"Won't you put your suitcase down on the floor? Look, you can put it between your legs," she said in French.

He conceded, finally, and moved it from his lap to the floor. This was after my mother agreed to let him have a second bowl of ice cream. Half of the first bowl had ended up on the suitcase and I was disgusted because if I had behaved that way I wouldn't have been allowed to finish the first bowl.

We went from the kitchen to our rooms and the little brother almost fainted from shock at seeing my toys. I had twenty stuffed bears who lived on my bed whose names I changed every few days and five Barbie dolls with yellow hair who had their own beauty parlor and closet. They were spread out in different twisted positions, some undressed, some half-dressed, their tiny shoes scattered about like pieces of chewed gum. I also had a Lego set and was building a castle out of red, white, and blue bricks. There were half-constructed puzzles and coloring books everywhere.

The little brother stared but would not touch. He had his suitcase and his two trucks in his arms and these he would not part with. I naturally was bored with my own toys and wanted to play with his trucks and a tremendous fight erupted.

Candida dragged me off screaming to the kitchen, and my mother took the little brother out shopping for clothes in the neighborhood. In a moment of crisis (when I fell ill, for example) my mother's reaction was always to buy, buy, buy. I was not the victim of this crisis but the cause; suddenly my whole little world was standing on its head.

Candida was peeling potatoes and onions at the kitchen table, her large, chafed hands moving swiftly over a glass bowl. She had come from Portugal at twenty-five, without her family, and had been with us since I was two months old. I spent more time with her than anyone else, watched her cook, sew, clean, shine our shoes, and these daily routines had a calming effect on me. "I am your second mommy," she would tell me in all seriousness. She was my ally, my best friend, but she was not my protectrice although she often tried to be -- she was as terrified of my father's wrath as I was.

The kitchen was disturbingly quiet that afternoon. The radio was off and the bright light above our heads buzzed like a mosquito.

"I hate him," I told her. Candida sighed deeply but for once would not agree with me.

"He's ugly," I said. "He's dumb."

"Ay, ay, ay, Channa," she said. Candida added as, os, and is to the ends of words. "Don't talk like that."

"You don't love me anymore too," I said.

"Ay, ay, ay," she said, sighing.

The little brother spread his new clothes out on his bed, organizing by color. He put the new blue shorts with the blue pajamas, the red shirt with the red socks, and so on.

"That's not how you're supposed to do it," I said.

"Leave him alone," my mother said.

"Pour moi, pour moi, et pour moi," he said, touching each thing admiringly with a flat hand.

He brought his suitcase out from beneath the bed and opened it. He put all the clothes in and zipped it shut and put it back under the bed.

"You have a closet of your own here." My mother pointed to the unvarnished wooden closet that had arrived yesterday.

"When I go, can I take the clothes and the trucks with me?" he asked her.

"You are going to stay with us forever," she said.

He looked at her with the same expression he¹d worn when the strange woman had left him at the front door.

Every day was like a holiday that first week. I was out of school for the summer, but instead of sending me to the park or shopping for groceries with Candida, my father quit work at lunchtime and took the family out. We went rowing on the Marne, picnicking in the country, out to fancy restaurants, and walking for hours around the Latin Quarter. He took us to the Lido Club on the Champs Élysées to eat hamburgers. The little brother ate four hamburgers with fried onions (since he was allowed to so was I, but I couldn't finish my third) and then we went to the movies. We saw lots of cowboy movies in English and my father told the little brother about America.

"Ben-wa," my father called the little brother. We only spoke to him in American now, except when we were with Candida.

"Ben-wa sounds terrible in English," my father said one day. We were having lunch in the Brasserie Lipp and the little brother and I were eating escargots, pulling them out of the shells with a tiny fork and sopping the baguette in the rich butter sauce.

"Maybe we should change it?" he suggested.

"But to what?" my mother said.

"I don't know. Let him decide."

"He's too little to decide his own name," I said.

"No he's not," my mother said. She had this childish singsong tone in her voice sometimes, "Goody-goody gumdrops," she called it; I hated it, and was convinced she was using it right then to inflame my already inflamed being.

"Then I want to change my name too," I said with a mouth full of bread and sauce.

"No," my father said flatly.

"I won't answer unless you call me Jenny from now on," I said.

"I'll call you Agatha, how's that?" my mother said in that same voice.

My mother's father had died when she was sixteen and I think on some level she never grew up, was never given the opportunity to rebel against her strong father. She acted like a child with me, but the only time I ever saw her cry was when she'd describe her father, a strong-willed, handsome, blue-eyed Italian man. Sometimes she would wail like a baby and put her head down between her arms. Sometimes, in that childish voice, she would say, "My daddy was just as nice as your daddy."

"Agatha," my mother said as I sopped up the last of the escargot sauce, "would you like some dessert?"

"You're Agatha," I said.

