Before I tell you more about my brother Sid, I have to tell you a little about some of our family dynamics.

It would have been hard for my mother to welcome anyone who was going to marry “her Sidney.� It would have been possible, but it would have taken someone wiser and warmer than Barbara and probably more thoughtful than any girl in her early twenties is likely to be. To win my mother’s heart, my brother’s fiancee would have had to be my mother’s ideal (good enough) and the girl would have had to go out of her way to make my mother feel cared for and important. My mother was very sensitive and had definite ideas about what was right and what was wrong. And there were my two older sisters who weren’t a piece of cake either. To be fair, I don’t think Barbara stood a chance.

Barbara committed two offenses before the wedding. She did not choose anyone from our family be in the wedding party. My mother thought I should have been Barbara’s maid of honor, at least a bridesmaid, but Barbara had her girlfriends from her sorority days. In my mother’s eyes, this omission was especially unforgivable because Sid had taken Barbara’s younger “schmendrick� brother to be his best man. My mother was certain that that was Barbara’s doing. In any case, the pattern for Sid to favor Barbara’s family and discount his own was being established.

The second thing was that my mother thought that my brother Bennie’s son, David, should be invited to the wedding. I believe David was about twelve at the time, and Barbara was not inviting any children to the wedding. Barbara didn’t have any children in her family who were close to her. I am sure my brother Bennie did not feel offended, and certainly his son didn’t care, but my mother announced that she would not go to the wedding unless David, 12, was invited.

At this time I had graduated college and had gone to Europe and I came back from Europe earlier than I might have to attend my brother’s wedding. I had missed a lot of this drama. A day or two before the wedding, my brother Bennie, David’s father, must have been over at our house when Sid strode in spitting fire, and without a word, threw an invitation down and then turned around and walked out of the house.

Now I have to backtrack some more.

When Sid was seventeen, he joined the Marines without having finished high school. I remember when he came out of the service, he came to my school and surprised me. There he was handsome in his dress uniform, getting me out of school early to spend the day with him. You can imagine my happiness.

My mother said that when my brother got out of the Marines, he had changed. He had changed in how he was to my mother. But not to my father and not to me that I had noticed.

Sid was rather footloose after the Marines. My sister Eleanor later told me he had started drinking, but I didn’t know that. Anyway, my father started a meat market for Sid. It was called the Union Market. My father started it for him, and my mother helped out in the store too, but my brother rose to the occasion. He worked hard, and he was sharp. He later built a shopping center and became a millionaire. A millionaire was bigger then than it is now.

My brother would go in to the store early, of course, and he would often take me for breakfast at a diner that friends and customers of his owned and operated — Andrew and Julie. They were brother and sister too! I could go with Sid for breakfast anytime I got up early enough, and I often would go to breakfast with him before I went to school. This was before Sid married, of course.

As it was, I could go into the store any time and take whatever I wanted, even get cash if I wanted. Until Sid married, naturally he brought meat home for us. At this time, Sid and I were the only two children still at home.

All of us (my father’s children) felt close to my father and very tender toward him. With my mother, we were all more defensive.

I have a sweet memory of Sid and my sister Eleanor and I taking my father downtown to get him new shoes. We all agreed on some brown and white shoes for him. We wouldn’t have dreamed of my father’s going by himself. It was like an outing.

It wasn’t only my brother’s marriage that distanced him from his family. My father’s death did too. This was a couple of years after my brother and Barbara had married.

It was only after my father’s death that I realized that it was my father’s presence that had kept the family together. My mother did all the cooking with great pleasure, but my father was the heart of the family. It was my father who tied us together. Despite my mother’s rigidity, she was a sweet woman, and it hurt her deeply when Sid became estranged.

You have to understand my mother. She seemed tough, but she wasn’t. She still kept Sid’s baby carriage cover and would take it out of the drawer in her bedroom every once in a while to look at it and hold it to her. She also kept, wrapped in a napkin, the first dime Sid had earned shoveling snow and had come home and given to her.

After my father died, my brother Sid took my two brothers in law into the store with him. My brothers in law delivered food to my mother, visited her, ask her what she needed. Sid did not. He had no contact with my mother. None. My mother and sisters blamed my brother’s estrangement on Barbara, his wife. I didn’t. My brother was capable of doing what he wanted.

At the same time, Barbara did not make things easy. I remember one time when it was Sid’s birthday, May 1, and I took over a bottle of wine. They both came to the door, took the wine, and did not invite me in. Although I had vowed never to be so easily hurt and offended like my mother, I kinda felt how Diane Keaton in The Godfather must have felt when Al Pacino closed the door on her.

It must have been around that time that I moved to San Francisco.

There will be a part 3 about my brother and me coming up, and I think that will be it.