Then she said that she was wrong, she had forgotten, there wasn’t only vermouth, that my brother had brought over some tequila the last time he’d come for dinner, two weeks or so before. It was still half there, the woman said.

I took the vermouth.

The woman took some, too, and we left the child at the table and went into the next room. The couch was sectional. We sat down with our glasses, and that was when the woman, in no context to speak of, told me that for the past several years, years I did not see him, Nicholas had taken to carrying photographs of himself in his wallet, photographs from ten or more years before, five or six different poses at a time and always changing—Nicholas in Cuernavaca, Nicholas in Taxco, Nicholas in Rome, on a stage where one year we heard Turandot performed at the Baths of Caracalla; Nicholas tan, Nicholas thin, looking the way he was supposed to look, the way he did when he still looked like himself.

The woman told me that on more than one occasion, after dinner and some drinks, Nicholas would take the photographs from his wallet, show them to her, that he would say, “This is how the face looked in 1968.”

“Not ‘this is how I looked,’” the woman told me. “What he said every time was ‘this is how the face looked.’”

It was along these same lines, more or less, that the woman told me of a time, just a few months ago, when she and Nicholas had taken the little boy to Coney Island. It was not easy to imagine Nicholas at Coney Island, so I did not put myself to the trouble. The woman told me that shortly after that excursion she showed my brother some photographs, casual snapshots, from that Coney Island day.

When my brother saw these photographs, the woman told me, he went at them at once with a ballpoint.

She then showed me the photographs, so I saw for myself where my brother had inked in an indentation to slenderize his waist, where he had carved blue hollows into his face to put cheekbones on his cheeks.

The woman told me that my brother had re-contoured twenty-eight of thirty-six exposures, without speaking, for well over an hour.

“As you can see,” the woman said, “he did it quite artistically.”

I could see how he had done it.

The woman told me that after he had finished with the photographs, Nicholas gave them back and helped her put the little boy to bed. She told me that the little boy adored my brother’s bedtime stories. That night, the night he carved ball-point hollows into his face, the story that he told the little boy began—the woman remembered—“There was a little boy who lived in a shoe. He had so many clothes he didn’t know what to do.”

“Except,” the woman said, “I think he said frocks.”