"Cut it out, you two," my father said. "Ben-wa, would you like a new name?" He said this in American, slowly, several times, and then in French.

The little brother shrugged indifferently. You could never tell what he was thinking or if he even understood what was going on around him, and that drove me crazy too.

"Think about it," my father said. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do."

After about five days he moved his clothes from the suitcase to the closet, but kept the suitcase under the bed.

It was that night, I think, that I was awakened by terrible whimpering sounds coming through the open archway that connected our two rooms. I got up and went to his bed in my bare feet. His tile floor was cold and I sat down on his bed and tucked my feet up under my nightgown.

"What is it?" I whispered.

"Le loup-garou," he said.

"What loup-garou?" Loup-garou was the French werewolf.

"He's here."

"No he's not."

"I did pipi. They're going to beat me." He slid a hand out from under the covers and reached under the bed, his hand groping blindly in the dark space.

"Don't worry, it's still there," I said as though he were the stupidest person in the world. "And they're not going to beat you. I promise you nobody's going to beat you."

"You can draw already and you can write your own name," he said in a dismal voice.

"Didn't they teach you to draw and write There?"

He thought about this in silence for a minute. "Yes," he said finally, "but I couldn't."

"Tomorrow we'll ask Papa to show you how to write your own name. What was it like, There?" I asked.

"It was all right," he said in that indifferent tone.

"Did you have lots of friends?"

"Everyone was all right except Sister Elene. She used to beat us for doing pipi in bed."

"Where did you get that suitcase?"

"I don't remember. Leave me alone." He dug his head into the pillow.

"Take off your pajama if it's wet. Here, I'll get you another one." I went to the wall and switched on the light. I opened his closet drawer and took out another brand-new pair of pajama pants which he had folded neatly, and placed according to color, next to some socks.

"Here." I handed them to him. He changed quickly, under the sheets. His feet and knees kicked the sheets up in all directions. I put the wet pants on the floor in the corner and switched off the light.

"NON! Don't turn off the light. The loup-garou comes in the dark. Sister Elene says he only eats bad children."

"You're not bad. You're as good as can be. I'm much badder than you, and no loup-garou is going to get me."

He thought about this for a while, frowning in that stubborn way. He did not seem convinced.

"Anyway, Papa would shoot any loup-garou that tried to get in our house. You want to come sleep with me? You can sleep with me if your bed is wet."

"All right," he said, throwing back the covers. He crouched down and brought his suitcase out from beneath the bed.

"You're not going to bring that stupid old thing, too, are you? Nobody's going to take it."

"I'll just put it down beside your bed. All right?"

It was strange to have him in my bed. I had a girlfriend who lived next door who slept over sometimes. We would talk and talk until we fell asleep. I didn't know what to talk about with Benoit. It wasn't as though he'd be gone tomorrow and everything had to be said right now.

"Well, then. Good night," he said.

"Good night."

I lay awake for a while, listening to his deep and even breathing and watching his round face, his heavy eyelids, his puffy mouth, finally at peace and comfortable in sleep. I hoped his dreams were good ones. I hoped that tomorrow I would be able to be nice. When we fought and my parents were not around, Candida took my side and smacked him or sent him to play in his room. Afterward I would watch him, feeling vindicated and righteous, through the crack in his door. He would sit on the floor hunched over his trucks and hum melancholy tunes he'd make up as he went along. I adored Candida for favoring me, but I knew it was not right. The strangest thing about it was that Benoit never told on us. My parents had no idea.

Why was it so hard all the time to be nice? Wasn't it easier to be nice? Why, on the rare occasion that I was nice, did I suddenly feel so rotten about all the times I wasn't nice to him? Why did he always make me want to pull his hair or bite him as hard as I could? Either that or he gave me a feeling of utter self-disgust, emptiness, and gloom. I wished there was a place they could send me to teach me to be nice. Like the place where he had been. I only wished this for a second, because I knew it was a place where there was no Candida, no parents, and no one to protect me.

For lunch on Saturday we went to the brasserie at the end of the island on which we lived, to celebrate that Benoit had been with us a week. It had been the longest week of my life and I did not think there was anything to celebrate at all, especially if the coming weeks were going to be as long as this one.

Benoit had two slices of tarte aux framboise for dessert and my father brought up the subject of changing his name again.

"J¹ sais pas," the little brother said. He had pieces of raspberry all over his face, even high on his cheeks, and I was disgusted.

"Bill," my mother said, "why don't we give him a name. How about Anthony, like my father?"

"I told you he's too little to pick his own name. Look, he's got sticky stuff all over the place."

"Be quiet, Agatha," my mother said.

"Let's give it a little while," my father said. "Let him think about it."

After the brasserie, I liked to hold my father's hand and run along the top of the four-foot-high cement rampart that ran all along the upper quai. It gave me the feeling I could fly. Below, on the lower quai, were dogs and fishermen and the murky river splashed loudly against the embankment.

