THE LOST BROTHER
I’d have known his handwriting at 50 paces. No one drove a pen like my father — the slant firm, the letters lean as fence posts. His Y plunged, his T flew like a banner. He wrote with the same forward rhythm that powered his landscape paintings. All through our house, they declared his uncompromising character. “I am Max Maynard,” said his brush. You had to live in our house to find the flourishes left with his pen, like clues to a mystery. They appeared on the flyleaf of Silent Spring, the lecture notes beside his bowl of oatmeal. Hs students’ blue books, if he got around to marking their exams.
His letters, for the most part, were a private matter. He composed the important ones at night, behind the closed door of his study, where he kept a Hellman’s jar on the shelf in case he had to pee and didn’t trust his aim in the bathroom.
On Christmas Eve, 1956, my father mailed a letter to his recently widowed sister-in-law. His brother Theodore had died in October; more than two months had passed since a telegram broke the news. My father didn’t know the full address of Mrs. Theodore Maynard. “Port Washington, Long Island, New York,” he’d written with his fountain pen, in blue ink somber as a banker’s suit. Yet the letter found its way to Theodore’s second wife Kathleen, and then down two generations to his granddaughter Rosemary. Nearly 65 years later, at my first Maynard family reunion, she placed it on my palm and said, as if she had been waiting for this moment, “I’d like you to have this.”
I had to read the letter on the spot, although it sent a shiver through me. My father never showed any gift for assuaging the grief of others. He struggled to contain his own. I never met my uncle Theodore, who lived far away when travel took forever and long-distance calls cost the earth. He died when I was seven. I’d known him only by the ache in my father’s voice when he spoke Theodore’s name.
Kathleen Maynard had torn the envelope open at the corner. Two months of silence, now the black sheep brother had finally arrived in her mail slot. I pictured my father, who held forth in complete paragraphs about art and life, searching for words about his brother. Of course he’d steeled himself with vodka. This I already knew for sure, although he’d somehow kept control of his pen. Richard Burton, in his cups, could orate flawlessly onstage. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that my father, drinking vodka from a hidden bottle, still formed his letters like an artist.
***
Max was the second-youngest of eight children born to Thomas Henry and Eliza Maynard, Plymouth Brethren missionaries. In a family photo taken circa 1905, he’s a winsome toddler in a dress with a ruffled collar bigger than a dinner plate. Theodore, 13 years his senior, wears a suit identical to his father’s and the superior half-smile of an oldest child accustomed to lording it over the youngsters. It’s no coincidence that his name means “gift of God.” Harry and Lily lost their firstborn in infancy.
My grandparents’ faith was a rod of iron. Although my father never said a word against them, he did say he’d lost his paint box for a year after being caught painting on a Sunday. He felt an early kinship with Theodore, who shared his artistic inclinations and questing spirit. Like Max, Theodore turned his back on the Plymouth Brethren — in the worst way Thomas Henry and Eliza could imagine. They detested Catholics, who in their eyes had sold out Jesus to the Pope. Theodore had the gall — or the moral courage, as Max must have seen it — to join the enemy. Said Eliza, “I’d rather see you dead.”
Theodore became a poet with a formidable literary network. His autobiography shows a wry wit and a flair for storytelling. If not for this book, I’d know nothing of my grandparents’ mission in southern India, where my father spent his early childhood. I had to press my father to admit he’d seen a tiger (the only tiger he cared to discuss was William Blake’s). So I seized upon this passage of Theodore’s: “Even when I was tucked between the sheets I could hear [tigers] prowling outside the window. One night when I was about five I was awakened by a tiger licking my hand…. My screams brought the family rushing in, and everybody assured me that I was quite mistaken; no tiger could possibly be there. I knew better; I had seen the tiger.”
As a chronicler of childhood, my uncle shone. On his conversion, he grew tiresome. The narrative includes a number of his poems, which dated quickly. My father, who taught English, was a reader of the highest standards. I remember him exclaiming at a poem by Sylvia Plath. Yet he still revered Theodore.
***
I pulled the letter from its six-cent airmail envelope, postmarked 11:30 a.m., almost time for lunch. Three sheets, folded in thirds, their edges perfectly aligned. My father would have parked at Newsky’s, the grocery store across from the post office. He might have dashed in for a can of soup (my mother took great pride in her own chicken soup and always kept a jar on hand but he had an odd affection for Campbell’s chicken noodle).
I stood with Rosemary in our hosts’ dining room, beside a table heaped with photos and family trees at various stages of completion. Almost everyone else was chilling at the pool with a drink and a communal tube of sunblock. I found my cousin’s presence both consoling and unsettling. The two of us are about the same age, and you don’t get to this point without taking your licks from sorrow. But we were meeting for perhaps the second time in our lives. In front of someone I barely knew, I was about to come undone.
I braced myself as I did in childhood — as we all did, never speaking the word “drunk” or “alcoholic.” How badly had Max Maynard blown it with his grieving sister-in-law?
***
“I don’t know what to say to you,” he begins, the “I” bleeding ink from the pressure of his pen. He then finds a great deal to say, all of it about his own regrets. First, missing the funeral. Our family had to move; the buyer of our old house would give us no quarter. “Please don’t think it was callous indifference that kept me here. Of all my family Theo was the one I most admired…and most loved.”
He recalls a charmed walk with Theo as a boy of eight or nine, “completely awed by my extraordinary older brother.” His heart swelled when Theo told him “that we two had a good deal in common.” Then the letter takes a bitter turn. He brings up a visit to Theo’s young family, before his marriage to my mother. He longed to feel part of their closeness and implies that Theo should have made it happen.
The letter already reads like an object lesson in how not write condolences. And my father is just getting started. After he became a family man, Theo and Kathleen made an ill-starred visit to my parents in New Hampshire. “An utter failure,” he writes to Kathleen. “And it was all my fault…. I now remember (and with deep sadness) how warm and friendly you both were and how negative, cold, stumbling and apathetic I was.”
Code for “drunk.”
He meant to write a letter of apology. Hoped Theo would extend an olive branch. They never met or wrote each other again. Now he begs Kathleen to forgive him. “Can you understand, Kathleen, that the legend of Theo made it difficult for me?”
I imagine myself in Kathleen’s position. Max has just beseeched her to get inside his guilt-ridden head. He urges her to share his desolation at Christmas (“carols over the radio, carols in the shops”). He begs her to visit us at the new house. The last place in the world she’d want to be.
My mother used to say that Theo’s death plunged my father into alcoholic gloom. The letter took me there. I grew up raging at my father’s violation of every social norm. Negative, cold, stumbling, apathetic. Hell, yes.
What I’d missed was the depth of his shame, his terror at being judged. His parents had warned him to prepare for the last trumpet, when the saved would rise up to sit at God’s right hand while the damned would burn forever. He thought he’d rejected all that, but still dreaded the judgment of those he’d offended. He tells Kathleen, of that disastrous visit to New Hampshire, “I suppose you went away thinking I had been deliberately repelling.”
A cudgel of a word to use of oneself.
***
Late afternoon sunlight streamed through the dining room window. Outside I heard action at the barbecue. A few minutes had passed, yet it seemed like 65 years. Rosemary was still beside me. “He was drunk,” I said, cringing a little at my vehemence. It wasn’t the best thing to say at a family party, but the Maynards have heard a lot worse.
The way my father saw it, he lost Theodore in his own living room. Drove his brother away, never to return. Yet here we were, a few dozen Maynards gathered for a long weekend’s merriment. Soon a country band would set up in the barn. Grownups would dance while kids blew bubbles. I couldn’t think of a more joyful place to be than where I was.
