The death in the family I caused occurred in 1973, when I was six and Oren four, but it took decades until I learned what truly happened that night, the blast radius of that conflagration, and its attendant consequences, widening to this day.
At the time, Al Moretti and his lover, Neal, were our neighbors at Lincoln Towers, a residential complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Its eight buildings were an agglomeration of nondescript gray brick high-rises, each thirty stories tall, though Oren and I always subtracted the absent thirteenth. They were a bit sandier and brighter than cinder block; on certain days, if the light was right, the sunset turned them gold. The higher floors enjoyed views of the Hudson and midtown’s landmarks, like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, but our fifth-floor view was more claustrophobic, looking onto the complex’s other towers, whose windows filled ours and blocked the sight of the river or the sky, and its parking lots, circular driveways, and green spaces below. It was only at the property’s northernmost edge, above Seventieth Street, that West End Avenue took on its legendary character. There the cupola-topped walkups abutted buildings with rusticated limestone facades, blackened by car exhaust but magnificent despite the grime. Their ironwork was inset with decorative lions or tritons, and their awnings, taut with the occasional gusts, snapped their canvases like expensive kites. Their marble lobbies, where a plush couch and wingback chair might be set beneath a nineteenth-century landscape, seemed more like a rich man’s smoking room than a place to wait before the doorman permitted you upstairs.
Our building’s modern, high-ceilinged lobby, meanwhile, had all the charm of an airport concourse, with a wall, opposite the mail room, covered with an ugly mosaic, the abstract image its tiles formed as large as a stegosaur but so nebulous in shape that it resisted any attempt to morph it into something I could categorize as animal, vegetable, or mineral. Our hallway was two bowling lanes long and similarly narrow, its floor tiles the hue of a neglected aquarium. As I passed each apartment’s heavy steel door, I’d catch snippets of our neighbors’ lives: the Von Wurtzels practicing their harps, the angry yap of Miss Kapner’s Chihuahua. In Al and Neal’s case, what could be overheard through their door was often shouting and, when things got really bad, the sound of a flung plate shattering or a piece of furniture thudding against a wall. Al always made a single-knuckled knock at our door afterward—three gentle taps—as if to apologize for the ruckus.
“Lily,” he’d ask my mother before she answered, “are you there?”
I made it a point to get a look at Al during these visits. The result of one brawl: his lip, swelled until its underside was exposed. After another scuffle, his plum-colored eyelid glistened so brightly it looked shellacked. Once he showed up with a gash above his hairline, the blood spidering across his forehead. He pressed his palm’s heel to his scalp to stanch it, but the wound leaked in rivulets so fast-moving it was as if he’d squeezed a soaked sponge atop his crown.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said to my mother, then shut his eyes in shame before she took his elbow and led him to the dining table to clean him up. When she was done, she poured him a drink, and they spoke in hushed tones. Al rambled, sobbing occasionally, while my mother, who was naturally reticent, listened patiently, waiting while he once again talked himself into leaving Neal. When Mom urged him to stay the night, Al said, “I can’t impose,” but then stood and walked shakily toward the couch. “Maybe I’ll just put my head down till I get unfercockt.”
I liked watching Al outstretched on our living room sofa, an ice pack pressed to his cheek. All adult pain seemed gigantic to me. With one arm draped over his eyes, the other would reach for the highball’s rim, its base leaving a circle of condensation on the floor whenever he lifted it and loudly sipped his vodka rocks. He was always gone when I woke the next morning, the only proof of his presence the ring his glass had left on the parquet.
In person, Neal was soft-spoken, almost demure. He had large, expressive eyes, and a mustache and beard that seemed more apparatus than facial hair, as if integral to the workings of his jaw. Once or twice a week, Mom had the couple over for martinis, Al excusing himself after the second to retrieve a bottle of wine from their apartment, leaving my mother and Neal alone for a few minutes. He always seemed so indrawn sitting there, his hands clasped on his lap or tucked beneath his bulging biceps. He was one of the rare people able to coax my mother out, to get her talking, to make her laugh, and in Al’s absence, them getting along almost felt like a betrayal. But I favored Neal. Al was never reluctant to correct or reprimand Oren or me in our parents’ presence, and he often failed to keep our names straight when he told us to shut up or to maybe go play outside. But Neal always greeted us with interest, actually looking at the drawings we showed him or the papier-mâché sculptures we made at school. If my mother had to step out to the store for wine or couldn’t get a sitter when she was seeing the ballet’s Sunday matinee, she occasionally left us with him, walking us down the hall, Oren and me admiring her pretty dress as she rang his apartment’s bell and then caught the elevator as soon as he answered.
