From 1976 until 1982, I kept a black trash bag in the back of my closet. In the bag were a denim jacket, a red chamois shirt, and a pair of jeans — the clothes my brother was wearing when he drowned in the Jerome Park Reservoir in the northwest Bronx. But when I say “my closet” what I mean is a succession of closets because I moved 13 times in the 8 years after he died and I took the bag of clothes with me every time. The bag had become mine but I didn’t know what to do with the contents. I couldn’t wear them myself for myriad reasons, not the least of which was that I could never squeeze my Junoesque form into clothes that fit my beanpole brother. Throwing them out seemed disrespectful and I didn’t want to donate them to a charity. I thought it would be extremely bad juju for some innocent to be walking around in the clothes a 24-year-old man had died in. I couldn’t think of anything to do except keep them in the bag and keep the bag with me. A fat black sack of a dead man’s clothes.
I had moved to Boston in 1976. Fresh out of college and just turned 22, I was on my own in a new city and working professionally in the theater — a dream I’d had since I was 14. Almost immediately I had found and rented an affordable furnished studio with a working fireplace behind the gold-domed State House on Beacon Hill. It was the year of the bicentennial and life in Boston was an endless party. It seemed that everything that the gods and man could do was done to launch me on my chosen path. Until my father called and told me that Jamie, my older brother, my only sibling, had drowned.
I didn’t ask many questions on the phone; questions came later, after the shock had subsided. I talked to my sister-in-law — my parents were at her apartment — and said I’d come back to New York the next day. Then I fell on my bed and cried, howled like an animal — furious betrayed bereft — until, exhausted, I fell asleep. In the morning I took a Greyhound to the city.
During the five-hour bus ride, I kept going over the words. Jamie. Dead. Drowned. “Drowned” was the word I couldn’t fathom. Jamie was the athletic one. Baseball. Football. Swimming. Hell, he even had bowling trophies and a custom bowling ball. The previous summer he had come to visit me at my summer theater gig in Kentucky and was particularly interested in having access to a pool. “Write giving me the details on the best time to come to Kentucky,” he’d asked in a letter. “Is there a hotel? Motel? Air conditioning? Room service? Does it have an indoor/outdoor swimming pool? Can I get all this for five dollars a day?” I couldn’t imagine him drowning.
I got off the bus at the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and took the subway to my brother’s apartment in the Bronx. His widow, Dorcey, met me at the elevator. She wore the stunned bloodless face of grief; I suppose I did as well. We went back to the apartment and sat in the kitchen and she told me happened.
She said that Jimmy — my brother was named James but called Jamie within the family and Jimmy without — had gone out to walk their Irish setters, Buster and Beren, at about 10 o’clock on Sunday night. Dorcey was taking a bath and lost track of the time. At about 11:30, she was annoyed that he wasn’t home, but not worried. They knew a lot of people in the neighborhood and dog-walking was a gregarious activity that, in that just-post-hippie time, went on at all hours. At midnight she made a couple of apologetic calls, but got no news of him. At 2 she was seriously worried, went out to look for him, and didn’t find him. At about 4, she went out again. At the entrance to the park, she ran into a couple they knew, David and Lisa, coming out with their dog. Lisa told her they thought something was really wrong. They’d found Beren, the younger of the two setters, curled up under a tree, soaking wet, shivering, and with bloodied paws. David offered to take Beren to the Animal Medical Center, a 24-hour veterinary hospital in Manhattan, Dorcey accepted, David hoisted Beren into his arms, and he and Lisa left with both dogs. Now frantic, Dorcey paced up and down the park and found no evidence of my brother or of Buster, their older dog.
She flagged down a police car and told them her husband was missing. They suggested that he was out drinking. He didn’t drink. They suggested he was out with some of his buddies. He always called. They suggested he was with another woman. He wouldn’t do that. Finally, she persuaded them that something was seriously wrong and they lumbered out of their car to investigate. The pre-dawn light was sufficient to show that something had indeed crawled up the boat ramp out of the reservoir and left a bloody trail on the concrete; Beren — wet, shivering Beren with her scraped-up paws — was the logical culprit. Investigating now meant dragging the reservoir. At about 6 A.M., Dorcey called my parents. They drove over and stood with her at the edge of the water, watching as the police worked.
Later my parents told me that the police helicopter had hovered low over the reservoir. The wind from the rotor pounded the air and the turbulent air churned the water while a police boat in the reservoir trailed a bar fitted with grappling hooks along the bottom. It caught on something and they hauled it up. A slim dead man, dressed in a denim jacket, a red chamois shirt, and jeans. Their son. Her husband. My brother.
