Oh, yes, and we knew about the middle-of-the-road too: whether aproned, or suited, or sprightly in casual dress, merging with bored legions, jockeying for position at the coffee kiosk, shoving through the train doors, squeezing into elevators; those who did what they did for no other reason than there simply wasn't anything else to do with one's life but work, work, work. No, we were not the first to observe that existence, no matter how modern, how close, and how cozy, was futile. And we would not be the last. But, in any case, we could at least rest easy in the fact that every morning, arm-in-arm, we swore to take the high road.

We had taken to sleeping on the floor, wrapped in newspaper. We'd given away our blankets to the cold and the pungent, and thought we might as well go all the way and give up our apartment to a huddled, hungry family but we stopped just short of it. We were cowards in our way. We ate out of cans. It was a habit acquired from our father, an average man in every respect except that he was prone to fits of paranoid delusion. He made sure the cabinets were forever full of canned foods, in case the great catastrophe ever came. It never did. But sometimes, when we'd run short of money, or just for a change of pace, we’d eat out of cans—corned beef hash, creamed corn, condensed soup—and boxes of dried, powered milk, and flakes of freeze-dried mashed potatoes in chrome-colored bags like the solar shields on the space shuttle. War rations. And he would tell us, by candle-light, of the great war, The War to End All Wars, Pt. II, in which he'd been a private but was damn proud all the same, cause he had rid the world of “that motherfucker Hitler and his motherfuckin goddam fucking Red Nazis.” Only he said “Nazis” like “Naazees,” which of course made them even more colorful. And we'd sit wide-eyed, entranced by language only heard in trenches - gory, filthy language, bathed in looted French wines, and the loins of lonely country girls.

He knew how to suffer, that old stalwart of the Greatest Generation, and, by golly, we would too, even if it meant we ran the risk of leaning rather too heavily on nostalgia. It was the high road was for us, come boom or bust, we'd no more use for crass materialism than we had for fancy titles, powdered wigs, and shoes with buckles.

My brother had a solid gig selling The Daily Cornet on the street corner. I happened to write a weekly column for that same rag. Nothing special, just local color: baby found in dumpster, Mr. and Mrs. Murder-Suicide, disappearing socialite, politico stabs rival big fat boss in back, protestors protest the death of the protest—the usual. There seemed little difference between our two vocations, each one clamoring, morning upon morning, for the attention of the passing herds. He was not unintelligent, my brother, and had had a decent enough education, but he had no ambition whatsoever, and for that I envied him.

Every Sunday, my brother and I slaved the day away at the local downtown soup kitchen. It was satisfying work, because the quality of the food was rarely at issue, only that it filled lots and lots and lots of hungry bellies. I sometimes yearned to try something different: smaller portions, an exotic recipe from a Southeast Asian cookbook I had owned for years but never opened, themed dishes. My ideas were flatly rejected by the director of the kitchen. I remember at the time I had muttered something about sumptuary laws for the homeless, but he, the petty tyrant, had pretended not to know what I had meant. During the week I went back to my office, read the wires, made some phone calls, put the next day's tragedy in words. No one there, of course, had any inkling that I'd taken to the high road. Our brief exchanges were confined to the weather, for the most part, the outcomes of sporting events, the general state of affairs in the world, interspersed with adolescent pranksterism. My brother also, come Monday, returned to his street corner. In the evenings we came home and lit candles and ate out of cans and concocted and embellished our own personal war lore. Life, it seemed, could go on like this forever.

What was it we were after anyway? Oh, we had no illusions, mind you. We were not so maniacal as to believe that our exercise would yield much sustenance—spiritual, or otherwise—for the millions of hungry nothings in our city. As I said, my brother was blithely devoid of ambition, and I had just enough to stay employed. Maybe the austerity of the high road made us feel somewhat like the Puritan fathers. Yes, that was it. It took us several days of wrangling to decide who was Increase and who Cotton. In the end I took the former, because I was the elder, but I sometimes think things would have turned out differently had I fought for Cotton.

My mother had left us, my father, my brother, and I, long ago to marry a man of wealth and distinction. Not long after that she left that man to marry another of even more wealth and more distinction. Both of these men were Evangelists by trade. We had joked at the time, among the three of us, that she would never be happy until she married God himself, then we ho-ho-ed and har-har-ed as we saw her swoon and writhe like St. Theresa at the touch of the Almighty. It was obvious that this joke pained my father. How indeed, his puckered forehead said, could a man stand to be cuckolded by God?

It was after my mother's third marriage that my brother and I had vowed to always take the high road. I had come by the phrase from our landlord, a man named Al Sutton. We called him All-the-Sudden, because he'd shown up at the newspaper office personally to place an ad for the apartment on the exact day we’d begun to look for one. While signing the lease over chicken and waffles, I had related to All-the-Sudden the circumstances surrounding our estrangement from our mother. Her betrayal, I had made him understand, was unforgivable. He showed no surprise. He had only raised his eyebrows and said in a basso profundo, "Well, sometimes you've got to take the high road." This seemed to us a very sage saying.

It was shortly after this that my father came to visit. My brother was not pleased, but did his best not to show it, in accordance with our principles. We sat on magazines on the floor of the apartment and ate out of cans. We made a concession and bought a blanket and pillow for my father, who had not thought to bring his own. He complained that the floor hurt his back but we refused to buy him a bed, even when he suggested some inflatable monstrosity that came with its own blower-upper. On the second night of his visit he told us why he had come.

"Boys," he said with a sneer, one end of his mouth clamped down on an unlit cigar, "it's long past time we settled a little score with your mother."

