We Were Brothers (3 page)

TOMMY WAS DIAGNOSED
with amblyopia long before he started school. It is a common condition and causes more childhood blindness than all other causes combined. Tommy’s specific ailment was strabismic amblyopia. His left eye turned in toward his nose. When that happens the vision becomes blurry and the brain shuts down that eye. Simply put, Tommy didn’t see well. Nor did he do well in school. His bad eyesight predisposed him to being academically challenged, particularly when it came to reading. He had done so poorly in his first year in school that he was made to repeat the first grade at Eastdale Elementary School, which was about half a mile from our house up toward Hoyt Street. He repeated first grade, passed, and went on into the second grade.

When he finished the second grade, the local Board of Education redistricted the school system and Tommy had to change schools. His new school, Sunnyside Elementary, was a mile from our house in the opposite direction. But they did not accept his second-grade credentials from Eastdale Elementary, so he had to repeat the second grade, too.

This made him two years older than his classmates, which put him in an unavoidable and socially awkward position, one that invited ridicule. He hated being called “crosseyes.” Or “dummy.” Or “moron.” From that point on, Tommy was hypersensitive to failures, humiliations, slights, and hurts—both real and perceived. It didn’t help that our aunts, uncles, and Daddy were always kidding him about his little brother.

“Better watch out, Tommy. Barry’s gonna catch up with you one of these days. You better be careful.”

I never corrected them. Never took Tommy’s side.

One day Mother got a call from the principal, Mrs. Wright, a Virginian who pronounced
out
and
about
oddly. The semester had just begun. I would start school the next fall, so I was home with Mother when the call came. Tommy had been too embarrassed to ask for permission to go to the bathroom to do a “number two,” so he held it. And he held it. Until finally he couldn’t hold it any longer and just let it go. And he did. In his pants.

Tommy and Barry modeling football helmets for a newspaper article about the new plastic helmets that their daddy was selling, c. 1950

Mother borrowed a car from Velma, put me in the front seat (there were no laws against that in 1945, nor were there any such things as seat belts), and we drove to the school to get Tommy. He was standing out on the sidewalk with Mrs. Wright. He was crying. She was holding his hand. When he got in the backseat, Mother told him not to sit down because Velma had told her that she didn’t want any shit getting on her upholstery. So he stood up all the time. And all the time he kept whimpering, more or less in my ear,

“It’s just a itty bit, Mamma, it’s just a itty bit.”

WHEN I STARTED
SCHOOL
in the fall of 1946, I went to Sunnyside, too. I was there from the first grade through the sixth. I did not go to kindergarten as Tommy had.

Sunnyside’s main building was what, generously speaking, might be called Classic Revival, though not much of it was classic, except perhaps the odors associated with elementary schools of the time: glue, disinfectant, cafeteria, and the readily recognized, though hard to identify, odor of, well, elementary schools. It was a masonry building, with nine-over-one windows that peeled lead paint. The main structure was built during the 1920s or 1930s, and during the 1940s an addition was built to accommodate a new auditorium and a few new classrooms for the three lower grades.

I hated school just like Tommy did. It’s impossible to say who hated school more, but I hated it, shall I say,
ardently
—and that may be an understatement. Like my brother, I didn’t read well, though for different reasons. I was dyslexic. Or so I think I was, looking back. I was never diagnosed, even though the condition had been known since 1881. I’m not sure that
anybody
had been diagnosed with dyslexia in 1946 America. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was inept at memorizing poems or Bible verses. I had trouble conjugating verbs correctly, or reciting my times tables accurately, especially if I had to do it out loud. Both Tommy and I were utterly incompetent at playing the little red-and-white plastic recorder called a flutophone.

There were very few activities, curricular or extracurricular, that either of us liked—other than leaving school and going home.

Unless looking at
National Geographic
counts as an extracurricular activity. They were shelved, strangely enough, in the hallway outside Mrs. Wright’s office, and I sat on the floor, sometimes with a friend or two, looking at them. When we were lucky, we found pictures of brown-skinned women with naked breasts, which always prompted little-boy giggles of embarrassment and titilation.

I had my fair share of insults to my young self-esteem, the same as Tommy. In the classroom some of my classmates called me “idiot” and “imbecile” under their breath because of my inability to memorize state capitals and the parts of speech. On the playground I was called “fatso” and “lard ass” and “slowpoke,” because I was a fat kid and couldn’t run very fast.

I didn’t enjoy recess very much because I didn’t have many playground skills. I was always the last boy to be chosen for the softball team because I was slow and I couldn’t hit the ball. And I had absolutely no sense of strategy. I was at my best when pretending to be a horse for the girls. And for this I was called “mama’s boy” and “sissy.” They giddyapped me all over their side of the playground with imaginary reins and bits. I could swing and seesaw pretty well, too, especially when I was swinging and seesawing with the girls. It seems that I have always enjoyed the company of women over the company of men.