Since both dogs had greeted me when I walked in, I asked Dorcey how she’d gotten Buster back. She had put up signs. A man who lived nearby brought Buster back on his leash and told her that he’d found the dog at about midnight, tied to the fence, barking hysterically. There was no one else in the park and he hadn’t heard anything inside the reservoir property. He calmed the dog and took him home, thinking that it had either been abandoned or that someone would be looking for it in a day or so. Dorcey thanked him and gave him some money for his trouble. I asked if she thought the man had anything to do with the accident. She said no, but she had given his name to the police. They talked to him and came to the same conclusion. The next unspeakable question hung in the air and she answered it. “The police asked if it could have been suicide, if we’d been getting along all right. It couldn’t have been. We were.”
And that was all she knew. The coroner had taken the body to the morgue and would make an official determination of the cause of the death. After the body was examined, we had to send someone to identify it so the coroner could release it to the funeral director. The next day my uncle, my mother’s brother, made the identification and we organized the wake.
On the first day of the wake, my parents picked us up and we rode in silence to the funeral home. The funeral director, Mr. Richter, led us upstairs to the viewing room. My parents and Dorcey rushed the coffin and went into a weeping huddle before it. I stood in the doorway with Richter.
People always say what a good job the cosmeticians do, but when I first saw the body, the face bore little resemblance to the man I had known. It looked like Jamie and it didn’t look like Jamie. Without its vital animating core, its essential lively Jamieness, this body was so unlike him that I was still able to harbor the notion that it wasn’t him.
Richter took my hand, pressed something into my palm, and closed my hand around it with both of his. He said, “If you need me, I’ll be right downstairs.” And he left. I opened my hand and looked at the three ammonia capsules he had placed there. Occasionally I still flash on the image of those net-wrapped capsules in my palm and remember thinking “If I faint, no one knows I have these. If we all faint, there aren’t enough.”
The wake was divided into two sessions, two hours in the late afternoon, then two in the evening. As the room filled with people, I was able to approach the coffin privately, that is, without the pressure of family, and I saw that this was indeed my brother’s face. I saw three puncture marks on his jaw that the mortician’s makeup hadn’t camouflaged completely. The two wounds in the cheek were parallel, about an inch-and-a-half apart, and had clean edges. The third glanced off the bone and had a small comet’s tail. It looked like three-quarters of a dog bite. There might have been a fourth puncture to complete the pattern but I hadn’t wanted to move the head to look. During the break my parents went home and I stayed with Dorcey at the funeral home. I asked her about the wounds I had seen. She said that they hadn’t been there when he went out to walk the dogs.
My parents came back for the evening session and the room filled again with visitors. People came and went, people milled around. Dorcey’s father was so impressed with the brushed-steel coffin he talked to Mr. Richter about ordering one for himself. Not wanting to intrude on my parents or Dorcey — obviously the chief mourners — people from my brother’s life, people I didn’t know, asked me what had happened. I told them what we knew and what we didn’t.
At some point my mother asked me if Richter had said anything about the autopsy. When her brother identified the body, he had forgotten to ask about it. “No,” I told her. “He didn’t say.”
“Can you tell from the body if they did one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out?”
This was in the pre-Quincy days, before the entertainment industry acquainted us with how coarse a procedure an autopsy is. Looking back on it now, I don’t know why none of us called the Medical Examiner’s office or asked Mr. Richter directly. Delicacy, maybe, or squeamishness. But I knew a lighting designer who was also a licensed mortician and I said I’d call him as soon as I could. Then all at once the viewing was over and the room was empty again.
As we were leaving, Richter handed my mother a black plastic trash bag. She handed it to me. It was unusually heavy. After a moment I realized that it was a bag of clothes, the clothes my brother had died in. The bag was heavy because the clothes — a denim jacket, jeans, a red chamois shirt — were still wet. I had helped pick out the coffin. I had seen the body lying in it and recognized the body as belonging to my brother. I had told the story — what we could piece together of the story — of how he died maybe 20 times that day. But it wasn’t until I was standing in the parking lot, holding the bag holding the clothes he had died in, feeling the cold wet weight of his clothes through the sticky black plastic of the bag, that I knew he was dead. Knew it absolutely. Because of the weight.
The next morning, Dorcey washed and dried the clothes and put them back in the bag. I sat at my brother’s desk in his chair and called my friend the ex-mortician. He gave me a short course in autopsy procedure. He told me about the Y incision and the H incision. He warmed to his subject and told me that the organs are examined individually as needed and then packed in a plastic bag, the bag is put in the abdominal cavity and the incisions are sewn shut. I was getting a lot more information that I needed and he heard it in my voice. He stopped talking.
“So, you would see the incision if you looked at the chest?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
He offered condolences and we talked briefly of other things before hanging up. I told Dorcey what he told me. She said, “There are no marks on his chest.” I didn’t ask how she knew that. She was his wife, she had a right to his body. Later, I told my mother that I thought there hadn’t been an autopsy. I don’t know what she did with that information.
