Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [50]
As we grew up, Paul was always more popular and social than I. He kept count of his friends and could tell the number he had down to the person. He would occasionally brag that he had eleven or eighteen or twenty-three friends. He wrote down their names. He spent his time with them, playing, and later carousing, and was usually away most of the day from whatever house or apartment we were living in. He went out for sports teams and had girlfriends.
Paul still has this sociability. He has a network of friends, at church, at work and even back in New Jersey, where he returns for occasional reunions. I’ve envied this about him. He has always been good at building relationships, doing people favors—coming through when necessary by pitching in on a friend’s backyard project, fixing a neighbor’s oil furnace or volunteering to help someone at work get his boat in the water. He has put on more than a few clambakes for retirement parties and wedding receptions. This web of relationships showed in the construction of the cabin—he had access to tools, equipment and help when we needed them. Friendship is important to him. I on the other hand have lived a rich inner life, but it has been a self-absorbed life. Paul isn’t reflective in the same way. He puts his thinking to work on solving practical problems—how to renovate the church’s parish house kitchen or help a neighbor start his car. He cooked a big meal nearly every Sunday for his kids and their friends. On holidays and birthdays, he let each of the eight children pick their favorite foods for him to prepare.
It was in part this sociability—his ease with people and a straightforward engagement with the world and its simple pleasures—that brought him closer to our stepfather, Johnny. I had only one or two spasms of resentment about his relationship to Johnny.
The most powerful episode happened when I was about twelve. We were still living in New Brunswick, our urban interruption between episodes of life in the country, and Johnny was staying with us even though he and my mother had not yet married. I was playing catch with Johnny when a boy who lived in the same apartment complex joined in. His name was Freddy De Leo, and he was a terrific baseball player. He was maybe thirteen, athletic and a little cruel in the way he threw the ball at you, and you had the sense he was destined for the major leagues. Soon Johnny was throwing him more balls than he was throwing me and complimenting Freddy on his arm. Eventually I was getting no balls thrown to me. I held back my tears until I reached the inside of our first-floor apartment. My mother saw me crying and asked me why. I told her. She ordered me to stop. It was unmanly, she said. That was the word she used: “unmanly.” Now I felt inadequate in the eyes of both my mother and Johnny, and I blamed Paul—maybe because I knew he would not have cried. Even then I understood he was stronger in that way. For about an hour I wanted to hurt him, and I concocted plans, but then the urge passed with a powerful feeling of guilt.
These episodes were few, and they eventually stopped altogether even though it was clear Paul held a special position with Johnny. Paul was more of a man’s boy—tough, with an attitude, barely skirting trouble, sometimes inviting it. On the other hand, I was quiet and often alone, wanting to be reading or wandering in the woods or fishing, and I would do things Johnny could not comprehend, like asking for a typewriter for Christmas. At moments, I think Johnny, a big strong man whom Paul and I both loved, thought I might be gay. I remember the time, after we had moved down to the shore, that a new neighbor of ours, a former schoolteacher from out of town, suggested that I apply for a scholarship to spend my final two years of high school at a fancy prep school in