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little older she started telling Paul that he was mean and that she didn’t like him, and every time she did so he looked stricken. I took to encouraging her, though she didn’t need much encouragement. Every time she learned a bad word, she used it against him. Once, Paul came home with a bag full of Emily’s favorite candy bars. He said, “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas,” even though it was nowhere near Christmas. She jumped up and down as she unwrapped a candy bar, which she then very theatrically dropped, saying, “I don’t want candy from a jerk,” as she stomped it into the carpet. Then she ran into her room, and instead of chasing her, Paul grabbed me by the back of the neck and pushed me into the sofa.
    â€œHa ha ha, she doesn’t like you.” I did my best to taunt him while he held me down long enough to grab an apple from the bowl on the glass coffee table, eat the apple, and shove the core into my mouth. Before he let me go, he beat me hard in the back and the chest.
    Eventually Emily started mocking Paul by taking a piece of fruit out of the fruit bowl, taking a bite of it, and then dropping it. Sometimes she pretended an apple was too hot to hold; other times she pretended that she was incompetently juggling one pear. Whenever she did this, I was sure to receive a beating later in the day, but I never told her about these particular beatings, partially because I didn’t want her to feel guilty but mostly because I didn’t want her to stop making fun of Paul.
    My father, having decided that Paul’s treatment was my just punishment for being who I was, mostly ignored us whenever he would pass. I learned to imitate the thud and sweep of his crutches the way other boys imitate fart noises. Emily did not like it when I kicked fruit into our father’s path, and though she would have sooner died than tell on me, she did try on a number of occasions to kick the fruit in a different direction so that it wound up becoming like a soccer game. When our father did get knocked down, he would never let us help him up.
    Noble but absurd, absurd but noble, mostly absurd, mostly noble; my thoughts on my father and his crutches have shifted probably tens of thousands of times over sixty years. My mother I did not see much of—she was usually in her room drinking or reading the romance novels that she consumed at the rate of one or sometimes two per day, thus leaving our apartment lined with several thousand drugstore-grade romance novels that shared space with the Latin copies of Virgil and Tacitus that my father had ostensibly read in prep school.
    Emily spent a lot of time following me around, asking me what I thought about whatever she happened to be thinking about, gazing at me with the extremely large blue eyes that made her look like a bug (“Ladybug” was her hated childhood nickname, used by everyone in the family except for me). I helped her dance, after a fashion. We watched movies together; we shared a fondness for the 1930s and 1940s comedies, musicals, and gangster films that played on the Late Show and the Late Late Show . When there was a movie playing at three in the morning that we both wanted to see, we would set the alarm and watch Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire, and then go back to bed just as Paul was waking up. I was always amazed by Emily’s intelligence and her lightness of heart. It was impossible to see her in the glow of the television and not think that one day she was going to be a movie star, or a famous writer, or something else wondrous.
    Actually, Emily was talking about becoming a writer when Paul almost went too far. Paul had sat down to watch television with us, and Emily said that when she grew up she was going to write a book called “Stupid Paul.” For whatever reason, this silly child’s insult set Paul off, and he grabbed her by the shoulder and raised his hand to hit her. I leaped in between them and grabbed