Blue Genes
Authors: Christopher Lukas
Blue Genes
CONTENTS
For Susan,
without whom I would not be living
’Round and ’round she goes . . .
Where she stops nobody knows.
—
CARNIVAL PITCHMAN’S DITTY
Why are you so obsessed with death?
—
J. ANTHONY TO HIS BROTHER, CHRISTOPHER, SUMMER OF
1996
I’m not. I’m obsessed with living.
—
CHRISTOPHER’S REPLY
ON A LUSH MAY AFTERNOON IN
1940, my seven-year-old brother, Tony, and two of his pals from the second grade at the one-room schoolhouse down the road were playing one-o-cat baseball in our front yard. “Yard” is not quite accurate. The elegant, ten-room Revolutionary-era house in which my parents, my brother, and I lived for a few years in the late 1930s and early ’40s was on seven acres of land. A small lake had been dug in the back of the house; rosebushes lined the south end of the property; and a small wooded area led, by a winding path, to a private school some miles away—a school to which my family hoped we would eventually go.
In short, we were upper-middle-class. Four white people, served by a “colored” staff of two, in prewar Westchester County, New York: privileged, select, unaware of the national, international, and personal doom that would soon descend upon us.
The stretch of greensward in front of our house was big enough for three young boys to debate the rules and practices of a game they had only recently learned, to ignore and place on the sidelines Tony’s five-year-old brother—myself—and still leave room for batting, running, and catching.
The game was full of the sounds of boyhood play.
“You’re out.” “I’m not.” “You didn’t touch me.” “I don’t have to.” “That was out by a mile.”
I could clearly see that the game would be more enjoyable if they invited me to play. More pleasurable for them (another out-fielder) and more fun for me. But in Tony’s view, I was too young to pitch, field, or bat. I was an outsider, not an outfielder. I was his awkward brother.
To me, none of that mattered. What I cared about was being
left out
. And, having asked politely several times to be included—and having been rudely denied—I decided to grab the means of production, the baseball bat, and see what transpired.
What happened not only says a lot about how Tony would approach the world in the next fifty-five years—as he sought and secured for himself jobs on major American newspapers, won two Pulitzer prizes, and wrote five important books—but also would establish the nature of our fractious relationship, a hands-off, hands-on kind of brotherhood that, in the end, was worlds away from the type of bond we wished to have. Fate got in the way.
While Tony and his friends debated a point of baseball arcana, I hid the bat behind my back, its knobby end showing clearly above my head.
Tony asked me to give it back.
No, more accurately, he demanded I give it back. By now, not sure of my position, as the three seven-year-olds began to advance on me, I grabbed that knobby end and began to spin the bat around my head.
“If you don’t stop, I’ll hit you,” I declared, not exactly sure how I’d achieve that goal, but sure that giving in now would decide my fate for the rest of the afternoon.
The others stopped, but Tony continued toward me.
“Give me the bat, Kit.”
“Not unless I can play.”
“You’re too young.”
“I’m not. If you come any closer, I’ll let go.”
Tony was not frightened by my threat. In the years that followed, he would never be frightened by anyone’s threats. He saw a frontal attack as the best course of action.
He advanced. I swung. How I aimed, I don’t know, but the bat went straight to his temple and knocked him to the ground.
The other boys flew to their homes.
I ran into the house, sure that I had killed my brother.
Blue Genes
SOME PEOPLE ARE DISTURBED MOST
by events that are unexpected.
For me, it has always been the half-awaited ones that carry the blow: the semiconscious fears that lurk behind closed eyes, the half-dropped pair of shoes, the what-ifs.
JUNE 5, 1997, 11:00 P.M.
Susan and I return home from a party. In an unusual show of activity, our answering machine has had eleven hang-ups and one message—from Linda, my sister-in-law.
“Christopher,” she says, “can you call me, please.”
Usually, no one calls me Christopher except strangers, but maybe Linda is echoing my brother, who sometimes calls me by my full name as a joke.
I make a mental note to call her tomorrow; it’s too late tonight. I figure that she’s probably planning a publication party for Tony, who has just finished his latest book, nine years in the writing.
The book before this one—
Common Ground
—resulted in his second Pulitzer Prize and dozens of other awards. One reporter called my brother “the best journalist of our generation.” Another said he was “the patron saint of contemporary reporters.” He has won numerous accolades for his reporting for the
New York Times
, has received honorary degrees for his deep analysis of crucial episodes in recent American history, and has been wined and dined by literati and academics alike. He is, in short, one of those remarkable men whose work received enormous respect and attention.
But Tony is not sure that the new book, a huge volume called
Big Trouble
, is up to his previous works. It’s due out in a month or so, and we’ll all have to wait.
While I’m at the closet, taking off my shoes, the phone rings again. Susan is near and she answers.
“Hello.” A pause. “How?” Her voice is electric, alarmed. I recognize a disaster in the making.
I come around the corner of the closet, a shoe in one hand, the other still on my foot.
She looks at me, the phone to her ear, shaking her head, a look of terror on her face.
“What is it?” I ask, already feeling the pain begin.
“Tony killed himself,” she says.
I scream and throw the undropped shoe at the far wall.
MOST BROTHERS HAVE SIBLING-RIVALRY PROBLEMS
, interrupted by close bonding, but Tony and I always seemed to have great difficulty in finding common ground. The history of our family is partly responsible, a history full of self-destructive events.
In the wake of a family suicide, there is sorrow, guilt, despair—and anger. My reaction to my brother’s death was no different; in fact, because of the difficult relationship we had had, it may have been worse.
During the first months after Tony’s death, I viewed my life with him through the prism of anger. Why did he do this to me and to his family? If there had been good times in our years together, I didn’t allow myself to remember them.