"Daddy! On the wall! On the wall!" I reached up to him. My father lifted me onto the rampart and gripped my wrist. I skipped and yelled as I ran along the two-foot-wide wall, arms spread out and flailing the air.

"MORE! MORE!" I shouted, but my father lifted me off and put me down on the sidewalk.

"Ben-wa, do you want to walk on the wall?"

"Non."

"He's such a scaredy-cat he'll never do it," I said.

"Look, I'll lift you up and you can see how you feel about it." My father only spoke to the little brother in American now, and he seemed to understand the gist of things well enough, although he would only respond in French.

He lifted Benoit onto the rampart and Benoit started to scream. Tears poured from his wide-open eyes.

"NON! NON!" he cried. He threw his arms around my father's neck and crawled onto him, his feet scrambling to hook onto something at my father¹s waist.

"It's all right. It's all right," my father kept saying.

"Papa, non, j¹veux pas! J'veux pas!"

"I told you he's scared," I said. This didn¹t make me feel better at all, though I had hoped it would. I felt sick inside from his fear and grabbed my mother's hand. She squeezed it tightly.

"I'm sorry, Mommy."

"It's not your fault."

My father's hand held the back of the little brother's neck while he rocked him from side to side. Benoit pressed his face into my father's chest.

"O, Papa," he said. "O, Papa Papa Papa. I'll walk on the wall. You'll see, I can do it."

"We'll try it some other day," my father said, walking toward our house with the little brother in his arms. "O, Papa Papa," Benoit kept saying, as though it were the only word he could remember.

My father went upstairs to his office and wrote every day but Sunday. It was the only day of the week he slept late. It was also Candida¹s day off and my mother had to go to the kitchen to pour the water into the coffeepot that Candida had left out on a tray with the cups and sugar the night before. Then we had a ritual. My mother called to me and I ran to the kitchen and went downstairs with her to their room which was below the living room. I crawled onto the enormous bed and had a glass of milk in a coffee cup while they had their coffee and discussed our plans for the day.

This was Benoit's second Sunday. When my mother called from the kitchen I stopped by Benoit's room on my way.

"It's Sunday. Are you coming?"

"Not right away," he said. He was organizing his suitcase again. It was lying open on his bed and he was taking things out and putting things in. I didn't wait to see what and ran down the hall, happy to have my parents to myself for a few minutes.

My mother's voice always sounded gravelly on Sunday mornings. She was slow to wake up and her eyes seemed puffier than on the other days.

"Where's your brother?"

"Doing something in his room."

"There's a John Wayne cowboy movie on TV at two," my father said. "We'll go have Vietnamese and then watch the movie. Maybe I'll put on my cowboy hat and boots. Maybe I'll get my pistols out too." My father had a real cowboy outfit he'd bought in the West when he was young; he liked to put it on when "humdinger" cowboy movies were on TV. He had gotten Benoit a toy cowboy hat and a gun belt, a special belt for bullets, two big black pistols, and a little cowboy vest with fringes. They'll probably both get dressed up together from now on, I thought, wanting a cowboy suit.

We heard Benoit's footsteps coming down the stairs. Something thumped on the stairs behind him.

He came in carrying the suitcase. He hopped up onto my father's side of the bed and crawled toward him with the suitcase dragging beside him. He put it down on my father's lap, over the sheet, and said, "C'est pour vous."

"For me?" my father said.

"Pour vous."

"Are you sure? My God, Ben-wa, that's the nicest present I've ever gotten in my life." My father unzipped the little suitcase and peered inside. In it was everything the little brother had arrived with, including the plaid suit he had been wearing.

In French, the little brother said, "I want to call myself little Bill."

"Little Bill? Billy. All right." My father's voice went quiet.

"Billy Anthony Willis," my mother said. "How's that, everybody? All right?"

"Billy," the little brother said.

"Isn't that something? I've hated that name all my life and he wants my name."

"Billy! Billy!" I said, jumping up and down on the bed. The cups jiggled on their saucers, my mother grabbed the tray and steadied it. She did not reprimand me.

"I just have this feeling," she said in her gravelly voice, "I really had no idea but now I think everything's going to be all right."

I see the rich velvety colors of the curtains and bedspread and the antique bedside lamps bathing us in amber light. I see the little brother's flushed and smiling face, his sweet blue eyes all watery, and the dark space glinting between his front teeth.

We had our first four-way kiss. The little brother put one arm around my father's neck and one around my mother's. I was on the other side. Our four mouths came together in a loud smack.

The happiness I felt did not last through the day, nor did it return the next day, but at the moment of the four-way kiss I was happy that he was mine and that I was his. For a short moment, I was almost in love with him, for he was certainly brave, much more so that I would ever be, and had somehow found it possible to forgive me.

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