8.

I recall a day in 1975. The air was positively Greek, sun sparkling across the splashing mild waves of Asbury Park. I lay in the sand beside my very first soon-to-be-lover, Ruth Siedman, a premed major from Flushing, and my housemate, Aaron. Ruth was a buxom brown naiad in two-piece. I was a spindly eighteen, between my freshman and sophomore years in college and caught in the grip of Hinduism. Between romps in the ocean, she poked fun at my squid-white body, as well as at my heavily underscored copy of the Upanishads, which I made a pretense of trying to read.

Later, in the early summer evening, Ruth and I sat alone, traced in salt and sand, on the front seat of Aaron’s Riviera. The scents of sweat and suntan lotion from Ruth’s body were nearly overwhelming. She turned, her reddish hair frosted blonde by the sun. My breath stopped as I leaned toward her. We kissed. We kissed and my body was locked to hers in terror, though not from inexperience. (I enjoyed that expertise in elaborate kissing peculiar to late virgins.) I was afraid in the certainty that in the arms of Ruth Siedman, with her textbook knowledge of physiology and birth control, this step would not be the last. For once I was thankful that I had to get ready to see my father.

My father and I had nothing to say to one another. But we submitted to these meetings in order to win reprieve from Angelica’s nagging guilt that she had caused the split between us. Only a few blocks from the Victorian rental where Aaron and I lived, I arrived early at the steak and ale restaurant called Lord Bumpley’s wearing an unfashionably thin tie, unpressed shirt and tire-tread sandals. Hurried and distracted, my father entered wearing a battered tweed jacket, a cigarette dripping from the corner of his mouth.

We had not seen one another in several months. Face grown deathly thin, his shoulders no longer filled his jacket. But his hands and body had ceased trembling. Since his third son’s birth, he had managed to turn off his moral seismograph.

We ordered drinks, and my father shook a new cigarette from his pack. Since that day along the highway, there had been a tacit agreement never to touch upon the past, and his violent mood swings had ceased at Dain’s death. Thus our conversation was the usual muzak of American fathers and sons. The waiter brought his scotch and my tonic. Our eyes touched, briefly, like men checking around a bathroom door. I longed to return home to Ruth, and for him to go back to his new son and Angelica.

We talked about the money Thieu had drawn out of South Vietnam, Patty Hearst, the disappearance of Hoffa.

I should note that I was a bitter disappointment to my father. After his life in politics, a son with mystical pretensions was as painful to him as any willful blow. My mother never understood that for him my very being was a kind of vengeance.

She had phoned while I was getting dressed. She asked once again why I had agreed.

“I’ve told you. It’s not for him.”

“So his wife has a nagging Catholic conscience. You tell him you want it to stop and let him handle it.”

I slipped my feet into my sandals. Downstairs, Aaron and Ruth had turned up Sly and the Family Stone. The floor buzzed.

“You know that will never happen.”

“Why not?”

I strung my tie. My room was on the top floor, under a sloped ceiling and a skylight someone had painted with a rainbow. I had papered the walls with posters of Meister Eckhart, Vishnu, the Dalai Lama …

“Because … because we’re men, I guess.”

“Come again?”

“So why don’t you call him?”

“For godssake, Joseph, he used us both. He used all three of us. And now this witless Madonna and child …”

It had never even occurred to me that my parents did not still love each other deeply. What others call passion, they had simply never learned any name for but politics.

Then her voice softened. “Aren’t there things you want? He’s your father.”

I halted, fingers tangled in my tie.

What does one ask of one’s father?

One asks to be shown how to outfit a nest with colored baubles, how to do the courting dance that gets one with wife and child. How to respond to the promising kiss of Ruth Siedman.

In the restaurant, I said, “I went to Asbury today.”

Looking over the menu, he set his cigarette in the ashtray. “That right?”

“It was a real oven. I went with some friends. A roommate and a girl. She’s premed. Wellesley.”

“I guess it’s pretty crowded these days.” He peered across the room for the waiter. “The beaches I mean.”

“Oh yes.” A laugh squeaked from my mouth like a breath dragged up with pincers because I was experiencing a mild vertigo, at the edge of asking, “So, Dad, what the heck is fucking actually like?”

