Brother.

WHAT was young Billy like? A pigeon-toed, skinny little boy in short pants, his bony knees covered with scabs, too busy asking a question to watch where he was going. As sixth in a family of ten, his boast was that he was the top of the bottom half. I was firmly top half. Though low on the totem pole, Billy was no copycat. He didn't hunt like John, or love nature like Jim, or play golf and tennis like Allie or me. His great enthusiasms were riding: With Jane and Patricia, the sisters who flanked him, he explored every dirt road and trail around our home in Sharon, Conn., and he sailed. Oh, how he loved sailing. His greatest aspiration, as a boy, was to cop the battered faux-silver trophy for the most wins in the weekly "regatta" on the grandly named but diminutive Lake Wononscopomuc (length: one mile). His great love--from the day of her birth--was his red-headed, just-younger sister, Patricia (Tish).

But what I remember most about him was his inquisitiveness. He wanted to know the answers to everything, and as one of his more patient seniors, I heard a lot of questions.

One weekend when he was home from Millbrook School and I from Smith College (we were both sophomores), he asked me so many questions about college life that, probably to shut him up, I said: "Bill, why don't you come up to Smith for a weekend and see for yourself?"

And so he did, and was transported at sharing the milieu of such worldly sophisticates as my 19-year-old friends and I. The weekend culminated in a wild toboggan ride at Mt. Tom, in Holyoke. Billy rode up front in the scariest position. At the end of the ride, red-cheeked and breathless, excited and happy, he insisted on buying us all hot chocolates.

Before he left Northampton he made me promise that when he was a college man, at Yale, I would spend a weekend with him, no matter how old I was. But it was not to happen. A world war intervened. So it was after six years, not three, and after Army service that Bill matriculated at Yale--by which time I was working round-the-clock shifts at United Press in New York, that Smith weekend a lifetime behind us.

Nearly ten years later, when I was with UP in Paris, the phone did ring. It was Bill (no longer Billy), inviting me to work at his newly founded NATIONAL REVIEW, the best invitation I ever received, the opening to a wondrous and fulfilling life, courtesy--as so much in so many peoples' lives--of my brother Bill.

Priscilla Buckley is a former managing editor and senior editor of NR.