Read Online My Mistake by Daniel Menaker - Free Book Online Page B

class. I ask him which his son is. “Tony,” he says. That would be Tony Dupee. Which means that the man thanking me is F. W. Dupee, one of the leading American Literature scholars in the world. So the compliment grows even more rewarding. Until I remember that it was Professor Dupee who wrote that Introduction. My mistake.
    â€œDon’t worry,” he says as I redden. “It was a really good class and your criticism made sense. Although I can’t help defending myself—that’s the trouble with academics. I
meant
the Introduction to be biographical, for those who were reading the book—and maybe James—for the first time.”
    Â 
    My brother Mike has graduated from law school at the University of Virginia. Law school has made him more studious and somber. He gets serious about the girlfriend who soon ends up his wife and never tells intimate stories about her. Well, maybe a little, at the start. He begins to criticize my immaturities, which are many, in a more sober way. When he’s hired by a fancy law firm in New York—Davis, Polk—courtesy of a UVA Law professor who took a liking to him and overlooked his just-shy-of-stellar grades, he finds the work overwhelmingly difficult and tells me glumly that he doesn’t think he will ever be made a partner there. He is starting to carry the weight of adulthood, in other words, and in doing so once again shows me the way. I don’t like the way and don’t follow it—I don’t want to have any part of this weightiness. I’m teaching at Collegiate and still want my summers off, my work hours limited, my personal life “free.” And I want Mike to be my brother as he has always been, when we were kids and teenagers and undergraduates. I want time to stop for us. I’m jealous of his relationship with his wife. I think I’m losing him, and in a way I am. This is Mike’s hardest fraternal task—putting a stop to my childhood. He succeeds, ultimately, but in a way so devastating to me and my family that I think the worst villain would not have willed it to happen.
    It’s Thanksgiving of 1967, and we’re playing touch football before dinner with some Grace cousins from Boston on the front lawn of the house in Nyack. It’s a pure fall day, with the Hudson all blue and white, the tree branches vascular-looking in their bareness, and the air as clean and clear as alcohol. Mike’s wife and my girlfriend are standing on the sidelines. Before the game starts, I try to tease him about something, and when he doesn’t respond, I grab him around the waist and try to wrestle him to the ground. He shakes me off and says, “Why don’t you grow up?” I’m embarrassed and angry.
    The game begins, with me and Mike against the Graces. Because he has bad knees and has already had surgery on one of them, Mike plays the more static lineman position and I play backfield. Still consciously smarting from his scolding, I finally say, “I’m tired. You play backfield for once.” My mistake. Mike says, “You know I can’t.” I say, “Your precious knees will be fine.” He says OK. On the very first play, he jumps to try to knock down a pass and comes down with one of his legs all twisted up. It buckles beneath him and he tears a knee ligament. He is furious, and his wife glares at me. I’m covered with remorse and apologize to them. Mike hobbles through the rest of the holiday and has surgery in the first week of December.
    On the day after the surgery, in Brooklyn, Carl Andrews walks into my classroom at Collegiate and tells me to call my parents at the hospital in Brooklyn where Mike was operated on. I go out of the classroom and dial, then stand there, next to the wall phone, listening to my mother try, without crying, to tell me that something has gone wrong. And that same dreadful feeling of cold and abandonment which descended on me in Grand