He picked up his cigarette and nodded to the waiter. Behind his gray head, four men stuffed themselves into a booth and laughed at the tight fit. Once the waiter had taken our orders, my father exhaled smoke, scanned the room, and then glanced at me briefly, as though assessing an opponent. Though his manic swings had been reduced to mere moodiness, to this day I try to recall if there were signs, if I should have known something was coming.

“I never wanted a family,” he said flatly. “That wasn’t what I’d intended my life to be about.”

I peered straight at him. But his eyes were as depthless as his voice.

“I don’t apologize for any mistakes I made.” (I dropped my gaze to the table.) “It’s not as though I ran out. You probably think I’m a real son of a bitch. Well I hated everything my father stood for so I guess we all end up joining that club.” He exhaled smoke. “Anyway, with a father like me you’ll have great excuses for all your problems.”

He had another son. But he would remain for better or worse my one and only father. And that was why—for that power—why you bothered with the mating dance at all. I know now that he had planned his death even before entering Lord Bumpley’s. But at the time I couldn’t appreciate that this was my legacy, transferring what wisdom he’d gleaned from fifty years of life.

He jousted out his cigarette, stood and headed to the bathroom. Staring at the green leather where he had been, I thought seriously about leaving. It seemed a betrayal of my mother’s trust to sit through this. Then, between the frosted scrolls on the front window, I saw a man attaching our pickup to a tow bar.

I dashed back through the hall of pay phones and cigarette machines and crashed through the men’s room door.

Beneath fluorescent light, he was leaning forward over the urinal. His left hand was pressed against the wall as he turned his face. But before our eyes made contact his features twisted, as though a winch were pulling his face down through his throat. A sigh broke, and then it started. The yellow stream fanning the porcelain was suddenly marbled in red and I was stumbling back out into the restaurant.

I could not look at him until he sat, and it became clear he was no more self-conscious than before. He hadn’t recognized me in the doorway. I’d forgotten entirely about the pickup. I couldn’t have said anything, the way I felt just then. He lit a fresh cigarette.

“Look,” he said. He rolled the ash against the edge of the tray, sharpening it like a pencil.

I said, “You don’t have to explain anything,” and at that moment I meant it. I could see him dying. The shoulders of his jacket were fallen because he was collapsing inside. His fingers crushed the cigarette filter, holding on through a stab of pain. “I—didn’t mean to expose her.”

A line from the Upanishads was in my head. “As there is nothing but myself, why should I fear? Thence fear passed away. For what should I have feared? Verily fear arises from a second only.” Then I said, “I’m sorry,” and took my napkin into my fist. And then I was walking into the street in an impassive stumble, through heat and traffic, across intersections, down the three blocks to my house. I came to a halt discovering Ruth, still wearing her bathing suit, seated cross-legged on the couch with an anatomy textbook open in her lap.

“You’re back early.” She looked at the napkin in my hand. “What’s wrong?”

No scripture came to me. I simply grabbed her wrist and led her upstairs into my room. With Krishna Murti and the Apostle Paul as my witnesses, I took off my jacket, tie, shirt, and pants. Ruth stood confused, arms crossed protectively over her ribs.

“What’re you doing? What’s wrong?”

Sunset through the rainbow glass turned her hair violet. In my socks and shorts, I said to her, “Take your clothes off. Take off your clothes or I’m going to kill myself.”

It was just four weeks later that Angelica called in the late afternoon. Ruth and I were drinking beers over an early pizza dinner, debating whether to go to a Lena Wertmüller film or a lecture on feminist healing, and then Angelica was sobbing into my ear. I borrowed Aaron’s car and drove the forty miles back home through a warm rain.

I found Will locked out on the porch. He was six, wearing only a bathing suit and a Phillies cap. As I stood on the top step, rain pattered the backs of my shoulders. I turned to look at the little plastic pool catching raindrops, then across the road where George and Allen should have been parked. I had never seen the boy before. In his solid little frame and clear skin, he seemed only a particularly impressive apparition.

He had been crying. I could see in the deep eyes, in the utter openness, I could see his capacity for hurt and meditation. I thought I could detect a bit of Dain.

