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  There were still flashes of his old self. He would startle us with an observation: “The color of this blanket is institutional yellow,” or “The breadth of that doctor’s shoulders gives him false confidence.” But as the days wore on, these came less and less frequently.

  And then the tug of his failing body finally won out. He roamed from stranger to father to man-child to madman. There wasn’t much talking with him, just listening, and deciphering.

  He put his hand over his eyes, as if he was staring at something. “I’m standing on the rocks looking out over a promontory. But I can’t see the shoreline. Will I like it there?”

  “Yes,” we told him.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, grabbing my mother’s arm. “This isn’t a time for lying.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  “Okay then.” He looked around at the friends and family assembled in his room. “Who wants to join me?” He patted the mattress next to him. “Blissy?”

  I lowered the bed’s railing and stretched my body alongside his, resting my head lightly on his shoulder. He draped his thin arm across my back. We could have been home on the couch, watching TV.

  “Sandy?” he said, lifting his head. “David?” He called to a friend. “Come join us.” He raised his hands, the magnanimous host. “I invite all of you, anyone who’d care to, to come join me in my bed. Why not?” My mother spread herself out on the other side of my father. He smiled and patted his wife and daughter.

  “We’ll go down in history as the family with the least affection for each other,” he said.

  “No!” we all protested.

  He shook his head, exasperated. “It’s a joke.”

  Another time, when I was helping him to eat, he became agitated suddenly and took the fork out of my hand. Then he took my hand and pressed it to his lips several times, kissing it over and over again. “I had to do that because you’re my daughter,” he said.

  “And you’re my father,” I answered.

  We camped out in that hospital room for days, keeping him company. We ordered in pizza and brought back ice-cream sundaes. A steady stream of people came to say good-bye. On some nights the atmosphere was like a party.

  While my father drifted in and out of consciousness, we talked about the story of the secret. Friends visiting shared what details they knew and told of the secrets their own families harbored: Illegitimate children. Adopted children. Jewish ancestry.

  It’s said that the hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying. Maybe my father heard us. He beckoned to me one evening: “Lorraine. Lorraine.” His sister’s name. Another time he told me, “You’ve got to listen to more Afro-Cuban music.”

  There were no final words that anyone agreed on. The last to me were on the phone one afternoon during a brief flash of clearheadedness. I told him that I’d be at the hospital soon. “Okay, sweetie pie,” he said. “See you then.” My brother remembers a conversation about a road race coming up. My mother didn’t offer what final words she and my father shared, and I’ve never asked.

  One day he fell into a coma. And then, a week or so later, very early one morning, he died.

  His death certificate indicates that he was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 16, 1920, to Edna Miller and Paul Anatole Broyard and that he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 11, 1990, as the husband of Sandy Broyard. His race is identified as white.

  -2-

  My father used to say that he’d come from nothing. While he’d been raised with modest means in New Orleans and Brooklyn, and his parents only had eighth grade educations, I knew that by “nothing” he meant the existential kind. With no ancestors that he spoke of, no legacy that could explain his habits and tastes, he seemed, as he later wrote, to have “sprung from my own brow, spontaneously generated the way flies were once thought to have originated.” Where some people had parents and siblings, a history and hometown, my father had the literature of his favorite authors: Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Charles Baudelaire, and D. H. Lawrence. In his memoir about living in Greenwich Village in the 1940s—which was published posthumously as Kafka Was the Rage—he explained that these writers were “all the family I had now, all the family I wanted.”

  But after twenty years of bachelorhood in New York City, my father married my mother, they moved to Connecticut, and my brother and I were born. He still had his writers—they lined the shelves of the study where he spent his days, alternately reclined in a Barca-Lounger chair with a book balanced in his large palm or hunched over a wooden desk, writing on a long yellow legal pad with a very sharp number one pencil—and we became all the family that my father wanted. Or so I’d been led to believe.

  When I asked him why we didn’t see his relatives—his father died before I was born, but his mother and two sisters lived an hour away in New York for much of my childhood—my dad would say that they didn’t interest him. “You know, Blissy, just because you share blood with someone doesn’t mean you have to like them,” he’d explain. The implication was that he liked—loved—us by choice, as long as we remained interesting.

  My mother didn’t have much family either. Her parents were both dead by the time she was twenty, and her brother and sister lived very different lives in faraway places. On vacations, at school graduations, and on Christmas mornings, it was usually just my mother, my father, my brother, and me. Our tribe of four made us seem alternately special and forsaken, the last survivors of a dying colony or the founding members of an exclusive club. We were fragile. We were definitive. We were the platonic ideals of father, mother, daughter, son.

  On holidays, without the buffer of other relatives, our home life grew even more concentrated. There were elaborate meals, abundant presents, roaring fires in the hearth. Looking back now, I wonder if these efforts were a celebration of what we had or compensation for the people we were missing. While my mother’s relatives were absent by circumstance, my father’s had been banished—although never quite completely. Occasional stories, artifacts buried in closets, photos tucked into old albums, kept their spectral presences in the air. Then, every so often, one of them would burst into life, unexpectedly fracturing the calm surface of our existence, and, as if I’d spied a ghost, everything that I believed about the natural order of my world would be called into question.

