JOHN HOLLANDER
531
It was not until I was old enough not only to have put away
childish things, but to have returned to them, as it were, in the way
that certain fortunate adults can manage to do, that I could consider
this sense I had of the Other one, and what it all might mean . Iq
those days, I traveled for a notions manufacturer, visiting poth
wholesalers and chain retailers that did a lqrge business . Driving at
night, or in b4ses or airplanes on short hops, I would often look out
into the distant darkness, moving and motionless both, as if search–
ing it not for someone else possibly hidden there , but for a truth or
an answer in another kind of hiding: What did my unknown twin
brother correct in me? What incompleteness did he add to? Would
there be some reciprocating defect in his nature which was redeemed
in mine? It was only in the year in which I finally realized my defec–
tive property-which was purely and simply my uniqueness itself–
that I encountered my brother in a bar in a small New England
town.
Outside it was dark- a late fall evening- and dark within, but
I had an immediate sense, as I saw from a booth a figure with its
back toward me standing at the bar, that this was someone I knew.
When he turned around to leave , I saw who indeed it was and walked
up to him immediately, leaving him no time in which to be startled .
I set out at once to explain myself- and , in a way, himself- to him.
I discovered that although he knew that his parents had been adop–
tive, he was unaware of my existence . But our identical resem–
blances, my story, and reasonable iqference after his initial shock
and disbelief, combined during the course of the evening to convince
him.
We had walked to his home, a small house in an older part of
town (like me at the time, he was unmarried), and we sat quietly
there, drinking and talking, until very late . From that night on, we
saw each other at long but regular intervals, either in the city on
weekends, or in the town where he lived and worked in the manage–
ment of a mill. All this is, actually, unremarkable enough. Both of us
had lost our foster-parents and were without other relatives; we were
both hardworking and solitary, both used to avoiding intimate
friendships with the men of our acquaintance and to anything more
than guarded, casual affairs with women. Neither of us was ready or
willing to claim the other for a new-found and unsettling friendship,
and our blood relationship- even this ultimate of those- could only
be represented socially by improvisation.
For my part, my sense of completeness in another one re-
