Off Broadway

Families are like off Broadway plays - each with a cast of characters, clever dialogue, and plot lines. They can run for years or close overnight but mostly they carry on, in quiet obscurity or plain, old ordinariness. Everybody has a role to play.

In my family, the first child was the precedent setter - my part was to break ground and challenge authority, to see how far rules could be bent.

My youngest brother's role was to take advantage of anything I accomplished.

The middle child was a walk on with no lines, sullen, resentful and slightly savage, a nasty little mystery.

My youngest brother and I, although without his thin frame and blue eyes, took after my daddy. I was blessed with his love of books and music and his quiet nature. My brother inherited his ability to arbitrate and compromise, to be the family peacemaker and see all sides of a particular question. He and I got along more often than not in the early days - we were not close, but we were rarely at odds. He was more of a follower - on the shy side, sharply dry witted, mostly an obedient child. He liked for the river to flow smoothly.

The middle child took after my mother, emotionally as well as physically. He was short, heavy set, with a perpetual sneer and an affinity for trouble. There was a cruel streak in him and an inability to make eye contact with others. He had a temper, liked to use his fists, and from the age of just ten was drawn to violence. He lied with the best of them, ran with a rough crowd, threatened anyone who got in his way and usually followed through. No one understood him in the slightest.

Blood is thicker than water, so the saying goes, but in my family, it felt as if happenstance ruled, as if we were strangers under the same roof, unrelated, unattached and unfamiliar. We each played our parts and then left the theater alone and in the dark. There were no standing ovations, no encores, no performance awards.

I know that I will never reconcile with my family and I regret it no more than I would offending a disagreeable stranger. I still suspect that our existence was an unhappy accident.