Three months after the funeral, my parents received the official death certificate which stated in letters small enough to require magnification with a hand lens that the cause of death had been determined “without autopsy, by surface examination.” My mother had been counting on the autopsy to make sense of this for her. She believed that an autopsy was required if someone died alone in a public place. But this was not so. At that time there were only two situations in which an autopsy was mandated. One I don’t remember, but it wasn’t dying alone in a public place, and the other was a state execution. And so the cause of death was not truly “determined,” not to my mother’s satisfaction. It could have been drowning. It could have been a heart attack. It could have been murder. Deliberate? Accidental? We don’t know. We’ll never know.
II.
Before I fell asleep on the night that my father told me that Jamie was dead, I remembered the old family story about how my grandparents had taken him and their daughter Nell to their house in Delaware to keep him out from underfoot while my mother was waiting out the last scorching August days before I was born. Nell liked to tell the part where she told him that he had a little sister and his face lit up with a huge grin, then he jumped up, spun around, and said, “Where?”
If you had asked me at any given time when he was alive, I would have told you that my brother and I were not close. We never had mutual friends, had no communal interests or hobbies. We grew up side by side in different worlds: We went to different elementary schools, different junior highs, different high schools. Jamie was a terrific student and went to Peter Stuyvesant High School, an all-boys honors school in faraway Manhattan. I was an indifferent student and scraped by on native quickness and a decent memory. My mother wanted to enroll me in a private high school but I insisted on going to the local public school. Looking back, it would seem that losing him should not have been so shattering. But it was.
Jamie was not just the son, he was the sun, of the family. He was smart and funny and gracious. He was musical — a talent I particularly longed for and have never compassed. Jamie was the one who organized his friends into a posse to get back the retarded boy’s money after he was robbed. Ultimately, my brother was tall, slim, and good-looking, with the kind of megawatt movie-star smile you’ll see on Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington. I resented him intensely and I wanted nothing in my life so deeply as I wanted his approval. I wanted his glory to illuminate me as the sun does the moon.
We lived on the top floor of a three-story house that my grandfather had built in the 1920s in the northeast Bronx. The end room was a long rectangle and my father erected a plywood partition to divide it into two squarish bedrooms, one for each of us. It was an awkward compromise. The big room had only one door and when it was divided, I had to pass through my brother’s room to get to mine.
From time to time, for extended periods of time, I had to share my room with my aunt Nell. She was my mother’s youngest sister. She was four when my parents married in 1948, eight when my brother was born, and twelve when I came along. I assume that my mother took Nell under her wing to shield her from their father’s brutal drunkenness. (My grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived on the first floor.) By the time she was a teenager, Nell was adept at telling my grandparents that she was with my parents and telling my parents she was with my grandparents, while in fact being off somewhere altogether else doing whatever she god damn pleased. She was my brother’s best buddy, and my bête noire.
Nell was crazy about horses and dogs. She bred and showed Shetland sheep dogs and my brother went with her to the shows. She liked to go riding at the local stable and Jamie often went with her. When I was old enough, my mother let me go with them. My riding lessons consisted of Nell telling me to steer the horse by pulling the reins in the desired direction, and to watch how my brother “moved with the horse.” I never learned to ride properly, never learned the traditional signals with reins and knees that give you and the horse confidence in each other.
One day, when I was 10 or 11, Nell and I went riding by ourselves. I was given a horse that did not want to be out. Every chance it got, it tried to turn around and head back to the paddock. I pulled and pulled on the reins, but I couldn’t keep it headed down the path. Nell would ride in front of it and turn it by herding it with her horse. We were forced to walk for a long time before my horse resigned itself to being on the trail. This made a frustrating outing for Nell who liked to live fast. I had always felt like an outsider with my aunt and my brother. Taking advantage of this rare chance of being alone with her, I asked her why she didn’t like me. She said it wasn’t that she didn’t like me exactly it was just that since she and Jamie had grown up together it was really like she was his sister. “So,” she said, “When you came along we really didn’t need you.” Then she said she wanted to gallop and would I be all right? I didn’t think so, but not wanting to burden her any further I said “Yes,” and she took off.
As soon as she was gone my horse turned around and bolted for the stable. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t turn it. After a short struggle I couldn’t do anything except cling to the saddle horn with both hands and scream for my aunt.
The trail crossed a highway exit ramp. There were cars coming off the highway and I couldn’t stop the horse. Car brakes screeched and I was screaming and then Nellie was there on her big horse and she was reaching for the bridle. I remember the angry face of a black-haired woman staring at me through her windshield as our horses slowed to a walk and finished crossing the ramp. I remember her mouthing the word “crazy.” We rode back to the stable in silence and I don’t remember ever riding with Nell again.