My brother looked away. I stared at my father blankly as though I had not heard him.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"You heard me," he said. "Why that woman feasts on lobster tails and strings her gorgeous, swanlike neck with pearls, while her boys eat fucking dogfood with… sporks. The universe is outta wack, boyos, and I for one..."

I glanced at my brother, who face bore a look of unmitigated disgust. He was an emotional ascetic, him.

"Daddy," I said, "It’s not dogfood. It’s MeatUms Pasta Food. And furthermore, there is no reason to trouble the poor woman. She suffers enough, I'm quite sure of it."

"You think?" he said, a glimmer of hope in his good eye (he had lost the other one in the war).

"I know so, Pop, I just do," I reassured him. My brother fixed his eyes on the ceiling.

"Well, that ain't what I call suffrin at all," says he, "and if you two fuckin pansies ain't men enough to do something about it, then it's high time yer old man did it for you—livin high on the hog while her boys live in squalor. It ain’t meet, and I aim to fix ‘er. Yup, I’ll get ‘er done."

It was this tough-guy put-on way of speaking he had about him that really put my brother off, I'm sure of it, copied, no-doubt, from cheap, pulpy novels and detective comics read in bed by moonlight. But I loved my old dad as sure as I loved creamed corn. I resolved to hear him out, as he had defeated the Germans, and was highly rational, even when preparing for Apocalypse.

"What say you, Cotton?" I said. "Shall we hear the old man's plan?"

"What's that you called him?" says Dad, "Cotton? I named him Gerald. His name is Gerald."

"Pardon us, old dad, but we've assumed other identities for the sake of a top-secret project."

He gave us a look with that eye, I tell you, that would melt steel, but we held firm in our decision to tell no one, not even our reverend father, of our methods. Such indiscretion was not only a violation of principles but in fact, also the absolute death of the high road.

"Well," says the old billy-goat gruff, "You two fruits can keep your girly little secrets, I don't give a shit. Just as long as you back your old dad when we rob your mother blind!"

And before we (or I, rather, as my brother had ascended to the third plane of absolute indifference) could react to the previous exclamation, the old soldier pulled from his duffel a cardboard tube. He dislodged from the tube a sheaf of blueprints, carefully hand drawn by himself, of the palace in which my dear mother lived with husband and family number three. There he was, crazy old one-eyed dotard, bent double over his plans, which he'd spread out all over the floor. He mumbled and pointed out ingresses and egresses. I, for one, was engrossed.

My father rose to his full height of five feet and one inch, stuck out his chin, clamped his cigar tightly in his jaws and began, with the free side of his mouth, in the most abominable language, to further inveigh against our mother for the squalid state in which we lived. What was I to do? I could not reveal that we'd taken up arms against high living. No this I could not do, to this man who had shot at Germans and bedded French prostitutes and slept in dank dark trenches just so that his sons and theirs could have the very best of what life had to offer. How could I tell the old warhorse that we thumbed our noses at the automobile and the hi-fi and the microwave? It would have shaken him to his very foundations. I acquiesced to his plan. Because to make an old man happy and a rich woman poor, were in my estimation, high roads indeed. And besides that, Cotton and I were flat broke.

My brother, on the other hand, would have none of it.

"I'll have none of it," says he, "I don't cotton to this at all."

This set the old man off something powerful. He stood up even taller, barking orders, shouting out commands, and then I realized something else. This rude adventure was for him much more: an opportunity, his first and probably his last, to run the show, one for which he'd waited fifty… some-odd years for. Well, I wouldn't let him down. Cotton just would though.

We entered through the ventilation shafts when no one was at home. His and her highness had left town for the weekend. We raided the old woman's drawers and swathed ourselves in silk and ermine, clasped around our necks her cameo broaches, showered ourselves with French parfum and rolled about the house cackling with wicked glee. We poured ourselves glass after crystal glass of fine champagne, smashing a glass after each sip. We lit a fire and fed it with the photographs of she and the Reverend Hogarth Huddlebottom and his ugly, swine-faced children, and we danced around the fire, arm in arm.

"Oh, we're livin the high life now, me boy, ain't we?" screamed old dad.

"That we are old dad, that we are," I shouted back, my head wrapped up in pink chiffon.

Before old dad and I could crack the safe, the front door burst wide open, and in burst mom and Hogarth with a detail of hired thugs, and dad and I were caught huddling together in her lingerie and foxfur shawls and all. I now think, in hindsight, that it was a rather low thing to do.

My brother would visit us both in the prison. He never stayed long. He had changed his name by law to Cotton Mather, moved up North, and joined up with a Dutch arts and crafts guild of sorts. He brought us tiny, hand-woven baskets the size of thimbles and rolled up inside them we would find tiny prayer tracts in Dutch. Cotton was unable to translate them. My mother never visited, and when I wrote her she would not respond. My final letter to her was, I will admit, quite bitter, but my anger was directed toward myself. I had betrayed my principles. I had stepped off the high road and there was no going back. In the letter I wanted to tell her how much I had suffered for the good of mankind, how badly I had wanted to change the world for the better. But I did not believe a word of that. Instead I wrote the following.

Dearest Mother,

How are you? How is Hogarth? Please say hello for me. Dad and I are fine, resigned to rotting away for six more months inside this house of pain. He sends his regards. I must be honest with you, my dear Mother; I've never found a way to excuse you for abandoning your family. Cotton (that's Gerald) and I had great hopes for the future. We clung, as children do, to the grand idea that we would live to see the continents shift again, until their borders met and we could walk to China. Yes, it was a childish dream, but we dreamt it for you. I will sign off now. I know you are busy stuffing yourself with pheasant and luxuriating in a bath of mother-of-pearl. Someday I will make you proud, but not, perhaps, today.

Your loving son,
Increase