My Mistake

by Daniel Menaker

  The students in the class are seniors. The next year, when coming back to Collegiate to visit, three or four of them, mostly the whiniest, tell me how helpful the course was in their college English classes—which is not only a compliment but a reaffirmation of the delayed gratifications of persistence.

  In that senior class, on Parents’ Day, I criticize the Introduction to James’s Daisy Miller as being more biographical than literarily enlightening. One of the visiting fathers comes up to me when the class is over and says how much he enjoyed the class. I ask him which his son is. “Tony,” he says. That would be Tony Dupee. Which means that the man thanking me is F. W. Dupee, one of the leading American Literature scholars in the world. So the compliment grows even more rewarding. Until I remember that it was Professor Dupee who wrote that Introduction. My mistake.

  “Don’t worry,” he says as I redden. “It was a really good class and your criticism made sense. Although I can’t help defending myself—that’s the trouble with academics. I meant the Introduction to be biographical, for those who were reading the book—and maybe James—for the first time.”

  My brother Mike has graduated from law school at the University of Virginia. Law school has made him more studious and somber. He gets serious about the girlfriend who soon ends up his wife and never tells intimate stories about her. Well, maybe a little, at the start. He begins to criticize my immaturities, which are many, in a more sober way. When he’s hired by a fancy law firm in New York—Davis, Polk—courtesy of a UVA Law professor who took a liking to him and overlooked his just-shy-of-stellar grades, he finds the work overwhelmingly difficult and tells me glumly that he doesn’t think he will ever be made a partner there. He is starting to carry the weight of adulthood, in other words, and in doing so once again shows me the way. I don’t like the way and don’t follow it—I don’t want to have any part of this weightiness. I’m teaching at Collegiate and still want my summers off, my work hours limited, my personal life “free.” And I want Mike to be my brother as he has always been, when we were kids and teenagers and undergraduates. I want time to stop for us. I’m jealous of his relationship with his wife. I think I’m losing him, and in a way I am. This is Mike’s hardest fraternal task—putting a stop to my childhood. He succeeds, ultimately, but in a way so devastating to me and my family that I think the worst villain would not have willed it to happen.

  It’s Thanksgiving of 1967, and we’re playing touch football before dinner with some Grace cousins from Boston on the front lawn of the house in Nyack. It’s a pure fall day, with the Hudson all blue and white, the tree branches vascular-looking in their bareness, and the air as clean and clear as alcohol. Mike’s wife and my girlfriend are standing on the sidelines. Before the game starts, I try to tease him about something, and when he doesn’t respond, I grab him around the waist and try to wrestle him to the ground. He shakes me off and says, “Why don’t you grow up?” I’m embarrassed and angry.

  The game begins, with me and Mike against the Graces. Because he has bad knees and has already had surgery on one of them, Mike plays the more static lineman position and I play backfield. Still consciously smarting from his scolding, I finally say, “I’m tired. You play backfield for once.” My mistake. Mike says, “You know I can’t.” I say, “Your precious knees will be fine.” He says OK. On the very first play, he jumps to try to knock down a pass and comes down with one of his legs all twisted up. It buckles beneath him and he tears a knee ligament. He is furious, and his wife glares at me. I’m covered with remorse and apologize to them. Mike hobbles through the rest of the holiday and has surgery in the first week of December.

  On the day after the surgery, in Brooklyn, Carl Andrews walks into my classroom at Collegiate and tells me to call my parents at the hospital in Brooklyn where Mike was operated on. I go out of the classroom and dial, then stand there, next to the wall phone, listening to my mother try, without crying, to tell me that something has gone wrong. And that same dreadful feeling of cold and abandonment which descended on me in Grand Central Terminal fifteen years earlier descends on me again. In this terror, I’m surprised to feel my knees go weak—I didn’t know it ever really happened, outside of metaphor.

  My brother lies in a semi-private hospital room in Brooklyn. In view of his critical condition, the room’s other patient and the doctors agree that Mike should have the room to himself. The roommate is moved out. Mike has septicemia—a vicious, systemic blood infection that he must have contracted during the surgery, which was a routine procedure to repair the ligament injury he sustained when we were playing football.

  I have a cold and I ask the resident if it’s a bad idea to go into Mike’s room and talk to him. The resident says it’s probably OK, but if I want to be on the safe side, it might be best just to stand in the doorway. That’s what I want to hear, because the truth is that I don’t want to get near my brother. I am terrified of his perilous condition—he’s conscious but very, very sick—and I don’t know how I would act or what I would say if I got close to him.

  My mother and father and girlfriend and sister-in-law and I sit in a typically inhospitable hospital waiting room. My brother had come back to consciousness after having been unresponsive for some time. But the doctors say that he is still in great danger—they say it in such a way as to make me sure that my brother is going to die. My mother encourages me to go to Mike’s room and talk to him. I get up and go down the hall and stand in the doorway.

  “I almost bought the farm,” Mike says.

  “I know,” I say. “You had us all really scared, even though I knew you were probably faking.”

