It seems that I have always resented my brother. But in fact it has only been 44 years of resentment. It began when Roderick was just ten and I was nine. I had sulked treehouse high as my playmates ran virus free that July. Summer had really just begun, and Roderick and I were quarantined to the backyard. We lay bare chested on smooth pine floorboards suspended midyard, thus protected by the hoary elm tree. I could catch a peek of blue when the humid air rustled the limp leaves that day. The air was stretched tighter than a helium balloon and our hound dog kept changing laying places under Mother's rhododendrons. A thunderstorm was brewing. It was that season. Roderick was over-tired cranky like the times we had stayed up to late watching for the Perseus meteor showers. Something had to be done. I grabbed his coonskin cap and rifle and poked him in the butt. Eyes remained closed as he swatted the air at an imaginary blackfly. Poke, swat, poke.
"Cut that out, I'll tell Mother."
"What I do?" I was the expert at feigned innocence. But then again, Mother never believed me. The air was thick. We were both hot, tired and bored, me more than Roderick. "Come on, ole pal, let's go possum hunting."
No reply. Roderick had been getting harder to persuade. He didn't want to go anywhere. It might upset Mother.
"Naw," he said, "it's almost dinner. We're having pork chops." We were both hungry and thirsty. Pulling on the dog's tail had lost us kitchen privileges. Five in the afternoon, a bit of rumbling in the distance and a breeze had picked up, but it was still lemonade hot, and I knew that bothered my brother. I poked him again, a little bit harder. Roderick actually opened his eyes. I could almost see the wheels turning. What was my brother up to?
"Let's go to the park, get a cool drink," he said. I smiled a lopsided grin and pushed the coonskin cap off his head. My brother finally had a good idea. The fountain in the park was forbidden. These were dangerous times. Every parent feared the public drinking fountain, especially Mother. Evil and polio lurked in the pipes. The water might as well had been communist.
Our days were obsessed with the future, since the Russians had put a dog in space. Mother was very aware of the politics of the times. She felt it distinguished her from the other housewives in our neighborhood. She often told us the story of the great kitchen debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Krushchev. Even I knew that the Russian rockets were more powerful, but Mother said that the Americans had a clear lead in Maytag automatic washers. Roderick only wanted to know why the vice president had a middle name like Milhouse.
So that hot afternoon in July, we had climbed down the gnarled trunk imagining the cool water from the public spigot. Roderick grabbed the coonskin cap and threw it into the rhododendron. The dog caught it midair like he was snapping at a fly. As I wrestled to get it back, my brother ran out of the yard yelling, "Race ya!" and disappeared.
No one else was at the park. The dinner hour had begun and there was a silence. When I got to the fountain, I saw Roderick grinning and waiting for me. He grabbed me by my shirt collar and held me at arm's length as he guzzled mouthful after mouthful recklessly.
"Hey, leave some for me!" I shouted fearful that he would drink it all. He took my face and pushed it into the spigot, so all I got was water up my nose. Then we heard the dinner whistle, and Roderick wiped his mouth with his forearm and turned to race home.
"I'll beat ya, pip-squeak!" He left me coughing and crying, my face and shirt wet from fountain splash and hot tears. I didn't even have time for a quick slurp, before I scrambled after to catch up to him. I was determined to tell to my Mother what Roderick had done to me at the fountain. When I got to the back door, my father was waiting there, slapping a rolled-up newspaper across his left palm. I was late and dad was hungry.
"Change your shirt!"
"But, dad, Roderick..." I was determined someone should know of my brother's treachery. He deserved to be punished.
"It's pork chops, move!"
