Even the most forbearing of men—of brothers—has a breaking point. When mine came, I ordered a special train from Manchester down to Boston and arranged for a plain, closed hack (not one of the Boston & Lowell’s emblazoned carriages), to deliver William across the river to the McLean Asylum for the Insane.

My wife pleaded with me not to take him. “I’ve read such terrible things, George.” She had waited until we were alone in our bedroom to speak. “Remember that woman in the newspapers? Her doctors were horribly cruel.”

“I’m afraid we must take testimony of that sort with a grain of salt. The lady in question, if I remember correctly, was committed by a husband with oppressive religious beliefs. And in any case,” I added, to clinch the matter, “she didn’t live in New England, but in Illinois.” Which, if not exactly the antipodes, was certainly not among the more refined regions of the country.

My wife’s face, after this week of long, taxing days, was white, her eyes strained. “But people—William’s friends—will say that we didn’t want to take care of him. That we’ve sent him away, locked him up, because he was sick or an…inconvenience.”

“He is an inconvenience! And a damned dangerous one.” Emptying my pockets onto the side table, I unclasped my watch and unbuttoned my waistcoat. “I don’t care what his friends think of me. If any hope remains for the Senate seat, I need the regard of serious men. And I’m more concerned with running the Boston & Lowell—which supports our family, I might point out, and hundreds of others.”

“But don’t you care about his…condition?”

“Who can say if it’s truly dire, in comparison with the trouble he’s caused us?”

“This is what you always do.” The strain on her face was turning to anguish. “You put your career and your railroad ahead of others. Ahead of your own brother’s welfare. And you can’t tell me that either has been as badly damaged as he is.”

Her words landed like blows on flesh made tender by my own disastrous week. “Not damaged? Am I not damaged, when the better part of my qualification is based on my family’s name and reputation? I’ve prided myself—we all have—on our descent from a man renowned for righteous judgment and leadership. How can it not be significant when the brother who shares that lineage is so obviously unstable? People will whisper, if they don’t say it to my face. They’ll have little reason not to. ‘Something is wrong with that family,’ they’ll say. ‘Blood will tell.’”

She was openly weeping. “You are more than your lineage. Things like this occur in every family, if one looks hard enough.”

I shook my head. “This isn’t like an unfortunate predisposition to gout or rheumatism—or consumption, Heaven forbid. How will you feel when it comes time for Emma to marry and whispers of a hereditary taint continue?”

My wife froze. “She’s too young. She won’t be married for years.”

“John Francis, then. He’s already had a romantic disappointment, hasn’t he? Can you be sure that William’s condition wasn’t the cause of it?”

She stared at me now in wet-eyed horror. “But you can’t send your own brother to that place just because you don’t have enough information about his illness.” She swallowed heavily. “It’s brutal.”

“Insanity in the family is brutal.”

“But William isn’t— He was only trying to—”

I came over to her and gripped her hands. “You know what happens to men who fall into disrepute. And to their families.”

I was thinking of men I had known who’d failed in business and dwindled in health, of the embezzler who, once exposed, had swallowed poison in a Washington hotel. Even New Hampshire’s own son Franklin Pierce was drinking himself to death after his inglorious presidency. But in my mind as well were the dozens of men I’d known over the years who had been, not disgraced, but simply passed over or replaced—the small, regional railroad owners driven into bankruptcy by competition, the laborers ousted and usurped by the Otis steam shovel, the good, competent men who, after all their effort and hard work, had seen their potential wasted and their dreams derailed. To be irrelevant and disregarded seemed to me in that moment a fate every bit as bad as death.

My wife snatched her hands out of my grasp and stared up at me with red-rimmed eyes. Then, with another strangled sob, she ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

I sank into the room’s soft chair as her quick footsteps faded. But you agreed with me, I wanted to call after her. She’d said as much that first night, after Will collapsed. Did she think it was easy for me? Did she know what it cost me, day after day, to make the family’s hardest decisions? It was my duty, I knew, but wasn’t it her duty to understand and support me?

