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  “Well, did you know that she died back in September? Eight months ago?” My voice was full of affront.

  “I figured from the postmark on the box.” Todd frowned. “And I remember that Dad seemed kind of down around then, which was weird, since usually he’s pretty happy. And I figured that it must have been about his mom.”

  Our father had been sad? Normally he was happy? I was too close to my father—too caught up in the ebb and flow of his affections—to notice the changing weather of his moods. What else had I been missing? But I didn’t ask. For the most part, Todd and I carried on our family’s pact of secrecy. To have discussed the mysteries in our household would have entailed trying to solve them, which seemed like an impossible, or at least dangerous, task. As the saying goes, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

  And so for the next dozen years, these questions stayed in the closet along with the ashes of my grandparents. But after my father died, we had to start going through his things.

  -3-

  The village of Southport, where my family lived before moving to Cambridge, has been described as the jewel in the crown of the town of Fairfield, a town that is located in Fairfield County, the richest county in Connecticut, the richest state in the United States, the richest country in the world.

  Southport is a historic village, which means that we couldn’t alter or renovate our home without permission from the committee in charge of zoning. There are rules that dictate the style of your shutters, how high you may build your fence, the types of windows you may add to your family room. Unwritten rules dictate that your grass be clipped, your hedges shorn, and any dead limbs promptly cut down and carted away. As a result the village is breathtakingly beautiful in a uniform, wedding-cake-decoration kind of way.

  At the edge of the village center, at the end of a narrow inlet, sits the Pequot Yacht Club. Twin brick buildings constitute the club—both tall, rectangular, and imposing. Ivy covers the front façade of the one that serves as clubhouse, and a large wooden porch extends from its back to overlook the harbor. On the first floor is a dining room where members can have burgers and club sandwiches for lunch year-round.

  In 1987 Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas tried to join the yacht club after buying a mansion on Long Island Sound a few miles down the road. After initially voting to admit them, the membership committee reversed its position and denied the Donahues’ application. The reasons were unclear: that the family weren’t serious sailors but wanted to dock a large motor yacht, or some objection to the subjects covered on Phil’s talk show, or a general disdain for celebrities. My family had joined a year earlier, and my mother, who moored an eighteen-foot Cape Cod catboat there, had learned these details from some people on the membership committee with whom she’d become friendly.

  My family’s application was approved without incident. Anatole Broyard, the erudite, politically conservative literary critic for the New York Times, was their kind of guy. Of course nobody knew about his racial background. In 1986 the club had never had a black member. When I spoke to a former commodore in 2000, the club still had not, although one member offered my father, whose racial identity had since become public knowledge, as evidence of the club’s history of integration. According to the former commodore, the Pequot Yacht Club had never denied a black person either—none had ever applied. Sailing, he observed, isn’t typically a black sport. Another explanation might be the demographics of the town: 0.5 percent of the population, or twenty-four out of the town’s five thousand people are African American, according to the 2000 census. I asked some residents and the local librarian if they knew who these two dozen black people were or where they lived, but nobody could think of any African American families in Southport. They did remember, however, seeing some black nannies pushing strollers down its cobblestone streets.

  Back in 1986 it wasn’t the yacht club’s policies or politics that interested my mother, but sailing. She was not yet a serious sailor—her experience was mostly a few summers as a kid—and she was eager to learn. My father didn’t like being on the water. He spent too much time cooped up on ships during World War II, he’d explain. But he enjoyed having lunch at the yacht club, and on the days that he worked from home, he would walk over there at noon, eat a hamburger, and chat with the retirees and the men whose family trusts were such that they had never had to work.

  As my mother was casting about for a location for the reception following my father’s memorial service, the yacht club had seemed like the perfect choice. My dad once wrote that “dying should be like a birthday party to end all birthday parties.” We imagined that he would have approved of his final celebration’s being held in a setting he’d found so beautiful.

  My father particularly admired the view from the porch. From there you can see the harbor filled with freshly painted boats; the rolling green of the golf course across the inlet and the tall umber reeds along its edge that ripple in the wind like water; the high hill above the curving shoreline, banked by massive oaks and maples through which peek the tops of turrets, widow’s walks, and chimneys of the mansions; the great blue-green swath of the Sound; and in the distance, the smudged brown line that is Long Island, and the horizon, and the sky.

  This view has always made me think of the scene in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby stands in front of his mansion and stares at the green light of Daisy Buchanan’s dock across the bay. My father greatly admired Fitzgerald’s novel about American self-invention. It’s tempting to think of my dad standing on the porch while reflecting to himself how far he, like Gatsby, had traveled in his life—from a young colored boy in New Orleans to this! But I can’t actually imagine him indulging in that kind of sentimental, self-congratulatory moment. It never seemed to occur to him that someone might want to keep him out. And I don’t think he would view his version of the American dream as being as hollow and ultimately tragic as Gatsby’s.