III.
In 1972, when I was a freshman at college, Nell was shot dead by her second husband. A year or so later, I realized that the main thing I felt was relief. I don’t remember my brother’s reaction. But once she was gone, Jamie and I started spending more time together. I was going to Fordham University at their Lincoln Center campus and he was working across the street at John Jay College in their audiovisual department. We started having lunch together in Fordham’s cafeteria. I was a theater major. I had started taking drama classes when I was a sophomore in high school — it kept me out of the house and gave me a sense of belonging that I’d never experienced at home. (I later realized that I fled home — a place where I pretended to feel nothing — and landed in a place where people pretended to feel everything, and that that was not better.)
Jamie started coming to some of my shows. Eventually, he worked on some of them and then began writing plays. I directed a partial script of his as a final class project. Partial scripts were his specialty. By the summer of 1975 when I was in Kentucky for a summer theater gig, a bridge had formed and I was getting frequent updates on his work and life at home. He had started a new play about a writer who couldn’t finish his plays. “I have now completed a full unalterable seven pages on that melodrama,” he said in a letter. “There is a middle and an end to it too, and you know what a great leap forward that represents, even if they’re only in my head as yet.” I suggested he call it And Other Plays so that the collection could be called And Other Plays and Other Plays.
Jamie had also worked off and on for a local veterinarian for years. In 1975, just married to his first love and with an eye toward their future, he had decided to become a vet himself. He went back to school and was taking the sciences he’d skipped during his long, checkered, humanities-based undergraduate career. The last letter I ever got from him was triumphant — “You will doubtless jump for joy when I tell you that I got an A, that’s capital A, spelled A, in Genetics. Quite an achievement. Roughly equivalent to discovering a new continent. The lackeys who review my veterinary school application will not now be able to say, ‘Lo, he may get A’s at the college of bullshit flapdoodlery, but put him a good school, with sound academic principles and a celestial standard of achievement and, poof! a flunky.’ That’ll show them, the bastards.” This was especially amusing to me since the good school with the celestial standards was Fordham, my own alma mater, a place I had chosen because they gave me the most money and had the fewest academic requirements.
The vet trusted my brother to the extent that he would sometimes go away on short trips and leave Jamie in charge of the office. By and large this meant checking animals in and out of the clinic rather than doing anything medical, so it was usually an okay arrangement. There was the time, however, when on a follow-up call to retrieve a cat, someone asked for “the young doctor” — a female someone, naturally, the girls were all crazy about my brother — and the vet slipped and told her “Oh, he’s in college.” Subsequently, Jamie wrote me and said: “The owner naturally asked what the hell a doctor was doing in college and so on and so on. But he got clever and got out of it. He said, ‘I’m sorry you misunderstand me. He’s teaching, not studying.’ So, before I’m even licensed I’m not only ‘the young doctor’ but a tutor of future generations of ‘young doctors.’”
I’m sure part of this ambition came from my mother’s indulgent attitude toward pets. We had always had some kind of animal in the house when we were growing up; not just the usual run of dogs and cats and fish and birds (and a hamster that crawled into the back of the washing machine whenever it got out of its cage) but also the kind of off-beat pets that most big-city kids only see in petting zoos or picture books: a horse, turkeys and ducks, a lamb, rabbits. For a while we even had half a dozen semi-domesticated raccoons that we had gotten from an Amish family in Delaware in trade for the rabbits.
A neighbor was a tree surgeon and he often brought us nests of baby squirrels that he had taken from the trees he cut down; small, pale gray, quadruplet nestlings that were so young they barely had fur and their veins glowed pink through their skin. We’d put them on a heating pad and feed them with an eye dropper and try to keep them from dying, usually without much success. In the mornings we’d take the dead ones — their skins blue and pearly beneath the silky down of their almost-fur — and bury them in the yard. I still think of them now and again, of their small bodies dissolved in the raw and welcoming earth, tangled in the roots of trees they would never otherwise have known, being slowly absorbed by the trees and becoming wood and bark, branches and twigs, leaves and flowers, living in the life of the tree for as long as the tree might live.
Jamie managed to keep one squirrel alive and we kept it in the house through the winter. Dubbed “Squirrely,” this wee sleekit scampering gray beastie gnawed everything — books, furniture, what-have-you — and was impossible to housebreak. For years after my brother released it, whenever we moved furniture or took a cabinet off the wall, we’d uncover caches of petrified squirrel dung. By spring it was clear that we couldn’t go on keeping Squirrely in the house and Jamie starting taking him outside.
