“That’s not true,” he’d protested. “It’s just that I don’t think that every rejection is meaningless, and I don’t think everyone who gets a job over me does so out of dumb luck.”
There had been another silence. “You’re too kind, Willem,” JB said, darkly. “You’re never going to get anywhere like this.”
“Thanks, JB,” he’d said. He was rarely offended by JB’s opinions—often, he was right—but at that particular moment, he didn’t much feel like hearing JB’s thoughts on his shortcomings and his gloomy predictions about his future unless he completely changed his personality. He’d gotten off the phone and had lain in bed awake, feeling stuck and sorry for himself.
Anyway, changing his personality seemed basically out of the question—wasn’t it too late? Before he was a kind man, after all, Willem had been a kind boy. Everyone had noticed: his teachers, his classmates, the parents of his classmates. “Willem is such a compassionate child,” his teachers would write on his report cards, report cards his mother or father would look at once, briefly and wordlessly, before adding them to the stacks of newspapers and empty envelopes that they’d take to the recycling center. As he grew older, he had begun to realize that people were surprised, even upset, by his parents; a high-school teacher had once blurted to him that given Willem’s temperament, he had thought his parents would be different.
“Different how?” he’d asked.
“Friendlier,” his teacher had said.
He didn’t think of himself as particularly generous or unusually good-spirited. Most things came easily to him: sports, school, friends, girls. He wasn’t nice, necessarily; he didn’t seek to be everyone’s friend, and he couldn’t tolerate boors, or pettiness, or meanness. He was humble and hardworking, diligent, he knew, rather than brilliant. “Know your place,” his father often said to him.
His father did. Willem remembered once, after a late-spring freeze had killed off a number of new lambs in their area, his father being interviewed by a newspaper reporter who was writing a story about how it had affected the local farms.
“As a rancher,” the reporter began, when Willem’s father had stopped her.
“Not a rancher,” he’d said, his accent making these words, as all words, sound brusquer than they should, “a ranch hand.” He was correct, of course; a rancher meant something specific—a landowner—and by that definition, he wasn’t a rancher. But there were plenty of other people in the county who then also had no right to call themselves ranchers and yet did so anyway. Willem had never heard his father say that they shouldn’t—his father didn’t care what anyone else did or didn’t do—but such inflation was not for him, or for his wife, Willem’s mother.
Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money.
He was his parents’ fourth child, and the only one still alive. First there had been a girl, Britte, who had died of leukemia when she was two, long before Willem had been born. This had been in Sweden, when his father, who was Icelandic, had been working at a fish farm, where he had met his mother, who was Danish. Then there had been a move to America, and a boy, Hemming, who had been born with cerebral palsy. Three years later, there had been another boy, Aksel, who had died in his sleep as an infant for no apparent reason.
Hemming was eight when Willem was born. He couldn’t walk or speak, but Willem had loved him and had never thought of him as anything but his older brother. Hemming could smile, however, and as he did, he’d bring his hand up toward his face, his fingers shaping themselves into a duck’s bill claw, his lips pulling back from his azalea-pink gums. Willem learned to crawl, and then walk and run—Hemming remaining in his chair year after year—and when he was old and strong enough, he would push Hemming’s heavy chair with its fat, stubborn tires (this was a chair meant to be sedentary, not to be nosed through grasses or down dirt roads) around the ranch where they lived with their parents in a small wooden house. Up the hill from them was the main house, long and low with a deep wraparound porch, and down the hill from them were the stables where their parents spent their days. He had been Hemming’s primary caretaker, and companion, all through high school; in the mornings, he was the first one awake, making his parents’ coffee and boiling water for Hemming’s oatmeal, and in the evenings, he waited by the side of the road for the van that would drop his brother off after his day at the assisted-living center an hour’s drive away. Willem always thought they clearly looked like brothers—they had their parents’ light, bright hair, and their father’s gray eyes, and both of them had a groove, like an elongated parentheses, bracketing the left side of their mouths that made them appear easily amused and ready to smile—but no one else seemed to notice this. They saw only that Hemming was in a wheelchair, and that his mouth remained open, a damp red ellipse, and that his eyes, more often than not, drifted skyward, fixed on some cloud only he could see.
“What do you see, Hemming?” he sometimes asked him, when they were out on their night walks, but of course Hemming never answered him.
Their parents were efficient and competent with Hemming, but not, he recognized, particularly affectionate. When Willem was kept late at school because of a football game, or a track meet, or when he was needed to work an extra shift at the grocery store, it was his mother who waited for Hemming at the end of the drive, who hefted Hemming into and then out of his bath, who fed him his dinner of chicken-and-rice porridge and changed his diaper before putting him to bed. But she didn’t read to him, or talk to him, or go on walks with him the way Willem did. Watching his parents around Hemming bothered him, in part because although they never behaved objectionably, he could tell that they viewed Hemming as their responsibility but no more. Later he would argue with himself that that was all that could reasonably be expected of them; anything else would be luck. But still. He wished they loved Hemming more, just a little more.
(Although maybe love was too much to ask from his parents. They had lost so many children that perhaps they simply either wouldn’t or couldn’t surrender themselves wholly to the ones they now had. Eventually, both he and Hemming would leave them too, by choice or not, and then their losses would be complete. But it would be decades before he was able to see things this way.)
His second year of college, Hemming had had to have an emergency appendectomy. “They said they caught it just in time,” his mother told him over the phone. Her voice was flat, very matter-of-fact; there was no relief in it, no anguish, but neither was there any—and he’d had to make himself consider this, even though he hadn’t wanted to, was scared to—disappointment either. Hemming’s caregiver (a local woman, paid to watch him during the night now that Willem was gone) had noticed him pawing at his stomach and moaning, and had been able to diagnose the hard truffley lump under his abdomen for what it was. While Hemming was being operated on, the doctors had found a growth, a few centimeters long, on his large intestine and had biopsied it. X-rays had revealed further growths, and they were going to excise those as well.