Fully mended, and seeking to settle down

Third in a four-part series exploring the experiences of two brothers, one gay and one straight, celebrating their weddings this year.

It was the summer of 2002, and Eric and Brian Hyett were strolling under the stars along the narrow streets of Montolieu, a medieval town in southern France known for its bookstores and olive groves. They had come to think and to write, students once again in one of their mother's poetry workshops.

As they walked, Brian launched into a topic much on his mind. At 28, he felt ready to settle down. And he knew just the kind of woman he wanted.

"I don't think I'm going to end up with a blond girl," he said, as both recall it.

No, he went on, she would have dark hair. And blue or green eyes. And be no taller than him.

Eric had to laugh. He couldn't believe his brother's sketch was so specific.

Making their way through the village, the two basked in a sense of triumph. Their last trip here, five years earlier, had come just weeks after their parents' breakup. It had been a time so bleak they still could hardly speak of it.

But now they felt back on track. In two days, Eric would return to New York City, where he was a thriving venture capitalist, and Brian to Worcester, where he was a second-year medical student.

"She just has to be stable and committed to me in a way that no woman ever has been," Brian continued with his portrait.

And, marking a change in his thinking, he said he'd prefer to marry someone Jewish. "There is something about religion," he said, "that makes things easier."

Eric patiently heard him out -- the brothers had had such conversations in the past -- and then issued a quiet challenge.

"Listen," Eric told Brian. "I'm sick of hearing this. . . . Go find her."

 Audio: Brian meets Amy

Settling down hadn't come easily to Brian Hyett.

More than his brother, for whom academic and career achievement had seemed so effortless, he had struggled to establish a professional path. He failed to get into medical school when he first applied after college. Now a student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, he felt securely on the road to being Dr. Hyett, at last.

His medical degree would be, he said, "something that was so completely my own."

Also more than Eric, Brian was caught up directly in the aftermath of his parents' volcanic divorce. He had stayed close to his mother, Barbara. Indeed, he had chosen UMass in part so he could easily visit her in Brookline, where she now lived alone.

But he hadn't felt fully ready to press on with his life until he had ended the stony silence with his father, Norman.

For months after the 1999 divorce, he had refused to speak to Norman or answer his letters. He blamed him for betraying the family. And his anger only intensified when he learned that his father had remarried, four months after the divorce was finalized, without inviting his two sons.

But with time, and with a therapist's help, Brian let go of his rage. His efforts to assign blame in his parents' divorce, he realized, were fruitless. And so one spring day in 2000 he called Norman in Winthrop, where he lived with his new wife, Maxine Liberman, and suggested a reunion.

The two met on Newbury Street, among the city's fashionable boutiques and bistros.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," Norman began. He told his son that he had had to leave Barbara if he was ever going to be happy again.

And Brian, with difficulty, forgave him.

"If somebody's hurt you irreparably, then you don't accept that apology," he would say later. "But if somebody has hurt you and you think that there's some room for repair, then at some point you have to just say, 'OK, I forgive you.' "

The third piece that needed mending was inside: Brian saw too much of his parents' stormy side in himself.

He, like them, had a flair for high drama and arguments, slamming doors and angry exits. His romances had tended to alternate between periods of devotion and pangs of distrust. He was quick to threaten the end of a relationship, and as quick to make up with grand displays of affection: flowers, poetry, gifts.

"I was playing out things that I was seeing in my parents' marriage that were bad," he later recalled. "The lights started to come on about how I acted and how I didn't want to act."

Still, Brian didn't want to discard every aspect of his parents' marriage. He liked the fact that his parents were not shy about exhibiting affection. And that they thrived on hard work.

Most of all, he admired the family that his parents created, or "invented," as Norman put it. The years of the "Flying Hyetts" were as real as anything he had known. He still wanted that for himself, this time as a husband and father.

Chasing Amy

One month after confiding his dreams to Eric in France -- and taking in Eric's blunt exhortation -- Brian was sitting in his apartment, scrolling through an Internet site designed to help Jewish singles find each other.

He reviewed the profiles of many women, and responded to several. But he took particular note of "Amy 1270."

She was 25, pretty, and just back to Boston after living in San Francisco for a while. She liked dim sum, art galleries, and jazz.

And she had green eyes.

"Amy," Brian typed on his computer keyboard in his apartment. "Welcome to Boston! I like what I see and read in your profile . . . Please write soon if you're interested in meeting a nice, fun, creative and sane guy."

That evening, Amy Lowenthal dropped into a chair at her parents' kitchen table in Lexington. She had just come back from her job as a technical writer in Burlington. On the table was her father's laptop.

