Epigraph

“And he carried to the wars with him a gilded scutcheon, whereon he had no cognisance, nor ordinary device of the Athenians, but only had the image of Cupid on it, holding lightning in his hand.”

plutarch, Lives

I Look Divine

My brother would not smile for a photograph. He smiled now and then in life, he was even known to laugh, but never for a camera. Even when we were growing up, when he was a little boy, Nicholas knew how he wanted to be seen.

He knew how he was willing to be remembered. Any camera would alert my brother’s instinct for posterity.

In the years that we had grandmothers, one of them was the kind who liked to compose grandsons within a frame in front of a Christmas tree. She liked to pose the smaller boy in front of the bigger boy, the bigger boy holding the smaller one, me holding Nicholas, my arms around him, enfolding him from behind.

The idea, I think, was that this embrace would make us look like brothers.

Ours was a weak resemblance.

Nicholas would look at himself in the red glass ornaments hooked to the boughs, the ones that were silver inside when they shattered. He could see himself in them and in the presents wrapped in shining paper at our feet. He could find his face in the heaps of packages, of which more than half, every year, were invariably for him. He would be himself up to a point, as much as Nicholas ever was himself, until our grandmother would say, “Say cheese.”

We could not, even in those years, either of us, believe that we had that kind of grandmother.

Nicholas said that she came from a bad family.

He did not say this in those years; he said it later, in the years when he was fond of calling things de trop.

One year—almost thirty years ago—while we were waiting for the cheese, Nicholas stood on my shoes and reached behind us both. He put his hands in my back pockets and squeezed handfuls of me, the biggest handfuls he could get, clutching through the cloth. He held on to me, his feet planted on mine, and he tipped his weight forward, leaning with it, not to make us fall, but as though he wanted to take flight without leaving me behind.