The thing was, I couldn't think of a room or a house or anything to
describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. I'm not too crazy about
describing rooms and houses anyway. So what I did, I wrote about my
brother Allie's baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It
really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was
left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he
had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In
green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he
was in the field and nobody was up to bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia
and died when were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He
was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as
intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always
writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a
boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap.
They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent
member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never
got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very
easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what
kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years
old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all,
and having a hunch that all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure
enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence—there was this
fence that went all around the course—and he was sitting there,
about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the
kind of red hair he had. God, he was nice kid, though. He used to laugh so
hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about
fell off his chair. I was only thirteen and they were going to have me
psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I
don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died,
and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it.
I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that
summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and
I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll
admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know
Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while, when it rains and all, and
I can't make a real fist any more—not a tight one, I mean—but
outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam
surgeon or violinist or anything anyway.