Over time, my father said, he'd come to wonder whether such extravagance was Teddy's recognition of the diverging paths their lives would take, something he saw long before my father did. And it happened: my father often in the clinic, or attending an art-house-film series with friends, or taking us on summer camping trips. Trips to which, he added, he frequently invited his brother and Donna, knowing full well that they would refuse. What the Malle film was to "The Giant, " Arches National Park was to Reno, where Donna gambled and my uncle, I assume, must have spent his time doing something other than eating, and yet returned only with photos of himself (dressed in that eternal off-white dress shirt, his arm slung over Donna's shoulder) against the bounty of the buffets. They were an odd couple. Now I suspect he was drawn to her for the sheer volume of her Americanness—for her big American hair and white patent-leather heels, for the brooches, bracelets, and earrings that jingled out her presence well before she entered a room.
Even her bust, hammocked in polyester pink-and-chartreuse blouses, seemed somehow American in the brash way it called attention to its size. She was of stone-fruit farming stock; the family went as far back in California as anyone could go, she'd say, "without being Miwoks. " She had a history of epilepsy, and though it had been decades since she'd had a seizure, she never learned to drive, and so my uncle chauffeured her everywhere. For as long as I knew him, he drove a Pontiac Bonneville, a model from the early '70s that reminded my sister and me of the cars driven by kidnappers in those ominous school educational videos that taught us not to talk to strangers. For Donna's part, aside from the chauffeuring, it was hard to say what she saw in my uncle. He was handsome, or appeared to have once been handsome, and I can recall the occasional waitress, checkout girl, or, later, nurse who was quite charmed by his courtly European manners and his accent. But Donna showed no interest in where he'd come from.
At the time, he didn't think it was remarkable. He had seen his brother go through a similar period of interest in his adopted country earlier, at the time of the bicentennial, though that had a seeking, sad quality to it, as if the commemorative plates, the flag placed on his balcony, were ways of trying out an identity he didn't possess. My father could remember how on that Fourth of July, he and my mother had gone with Teddy and Donna to watch the celebrations. Parades were not something my father went to regularly—they were, he felt, only for children or for fascists. But Teddy was different. He never spoke of the connection between his observance of certain holidays—the Fourth, Memorial Day, Veterans Day—and the fact that, due to his hip, he had been turned down when he had tried to enlist for Korea. My father wasn't even born at the time of those rejections, but in later years, he sensed that the sole thing his brother ever envied him for was his two years of service as a doctor with the VA.