Angelica opened the door. Her face too was red and wet as she pushed Will back, as though to protect him from contagion. Screaming a ragged mix of English and Italian through her tears, she pulled me inside. There were no lights on in the kitchen and the clock had stopped at two-twenty. She shoved me across the linoleum, forcing me toward the stairs.

The basement smelled of the old boxes full of his books, the workbench and mouse droppings, and something I couldn’t identify. Stepping onto the cement floor, I heard Angelica sob as she tried to calm herself by scrubbing the floor overhead. Will cried again, battering a window with his fists.

Only his legs were visible. The rest of his body was cut off in shadows behind the furnace. I stepped over him to unscrew the fuses, until the crackling stopped.

He had put on his writing clothes: sweater, a pair of slippers with a hole in the bottom. It was meant to look as though he had been fixing some wiring and had unscrewed the wrong fuse. Yet the message was as clear as the shadows rippling the folds in his trouser legs, as pervasive as another scent in the air. This cover was his gift to her, to Angelica, so that she could bury him under the eyes of her church. And yet obvious enough so that I might know just how much he had learned to give up.

The problem was that he had been standing at the workbench, and as he fell, the wires must have caught on a nail and been pulled out of his hand. Probably stunned, he seemed to have grabbed them again, so that he lay with his arm awkwardly reaching up, as though desperate to die. I unhooked the wire from the nail, folded his arm across his chest, then put the wires back between his fingers.

I don’t know why I took the things from his sweater pockets. Cigarettes, matches, pliers, notepad and pencils, a roll of tape, and a business card soiled and softened from handling.

Helena Smith Kennels

Guard Dog Specialists

Training, Sales, Accessories

He had written on the back, in pencil: “Bulls and Shepherds $90–150.” While Angelica continued to scrub overhead, and Will’s cries slowed with exhaustion, whatever resentment I had ever felt toward him was finished. It was extinguished in the thought of my father—knowing he was going to die, that he was abandoning his new family—shopping for a dog to watch over them in his place.

I put the card in my pocket, and walked back upstairs. Through Will’s renewed screams, Angelica held me until she felt my erection, and then pushed me away.

I suppose that too may be where the trouble actually started. It may have been in the lies that followed, telling Angelica it was an accident, and my mother that it was not, and that he must have been unhappy, it may have been then I caught the habit of telling stories, in relationships, in print … whatever would make others feel all right. I think it possible to set such patterns by a single decision, be the moment only sufficiently grave.

My mother and I drove her Volkswagen to his home town for the funeral. She wore a red skirt and blouse, determined to show his aunts and cousins and Angelica how little she grieved. But she never opened her raincoat at the graveside. After we had left the cemetery, we drove aimlessly, for so long that the mud on our shoes dried. Still unable to abandon the charade of celebration, she stopped at a Friendly’s for ice cream.

She kept her coat on at the table. I said to her, “We don’t have to do this.”

“Don’t start with me.”

Her eyes came close, leaning so low her lapels puckered and kissed the table. Each retina swirled with thunder-heads: “It’s you and me left. Just you,” pointing at me, “and me,” pointing to herself.

I stared through the window. The drizzle had thickened, as though the present were a narrow vestibule, between the past, and the afterlife, and each threshold veiled in warm rain.

Above the horizon in the west, there appeared a little biplane trailing an advertisement for carpet cleaning. But to me it brought a different message—over the smoking river, over a muffler shop in this mill town where my father had been raised by immigrant parents:

YOU HAVE A HALF BROTHER, WHO LIKE YOU IS A HALF ORPHAN.

As though my father’s trembling spirit had invaded her, my mother’s hand rattled inside her coat for a cigarette. I knew she was afraid I might say something tender. I held up my spoon and looked at my inverted image.

