Poor guy, you think, but no. His was not an affliction, it was a boast that set him apart as someone special. What had begun in his teenage years, after a spell of mumps, as a mild form of Bell’s palsy, Frank had discovered to be an asset, and he somehow contrived to remain uncured—his face fixed and asymmetric, and looking, he once told me with pride, like a pirate. Something else: I always felt that he was scowling at me furiously behind this face.

As his brother I often studied my face in the mirror and talked to myself, to see if my face was separated in the same lopsided way. But it wasn’t, and I concluded that Frank’s had become like that over decades of equivocation, the way a habitual smiler acquires laugh lines, or a doubtful one a permanent scowl.

“There’s a short answer and a long answer to that,” he said of my harmless greeting. “The short answer is ‘I’ve got a ton of things on my mind.’” His eyes dismissed this as he agitated his folded hands. He said, “The long answer is what I have on my mind, the details. I keep thinking, when Dad was my age he had a small insurance agency, and was in debt because of some bad faith policies, and two young kids. I don’t know how he kept his composure . . .”

I started to say, Dad was an optimist, and was going to add how he was positive and spiritual, his piety giving him strength, but Frank had unfolded his hands to gesticulate and was still talking.

“. . . something to do with not facing facts, being a kind of dreamer. Ask him what he did for a living and he’d say, ‘Insurance, but what I’ve always wanted to do was some sort of forestry-related work.’ He wanted to be a forest ranger! I could never live like that. What I never understood . . .”

Dad never wanted to be a forest ranger. But instead of correcting Frank, I said, “He admired you for having important friends.”

This seemed not to register. Frank said, “Think of it. How he died before the reckoning came. It was Mum who had to face the music. She had her feet on the ground.”

“And her parents’ money.”

Frank wagged his finger, using it to clear my statement away. He said, “She paid back every penny.”

This was an old story I’d heard before. In an early version the debts were forgiven, Dad was absolved, but Frank had advised Mum on the procedure. Today, Mum was the heroine, having settled Dad’s bad faith debt. Something was unspoken, too. I had always been Dad’s favorite, and Frank’s disparaging him as a deadbeat seemed a dig at me—another of those roundabout, untranslatable family slurs I referred to earlier.