She was able to play the piano on Thursday nights and participate in most of the other MYF activities because she could bring their little boy along. He was a biddable, easy child. Everyone liked Morrie. To the best of my recollection even Billy Paquette, that young atheist in the making, liked Morrie, who hardly ever cried. Even when he fell down and skinned his knees, the worst he was liable to do was sniffle, and even that would stop if one of the bigger girls picked him up and cuddled him. When we went outside to play games, he followed the boys everywhere he could, and when he was unable to keep up with them, he followed the girls, who also minded him during Bible Study or swung him around to the beat during Sing Time—hence the nickname Tag-Along-Morrie.

Claire was particularly fond of him, and I have a clear memory—which I know must be made up of many overlaid memories—of them in the corner where the toys were, Morrie in his little chair, Claire on her knees beside him, helping him to color or to construct a domino snake. “I want four just like him when I get married,” Claire told my mother once. She would have been going on seventeen by then, I suppose, and ready to graduate from MYF.

“Good luck on that,” my mother replied. “In any case, I hope yours will be better looking than Morrie, Claire-Bear.”

That was a tad unkind, but not untrue. Although Charles Jacobs was a good-looking man and Patsy Jacobs was a downright beautiful young woman, Tag-Along-Morrie was as plain as mashed potatoes. He had a perfectly round face that reminded me of Charlie Brown’s. His hair was a nondescript shade of brunet. Although his father’s eyes were blue and his mother’s that entrancing green, Morrie’s were plain old brown. Yet the girls all loved him, as if he were a starter-child for the ones they would have in the following decade, and the boys treated him like a kid brother. He was our mascot. He was Tag-Along-Morrie.

One February Thursday night, my four siblings and I came back from the parsonage with our cheeks red from sledding behind the church (Reverend Jacobs had set up electric lights along our run), singing “I’m Henry the Eighth” at the top of our lungs. I remember that Andy and Con were in a particularly hilarious mood, because they’d brought our toboggan and put Morrie on a cushion at the front, where he rode fearlessly and looked like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.

“You guys like those meetings, don’t you?” my father asked. I think there was mild wonder in his voice.

“Yeah!” I said. “We did about a thousand Bible drills tonight, then went out back on our sleds! Mrs. Jacobs, she sledded, too, only she kept falling off!”

I laughed and he laughed with me. “That’s great, but are you learning anything, Jamie?”

“Man’s will should be an extension of God’s will,” I said, parroting that night’s lesson. “Also, if you connect the positive and negative terminals of a battery with a wire, it makes a short circuit.”

“True,” he said, “which is why you always have to be careful when you’re jump-starting a car. But I don’t see any Christian lesson in that.”

“It was about how doing something wrong because you thought it might make something else better doesn’t work.”

“Oh.” He picked up the latest issue of Car and Driver, which had a cool Jaguar XK-E on the cover. “Well, you know what they say, Jamie: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” He thought for a moment, then added: “And lit with electric lights.”

That made him laugh, and I laughed with him, even though I didn’t get the joke. If it was a joke.

 • • •

Andy and Con were friends with the Ferguson brothers, Norm and Hal. They were what we called flatlanders, or folks from away. The Fergusons lived in Boston, so the friendship was ordinarily restricted to summer vacations. The family had a cottage on Lookout Lake, only a mile or so from our house, and the two sets of brothers met at another church-related event, in this case Vacation Bible School.

The Fergusons had a family membership at Goat Mountain Resort, and sometimes Con and Andy would go with them in the Fergusons’ station wagon to swim and have lunch in “the club.” The pool, they said, was about a thousand times better than Harry’s Pond. Neither Terry nor I cared much about this—the local swimming hole was fine by us, and we had our own friends—but it drove Claire wild with envy. She wanted to see “how the other half lived.”

“They live just like us, dear,” Mom said. “Whoever said the rich are different was wrong.”

Claire, who was running clothes through our old washing machine’s wringer, scrunched her face into a pout. “I doubt that,” she said.

“Andy says the girls who swim in the pool wear bikinis,” I said.

My mother snorted. “They might as well go swimming in their bras and underpants.”

“I’d like to have a bikini,” Claire remarked. It was, I suppose, the sort of provocation girls of seventeen specialize in.

My mother pointed a finger at her, soap dripping from one short-clipped nail. “That’s how girls get pregnant, missy.”

Claire returned that serve smartly. “Then you ought to keep Con and Andy from going. They might get a girl pregnant.”

“Zip your lip,” my mother said, cutting her eyes in my direction. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

Like I didn’t know what getting a girl pregnant meant: sex. Boys lay down on top of girls and wiggled around until they got the feeling. When that happened, a mysterious something called jizz came from the boy’s dink. It sank into the girl’s belly, and nine months later it was time for diapers and a baby carriage.

My parents didn’t stop Con and Andy from going to the resort once or twice a week during the summer in spite of my sister’s dog-in-the-manger barking, and when the Fergusons came up for February vacation in 1965 and invited my brothers to go skiing with them, my parents sent them off to Goat Mountain without a qualm, my brothers’ scarred old skis strapped to the station wagon’s roof right along with the Fergusons’ gleaming new ones.

When they came back, there was a bright red weal across Con’s throat. “Did you drift off-course and run into a tree branch?” Dad asked when he came home for supper and saw the mark.

Con, a fine skier, was indignant. “Gosh no, Dad. Me n Norm were racing. We were side by side, going like hell’s kitchen—”

Mom pointed her fork at him.

“Sorry, Mom, like heck’s kitchen. Norm hit a mogul and just about lost his balance. He stuck out his arm like this”—Con demonstrated, almost knocking over his glass of milk—“and his ski pole hit me in the neck. It hurt like . . . you know, bad, but it’s better now.”

Only it wasn’t. The next day the red mark had faded to a necklace-like bruise, but his voice had gotten hoarse. By that night he could hardly speak above a whisper. Two days later, he was completely mute.

 • • •

A hyperextension of the neck resulting in a stretched laryngeal nerve. That was Dr. Renault’s diagnosis. He said he’d seen them before, and in a week or two, Conrad’s voice would begin to come back. By the end of March Connie would be as right as a trivet. Nothing to worry about, he said, and there wasn’t. Not for him, at least; his voice was fine. This was not true of my brother. When April rolled around, Con was still writing notes and making gestures when he wanted something. He insisted on going to school, even though the other boys had started making fun of him, especially since he had solved the problem of class participation (to a degree, anyway) by writing YES on one palm and NO on the other. He had a pile of file cards with more communications written on them in block letters. The one his classmates found particularly hilarious was MAY I USE THE RESTROOM.

Con seemed to take all this in good spirits, knowing that to do otherwise would only make the teasing worse, but one night I went into the room he shared with Terry and found him lying on his bed and weeping soundlessly. I went to him, asking what was wrong. A stupid question, since I knew, but you have to say something in that situation, and I could say it, because I wasn’t the one who’d been struck across the throat with the Ski Pole of Destiny.