Driving from the cemetery, she’d told me about the half-dozen guests at the graveside: the skeletal man in a brown leisure suit, my father’s cousin, Stan Brankovich, whose mother had spent all of her savings so her children would have to pay for her funeral, and an Aunt Sadie, taken from her family’s flat in Sarajevo for a bucket of beer in the autumn of 1931. While we drove, while I looked at old men sitting on covered porches contemplating their hands in the sodden heat, at women pushing fratted hair into shape, she recounted the feuds and resentments transplanted from the banks of the Danube and Elba and set down in American soil where they had flourished for over half a century. But as we passed the brownstone churches, the Portuguese bakeries and the textile mills that had eaten up my grandparents’ lives, and which now stood eyeless with graying plywood and For Sale signs, what I recalled was the haunchy toughness of the women gathered to his coffin. Women who had left their homes carrying a few clothes and pots, and an instinct for survival distilled from centuries of slavic winters and war into an elixir thicker and more viscous than blood; so thick that all the myths of America, the rabid good cheer and long-toothed optimism, had slid off of their shoulders like foam from sea-worn stone. The men became Americans; anonymous as the offices of insurance adjusters and the city busses they worked in. But the women, steeped in the smells of onion and cabbage and turnip in their sweltering kitchens, speaking their mother tongue over fence posts and church pews, over sweatshop tables, the women only took on the camouflage of synthetic fabrics and silvered perms. Women with mouths as tight as fists that laughed in jabs and punches, eyes rough-cut from adamant, their bodies worked and worn into rye-fed stumps.

And she was one of them. My mother.

“You know what those people did to their own kids? His own father? They insisted—insisted they do nothing but what they had done: slave out their lives in the mills and attend mass.”

The waitress set down enormous sundaes. I watched a delicate old man bring a spoon of melted ice cream quaking to his lips as old men must just then have been raising spoons of broth in Riga and Belgrade.

After her lifetime of struggle, after her petitions against both a young and an old Nixon, against the war that was now finally over, here she was, her jade green eyes, her skin as densely grained as unpainted maple, another hardened Slavic daughter. Annalise Marie Stoyanovich, née Gierek, ready to fight off Germans, or even Russians, to defend to the death what was left of her immediate blood.

And that was me. Joseph. In my thrift-store suit.

Despite all sense, I started to reach across the table. I wanted to remind her that there were no invading forces on the horizon, not even the galling thought of my father’s belated happiness. She stared away through the front window, giving me a chance to think again.

“Did you see that woman?” she demanded. “Gripping her rosary with his—his son, clinging to her hips.”

I had watched little Will Jr. on the other side of the grave. I had stared at his ruddy arms and envied him burying his face under Angelica’s black shawl. It had not occurred to me before, what his existence meant to my mother. It meant my father had done what she never would. He had replaced his missing boy.

She lit her cigarette. “Pure melodrama.” Exhale. “Medieval soap opera. There was a renaissance to wipe out that crap.” She poked the coal in my direction three dots: “Bacon, Galileo, Shakespeare. What’s the point if that’s going to survive?”

I pulled my hand back into my lap. And then all of my anxiety popped like a dry weed.

How could I tell her that my father’s other wife had sparked my first Oedipal longing, and that even at the graveside, my loins had loosened with the memory of desire? The sadness of it was unspeakable. After fighting hand to hand for reproductive rights, the homeless, for Vietnamese civilians … she had been cheated even of a mother’s right to her only son’s jealousy.

Suddenly she touched her brow as though sensing for fever. She said to the table, “I looked forward to burying him. I should feel relieved. I feel like I’ve been stood up.”

“Mother, it’s all right.”

She stared into the day. Her lips were mildly pursed and I saw where age would make its next marks, like a damp clay statue turning white and cracking at the edges.

“The relief may come later,” I said. Our sundaes were melting out of focus. “I’m glad he’s gone. I really am.”

She inhaled smoke and nodded, acknowledging what this concession might have cost me. Though I felt my bones grow heavy, I said, “I’m glad it’s you and I left. I really am glad.”

But it became intolerable trying to divert our eyes and we drove back to the motel.

I took a shower. When I came from the bathroom, she was sitting on the bed, drinking vodka from a plastic cup. She handed me a drink and I turned on the TV. Ford was telling an angry VFW hall why he had pardoned the draft dodgers. My mother set her cup atop the Gideon bible on the nightstand.

