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.

“Tell Mama the truth,” I heard my brother say seven years ago to a young man sitting on a pool table in an all-night bar. “What would you say if I told you that you were my type, tonight?”

Nicholas had taken me to a place where men did not wear ties. Ties were not allowed. Sweaters were not allowed. The sign at the door listed what was not allowed. Cologne was not allowed. Certain kinds of shirts were not allowed. Shirts could be checked at the door. Anything could be checked at the door. Some men checked everything but their shoes.

The pool table was not used for pool.

I was surprised that Nicholas would bring me to the kind of place it was. I was surprised, too, by his attention to the young man on the pool table.

The young man was younger than Nicholas.

That year Nicholas was thirty years old.

At the bar, tickets were exchanged for drinks. The bar was not licensed to sell liquor, but it was legal to sell tickets. The liquor was house brands and was served in plastic glasses. Most everyone drank beer from cans.

Nicholas did not drink beer from cans.

“Take that right back to the place where you got it,” Nicholas said when I brought him a can. “Mama does not drink suds. Mama especially does not drink suds from containers. Mama will drink her bourbon in her Styrofoam.”

Nicholas drank bourbon in what Nicholas called Styrofoam. It was in fact clear plastic, and the sight of my brother drinking bourbon from a plastic glass struck me, that night, as close to the most unlikely thing that I had seen him do. That night seven years ago when he was thirty years old was the last night I saw my brother.