EVENINwS AT HOME
"thrown together" when the truth is that every effort was made to
tear us apart and only my mad-dog determination prevented that.
And I began to hate my brother, my own flesh and blood, now
dead, poor boy. It was he who started interfering and I can still
see him, his face twisted with wonder and fear, saying, "How could
you?" My brother's case was weakened, even in his own mind, by
his inability to accuse my friend of anything except frightening,
depressing stupidity. Oh, is
that
all? I must have thought victoriously,
because I continued to make clandestine engagements and took no
interest in anyone else.
I heard my parents coming up the steps--thump, thump, closer
and closer-and then like the killer in the movies they passed by
the one marked for destruction and went to their own rooms. But
this is impossible, impossible, I resolved; I must face it. (Self-analysis,
bravery, objectivity. Is anything really
bad?)
Yet it was so difficult
to recall those old days, almost beyond my powers to see myself
again. I couldn't even remember when I had first met that terrible
creature. It seemed to have been in high school, some dull, immoral
season, a kind of Indian summer romance. On the other hand, I had
the weird and disturbing notion that I had known him since in–
fancy, which is quite possible since he has lived off and on in our
neighborhood or else we could not have gone to the same schools.
In any case I remembered that he was literally not interested in
anything, did his lessons with minimum competence and never became
involved in anything he learned, never preferred one subject to an–
other, since he was equally mediocre in all of them. He played sports
but was not first-rate in any game, even though he was physically
powerful.
A few other mortifying things flashed through my mind. His
behavior had only two variations: he either went blindly through
the days like a stupefied giant or then quite suddenly, as if bored
by his own apathy, he would laugh at everything, burst forth in this
rocking, strange sound as if some usually sluggish portion of his brain
had flared up in a brief, dazzling moment. The laughter must have
cost him great effort and he engaged in it only out of a rudimentary
social instinct which at times told him that he owed the human
race at least that raucous recognition. The other aspect of him I
remembered was that, though he initiated nothing, things were always
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