Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #8

Steven (mostly)


The youngest of us, Steven was probably the most accomplished even if he wasn't the surgeon Margie was. He had moved smoothly through college and various corporate environments in New York, Chicago, and London. Three years my junior, he had learned well from my mistakes and had developed into a well-balanced and respectable man. Though he must have known--and I must have told him--that for much of my youth I would have been happy if he had not joined our family, he seemed to never hold my sometimes outward dislike of against me. In some ways there are few things worse, more humiliating, than being forgiven by those we hate. He told me once that he had always admired me, but that he had also learned not to emulate me.

Now, he slept in the chair beside me. He was not snoring so much as purring. I looked out the window and wished I had his ability to sleep no matter the time or circumstance. When we had shared a room as boys, I would rise to visible jealous anger that he could sleep through the night when I battled insomnia. I probably would have been a better older brother if I had been able to sleep. His brown paper bag and can of beer were tilted loosely between his hands, and I pulled them gently from his fingers. The can was empty.

Years before, not long after he had returned from London, we were sitting in my parents' kitchen. I have forgotten if were were gathered for a holiday, but it might have been his first Thanksgiving home in awhile. I remember we had spent time looking through my mother's photo albums, and Steven lingered over pictures of the two of us hiking and fishing at Barney Lake in the eastern Sierra.

"Tell me," I said at some point, "what exactly do you do for a living?"

Steven laughed. "I sometimes ask myself the same question. But, I get paid for developing software. Actually, that's not true. These days I get paid for managing other people who develop software. For banks, sometimes for governments. We find ways to transfer money from one place to another."

"That's legal?" I asked.

"As far as I know. It's not even real money, though. It's all electronic--funds transfers, that kind of thing. Billions of dollars going from one place to another in less than a second."

I kept looking out the window at Colorado and wondered how I had missed so many steps along the way. I had started college and dropped out; I had been married twice but was now single; I had had good jobs but was now without one. Steven and Margie both seemed to have missed no steps, and their lives consisted of even and controlled movement forward. Years ago I was jealous of those two lives, and I often felt I was chasing my sister and being pursued by my brother. Steven had never said a thing, though, had never let on if my brushes with both law and early mortality had ever bothered him. "You don't have to be me," he had once said, and I was stricken with how this should've been something he heard from me and not the other way around. I knew it was his way of saying that he accepted me for whatever and whoever I was. We had at different times bemoaned our birth order: the overachieving oldest child pressured to lead the way; the often-lost middle child pressured from both sides; the carefree yet desirous-to-please youngest child.

The train car was filled with the quietness typical of after-meal contemplation. If they could, I knew, old men would be enjoying their cigars and brandy. I turned on the light above my seat and opened the Rhodia. Leafing through the pages, I searched for something else from Ophelia, and I found several entries all in her fine script. With the tip of my forefinger I traced her signature and felt the depth of the pen stroke.

Steven had stopped purring. "You still here?" he muttered.

"I am," I said.

"Good," he said, and then he went back to sleep.

Ophelia's writing seemed to range from happy to quite sad. One entry toward the middle of the notebook entreated people to read James Joyce's story "The Dead." After several exclamation marks, she wrote: "This is only a small part of the story--out of context. Please read the entire story! This is one of Gabriel's passages..."

from "The Dead"

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasms, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

I wondered about this--about its meanings, about who Ophelia was and what she was trying to say. I looked at Steven's sleeping face and wondered if he would know, if he could tell me who James Joyce was. I felt nothing but admiration for my brother then, and I asked myself if I would ever tell him so.