I must confess that I had wanted my brother to die that year that polio lurked on peach skins and when each sweet delicious fruit had to be peeled. I think he knew it, too. I still continue to wrestle with this fact of life and yet now, I feel no remorse nor guilt. In this retelling of my sins, I recall clearly the night after he drank from the public fountain, the night the thunderstorm just threatened and moved over our house with heat lightning. Roderick's fever spiked that night as he slept, the demon yet undetected. I couldn't sleep; it was too still and hot. I had laid awake thinking of ways to impress Mother. Roderick always managed to amuse her with his Howdy Dowdy brand of humor, while I had been in his shadow.
One week later, he was stricken by infantile paralysis. After my small-sip midsummer fever broke, and the sweat was cool on my forehead, the gloved intern sent my brother to the isolation ward. At the time I had believed Roderick had left the family for good and my conscience struggled with my elation. It wasn't just that Roderick was fairer, older, smarter, and more beloved, it was that niggling feeling that he knew it, and it was his goal in life to lord it over me and my lot to endure it. After Roderick was diagnosed with polio , my parents were steadfast pilgrims to Bridgeport and prayed in the hospital lot. We visited Roderick every day. I trailed behind Mother where ever she went . No one seemed to notice me, it was as if this skinny nine-year-old was invisible to the hospital staff. The doctors and nurses were overworked and underpaid. The polio epidemic controlled their working hours. Even I could see the hospital was pitifully understaffed. I sat for endless hours listening to Roderick's cry mixed in with all the other cryings megaphoned by iron lungs.
For that moment, I'd believed that the gods had finally smiled on me when Mother sat at my beside one early August evening, the night of the full moon. The house was so quiet, and I had known in my heart that she had finally abandoned Roderick. She sat on the edge of my bed, stroking my sweaty forehead. I was caught in that world between sleep and consciousness. My legs were twisted in the cotton sheets. I remember dreams of swimming in ice cream, trembling. I struggled in my dream, my pajama trousers sticky, pressed to my skinny white body, mouth open gasping for air and at the same time, my nine year old penis erect wallowing in the creamy desire of 57 flavors. Somewhere at the end of the ice creamy tunnel floated Mother, arms out-stretched, spoons in hand, body draped in a magenta negligee.
"Will, be still, go back to sleep," Mother had held onto my icy hand and squeezed a bit too tightly. I had tried to tell her to let go, but I couldn't ascend from the icy depths yet. I blinked. Her hair was no longer flowing gloriously in some phantom breeze, but was pulled back tightly from her smooth Greenwich face. It amazed me that even in the sweltering August dog days she was cool to the touch and shirtwaist crisp. I drifted back off to a dreamless sleep. I was obsessed with other things. It was after midnight when the thunder had awakened me. I got out of bed and wandered down the upstairs hallway to Mother's room to see if she was still here.
"Roderick wants a coonskin just like Davy Crocket," I said as I stood in her open bedroom doorway.
"Here, come sit on the edge of the bed." Mother sat at her night table and opened the gold cigarette box and tamped the unfiltered end on the edge, tobacco to metal.
"Want a light?" I proposed with sudden audacity.
She laughed and leaned towards me, then flicked the lighter, the flame kissed my inhalation. My heart pounded and blood surged and filled each vein and vessel in my body to throbbing fullness as I moved closer. I felt light headed. A trickle of night sweat dripped from my under my nose onto my upper lip. The salty taste confused and excited me. The heat lightning flashed.
"God, I hate a summer storm," she murmured as she lit up a Lucky Strike. In her dressing table make-up mirror, I watched a fire burn corkscrew circles round her cigarette, a red coal glowing like beacon light. The heat lightning flickered on, off, on, off. My eyes stole a glimpse of a milky breast, feather-pillow flat, peeking from a china silk dressing gown. The apprehension almost made me swoon.
"Mother. please may I go to the bathroom?" I couldn't seem to move and I didn't know what to say or do. It was as if she had cast a spell upon my body.
"Mmmmm." A bit of ash fell into the darkness somewhere on the dressing table.