Neal was a dealer in Eastern art. He owned a gallery in midtown, but he also did a great deal of business from home. Their apartment was a menagerie of paintings, silk screens, and religious sculpture that even now I’m tempted to see primarily as a reflection of their relationship: hydra-headed Naga, the snake goddess, emerging from a dragon’s mouth like a stream of Al’s profanity; fanged Kali, trident and scimitar in hand, and poor Al, I imagined, pinned like Shiva beneath Neal’s foot; boar-toothed Raijin, the Japanese thunder god, whose puck-sized drums orbited him as he squared off against Fujin, shouldering his bag of winds.
“Are they enemies?” I asked Neal as we regarded the two-paneled screen.
“Companions,” Neal said. He shrugged sheepishly and added, “They make a lot of noise.” He laughed, so I did too. To pass our time together, Neal liked to read me stories from the New English Bible. In Genesis we reread the stories about Jacob and Esau. Neal was especially fond of Exodus, while I preferred Judges—those Old Testament superheroes—but most often we returned to the adventures of David and his tussles with Saul, whose spear-throwing at his adopted son I found strangely upsetting.
“Do you trust your parents?” Neal once asked me after concluding a chapter. I was playing myself in chess—Neal had taught me the game—on an antique Indian set and moved my camel diagonally across the board to take the opposing elephant, at which point Neal apologized, adding, “Please don’t tell them I asked.”
Their corner apartment was the floor’s only three-bedroom. Our parents were in the market for more space, and upon first getting a tour my father had remarked to Neal, with his typical unwitting bluntness, “If you ever decide to move, let us know.”
But our family moved first.
That winter, my father had been touring with The Fisher King, the first of two Abe Fountain musicals in which he’d perform. Sunday was the only evening of the week he was home. After the matinee, he’d take a train from Philadelphia or D.C., then depart again the following evening. “The house is dark on Monday,” he’d explain, which always felt to me like a strange thing to say as he unpacked his bag. That night—I remember the Christmas lights were strung around our window—my parents were in their bedroom when Oren and I snuck out of ours. On the living room’s coffee table, beside a pair of empty wineglasses, were several lit candles my mother had left burning. I took the holder by its knob and, careful not to let the melted wax bleed over, led Oren into our front hall closet. “It’s a cave,” I told him upon entering, pushing away the jacket sleeves above us. “Watch out for the stalactites.” I recall him crawling past me, while I slid the door closed. When I turned and raised the candle to illuminate the darkness between us, it whuffed a sheath of dry-cleaning plastic, instantly igniting the coat within it, the jacket wondrously visible amid the flames. I dropped the candle holder and, in a panic, scooted backward, Oren doing the same but deeper into the closet.
From this point forward, my recollections grow fragmented. There is first blackness, and then I hear our cat meowing, its pitch high and desperate, a mournful sound that mimicked her name, which was French for “kitty”: Minou, she seemed to cry, Minou, Minou. The next thing I recall is Oren and I hiding behind my bed. “It’s a fire,” I said to him, “a real fire.” Then the pair of us racing to my parents’ bedroom to alert them to the blaze. Next I see my mother near the foyer, separated from me by a wall of flames. “Shel,” she screams to my father, “get the bucket!” I was sure she meant the plastic pail that I took to the beach, orange with a white handle and my name written on it in black marker, but why did she say “the bucket” instead of “the boys”? And then I was borne aloft, my father yanking my wrist above my head and carrying me in such a fashion that I occasionally touched down. My foot stamped a patch of flame on the entryway rug but didn’t burn. The lobby was filled with the evacuated tenants, all of us watching the firemen unhurriedly file in and march up the stairs. Smoke crawled along the ceiling’s recessed lights. I was in my father’s arms. He was wearing his bathrobe, the one with brown and black stripes, his only article of clothing to survive the blaze. All I could think while I held his neck was: Me, I did this.
