HIS AUNT MAE lived with them off and on through his childhood. She had been the oldest child in his mother’s family; his mother had been the youngest. His friends said that Mae seemed more like a grandmother than an aunt. She was thin, had gray-blond hair, fine features, and a wary look. She paid greater attention to him than to his brother and on Saturday afternoons took him wherever he wanted to go. She had done many things for a living; she was proud of having worked at exclusive seaside New Jersey hotels, in what capacity he didn’t know. When she stayed with his family she earned money addressing envelopes; she had a good hand and would sit at a table by a window with a pile of envelopes and a list of names and addresses and work for hours without fatigue or complaint. Her pen had a gold loop on the cap, and she wrote with a perforated red rubber guard on her index finger. She wouldn’t let anyone use her pen: “It might disturb the set of the nib.” She had been married to a Texas widower who had worked as a hotel manager and river boat captain and had finally settled down on a Florida orange grove. After the marriage broke up she retained the man’s name and occasionally told mildly heroic stories about him: once in Florida she found on the kitchen table a tarantula “ready to spring”; she called to her husband, who said not to move, appeared with a wet towel, and snapped the thing dead. He asked her why she had left her husband. Because he kept a loaded pistol on the night table, she said. He asked his mother the same question about Mae; she said that Mae liked to travel, enjoyed hotels and river boats but not the orange grove. When he got bigger he could do by himself the things he had done with Mae; still they stayed close. She agreed with his points of view, even when, he felt, she didn’t understand them and even when they contradicted those of his father and brother (except when his father or brother was present). She answered questions generously, and since she had been many places she knew many things. However, he doubted some of what she said: she claimed that appendicitis was caused by swallowing apple seeds; food that took long to cook, like candy, was cheaper to buy in a store because of the price of gas; after a certain age one shouldn’t walk barefoot in the sand because the grains worked through the pores into the blood stream. Mae took up little room and had few possessions. She owned one book, The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes (by F. E. Brown, copyright 1910), which contained 1,001 recipes: how to stiffen hats, soften corsets, make imitation brandy, cure cancer (there were five cures for cancer, two of them “sure”). She would let him have the book for short periods but got anxious if it was out of her hands for long. When he was about to be married he told Mae and his mother that his fiancée had insisted he go to confession so that he could receive Communion at a nuptial mass, and he had lied to her about the going to confession. He thought it was an amusing story; however, Mae in a loud voice, which he had not heard before, accused him of self-indulgence and double-dealing—“and you’ve always been like that, since you were a baby,” she said. He and his mother were taken aback: they thought Mae had been fond of him. He and Mae were then cool to one another, even after his mother reported that Mae was sorry for what she had said. When his father died he was glad Mae was around to keep his mother company. In her eighties Mae curled up on one of his mother’s couches, didn’t move, refused a doctor, ate little, voided little, lost weight. He put her into a hospital, intending that after a checkup she would be transferred to a home. In the hospital it was clear that she was dying. She was so frail no one was eager to find out what was wrong with her beyond the fact that there was a “sizable mass in the abdominal region.” A nurse consoled his mother with the information that Mae was “not in pain,” from which he gained a sense of how bad some deaths could be. No one came to the funeral home besides his mother, his brother, and himself. When his mother is the only survivor of her original family he will ask questions about the past, and often she will say, “Mae would have known that.” “It may be hard to believe,” she will tell him, “but Mae was a very attractive young woman, lots of men were interested in her.” He will understand that his mother feels more fortunate than Mae because she has had a proper marriage and children. Near the end of her life she will say, “I’m glad Mae went first so she didn’t have to be alone,” from which he will conclude that she knew that neither he nor his brother would have attended Mae. “I always felt sorry for Mae,” she will also say, “she was the oldest and got the worst of it.” “And you were the youngest and got the best?” he will say. She will nod and smile.