Peter at my side, I walk up Columbus Avenue, where I walked as a child -- only then, what was it but a grubby street of bars and walkups with black iron fire escapes over their facades, deli on one side (smell of brine of the pickle-barrel) and, across the street, huge seedy residential hotel everyone knew was seeded with whores and dope fiends. Close my eyes, I can see Columbus the old way, bleak but exciting, two-way traffic those days, my father holding my arm to steer me past the drunks. I remember a man flung out horizontal from a saloon. He flew slow-motion high through the air like some anti-Superman and ended in the gutter, blood turning his face into a mask, as if all the skin were stripped away. I even remember his giant nose -- well, I'd seen him before, poor bastard, the nose swollen, deeply pocked, and my mother, I remember I was walking with my mother, she nudged but didn't point and whispered, "You see? That's syphilis. You wouldn't understand. Godforbid you should end like that."
       I don't tell any of this to Peter, my seventeen-year old. Both of us in casual slacks and good sweaters, an adult victory -- he's usually in torn jeans and rock-band tee shirts. As far as his mother knows, we're in New York to look at colleges -- and we have been to Columbia, my alma mater. But in fact, I'm walking down this new Columbus with him because he asked to see where I grew up. I tell him that these stores and restaurants are all new, but I don't tell him how much the street has changed. How dark it was. How dirty and exciting. I don't tell him of the Irish kids who beat up the Jewish kids from the big apartment buildings. I walked wary.
       He's wearing a book bag on his back; he's holding a micro tape recorder in his hand, his stepfather's. Making it an interview lets it be comfortable for him; he knows I don't talk about my childhood. But as a project in family history for his high school history class it's okay, he's not just asking intimate questions. He's heard "everything," he says, about his mother's childhood in Colorado, about his grandparents -- his mother's parents -- and about their parents, a merchant family in Sweden. "Now it's your turn," he kidded me on the phone. "You know, Dad -- I don't know a whole lot about you."
       I laugh on cue. I've heard his mother's stories about family skiing adventures in Colorado. I don't have such stories.
       Columbus, I tell him, it's the street I knew, a street strange to me. "The old neighborhood's gone -- and just as well, Peter. But I still know New York. You stick with me, we're going to cook this town up for dinner. You're with a native." I don't tell him how the glory dreams brewed in my childhood Manhattan are gone too, along with the brewers who stirred those dreams. I don't tell him I'm a native who never comes back; if I have a business meeting in the city, I'm in and out the same day. I don't talk family; I give him a history lesson:
       "A hundred years ago, this was way out of town," I say into his tape recorder. I can feel myself making grand myth out of history. "Sheep grazed in Central Park. Then they built the Dakota and a couple of other big apartment buildings on Central Park West and Broadway. Then rows of brownstones for the people in the offices. Later, Columbus went downhill. When I was a kid, it was a peculiar kind of slum, because the stores still catered to the fancy apartment houses. Mostly Jews. Walkups housed the Irish and Greek and Italians; later, Puerto Ricans. Then, 'urban renewal' -- a phony name to cover up what they were doing -- getting rid of the Hispanics by getting rid of their homes. When I grew up, it started to get chic, Peter. It's gentrified now," I tell him. "Ethnic restaurants, fashions. The gentry. Same beer's expensive now. There's history: price of a beer went up."
       He laughs. "Dad, I don't call Columbus exactly fancy. I mean look."
       I look. Sure. Street torn up, stores out of business, same black fire escapes with dead plants, filthy windows, shabby walkup rooms behind. Still, there's a Laura Ashley on 79th, there's a twenty-story apartment building.
       I thumb the ponderous brownstone original building of the Museum of Natural History. Peter's got his eyes open. Seeing through his eyes or what I imagine to be his eyes, I try to dream a kind of city radiance into being.
       Not glory -- it's something else I hunger for now. Imagine you're walking along Columbus thinking, say, of buying apples at a corner fruit stand and a woman walks by holding spring flowers (although it's fall, a clean bright day) and takes you with her by the heart so that you follow her with your eyes, forgetting to be embarrassed in front of your grown son. And you're nudged awake, especially because you imagine he's nudged awake, and now the street begins to resonate in you, bus groans and stench and a little boy yelling Hey, Mommy, Mommy, wait! -- while Mommy, fed up with his dawdling, hurries on ahead. You hear the thump of hip-hop, full bass beating out of the open window of a car; the throbbing cry of an ambulance. Somebody should make music of it, like the Elizabethan songs based on street cries of London.
       Of course, that music isn't radiance, I don't mean that -- but as the city comes real and suddenly you forget all about your apple, that's the way radiance dissolves desire when, for a moment, wings brush your face, when for a moment you recognize that the ginkgo tree bends just that way, no other, that even a dog on a leash walks in inward pulse of Being; that everything, even that woman talking so intently to herself, is charged with the life of its own making, life beyond your making and using.
       It's that sense of being inside Being that Peter lends me as we walk. I feel a flowering of my spirit usually inaccessible to me -- now it's gone again, because there's so much I'm not saying to him it crams up inside, gridlock, not all that hard to say, but no need to dump it on him. How sorry I am we don't see each other much. At the Stage Deli I asked, "How's Emma? You still close friends?" "Emma?" he laughed. "Dad! She's out in California. I haven't seen Emma in over a year." So I'm afraid to ask questions I should know the answers to. I moved away. We live in different cities and what the hell, I know, weekends a teenager needs his friends, but how sorry I am. So I bore him with questions not my real concern -- whether or not to apply to Cornell, is he getting behind in his AP class in calculus? He rolls his eyes, good humoredly enough. "Dad, come on -- will you please get off my back?"