My household looked to me for guidance and strength, but what had my discipline, my caution and self-control, even my loyalty, obtained for me? Everything I had striven for was in jeopardy anyway. Neither my family name nor my position, let alone any innate ability or aptitude, could protect me from the threat of failure. Had it always been evident? Had everyone else in our acquaintance known all along—been talking over and laughing at my troubles? The thought made me shudder.

The room was still; no noise came now from any nearby chamber, no fire crackled in the grate. My hand dropped to the table beside me, to finger my railroad-issued, silver-cased English watch. William Paley, I remembered, had once described God as a watchmaker, who set the contrived Universe in motion and now only observed the operation of its mechanisms and pre-established natural laws. Could it be so?

My anger snapped, then—the reflexive, thin-skinned anger that was as much a family legacy as any claim to courage or leadership. Usually I kept my temper on a tight rein, but tonight, desperate to break the room’s oppressive silence, I snatched up the watch, hurled it toward the marble hearth, and listened with grim satisfaction to the jangle of metal and crystal as it shattered.

I am neither a poet like my brother nor a philosopher, and, heaven knows, I am no theologian, but it’s my custom in the small hours of the night to lull myself from an anxious catalog of the next day’s tasks by pondering an unanswerable question. It occurred to me once, about this time, to wonder about the first poor sufferer who had used the phrase “a thorn in one’s side.” An ancient Israelite, presumably—but not, I thought, Cain or Abel, although either would have had just cause. Nor could it be related to Christ’s bodily wound, as that was inflicted by a spear, and it seemed to have no correlation with the “stitch” one feels after running a long race.

My curiosity was piqued, and when I looked it up in the morning, I found a verse from the harsh and moralizing St. Paul, writing to those quarrelsome Corinthians: “There was given to me a thorn in my flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.” So there it was. Paul was talking about a physical infirmity, it seemed, but the broader lesson was clear. God—or rather, the Devil—gave intelligent men younger brothers in order to keep them humble.

I was well familiar with the McLean Asylum’s grounds and its drive, winding up Cobble Hill from Washington Street, since I, or at least the Boston & Lowell, had several years before built a railway line straight through the middle of the property. The strip of land had been seized legally, with the blessing of the Massachusetts legislature, since a connection across the Mystic River flats to Charlestown Harbor was clearly in the public interest. But that fact hadn’t stopped the McLean trustees from demanding a monetary settlement.

Nevertheless, the superintending Dr. Tyler, with whom I had been corresponding, offered me a cordial greeting as I alighted from the carriage into the shade of the two jutting wings of the facility’s Mansion House.

“General Stark. Good to see you, sir.” He lowered his chin into the starched folds of an old-fashioned cravat, then glanced toward the interior of the carriage. “And, of course, your unfortunate brother as well.”

“Thank you for agreeing to see us so soon.”

I followed his gaze to where William sat, staring ahead in pale, stony silence. For the journey he had been freshly shaved, but he still wore the loose trousers and collarless shirt of an invalid. His lank forelock, blond without a trace of gray, for all that he was nearly fifty years old, tumbled over his forehead without pomade, like a boy’s. One might have thought him merely ill, if not for the ugly leather gauntlets lacing his arms together to the elbows.

“William,” I said. “We’ve arrived.”

He turned his head slowly, his blank stare flicking toward me without a sign of recognition, let alone comprehension. While he had been unconscious, I had waited impatiently for him to awaken, but now that he had, I found this unblinking alertness unnerving.

Dr. Tyler made a sign. “We’ll get him settled at once.”

Two white-uniformed orderlies appeared from the columned portico, and before I could oversee William’s removal from the hack, Dr. Tyler had shepherded me up the granite steps.

Inside, the spacious central hall boasted a double staircase, with steps sweeping up left and right. But the doctor led the way to a ground-level consultation room. He waved me to a cushioned chair and, unbuttoning his frock coat, took his own place behind a desk. My letter, I saw, lay unfolded before him.

“You say your brother appears to be suffering from a paralytic mania.”

“Well…” I wanted to convey my skepticism politely, without disparagement of the medical profession as a whole. “That was the conclusion of the regimental doctor who first attended him, and of our own family physician. But neither had experience, as you do, in diseases of the mind. And he’s not, strictly speaking, paralyzed. You saw him in the carriage. And he arises from his bed quite easily.” Too easily, I knew. “Perhaps stiff is a better description. Rigid.”

