“Be careful of Howie,” his mother always used to say to Saul. “He’s very fragile.”
After their father’s death — Howie said he could hardly remember him (Saul doubted this) and would never speak of him — Delia seemed to direct the few motherly concerns she had toward Howie in the furtherance of his well-being. Saul she left alone. With Saul, it was hands-off anarcho-laissez-faire parenting all the way. She treated Saul like a wonderful, charming guest or a performer in a rather dull show. But with Howie, the slightest sign of postnasal drip could mean another desperate search of The Merck Manual for symptoms, along with worried consulations with the long-suffering pediatrician, Dr. Greene. Howie had really made his illnesses work. Every time Howie got sick, he somehow came out, personally, in the profit column.
Sickly children with distant or absent parents have a tendency to become unattractive adolescents, Saul believed: bent-over, whining selfpitiers, autoerotic virtuosi of hypochondria. Unable to make conversation, they give themselves the attention and care they receive from no one else. But something had turned the other way with Howie. Saul watched with disbelief as his little brother gradually acquired a glow from some mysterious source, a light in his eyes that was somehow related to the animal kingdom. The growth hormones that in other boys produced acne, simian proportions, quick tempers, and cantaloupe-shaped heads, produced in Howie an eerie grace and beauty. From his years of illness he also acquired an inner quiet and watchfulness and a finely honed skill at manipulation.
He had large, liquid eyes — now like a doe, now like an owl.
In high school, Howie had led around a long trail of girlfriends, not to mention a host of bewildered guys who were friends of his but who also seemed to have fallen under his spell. Saul suspected that his brother would sleep with anything as long as it was beautiful. Howie had become a beauty snob, though he practiced secrecy about his love interests and never explained where he was going or whom he was seeing in his nocturnal prowlings. But he had also become rugged, given to endurance sports like rock climbing and marathon racing and soccer. He fought his sickliness with everything he had, and in the process had evolved into a man in whom contradictory male and female traits were mixed equally, producing a sleek, androgynous charm. He had a weakness for mirrors and stood before them for long periods when he thought no one else was observing him, studying the tough, beautiful mystery of himself.
Watching Howie grow into manhood was like reading two biographies, one of Teddy Roosevelt and the other of Greta Garbo, going back and forth between the two, getting the personalities mixed up.
Their father had died of a heart attack while driving to work the year when Howie was eight years old and Saul ten. In the Baltimore funeral home, following the memorial service, there transpired a scene that Saul would always remember whenever he thought of Howie. Howie had been seated on a metal folding chair in the corner, behind a table where the two Bunn-o-Matic coffeemakers were positioned, along with the cream, the sugar, and the Styrofoam cups. Friends and acquaintances of their father milled around the room, bending down to Delia and Saul to offer consolation. Howie refused to talk to anyone. With a manly and stoical expression on his face, Howie sat quietly there in the corner, the tears streaming down his cheeks, unsociable in his grief. He had loved his father, whose death was, Saul thought, a permanent injury for which Howie would never have words. The luster had simply gone out of everything. Later, in the house, when more friends of their parents dropped by, Howie found another corner to sit in, where he would cry inconsolably, then wipe his eyes and stand up and make brave conversation and eat cookies, before sitting down in his corner to cry, inconsolably, again.
Delia never remarried — out of loyalty, Saul thought, not to her late husband but to Howie.
Saul and Howie had tried some brother-to-brother male bonding once a few years ago on a long-distance bicycle trip. They had set off from Baltimore and had made it as far as Chicago. They did not speak much about personal matters during their evenings together: each had brought several books to ward off that possibility. They discussed the route, their provisions, the locations where they would camp or the motels where they would stay. Or they would confer about the bicycles, the condition of the gears and the tires.
Saul had been in charge of the maps, because he claimed he was good at maps. Howie was apathetic about their route. They stayed on back roads day after day and, after three weeks had passed, made their way carefully past the tangle of outlying Chicago neighborhoods toward Lake Michigan, which Howie had never seen. They had been bicycling in the northwest side of the city, avoiding traffic in the early morning, weaving their way through Greektown and heading for Lincoln Park, when Howie braked too suddenly, swerved, and hit the curb in front of a Greek restaurant, the Acropolis. He went flying over the handlebars and landed on the sidewalk, his belongings — which had broken loose from his pack — scattered around him.