At first Squirrely was not tempted by the great outdoors and stuck to my brother like feathers to a damp hand. But gradually instinct began surfacing and he was more and more restless in the house. Jamie had a sense of which trip outside would be the last one they took together and he marked the squirrel’s white belly with a broad stripe from a green magic marker — just to know that he could recognize him if need be — and they went out. Squirrely leapt from my brother’s shoulder and shinnied up a nearby tree. He scampered along a branch and looked back for a long moment before disappearing into the park. When he told me about that long look back Jamie choked up and said, “It was like he was saying good-bye.”
IV.
Before I went to sleep on the night my father told me that my brother was dead, I remembered a night back in elementary school, maybe fourth or fifth grade, when I dreamed that Jamie had suffocated. I woke up from that dream in absolute terror that it hadn’t been a dream. I laid still in the dark, quiet, rigid, holding my breath, listening avidly for some sound of my brother to float over or around the partition wall that separated our rooms. After what felt like a very long time, he finally sighed and shifted in his bed; my terror melted and I went back to sleep.
I stayed with my sister-in-law during the week of the funeral, sleeping in the living room which doubled as the guest room and tripled as my brother’s study. When I arrived, stacks and strewings of paper — Jamie’s various works in progress — littered the desk. Pens and pencils were near to hand, piles of books circled the work area, and his glasses rested on the papers in the middle of the desktop. The ashtray was full. The chair was tucked up to the desk, although it is a family trait to leave chairs standing out, ready for your return. The room had no overhead lights and the desk lamp was always on. Draped over the arm of the lamp were two sashes he had woven — one yellow, the other bright red.
My brother had always enjoyed weaving. As a boy, he had made stacks and stacks of jersey-loop pot holders on a small metal loom. Shortly after they were married, Jamie took it into his head to make an heirloom — a blanket of jersey-loop squares for his and Dorcey’s queen-size bed. This project took months. The resulting product was a vibrant patchwork that was enormous — and enormously heavy — but, he told me, not at all warm. More amused than disheartened, he donated the blanket to the dogs. (In the meantime, Dorcey’s grandmother had made them a patchwork quilt which was, he said, “enormous and very beautiful — in it are bits of cloth from the clothing of most of the people in Dorcey’s family on her mother’s side, from which it may be inferred that they are a bunch of loud dressers.”) At our last Christmas together, I gave him a table loom. Having seen me build scenery and hang stage lights with borrowed tools, he gave me a ratchet set.
One Christmas when we were kids, our grandmother, our father’s mother, gave us a pair of papier-mâché statues of squirrels. One was gray, the other was brown. They were about three inches tall and their tails were made of marabou feathers. I was enchanted by them — especially the slippery softness of the feather tails. After the second night of the wake I went into the attic in my parent’s house and hunted through the stored detritus of our lives until I found them. The next day I put the gray one in the coffin with my brother; a gesture older than the Pyramids, as fresh as grief.
Dorcey had selected the coffin. The basement of the funeral home was a display room with an array of caskets done up in fine woods and metals, upholstered in lush fabrics. They all had little rectangular pillows, some of which were lavishly trimmed with frothy lace. They came in sizes to accommodate various heights. Dorcey and my parents and I had walked through the spotlighted rooms and considered the options. A men’s-club-inspired oak-and-brass box lined with cream-colored satin. A piano-black, faux-ebony model with bright silvery fittings and button-upholstered white velvet. A small white-and-gold jewel box lined with shell-pink sateen, evidently meant as a consoling backdrop for a child. So many choices for something no one wants to think about.
I walked through this display, staggered at the idea of needing to choose, to weigh options, to picture what would be appropriate. I was surprised to find that I had a preference, although of course, this decision would not be mine to make. I stopped by a casket of pecan, lined with off-white satin. In addition to the plain pillow for the deceased, an embroidered one was propped in the open half of the lid. The stitched image was a leafy oak tree in silhouette. A card on an easel on the closed half of the softly polished lid said that if this option was selected, a tree would be planted to commemorate the deceased. If I were to choose, this would have been my choice. It spoke to me of my life with my brother.
One summer when I was eight or nine, a bunch of us went tree-climbing. I remember climbing up and up a particular tree and finding a place where the main trunk divided into three and formed the shape of a lyre. I was an eager reader and enamored of Greek myths so this was a captivating find. I scrambled down and told Jamie. He told me to go up the tree again, he wanted to show Mom how high I could go. I started back up and when I got to a certain point, he shouted up “That’s good. That’s high enough.” But I hadn’t gotten to the lyre, so I yelled back down that I was higher before and I was going to keep going. He went off to the house and I went on climbing my tree. I heard Mom call me and looked back to the house. She and Jamie were in the window. He was pointing and smiling. She was saying, “That’s great. You can come down now.” When my mother tells this story, she remembers it as a young tree and a windy day. She remembers her girl-child perched in a swaying sapling. I remember feeling accomplished and triumphant. I remember Jamie urging me to climb.