“I see.” He clipped a pince-nez to his nose and dipped his pen. “And this stiffness is…generalized?”

I hesitated.

“Not confined to his face,” Dr. Tyler clarified, “or present on one side of the body more than the other.”

“Oh, no.” Now I knew what he was asking. “My father had several shocks of apoplexy before his death. We are certain that this is quite a different malady.”

He made a note. “Has your brother complained lately of fatigue?”

I hadn’t been with him enough to have any idea. “Not that I’m aware.”

“Headaches? Insomnia?”

The memory of one significant conversation surfaced. “Perhaps?”

“For how long?”

“I’m not sure.”

He made another note but did not press me further on that point. “Have you noticed significant changes in his behavior? Loss of social inhibitions, for example?”

I barked a laugh. “That would be hard to tell. William has never been inhibited in his life.”

Dr. Tyler did not smile. “What about impairments of judgment?”

It was oddly comforting to hear someone else voice the complaints I’d had for years. “His decision-making has always been…erratic.”

Dr. Tyler consulted my letter. “Would you say that he has been prone to delusions, or convinced of a grandeur in his circumstances? Did he ever engage in schemes or plans, for example, that seemed fantastical to you?”

“Yes.” I released a long-held breath of relief, or validation. “You are describing William to the letter.”

“I see.” Pressing his lips together, Dr. Tyler wiped his pen and replaced it in its holder. “Your brother is an unmarried man, you said. Of passionate and ill-regulated habits? And well-known for his…disregard of convention?”

“Not only well-known, but notorious.”

“Women?”

“Yes.”

“An excess of masturbation?”

“I have no reason to believe so,” I said stiffly.

The doctor looked apologetic. “I only mention it because disorders of the mind are sadly common, in my experience, among those of a dissolute character. It may mark me as antiquated, but I remain convinced that self-indulgence and a lack of moral discipline predispose the mind to bouts of irrationality.” He picked up my letter again. “Another possible cause of such symptoms, of course, is a significant head injury.”

I shook my head. “Not likely.” William had not been hurt, at least physically, by his latest escapades.

“It might not be a recent injury, or an especially acute one. We’ve seen cases, I’m sorry to say, in which a boy takes a blow on the head and winds up a lunatic years afterward.”

At this a cold jolt shot through my stomach. Memories flooded back of a day on the Manchester bluffs above the Amoskeag Falls, long ago. “A blow to the head could do this? Are you sure?”

“We won’t ever be sure,” he replied, seeming oblivious to my unease. “But, as I said, it’s not unheard of. We’ll know more once we’ve completed an examination.”

Rising to his feet, Dr. Tyler buttoned his frock coat with what I recognized as an air of dismissal. He smiled, an expression clearly designed to comfort anxious families—practiced, professional, thin enough to let hope slip through. “It’s very likely,” he said, “that with time and kind treatment, your brother could soon be right as a trivet.”

Right as a trivet. The trite phrase clanged in my mind as I shook Dr. Tyler’s outstretched hand. His palm was cool and impersonal, in contrast to the heat of new doubts roiling inside me. Could it be possible that William’s troubles, his whole career of nonconformity, were all my fault? And was a trivet, of all silly, homely things, an appropriate exemplar of health and sanity? Dumb and sturdy, made of cold, hard iron, its sole purpose to endure the weight of things too hot to handle—what would it mean for William to be like that? What would it mean for me?

The thought lingered, harsh and unwelcome, as I turned to leave.

It is standard procedure in the military, and good policy in any type of business, to take time after a catastrophe or setback to analyze what has gone wrong. One begins a formal inquiry by stating its purpose, and then by collecting all the pertinent details, such as the time, location, and date of the event in question; the names and histories of all the persons involved, including witnesses and injured parties; and the specific machinery, materials, or processes in use at the time. The next essential component is a thorough and systematic analysis of the causes of the accident, both immediate and underlying, or root.

Accidents being unfortunately all too common in the railroad industry, I have been obliged many times in my thirty years of work to write such reports, and my powers of method and perspicuity are often complimented. My manuscripts have been said to show a careful arrangement and a precision of chirography, or handwriting, quite remarkable in a man who has devoted himself largely to outdoor practicalities.