If the temperature outside dipped below forty degrees, we had to stay indoors at recess and after lunch when normally we would be outside playing. As I think on this now, having lived through forty-eight cold New England winters, I wonder if the forty-degree rule might have had something to do with the kids who lived in the Chandliss Home, an orphanage that was across the street from Sunnyside. Perhaps they didn’t have clothes that were warm enough to withstand even a moderate forty degrees.

SUNNYSIDE DIDN’T HAVE
an art room, so when we had our rare art lessons we worked at our everyday desks. I might have looked forward to school more had there been art or craft lessons every day—or even once a week—but there weren’t. Our curriculum was typical of the time—the three Rs, as our teachers called it: Readin’, Ritin’, and ’Rithmetic. Art and music were nonessential frills to the overall program, much like Bible lessons—though I am sure that our Bible lessons were considered far more important than our art lessons. This was the South, after all, where religion is like summer humidity (if you will allow a Faulknerian allusion)—you just can’t get away from it, as hard as you might try.

No matter what grade we were in, we used the same uninspiring materials in our art lessons: colored construction paper, scissors, glue, poster paints, cheap brushes, and crayons. Despite the mundane materials, this is where I was first told that I had a talent for drawing. I don’t really believe that I drew any better than any of the other kids, and I certainly did not draw better than Tommy. I just drew things that were more “realistic” than my classmates, and my teachers, thinking that a gift for verisimilitude was synonymous with artistic talent, patted me on the back. It was rare that I ever got academic pats on the back, so those occasional approbations felt good. And it’s worth mentioning that I was fortunate that I never had a teacher “correct” my drawings. No one ever told me that I had drawn something wrong—as if any child could ever draw anything wrong.

I may have been the last boy chosen to play a game of softball, but I was always the first kid chosen for a team when it came time to paint the Thanksgiving or Christmas mural, and that made me proud. The only thing that did. I don’t know if anything at Sunnyside ever made my big brother proud. If it did, he didn’t brag or go on about it, and that would not have been like him.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1949 OR 1950
Tommy and I had our first airplane rides. Our uncle Bob knew a man, Frank Earhardt, who owned a 1946 Piper Cub Sea Scout. Knowing our fascination with flying (mine especially), Bob, ever the salesman, talked his friend into taking us boys up for a spin. We had to go one at a time since the Sea Scout had only two tandem seats, one for the pilot and one for a passenger.

Tommy went first, as usual. They taxied away from the dock, picked up speed, and lifted off the water. It climbed, banked to the left, and was soon out of sight. I waited for what seemed a very long time for that little yellow plane to return so it would be my turn to go up. I don’t think ten minutes had passed when it touched down on Lake Chickamauga and taxied back into the Harrison Bay marina. When Bob and Daddy had it tied up to a cleat on the dock, Earhardt got out and helped Tommy out of the cockpit. He was smiling ear to ear and popped me playfully on the arm as he passed by me.

Then it was my turn.

We taxied out of the marina, took off to the west, and climbed up over the lake. It wasn’t a long ride—we probably turned back four or five miles out, somewhere over Booker T. Washington State Park more than likely—but it was a glorious experience for me.

Piper Cub Sea Scout, c. 1950

I SPENT COUNTLESS
HOURS
drawing airplanes, of which the Piper Sea Scout had become one of my favorites, along with my favorite warbirds—Corsairs, Spitfires, and Mustangs. I even equipped some of those with floats when it struck me to do so. I drew airplanes on everything I could lay hands on: stationery that Daddy or Uncle Bob brought home from their travels, wax paper from Mother’s kitchen cabinet, butcher paper from the grocery store, paper sacks, walls.

Occasionally Daddy brought home long pieces of brown Kraft paper they used at his sporting goods store to wrap parcels. Tommy and I each took one or two pieces and drew alone, or if Daddy brought home only one long sheet, we often spread it out on the living room floor and drew together.

The drawings were usually based on the radio programs we listened to, like
The Roy Rogers Show
,
The Lone Ranger
, and
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon
(who flew a Cessna 310 named
Songbird
and was accompanied by his malamute, Yukon King, and his niece, Penny King).

But this was in the aftermath of World War II and so we based many of our drawings on the newsreels we saw at the movies: Paramount News, Pathé News, the March of Time, and the many recurrent clips of victorious Allied battles in both theaters of the war.

