What Was Mine: & Other Stories by Ann Beattie Page A

forty-four—not as old as you’d expect. When people hear “disability,” they imagine an old guy. My brother is forty-one but has lied even to the newspaper in saying that he’s thirty-five. That would mean nine years between us, and I wish there had been nine years, because when my brother was more or less turned over to me as my responsibility, I was ten or eleven, and he was seven or eight. He wasn’t a baby I could push around. He had a mind of his own, and I was a skinny kid, though I was taller than him, but my scrawniness gave him the idea he could take advantage of me, and I didn’t stand up to him. It was too much responsibility, a ten-year-old being the guardian of a seven-year-old, but when Martha (that was our mother) had the last baby she was forty years old and suffered terrible postpartum depression, and when she never did come around, my father took things into his own hands and turned Claude over to me, for all intents and purposes. I helped him tug his sweater off, got up in the night if he was having a nightmare, and eventually became his protector, strong-arming bullies who pushed him, when I’d put on enough weight to intervene. At first it was all too much for me. It amounted to child abuse, the way my parents sloughed off my younger brother on me. The oldest was gone: enlisted in the Marines at eighteen, and gone. He had a whole houseful of kids by the time Claude and I started high school.
    Get this: “Claude” is not his name. It’s Jim—plain, ordinary Jim. Not even James. I think the name he took is a little sissy, myself, but he didn’t arrive at it randomly. “Claude” was a villain who kept cropping up in his nightmares. My belief is that the name Claus—as in Santa Claus—got transformed into Claude. When he was a baby, he used to call Santa only “Claus,” drawing out the “au.” You could say to him, “Do you hear Santa Claus on the roof?” and he’d echo the name, but only the second part. “Claaaaaaaauuuuuuse,” he’d say, like somebody going superslow, trying to learn a foreign language.
    Don’t get the idea that Christmas was a happy family occasion at our house. One year Martha tore out a gob of hair and stuffed it in the toe of Dad’s Christmas stocking. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her face close to his and hissed, “I knew you were pulling out your hair. I told the doctor you were,” and she screamed, as always, and he let go and that was that. Just that vein bulging near the bridge of his nose, and his frightened eyes, though he was the one who was always terrifying everybody. Christmas cards—the kind with “From Our House to Yours”—came every year from Richard, the oldest. There was a new kid in every picture, but never once did he visit, and never once did we hear at any other time but Christmas. You figure it: the second kid and Claude are now pals. They play on a basketball team together. One of Richard’s six kids decided, after he read about Claude in the paper, to send him a postcard and see if his uncle would meet him. Now the two of them are as close as two fingers in a splint. They’re their own private duet, like Irene Dunne and Allan Jones.
    My idea for lighting the manhole is simple: one spotlight recessed in the ceiling, and no other lighting of any sort in the room. Trust me on this: it works, without seeming like some artsy lighting you’d see in some Off Off Broadway play. I don’t want to push the point and say it looks elegant, and, God help me, I am so tired of hearing the word “stark” that I’d never use it myself. The light seems like somebody—me—made a clear decision, and that clarity becomes something you consider when you view the installation. It might remind some people of those little overhead lights in airplanes that always make you jump when they come on, they’re so bright, and you wonder if the person next to you is going to give you a dirty look for reading. I was in an airplane recently,