  My brother smiles his dazzling smile. He’s not even thirty and looks even younger now, and in such danger. He is lying on his back, his head on a thin pillow, so he is looking at me with lowered eyes, half-lidded, as if he were in a waking dream, or watching out for an attack from below. His voice is dreamy, too. “And how are you, my young scholar?”

  “I have a cold or I’d go over there and straighten you out,” I say.

  “And how is Precious?” he asks.

  “She’s fine—she’s here too.”

  “How can someone so good-looking stand to be seen with you?”

  I am out of wisecracks.

  “I almost bought the farm,” he says.

  “Two farms,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. You know you’re going to be fine, right?”

  “I don’t think so. I really feel bad all of a sudden.”

  “Well, I’ll go back and get the doctor or a nurse. Hang in there.”

  “OK—I’ll see you later,” he says.

  I leave the room and tell a nurse passing by that my brother says he’s feeling pretty bad. She goes into his room and I go back to the waiting room.

  It turns out that his coming-to is only temporary. He goes into a coma, and all his vital organs begin to slowly shut down as the infection, resistant to the strongest available antibiotics, spreads. The hospital allows us all to stay in small, functional apartments that are generally used for interns and nurses. I call Collegiate and say that I won’t be able to return to teaching for a while. In the daytime, we sit in that waiting room with its cheese-rind hues. My sister-in-law sits on a couch, closing and opening a fist, saying that as long as she does so, Mike’s heart will keep beating.

  It doesn’t.

  Mike’s friends from Dartmouth come to Nyack to pay their respects. Dave Hiley, Alex Summer, the Good McGinnis, the Bad McGinnis, Arnie Sigler, Otter, Roger Zissu. Seeing these young men—still boys, in some ways—is unbearable. They cast their eyes down, don’t know how to act, what to say. How could they? They have had no occasion to learn comportment for such a disaster. As is only proper. And they can’t help it, but they fairly glow with energy and youth. Dave Hiley approaches me in the back yard and I put my hand on his shoulder—to keep him away, to draw him close, to keep myself from falling to the ground in grief.

  The funeral, conduct
ed by my sister-in-law’s uncle, the Reverend Francis Sayre, Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, takes place in an Episcopal church in Manhattan, Mike’s Jewish nipples notwithstanding. Everyone there—and there are hundreds and hundreds—looks sick and white, as if some terrible epidemic has struck them.

  Two years after my brother’s death, researchers develop an antibiotic that effectively combats hospital-acquired staphylococcus septicemia.

  Twenty-six to fifty or so

  When I tell people about this event in detail—as I do seldom and only when the conversation makes doing so unavoidable—they tend to wince as I describe how Mike was injured. As if they themselves have been hurt and as if they sense how deeply I have wounded myself. Because look—I know it’s true that I didn’t take a vial of staph bacteria and pour it into the incision during surgery, and I know that the accident’s outcome was violently random and arbitrary, and I know that we all tend to take responsibility for things we aren’t responsible for. But on the other hand, try telling me that there’s no chance that my brother would be alive today if I hadn’t done what I did. Try not to grimace when you think of the causal chain that led to my brother’s organs shutting down one after another way out in Brooklyn, where there weren’t even any tall buildings to add some grandeur to his death.

  That challenge isn’t as bitter as it sounds. I really was still just a kid then, I realize. Twenty-six. And after decades of hard psychological work and simply getting on with things, I’ve forgiven myself, and I understand that what all of us have done is surely what we were going to do. The past is the definition of inevitability. And as the years have gone by and the broken emotional bones have knitted, I’ve come to understand and appreciate not only what I lost in this catastrophe but what I found. I’m good at consoling others, for one thing. And this is not a small thing, especially recently, as the casualties of ordinary life have begun to mount among family and friends. Petty reversals, my own or others’, remain more or less where they should among my concerns—way down on the ladder. I do whatever I can to shape my future but when it becomes the past, I can leave it alone back there pretty well. Nothing to be done except learn from it. I think I respond even more deeply to art, music, and literature because of the lesson in life’s fragility I unwillingly learned from my brother’s death. And as my parents’ suddenly only child, I assumed and carried out a kind of lonely responsibility toward them, especially as they got older.

  And there’s this: About ten years after Mike dies, it begins to dawn on me that his death will ultimately leave me in better financial shape than I would have been if he had lived—my parents’ modest estate undivided, Enge’s house and land in the country similarly wholly mine. This comes as an almost overnight surprise to me, I’m ashamed to be proud to say—it has never once entered my mind before then—and it makes me feel good and awful at the same time. Good because the inheritance situation has at least had the decency to wait a decade to occur to me. Bad because it means I’d won the battle between us. Somewhere in my hideous id, I killed him. I vanquished him from the field, and the spoils are all mine. And the only thing worse on a primal human level than Oedipal defeat is Oedipal victory. This one, in conjunction with early-childhood illnesses and askew family geometry, has been making intimacy difficult for me for decades.

