"I have no memory of being a child," Richard says looking around the room, which is stuffed with the memorabilia of a boy's life.
"You were serious."
"And what were you — not serious?"
"I was a builder, always making things with balsa wood."
"That's what I remember — the smell of airplane glue. Did we have toys?"
"I think you had a cash register… a red Tom Thumb."
His brother goes to the linen closet for sheets, towels, and a pillow. There's something about his brother carrying the bedding that is so sweet, domesticated, not what you'd expect the great inventor to be doing.
"That's funny. I think I remember carrying around a red metal cash box like it was my friend, but I'm never sure if what I'm remembering was real," Richard says.
"You loved money; nothing made you feel better than to have money in your pocket."
"I have no memory of that," Richard says.
"You were a very good salesman. You went up and down the street, door to door, selling seeds you ordered from the back of a comic book. You even managed to sell seeds to people who didn't have gardens; that impressed everyone."
"They must have felt sorry for me."
"You made Dad take you to the bank to open your own account. And you used the points you got from selling seeds to get 'prizes,' and then you sold the prizes — don't you remember you got me my microscope?"
"Vaguely. Did the microscope work?"
"It worked great. We stabbed our fingers to get blood and we made slides…"
"It's all a little blurry."
"You were man about town until someone with no teeth asked, 'Do you sharpen knives?' and you got scared and quit. That, and Dad hated you going door to door."
"He thought I was begging."
"He called you a peddler. And then we had a newspaper route and we were jealous of the guy who had the New York Times route and got to go around collecting money and giving people little yellow receipts. We rolled our papers with advertisements, tied them with a rubber band, and then went building to building and left them on everyone's door."
"Why do I not remember this?"
Ted shrugs. "You were always forgetful; it was like you could only hold so much information and then you'd short-circuit."
"And Dad — what was he like?"
"He wasn't like much — tried not to stand out, that was his goal, to not be noticed. He used to tell us that, whatever we did, we should be careful not to attract attention."
"Now that you're telling me, it sounds sort of familiar. What else did we do?"
"We sat outside, watching people. I made things. You counted your money."
"What do you mean?"
"Literally, if you had a pile of pennies, you counted them, put them in order, and wrote down how much."
"How old was I?"
"Maybe nine? That was your idea of fun. Other kids played with marbles or soldiers, and you played with loose change, arranging your pennies, nickels, and dimes into brigades, and moving them across the Oriental rug as part of some kind of war game where quarters could take over, some sort of strategy for winning all the money. I never really understood the rules."
"And what did you do?"
"Marbles. I liked playing on that rug also. It used to drive Mom crazy, the two of us in the living room. She used to make you wash your coins with soap and water because she didn't want you to get her carpet dirty."
"She kept the furniture wrapped in plastic — a blue sofa wrapped in clear plastic, and when it rained, she'd unroll a long plastic pebbly runner that we had to walk on."
"She was very proud of her living room. She was going to take it to Florida, but when someone finally sat on the sofa, the silk cracked — too many years under plastic, and somehow it got brittle. Do you remember cutting off my finger?"
"I didn't cut off your finger. I had a saw from a children's toolbox, and I asked you to hold something while I cut it. I missed, and a little piece of your finger came off."
"I had to get stitches."
"It wasn't a real saw anyway."
"Yeah, but it was a real finger." The brother holds up his hand, and, sure enough, his third finger is a little shorter than it otherwise might have been.
"I said I was sorry about a thousand times. I practically had a breakdown over the guilt. I can't believe you're bringing it up again now."
"I haven't seen you in a long time."
"Would it be better if I went to a hotel?"
"I'm half teasing — it's good you're here. See you in the morning."
RICHARD lies back on the bed. The room is spilling with stuff: books, a baseball glove with a ball packed into the center, pennants, prizes, model cars, flying birds dangling from the ceiling. A reading light shines through the Visible Man, an anatomical model that stands, arms spread, legs spread, offering up the meaty red view of the stuff of man, organs and arteries in a clear plastic shell.
He lies on his nephew's bed trying to remember his own life as a boy. What did he think about? Baseball, bomb shelters, air raids, the end of the world. He lies back feeling a peculiar hollow. If he called his brother's name, Theodore, Ted, Teddy, Thermador, his brother would likely come back down the hall, sit at the edge of his bed, and talk to him. The brother would be like a father, because the brother is a father and he knows how to do that. And at some point his wife, Meredith, would tap on the door and ask if everything was all right, and it would all be deeply embarrassing.
He lies back, looking at the ceiling — the sticky remains of a galaxy of glow in the dark stars.
IN THE MORNING, the house smells of toast and coffee. He dresses as though he's got a meeting to get to. Truth is, he can't imagine spending the day sitting alone in his brother's house, a passive prisoner, waiting for everyone to come home. He catches a ride into town with his sister-in-law, a New England native with little use for the rest of the world.
"It's been a hard year," Meredith says. "We thought your brother was going to get a Nobel; it was close, and then it didn't happen."
"That would be nice," Richard says, not sure if the brother is really Nobel material; it had certainly never occurred to him. "Maybe next year."
She shakes her head. "You don't come that close and then get it the next year; it's like a comet, it passes that close only once in a lifetime."
"Well, even that must feel good: how many people actually think they have a chance of winning a Nobel Prize?"
"Your brother did. Two of his close friends already have them."
"You'd have to go to Stockholm to collect it."
"Oh, we've been to Sweden. That's what we do — every summer we take a house in Italy, Greece, Spain, France."
"I didn't realize."
"Ben has come with us a few times. Ben, and sometimes you-know-who, if she can get away for a few days."
"Really? I never knew."
"Where shall I drop you?"
"Anywhere is fine."
"The Public Gardens? You can say hello to the swan boats?"
"That would be great."
NOTHING IS OPEN — it's too early. He walks around the park a couple of times, and then he takes himself out for a second breakfast. Finally the stores open, and Richard goes up and down Boylston Street shopping because he doesn't know what else to do, because he never shops, because every time he buys something he has a nice conversation with the salesperson. He buys something for everyone — for the kids, his brother, the sister-in-law, the mother-in-law, the dog, the house.
After lunch, he takes a taxi back to Brookline, puts the gifts in everyone's rooms, and falls asleep on the sofa, exhausted.
"ARE YOU SURE you're all right?" the brother asks that evening. "I know you had a scare, but now you're scaring me; is there something you're not telling me?"
"He got us a mixer," one of the children says.