Sometimes we based our drawings on the movies we saw:
Fighter Squadron
,
Battleground
,
Home of the Brave
,
Halls of Montezuma
,
The Desert Fox
, and John Wayne in the
Flying Leathernecks
. Of course, the sanitized film clips and the patently jingoistic movies gave us no sense of the true, horrific nature of war, so Tommy and I found it all very heroic and exciting, especially when the clips and movies involved aircraft and American victories.

We spread out the four- or five-foot piece of paper on the floor and lay down next to each other. Daddy sat in his favorite overstuffed chair, smoking his pipe and reading the evening paper, the
Chattanooga News-Free Press
.

Tommy, more often than not, was the Americans, and I was the Japs or the Krauts, unless I whined about it and he let me be the Americans. We drew our airplanes in flight. Bombers and fighters. Mine flying in this direction, his in that. We drew tanks and troops on the ground or ships and submarines at sea. We took turns opening our bomb-bay doors and dropping our bombs. We alternated turns opening fire from our fighter planes. All this was, of course, accompanied by the best sound effects we could muster.
Rata-tat-tat. KaBOOM! KaBOOM!

Machine gun bullets were indicated by dotted lines that rarely went straight. We bent the trajectory at will in order to hit our targets. A drawing like this could take half an hour or better, and by the time Mother called us to the table for dinner, the entire surface was usually scribbled on and punctured all over where the crayons and pencils had torn through the paper in overly enthusiastic explosions.

Tommy always drew better than I did. That he was three years older than I was certainly a factor—though I think that his natural meticulousness had as much to do with it as anything.

When Tommy drew bombers he included details like insignias, machine guns and machine gun turrets, serial numbers, trim tabs, pitot tubes, antennae, and radio wires. And if his drawing was large enough, he drew in the flight crew. When his airplanes opened their bomb-bay doors, the bombs fell away in straight, evenly spaced, perfectly vertical files. Neat and orderly, his natural proclivity that would serve him well when, a few years later, he would attend a military school. I envied him and did my best to emulate his detailed and orderly drawings. I couldn’t do it. My planes were drawn sloppily and disproportionately. My bombs fell away from my bombers in cluttered, backward-sweeping, ragged arcs rather than neatly spaced vertical rows like his. My bombs fell in graduated stages from the horizontal as they departed the belly of the plane to the vertical when they struck their targets—which, actually, is the way such bombs behaved. The best part of my drawings were the scrawls I made when my bombs struck their targets. But in trying to draw like he did, I think my skills improved, even at that age, like a tennis player who plays best against a better player. That meticulousness stayed with Tommy all his life. As an adult he spent hours polishing his shoes, cleaning his guns, and trimming his hair. Every Sunday he ironed fifteen shirts. Five for him and five each for his boys. His son Tyson told me that his Daddy put so much starch in their jeans before he ironed them that they could stand up all on their own. Nothing in Tommy’s world was ever cluttered or messy—even the clothes in his closet were organized by kind and color, his shoes orderly on the floor—quite the opposite of his younger brother, then or now, whose closets are more like Fibber McGee’s.

Our drawings were done when Mother called us to dinner,

“Tommy. Barry. Ches. Y’all come on in and sit down and eat now.”

TOMMY’S DRAWINGS WERE
informed by his methodical and military wont and sense of order, precision, control, and regularity—a perfectly valid point of view from which to work, and a sensibility that served him well in his life in the world of finance and real estate. Had Tommy gone on to become an artist I imagine him in the camp of Josef Albers or Frank Stella in the sixties, or perhaps one of the hyperrealists like Richard Estes or Richard Haden.

My drawings, on the other hand, were informed—or so it would seem—by logic, spontaneity, and observation, which is an equally valid point of view from which to work.

THERE WAS ONE
DRAWING
I remember doing all by myself lying there on Mother’s Karastan rug. I don’t know where Tommy was that afternoon, but I had this big piece of Kraft paper all to myself. Daddy was smoking his pipe and reading his evening paper as usual. Mother was fixing dinner in the kitchen. This was four or five years after August 5, 1945, and I was trying to draw a Boeing B-29 Superfortress as accurately as my ten-year-old skills allowed. I had seen a B-29 in a newsreel (probably the
Enola Gay
or the
Bockscar
since it was carrying an atomic bomb) and was struck by the rounded, heavily glazed nose assembly. I was drawing it as large as I could and imitating as well as I could my brother’s use of insignias and other details. I drew the bomb-bay doors opening accompanied by a loud “skreeeeeak” that I thought might come from the metal-against-metal noise bomb-bay doors might make as they opened and locked into position.

Below the open bomb-bay doors, I drew one very large bomb. It was nearly half the size of the B-29 itself and was falling parallel to the fuselage, just like Tommy’s bombs did.

On the side of this big bomb I wrote “A-TOMMY” in big letters because I thought it was named after my big brother.