The Bowditch twins, Wilson and Minerva, had been ten years old when the president of the United States was assassinated. This momentous, truly inexplicable event etched a deep groove in their young grey matter. Any attempt to explain it to themselves was blocked by the reaction that there must be some mistake, because it wasn’t American.

They cried without knowing why. Everything connected to the event claimed and held their attention. They watched the funeral procession in black and white. Jackie and her black veil, the boots backwards in the stirrups, the hushed voices of the commentators, the slow beat of muffled military drums.

Jackie in her black veil. Minerva imagined being behind that veil with the whole world watching your every move, having to let everyone love you. It was frightening. Wilson loved Jackie, like everybody did. He wanted to help her in some way. Those kids were a distraction, though. Who the hell names their kid John John? Someone should take those kids away, so they don’t take the focus away from Jackie. He ached with a new feeling of wanting to help her.

The assassination woke them from a dream. Until that time, it had all been a dream of mom and meals, dad and money, school, school, school. Good kids, bad kids, tears, laughter, betrayal, double-dutch, bicycles, stitches, burning leaves, Christmas, snow days, galoshes, Easter bonnets, baseball, bare feet, thunderstorms. Mom and meals, dad and money, school, school, school.

Now that the Bowditch twins had been jarred awake, they began trying to make sense of what they saw. Rots of ruck. The guy who supposedly shot Kennedy got shot on television. What was that fat asshole in the white hat supposed to be doing? It looked like he was holding the guy up so he could get shot. They must have fired that guy afterward. He was obviously incompetent.

Mom was really pretty great, nothing seemed to upset her. She made everything seem okay. Dad could be a funny guy, but he wasn’t really allowed to be funny that often, or he didn’t let himself be funny that often. That’s the way it seemed. He could throw a baseball pretty well, and he had a tweed overcoat that smelled a certain way in the winter cold. He went to work somewhere else and did something in an office. He travelled for work too, being away for days at a time.

Wilson really loved his sister Minerva. He could look into her grey-blue eyes and know what she was thinking. He loved it when her eyes twinkled with humor. He grew into the habit of making her laugh, sometimes at the wrong times.

Minerva liked being with Wilson. She knew him in her own way. He was sharp and funny. If she had known what a schtick was, she would have called it that, and she was a little in awe watching him using his schtick to get along. He could be a real smart aleck, and he tested the patience of Mom and Dad. At a certain point they would just stop responding to his provocations. Either Wilson was smarter than he seemed, or he seemed smarter than he actually was. She could never be sure of which belief she held. In any case, he acted smart, smart enough to get good grades and, for the most part, stay out of trouble.

His sister was a pretty girl, the same height as he was, with long, straight hair he’d heard someone describe as “dirty blond.” It hadn’t seemed like a nice thing to say. She was pretty quiet most of the time, “shy,” as many kids were labeled. They made it seem a bad thing, or at least not a very good thing. But he thought of her as having a lively mind, quiet or not. She was very observant. Her eyes were a window he could look through. Most of the time they saw the same things, but not always. Sometimes Wilson would question her later, after a particular encounter with the world at large. He would say something like, “What was that guy trying to say?” He often did this to confirm impressions he may have had. He didn’t automatically trust his own judgments. He rarely changed them, but he used her to “check his work,” as they said repeatedly in school, school, school.

As far as school went, they both were “good kids,” who “did well.” Elizabeth and William Bowditch were lucky that way. It had always been a little strange for the twins – being in the same grade, sharing some of the same classes. At school, Wilson had quickly become ‘Ditch’, although his teachers called him ‘Will’. Minerva had left middle school with the unfortunate nickname ‘Minnie’. They both hated it, but Minerva just got resigned to it. Will – that is, Ditch – had always called his sister ‘Vera’. For their part, the twins had converted ‘William Trent Bowditch’ to ‘Bilbo’, the nickname they used when speaking privately.

Elizabeth Reed Bowditch was a lovely person, on that nearly everyone agreed. There must have been a couple of people who didn’t like her, the ones who felt inferior before her otherworldly serenity. But these people didn’t identify themselves. They hid behind the blandness displayed by most of the acquisitive well-to-do ladies in their milieu. It was all nicey-poo everywhere, everywhere except at parent-teacher conferences, and PTA meetings. There the claws came out, each she-bear desperate to proclaim her status as a model mother by protecting and advancing her cubs no matter what the circumstances.

Much to her credit, Elizabeth Bowditch didn’t enter this ursine fray. Her two cubs were smart enough to stay out of trouble, and so no unscheduled meetings were required and parent-teacher conferences were short and sweet. There wasn’t much to say. Minerva’s grades were always excellent. Wilson’s were mostly excellent, but boys being boys, occasionally there was some fluctuation. It depended on whether Wilson was in the middle of a “really good book” the night before tests, or not. He read widely, beyond the boundaries of schoolwork.