  It was Mother’s Day 1979, and I was twelve years old. For some reason he didn’t share with me, my father decided to get my mother something extra special that year—a pair of gold earrings shaped like sea urchins, from Tiffany. My dad considered himself a connoisseur of many things in life, but he was most discriminating when it came to women. He would hold forth about their varieties of beauty and the fashions that suited each type as if he were a gardener discussing the preferred growing conditions of heirloom roses. My mother—who my father often said grew more beautiful every year—had classic Nordic looks that were best complemented by modern twists on traditional designs. (I, on the other hand, was told I should stick to dark blues and earth tones that didn’t overwhelm my “subtle appeal.”) My dad showed me the earrings he had chosen and explained why they were perfect for my mom. Then he confided that he’d spent nearly $300 on them.

  On the evening of Mother’s Day, my father came into the kitchen to present his gift. I was already in there with my mother, who was making dinner, and I remember that she was in a rather bad mood. No doubt her foul humor was owed to the fact that despite its being her day, she still had to tend to all of us. My father placed the blue Tiffany box in the middle of the kitchen table and sat down. “Sandy, come over here,” he said, throwing a wink toward me.

  My mother was stirring a pot on the stove, and she delayed, saying something to the effect that, couldn’t he see she was busy? She hadn’t turned around, so she didn’t know about the present on the table. My father tried again, suggesting that the meal wouldn’t be ruined by turning off the burner for a minute. And my mother—who still hadn’t turned around—started to explain why the meal wo
uld be ruined, when my father abruptly stood up and flung the earring box across the room.

  “Fine!” he yelled. “Happy Mother’s Day!”

  After it was too late, I recognized the strained quality of my father’s entreaties: “She works so hard, Mommy does,” he’d appealed to me when trying to get her to sit down. He was at his worst when he was supposed to act a certain way. He seemed to have been reaching for the kind of moment that an advertisement for Tiffany might promise—a message from a man to his wife of love and appreciation as uncomplicated and unmistakable as that bright blue box.

  My father’s outburst snapped my mother to attention. I watched her face cloud in confusion as she scrambled, playing catch-up, trying to figure out what in the world had gotten into her husband. I made some comment scolding my father for ruining his nice surprise and promptly fled the room. His rages didn’t scare me so much—the same way a child’s temper tantrum wasn’t scary—but I didn’t like to hear my parents argue, especially when I’d heard similar versions of the same fight many times before. I knew that my mother would complain about getting stuck with all the work around the house, and that my father would say that taking care of the home was her job, just as making the money was his job, and she didn’t hear him complaining about it all the time. And then my mother would point out all the things she had to do herself because there wasn’t enough money, such as weed the gardens or make the curtains, and my father would say that no one had asked her to plant all those flower beds and redecorate all those rooms, and it would go back and forth like this for a while, until my father stormed out of the room, yelling, “You’re going to nag me to death one day!” And then sometime later, my father would take my brother and me aside and tell us how we had to help out more around the house, and for the next few days, he would even go as far as clearing his own plate from the dinner table and placing it in the dishwasher himself.

  I avoided my parents for the rest of the night and eventually went to bed. I’d been asleep for an hour or two when my mother came bursting in and shook my shoulder to wake me.

  “What? What?” I said.

  She was in her bathrobe, a hunched shadow in the doorway. Despite my grogginess and the dark, I could see that she was panicked. I started to sit up, my body getting ready to leap out of bed and run with the announcement of fire.

  “Blissy,” she said. “Where did you put the bologna?”

  “What?”

  “The bologna. Your father can’t find his bologna.”

  Every night before my father went to bed, he ate a bologna and cheddar cheese sandwich on rye bread, washed down with a single beer. That afternoon I’d helped my mother put away the groceries.

  “I don’t know,” I said, still confused. She’d woken me for bologna? “It’s somewhere in the fridge.”

  “Where in the fridge, Blissy? Do you remember where?”

  “I don’t know.” Now I was irritated. “In the meat drawer probably.”

  And then she was gone, running—from the sound of it—down the hallway to the back stairs.

  I lay down again, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep. After a half hour or so, I got up and went down to the kitchen. After rounding the stairwell, I found my mother kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator door, sweeping pieces of broken glass and globs of mayonnaise and jelly into a dustpan. She was crying, and my father was nowhere in sight. Bottles of ketchup and jars of pickles and tomato sauce were scattered across the kitchen floor like bowling pins after someone has thrown a strike. I leaned past her and saw that every single one of the shelves from the fridge’s door had been pulled off.

  I remember thinking to myself, or perhaps even saying out loud, “Wow, Daddy did this?” The idea of his lashing out in anger this way was certainly frightening, but more than that, it surprised me and even impressed me a tiny bit. I’d never seen him totally lose control before.

  “The bologna was right there in the drawer,” my mother said. “Right in front of him. He just didn’t look. He never looks.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” It struck me as particularly unfair that she was stuck with cleaning up his mess on Mother’s Day. “Do you want some help?”