Moving back with her parents could have been worse. The oldest of four daughters, she enjoyed being at home with them. But three years after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in English, Amy imagined her life in a different place.

Months earlier, she had returned from San Francisco, where a three-year relationship with a college boyfriend had abruptly ended. They had shared an apartment in the city's Mission District, her first experience living with a man. He was a former graduate student at the University of Michigan who shared her academic bent. A Christian, he had agreed to attend Jewish conversion classes. Amy had visions of marriage.

But the romance faded. By the summer of 2002, Amy could no longer imagine a future with him. She quit her job, and made a tearful phone call to her parents and sisters.

Her sister, Bethy, 22, instantly offered to fly out to California and help move her back home.

As Amy filled boxes inside her San Francisco apartment, finished already with the desolate task of dividing his and her objects, she told her sister she was sure of one thing: She would never again live with a man unless she was engaged.

Amy saw herself as part of a generation of American women free to define feminism as they saw fit, with no sense of careerist obligation. Though many of her friends had flocked to graduate schools with soaring ambitions, Amy didn't feel the need for a high-powered career. She had considered becoming a doctor, lawyer, or English professor, but she never saw it through.

A child of the 1980s, she knew about the "mommy wars," pitting women with careers against stay-at-home mothers like her own. Amy was never an ideologue on either side, but she knew what she wanted.

Over time, she increasingly admired the sparkling stamina of her parents' marriage, the traditional roles they accepted, and the way they never seemed to take their marriage for granted.

Amy reached across the kitchen table and began typing on the laptop. She wanted to check her messages from the Jewish online dating service she had experimented with since her breakup.

"Welcome to Boston!" said the opening line from the sender. His name was Brian Hyett.

She was intrigued. She liked his online profile and his message, right down to its lack of spelling errors. But his photograph knocked her back. He had posted a bare-chested picture of himself. While she thought he looked handsome, the choice was, she thought, "a little bit weird."

When her parents, Sheldon andCheryl, joined her in the kitchen around dinnertime, Amy allowed them to assess the different candidates. They all agreed that Brian Hyett, among others, deserved a reply.

She typed back. Her response was friendly, but not too eager.

Only after several more email exchanges did the two decide to take the next step. They spoke on the phone and agreed to meet.

On the evening of Aug. 15, as the sun set on a scorching summer day, Amy arrived first at the Wasabi restaurant on Route 9 in Framingham. She wore a lavender tank top with tan slacks, opting for a casual but modest look. With no air conditioning, the restaurant was sweltering. Still, she let her curly brown hair fall loosely to her shoulders.

Within moments she saw Brian at the doorway. He wore black pants and a button-down shirt. When he approached, they shook hands. She remembers thinking to herself, "He's much cuter than his picture."

For the entire two-hour lunch, they never stopped talking. Looking straight at her, Brian talked about his struggle getting into medical school and his despair after the accidental fall, on Valentine's Day 1997, that almost took his life. He opened up on almost every topic. He told her about his love of jazz. He talked about his parents' acrimonious divorce.

At one point, he even made a joke about homosexuality, then added, "I can do that because my brother's gay."

Brian didn't waste time asking for a second date. He came on strong. Two days later, on Aug. 17, Brian took Amy to some of Boston's famous spots: the Bay Tower Room for drinks and the North End for dinner. They shared their first kiss on an old-fashioned metal swing in a North End playground. Brian paid for everything. His generosity and sense of romance overwhelmed her.

"My weekend was good -- went on another date with brian sat. night," Amy wrote in an email to a close friend. "he is a charmer . . . really one of the most romantic dates i've ever been on!"

Within days, however, she followed up that email with another reflecting her reservations.

"I feel very mixed about the brian thing," she wrote. "he is very persistent and i am much much much more cautious. he is a great kisser though! so we'll see."

Brian, as she sensed, was in full pursuit. He reveled in her beauty. When he closed his eyes at night, he saw those piercing green eyes staring at him. There was something so sweet and stable about her. He wanted that.

"I couldn't believe that, in so many ways, Amy was what I had envisioned," he said. "That's partly why I fell in love so quickly. It's almost as if I knew she was coming, and then she came."

Not that there weren't, amid the glow, some occasional shadows of doubt.

The gravest of those came after about one month of dating, when the two were strolling through the Back Bay. Amy was lamenting the friends she had left behind in San Francisco. Brian tried to console her, saying it was hard to let go of the past. But the words didn't comfort Amy, she later noted in an essay. Instead, she found them condescending.

