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And it was determined that, while I was surely no genius, and was incapable of originality, I had a better than average mind. I was patient and orderly, and could sort out good ideas from heaps of balderdash.

I was the first child in the history of the school to take College Boards. I did so well that I was invited to come to Harvard. I accepted the invitation, although my voice had yet to change.

And I would now and then be reminded by my parents, who became very proud of me, that somewhere I had a twin sister who was little more than a human vegetable. She was in an expensive institution for people of her sort.

She was only a name.

• • •

Father was killed in an automobile accident during my first year in medical school. He had thought enough of me to name me an executor of his will.

And I was visited in Boston soon after that by a fat and shifty-eyed attorney named Norman Mushari, Jr. He told me what seemed at first to be a rambling and irrelevant story about a woman who had been locked away for many years against her will—in an institution for the feeble-minded.

She had hired him, he said, to sue her relatives and the institution for damages, to gain her release at once, and to recover all inheritances which had been wrongly withheld.

She had a name, which, of course, was Eliza Mellon Swain.

21

MOTHER WOULD SAY later of the hospital where we abandoned Eliza to Limbo: “It wasn’t a cheap hospital, you know. It cost two hundred dollars a day. And the doctors begged us to stay away, didn’t they, Wilbur?”

“I think so, Mother,” I said. And then I told the truth: “I forget.”

• • •

I was then not only a stupid Bobby Brown, but a conceited one. Though only a first-year medical student with the genitalia of an infant field mouse, I was the master of a great house on Beacon Hill. I was driven to and from school in a Jaguar—and I had already taken to dressing as I would dress when President of the United States, like a medical mountebank during the era of Chester Alan Arthur, say.

There was a party there nearly every night. I would customarily make an appearance of only a few minutes—smoking hashish in a meerschaum pipe, and wearing an emerald-green, watered-silk dressing gown.

A pretty girl came up to me at one of those parties, and she said to me, “You are so ugly, you’re the sexiest thing I ever saw.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, I know.”

• • •

Mother visited me a lot on Beacon Hill, where I had a special suite built just for her—and I visited her a lot in Turtle Bay. Yes, and reporters came to question us in both places after Norman Mushari, Jr., got Eliza out of the hospital.

It was a big story.

It was always a big story when multimillionaires mistreated their own relatives.

Hi ho.

• • •

It was embarrassing, and should have been, of course.

We had not seen Eliza yet, and had not been able to reach her by telephone. Meanwhile, though, she said justly insulting things about us almost every day in the press.

All we had to show reporters was a copy of a telegram we had sent to Eliza, in care of her lawyer, and Eliza’s reply to it.

Our telegram said:

“WE LOVE YOU. YOUR MOTHER AND YOUR BROTHER.”

Eliza’s telegram said this:

“I LOVE YOU TOO. ELIZA.”

• • •

Eliza would not allow herself to be photographed. She had her lawyer buy a confessional booth from a church which was being torn down. She sat inside it when she granted interviews for television.

And Mother and I watched those interviews in agony, holding hands.

And Eliza’s rowdy contralto had become so unfamiliar to us that we thought there might be an imposter in the booth, but it was Eliza all right.

I remember a television reporter asked her, “How did you spend your time in the hospital, Miss Swain?”

“Singing,” she said.

“Singing anything in particular?” he said.

“The same song—over and over again,” she said.

“What song was that?” he said.

“‘Some Day My Prince Will Come,’” she told him.

“And did you have some specific prince in mind—as your rescuer?” he said.

“My twin brother,” she said. “But he’s a swine, of course. He never came.