“I think I’m supposed to give you this.” She opened the drawer and removed a black book. “It arrived in the mail the day after you found him. There’s a letter to you.”

I sat on the other bed with the book, his journal, in my lap. (His only message to her was the postal date that had come with it—so she would know he had taken his own life.) We watched TV and drank for over seven hours, letting our attention dissolve into sitcoms, commercials, the stock pathos of a courtroom drama, and finally Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at 1 A.M.

I felt we should have been laughing at Jimmy Stewart’s faith in things in which we had never had faith to lose. But after Jimmy’s talk with the Lincoln Memorial, my mother said, “That was him, you know. He had that kind of moral ambition.” She exhaled smoke. “He thought you could talk people into being citizens.”

I recalled the odor of singed flesh in the basement. It was the most intimate memory I had left. And suddenly I could feel it lurking in the corners: the void no longer having him to hate would leave in her life.

Looking into Jimmy’s unshaven face, into his squeaky, filibustering vehemence, it was like searching through a family album. Squinting at each line and soft shadow, trying to detect where the bad blood had seeped in.

That was the question in my mind in the courtroom as the radiators pinged and gurgled, as the court recorder tapped away and the jury listened. Through a high window, I watched a thin plume of smoke dance up into the sky.

Throughout those days, Elaine never glanced in my direction. I think she knew it had all been a misunderstanding and that there was no hope for her case. But that was not what we were there for. The crucial thing was the ritual of support, for Felice to feel her mother’s unconditional faith, and that there were people who believed her. I swore to nearly as much. On the stand, under my own attorney’s, Marcia Solingen’s examination, I insisted that I thought the trial necessary, no matter what had happened, in order to do justice to Felice.

Half an hour later, while Angus quibbled valiantly about things I had implied in the Shore Leave Grill, she stood and sobbed to the judge that nothing had happened, that she had invented everything, and then ran from the room.

I have since tried to understand the meaning of that outburst, as well as her reasons for telling no one of our earlier and potentially much more damning encounter. To this day, in the middle of particularly dark nights, I try to put the pieces together. But in the end it always defeats me; like some flawed crossword puzzle, missing clues to key words.

If it served no other purpose, my trial offered the abortion protesters an outlet. Unable to shut down a single clinic, they set up pickets on my sidewalk. Local news channels broadcast pictures of my books being burned in a trash barrel of a downtown park.

I never complained. I never pleaded any injustice. This was my exorcism from a city whose faith I had betrayed, whose trust I had suffered for too long.

After the verdict had been announced, Judge Brown’s comments filled the hardwood vault like the tirade of a Baptist preacher. Marcia squeezed my fingers white and then Will hugged me in his big arms, never doubting this was all a misunderstanding. Once Marcia and I had broken free from the reporters, we walked to her car and she simply started to drive.

We headed east under crisp autumn sunlight, through the black and Polish neighborhoods and into the endlessly valleyed countryside punctuated with farmhouses and sleepy townships. Marcia is a compact woman, a competitive handball player with hard muscles in her jaw. I had let her handle my case because my mother had recommended her, but also because in her voice over the telephone I’d detected that nuts and bolts practicality, that midwestern impatience with speculation that I so sorely lack.

We drove through four small towns before I suggested we stop for a drink.

Inside an oak-paneled tavern with antlers over the door, we ordered bourbon and turned our glasses as though trying to strike upon the combination to a lock. Finally, I asked her to tell me about herself. She reconstructed her life—from Fargo to Kent State, to law school at Berkeley and five years with the ACLU—without its ever seeming quite hers. It was this disinterested tone that made the switch to my own life deceptively easy. I told her about Dain, about my father’s life in politics. I considered telling her about Dain’s visitations, and the copies of my books that no one had seen. But the moment passed.

Outside, a breeze rattled dry cornstalks in the sun, as though we had stepped into a Van Gogh landscape. Marcia slipped on a pair of sunglasses. We drove for another half hour before stopping to eat.

We sat at the bar and ordered lunch. Two big farm wives were having a good time over cheesecake and beer. We drank. We drank more over fried chicken and coleslaw. We talked and drank for four hours about things in the news, the publishing industry … anything but ourselves. Then I was trying to keep steady on my feet by following her heels to the car.