They passed the Massachusetts Avenue bridge.

"Let me show you my favorite view of Boston!" he said breezily.

But Amy was lost in her own gloom.

"I don't need a tour guide," she snapped. "I grew up here."

Brian fell into a glum silence. Talking to a friend later that night, he said with a scowl that he never expected to see her again. But soon enough, Amy reinitiated contact and apologized for her snappishness. And this detente ushered in a rapid blossoming in their relationship. They had their arguments, sometimes fierce, tearful ones, but resolved them through hours of talking. She was not afraid to state her views -- "a good fighter," she called herself. But she was quick to apologize if she was wrong, a virtue that Brian wished he possessed.

"I've never dated anyone who can admit they are wrong, even in the middle of a fight," Brian later said.

He felt she was the missing piece to make him whole, after all these years.

"Amy is my rock," Brian said. "I've never had a rock. She's given me the strength to feel totally confident."

Meeting the brother

If Amy was truly the love of Brian's life, she would have to appreciate the other most important relationship in his life. And so, on an autumn day in 2002, Brian and Amy dropped their overnight bags in Eric's New York City apartment.

When she looked around Eric's place, she was instantly struck by how stylish it was: the immaculate kitchen, the velvet curtains, the eclectic furniture. While Amy had never had a gay friend or relative, she firmly believed that fighting for total acceptance of gays and lesbians was her generation's calling.

Brian noticed that Amy showed no discomfort at spending time with Eric -- or with the man he was dating, Joshua Glazer.

The two couples hit it off right away. They went out for sushi and ordered sandwiches from a nearby deli. On Eric's apartment deck overlooking the streets of lower Manhattan one evening, they shared bottles of wine and asked one another getting-to-know-you questions like, "If you walked into a room and had to choose the music that would play, what would it be?"

That weekend, Amy felt herself entering what she saw as the creative and compassionate world of Brian and Eric. She loved their playful banter, their inside jokes, their deep loyalty.

When Brian and Amy drove back to Massachusetts, they stayed overnight at Brian's apartment in Worcester. While Brian stayed up late studying, he offered Amy an essay he'd written about the aftermath of his Valentine's Day fall. Sitting in Brian's bed, Amy flipped through page after page.

She read about Brian's feeling of helplessness as he convalesced at his parents' Brookline home.

"I think of death, and how I cheated it, and whether or not it will be back soon," he wrote in part of the essay. "I ponder the struggle to know one's self, the time that takes. I know that I am taking advantage of time. And I know, somewhere in my heart, that all of this is a strange gift."

When Amy finished the last page, she wanted to hug this man who was so open about his suffering. Her doubts about him faded. She thought to herself, "I love this man."

The two began spending even more time together, as their relationship grew deeper -- and more complex. There was a lot to ponder, as they talked of making a life as a couple, and they didn't always agree.

Amy saw herself through the lens of her own upbringing, as primarily a wife and mother. Brian imagined theirs as a two-career household, worrying that if he were the only one pursuing his professional dream, it might create a gap -- and friction -- between them.

Brian also found he had to work through his remaining, hard-to-shake fears about marriage. Amy was ready.

Then, on the evening of Aug. 15, 2003, exactly 12 months after their first date, Brian told Amy he had a special night planned. They were living together by now, Amy having yielded on her vow not to live with a man until she was engaged. When she arrived back at their apartment to dress, she knew something was up. Red rose petals were strewn about the beige carpeting in the living room. On the bed was a formal invitation, describing "a dream date" for that night. It asked "Ms. Lowenthal" to meet him at the lobby of the apartment building at 5:30 p.m.

After Brian picked her up, he drove to the Bay Tower Room on State Street. They sat for drinks on the 33d floor of the landmark skyscraper overlooking the Boston skyline. They had 8 p.m. dinner reservations at Lucca, a restaurant in the North End. But before dinner, Brian said he wanted to stop at an ordinary metal swing set at a park near the Callahan Tunnel.

As they sat on the swings, where they had shared their first kiss, Brian pulled out a small box. There it was, a sparkling diamond engagement ring.

After dinner that night, the two strolled near Boston Harbor. Amy and Brian used separate cell phones to tell their families. Amy called her parents, then reached her sister Bethy, asking her to serve as the maid of honor. Brian called his mother, father, and then Eric.

When Eric heard the news, he screamed with excitement.

"You've made a great choice!" he told Brian.

And Eric instantly agreed to be his best man.

Patricia Wen can be reached at wen@globe.com. Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com.