Would that the root causes of human conflict and catastrophes could be so easily understood and documented!

How and where should I start this analysis? Perhaps with Will’s antics at school, during the early years of my construction career. Or with his poetry—the embarrassingly suggestive verses he penned for Manchester’s Centennial celebration. Perhaps with his tragically short marriage, or with the image of the comet blazing through the Northern skies in the first violent summer of the War. I could start with the high-stepping elk team he made famous in the pages of Harper’s Weekly, or his scheme to establish an elephant herd in his Manchester zoo. I could start with myself as I am now: a contemplative, fifty-two-year-old man, three years removed from the events previously related, without a job, writing alone at night, in a dimly lit Pullman car swaying westward. Or I could start closer to the beginning.

William and I are direct descendants—great-grandsons—of Major-General John Stark, wily ranger of the French and Indian War, hero of Bennington and Bunker Hill, reckless husband of Molly Stark, and one of the towering figures of the American Revolution. As an old man, the General signed his letters “Live Free or Die,” and some people claim that it is his craggy profile that hangs above Franconia in the White Mountains. I can state unequivocally that his legacy has been as influential as any other aspect of William’s and my upbringing.

When this distinguished ancestor was twenty-three years old, he was captured by Abenaki warriors. The events became a tale told for decades afterward around New England fireplaces on long winter evenings and, for William and me, the story gained added consequence because it was our own Grand-sire who had been so brave. We often reenacted the exciting scenes on the wild, forested ridge that overlooked our home near the Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River.

On one such occasion, our cousin Henry was with us, as well as two boys, Tom and Jake, the sons of a man employed by our father, and a fluffy puppy, one of the many animals forever bounding at William’s heels. The high bluffs were ideal for boys’ enjoyment and exploration: on the top, amid outcrops of granite, trees and downed wood provided material for campfires and forts, while the sandy soil of the terraces below rewarded persistent diggers with flaked stones and arrowheads, and even a skull, if some of our older schoolfellows were to be believed.

On that particular day we found the Indian travois we had made the summer before from a pair of lashed-together saplings, and we loaded it with our doffed jackets to serve as fur pelts. During his ill-fated hunting trip some eighty years earlier, John Stark and his hunting party had been set on unawares by the Abenakis, and this was the scene we were preparing to reenact.

“Hiss!” Jake called from behind the trees.

Asserting my older-brother privilege to portray John Stark, I made a pretense of alarm. The other boys ran at me from the underbrush, armed with long sticks.

“William, my brother!” I shouted, in character. “Make haste. Save yourself!”

The real-life William escaped into the trees while the others fell upon me. We grappled for a few minutes before I let them seize me and pin my hands behind my back. They retrieved the sled with our coats, and we marched around the clearing several times to simulate the Abenakis taking John Stark to the village of St. Francis, far to the north, in Quebec.

Then William came back from the woods, and we changed roles. William became John Stark and Tom his fellow prisoner, Amos Eastman, while I squared my shoulders to represent Chief Francis Titigaw.

“Howgh,” I said, raising my palm. Our idea of Indian communication had been formed as much by The Last of the Mohicans as by family lore, and so we spoke in broken phrases, though John Stark reportedly had a good working knowledge of his captors’ language. “Palefaces must run gauntlet.”

We three “Abenaki warriors” found long sticks and faced one another. William and Tom took longer to arrange themselves, since they had to embellish each of their staffs, per the legend, with the skin of a bird or animal. Tom used a red-and-white checked handkerchief, but William, having only a small, torn kerchief, insisted on adding a blue jay’s feather.

When at last they were ready, Tom stepped forward. “I’ll thrash all your young men!”

Henry, Jake, and I roared our indignation and rained blows on him as he made his way between us. We were careful to strike one at a time, and to aim the whacks so that they met his stick cleanly. When Tom reached the end, he turned Indian and took the place next to mine, to even out the rows.

Then it was William’s turn. Planting his feet, he raised his chin and shouted, with a glee that has lingered long in my memory, “I will kiss all your women!” He swung his stick toward Jake’s midsection, but his cry had prepared the other boy to parry.