  Anyway, I wasn’t ready yet in the weeks after his death to consider what it meant to my father to live in this town and belong to this club, or, more significantly, why he rejected his black ancestry in the first place. There was still too much information to absorb, and his family to meet.

  The service itself was held in a Congregational church up the street. In the church’s back hallway, I saw my father’s older sister, my aunt Lorraine, for the first time in seventeen years, and finally met his younger sister, my aunt Shirley, and her son, my cousin Frank Jr.

  I noticed first how tall Frank was—he didn’t look like a Broyard to me; from my limited contact with them (my father and my brother), the men were of medium height and wiry—and then I noticed how, unlike Lorraine and my father’s mother, he and Shirley actually looked black, despite being light-skinned.

  I knew who they were before my mother introduced us. Out of the more than three hundred people who showed up that day, they were the only black people there, except for one colleague from my father’s office.

  And Lorraine felt familiar, like family even. She looked like my father’s sister; I recognized the shape of her face, her full checks and round jaw, from some pictures in our family album of a trip to Europe she took with my parents before I was born. When I was growing up, she used to call the house occasionally. I would answer the phone, and after she identified herself, I’d say, “Oh hi, Aunt Lorraine,” and then yell up the stairs for my father. “Dad, phone for you. It’s Aunt Lorraine.” Sometimes she even chatted with me briefly, asking about school or what sports I liked. As we said hello again, even though I was twenty-four and she was seventy-two and we didn’t know anything about each other, those words, “Aunt Lorraine,” didn’t feel funny in my mouth.

  After I graduated from college, I moved to New York and had my first apartment with my own phone number. I looked up my name in the huge Manhattan phone book, “Bliss Broyard,” and saw right below me “Lorraine Broyard.” We were the only Broyards listed. I put my finger on her listing and thought to myself, That’s my aunt, I could call her up right n
ow. But I never did.

  I knew growing up that my father didn’t speak to his other sister, Shirley. Over the years I would become curious about her and her family. They lived in Manhattan, too, on the Upper West Side. Whenever I asked my father about why we didn’t see them, he would say that he wasn’t interested in politics and that Shirley was married to a politician. In fact her husband, Franklin Williams, who died a few months before my father did, was a civil rights lawyer who worked under Thurgood Marshall in the NAACP in the 1940s. He started the Constitutional Rights Division in California in the early sixties and had served as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana in the seventies. The speakers at his funeral included New York City mayor David Dinkins and the South African independence leader Bishop Desmond Tutu.

  While it’s true that my father wasn’t political—as far as I know, he never once voted in an election—it might be more accurate to say that it was Frank Williams’s particular politics that didn’t interest him. When I pushed my father further, he offered another excuse: one of Shirley’s two sons suffered from schizophrenia, a condition that made it sad for the family to be around other families.

  Frank and Shirley were the secret brought to life. There weren’t any tears or long embraces. We all shook hands, and they offered their condolences. I can remember thinking, This is my father’s family and they are black, as I sought to confirm with my own eyes what before I had taken on faith. It’s really true! I thought.

  Then we hurried into the sanctuary, because the service was scheduled to start. My mother motioned for my father’s family to join us in the front row. There was plenty of room, given that his survivors numbered only six: my mother, my brother, me, his two sisters, and a nephew.

  Years later, at a dinner party with some old friends, I told the story about meeting my relatives. A man at the party who had been at the memorial service commented that he’d thought to himself, when he saw these three light-skinned black people sit down in the family row, that he hadn’t realized the Broyards had so much help.

  One by one my father’s friends took their place at the pulpit and briefly brought him back to life. The man who emerged took many forms: an eloquent literary critic and ironic observer of life, a purveyor of high culture and dispenser of common sense, an unsurpassed enthusiast of literature and a writer whose “intolerable perfectionism” kept him from finishing a long-awaited novel, an eager playmate and graceful athlete, a doting father and attentive friend, someone who worried that the world wouldn’t live up to the beauty and substance described by his favorite writers and so was forever searching out and celebrating those moments when people and life didn’t disappoint him.

  Michael Vincent Miller described three decades of strolls through Greenwich Village, Paris, Rome, Florence, over Connecticut country roads, and down imagined literary landscapes as my father lay dying. Another friend, the playwright David Epstein, recounted the start of their nearly forty-year friendship on a beach in Fire Island, when David was a chubby eight-year-old and my dad was a popular bachelor in his early thirties. The anthropologist Richard Shweder remembered my father’s emphasis on style—how a person walked, the precision of his language, the flourish with which he caught the football—as “the best defense against the materialism of a dreary world.” Everyone commented on his youthfulness, the immediacy of his presence, and his unapologetic, idiosyncratic take on the world. He didn’t seem like someone who had regrets about how he’d lived his life.

