When my brother was thirteen, he asked our mother if my bones had stopped growing, and when our mother told him that they had, Nicholas bought me a gold ring. It was, he told me at the time, technically, a wedding ring for a man, and inside it, all around the band, Nicholas had ordered an inscription. There are reasons that I have not worn the ring, and until two days ago, I had not looked at it for more than twenty years. But I have carried the inscription in my mind. Nicholas had the ring inscribed in Hebrew, a language he did not know. The inscription is not a line from the Old Testament; it is from no Hebrew source. It is a sentence Nicholas made up and had translated. He could have chosen Greek, he could have chosen Japanese, but Nicholas chose Hebrew. I did not ask why, because the year Nicholas gave me the ring was the year that Elizabeth Taylor had become a Jew.

Nicholas told me that he had paid for the ring by dressing up poor and singing on streets. It is possible, though not very, that he did this. At the time I wondered, what, exactly, Nicholas would have chosen to dress up in to look poor. If he dressed up poor, if he sang on streets, it was not in order to pay for the ring. Nicholas paid for the ring with money that he took from our father’s armoire, from a drawer that was supposed to be secret. I know this, because when our father noticed the loss, our father, then well into his sixties, called me in to his dressing room to ask me what to do about a thirteen-year-old boy.

I told our father to let it go.

Nicholas must have known that our father would let it go. I was impressed by my brother for finding the hidden drawer and taking the money. I was impressed, too, by his apparent notion of himself as unpunishable. I used to look in our father’s armoire, in the drawers, under the shirts, alert at all times to the risk of being caught. Nicholas, I expect, did not think in terms of risk.

Our father’s dressing room had chairs, tables, ashtrays. You could sit in the wing chair in our father’s dressing room and smoke a cigarette; when I was a boy it was the place I went to smoke.

My brother was the only one who found me. He would appear in the doorway, posed with his hand out, and command, “Give me a lovely cigarette.”

Nicholas never asked for just a puff.

Under the shirts in his drawers, our father kept magazines which in those years I thought I should want to look at. Smoking with my brother, I would point to a female chest.

I would say something like, look at these.

“What about them?” Nicholas would ask me, puffing.