Mimi would go out—Don training with the falconry cadets, or picking up an extra class to teach at one of the local colleges, or studying for his PhD; Mimi volunteering with the opera—and Donald, the oldest, would have to baby-sit, which he would not want to do. To divert himself, he’d goof around with his brothers: “Open your mouth, and close your eyes, and I’ll give you a big surprise,” followed by a mouthful of whipped cream.
Then the games would change. Donald would pound his brothers on their arms, right on the muscle, where it hurt the most. And then he would start staging fights. Michael against Richard, Richard against Joseph. He’d have two brothers hold a third one down while he took swings at him, then tell the others to take their own turn on the defenseless, captive brother. The command, to some of his younger brothers, was unforgettable: “If you don’t hit him and hit him hard, you’re going to be up there next.”
At first, all this seemed to happen without Don and Mimi doing much of anything about it. It wasn’t that they weren’t told—it was that they couldn’t believe Donald was capable of the things his brothers accused him of doing. “I begged my parents not to leave him there when I was home,” said John—the third son, four years younger than Donald. “Donald, I think, was my father’s favorite. He’d take Donald’s word over anybody’s. In the meantime, I had to go find a place to hide.” Mimi also, according to John, “didn’t know the half of it. I tried to tell them about my oldest brother, and they just ignored me.” Tattle Tale Tit, your tongue shall be split….
In Mimi’s and Don’s view, it might have seemed pointless to get too deeply involved in the gripes and vendettas of teenage brothers. In every family with lots of kids, a pecking order was inevitable. Donald would take command when Don and Mimi weren’t around, and Jim would seize power when Donald was gone. “The older brother would control the situation,” remembered Michael—the fifth son, who was eight years younger than Donald—except one time when Michael dislocated his elbow in a fight with Richard, who was younger, and Richard rose in triumph. Michael, in turn, once slapped Mark so hard, half his face turned purple with a bruise. The walk to school wasn’t safe. If you didn’t form a new alliance each day with a few brothers, you were basically asking to be dominated.
These conflicts, Don and Mimi sometimes thought, were best settled between the boys. Interceding too much might send the wrong message, and the boys might never learn to get along with one another on their own. And even if they had wanted to determine who was wrong in every instance, they would have had trouble figuring out whose fault it was. Because while Donald might have ruled over the other boys with an iron fist, Jim never stopped gunning for Donald’s position at the top of the heap.
* * *
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IF DONALD WAS the model son, Jim was more of a maverick. This meant embracing the James Dean and Marlon Brando spirit of the time—the leather jacket, the fast car, the defiant snarl. He had tried being more like Donald first and came up short. As an end receiver and defensive back, Jim had been good enough to, one time, block a punt and score a touchdown in the same play, but he never could outperform Donald on the football field—or in falconry, for that matter. Soon, he saw no upside in trying. Jim couldn’t fail to notice his parents’ expectations and attention always swerving past him and toward his older brother, and that angered and shamed him. There was, naturally, one person onto whom he could direct all that rage. Which was how, from his teenage years onward, Jim always seemed to have a score to settle with Donald. “It was like a pact with himself,” Michael said.
Jim and Donald never seemed to stop wrestling—in the basement, in the bedrooms, on the shrubs in the backyard. Jim was smaller, and so when Donald beat him, he’d go off and lift weights, or try to round up some of his younger brothers to gang up on Donald. That never worked. The other brothers were afraid