  When it was my turn at the pulpit, my gaze kept returning to my father’s family. I’d lost my dad and found them. They were the consolation prize that I hadn’t been expecting. I had the urge to address them, to ask them to rise before the congregation as if they were some kind of miracle that had been conjured up out of our collective grief. Anatole lives on, their presence said to me. His semblance, his flesh, blood, and DNA, his history exists beyond my brother and myself. There was more to him that I could still discover. Perhaps they could start by explaining why my father had kept us apart.

  It’s hard to imagine what was going through their minds as they listened to my father’s friends and family talk about this man who had become lost to them years before he died. It must have been sad, and maddening, for my father’s sisters and nephew to learn at his funeral about what he meant to the people in his life. Were they thinking, That’s only half the story? Did they wonder why he’d chosen Southport, that jewel in the crown of Fairfield, where in the 1980s a black family would have stood out as baldly as a purple house? Shirley’s husband, Frank, served as the NAACP’s regional director for the western part of the country in the 1950s and worked intensely to integrate residential neighborhoods; their lives were spent fighting against communities like ours.

  After the service was over, everyone poured outside onto the church’s lawn. It was a mild, beautiful day at the end of October, and the early afternoon light was sparkling and clear. I stood with my aunts and cousin. People were swarming all around us, and I stopped everyone who passed by to introduce them. “This is my aunt Shirley and my aunt Lorraine and my cousin Frank.” My enthusiasm, it seemed, was a little bewildering; Shirley looked overwhelmed.

  The uncanny exhilaration that can follow funerals buzzed in the air. Anatole might be dead, but we were not, and after hearing the vivid recounting of his life, we were determined to be as alive as we could. Then I was surrounded by friends. We started down the stone steps to the street, heading toward the yacht club. A little boy in a blue blazer ran past, yelling for his mother. I looked around, panicked because I’d lost track of my father’s family, but they’d assured me that they were going to the reception, so I expected to catch up with them there.

  I pulled aside my friend Jennifer from Martha’s Vineyard, whom I’d known since I was eight. Our parents were also close friends.

  “I found out what the secret was,” I said. I had already told her about that day on the Vineyard. “That was my dad’s sisters and his nephew back there. He was really black, but he didn’t want Todd and me to know.”

  “Well, I knew he was black.”

  “What?” I stopped walking. “How?”

  “I don’t remember. I just did. I’ve known forever.”

  Perhaps my mother, who had known about my dad’s ancestry since before she got married, had told Jennifer’s parents. In the hospital I discovered that many of her and my father’s friends knew about his heritage, but that was different: I was accustomed to adults having access to information that I didn’t.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I always thought that you just didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “No. I had no idea.”

  “It wasn’t like it was a big deal,” she assured me. “I hardly ever thought about it.”

  I was upset, because I felt that who I was had been misunderstood. I was not a girl who knew her father was black but didn’t want to talk about it. Had my friend been treating me like I was that girl? Was there any time when some racist joke was made that she shot me a glance, looking for my reaction, and saw none, or worse, laughter?

  I felt slow-witted and exposed.

  “It’s just weird that you knew something like that about me when I didn’t know it myself,” I said.

  “But it didn’t make any difference. I didn’t even think of you as black,” she said.

  “Well, why not? If you knew my father was black?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think of him as being black either.”

  But he was. Or at least his two sisters and his nephew were. And if my father was black, what did that make me?

  I don’t remember seeing my aunts and my cousin at the yacht club. I never saw anything beyond the circle of sympathetic faces waiting for their turn to offer me their condolences.

  Over and over: “Thank you for coming.” “Yes, he would have liked the service.” “I can’t believe it either.”

  At the end my family and some close friends were slumped in the chairs on the front porch, exhausted. T
he talk turned to the events of the day: who came, who didn’t, what conversations people had, how everyone looked, how the service went, what my father would have thought.

  The only scandal anyone heard mention of throughout the afternoon was not the presence of Anatole’s secret black family, but the fact that Martha Stewart, who lived in the next town over and had known my parents for years, had shown up wearing jeans and a suede fringed jacket.

  -4-

  I had hoped to meet up with my father’s family at the reception following his memorial service, because I still had so many unanswered questions. Why would my father keep his racial identity a secret in the first place? How black was he? How black was I? A quarter? An eighth? Were we descended from slaves? But even the thought of raising these subjects could make my heart beat faster. I worried that I was going to say something to my father’s family that would be considered ignorant or racist, and we would become estranged all over again.

  The problem was, I’d never had a conversation about race. In the world I was raised in, it was considered an impolite subject. The people I knew lowered their voices when referring to a black person. I didn’t know anything about African American history, nor had I ever known anyone black well enough to call them a friend. I don’t remember issues such as affirmative action or busing, which dominated racial politics in the 1970s and 1980s, ever coming up for discussion in my house. Although I grew up within an hour’s drive of three of the poorest black communities in the United States—Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford—those neighborhoods seemed as distant as a foreign country. I’d make jokes with my brother about getting lost in “Father Panic Village,” infamous as the worst section of neighboring Bridgeport, but I never gave any thought to the people who lived there. I couldn’t have imagined their lives even if I had tried.