Fiat parked between a horse pasture and a potholed tennis court. Beside me in the driver’s seat, my brother Frank lights a cigarette and unstraps the leather brace from his bad knee, sweating onto the upholstery. We have just finished our daily tennis match on the court near our grandparents’ horse farm, and as Frank gulps air and smoke in alternate lungfuls he jokes that that’s enough healthy living for one day. When the unfiltered cigarette burns close to his fingers, he flicks it out the window and starts the car. There’s no hurrying this ritual, which I recognize as his way of calming the anxiety that has plagued him since his return home that June.

I’m only sixteen, twelve years younger than Frank, but sense that I will one day write about this scene and that my words will have the nature of an elegy because he will die before me and too young. As Paul Valéry said of his fellow poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, “Near him while he was still alive, I thought of his destiny as already realized.” A few weeks earlier, Frank arrived at our parents’ house on Long Island after two years in Utah—obese, chain-smoking, and so crippled by phobias that he couldn’t drive himself across the Triborough Bridge to reach his psychiatrist’s office in Manhattan. As his constant companion, I can’t conceive of him having many happy, healthy years ahead.

Or healthy, anyway, since Frank always seems happy. In every photograph I have of him, some taken at the bleakest times of his life, he smiles mirthfully, as if preparing to tell one of his characteristic self-deprecating jokes. In the car that day he mocks his desperate craving for a cigarette after the smokeless hour on the tennis court, and narrates the unwrapping of his knee brace like a sportscaster saluting an aging athlete. Even when directed toward others, his humor is softened by empathy. Years later in his hospital room I’ll laugh as he speculates about the dieting failures of a baseball pitcher waddling across the TV screen. Frank had also been overweight as a young man, and except for a brief period of fitness during his Army service, he struggled with obesity until his final illness.

During my childhood, my five older siblings and I formed two distinct units within our family. The first comprised my three brothers, born early in my parents’ marriage and referred to as “the boys,” and the second my two sisters and me. My brothers went off to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire when I was still an infant, so I never spent much time with any of them until Frank moved back from Utah. By then I myself was at St. Paul’s, and arrived home that summer after my junior year to find him resettled in his childhood room. Having grown up in the company of my sisters, I must have been hungry for a male companion, someone I could look up to, and Frank fit the part—he was old enough for me to emulate, but as the youngest of “the boys” he knew what it was like to feel overshadowed by siblings.

Frank’s life up to that point was largely a mystery to me. I knew him mainly as the chubby boy standing alongside his slender older brothers in family photographs taken before I was born. I knew that he had been kicked out of St. Paul’s, from which his brothers had recently graduated. After receiving his diploma from a boarding school in Colorado, he served two years in the Army before enrolling at Franconia, a tiny counter-culture college founded in New Hampshire in 1963. I also knew that he was a writer, a vocation that I aspired to as well. The combination of his literary bent and his deviation from our traditional family path made him glamorous in my eyes.

Franconia was a good fit for Frank, offering individualized instruction and written evaluations...