Short Century by David Burr Gerrard Read Free Book Online

Paul’s fist. I told her that if he ever hit her, I would kill him. To my surprise he backed off and Emily hugged me and thanked me, and I felt immensely proud of myself for having scared him off, though in fact I think that he scared himself off.
    After that, Paul started leaving us alone. I want to say that this was theresult of my having stood up to him, but it’s just as likely that he left us alone because he started having girls over, and he seemed to understand that girls wanted to see him treat his two younger siblings well. Emily would sometimes tell these girls that Paul was “mean”—she told one, using a word that was truly shocking coming from a little girl in the late nineteen-fifties, that he was “an asshole”—but the girls tended to think that Paul was a saintly older brother beset with a bratty little sister, and they rewarded him for this saintliness in the only way that saints want to be rewarded: with copious sex. Given the mores of the time the sex was probably mostly limited to handjobs, but there was no telling what those girls were sighing about behind Paul’s locked door. If it had occasionally occurred to me previously that I wanted to be Paul—as, after all, it probably had—the thought was there constantly now. If Paul was what girls wanted, then I wanted to be Paul.
    Of course I also hated myself for wanting to be like him.
    At Yale, he was very much a baseball star; in addition to being an astonishing hitter, he had become an astonishing outfielder, and he had plucked so many would-be-homerun balls out of their natural destiny that he had acquired the nickname of “The Interventionist.” He looked destined for a brilliant career in the major leagues.
    On my thirteenth birthday, he came to my room and told me, with a broad just-us-gentlemen smile, that he was sorry for treating me as he had, and that he hoped we could be friends. I told him that I would hate him until one of us died. This did not result in the beating I had steeled myself for; he just continued to smile, said he hoped I would change my mind, and left my room.
    I had never really thought of my room as my room until I asked Paul to leave it. Since he had left for college I had mostly felt indignant that I had to stay in my smaller room while he kept the bigger one, even though he was in New Haven most of the time. But now I thought: this is my room. My next thought was that I should shut my door to Emily. I was starting to get a little irritated by my little sister. She was only nine and was not going to understand The Stranger , and though I didn’t really understand it either, I longed to be left alone long enough to try. She was constantly coming in to tell me about something that had happened with her friends, or some new plotline she had made up for her dolls. It might be fair to say that I was outgrowing her.
    Then Paul took a turn. In the spring of his senior year at Yale, he announced that he was not going to pursue the career in baseball that a few teams were trying to tempt him toward, and that he was instead going to become a soldier. My father was not quite delighted—I think he had gotten used to the idea of cheering as his son stopped a home run—but nothing could shake my father’s faith that a soldier was a fine thing for a young man to be. I on the other hand couldn’t have been happier; I was going to be claiming the big bedroom while my brother shared a bunk bed.
    The first truly disturbing incident came in April. He had gotten into a fight with another boy at a bar, and apparently had somehow broken the kid’s left arm. The victim’s family wanted Paul expelled without a diploma, and since they were more or less exactly as wealthy as we were, my father was truly worried for a while, and his crutches thudded with less alacrity. But he used whatever magic he possessed to turn Paul into a Yale graduate.
    Expected to enlist shortly after