"I gotta go." What had I wanted back then? I often ask myself now. It had seemed like Roderick no longer existed. Only me. She flicked her wrist dismissing me. I often regretted my bodies betrayal in that sudden flash of lightening. I could have stayed. I could have been the beloved one. She knew of my frozen anticipation of twisting in her flame, as only a mother does. I believed that the moment had passed when she ground out the half-smoked cigarette into the Lennox ashtray and stood up to face the open window. I paused in the shadow of the doorway too embarrassed to talk. I felt so stupid. Why couldn't I think of witty words like Roderick. He could make Mother laugh. I couldn't even make her smile. I sucked in a breath as the wind billowed the window sheers and her china dressing gown. They both billowed round her creamy body . She finally laughed, a throaty sound without turning round, "Want your own coonskin cap, Will?"
"No!" I shouted as I ran to the bathroom to escape her attention.
The summer days faded into summer nights. We spent many evenings at the hospital. The visitor bells rang at promptly nine p.m. I had forgotten about my brother's pain and was in a hurry to get home and snatch a bit of a summer night trapping fireflies in a mayonnaise jar. My father was at the hospital, too; I remember him driving the aqua Buick. He sat behind a folded newspaper, chain smoking, never speaking in the waiting rooms. Mother did most of the talking.
"Will, get some ice slivers from the night Nurse." My Mother demanded the delicate shavings to cool my brother's throat. I imagined them to be knives that would slice his vocal cords. Roderick, my only brother, could be paralyzed, impotent, or even die, and I had wished only to silence his whimpers.
"Harry, I have to speak with Dr. Blake. Take Will out to the car."
"Come on, Will," my father had wanted to leave almost as much as I did, but didn't quite trust Mother enough to leave her on her own, "go down to the Buick. Take the keys."
"Can I play the radio?"
"Sure, now git." I skipped down the hallway; my footsteps echoed a solo musical performance. Already I had forgotten where I was. There was an eerie silence down the hall where Roderick was captured. The swoosh-wish of mechanical breathing. As I rounded the corner I heard my Mother' click-clock high heeled steps. I stopped to listen.
"Dr. Blake, a moment of your time?"
"Mother, the doctor is tired, visiting hours are over," my father sounded fatigued.
"Nonsense Harry, the good doctor has time for me."
"Certainly, come walk with me to my office." He took her arm tucking it into the crook of his elbow effectively shutting my father out. Her coifed head leaned a bit on the doctor's shoulder as she submitted to whisper some concern. I found myself grinding my teeth as I watched the summer sway of her skirt disappear around the corner.
My father soon caught up with me at the stairwell.
"I told you to get down to the car. Now give me the damn keys."
"Can we stop for ice cream on the way?" He jiggled the keys. No answer was better than a "no " from my father. I had fallen asleep in the back seat and never knew what the doctor had told Mother, but I had accepted the worse, Roderick might survive.
We returned day after day, until the night of the last round trip. It was the time for nursing round the clock. How I envied my brother his illness. The doctor allowed Mother to sit by his bedside holding his limp hand. She wiped the sweat from his brow with her perfumed hankie.
"Doctor, my boy will be fine." The red-haired intern from the University school took off his horn rimmed glasses and just nodded. Who would have ever argued with my mother?
"Mommy! Mommy!"
"Try to be still, I'm here, darling." After she'd answer, he'd answer, "Just checking."
It was at that moment I knew he'd get well. It was a cold feeling in my stomach. I would never get to be Mother's only child. While Roderick had guarded his treasure selfishly for months, keeping her just beyond my grasp, I had stood outside the isolation ward that night. I had watched him, my nose pressed to the glass, finger-printed smudged, green-eyed. There is still that invisible glass wall between my brother and me. His muscles had healed quickly and that exchange continued to amuse Mother and became a family joke as he got well. It still to this day, doesn't seem funny to me at all. I had only wanted him to die 44 years ago.
"Try to be still, I'm here darling," she said.
"Just checking," my brother replied.