We lost a great deal of property: clothing, furniture, jewelry. The work of several artist friends that my father never failed to remind me “might’ve become valuable one day.” The Stickley dining room set Lauren Bacall had gifted Dad for voice-coaching her in Applause. Minou, who had hidden so well my mother couldn’t find her, died from smoke inhalation—the death I caused. While my mother scrambled to secure us a new apartment, Al and Neal were kind enough to let our family move into their place. I’d have my first Saturday session with Elliott a few weeks later. For nearly a decade, and in spite of therapy, this was my version of the event. It was not that the fire was verboten in our family; more accurately, and like so many subjects in that era—think religion—it was an issue left to me to raise. As for Oren’s version, there was one critical difference in our accounts, a piece of missing information he’d ultimately supply that for years he protected like a state secret.
My parents had a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy and filed a claim. Enter the agent handling it: Nick Salvatore. In the ensuing years, after my father and mother had retold the story so many times I made it my own, the on-the-nose irony of the agent’s name would never be lost on me. My parents met him in the lobby for the inspection, this young man memorable for many reasons but to my mother because of his heart-stopping good looks. Salvatore was a classically beautiful Italian man, from his curly, squid-ink hair to the amber-buttered hue of his skin, which made his teeth appear whiter when he smiled. He wore a camel hair coat over his black suit, a pressed white shirt with a dark tie—funereal colors, my mother thought, entirely appropriate given what had befallen them. But the beacon-bright accents of his shirt and overcoat, even his name, suggested he was more like an angel—he was here to help, after all. What made her swoon, however, were his hands, in both of which he cradled hers when she greeted him. Something about their size and squareness, the hard angles of his thumbs’ metacarpals and the pronounced, indented triangles where they joined his wrists, made her desire take flight and then bloom inside her chest like fireworks. She was a deeply loyal person, incapable of infidelity, and yet it took all of her self-control not to turn to my father and say, “Why don’t you go find something else to do?”
Salvatore couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and while my parents rode the elevator with him to their devastated apartment, she was transported back to Rome, to her honeymoon, the afternoons she had to herself after the movie star Anthony Quinn, who had brought them along to Europe so my father could continue as his voice coach, had decamped with Shel to play tennis—a daily ritual that always ended with the pair eating lunch so late it pushed back dinner until nearly midnight. Come midday, when boredom and exhaustion had overwhelmed her, she fled their stuffy hotel room, abandoning her typewriter and Quinn’s rambling recorded dictation (she was transcribing his autobiography), to find somewhere to eat first and then window-shop a little, killing the rest of the afternoon at a café with a book and a carafe of wine. This was followed by an early-evening siesta that left her bright-eyed for the endless dinners, which she was bathed and dressed for long before Shel and Quinn returned. During these several-hour jaunts through Trastevere or Prati, the Foro Romano or Via del Corso, she was often accosted by such similarly gorgeous men walking Rome’s streets singly or in packs, their English poor but for the most obvious blandishments—“pretty lady” or “my beauty.” It was at these moments that she suffered neither temptation to stray nor regret at her newly betrothed state but something far sharper and more crushing because it was an emotion entirely new to her: she felt alone in her marriage.
Standing beside my mother in the lobby, my father also had a strong reaction to Mr. Salvatore’s appearance. Why, he thought, were such good looks squandered on an insurance salesman? Why couldn’t he have been similarly proportional, more symmetrical, instead of his own enormous face, from chin to crown as long as a canoe, with a brow so tall one asshole casting agent once said, “You remind me of a Jewish Herman Munster.”
To my mother, Salvatore said, “Mrs. Hurt, I’m sorry for your loss, but I promise: Nationwide is on your side. We’re gonna take care of your family.”
My father had noticed my mother’s reaction to Salvatore, her already severe shyness so intensified by his presence that she was rendered speechless. Her attraction to him was so obvious, an obviousness so closely akin to a poor performance, that my father couldn’t bear to watch. Lily grew talkative the moment they got on the elevator. By the time they arrived at the apartment door, she’d not only recounted to Salvatore the whole disaster but also confessed to a lingering sense of guilt for leaving the candles burning.
“I don’t know how I could’ve been so thoughtless,” she said.
Salvatore pressed his hand to her shoulder. He rubbed it somewhat hurriedly, like he might a homely aunt’s, but so far as Shel was concerned he kept it there a little too long.
