Gordon Lachance and Dennis Lachance

Gordon Lachance, the younger brother of Dennis Lachance by ten years, grew up in the shadow of a sibling who was more a distant figure than a close companion. Dennis was already a teenager when Gordon was born, and by the time Gordon was old enough to form memories, Dennis had his own friends and life. The age difference meant they rarely argued or fought, but it also meant they were never truly intimate. Gordon recalls that Dennis was "hardly more than an acquaintance" and that they "ate at the same table for a lot of years, and sometimes he was my friend and sometimes my tormentor, but mostly he was, you know, just a guy." This emotional distance was compounded by their parents' open favoritism, which made Gordon feel like an invisible presence in his own home.

The Invisible Boy

Gordon's sense of invisibility was rooted in the family's dynamic. At the dinner table, conversations revolved around Dennis—his baseball games, his dates, his future in the Army—while Gordon's attempts to participate were ignored. He recalls saying "Pass the butter" only to have his father ask Dennis about the Army, and once, at age nine, he deliberately said "Please pass those goddam spuds" just to see if anyone would notice, but his mother simply continued talking to Dennis. This pattern of neglect led Gordon to identify with the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel about a Black man whom no one sees unless he "fucks up." Gordon felt that his parents looked right through him, and he came to believe that Dennis was the only child they truly cared about.

Shared Moments and a Brother's Legacy

Despite the distance, there were rare, cherished moments when Dennis included Gordon. Dennis would take him to baseball practice, where Gordon would sit on the bench, feeling "impossibly small under the sweet summer clouds," watching his brother pitch. Dennis also read him bedtime stories—not the usual fairy tales, but darker ones like "Bluebeard" and "Jack the Ripper," and a version of "Billy Goat's Gruff" where the troll wins. He taught Gordon how to play cribbage and how to do a box-shuffle with cards, skills that Gordon later realized were a piece of Dennis he could not share with others. These small gifts became precious after Dennis's death, as Gordon felt he had "so much of him" that he could not afford to pass pieces around.

Death and Its Aftermath

Dennis was killed in a Jeep accident at Fort Benning, Georgia, in April 1960, when a truck hit him broadside. Gordon cried at the news and at the funeral, but he later realized that most of his tears were for his parents, who "just fell to pieces" and never fully recovered. Dennis's room was preserved like a shrine, with his Ivy League pennants, senior pictures, and magazines still in place, a "suspended animation" that Gordon found terrible rather than sentimental. He dreaded going into the room, imagining Dennis's ghost emerging from the closet, pallid and bloody, croaking, "It should have been you, Gordon." This recurring fantasy of the dead brother in the closet later resurfaced in Gordon's early story "Stud City," where the protagonist Chico imagines his own dead brother Johnny standing in the closet, charred and whispering threats.

Writing as Reckoning

Gordon's relationship with Dennis became a central theme in his early writing. "Stud City," which he published in a college literary magazine, was the first story that felt like his own, and it was filled with echoes of Dennis: the protagonist's brother Johnny dies in a racing accident, and the story includes the same closet fantasy. Gordon acknowledges that the story was "too much Denny in it" and that he never showed it to his parents. Writing it was a way to impose control on memories that had troubled him for years, transforming childhood fears into a form he could manage. The act of writing became a means of understanding the past and preparing for mortality, a process that Gordon sees as the only reason anyone writes stories.

The Enduring Absence

Decades later, Gordon still feels the weight of Dennis's absence. He reflects that his parents' grief made them unable to see him, and that he was "the Invisible Boy" that whole summer. The memory of Dennis's preserved room and the fantasy of the closet door swinging open stayed with him, and he later used it in his fiction. Gordon's relationship with Dennis is not one of simple love or hate, but of a complex, almost clinical awe—the kind of awe "so-so Christians feel for God." When Dennis died, Gordon was "mildly shocked and mildly sad," comparing it to hearing that actor Dan Blocker had died. Yet the loss shaped his entire adolescence, driving him to seek recognition and to write stories that would make him visible.