Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

expected her to be surprised, to exclaim against this, even to smile at him for such an idea, but instead she seemed to be letting the possibility blossom slowly, seductively, in her head. “You think he might have?”
    “I don’t know. I think he was disturbed. I think so. I find it hard to tell when one of you is disturbed or not.”
    “He wasn’t one of us,” said Calla. “He was fairly old.”
    “He might have wanted to do that, though,” she said in a minute. “It’s just another thing he might have wanted to do. If that’s what he was going to do, then nobody ought to stop him, should they? Or feel sad about him. I never feel sad about anybody.”
    Mr. Lougheed turned away. “Good-night now,” said Calla persuasively. “I’m sorry if you don’t like your door.”
    Mr. Lougheed thought for the first time ever that he might not be able to get to the top of the stairs. He doubted his powers even for that. It was possible that he would have to go into an apartment building, like the rest of them, if he wanted to continue.

Forgiveness in Families
    I’ve often thought, suppose I had to go to a psychiatrist, and he would want to know about my family background, naturally, so I would have to start telling him about my brother, and he wouldn’t even wait till I was finished, would he, the psychiatrist, he’d commit me.
    I said that to Mother; she laughed. “You’re hard on that boy, Val.”
    “Boy,” I said. “Man.”
    She laughed, she admitted it. “But remember,” she said, “the Lord loves a lunatic.”
    “How do you know,” I said, “seeing you’re an atheist?”
    Some things he couldn’t help. Being born, for instance. He was born the week I started school, and how’s that for timing? I was scared, it wasn’t like now when the kids have been going to play-school and kindergarten for years. I was going to school for the first time and all the other kids had their mothers with them and where was mine? In the hospital having a baby. The embarrassment to me. There was a lot of shame about those things then.
    It wasn’t his fault getting born and it wasn’t his fault throwing up at my wedding. Think of it. The floor, the table, he even managed to hit the cake. He was not drunk, as some people thought, he really did have some violent kind of flu, which Haro and I came down with, in fact, on our honeymoon. I never heard of anybody else with any kind of flu throwing up over a table with a lace cloth and silver candlesticks and wedding cake on it, but you could say it was bad luck; maybe everybody else when the need came on them was closer to a toilet. And everybody else might try a little harder to hold back, they just might, because nobody else is quite so special, quite so center-of-the-universe, as my baby brother. Just call him a child of nature. That was what he called himself, later on.
    I will skip over what he did between getting born and throwing up at my wedding except to say that he had asthma and got to stay home from school weeks on end, listening to soap operas. Sometimes there was a truce between us, and I would get him to tell me what happened every day on “Big Sister” and “Road of Life” and the one with Gee-Gee and Papa David. He was very good at remembering all the characters and getting all the complications straight, I’ll say that, and he did read a lot in Gateways to Bookland , that lovely set Mother bought for us and that he later sneaked out of the house and sold, for ten dollars, to a secondhand book dealer. Mother said he could have been brilliant at school if he wanted to be. That’s a deep one, your brother, she used to say, he’s got some surprises in store for us. She was right, he had.
    He started staying home permanently in Grade Ten after a little problem of being caught in a cheating-ring that was getting math tests from some teacher’s desk. One of the janitors was letting him back in the classroom after school because he said he was working on a special project. So he was, in his own way. Mother said he did it to make himself popular, because he had asthma and couldn’t take part in sports.
    Now. Jobs. The question comes up, what is such a person as my brother—and I ought to give him a name at least, his name is Cam, for Cameron, Mother thought that would be a suitable name for a university president or honest tycoon (which was the sort of thing she planned for him to be)—what is he going to do, how is he going to make a living?