Saul was horrified. Be careful of Howie. He’s very fragile.
Howie stood up quickly, seemingly unhurt, and out of relief at seeing that his brother was still in one piece, Saul began to laugh. His laughter provoked Howie to fury. Enraged, he danced a little dance of humiliation and wrath on the sidewalk before he stomped a plastic water container, his baseball cap, his Robocop wraparound sunglasses, and his uncapped tube of sunblock, which squirted orgasmically over the pavement. Saul only laughed harder, knowing he shouldn’t but unable to stop. As he did, Howie walked over to Saul and waited for him to control himself. Howie’s face was bright red.
“Someday in the future we can laugh about this,” Howie said, “but right now I swear to God that if you keep laughing, I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Saul composed himself, wiped the tears off his face, and helped Howie collect his things. From the experience he learned two facts about his brother and himself: first, that Howie feared being the object of ridicule — lethally — especially in moments of vulnerability; and, second, that he himself feared Howie’s ire at such moments, not for himself but for his brother’s sake. He had seen a pool of bitter sediment in Howie’s eyes, which spoke of old grievances and all the memories of illnesses that had brought forth both welcome and unwelcome responses.
They found an old hotel near Lincoln Park to stay in — they would be flying home in two days and would ship the bicycles back — and after taking showers they walked around the Loop, making their way down to the Art Institute to see the Seurats. That evening, when the weather was still humid and unsettled, they strolled through Lincoln Park. There were crowds of other young people like themselves, walking and talking and eyeing one another. Within sight of the lake, they were standing near a water fountain when an attractive young woman wearing jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt and holding a sketch pad began speaking to Howie. Howie carried with him a wounded look that women apparently found irresistible. Addressing the sky in a tone of cool, hip indifference, she remarked on the weather, and Saul’s brother said something in return, equally cool and hip, speaking of the clouds in a way that suggested that he, too, was indifferent to the weather, being from out of town and not subject to these particular clouds. She asked where he lived and he told her. Baltimore! she said, with admiration, touching Howie’s arm. He had bicycled here? Amazing. She had never been to Baltimore. No? Well, the row houses, he said, came right down to the water in the harbor. Where are you staying? she asked. Howie named the hotel. They introduced themselves: Howie, Voltaine. Yes, the name: her parents had been hippies in Vancouver; she herself was a Canadian citizen, and when she was a girl her mother had sung “Mellow Yellow” to her and her sister Saffron night after night, year after year, as a lullaby. Now she was a student here in Chicago at the Art Institute. Howie didn’t say anything about his occupations or his age; it didn’t seem necessary. Nor did he bother to introduce his brother. Saul was standing a few feet away, lost in bemusement and pride in his brother’s social skills, though feeling like an encumbrance himself. In disbelief, from his safe distance, Saul detected Chanel No. 5 emanating from Voltaine, an expensive scent his mother sometimes wore when she hadn’t applied the mustard gas. Voltaine, for some reason, hadn’t noticed him. Girls didn’t turn their heads when Saul walked past. Howie was the one who got them riled up and confused. Instead of introducing himself, Saul just watched his brother and this woman, and he took deep breaths of Voltaine’s perfume. Howie had given Saul a semidetached look, as if something was on the tip of his tongue that he would not say. Voltaine and Howie proceeded to sit down on a bench quite close to each other, and as the light faded, she removed the cover of her sketch pad and outlined his face on paper using pencil and charcoal, including in her drawing the scrapes on his forehead from his bicycle accident. After ten minutes of small talk between the two, Howie finally got around to pointing toward Saul, who smiled, nodded, and belatedly shook hands with Voltaine. He hadn’t been able to decide whether he should return to the hotel or lurk in the middle distance. Voltaine continued to pencil in details of Howie on her sketch pad, but by then it was getting so dark that Saul couldn’t make out what his brother looked like in Voltaine’s version of him.