I didn’t know this when we were looking at caskets, but there is an oak tree near my brother’s grave. This tree is a stranger to me, not only because I go to the cemetery so rarely but also because of the funeral director’s careful description of the interment. The coffin, he said, would be sealed and placed in a crypt. The crypt, a six-inch-thick cement box lined with lead, would also be sealed. The crypt and coffin are under six feet of earth and four inches of perpetual-care turf. Sometimes when it rains, I think of the coffin in the crypt in the earth. I think of my brother’s formaldehyde-pickled body walled off in nested boxes, shut away from all contact with life. Forever. No part of him is permitted to dissolve in the earth and be upraised by the oak. It is one of the loneliest, most isolated things I can imagine.
V.
The park that borders the reservoir where my brother drowned is a steep hill with a broad asphalt path flanked by two strips of grass each slightly wider than the path. Black lamp posts with frosted glass globes that evoke the 19th century illuminate the path. Mature shade trees dot the grassy slopes. A chain link fence separates the park from the reservoir property. On the reservoir side of the fence is broad swath of lawn, an asphalt road for the reservoir’s maintenance and security patrols, and another narrower strip of grass that banks down toward the water. The lip of the reservoir is a band of concrete about a foot wide. The walls of the reservoir are perpendicular to the bottom. The distance from the lip to the water’s surface is about 3 feet. At the edge where the body was recovered, it is a straight drop to 30 feet of water. The water temperature on the night my brother died was in the high 50s. Chilly, but not freezing. Not cold enough to cause cramp. Not cold enough to incapacitate an experienced swimmer.
In the summer, neighborhood kids cut holes in the fence and used the reservoir as a swimming hole. About 60 feet away from where the body was recovered there is a brick building and, on its opposite side, a wide boat ramp. The kids would climb to the top of the building, dive into the cool deep water, and walk out using the ramp. People in the neighborhood referred to it as the Jerome Reservoir Beach Club. It was illegal. It was unhealthful. It is what kids do. Periodically, the maintenance crew drove around and chased the kids out. Sometimes they’d even lace up the holes in the fence. But the kids always came back; that much water just sitting there in the swelter of summer was too much temptation. But when the summer ended and the kids were back in school, and certainly by mid-October when the air temperatures were drifting toward winter, there was no urgency about repairing the fence. No one was tempted to swim in the reservoir in October.
Before we went to the funeral home for the first day of the wake, I went to the park. I walked up to the top of the hill and found the cut in the fence where Buster, the older setter, had been tied. I stepped through the hole in the fence and walked along the edge of the reservoir. I found a crumpled, green-and-silver cigarette package in the grass. This was where the police had set the body down after they fished it from the water. My brother smoked. Periodically, he would quit for two or three months, but he always went back to it. I remember him telling me how annoyed he got that people complained if he smoked, but never commented when he didn’t. Until he mentioned it, I had never noticed when he didn’t smoke. In the hurly-burly of living the presence of an absence is too subtle to register. But death bloats small details with portent and turns them into symbols, metaphors.
I picked up the crumpled package; it was about half-full. The paper had obviously been soaked through and then, abandoned on the grass, dried and faded by the sun. I smoothed out the wrapping and read the brand name: NOW. I sat on the grass and looked out at the water and cried. I cried silently, aware that I was in a public place and afraid of being conspicuous even though I was alone on the embankment.
Under this outpouring of grief was fear. I was terrified that he hadn’t known how much I loved him and shattered at how I hadn’t known it myself. Years later, when I was again able to read his letters, I saw in them that he missed me when my theatrical rambles took me away, that he was proud of me, that he loved me — as much, I now knew, as I had loved him. And yet, if you had asked me at any given time when he was alive, I would have told you that my brother and I were not close. I saw the maintenance truck on the road and when it was still far away I got up, put his cigarettes in my pocket, and went back to his apartment to dress for his wake. Three days later, we buried him in the Tower Gardens section of the Kensico cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
After the funeral, we went to the home of neighbor for the last phase of the wake. Sandwiches. Coffee. My parents moved in separate orbits of pain, wanting desperately to help each other, each knowing no help was possible. Urging each other to eat, which none of us could do. I overheard my grand-father, a man despised for the violence of his drunkenness and the ingenuity of his violence, a man whose youngest, wildest child had been shot dead by her second husband, tell my father: “Remember that you still have a wonderful daughter.” My father winced and nodded, said nothing, and turned away. But my father rarely speaks, even under the most congenial circumstances. Eventually this gathering too broke up and we went our separate ways. An uncle drove me and Dorcey home. The next morning, I packed my bags and went back to Boston.
