We couldn’t possibly pick a favorite; they were both such good boys. Dante was our firstborn – so serious even from the start. He didn’t much laugh or cry. Came into this world with a full head of hair and a furrowed brow, he did.
Blake followed a couple years later – unplanned, truth be told, and once we knew we really hoped for a girl, but what can you do? Bake really was a strange child. “Touched,” they’d say. He was so contented just to look out the window at the setting sun, but other times he would scream and scream as if he didn’t know who we were.
Thank goodness for Dante’s quiet nature those early years. It must have been trying for him, so much attention on his younger brother, but he never complained or made a fuss. Soon as he learned to read we couldn’t tear him away from that Bible. He wanted to know all about which devil in what layer, what angel and when; we knew a bit of Book but nothing like that, so he started to figure it out for himself. Made all these lists and charts and diagrams. Really was quite ingenious, even if the neighbors’ kids found it a mite strange.
School of course was no challenge at all for our studious little Dante, but Blake really did struggle. We never did get the test, but his teachers thought maybe it was the dyslexia, the way he’d write his words not quite right – a “y” instead of “i” in “tiger,” little things like that. He always did march to a different beat, Blake did. His older brother tried to help, but Blake could be so willfully ignorant at times – didn’t want to learn things the way most folk do. Wouldn’t listen when Dante showed him how to write his letters, or how to memorize his multiplication. Blake wouldn’t so much as say a word – just made his little doodles and left Dante to do all his homework for him. Probably quicker that way anyway, and Blake’s grades really did improve. It’s doubtful he would have even graduated grammar school if Dante hadn’t helped his brother so. He was a prince, he really was.
Later on the boys weren’t so close. Siblings go through spells, Lord knows, but these two… They did all the hair pulling, the name calling, the toy stealing, but where Blake could be loud and bratty oftentimes, Dante was just plain mean. Telling his brother he was… how did he phrase it… some “infernal wretch” or somesuch, or that the family never so much as wanted him.
That is absolutely not true, but the way, and we never said anything of the kind to Dante. Like any parents, sometimes we’d gripe about our struggles with the youngest, how it were a shame that he couldn’t be more like his older brother – so clever and mindful of his elders – but we certainly did not show favor to one over the other, so who can say where he got such an awful idea?
The years passed all the quicker for each one that passed before, and soon they reached that age where boys grow like weeds – one day you have to force them to take a bath, and the next they’re taller than you, with baritone in their words. Their dispositions didn’t change overmuch – they just settled into themselves over the years. Blake found teachers – some stranger than he, honestly – who adored him and gave him passing marks just for being Blake, writing his stories and scribbling his doodles. He never was all that interested in the girls, so of course some of the stranger ones pursued him for a time. Nothing really stuck. Blake just never did have a mind for common everyday matters, like the simple give and take of conversation or even holding the door for a lady.
Dante tried, bless him, but those know-nothing girls thought him too serious. Too earnest. Well, what’s wrong with that? Youth is too ironical nowadays for their own good. Our Dante always treated a lady like a lady: minded his p’s and q’s, said “ma’am” or “miss,” never tried anything untoward. They laughed at him. They did! Called him a mama’s boy, even “queer.” And they didn’t mean “funny.” To think! Not our son. Not in a hundred thousand years.
He’s a lawyer now, settled down nearby with a nice girl from good stock. No children yet, but they’re trying. We ask about it every day. Blake, you may have supposed by now, still has not found his path. Has delusions of being a writer of some kind – living in sin, meanwhile, doing God knows what all day with these other “artists” off in the ghetto slums of New York City.
Really, though, it’s impossible to compare them. If both our boys were drowning, we’d drown ourselves to save them both. They were loved equally, always, and no one could ever say different.
But if we had to choose…?