The Portrait

continued

Daddy was devastated by his mother's death. Retracing my journey in those early years, I see my parents coping with their own physical and emotional crises. I see my brother, Donn, born in November 1929, just after the stock market crash. Of financial hardship I was too young to be conscious. But I was very aware that an all-eclipsing newcomer now dominated my small world.

The Loner

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav'n espy.
George Herbert

If Donn really did get more attention as we grew up, it was simply that the culture of the time placed more importance on boys. My childhood struggles were the common ones of any era – an older child feeling supplanted, one sibling believing another the favorite – which children handle in their various ways.

Mine was to live behind an imaginary door. The bolt was on the inside, to be opened, if at all, to one person at a time. To be one-of-a-group held a nameless terror. Paradoxically, perhaps, I was also a leader -- president of the high school drama club, chairman of the war bond drive, editor of the school magazine. Leadership provided a kind of separation.

To maintain my status-apart within the classroom, I carried on for fourteen years a secret competition. This race with only one runner seems so sad to me today that I can hardly bear to look back at it. It began in the third grade, the first one in which test scores were given. If I got the best marks in the class, I would retain my isolation!

From age eight through my last college class at age twenty-two, I ran this self-imposed marathon, no matter how unappealing the terrain. I hated dissecting frogs, I loved reading. But driven by demons I didn’t understand, I needed to be best in every subject. On the first day of school I'd appraise my classmates, as kids unerringly do. If there was a "competitor," unaware though he or she was, I'd throw myself into such stupefyingly dull tasks as memorizing chemical tables.

In those war years, students who did well in math were offered scholarships by technology schools. I remember telling a bewildered recruiter, "But I hate math!" Those who run in an earthly race, said St. Paul, do it to receive a prize that withers away. To run a phantom race for a prize I didn't want … this is the journey without road signs.