In the spring after my brother died, I was in a bookstore in Boston. I was completely absorbed in browsing the shelves and had no consciousness of the past, none of the future, only the beguiling distraction of titles and content, the colors of the covers, the feel of the paper, the slightly musty smell of ink. I collected a few things I wanted for myself, and also a book that I thought Jamie would like. On I went, down the shelf, eagerly reading titles. I was kneeling on the floor looking at something on the very bottom shelf, when I remembered. I couldn’t give Jamie a book. Jamie was dead. I had forgotten. In that moment was born the habit — not knowledge or acceptance, but the habit — of thinking of him as dead. Never again did I forget that central fact.
While I was in Boston, my life began to come apart. I broke up with the man I was seeing. I alienated the management staff at the theater with ill-considered sarcasm. I moved from Beacon Hill to Somerville, familiarly known as “Slummerville.” I took a series of dead-end day jobs to support myself. I moved from city to city. I couldn’t hold a job. I shunned relationships. I slept around. I maxed-out my credit cards. I drank Irish whiskey out of the bottle. If anyone asked, I said I was fine.
As my twenties grew increasingly chaotic, the age “30” began to take on cosmic significance beyond that ascribed to it by the Summer-of-Love culture I had grown up imitating. In addition to my aunt who had died at 29 and my brother, the veterinary student who was drowned by his dog at 24, I had a cousin who had been beaten to death — with no suspects ever identified, no arrest made — when he was 28. Whenever the family got together at funerals, we would look around the diminishing circle of faces and wonder who was going to be next. I was sure it would be me. I thought it would have been better if it had been me. Better the loss of a satellite than the death of the sun.
Birthdays were particularly grueling. Jamie died a month before his 25th birthday. The year I turned 25 was haunted by the knowledge that I had outlived my older brother. After that, the underlying, ever-present anxiety about making it to 30 gathered weight. From time to time, I carried a razor blade in my wallet. I didn’t really want to kill myself — it felt like a cop-out — but I wanted to know that I could; that if the strain of waiting for my fatal accident became too great, I could just bail. It was comforting.
In the course of moving around so much and flailing away at making some sort of career in the theater, I met a lot of people. And, as people do when they first meet, many asked me, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” For years, I didn’t know what to say. In the beginning, because the grief was so immediate, I said that I’d had a brother, but he was dead. And they would ask the same questions always, in the same sequence:
What happened?
He drowned in the reservoir trying to rescue his dog.
Was he married?
Yes.
Did they have any children?
No.
What happened to the dog?
The dog is fine.
Having satisfied themselves that all the essential points were accounted for, they exclaimed, “Oh, your poor mother!” and then they would start to talk about something else. I would think, and sometimes I even said: “Excuse me, my brother. Mine. I lost someone too.” But I didn’t say this too often because I had learned that the response would be: “Well, yes, of course, but there’s nothing like the grief of a mother who loses her child, a wife who loses her husband” — and what can you say to that?
After a while I began to see that few, if any, people wanted to talk about the death of a 24-year-old when they asked a conventionally polite getting-to-know-you question. To answer their politeness in kind, I began saying “No” when people asked about siblings. Often, the people whose siblings still lived would tell me I was lucky to be an only child. And I said nothing. I would shrug. I would smile. We would talk of other things. Now months or years may pass in a friendship before I mention that I had a brother who drowned at 24. Now friends say to me with shock, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” And I say, “Because I didn’t know you well enough before.”
I have my own anno domini, a death by which I measure time. It has been a year since he died, two years, five, ten. After ten years the count became less automatic, sometimes now I have to do the math. Sometimes several days go by without my thinking of him; then I’ll think “I haven’t thought about him” and so remember. I sometimes wonder: If I heard his voice, would I recognize it? I like to think that I would, but maybe I wouldn’t. Once, after an argument and a months-long period of estrangement, I called my mother to offer a truce and after a few tentative exchanges she asked: “Who is this?”
When an event such as the death of a sibling is upon you, you think that you will remember everything, your senses are so heightened, so hyper-acute. But as time went on I realized that the shock and pain and surprise of my brother’s death was too enormous. It was too much to take in and the fact of it, the dailyness of it, could settle within me only by degrees, in much the same way that the body weaves tissue to fill the space left behind when an organ is excised.
I lived to be 30. I lived to be 40. Having outrun the curse, I will probably live to be 90. I can imagine that. I see the necessity of preparing for it. But I can’t imagine the physical law of equal and opposite reaction applying here. I can’t imagine a happiness profound enough, consistent enough, to offset the destabilizing impact of those early deaths. Along with the dissolution of life as I had always known it — life with my brother in it — it was the loss of what was beginning to be, the beginning of a relationship with my brother that my little-sister self had never acknowledged her yearning for, that was so devastating.
