Hollis

Hollis is Auden’s older brother, a restless presence whose childhood demands shaped the family’s roles and whose long absence later made his approval of Auden’s changes especially meaningful. He is associated with childhood exhaustion, wandering abroad, intermittent contact, and a return that lets him see his sister as someone making a life of her own.

Identity and Family Background

Hollis’s name connects him to his father’s intellectual world: Auden explains that her father named him for Detram Hollis, a professor he greatly admired, just as he named her for the poet W. H. Auden. The names are not incidental decorations in the family. Auden remembers wishing for a more ordinary name, while her mother presented the literary reference as a test of whether other people might prove intellectually compatible. Hollis’s inherited name thus belongs to the same cultivated family culture that helped define Auden’s childhood.

The siblings, however, occupied sharply different positions within that household. Auden describes Hollis as a colicky baby and hyperactive toddler, later characterized as spirited but difficult; he required constant supervision and, in her account, wore their parents out. Auden became the quiet counterpart: even at three, she sat through adult conversations about literature, coloring rather than interrupting. While Hollis drew attention through the effort of managing him, she learned to entertain herself and pursue schoolwork, which reliably attracted her parents’ notice. The contrast is not simply between an unruly child and a well-behaved one: it sets up the unequal kinds of attention each sibling received.

Distance and Intermittent Contact

By the time Auden describes the family’s later circumstances, Hollis is wandering around Europe and communicating only occasionally by email. His messages offer another revelation about what he might do with his life, followed by a request for money to put the idea into action. Their parents can make his absence sound artistic by imagining him at the Eiffel Tower rather than at the Quik Zip, but Auden’s dry comparison keeps the glamour in perspective. His travels may supply a better story for family friends; they do not make him a consistently present brother.

Their relationship nevertheless retains familiar, informal points of connection. During a late-night party, Auden receives a call from Hollis and recognizes him as the other man who regularly leaves her wondering. He begins a guessing game by asking where he is, one they have played before and in which Auden says she has always lost. The exchange establishes a recurring ritual between them without making their communication seem close or dependable: the game offers shared history, while the call arrives amid Auden’s uncertainty about other relationships and does not resolve the distance between siblings.

Gifts, Partners, and Recognition

One earlier contact comes through Tara, who introduces herself as Hollis’s girlfriend and says he asked her to deliver something while she was passing through on her way home. The package, sent straight from Greece, is a small glass picture frame with colorful stones and the words THE BEST OF TIMES etched along its bottom. Inside is a photograph of Hollis in front of the Taj Mahal, smiling in cargo shorts and a T-shirt with a backpack over one shoulder. The souvenir compresses his travels into a portable image: Auden receives evidence of where he has been, and of the relaxed, mobile version of himself that the photograph preserves.

The delivery also shows how Hollis’s presence can be mediated by other people. Tara brings the gift in person, embraces Auden, and explains its origin; Hollis himself is absent from the exchange. Later, when Auden raises Tara’s name with him, his response suggests that he does not immediately recognize whom she means. The text does not establish what became of their relationship, but the brief mismatch between Tara’s confident introduction and Hollis’s uncertain response reinforces the fragmentary quality of the information Auden receives about his life.

After more than two years away, Hollis returns by car with Laura. Auden recognizes him as essentially the same, though a little thinner and shaggier-haired. Laura, too, seems familiar before Auden understands why: Heidi points out that Laura looks strikingly like Victoria West, Auden’s mother, with long dark hair, dark clothes, and very pale skin. The likeness unsettles Auden as the visitors approach. Hollis’s homecoming therefore brings not only a familiar brother back into the house but also an unexpected resemblance that makes the arrival feel charged with family echoes. The evidence presents Laura as accompanying him, but does not specify their relationship.

Hollis’s View of Auden’s Summer

Later, Hollis and Auden walk toward the Last Chance, where they take a booth by the window. Before their conversation, Auden has watched a young girl continue learning to ride on her own, her mother following close behind without taking over. Against that image of a child’s independent effort, Hollis tells Auden he is glad she came to Colby for the summer. He names what he is glad about: that she has been spending time there, making friends, and joining in rather than repeating the pattern of previous summers. He had worried she would spend this one as she had the others.

His remark gives their reunion a clear measure of change. The brother once remembered as the child who consumed the family’s energy now notices the life Auden has begun to build, and he understands her summer as a departure from her earlier isolation. He does not claim credit for that change or describe it as complete; his words register it from the perspective of someone who has known the old pattern and can see a difference. Hollis’s role is therefore both personal and structural: he carries the history of Auden’s childhood, yet, on his return, he becomes a witness to her having moved beyond it.