You may have noticed that this is often true of men over-cherished in childhood, common, for example, among favored sons—an exemption from the first shocks of aging that is a hallmark of the self-regarding.

We were seven years apart. Our mother and father had not been young when I was born; when Nicholas came, he was their miracle.

He came weeks before he should have, cut from our mother’s stomach in a crisis that was not discussed.

I used to think he staged that entrance.

I used to imagine Nicholas coiled in our mother, pressing to get out, to get born and be adored, as though he knew that being born—too soon, sickly, delicate—was all that he would need to do in life.

I know, of course, I knew even then, that there can be no sound in the womb, that life before birth is as without sound as life is after life, but I still imagined Nicholas crying out before his first breath to be made alive at once, beautiful at once, and adored without delay.

In fact, there are times I still imagine this. Today, for example, I can almost hear the cries. And in truth, nothing I imagine requires vast imagination: the womb would not have been too soon for Nicholas to demand his due.

For years, Nicholas would frequently remark that being born Caesarian was the next best thing to being adopted. I cannot say how many times I heard my brother say this.

One year, when we no longer had grandmothers, one of the years that our mother and father took us to Mexico every Christmas, I heard my brother tell a little boy his age, in the pool of the Cuernavaca Racquet Club, that Caesarian babies were more beautiful.

Nicholas explained to the little boy that being born in the usual way, through the mother, can deform a baby, make it ugly.

He made a face with his mouth and said, “Squish.”

I watched my brother raise his arms from the water to trace his wet mouth with his pool-wrinkled fingers. He traced his eyes and caressed, in both hands, the molding of his skull. Then, the proof exhibited, Nicholas explained to the little boy that Caesarian babies were more beautiful because they were more perfect.

Our mother was there, heard it all, and she told Nicholas that there was no such thing as more perfect.

She must have meant, of course, that there was no such English as more perfect, but that was not what she said, not the way she put it. What our mother told Nicholas when she looked up from a magazine to correct his grammar was that there was no such thing.

“Sweetheart,” our mother said to Nicholas, “there is no such thing as more perfect.”

Nicholas looked up at her and said, “Of course there is.”

Then my brother asked the little boy, “How were you born?”