  But then there’s this: literally this. It allows me to write. It compels me to write. For five or six months I was so paralyzed by sorrow and dismay that it was all I could do simply to function. To go back to Collegiate and teach. To try to figure out how to talk to my parents. To brush off kind inquiries from colleagues and students, for fear that if I gave in to what pressed down on me so hard, I would never get up. And then out of desperation I wrote a story based on what had happened. And then came more writing—because much as I dislike the actual work of writing, it settles me, makes me feel as though I am actually managing myself, as nothing else does. I suppose this goes in the plus column too.

  But finally there’s this: Would I give back every sentence, every lesson learned, every bit of wisdom, every gram of sympathy for others, every sensitivity, every penny, every square inch of real estate, to have Mike walking three years ahead of me? Instead of adding year after unnatural year to my seniority over him? Instead of coming around the bend of the year and into the fall with the usual schoolboy’s summer’s-end sadness so uniquely sharpened? Instead of living in the shadow of an alternative unlived life? You tell me.

  Twenty-seven

  Tom McDade, Mike’s and my godfather and the former FBI man who investigated my father and someone who lost his brother when they were both young, visits us in Nyack after Mike’s death and, unprompted, says to me, “I know you think you’ll never get over this, but you will—I promise.” And, well, eventually I will. Over it but, obviously, not through with it.

  I’ve been teaching English at the Collegiate School for two years. Now that I’m over twenty-six, over draft age, I decide to leave teaching.

  The Headmaster, Carl Andrews, is an excellent man—a little short, a little heavy, a heavy smoker, very smart and decent, always scooting around from one responsibility to another, a great basketball fan, and extremely proud of and fatherly toward the school’s students, with their startling ties and dope-widened eyes.

  Carl tells me that when Jacqueline Kennedy was considering Collegiate for her young son, John, he had shown the two of them around the school and its new building. Mrs. Kennedy kept saying things like, “If John is accepted, would there be an orientation for new boys in the fall?” and “If John is accepted, I assume we’d need to provide you with records from his previous school.” Carl finally stopped in the middle of a hallway, drew Mrs. Kennedy aside, and said, quietly, “Mrs. Kennedy, I think it’s safe for me to say that John is accepted at Collegiate.”

  I laughed, but for a few minutes this story struck me as being a poor reflection on the Headmaster’s integrity. I could hear Enge and my father saying, “You see?” I did see. But I was also continuing to learn that, as in the English Department at Hopkins, influence and connection are always part of the way of the world. And that Carl has been treating me like an adult by confessing his own—and understandable—susceptibility to influence, not so much for the sake of this fortunate unfortunate child as for the sake of the school.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not coming back next fall,” I tell Carl in the late spring of 1968.

  He gets angry. “This is a real problem, Dan,” he says. “This means we have to find a replacement in an impossibly short time.”

  My mistake. I feel awful. I haven’t given a single thought to the predicament I am putting the school into. “I’m really sorry,” I say again. “I guess I didn’t realize—”

  “You should have. This is just typical of the selfishness of some young people today. It really speaks poorly of you.”

  Desperate to regain some sort of footing, I remember an incident from the previous fall. “Well, you’re not the only disappointed one here,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember you told me that I would be named head of the English Department next fall?”

  “What?”

  “You said with Henry Adams leaving, I’d be head of the department. And then a couple of weeks ago you appointed Pete.”

  Carl pauses, looks stymied. “You’re absolutely right,” he says. “I went back on my word. I guess I have no right to be criticizing you this way.”

  Well, what do you know! He made a mistake and admitted it—which reminded me of his candor about young John Kennedy’s acceptance to Collegiate. He was showing me exactly the kind of adulthood that, with my thoughtless announcement of departure, I was still a considerable way from achieving.

  Part III

  The Drudge; Alex Trebek’s Constitution

  Twenty-seven

  It’s May of 1968. Without a new job in the offing, despondent, girlfriend with good sense gone back to the South. Family devastated. My widowed sister-in-
law comes to visit in Nyack, and I hear her and my mother practically barking, they are weeping so violently upstairs. My father’s early signs of dementia become more pronounced—mercifully, maybe.

  What will become of me? Before I have to decide—I couldn’t decide anyway—my uncle Enge’s young lover, Tom Waddell, makes the United States Olympic Team in the decathlon. Tom had been a counselor at my uncle Pete’s boys’ camp during the summers he was in college, at Springfield, and that’s how he and Enge met. The Olympics will take place in Mexico City, and so with four or five others, family and friends, I go to watch him compete. I see Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists in the Black Power salute. I watch Bob Beamon shatter the world long-jump record by a foot and a half. The crowd groans with astonishment when he does it.

  Tom swipes a U.S. Olympic Team sweatshirt and sweatpants for me. The outfit allows me to go with him into the locker rooms and staging areas for the events being held at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City. The young men there are often half dressed or naked. They look like Phidian sculptures brought to life and forward to the twentieth century. As with the caliber of their performance in the events they compete in, the physical appearance of these guys puts to eternal rest my fantasies of ever having been or being a good athlete. Except for one sport—tennis—which to this day I believe I could have excelled in, if only I had started lessons early enough, instead of trying to pick the game up in my late twenties. I have the slightly bowed, slightly short legs of many a tennis pro, very quick reflexes, and nothing else but such fantasies.