A REALIZATION

My brother's death -- which was two years ago and no one told me about -- has become mixed with the coronavirus, which is just about as sudden and unpredictable.  And ambiguous.  He died of COPD and pneumonia, which is very similar to death from Covid-19.  I mean, it seems to me that Mark's life was in percentages, mostly just normal and recoverable, somewhat uncomfortable and unresolvable, and -- to a small percentage -- somehow already dead.

Mark was the "normal" one of we three kids.  He wasn't as red-headed as Paul and I and he cared about money, though he never went for the kind of jobs that paid well.  He liked the same things I liked, the humanities of words and presentation, and had the same abilities.  My mother thought of him as her primogeniture-entitled inheritor and designated him her executor.  He took the job seriously and did it well.  

Two little vignettes struck me.  He asked formally whether I minded if he took the pen I had originally given our mother decades earlier as a Christmas present, a moderately expensive white Schaeffer pen.  He said with glistening eyes, "because she held it in her hand."  Of course I didn't mind!  That was before ballpoints and before keyboards, which is how I've written everything for years.  The other item was her down comforter, which he hid so I wouldn't ask for it because he wanted it so much.  I would not have asked for it.  I had a much loved imitation-down comforter that could be washed.

The image I got for my mother's special sheltering of him was that of a big bird, like our pet eagle, making a tent with her wings over him.  That's not quite right because the eagle was protecting food.  But she had the strange conviction that somehow because I did well in school, esp once I discovered dramatics, that I was preventing him from being the kind of achiever she thought he could be.  Both boys believed that and went to the Polytechnic high school to avoid me.  Mark did well in debate and on the school's radio station.  It's true that teachers judge younger siblings by the qualities of the oldest.  I was careful, if unconsciously, of not being first rate, always the B+, but I did well on tests.

My mother's generation believed that females are there to serve and protect males.  Not much she could do for my father, with the exception of one year when his ag supply cooperative was selling wax and she became a demonstrator of how to make "glo-candles" from it.  Otherwise, until she went back to college and finished her degree, the house and we kids were her work.  With a little smuggled bookkeeping for friends and some defiant crop picking of berries, which lots of kids did.  Once things got so tight that she went to work at the cannery for a month.

Mark made his money with a paper route which he did on his bike except that if my father were home and it was raining hard, he'd drive him.  I don't remember my mother doing it.  Mark paid for a bedside phone so the newspaper could call him if the papers were late so he could sleep a little longer.  He cashed his checks and maybe that was the source of his bank bags of pennies, which he scrutinized one-by-one for value.  I don't remember him ever finding one worth anything but he had pounds and pounds of them hidden in the back of the clothes closet.

When he went to the University of Oregon on his GI Bill, he accumulated enough credit-hours for several degrees because he changed majors, but never really finished the last classes for any of them.  In the end he got a BA, but it was not the sort of thing that led into a preordained job, like teaching.  Maybe he didn't want school to end, but he never pursued a higher degree.  His most long term job was as a librarian, but not the kind with specialty certification, just routine book-handling like we did at our book fortress home.  That's when he married the woman who is now his widow.  She is a bit older and had been married before, still had a boy at home.  By that time I was on the wind, divorced, broke, working hard, living lean.  I didn't go to the wedding.

Mark smoked heavily and when he was patching up the house that was our mother's bequest and handling the sales, he seemed to me alcoholic.  Over the years I've tried to understand what it was that weighed him down.  It seemed to affect Paul as well, but not so much.  None of us really wanted to grow up.

In the years after WWII our neighborhood in Portland, roughly at NE 15th Av near Alberta, had several low-cost apartment buildings -- not tenements but two-up and two-down with wide porches and one even cheaper basement apartment.  Rough boys with mothers trying to recover from the loss of their husbands and to earn enough money to survive, ran loose, out of control.  Later, after the Vanport flood when the Black workers that Kaiser had brought in as shipyard labor had lost their housing and the original germ of Portland State College and had moved into N and NE Portland, the area was full of gangs, shooting in the night, robbing, dealing drugs.  But right after the war it was "white trash", in a semi-similar way brought in from the agricultural life that used to prevail for low income, poorly educated people.

On the other side of the house just north of us was a duplex, upstairs/

downstairs.  An older widow, Mrs. Donovan, lived downstairs and for a while family friends lived upstairs until they moved up socioeconomically and bought a house.  For a while the upstairs was empty and unlocked.  The boys went in there.  They put up a pup tent in the backyard.  "Donnie," as we called her, seems to have been gone then, visiting or sick.  Mark was a preschooler.  The boys pulled him into their "club" in the tent but he didn't seem to like it.  They were dirty, teasing, tormenting boys, the kind that have become today's Republican legislators, I say with prejudice and contempt.  The kind who are defiantly drunk during a pandemic.

About this time my mother enclosed Mark in her protective way and he withdrew from Paul and I.  "Donnie" had a special care for Mark and gave him a fine copy of Steinbeck's "The Red Pony."  A few years later he caught rheumatic fever and I slept on the sofa downstairs while he was quarantined.  That's when I sat up all one night, reading "The Biography of a Grizzly." I must have been nine, so he would have been seven.  For a while my mother worried about him having a heart murmur, but he "lettered" in high school wrestling and served honorably in the Marines.  My mother always thought of him as fragile.

Today I have an idea about the mystery, given what we have all learned about children who are molested -- one third of girls and one fifth of boys.  I think that's what happened in the pup tent behind Donnie's house.  It explains the rage, the suppression, the failure to complete, the evasion and secrecy.  The prissy rigidity.  Part of a little boy died in that pup tent.