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hindsight and medical knowledge that didn’t exist in the 1950s, Jay and Natalie are convinced now that their first son had attention deficit disorder (ADD). In those days ADD was unknown, and smart kids like Bruce who couldn’t concentrate in school were often accused of not trying hard enough and of failing to live up to their potential. That’s what made it tough for Jay and Natalie. They knew Bruce was smart, he simply refused—or so they thought—to apply himself.
    “Of course knowing what we know now, we would have handled things entirely differently,” Jay said, shaking his head. “We always thought Bruce was testing us, that he was simply being stubborn. I’m convinced now it wasn’t nearly that simple.”
    Brian was born three years after Bruce, in September of 1957, and Gwyn came along in 1962. By then the family hierarchy was pretty much set: Chris was the good child; Bruce was the bad child. Brian and Gwyn became observers of the family dynamic as they grew up. “We probably shortchanged both Brian and Gwyn growing up because we were so focused on Bruce,” Jay said. “Almost everything that happened in the family seemed to center on Bruce and his behavior. Whenever we traveled, we gave him a pill that was supposed to help him sleep. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it was always the same: If he slept, the others slept; if he was awake, they all stayed awake.”
    It is not at all unusual in today’s world for a family with an ADD child to be ruled by the whims and moods of that child. Many ADD kids today take medication to modify their behavior and to help them concentrate in school. When Bruce was growing up, there was no diagnosis, no medication, and no relief for anyone in the family. “I think I challenged them and tested them almost every day,” Bruce said. “It was never easy.”
    It certainly wasn’t easy on Bruce, who was keenly aware of what his family perceived as his shortcomings. He was sent to different child psychologists, which angered and frustrated him. Brian remembers Bruce coming home from one psychologist’s where he had run into one of his classmates. “That kid is crazy,” he told Brian. “I’m not perfect, but I’m
not
crazy.”
    Chris and Bruce may have had different personalities, but they were similar physically: slender, dark-haired, with easy smiles, and good at any sport that involved speed. Brian and Gwyn were both stockier, Brian with sandy hair and Gwyn with the same brown hair as Chris and Bruce but swimmer’s shoulders. In fact she swam in high school and briefly in college at Lafayette. When she stopped swimming, she played women’s rugby briefly. “I played until we went up to play Rutgers,” she said. “I was a pretty big kid, five seven, a hundred and forty pounds, but these women were
huge
. I was the biggest girl on our team, and I was smaller than anyone playing for them. They were mean too. They just beat us to a pulp. That, and knee surgery, ended my rugby career.”
    Brian was always a runner. He ran cross-country in both high school and college and still runs today. He has run in several Boston Marathons, with a best time of 3:07. “Brian likes to do anything that’s hard,” Bruce said. “Marathons, white-water rafting. If it isn’t hard or dangerous, he isn’t interested in it.”
    Bruce and Brian were roommates briefly as kids before Brian decided to turn the family’s sunroom into his room. Gwyn, always the observer, didn’t think Brian moved out of the room because he needed more space but because he wanted to get away from the crossfire between Bruce and their parents.
    In spite of Bruce’s frustrations with his parents and theirs with him, the family remained close-knit as the kids grew up. Gwyn, eight years younger than Bruce, adored him because to her, “he was always so cool.” Jay and Natalie had a strict rule on school nights that all four children had to spend the hours between seven o’clock and nine