All the other girls loved his twin brother, but I preferred Charles. I still don’t know exactly why, but looking back, I may have sensed that what resided, unmanifested, in me resided in him as well. Not that Joe left me anything close to cold. He was curly haired, cuddly, silly-sweet, with big round puppy dog eyes, his school tie and jacket always askew. What wasn’t there to love?
Not so with Charles, who was arrogant and, though far from homely, not entirely promising in the looks department. In high school, the difference was even more pronounced, the girls falling over Joe while dodging verbal darts from Charles, who’d grown to his full adult height but still had the expression of a feral cat. Even when we were in our postcollege years and started seeing each other at reunions, Joe was the clear favorite, whereas some girls avoided Charles entirely, claiming that he had ruined their childhoods. He hadn’t ruined mine, though, maybe because I was so far off his radar that he didn’t bother talking to me.
I didn’t really know either of them, despite their parents and mine being in the same social circle, and our mothers becoming the closest of friends, so much so that I can’t remember a time when my mother didn’t tell me the story about how, when she was giving birth to me at George Washington University Hospital, their mother, Joan, was just a few doors down the corridor, giving birth to the twins.
“You’re triplets!” my mother insisted.
Not really. Not with the great, gawping social distance that separated the 10 or 12 top kids in our small private-school class from the bottom roughly 50 of us. We, the non-top-kids, were not, however, grouped into one large lump of the not-quite, but rather occupied many and variously shifting lower levels, from passable to pure-out, freak-of-death weirdo. Dwelling in that unwashed majority meant constantly holding your ground lest someone even lower than you try to pull you down with them or, worse, bump you from your own tenuously held spot. Privileged kids, all of us, with fathers who had big careers in government and law, and mothers with degrees from Seven Sisters schools and heirloom china.
Surrounded by playing fields and, beyond that, acres of rolling grassy hills and woodlands, the school (which ended after the ninth grade) was for many of my classmates a green and gentle paradise. May Day! The Christmas play! Book Fair! And do you remember when Oliver Platt was the mikado in The Mikado?
And so it went, at the school reunions I started attending around the age of 30, when at last I felt reasonably confident that I was no longer the walking embarrassment I’d known myself to be in school. Low self-esteem was my calling card, and it didn’t help that I was one of two Jewish kids in the class but the only identifiably Jewish Jew, with Jewish hair, Jewish features, a nervous Jewish stomach and an Orthodox father with a habit of belting out Hebrew prayer.
Perhaps because I was programmed by my parents to believe that where-you-went-to-college was tantamount to the quality of your life’s essence, to this day I can tell you where each of us kids got our undergraduate degrees. For that matter, I can tell you where everyone went to high school, law school, medical school and graduate school. I can identify each kid in the first-grade class photo of 1965, when Joe became obsessed with Monster trading cards — a memory that, as it turned out, he doesn’t share. I know because when I saw him and Charles at a political fundraiser I attended some years ago for the sole purpose of seeing them, Joe said he had no recollection whatsoever of anything to do with Monster or any other kind of trading cards.
Until then, I hadn’t spent more than an hour total with the twins combined, which didn’t mean I didn’t know what they were up to. Courtesy of the twins’ mother, who apparently kept my mother up to date regarding every detail of their lives, I could have written their biographies. My mother’s onslaught of intel made me slightly queasy, not because it was juicy so much as that a) my mother had no boundaries, and b) every update my mother imparted made me feel like I was back in the sixth grade, struggling to keep my spot a half-rung up from the bottom.
Unlike me, the twins graduated at the top of their class at St. Albans, notched spectacular SAT scores and then went, respectably, to Harvard and Yale. In New Haven/Cambridge, each thrived, with pals and romance, and, in Joe’s case, a bad bicycle accident resulting from a midnight tryst. Whereas I graduated towards the top end of my public high school class with SAT scores in the meh range and went to Tufts, which my father called a “B, B-plus school on a good day,” and where my first boyfriend broke my heart so badly that I’m still recovering. Post bachelor’s degree, more of the same, but now the twins, on top of their other accomplishments, were dating the most beautiful and brilliant women you can imagine.
To this day I wonder what my mother told Joan about me. “Oh, you know, Jennifer’s dating a young man who she seems smitten with, but between you and me, I think he’s a bit of a jerk.”
After the story regarding Joe’s bike accident, I didn’t hear much about his love life, but I got an earful about Charles’, mainly, I think, because he’d fallen in love with a Jewish woman he’d met when at Yale Law School, who, according to my mother, according to Joan, had dark hair and eyes not unlike my own, and therefore, somehow or other, at least in my mother’s mind, was a person who I might have replaced in Charles’ affections — had I been entirely different, and had Charles and I spent more than five minutes a decade together.
“You don’t look anything like Liza,” my boyfriend’s friend Sam, who was in Liza’s year at Yale Law School, told me. “Liza’s hot.”
Whatever. I’d never met Liza, and in any case, I was madly in love with my own law student, despite his relative impoverishment, his distinctly non-upper-crust background and my parents’ lack of enthusiasm for him.
Charles and Liza, meantime, went on to win top clerkships with federal judges, got married, moved to New York and launched big careers. Whereas I had a job reading slush and fetching coffee at a women’s magazine, followed by a job writing dumbed-down copy for a Reader’s Digest book about the Bible, followed by a job editing recipes and writing travel copy for a food magazine, all the while hearing from my mother, who typically started off by asking: “Got any good gossip for me?” And when I didn’t, supplied me with her own.
“Joan says —”
“Us kids” had kids of our own, sent them to school, watched them grow. And then everyone died. The twins’ father died of a pulmonary embolism when he was in his early 80s. Some years later, Joan died of breast cancer, leaving my mother, who was herself dying of cancer, to tell me over and over that Joan said she didn’t care if she died, because without her husband, life was no fun. “Can you imagine having a marriage that good?” A year later, my mother died, and I was left, in my mid-40s, holding all her stuff.
After her death, I literally started dreaming about Charles and on occasion about Joe — usually we were at Yale together. I hadn’t seen either of them more than once or twice in more than 30 years, and the dreams disturbed me. Was I still that messed up over my non-Ivy education, and all that that represented vis-à-vis my parents’ distorted understanding of the essentiality of the Ivy League, that my deepest, most yearning-filled dreams put me walking side by side with one or the other twin in New Haven? After all, by then I too had launched an adult life, with a husband I had married despite my parents’ initially lukewarm reception, children, and a career. The point is: check, check, check; all the major life-markers were in reasonably good order. My insides were another matter.
You’re triplets!
Not so much, but over the years, when I ran into one or the other of them, I was at least capable of telling a good one, such as the one about being cast as a “villager” in the Christmas play. Which ability, in turn, at least in my own mind, raised my status among my classmates, and if I hadn’t yet attained the highest ranks where the 10 or 11 top kids dwelled, at least I might on occasion be invited to visit there. That said, and cool kid or not, as the years ran on, every time I saw Charles (and to a lesser extent, Joe), I felt a deep connection, and I longed — and I do mean longed — to be pals with him.
We were middle-aged and then our kids were in college and then we were in our 60s, with gray hair and, for my husband and me, grandchildren, and that’s when it happened. Charles and Liza met us for dinner. It was high summer. They were in Vermont. We were in the Adirondacks. We met halfway between, at a restaurant in Glens Falls, New York, two long-married couples with three grown children apiece and a lifetime to catch up on.
Liza told funny stories about her late mother-in-law, Joan, and I told stories about all the stuff my mother told me Joan had told her about Charles and Joe, and Charles winced and said: “You knew that, too?”
Sorry, I thought. I overshared, overblabbed, overconfessed and overemoted. But Charles and Liza didn’t seem to hold it against me. So, we met the next summer and the summer after that, and just last summer, I told them the story about how, when I was dating my husband, my husband’s friend Sam, told me that unlike me, Liza was “hot.”
Charles said: “You’re hot, too.”
We were 66, and as we went our separate ways, I started looking forward to seeing them again the following summer.
Both Charles and Liza had recently retired from their big legal careers and seemed, in every sense, happy, at home in the world, delighted with each other, at ease with who they were and how they had lived and planned to continue living. No regrets. No road not taken. And from him, where in boyhood there had been arrogance, there was nothing but kindness, sweetness, humility, empathy and a great, bursting love of life. A great guy, a sweetheart of a guy, the kind you hope your daughter marries or, if you’re me, will be your old-new friend until you’re both so ancient and decrepit that you can hear God calling. If not twins or triplets, we would be siblings of the soul. I would be as a long-lost sister, a third-musketeer-but-not, the former classmate resurrected from the depths of childhood, years and years of dark beer and grilled fish on the porch and wondering how we had gotten to be as old, and then older than, our own parents.
I was not, however, without siblings. I’m the middle of three sisters, with a near twin in my brother, David, who was born a year after me. But decades of addiction had hollowed David out, stealing not only his health and his looks but his sweetness as well. By the time I was 30 — and I’m not proud to say this — I started keeping my distance, and despite pleas from my parents, refused to get involved in his life. But when he died at the age of 65 of a heart attack, David died clean, his true self restored, his literal as well as figurative house in order, a vast comfort to our ancient father, who could not fathom how his beloved son had fallen to such despair.
I mention my brother because, when he died, I barely shed a tear. Eventually, I did cry, but it was more for our father and for all the years that addiction had deprived me of the only brother I had, the little boy who had once been my closest companion and dearest playmate. Then again, I’d been mourning him for most of my life, so perhaps I’d run out of grief.
Three months after we buried my brother in the plot next to our mother’s in Northern Virginia, word came via email, spreading among us, the kids of the Potomac School ninth grade class of 1974, that our classmate Charles had died, in London, of a heart attack.
I can’t speak for the other kids, those I once envied as being impossibly above my pay grade and those I had shied away from for fear of being infected by their even-lower social status, but I can say that I’m not alone in my grief. About 20 of us were in attendance along with our spouses and our memories, our excellent or so-so or work-in-progress marriages, our hip replacements and cancer scars and sorrows and joys and frustrations, all of us soaring through time and newly aware that our own graves were waiting.
Afterwards, the little group that had once competed on the playground together sat drinking together at a hotel bar, crying, talking, crying, talking.
Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of eight books and a frequent contributor to this magazine.