HIS BROTHER RESEMBLED his mother. He resembled his father. At first he thought his father was handsome. Later he thought his father was ugly and hoped he would grow up to look like someone else. He had a fat face and wished it were lean. He thought his mouth was soft and, examining himself in the mirror, often clenched his teeth and narrowed his lips. He wanted to look hard, and outdoors he adopted a severe manner. In adolescence he was pleased to hear that this or that girl liked his looks, but he doubted the girl’s taste. When he went into the army he was told to get a short haircut; he had his head shaved instead and felt very manly. When the army sent him far from home his face, chest, and back broke out in lumps. An army doctor said that nothing could be done about the condition because it was only disfiguring, not disabling. After he returned from one furlough his company commander, a man with dark, smooth skin, showed him a red-bordered letter from Eleanor Roosevelt. It told how his mother had written to Mrs. Roosevelt complaining that the army had not given him proper medical care. He was sent to the camp dermatologist, who insisted, despite his denials, that the lumps had been there since he was thirteen or fourteen. At another camp he went to a dermatologist, who reassigned him to limited service, which he afterwards thought might have saved his life. By the time he was discharged from the army his face was scarred. He was grateful to his girl friend for still caring about him and a year later married her. Occasionally she caressed the scars, and although her touch was soothing it embarrassed him. For years he considered the scars not part of himself; in dreams his face was as smooth as when he was a boy. He envied men with good skin. Once when getting off a ferry he offered to help a scarred young woman carry her heavy bag. She refused; he was relieved but thought that they had lost a chance for comfort. He had his first adulterous affair with a woman who said his scars made him look dangerous, although later she said that his constant concern with his appearance was faggy. Later another woman he was sleeping with said that without the scars he would have been too handsome for comfort. Because of his successes with women he now accepts the face he sees in the mirror as his own. As time goes on, the scars will be absorbed, even to the extent that unscarred skin on one side of his face will change as if to re-establish symmetry with scarred skin on the other side. For a while he will be amused by the signs of age: lines in his cheeks and between his eyebrows, ridges in his fingernails, spots on the backs of his hands, yellowing teeth, hair falling from his head and growing in his ears (“just nature moving things around,” he will say). But he will be put off by other, later signs: the boniness of knees and elbows, a breakdown of the orderly retreat of his hairline, the pendulousness of his earlobes, a whiteness to the skin of his inner arms, a looseness around the eyes so that they do not express his moods. He will have hoped to age into a rosy cragginess, but instead there will be a general slackness and grayness. When he understands that all future changes will be for the worse he will be struck by the fact that never in his life will he have been satisfied with his appearance. More and more he will remind himself of his father as he remembers his father before his father died. At night when he wakes and coughs or clears his throat he will hear his father’s sounds. In unexpected reflections in shop windows he will see his father’s late face: irritable, confused, and suspicious. Somewhere among his belongings he will know there are photographs of his father as an old man, which he will intend to search out and study in order to discern how close the resemblance is. If the resemblance is an illusion it will mean to him that his life span is not determined by the genes of his father, who died at seventy-two, but may be modified by those of his mother, who will have lived longer.