Now, I don’t believe for one minute that this threat was what John Stark actually said. Most grown men who know the story assume, as I do, that his taunt translates more accurately to “I will fuck all your women.” Our mother had primmed her mouth when she told us the bowdlerized story, and my cousin Henry used the same version years later, when he edited the General’s memoirs for publication. Indeed, it is possible that “kiss” would have been more accurate, since John Stark, I’m convinced, meant that he would seduce the tribe’s maidens rather than rape them. But I include the version with the vulgarity to give you a better idea of the bold and exuberant, the audacious brand of courage that became the model against which all Stark descendants measure themselves. His example taught us not only that a man must defend his person, but that the defense must be carried out with a swagger.

In real life, apparently, Chief Francis Titigaw was more amused than offended at our ancestor’s bravado, however profane, and admired the skill with which he fended off the braves’ assault. The tribe adopted John Stark and kept him for nearly a year in Canada, until the Massachusetts colony ransomed him the following spring, for one hundred and three Spanish dollars. Our Grandsire never forgot the bonds of affection that had formed between him and the tribe. Years later, as a British ranger in the French and Indian War, he refused to take part in an attack on his Abenaki foster-brothers.

But I, on that day on the bluffs above Manchester, failed to emulate Chief Titigaw’s magnanimity. The pace of our blows increased, and eventually, as I raised my bark-covered staff, its front end clipped William’s head. Staggering back toward the edge of the clearing, dazed and gasping, he might well have fallen had not a man stepped out from behind a tree and caught him. We all screamed except William himself, who looked up at the lank-haired, swarthy face above him and fainted dead away.

The man was not an Indian, of course, much less a bear (as Jake later admitted to be his first fear). He was a tramp fisherman, headed to the Falls for the annual May herring run, which, in the years before the construction of the Great Dam, was a notable event in our town. His accent revealed that he was French-Canadian, but his flashing eyes, high cheekbones, and hawk-like nose made it easy for us to imagine that he had native blood.

After he had laid William out on the ground, he doused the torn handkerchief with a flask, wrapped it around Will’s head, and melted into the woods as suddenly as he’d appeared.

William was wobbly as we helped him to his feet. Tom had the idea of carrying him down the ridge on the travois, and he ran behind an outcrop to retrieve it. Only then did we discover that Henry’s jacket, with its handsome pewter buttons, was missing from the pile of coats on the sled.

Thus, when we arrived home, we had to answer for losing the coat as well as for William’s stained, stinking kerchief and, direst sin of all, the growing knob on his temple. Mother sent our friends and cousin home, fussed over William, and bundled him and the puppy off to bed. Father, meanwhile, switched me with a birch rod for failing in my responsibility as the oldest of the group.

I lay in bed that night, my backside smarting, and wished I’d never had a brother at all.

EXALTED OBJECTS is a historical novel inspired by the lives of George and William Stark, great-grandsons of the Revolutionary War hero Major General John Stark. My fascination with their story began while I was editing an 1867 travel diary that mentioned a visit to “Mr. Stark’s Zoo” in Manchester, New Hampshire. This zoo, I discovered, had been run by the same William Stark who, as a student, had led Phillips Academy Andover’s locally infamous “Catalog Rebellion” of 1846.

William’s life, I soon learned, had been a kaleidoscope of eccentricity: the authorship of bawdy poetry, the training of an elk team that he drove through the streets, the collection of animals from all over the world. By contrast, his brother, George Stark, had been a Civil War general and an ambitious railroad magnate, with his sights set on the U.S. Senate. When I learned that William had, at last, been committed by his family to the McLean Asylum for the Insane, reportedly to stop him purchasing a herd of elephants for his zoo, I knew that the story had both conflict and a natural narrative arc. Questions about family, power, and the cost of ambition became the heart of my novel.

Set in the early Gilded Age, EXALTED OBJECTS explores the intersection of technological progress, class divisions, and humanity’s relationship with nature. Through the two brothers’ tangled bond, the novel examines the enduring tension between inherited legacy and individual freedom. Ultimately, it’s a tale of ambition and sacrifice, in which loyalty and betrayal shape the fates of two men who bear the weight of both personal demons and a family name steeped in American history.