(11 of 12)
He moves nimbly on his mental map because all parts of it are equally clear. It does not fuzz off at the edges or border on larger mysteries. You do not fade from this map; you are either there, firmly placed, or you fall off. Stelian fell off. Stelian was the older brother, who did first all the things that Michael rapidly did better. But Stelian was soft, gentle and more social, vulnerable. He was partly a boyhood role model for Michael and partly a competitor to be surpassed (as friends have been since Sandy Cohen's day). Their mother admits that the boys, though close and loving, were intense in their rivalry, and Michael, the younger, was the eventual winner in every arena.
Then, in 1951, the year Michael graduated from high school, his brother, already in college, suffered some fatal wound to that self-confidence the Dukakis-Boukis marriage was meant to instill. Stelian attempted suicide, and was committed to mental care. He lived on, erratically, for 22 more years, haunting the outskirts of his brother's career, organizing with him in the heady days of the C.O.D., winning his own term on the town-meeting committee, then changing party, competing for the votes of his parents (who had to change their registration to Republican when Stelian was on that ticket), trying to sabotage a campaign by his brother. In 1973 his bike was hit by a runaway driver; he lingered in the hospital for four months before dying, a partly shameful mystery to his family.
Especially a mystery, one would think, to Michael. Stelian was the only other Greek boy who had grown up in the same circumstances. Michael had no Greek kids in the neighborhood, peers or rivals, to compare himself with -- as Mario Cuomo, for instance, had a swarm of Italian friends to gauge himself against. In Michael's formative early years, there was not only monos mou but also oi thyo mas ("we two"). When Stelian, the soft one, went under, Michael, the quicker one, must have made something of that. But we cannot know what -- he is quietly respectful of his brother's memory, and incurious. He has forgotten many of his brother's bizarre actions, including -- most significantly -- his suicide attempt. Stelian is off the map. His brother was not Greek after all, as Michael understands Greek self-reliance and achievement.
Even Kitty is sometimes off the map, when Michael does not want to know what she is doing. She tells the famous story of hiding her dresses for years in her father's house so Michael would not see how many she had bought -- which means he did not keep track of the ones she wore. She walks on the border of his clear mental map, usually there but sometimes not. So did Sasso, proving that Dukakis can combine intimacy with a person and a carefully determined distance from some aspects of them, a distance so great as to defeat his vision.