"The Brothers" is a short story by John Cheever which first appeared in The Yale Review in June 1937.
The work was included in the short fiction collection The Way Some People Live (1943), published by Random House.
Since the divorce, the brothers routinely travel by car and ferry from Boston on Saturdays to visit the middle-aged Amy on the rural North Shore.
Jane secretly favors Kenneth, and jealously resents his failure to lavish his attention solely upon her.
She feigns a sprained ankle, but quickly forgets the injury when the trio arrive back at the house.
When a young undergraduate, George, visits Amy for dinner, Jane briefly shifts her attention to him.
When Jane asks Kenneth to dance with her, he declines, and returns to his discussion of rebuilding automobile engines with Tom.
When Jane directs a hateful glare towards Tom, he is mortified, but feels helpless to intervene on her behalf.
Tom realizes that his devotion to Kenneth is an emotional artifact forged by the suffering the boys had experienced by their parents' divorce.
[7][8] Literary critic Lynne Waldeland considers "The Brothers" "the most distinguished story in The Way Some People Live, the first of collections of Cheever's short fiction.
[12] The story is an examination of Cheever's very close and often difficult relationship with his older brother Frederick, who was almost seven years his senior.