I don’t believe that this pain was a gift in disguise, that it was a lesson. I don’t believe that that which does not kill you makes you strong. Strength is an over-rated virtue. I have a certain emotional resilience from knowing that there is nothing that can happen that will ever hurt that much again, hurt with that kind of surprise, that depth of injustice, that infinite degree of brutal randomness and incontrovertible fact. But this resilience is complicated by a fear of caring — since caring is the root of the hurt of losing — and traces of an intractable loneliness.
When my brother died, my naive 22-year-old’s confidence in the natural order of things died as well and I acquired a crick in my heart, an emotional limp. Hypersensitive to how completely life can change in an instant, I am intolerant of small latenesses, promised and forgotten phone calls. I am always a little on edge, braced against disaster, snappish, and weary from anxiety. I know now in a way I didn’t know then that unimaginable things happen all the time. Maybe this is maturity, I struggle against its devolution into callousness.
I have resigned myself to the accident theory. An impish do;. An impatient man. A damp location. A chilly night. A classic set up for an accident. I can’t be sure, but knowing what happened has lost importance for me. Knowing what happened won’t change what happened, or anything that happened after.
I moved from Massachusetts to New York in the summer of 1977. In the autumn, I moved from New York to Delaware. The next summer I was back in New York. I lived in the Bronx in an apartment across the hall from Dorcey; my kitchen window overlooked the reservoir where my brother died. Most mornings I jogged around the reservoir with my boyfriend’s dog. I lived there for two years, broke up with the boyfriend, and moved to Queens.
In the early ‘80s, my brother’s widow sued the city and was awarded $150,000 as compensation for negligence leading to the wrongful death by drowning of her husband in a public reservoir. She sent my parents a check for a thousand bucks, remarried, and pretty much disappeared from our lives. My mother hears from her every now and again, birth announcements for her children, an occasional Christmas card.
In the late ‘80s, when I was packing to move from Queens to Brooklyn, I finally knew what to do with the black bag in the back of the last closet. I opened it and touched the stiff fabric of the shirt. Previously whenever I did that, a shiver would run up my arm. This time, I felt nothing. I saw the sleeves of the jacket and the legs of the jeans jumbled together in the bag. I stood there, unmoved, holding a red chamois shirt and looking at a heap of denim in a black plastic trash bag. At last, they were that and only that: a pair of jeans, an old shirt, a jacket. I put the shirt back in the bag and knotted it shut. Then I threw it out. It was a burden I no longer needed to carry. I stopped moving and began moving on.
VI.
I remember the day of the raft in patches and splashes. I was six or seven, a tag-a-long little sister, wise and experienced enough to follow furtively and to hide and watch and to jump out at the moment when it was too late to be sent home. In the summer of the year when I was old enough to know that, but not old enough to know better, my brother and his friend Eddie built a raft. There was a huge puddle in a low-lying area of the neighborhood; a vast body of water to us kids, deep enough and wide enough to evoke the stories told by Twain and Stevenson and to inspire feats of imitation.
I don’t remember either going to or arriving at the pond. I remember the backs of the boys’ heads — Jamie’s longish hair, fine and wavy and brown, Eddie’s wiry, curly, and almost black, cut Leave-It-To-Beaver-short. I remember the curves of their backs as they squatted at the water’s edge fussing with the raft. A white shirt in white sunlight. A blue shirt silhouetted against the greenish-brown water. I remember hearing Eddie say that they needed to test the raft and me begging them, “Let me try. I can do it. Let me do it.” I remember the boys’ profiles as they looked quickly at each other, glanced sidelong at me, and looked back out at the water. I remember, now, the erupting smiles that were hidden by that turn toward the murky deep.
Jamie stood and Eddie steadied the raft. My brother helped me get on. The next thing I remember is the exhilaration of standing on the raft in the middle of the pond — I did it! I did it! — and the sudden realization that I had no way to get back to shore. There was no tether, no paddle, no pole. I had a flash of feeling alone and afraid and abandoned but only a flash because when I turned my terrified eyes to shore, Jamie was there. Eddie was long gone — he was not one to stick around when complications arose — but I locked onto my brother’s eyes and his steady gaze told me he would get me back. The fear evaporated and I did what he told me to do to help him reel me in.
I don’t remember how he did it — I think it was a combination of proffered branches and fortuitous drifting — but I remember the moment that he held out his hand — his strong, dry, big-brother hand — and I took it and he pulled me off the water and onto the shore. The ground was spongy and my sneakers got all muddy before we got to the high ground. Jamie knelt down and had me pick up one foot, then the other — I held his white-shirted shoulder for balance — and he scraped them clean.
Walking home, he asked me not to tell Mom. I was bursting to tell anybody, everybody, about our adventure, but he was serious. I thought it was a strange thing to ask, but because he’d never asked me anything like that and because I relished having a secret with him, and because he hadn’t abandoned me on the water, I promised I wouldn’t tell and I never did.
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