I can’t even remember who made the initial suggestion. We were headed back toward the city. All the necessity in the world seemed to dissolve into the sunset’s copper glare. After the weeks of accumulated stress, we fell into that chummy flirtation known best by longtime coworkers. I do remember laughing, so I imagine it was first spoken as a joke.

There was some forced humor at the expense of a porcelain poodle full of hard candies, and a woman in a yellow sweatsuit glaring at me across a registration card upon which I was writing the name Otto Baxter. However it was, I retain a distinct image of sitting on the edge of a bed in a room that smelled of mothballs, looking between my bare knees at my shoes and thinking they looked like an old man’s shoes, and that I had been in this situation somewhere before.

I remember my face wedged between hair and ear and cotton and the moment becoming only more absurd for the fact that we captured the rare, shy bird of simultaneity, which without love or passion to lift its wings, sat in the room like a decorative exotic, molting in a pet-shop cage. When I came from the bathroom the front door was open to the cold and she was waiting with the engine running. We said nothing during the drive back.

Following a sleepless night, beginning to record these memories, I drove to Albany. For four days, I walked through flats and studios and townhouses. But I was not seeking so many square feet within a particular price range, or the best morning exposure. I was in quest of an outpost. And I found it, just across the Hudson, in the old hillside city of Troy.

My reasons for moving were relatively simple. There was of course the awkwardness of remaining in Buffalo. But more importantly, I have decided that one should never live in too close proximity to the escape hatches from one’s particular despair. It breeds complacency, which is the germ of cynicism. In short, I left Buffalo, left Will and Cindi, Rachel and Isaac, for the very reasons I first went there. This is also why, despite my publisher’s offer of a pseudonym, I quit writing for children.

I confess I tried to finish the story of Henrietta. But I lacked Dain’s musing spirit. And I could no longer fail to learn this last lesson of my father’s life. I had to admit, I could not write those happy endings without spilling into each clean margin a vital portion of my soul.

I have come, then, to this city that once smoked and bustled with factories, with mills and docks and warehouses, and as the furthest navigable stretch of the Hudson, meant for many the last reach of civilization properly so called. It is here that I live in four smallish rooms, five floors above the main business street, facing west toward Rockefeller’s glistening Albany, or looking down upon pigeons as they pick through the gravel atop the marquee of Proctor’s movie theater. If you step up close to the theater’s locked gates, between the election posters, you can see fliers inside for The Little Colonel with Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore, while the marque announces an unchanging

WELC ME HOM DESERT STOR VETS

In late morning, or early afternoon, I often go out to eat at one of a half-dozen cafes where the people know me as a man who always wears the same button-down sweater vest, white dress shirt, chinos, and old running shoes, and who will talk about politics foreign and domestic for as long as you have the time. And as I sit at the lunch counter, I catch the eye of the waitress, who calls to me, “Hey, Joe, how’s government?” to which I answer, “Limping along.” And though my reply is always the same, she feels that she has had a glimpse inside the citadel. For as a freelance writer in my mother’s one-year-old lobbying agency, I compose position papers, as well as the occasional sentence adopted into a legislative speech on zoning or tax law.

They know too that in those lines I defend the defenseless of all classes, races, religions and species, champion the abused and lampoon the small-minded. They respect the fact that my words have been set down in state archives. They joke that I might myself enter politics, to which I smile, claiming I could never give up their chicken salad on whole wheat.

I see my mother for dinner on those Thursdays when she is not either working, or on vacation with a man named Art, a former union organizer and construction contractor who collects shells and deals a little Florida real estate. (She insists the state bores her. I suspect she enjoys herself enormously, reading in the sun while Art collects sand dollars and starfish.)

As for Dain, he has returned happily to the shadows of memory. At most he is a face in the corner of a glance; that visage reflected in a passing window, which one can never turn quickly enough to catch.

And I am satisfied. At times, I am even happy. I might have acted more wisely. But I might have acted very much worse, and I call that enough.

