LEONARD KIUECEL
63
not in public squares but in the dim confines of a L3ronx apartment, I lis–
ten
[0
my brother unfold his wrsion of my life.
And if Illy life turned out
to
be his legacy, too, then why shouldn't he?
In certain respects, the virus that took my legs took things of greater value
from him-his childhood and adolescence. So that ewn the mind's com–
edy, where
II
DII((,
berates the world fi'om a balcony in Itome, is
overwhelmed by the wrench of pain I hear in my brother's vo ice. Not our
laughter at how absurd history's pomp and circumstance may be but our
fear of the intimate legacies pain inlposes on our relationship-that is what
binds us to each other, as those S,lnll' legacies bind us to the subtleties of a
past whose love and bitterness we share. What I detect in my brother's
voice, as it burns through the
\Vire~
fi'om Memphis, are the memories he
earned. For men earn the memories that susuin them,just as they earn the
roles they play-father, brother, husband, son. In imagination, I am con–
demned to li sten to my brother's words as they sting my flesh like pellets
fi'om a L3-L3-gun. I must look
,It
the self my brother sees, in that landscape
which, ewn ,IS it grows distallt, defines the man each of us has become.
Only this time my search is not fc.)r what of myself I see back there. It is
for what of my brother was left b,lck there wi th me.
L30th Abe ,llld I haw long since departed fi'om the streets that ti'amed
our coming-of-age. After completing his graduate work in history at
Duke, my brother settled in Memphis, Clpitol of that Deep South which
was the
Celic/llltl
of our New York City childhoods . I traveled a much
shorter road-at least as fIr as distance is concerned-to Manhattan, that
spot on the m;lp both Abe and I were conditioned to think of as " the real
city." Yet the past that binds is also the past that separates. The question is
not merely one of geography but of- whose version of reality we can
accept. Abe ,1Ild I are not only brothers, we are also men trying to under–
stand what fc.)]")lled us-each of
LIS
husband, Elther, taxpayer, citizen. And
each a son to that same dead
f~lther.
As I listen to his voice fill wi th accu–
sation, it occurs to me that m y brother, like me, is middle-aged. The
thought is so sudden th ,lt it shocks nll', disilltegrating time. I don't under–
stand why that is so. Not really. I have no difliculty in accepting that my
sons and my wife and I myself are growing older. L3ut when I see Abe on
his trips b,lck to New York or on Illy own forays to Melllphis, I am
stunned to see that hL' has a beard now, gray and bushy , and that his face
has taken on the contours of our (Ither's fleL'.
Like me, my brother is one of Illemory's children. Even in my imag–
ination, he measures the r,lge in
hi~
heart by everything that lies unresolved
in the past we mutually claim. Only it is his to interpret, he now insists,
even more than it is mine. It is his past that we must decipher. When he
speaks of his lbughters, m y nieces, or asks after his nephews, m y sons, his
