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unbearably mortifying and not to be heard by the neighbors. So Vernon was confined, almost always, to a single room at the back of the house, and when I see him in my mind it is always with the walls of the room rising around him, the ceiling, the floor, the door. He could not walk but rather
clattered
, and an inability to hoist himself any higher than his elbows meant the view from the window was largely denied him. He had no strength or freedom.
    He was whiteness, like me. His skin was snowy-white. His hair, which my mother kept cropped, was prickly like a summer lawn, wan as schoolyard chalk. He wore nothing but a nappy, which was bleached ivory from dryings in the sun. The walls and ceiling of his room were white, as was the porcelain handle on the door. His eyes were blue, as are mine. His lips were a childish pink.
    He was not cheerless. As a boy I was convinced he loved me. He would rattle his cot and snort merrily when I slipped into the room. He was easily entertained with a song, a toy, a waggle of his toes. If I am thin now, he was always thinner, and when he was happy his scrawny arms would wave like the wings of a chick. He could not talk, but he could gurgle, and he was capable of joy.
    He could also cry. It was the greatest blight in a blighted life. When he was not gurgling or sleeping he was crying, the bored, insufferable yowl of the tired toddler. It was his natural state of being: wet-faced and snot-nosed, ribboned with saliva, his bland face rosy with a woe he could not explain or comprehend, dribbling out a soulless sound that was, I decided, the sound of the boy-he-was grieving for the boy-he-should-have-been. The idea, I knew, was fanciful. I knew Vernon wept simply because there was nothing he could say and nothing else he could do.
    It was this bleating, pathetic, constant noise that made my mother loathe him so. It was his inability to be soothed or commanded or frightened into silence. Vernon’s crying was the most defiant thing my mother had ever encountered. And my mother looked with hatred upon anything that defied her.
    Vernon was not a secret — everyone in Mulyan knew of his twilighted existence. To my mother’s and father’s faces, and mine, the townspeople sympathized.
You’re good to your brother, aren’t you, Anwell? It’s nobody’s fault, Harry; these things happen. Beth, you’re a saint
. In the streets of Mulyan, outside the grocer or the auto repair, my father shrugged off such platitudes; at home he feigned obliviousness to the presence of the child. Responsibility for Vernon fell to my mother, who, on the main street, called him her
blessing
and
life’s joy
. At home, he was a curse on her. The people who sympathized to her face whispered, when her back was turned, that she was rightly cursed. I never saw such falseness, such extremes of truth and lie, such coldness of the human heart as I did in those first seven years of my life, when Vernon was alive.
    Let him starve to death then, Mother would rage, throwing down the plastic bowl that held his mushy food. Mush on the floor, mush on the walls, mush plastered round the child’s locked mouth. He disgusts me, I feel ill. His father won’t stoop to feed him. And Vernon would howl. I can do it, I would say, Mother, here, let me.
    Rub his face in it, she’d sometimes say. That will teach him. Even a mongrel can be house-trained. God help me, I wish he’d never been born; and she’d run his bath cold or too warm.
    Vernon, I’d breathe, past the bars of his cot, you should die. You will be safer if you die. You might be happier. The doctor said he could live forever, there was no reason he wouldn’t grow old. I loved Vernon, but I would lie awake listening to him and I’d pray for a snake to slide in his bed, hope for an illness that would finish him fast, dream that some collector of damage would take my brother away. Such wishing brought tears of shame to my eyes, but inside I must have known that Vernon was a curse