“Aw, c’mon, Mrs. Hurt,” he said, “you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“What if one of the children had been injured?” she said. “Or worse, like our poor cat?”
Lily was crying now, and Shel was relieved. When calm, confident, her ballerina’s beauty was angular and regal, as long-necked as she was; upset, however, her features collapsed like a shrunken apple.
“Thankfully neither of them was,” he noted.
“I rushed the kids to bed,” she continued. “I left dishes in the sink and those stupid candles on the table. Shel had been gone all week, and I wanted us to have some time alone.”
What was she going to tell him next? my father wondered. That while they were making love and heard the kids scurrying around, he’d told her to ignore them, that sooner or later they’d go to sleep?
“Let the man do his job,” my father said.
Her expression grim, my mother nodded toward the door. “I don’t think I can bring myself to go in there.”
“There’s no need whatsoever,” Salvatore said.
Gathering herself, she offered her hand to him once more. “Thank you again, Mr. Salvatore.”
“Please,” he said. “Call me Nick.”
Lily smiled, then snapped open her purse and found some tissues, dabbing her eyes with them. She laughed, and the transformation back to her old self was miraculous: her face reconfiguring, her cheeks blooming with color. Salvatore smiled back.
“I have to go see about an apartment for us uptown,” she said.
Salvatore waited until her elevator arrived. Lily stepped on, and the moment after its door closed, his face darkened.
“Let’s take a look at this place already,” he said to my father.
Salvatore’s bad mood persisted throughout the inspection, which to my father felt perfunctory, infuriatingly quick. He seemed put out by having to breathe the several-day-old smoke’s still-overpowering odor, a frustration he further underscored by pinching the tarred clothes and soot-covered bed linens and then holding up his index finger in disgust, as if his pitch-black pad were evidence of a failed white-glove inspection—a sign of messiness in our life instead of its ruin.
When they were back in the hallway, Salvatore finally spoke. “Just so I’ve got this straight. Your kid sets the closet on fire. Then your wife tries to put it out while you get the building’s extinguisher. But it doesn’t work?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you keep it?”
“What?”
“The fucking defective, probably-never-inspected-in-a-million-years fire extinguisher.”
“No, I…of course not.”
Salvatore shook his head miserably. “I bet you all the money I got,” he continued, “that the superintendent raced up and down these stairs checking every last fire extinguisher the second after your kid torched the place.”
“It was an accident,” my father said.
Salvatore rolled his eyes. “Tell me why you’re not taking these guys to court again? You’re looking at a helluva lawsuit.”
My father shook his head. “We have you,” he managed to say. He’d never considered bringing a negligence claim. For one, he distrusted the process. The lawyers, the courtroom drama. What if it were all for naught? It was like multiple callbacks for an audition that ended with a producer’s rejection: getting one’s hopes up hurt more than the final refusal. This was coupled with his reluctance to cause a stir, consistent with his actor’s disposition, a common flaw in that breed’s character but one my father suffered from acutely, for he saw such relationships as personal, based on more than simply commerce. Sue management successfully, and by recouping his losses, he risked inviting that state of relations most anathema to him: he would be disliked.
“So what now?” my father asked.
Salvatore shrugged. “We got problems.”
“How’s that?”
Perhaps because they were standing in the hallway Salvatore lowered his voice. “Put yourself in my position,” he said. “I got a client whose kid ignites some combustibles, and now he wants me to give him the full amount of his policy. No offense, but that’s like if your dog bit me and I’m the one being asked to pay for his chipped tooth.”
My father couldn’t bring himself to argue.
“You don’t seem like a fine-print kind of guy, Mr. Hurt. But you understand when I say this looks bad.”
My father spoke the words he’d wanted to utter from the moment he’d first smelled smoke: “I’m sorry.”
Salvatore sighed. “Look, I’m gonna pull some strings, get you and your pretty wife your check.” He glanced at his watch and then brightened. “This afternoon, in fact.” Then he slapped the back of his palm against my father’s chest and pressed it there. “But to do that, there’s something I need you to do for me first.”