Because it was a private school, of the “country day” variety, the students came from all over. The suburbs didn’t really have neighborhoods, or any other cohesive community, certainly not once the kids entered junior high school, when, in no particular order, they were involved with schoolwork, the quest for style, mandatory after-school sports, competitive one-upsmanship, the avoidance of humiliation, being assholes, clumsy pairing, and the dispersion of libido, almost exclusively through masturbation. The school’s traditions still included segregation by gender for most classes, except for languages – Latin, French, and Spanish – and some of the more advanced math and science classes, peopled only by the more brilliant among the student body. Remarkably, it was still a meritocracy. As a consequence, as an underclassman you could find yourself sitting next to some of the elder students, such as the slow, narcoleptic, or hopelessly stoned rich kid, or the athletically talented thug whose academic performance revived the rather old-fashioned phrase ‘dumb as a post’.

Wilson and Minerva Bowditch were watchful students, whip-smart but not showy, to the extent that none of their schoolmates found them at all remarkable. They kept to themselves, as individuals and as a pair of confidants. To meet requirements, Ditch played some desultory basketball – not quite bad enough to be cut from the squad, which would have required playing a different sport – and baseball. Ditch actually liked baseball, in part because he had some talent, but mostly because hitting a thrown hardball was a challenge he had gotten hooked on. Also, even as a lad, he had recognized that a lot of baseball consisted of standing around, running on and off the field, and by the end of the season, sporting a bit of a tan, ready for real summer to begin. He appreciated not having to wear forty pounds of equipment and assume the persona and habits of a bison, and not having to run constantly until you were bent over trying desperately to breathe, with some maniacal coach telling you, “Don’t bend over, you’ll get your wind back quicker if you stand up straight.” Uh huh, just because some maniac told him that back when he was a dumb-as-a-post student.

Minerva worked at playing field hockey in the fall, and pretended to earnestly run track in the spring. On the hockey field she was tall but slight, faster than many but not all, and she was fairly quiet. As a result, no one expected great things from her. She successfully fulfilled whatever expectations they did have. As far as track and field went, she liked wandering around the field, and even liked being on the track running in her signature event, the quarter mile. In fact, she managed to come in third or fourth in the quarter mile more than any other girl in the long history of the school. She never really got it, a sport where small groups of contestants went off and competed on their own, with all the different events going on at the same time. It looked chaotic. She never left the field until everybody seemed to be drifting away. Sports weren’t really her thing. The faculty coach didn’t pay her much attention. He had only become such as punishment for some crime of academia, if only the lack of seniority.

The good thing about track and field was that the track was next to the baseball field, and so she and Wilson could wave to each other. On non-meet days, Vera could pretend to be stretching or loosening up jogging slowly at the same time she watched her brother take batting practice, or take his turns at bat during real games. She admired his intense focus on this one aspect of the game. She was surprised to see him shrug off his natural diffidence and take pride in this one particular skill. It was strangely exhilarating to see her brother, who she knew so intimately, immersed in a team effort. Even from afar she could see that his teammates respected his skills. He was better than “pretty good,” that much she knew, but she didn’t know how good. He didn’t talk about it much at home. Their parents didn’t go to his games, for different reasons, and he was careful not to display any excitement about the sport. As a teenager, it was his duty to withhold that from his parents. It would never do, if one could help it, to display genuine enthusiasm to one’s parents.

In short, in their quiet way, Wilson and Minerva Bowditch were both too cool for school. They diligently, for the most part, fulfilled all requirements and expectations and did not stand out conspicuously. Certain faculty may have noted them as exceptional and been frustrated by their lack of drive, but their fellow students did not. Their twin-ness kept them subtly apart, and their peers couldn’t relate to their comparatively old souls.

Here was the thing, though. In spite of their relative maturity, as with all youngsters, impressions remain uncensored and could be indelible. Minerva took things in as a wordless disorder which made her anxious, fearful, and she built fragile defenses against this undifferentiated mass of sounds and pictures. Wilson, however, unbeknownst to himself, was a natural-born satirist. He connected dots and put words to pictures. His observations continually outstripped his understanding. His observations were accurate, but his lack of understanding prevented his developing compassion. He had no natural capacity for compassion. As a result, some of his apprehensions of experience, if expressed, could seem sociopathic. He’d seen enough adults look at him quizzically to learn to keep quiet as often as not, if not more often.

What additionally saved him from a more generalized rejection, what further kept him from heedlessly expressing his savage observations as a matter of course, was his intuiting of his sister’s fragile state. He grew up with the habit of lessening her burdens, easing her fears in any way he could. So he was often seen as the one putting things in the best, the gentlest, light. She was the entire focus of his compassion. Nobody could have understood this dynamic sufficiently to have intervened, to have changed history.