And at those times when I do feel insufferably low, I take the next train back to Buffalo. Sprawled on the floor, reading to Isaac from one of my old books, as we recite out loud the words he already knows by heart, I feel fine again. Cindi and Rachel come home from school and shopping. And though Rachel’s demeanor toward me is still tentative and awkward (she is nearly nine now, and was taunted mercilessly by her schoolmates during my trial), once Will arrives with a fraternal six-pack, everything is okay. We eat and talk, and in the morning Will drops me with a hug and a blessing at the depot. (I never see Sylvia or Max or Gordon on these visits, though I did once run into Greta. She has put her career back into high gear, while Gordon has sold off his properties and become chair of his department. As for Angus, the investigation of his grading habits turned out badly. He has since taken a position in Virginia, teaching remedial English to Navy cadets.)

Back in my rooms, busy amid the daily papers and budget and environmental impact reports, I sit down at my computer to resume the attack upon a developer who would turn the Alleghenies into a theme park, usurious health insurers, dumpers of toxic waste … translating my once marginal bile into cool-headed rhetoric. After faxing a copy to my mother’s office, I lock my door, take the squeaking elevator down, and sit at the counter of Sandy’s Coffee Mill. And there I order the special tuna melt on rye toast. Harold, a retired mailman, asks me over his hot tea and gray stubble what I think of plans to widen Pine street, “Without so much as a how-do-you-do to the people who live there.”

And being a thoughtful man, I get all the facts first. Through the kitchen pass-through, Sandy says, “I got a sister lives on Pine with two little boys and she ain’t happy one bit the way people are gonna race down that road.” Then Martha, in hair net and apron, warms my coffee: “They let you scream and spit but they always do what they want,” and I tell her, “No. No, you really can do something. You can give them a broken toe for the trouble of kicking you,” and Martha likes that, and Harold upsets his tea slamming the countertop while Sandy turns a smile back to her hissing griddle—“Go get ’em, Joe.”

If Sandy’s sister will draw up a list of her complaints and worries, I will compose the text of a petition they can all circulate. Then I return home, as satisfied as a lunch-counter activist, a mere blue-plate demagogue, can hope to be.

And the moral of this story?

In the final analysis, the fact that I never meant to touch Felice inappropriately, or that I may not have caused my brother’s death are trivial considerations. Though circumstances may bring one to act badly, such action is nonetheless wrong. For one set of conditions can always be blamed on one prior, ad infinitum, until we must eventually indict Creation. To accuse oneself for all the hurt one does may seem excessive. But to excuse a single injurious action is to implicate the universe. That is the magnificently tentative balance of a moral life. And even if I did kill my little brother, by thus driving my father to the fertile loins of Angelica da Vincini, I also helped give the world Will Jr. And in the final tally, I think the world won.

And of course there is Marcia.

After I had moved to Troy, after my mother had opened her own office and needed a lawyer on call, we began to run into each other. Though the initial meetings were terribly awkward, our earlier indiscretion was quickly forgotten. Only hours ago, in fact, before I sat down to write these concluding pages, I returned from lunch with her in the city.

I was early as usual, and to pass the time I had brought along my father’s journal. It begins in January 1950, with reflections on the Hiss conviction, and proceeds up until three nights before his own death. I only scanned the lines, leaping forward by years in search of my mother and Dain, of Will and me and Angelica. But as I suspected, we are mere footnotes at the ends of commentaries on the execution of the Rosenburgs, the falls of Stevenson and McCarthy, the rise of Castro.… I nodded to the waiter for another glass of tonic before taking out his yellowed letter, dated September 23, 1975.

Joseph,

By the time you read this it will be too late to respond. Maybe you don’t need any clarification. You can make of me whatever the hell you want.

Then I saw Marcia across the street.

Yesterday, like record numbers of our fellow citizens, we voted for a president. Waiting for the light, she waved the morning paper. I’d made a point of not watching TV or looking at newspapers, promising to let her surprise me.

Still a few tables away, the shoulder strap of her brief slung across her chest like some intrepid frontierswoman blazing a trail between salmon-colored tablecloths and cut mums, she was radiant with the things she had to tell me. I folded my father’s letter back between the pages of his journal. Grinning welcome, I rose to my feet, confident that I too had things to tell her.