When I arrived at Aunt Gladys' house I had the clothes on my back, and nothing more. She made a bed up for me and my sister Dawn in the living room. We didn't see my mother, or go home again, for three weeks. We didn't see my brother Charles for at least a year. An ambulance had taken him to the hospital.
It seems I spent a large chunk of my childhood fearing Charles would die. He had become an invalid long before the mid-night journey to my aunt's house. That climactic night he went to two hospitals. The first refused to give him oxygen, because they said he had no chance of surviving the night.
The second hospital, St. Francis, admitted him and immediately administered Last Rites.
Charles' road to health stretched on through his adolescence. I remember the day, months after he had gone to St. Francis, when we received a jubilant letter from him.
"I was dangling!" he wrote. It was a victory, a milestone, that he had been allowed to sit up and hang his legs over the side of the hospital bed.
St. Francis is a heart hospital and in those days, the 50s, had a specialty treatment center for severe pediatric cardiac cases. My brother's ward was filled with young 'friends', some who lived and some who did not survive. Charles was one of the lucky ones. He did survive the hospital, but he never came home again.
This was part of his passage through life, one of those ruptures that heals but leaves deep scars.
St. Francis set him on the road to recovery. It also represented an opportunity for my father to separate Charles from the rest of the family.
My mother remembered the day they picked Charles up at the hospital. My father parked in front of our house and told my mother to get out.
"He's coming with me to Nana's," he told my mother. "He's not getting out."
There was no discussion. My mother was stunned, and she obeyed, for my father backed up his words with brute force.
Charles didn't die at St. Francis, but something else did. My family was broken. Long before that day when Charles didn't come home, my father had abandoned the family. It was frankly a relief to be rid of him. His absence tied us together more tightly than we might otherwise have been. We were a unit knit as one by my mother.
My father was good at breaking things. He broke my family that day. He broke my mother's heart, and he marred Charles' childhood happiness.
This part of my brother's passage through life may have been as hard for him, for us, as his illness.
He visited me, maybe seven years ago, and had a discussion we'd never had before.
"I was so lonely," he told me. "I missed all of you. I longed to be with my brothers and sisters."
Because he did not live with us he had 'advantages' we could not hope for. A Brownie camera, for example. He'd visit and take pictures. These are just about the only pictures I have of my childhood, the ones Charles took. Symbolically, he is in none of them, because he was the photographer. He had become part of the outside world.
Some ten years ago Charles wrote a little booklet, a retrospective about those years he spent with my father. The booklet was entitled, "Satan".
My mother never got Charles back, not until he was grown and had gone to college. This theft of my brother encapsulated the powerlessness she felt when dealing with my father. He was a lawyer, she a seamstress. He came from a powerful family, she was a stranger in his community. Not only was he a lawyer, but at one point was elected Town Alderman.
My mother could do nothing while she lived in that community to save us, or herself, from my father's control. And so we left, one day, without notice.
But where was Charles? He was still up there, still with my father.
The illness that took Charles from us in the middle of the night a long time ago, scarred his heart. It scarred his life. It scarred my mother and all of us.
A scar may leave its mark, but it can heal over. It's a rough patch, part of the whole, but it does not define the whole.
When Charles graduated from high school, he left my father. He applied to college a thousand miles away from my father. It took a while for him to find his footing. He was naturally attracted to other outsiders, college mates from the Middle East. These friendships lasted a lifetime.
After graduation he started a business, a sandwich stand. This went bankrupt. Eventually he discovered the formula for success. He married. Had children. Started another business. Became a millionaire several times over.
Our children became close. Our two eldest sons are fast friends, like brothers.
While it's true my family, my mother's little brood, was split, separated in a way that could not be seamlessly healed, my brother found a way to build a bridge. In our sons there lives the intimacy that was stolen from him, from us.
My brother Charles died last year. It hit me hard, because fear of his death was something that marked my life. But that death did not come until he was 81. He had a most remarkable passage through life. When I look back, there is sorrow for what was lost, and joy for what he claimed.
I don't have to fear for you any more, Charles. Rest in peace, dear brother.
It took me a long time to make the picture at the top of this blog. I wanted the image to reflect my feelings more than my thoughts. This picture does that.
Sources:
LMAC
Road by
LIL Gallery
Personal photo of a man running errands:
