Blood Relations

One day evil entered their home disguised as a clock. The clock, which changed colors from red to pink to blue, was their father's anniversary gift to their mother. Because Max grew up in a house ruled by a psychoanalyst, he could tell you by the time he reached puberty that he despised that clock because it was a gift to the mother who, he felt, had betrayed him by turning her attention to Max's baby brother: blue-eyed, blond-haired, charismatic Sam. And so Batman convinced Robin that the clock must be destroyed. Max jerked on the wire while Sam bit it, to no avail. In his fury Max sank his own teeth into the wire, and all of a sudden--zap!--he saw zebra stripes and smelled something funny. The burn fused the left sides of his lips and required three surgeries. What would've been, their mother still wonders, had that accident never occurred?

MAX ENTERED first grade. His scarred lip made him a target. He told his mother about a boy who was taunting and poking him in the schoolyard. Tell your teacher, she said.

Max's father heard the conversation. Two responses lay coiled in Henry's genetic wiring. You could ignore the threat and hope the local authorities would protect you, as Zeida's mother and sister had done. Or you could attack your antagonist, the way Zeida had as a teenager in Ukraine, cracking the skull of a Jew-baiter with his own walking cane, then landing a left between his eyes, dropping him in a pool of blood. The way Zeida's brother really had, capturing two Jew-killers in the dead of winter, their shirts still red with neighbors' blood, then marching them onto the frozen Dniester, ordering them to cut a hole, then shoving them into it and covering the hole with the disk of ice.

Henry, as a child, became a wunderkind of the Jewish leftist movement, performing dramatic recitations of resistance poems in Yiddish across the country. The essence of this poetry was: the Holocaust, never again.

Henry pulled Max aside. Next time the kid pokes you, the psychoanalyst told his scrawny first-born, slug him in the face with all your might. And that would go for anyone who picked on Sam, Harry or Jack, as well, because Max was his brothers' keeper.

Max unloaded. That kid never taunted or poked him again.

WAS THIS the way life worked? One circumstance leading like an arrow to the next and then the next? If it were, then a forceful and logical man might begin to foresee those circumstances, might blaze his own trail of cause and effect ... and determine his fate. Max began to sharpen his power of reasoning, to strip the sentiment from an argument and make it stand on the legs of logic, knowledge ... and will. The dinner table became his workshop. Pick a topic. Any topic. Hakeem Olajuwon, best center in basketball? How can you say he's better than Patrick Ewing? Didn't matter what the conventional numbers said; Max unearthed factors that nobody else at the table knew, debated in a way that made you feel he'd already rifled through the closets and drawers of your argument and discarded it. He became an animal of logic. That's what brother Jack said.

One boy kept entering the animal's lair. Sam, as a fourth-grader, wrote a story about a monkey in a barrel whose keeper pelted him with numbers--big, heavy ones like 110--until the monkey heaved back a huge one, 1,186, the sum of all the numbers hurled at him, and knocked out the shocked keeper. All the brothers, as sons of a shrink, knew it was a story about Sam and Max. Sam could think and articulate as fast as his big brother, lie in wait listening and then wreak havoc with a reply. Once, debating why man had invented sports, Sam unloaded this haymaker: "Sports is man's joke on God, Max. You see, God says to man, 'I've created a universe where it seems like everything matters, where you'll have to grapple with life and death and in the end you'll die anyway, and it won't really matter.' So man says to God, 'Oh, yeah? Within your universe we're going to create a sub-universe called sports, one that absolutely doesn't matter, and we'll follow everything that happens in it as if it were life and death.'" Which delighted Max, because he craved a foil, someone who would compel him to hurl ever bigger and heavier numbers.

On a dry debating day they'd resort to the King of All Games, a joust they'd invented in which they'd select a subset--condiments, say--and then hammer out its hierarchy, haggling over whether salt, butter, mayo or ketchup was the king, the prince or a mere jester. Then they'd analyze each other's analyses, exposing hidden psychological motives, louder, louder, with younger brothers Harry and Jack chirping from the sidelines, until their father would shout, "Time out! Time out! I can't take it!" and their mother would flee to her easel and their friends would flee to the bathroom, choking back laughter, leaving Max and Sam at the table arguing, their debate disintegrating an hour later into Ahhh, you're full of s--- and You're such a f------ moron! ... two boys growing closer than any brothers you've ever known.

NEW OPPONENTS kept coming after Max and his scarred lip. He sat beside his dad one night and watched Muhammad Ali fight on TV. He disappeared into his bedroom with Ali's autobiography and emerged spouting Ali's poetry. He decided at age eight that he needed more control over his response to his antagonists, more science-- Ali's science. His father started taking him to a gym for boxing lessons, which lasted until Boom Boom Mancini battered Duk Koo Kim to death on national television in 1982. The boy's horrified mother and grandmother retired him at age nine.