I pulled him to me and smelled soap on his skin, starch in his white shirt, and the wool smell of his short gray trousers. I smelled tonic in his hair, and Listerine, and under them, I was sure, I smelled our mother’s perfume. It may have only been the scent that her kisses left behind, but with his weight on me I imagined Nicholas looking at himself in our mother’s mirror, splashing her Arpège into his hand, then lavishing it behind his ears, as she did. I could picture my brother stroking perfume on the pulse of his neck, with the thrill that is the point of the forbidden.

I imagined what must have been his rapture.

I squeezed him tighter, and while our grandmother squinted, trying to attach the flash, Nicholas took one hand from inside my pocket and forced it in between us.

He whispered, “Goose you!”

I felt his laughter in my feet. I felt it rise, I felt his laughter in his ribs, where I was holding him. My brother’s laughter made me laugh. I felt it in his body, then in mine.

I thought our grandmother should have captured that. I thought that would have been a picture worth taking, worth having.

It would be worth having now.

Now it would be proof.

Nicholas and I were still laughing when she told us she was ready.

She called us boys.

She said cheese.

“Cheese, boys,” our grandmother said.

That was all it took to stop my brother’s laughter. Nicholas stepped down from my shoes. He folded his hands in front of his body and made them mimic a boyish repose. I watched his face change in the ornaments.

He changed it to a face that he had taught himself. It was a face that a little boy will learn to make after hearing too often that he is a beautiful little boy, in the same way that children who have been told that they are smart are apt to teach themselves to act it.

It was a face that said, “This is how I look.”

Our grandmother said that she was waiting for Nicholas to smile.

I kicked his foot and told him to do it. I told him that the smile would only be for her, that no one else would see it. I told him that it would not end up on the cover of Photoplay or anywhere else that would embarrass him.

I told him that a smile was nothing.

Nicholas stepped forward, a step away from me. Then he turned his face all the way around and gave me a look of everlasting patience that did not want to last.

“You are so oblibious,” he said. “How do I know who she’s going to show it to?”