Short Century by David Burr Gerrard Page A

shrugged off the kind offers of graying men in expensive suits. He wanted to pour the dirt himself. One colleague tried again after being rebuffed and my father shoved his crutch at him. Then he dropped this crutch and leaned on the other one while he swung down, ape-like, to scoop up some dirt and hop to the edge of the grave to throw the dirt in. He did this successfully, but everyone present was so afraid that he was going to fall in that it was impossible to feel moved by the sight, mostly it just looked ridiculous. My father must have agreed because he suddenly started to guffaw with an abandon I had never heard before.
    â€œOn crutches or underground,” he said, looking at me and putting on a fake British accent. “Tally ho, Huntington men, tally ho!”
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    For the next several years Paul was never very far from my thoughts, even apart from Emily’s birthday weekends at the Chappine, which started soon thereafter. The fact was that I missed Paul. The cliché about missing your enemies turned out to be true in my case, and not only that: I found that I truly respected him in ways that I hadn’t previously understood. You have to understand that all of this is quite difficult for me, insofar as I am trying sort out exactly what it is that has caused me so much pain in my life and that caused me to cause so much pain in others. I suppose that on some level I had come to love my tormentor, just as oppressed populations come to love their dictators, a phenomenon I examine at length in my book That Which Is Caesar’s .
    When I was fifteen I had a swift and comprehensive growth spurt; by the time I left for college I was over six feet. Everybody started telling me that I looked like Paul. It was easy to see in the mirror. I was Paul’s height, and shared the sharp cut of Paul’s chin, the face that looked like a V for victory, and a small nose that turned very slightly up at the end. My mother saw it, our doorman saw it, even Mac Bundy 3 saw it when he came for drinks.
    One Sunday afternoon while I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some math homework, I heard my father thumping by, and as soon as I looked up he threw a baseball in my direction. When I instinctively cowered and the baseball shattered the mirror behind me, he told me that Paul had had excellent reflexes and that Paul had never failed to catch a ball thrown at him. “But at least you’re strong enough to pick up broken glass.” Then he hobbled away. I bent down to pick up the shards and Emily came running to help me.
    â€œDon’t touch the glass. It’s dangerous,” I said. But she couldn’t be dissuaded, and with her still small hands she picked up the shards of glass and made funny faces into them. She stuck out her tongue and twisted her mouth. She held her eyelid open with her thumb and held a shard up close, making her look even more bug-eyed than normal, and even though I was nervous I laughed. Then she held the shard up to my strong jaw.
    â€œYou don’t look anything like Paul,” she said. “They’re just trying to keep him alive. You don’t look anything like Paul.” When she said this the second time her voice cracked just as the mirror had, and it certainly wasn’t effective to show me the mirror when I could see beyond it to a picture of Paul in a prep-school uniform that matched my own.
    Over the next several years, Emily grew more and more precocious, cutting our initial age difference, intellectually speaking, from an original four and a half to three, and then to two, and then really to nothing at all. She read all the books that I read and she looked to me for my opinion, which typically became her own, though her reasoning was usually a bit clearer. It was often intoxicating, I have to admit, to hear her defy our mother and father but almost always defer to me.
    Toward the end of high school I became friends with a small dark-haired kid two years