It was brutally cold outside, but especially here, where Broadway intersected Columbus Avenue. Even Lincoln Center’s fountains, their jets almost furry in the January brightness, bent slightly, the spume steadily sheared off in the prevailing wind and spraying unwitting passersby. Men held the brims of their hats, staggering as stiffly as zombies against the blast. Women pulled their scarves over their mouths, the trailing fabric snapping behind them as they leaned forward or sometimes even turned to walk backward against the gale. At Columbus Circle, a few blocks down, the flurries seemed even more powerfully channeled by the GW building, swirling before the Coliseum’s facade, whistling like some maritime squall. Shel would catch the downtown train there, to meet Salvatore as planned, but only after he stopped at the bank.
Get started now on your road to riches, my father had said in the commercial, by saving regularly at the Dime. Offices in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island. His tone was gentle, reassuring—solid as the branch’s black marble facade. As the bank’s TV spokesperson, he had been given complimentary checking and savings accounts, and when he’d first started doing his business there, he couldn’t help offhandedly mentioning this to the tellers, just so they knew with whom they were dealing.
“Mr. Hurt,” said Glenda, as he stepped to her window, “what can I do for you today?”
“I need to make a withdrawal. From my savings.”
Glenda passed him the slip and then folded her hands on the counter. “How much, then?”
If he hadn’t been there just the week before, he wouldn’t have known his balance: just over $4,100. As a rule he preferred to ignore it, thereby going longer stretches not tormented by its shabby state, or, more recently, to be pleasantly surprised by the amount, boosted by weekly checks from The Fisher King.
“All of it,” my father said.
At this, Glenda winced. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hurt, but we do ask you maintain at least a hundred-dollar balance. Otherwise you have to pay a penalty.”
“Four thousand, then,” my father said. He smiled wearily. “Keep the change.”
Salvatore had demanded Shel pay him a kickback to get the insurance money, and really, my father thought, what recourse did he have? Without it he’d be wiped out, ruined. He’d agreed to meet the agent at the edge of Chinatown, on Canal and Bowery, the district’s easternmost corner, to make the exchange. It was a madhouse. Aproned street vendors stood before their carts, loudly negotiating with customers. In the restaurants’ windows hung rows of glazed piglets and ducks, their hooked bodies shiny and brown. From barrels, the fishmongers tonged chains of blue crabs into paper bags. Here, pedestrian traffic changed, its density fivefold that of midtown. All the micro-allowances to right-of-way were outright ignored, the lack of concessions to flow creating crowded eddies so slow-moving Shel was forced to sometimes walk turned sideways or, at the worst bottlenecks, stand completely still. Salvatore had said he’d be in his car, that he would park in front of the Citizens Savings Bank, and this seemed appropriate to my father, for in the shadow of its limestone dome it was as if a robbery were about to take place—because what else was this bribe he was about to pay?—the insurance agent playing both thief and getaway driver. And then there was his car:
It was a black Lincoln Continental Mark III, not so different in design from the model Anthony Quinn had driven in Europe. Its hood was similarly long and formidable, its front-to-rear fenders tall and pronounced. Seeing it, my father was suddenly seized by a memory: he and Lily were driving behind Quinn in a van. It had struggled to climb hills, but loaded with the movie star’s painting supplies and knee-jerk rug and furniture purchases, my father wondered if it had the horsepower to make any major ascents. Would he and Lily simply roll backward? They had trailed Quinn all over Italy and France in this vehicle: from Naples to Rome to Perugia to Venice; from Milan to Biarritz and back; from Genoa along the Ligurian coast to Imperia. But now, most harrowingly, on their journey’s final northward push through the Alps to Paris, they drove along the mountainous Col de Turini, its hairpins so sharp it was like a carnival ride, Quinn’s Lincoln disappeared behind walls of rock rising into their path, only to reappear far ahead, almost out of view, as if he were flaunting its handling and speed. I am not this man’s voice coach, my father realized. I am his Sherpa. He imagined this trip would end with them losing their brakes on one of the dangerous descents and rocketing through the guardrail to plunge into the valley, dying on this fool’s errand called their honeymoon.
“What took you?” Salvatore said when Shel got in the car. The insurance agent was eating noodles from a take-out carton, exhibiting impressive facility with his chopsticks. When my father didn’t answer, Salvatore tilted the box top toward him. “Want some?” he asked. “It’s lo mein.”