  “No, you don’t have any shoes on. You’ll cut your foot.”

  I stood in the doorway as my mother cried and cleaned and began to talk in a despairing way about not being able to put up with my father anymore. He was so unreasonable at times, and she was tired of his craziness. “He just went crazy!” she said, gesturing at pieces of the disassembled shelf on the floor.

  This kind of talk—although I’d heard it before—struck me mute with fear. To my mind, my mother ridding my father from her life was as good as ridding him from my brother’s and my lives too. As much as I believed that my father loved us—telling us so was his daily ritual, like a sort of unorthodox prayer—I couldn’t picture how we’d fit into the world of Greenwich Village, bachelorhood, and books where my mother had found him. I knew that other family members had lost him to those pursuits before.

  “What’s his problem, anyway?” I managed finally. “I mean, it’s Mother’s Day, and he got you a nice present and everything. He just ruined the whole thing.”

  My mother looked up at me. Her face cleared for a moment, and I could see that she actually had an answer for the question of what my father’s problem might be. “Well, his mother died,” she said hesitantly. “And I think he feels guilty.”

  “Daddy’s mother died?” I repeated. “Grandma died? When?”

  “Back in September.” Now my mother sounded apologetic.

  That was eight months ago. “How come nobody told me?” I asked.

  My mother shrugged. “You didn’t really know her.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “As if that was my fault.”

  But my mother had said enough. “It’s late,” she said. “You should go to bed.” I stood there for a minute, unsure what to think about this news. My mom sighed and sat back on her heels, planting her hands on her thighs. “Listen, honey, don’t worry. Your father can be irrational sometimes, but he loves us. There’s nothing to worry about. Go to bed, okay?”

  I climbed back up the stairs to my room, feeling the hot stab of tears gathering at the corners of my eyes, but when I lay down in bed, clutching my pillow tightly to my chest, they refused to come. Grandma’s dead, Grandma’s dead, I whispered to myself, trying to help things along. Shouldn’t I feel something?

  I’d heard kids at my school, back in class after an absence, explaining how they’d been at a grandparent’s funeral—their voices quivering as they tried not to cry. I’d nod along sympathetically with my other classmates, as if I too was grief-stricken at the thought of losing a grandparent. But in truth, I had no idea what that might feel like. My father’s mother was my only living grandparent, and I’d met her only once that I could remember, shortly after my seventh birthday. The thought that I’d never know what that relationship was like sent a shot of self-pity sputtering through me.

  Her death, however, didn’t come as a complete surprise. My dad had mentioned in passing that he’d been to visit his mother in the nursing home where she lived, which prompted me to ask if I could join him the next time. He shook his head, saying that he doubted there would be a next time. His mother’s mind was gone, and she no longer recognized him. “She didn’t know her own son,” my dad said again, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. The visits were sad and very hard on him.

  “But can’t I go just one time?” I pressed. “I barely know her, and she’s my only grandparent.” I felt a sudden desperation that this representative figure in my life was slipping through my fingers, without my even realizing that she’d been so close at hand.

  My father looked resolved and plaintive. “But you wouldn’t be getting to know her, not the real her,” he said. “She’s nothing like she used to be. And I wouldn’t want you to form your impressions about her now.”

  This made sense to me. But, I wanted to ask my fat
her, why hadn’t my brother and I gotten a chance to know her any earlier? How had it suddenly become too late? Something, though, made me drop my line of questioning. While my father could be very tender with Todd and me, and my mother too at times, it was rare to hear him talk about his own family in this way. It was as if I’d stumbled on a scene of two deer grooming each other in the woods, and I was afraid of moving or making any noise that might scatter them.

  As I lay in bed that night on Mother’s Day, trying to cry about the death of my grandmother Edna, what finally moved me to tears was this fresh evidence of the boundaries around my father’s personal life. I hadn’t even been invited to his mother’s funeral! I wondered about the tenacity of our connection, of his love for me.

  Our family wasn’t bound by duty and obligation: children didn’t attend their grandparents’ funerals; aunts and uncles didn’t visit their nieces and nephews. In our house, we didn’t love each other because we were supposed to. Rather my father and I reknitted our ties every day—throwing a softball in the backyard after school, showing him what I’d learned in ballet class that afternoon, answering his nightly question when he carried me upstairs after I’d fallen asleep in front of the TV: Who loves you, Blissy? You do, Daddy....You do....You do.

  I had almost drifted off to sleep, but a thought jerked me back awake, and kept me tossing and turning for much of the night. Hadn’t my father once loved his parents and siblings too? What had they done to make his feelings change? Or was it what they hadn’t done—read enough, accomplished enough, remained interesting?

  The next morning, my brother and I were watching cartoons and eating cereal when I told him what I’d learned the night before.

  “Yeah, Grandma’s dead,” Todd said, without lifting his eyes from the TV set. “That stinks.”

  “Wait a minute. How did you know?”

  “I saw another box of ashes in the closet in Daddy’s study.” Now Todd glanced at me and a look of understanding passed between us. So he searched through our father’s things too.