passed, and my father came home. Officially away on several scores, all true, he had first suffered a kind of breakdown not hospital serious, during which the therapists had advised no family contact. He had then snapped back by means of an athletic tour of some South American clients he had never met in person. Their wealth, until now never really credited, had turned out to be able to pay him all his costs, even to support for my grandmother, as well as what were to be many expensive family conversations on the international telephone—his first remark to my mother when he came home, after exclaiming how well she had kept, being to express his gratitude that she had never given in to shouting intercontinentally.
To my brother he had written steadily. In hindsight often with real audacity, for what ordinary father would so have trusted a fifteen-year-old boy—or been able to? Though when read to my mother and me in parts, and for the factual report only, the letters had seemed only in the self-consciously manful style a traveling father might adopt for a boy rather small for his age.
He himself was tanned even deeper, and looked international too; by now I could see that he always had. He told us a lot about Rio, with due respect for its foreignness, but also as if it were, like New York, only the city next door. As he talked I began to see that while my mother was sophisticated, she had had to do it in dots and dashes, as a woman could; he was the genuine article. The conventions of being a lawyer had tended to obscure this. In our biennial visits to his office in Maiden Lane, where his longtime secretary bowed to my mother and called me “Miss” and my brother “Master,” anyone could see that conventionality was in part what he loved the law for. I scared the secretary, I now think. I so much resembled him.
Once he came back to live with us, we were struck by how lopsided we had been without him. He was no mere breath of fresh air; all the old, ingrained habits a family gets were immediately upon us. He was the breath that made ours complete. Yet we were not to keep him. It came about in this way.
“My mother—” he said to us, when he had returned from seeing her home, after dining us all at a big but disappointing restaurant farther down in Jersey. He always referred to grandmother this way, as if in spite of his four siblings she belonged solely to him. Admittedly the others—three flaccid sisters scattered over the Sundays and a ne’er-do-anything brother, did not count with her. “My mother wants her grandson to come live with her.”
He stared at my brother—who was not the only grandson. “I said if she would stop calling you her poppet, you had my permission to.” He turned to my mother. He had a black and white stare, not formidable but opaque. “That Watanabe has too much influence.” This was the Japanese student he had got cheap for his mother as houseman before he left, serving her grandiosity—“my Jap butler”—exactly as he knew she would accept, since he had his own share of pomp. At that steak restaurant, though he scorned it, he himself had sent the chef cigars, with his compliments. The dumfounded waitress hadn’t known what to do with them, nor possibly the chef either.
My mother immediately ordered my brother upstairs. Ever wrong with him, she always did this the minute his needs were to be discussed, although no more able to talk with him than my father was with me. But I had her warm company; my brother had only the letters. Yet, always polite, he got up to obey. He knew that only her conventions opposed his going; the two of them were never mutually fond. When he was halfway up the stairs, though, my father said: “Wait. Do you want to go?”
My brother looked much as he does now, small of size by his own will, and precise from judging us. Though even then one was never sure whether that judgment was sardonic or flawed. It was he who had chosen the restaurant.