My father shook his head. Out the windshield, Shel could see the Manhattan Bridge’s triumphal arch and colonnade. From where they were parked, its span wasn’t visible, nor Brooklyn’s low-slung buildings: just sky. In New York, a rare view. Like a gate to nowhere. The structure was reminiscent, in its pillared horseshoe design, of Saint Peter’s; and overwhelmed by memory yet again, Shel recalled Quinn and his mistress, Jolanda, standing beneath the Sistine Chapel’s pietà, the priest pouring holy water over their bastard child, Francesco. Lily, who stood next to Shel, had leaned toward him to whisper, “This is the most profane, ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.”
Salvatore put down the carton. “We gonna do this?” he said.
From his breast pocket, my father removed the bank envelope. Salvatore produced the check and held it in the air between his fingers. It was a larger slip than most, as if its additional surface area were necessary to accommodate such a figure, the amount typed in capitals: Ten Thousand Dollars and Zero Cents.
“I don’t understand,” my father said.
“What?”
“The math.”
“You lost me.”
“Of this,” Shel continued. “This transaction.”
Salvatore smiled. “You wearing a mic or something?”
“I give you four thousand so that you’ll give me ten—”
“Okay,” Salvatore said, “if this is how you’re gonna play it—”
“You give me ten thousand, but it’s really only six.”
“Out,” said the agent, reaching across to pull the door’s latch.
“If it’s only six,” Dad said, and knocked his arm away, “why not make it that to start?”
“Don’t fucking touch me.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” my father said.
“Get out of my car!”
“It doesn’t make sense!”
The two men grabbed each other’s coat collars, but the stiff-armed fashion in which they clasped made it appear closer to a pose, the pair deadlocked, like those crabs my father had seen in the barrel. Still the parting finally did come, albeit suddenly and more violently than Shel was prepared, for he was ejected from the car, tumbling backward while Salvatore peeled off in a great screech. The check was wadded in my father’s palm, the slip crumpled but intact, and his money gone. For the briefest moment, it seemed the people around him paused, giving him space and time to stand and dust himself off; and then their hectic rush and crush resumed. Salvatore merged into the traffic’s stream and disappeared, over the bridge, into the thin blue air.
Mom had found us a place uptown, on Eighty-Eighth and West End, the new apartment so much larger than its predecessor that Oren and I no longer needed to share a room. It was in a building that would prove so expensive we’d be forced to move back to Lincoln Towers within a couple of years—a different sort of trauma altogether. What I recall then, however, was the excitement, the sense of hope. We were meagerly packed and ready to move from Al and Neal’s by the following Sunday. But when my father appeared at their door, I somehow knew he’d come for me alone. I ran, terrified, into the room Neal used for storage, the one where Oren and I slept, and hid beneath a bed. My father dragged me by my wrist from its safety. I vividly remember backpedaling with all the strength I had, grabbing a doorknob, a sculpture, a table’s leg—I was as willing to pull my arm from its socket as a lizard is to detach from its pinned tail. But it was no use. My father gathered me into his arms and carried me down the length of the hallway to our decimated apartment. I remember my feeling of utter surrender during that seemingly endless walk. The sensation of flying—of being held aloft—with the hallway floor far below. Of dried tears staining my cheeks. The girth of my father’s neck, which I clutched now. And the strangest sense that the smallest space—not even a unit of measure I could name—had opened up between my thoughts and my face; and the conviction that, so long as I hid behind this mask, I’d be safe.
Our door’s lock had been punched out by the firemen. A thick tuft of pink insulation, flecked with soot, was stuffed in its bolt hole. My father touched the door, and it swung inward, easily, revealing that the floor was still covered with a layer of water. This standing slick was black, debris-flecked and dotted with ash. I was afraid that its inked surface hid falloffs, sharp objects. That he might deposit me in it and abandon me there. Instead, my father walked me through every room. Past the galley kitchen’s blistered cabinets, the stovetop powdered white, as if with flour. The dining table and chairs only a piled outline. My parents’ mattress nothing but springs. The room Oren and I shared, our ceiling’s paint hanging in tattered flaps. My favorite book, World Atlas of Marine Fishes, whose charred cover now read Atlas of Mar. My father pointed out the charcoal streaks where flames had licked the walls, the melted fixtures, our blackened clothes. Though most terrifying by far was the stench—this cold mustiness—like the carcass of a drowned dragon. Having finally returned to the front door, my father stopped so that I might take a last look. When he was satisfied the image was indelible, he broke his silence:
“Never again,” he said.
Within a year, I made my first television appearance.