But gradually the truth seeped in: there was a whole store of other memories that I was hiding. I needed to make an effort to dredge up those experiences—the ones that had provided pleasure and comfort. To put a picture of our relationship in some kind of balance, if I could.
So, what would happen if I stopped thinking about all the rage I had for the way Tony had died and for the slights I had felt? What might occur if I recalled how much we had shared, what burdens we had lifted together, how we had supported each other? What then? I began writing about my family two weeks after my brother’s death. At first, I could put down only a few thoughts about
him
, mostly about my anger and sorrow, but as the weeks and months went by, memories came—long-ago events that had been forgotten. Time passed; I would come back to the computer, put down new recollections. About us. About our relationship. I found memories of other family members, of the distant past, of things I thought had been obliterated forever. The mind is tricky: it brings back even the most distant feelings and events just when you think they have left you alone, left you in peace.
Today, more than a decade after Tony’s death, I am still writing. But my idea of who my family and my brother were has changed over these years. The perception of who I was—and who I
am
—has also changed. So I keep writing. Trying to get it right.
A week after the suicide, when Susan, our daughters, Megan and Gabriela, and I attended a memorial gathering, Linda gave me a copy of
Big Trouble
, fresh off the presses. I turned the first few pages. In the dedication Tony had written, “To Christopher William Lukas. My brother, my friend.”
That was an extraordinarily moving moment. I turned from the group around me and shielded my eyes, in tears. I had not had the slightest inkling Tony was dedicating the book to me. Nor could I have guessed that he would add “friend” to such a line. We were brothers—no doubt. But when all was said and done, were we really friends?
I decided I would start from there, from that emotional moment when it occurred to me that he really did care about me, that all the battles and absences and slights did not, in the end, seem to be as important as the fact that we were brothers—and friends. He had thought about me when he wrote that dedication. And perhaps he had thought about me even as he ended his own life.
CONFLATING THE PRESENT
with the past is an old theme of philosophers. The idea of all chairs, said the philosopher William James, is present in the image of any particular chair. So any particular friend’s essence is distilled by all the friends one has had.
And so it is with brothers. They are never what they appear to be to others, or even to oneself. Tony is a combination of past and present, of what he was and how I see him today.
But that is true of me as well. I am not merely the bald head in the mirror, the tired knees, and the naps in the afternoon. I am the sixteen-year-old with an enormous appetite, the twenty-two-year-old having his first real love affair, the thirty-three-year-old looking down at his first child.
Sister to sister, brother to brother, siblings can never be 100 percent fair about love and parental sharing and other sharp facets of the bright and painful lives they have together—even when much of that time is spent apart, even when they can communicate well and take the burdens of their relationship with good grace. I could not pretend that my brother and I were pals. Friends, perhaps, but not buddies.
Tony and I are brothers across the stroboscopic echoes of the past: dissolving across black interludes into the next image, and the next, and the next, until all vestige of pure vision is destroyed. All that is left is memory, and we know how faulty that can be. Who Tony was is forever blurred by who
I
was and how I remember who I thought Tony was. Yes, we are brothers in fact, in memory, and in wish, but he is dead, and I am alive—left to dwell on the questions, and to seek the answers.
There were questions of great importance to me: Would I, too, end up killing myself? Was the legacy of self-destruction I would discover in my family too great for me to survive? If so, when would the pendulum swing? And if it never did, why not? How could I—almost alone among my family—escape?
To answer these questions, I needed to go back and delve more deeply into my family and explore my relationship with Tony.
This is a story of two brothers in a
particular
family at a
particular
time in the history of that family. If the tale often appears to be as much about my parents and grandparents—and
my
emotions,
my
life, and
my
memories—as it is about my brother, it is because it is very much a story about relationships. The relationship my father had with my mother, the relationship of my mother to her parents. Mine with Tony, Tony’s with those other people.
Beyond that, it is also a book about coming to terms with the suicide of a brother—an event I had written about previously when it happened to
other people
, but never before experienced for myself.
THE LETTERS
, autobiographies, and other written notes have lain for decades in cubbyholes in an old rolltop desk that Susan and I bought on a trip to my uncle Ira’s house near Philadelphia. The desk cost $40. At the time, I thought it was too much money to pay for an “old piece of furniture,” but as usual Susan was right: you can always use a schoolmaster’s rolltop.
Today, I love that desk. This is where the detritus of our lives lies. With nineteenth-century wisdom, its makers built it with myriad slots in which to stow important pieces of their complex lives. Into those compartments I have put the passports used for various family trips—their photographs attesting to the passage of time, change of hairstyles, even emotional states. I see Susan in early years, with downcast aspect, her hair tightly wrapped around her slender head, a strained smile on her face. I see her later, lovely brown tresses surrounding a confident, smiling countenance. And later still, the strands and flecks of gray shining in the sunlight of a photo I took myself. My own visages: young and shaven, a boy on the go; leather shirt from the 1960s; sideburns in the 1970s; finally, balding pate—“aging criminal on the go,” the family said, jokingly.
Here in this desk went the birth certificates of our daughters, Megan and Gabriela, audiotapes of graduations and memorial services. Old keys. Legal documents. Currency from trips abroad. Broken pens. Broken promises.
It is through that desk, and from long-hidden events, that my memory is awakened. I take comfort that I can substantiate there the fact that Tony was not just a brother worth thinking about and arguing over on a personal basis but a complex, world-class character whose contributions to journalism and to his friends were valuable and whose death by his own hand is made all the more heartbreaking because it was not preordained.
Or was it?
What do I really know about the past? What do any of us know? Who were these characters? What led up to the deaths in my family? In truth, I was woefully ignorant—and, to be honest, fearful of finding out.