By Jeffrey Page
Where do I start this? Probably with the fact that the man I knew as my brother, 16 years older than I, was really my half-brother. I only learned this when I was about 18. Some families keep their secrets well, even from their own members.

I remember a sweet Sunday morning in Queens. My father was playing the piano and my mother was reading The Times. I think they knew it was the day he was coming home from the war. All at once there was a thud in the corridor outside our apartment and a knock on the door. My mother flew across the room. My father stopped playing. The door swung open and there he was, the man I didn’t know, because I was about 2 years old when he was drafted. My mother screamed and cried and clung to him. My father smiled. I did not smile because all this attention usually was heaped on me.

The age difference explains some things. When I was 5, and he 21 and the war over, he wasn’t much interested in the babysitting chores imposed by my parents. Thus did he toss me into a bedroom closet and inform me that he wouldn’t let me out unless I promised to be good. I promised, and I carry a fear of dark confined places to this day.

And it probably explains why, when I was about 7 and had the measles, I touched a wooden tongue depressor on an electric hot-plate to see what would happen. It ignited. I panicked. What to do with the burning wood? I tossed under his bed, not my bed, and they had to take it outside as smoke billowed from it.

As I made my desultory way through grammar school, I grew impatient with him though it was not his fault. Always with lousy report cards would I get the word meant to soothe from my mother: “Gerry always did better in school because he wasn’t distracted by television and because he liked to read.” She identified us as “the smart one” and “the nice one.”

I grew up knowing beyond question that he was her favorite. Not that my mother didn’t love me. But if she loved me a million, she loved him 1,000,001.

But with all that and despite the adult-child age difference, he was my terrific big brother. When an older kid bloodied my nose, my brother spoke to the boy’s father, suggesting he would “wipe the streets” with his son – who never bothered me again. He took me to the beach, just the two of us. Me and my big brother. He informed me at an early age that we were a family of Brooklyn Dodger fans. He made me best man at his wedding when I was 14. Once, he bought me a boxcar for my electric trains; push a button and the door opened, and a little man came out to wave a lantern. He taught me how to play chess and gin rummy and never threw a game to me with an obviously stupid move. He taught me some magic tricks. He taught me some of the songs of the Spanish Civil War. He taught me to love classical music, Mozart and Handel specifically. When our cousin rode in the opening procession of the Madison Square Garden rodeo and gave us free passes, my brother took me – except in the years he got home too late the night before.

He kept his secrets. Of course I knew he had been in the Army during the war but it was only a few years ago I learned that he was in the Battle of the Bulge, that he was the medic who drove George S. Patton to the hospital after the general suffered fatal head injuries in an accident, that he liked the army and had thought about making a career of it, that he wanted to marry an English girl – a romance my mother managed to dismantle without leaving New York.

He moved to California about 25 years ago and I saw little of him, maybe once a year when I would go west to visit him and my mother, who was living close by. We managed to maintain a relationship on the phone and in the mail. He wrote short, witty letters and preferred typing on paper over email. He sent old family photographs. Not long ago, I opened a package and found a cigarette case he had bought for my father near the end of the war.

His second wife’s daughter called two years ago to say he had been rushed to the hospital with severe respiratory problems. He survived. She called again last week to say he was gone.

He was not in good health. Yet he kept smoking right to the end, and didn’t carry the bottle of oxygen he was supposed to have with him at all times. He did things his way. When my daughter asked me this week how I was doing, I was about to say I was OK but realized that would have been a lie.

I wish that we had time to talk some more, that we had another cup of espresso together, that he could have enjoyed one more cigarette, that we could have listened to the G Minor Symphonies together one more time.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

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