O.C. Clan’s 2nd Painful Vigil : Disease: One of seven sons is dead and a second is stricken. Family is battered, torn.

NEWPORT BEACH — Having lost one son to AIDS two years ago, Noreen Maiorano now stands vigil at Kevin’s bedside, watching and waiting as another son battles the same greedy virus.

At times she is joined by other members of their sprawling clan, including Kevin’s five surviving brothers, a group stepdad Ray says used to fill “a pew and a half” at Sunday Mass.

Theirs is a family battered by twin nightmares, one played out beginning in 1989 when son Liam said he had AIDS and another now unfolding at a nursing care center where Kevin could die any day.

“They haven’t really had a chance to grieve for their first brother,” Noreen says of her other sons. “Now they’re grieving for this one.”

No one seems to know how often AIDS strikes twice in one family. The experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta don’t keep such statistics.

But having more than one gay son--as happened to the Maioranos with Kevin and Liam--is “actually quite common,” according to Dean Hamer, who led a recent National Institutes of Health study that suggests that male homosexuality may be rooted in a gene in the X chromosome.

The study suggests that 16% of all gay men will likely have one or more gay brothers, he says. Considering the high incidence of AIDS among gay men, “it will not be a terribly rare phenomenon” for two sons in a family to have the disease, Hamer says.

The Maiorano family is struggling with just such a reality, grieving as would most people over loved ones who die young. But for Kevin’s brothers, the process has taken on a new twist as they sort out memories of a complex childhood where both camaraderie and isolation played major roles.

They know what it’s like to grow up in a big family, wrestling with what it means to be a boy, defining maleness narrowly as young boys do. They remember how the “boy mold” took shape in their family and the occasional taunting of two brothers who sometimes did not fit.

“I’m probably the most guilty of all of them,” says Joe Meuse, the oldest brother who’s been absent from the family vigil since bolting in tears after a brief visit six weeks ago. “I used to be pretty much unmerciful to (Kevin and Liam). . . It would drive my mom crazy because I’d be picking on them for hours.

“And I feel pretty bad about that,” he adds. “If I had anything to do over, I probably wouldn’t have been so tough on them.”

It’s been two dozen years since the Meuse brothers saw their father. Joe was almost 12 when his dad left; the twins, Barry and Brian, were still toddlers. The middle boys--Tony, Liam and Kevin--were all in elementary school.

With their mother working in a factory, the brothers say they grew up looking out for one another.

“I’m not saying we’re the Brady Bunch or anything, but we’re all pretty close,” says Sean Maiorano, the seventh son, born 20 years ago after Ray and Noreen were married. “We stick there for each other.”

Like most other boys, they played ball in the street, roughhoused in the back yard. The difference was that there were so many of them--enough almost for a baseball team.

But Kevin and Liam were not interested in these pastimes, the brothers say. They were “loners” within their own family, occasionally suffering taunts from their siblings for not participating.

Still, Joe’s most vivid memory of Kevin is of the day his little brother signed up for Pop Warner football. Though Kevin quit shortly thereafter, Joe still cherishes the memory.

“He was the studliest kid there,” he says proudly. “He was really in good shape. We thought we had changed him.”

Sean says he grew up proud of his family, puffing up when his friends would say, “Hey, you’re brothers are all so cool.” But he admits, “it was kind of a hard life” for Kevin and Liam, recalling the way his brothers would at times call them their “sisters.”

And Joe has a darker memory, about the time Kevin and Liam were “jumped” once by other boys. “I don’t know exactly what happened, my mom wouldn’t tell us,” he says, “but I went out and tried to drag the kid out of his house. And I went after his dad too.”

But Joe says he didn’t know his two brothers were gay until they came out of the closet in Orange County in the early 1980s while he was playing semipro baseball in Boston.

“My reaction when I found out. . ,” Joe says, was “I wanted to whip the tar out of them.”

Ray Maiorano, 61, who is “Dad” to most of his stepsons and has five children from a previous marriage, remembers the shock of learning later that Kevin was HIV-positive just months after Liam revealed that he had AIDS. Kevin now believes he acquired the virus while sharing a needle during a period of drug use in his late teens.

“It’s one of those situations where you tell yourself, ‘This can’t be really happening,’ ” Ray says. “We did a lot of crying for a few days.”

The parents took their ailing sons into the Huntington Beach home where they then lived, caring for them both as Liam weakened. Grief-stricken, Noreen sought help from a psychologist who encouraged her to speak openly to Liam about death, but “slowly, one step at a time.”

“That’s how I started,” she says. When he started to get sicker, I’d say, ‘You know, Liam, when the time comes for you to leave me, it’s OK for you to go.’ I see that as a blessing because I don’t think you can give your loved one a greater gift than to be able to talk about their leaving, the process of dying.

“The thing I’m grateful for,” she added, wiping at her eyes with a damp tissue, “is that before (Liam) died we had this wonderful communication going about his death, his gayness, issues in his childhood. And it’s the same process I’ve kept going with Kevin the last two years.”

After Liam died at 32, Noreen and Ray opened Annie’s House, a Costa Mesa home for people with AIDS. Named after Noreen’s mother, the financially troubled care center has consumed not only much of their time over the past two years, but also most of their retirement savings.

While some of the brothers seem at peace with their brothers’ homosexuality, others still struggle with it.

“I love them, but I don’t support their lifestyle,” says Brian, 27, who describes himself as a “born-again” Christian. “It’s almost like homophobic. I still feel that way.”

On the other hand, he is pained at the thought of losing two brothers with whom he now wishes he had spent more time.

“I missed out. . . . We could have done plenty of stuff together,” he says.

“When I lost Liam, it changed my whole life,” says Brian’s twin, Barry, who named a son after Liam. “It changed my way of thinking. I never thought it would happen again. I’m closer to Kevin than to any of my brothers. I’m going to miss him a great deal. As a matter of fact, I do now.”

Strapped to a hospital bed and suffering with brain lesions, Kevin has been largely incoherent in recent weeks, occasionally becoming lucid long enough to ask about his brothers, the dog, or his nieces and nephews.

But on Saturday, at the close of the season’s first rainfall, the old Kevin reappeared, thrilling his mom with a smile. With Noreen holding one hand and an obviously shaken brother Tony grasping the other, Kevin began to talk.

“I’m so glad you’re here Tony,” he says. “I’m happy, unbelievably happy. . . . I just love my family being here. I do. I do.”

He chatted until he tired. The room emptied, leaving only Kevin with his mother at his side.

The sons acknowledge that AIDS has changed their mother, in that her commitment to help people with the disease has become a mission that has lent new meaning to her life. For the most part, they are proud.

“She’s found something she has passion for,” Sean says. “It’s a great thing.”

“I think she’s being blessed,” added Brian, “and that’s all I can say.”

For others, however, their mother’s commitment to AIDS patients feels more like another loss.

“I don’t get to spend quality time with her and when I do see her it’s in the hospital,” Tony says. “She won’t take time to come walk on the beach with me, have some tea, coffee. It’s hard for me to understand. I feel like, in a lot of ways, I’ve lost my mom.”

And as Tony’s mom immerses herself in this latest family crisis, big brother Joe has pulled away, distancing himself from “the crying ward” and a disease that has shattered his family.

“I think AIDS not only kills the individual, it tears the family apart,” Joe says. “And, I don’t know, to be honest with you, if the pieces ever get put back together.”