       I hold up my palms in surrender, I smile but feel I've failed us again. I don't say how much I love it that the idea for this trip came from him. I was the one who called up and said, "What about a weekend in New York, Peter? We can do a Broadway show?" But he was the one said, "Sure. Great. But, Dad, what I really want to do, Dad -- I want to see the places you grew up."

       It's late; we spent too long at the Stage Delicatessen over pastrami and pickles, then walking past Lincoln Center and up Columbus; so before we get to my old street I veer off at 81st and cross Central Park, past my playground surrounded by black iron bars, past the runners, bikers, roller bladers -- Central Park parade. Past the pond, little castle I laid siege to; past Cleopatra's Needle to the Met. After school, those days my mother stayed in her room, cursing, in Yiddish, Hitler or her life, when the apartment felt as if all the air had been sucked out, here is where I came to breathe -- even as a nine year-old. A city kid who'd never seen a harvest, still, I felt home when I climbed the grand stairs to the sunlight of Breugel's "Harvesters."
       Peter looks up at the great triple-vaulted ceiling as if this were St. Peter's in Rome, grand and somehow sacred.
       I cop a look at him aslant. He's bigger than me already, over six foot, but he walks so gracefully I wonder where he got his grace. His mother, I suppose. Same place he got his blond good looks. Me, I'm built like a wrestler, I move like a wrestler, my hair thick, curly, once black.
       "Wicked huge," he says, looking up, and I laugh at the language and he knows that and grins.
       "You've been here before, haven't you?"
       "I can't remember," he says. "Not for years and years I think" -- and he smiles his extraordinary smile. Not his polite smile or his happy smile or his ironic grin. This one's like a love gift, not just to me, love gift to the world, and it dissolves the need for questions and answers.
       We climb the great staircase, but at the top there's a dead wall that doesn't belong, cutting off the gallery where Breugel's Harvesters hung. We wander the labyrinth of rooms until we find it; he likes the color, I tell him I used to lose myself inside that sunlit field. I don't tell him why. I try not to lecture. We look at young Rembrandt, then old Rembrandt, and I talk changes in brush stroke to avoid talking about the real changes -- what life did to Rembrandt, what it's going to do to Peter. I don't want to come on as some middle-aged tragedy soul, because that's not the father he needs me to be. His stepfather, administrator in a small Vermont hospital, is a good guy and reliable, but dreary, bland, and I figure Peter needs a more exciting model. We go from canvas to canvas in the room of Degas pastels, where I can talk upbeat about "vitality" and "experiment."
       Now we wander through little rooms of late medieval paintings, and looking up I find he's gone, and I'm uneasy -- we made no back-up plans to meet if we got separated. He's a big kid, I'm not worried; still, unease roils in my stomach as I jog through the maze again. It's like fast-forwarding through the history of Western art the way paintings blur past. And there he is, next to El Greco's View of Toledo, he's looking at the picture with a girl, older than he is I think, and I see his shining, I wonder if she sees it, if other people get it, this shining he does, something he does, that emanates from him, for me at least, a thing of the eyes, I suppose, but it seems to be generated by the whole of him.
       I keep my distance, but he spies me and waves me over.
       Waves me over! Used to be, when I drove up to see him in Brattleboro, he wouldn't let me near his friends. "Dad, just pull up here. I'll walk the rest of the way. Okay?" But now -- now I come up to him, and he says, "Dad, we were talking about movies. What's that early Scorcese film we saw?"
       "Mean Streets?"
       "Right. Mean Streets," he says to the girl.
       "Oh, I love that movie," she says. "Well, I love Scorcese," she laughs. I feel the affectation and don't care. I'm taken with her smile. She tosses a wave of blonde hair back from her eyes. The gesture reminds me of Peter's mother when I first knew her. Blonde like Peter, girl with long legs. A pretty girl, and that she seems interested in Peter pleases me. "You go to college in New York?"
       "I'm still in high school," she says, and her eyes half close with the tedium and embarrassment. "I'm a senior."
       "You want to join us for a cappuccino?" I ask her.
       "Oh I can't, I'm sorry. Maybe I'll see you. I'm meeting a friend at the restaurant. But thanks. Thank you. Really."
       Peter says it was nice talking and when we're alone he stares up at the El Greco. "God. That's some weird city," he says. "A ghost city . . . Nice!"
       "I always liked it." We walk to the restaurant. "So, you dig that girl?"
       "Oh, Dad!" Not needing to understand exactly how he's making fun of me, I grin.

       There's not much of a line -- it's after lunchtime -- we sit over cappuccino and biscuit and I remember the bronze boys lifting arcs of water from their penises, circles on the surface of the pool expanding and conjoining. Now it's just columns and white table cloths. "Before we go, I want you to see the American wing."
       "Fine. But we want to see the house you grew up in, the school you went to. Right? There's still plenty of time, Dad."
       "That makes me feel real good -- that you ask. It does. But you know -- it's nothing special, where I grew up. Nothing special at all. A third-rate apartment building on a lousy side street. I want to go back up to Columbia, really check it out, maybe you'll apply. I guess I'd be proud. And I want to take you downtown, show you the real New York!"
       "That's okay, Dad. Special. I don't expect anything special. I told you -- it's my history I'm after. Okay?"
       There's a woman by herself a couple of tables over, my age, mid-forties, new kind of mid-forties. When I was a kid, a woman forty-five was a dreary, pudgy matron, permed hair, dead clothes. This woman pulsates shrewdness and sexual stuff. Her hair, auburn flecked with gray, is cropped pixie-style around her head. Its severity shows off her strong-boned, suntanned face. Her eyes, calm, are the eyes of a woman who knows what she wants.
       "Dad, you're staring."
       I guess I am. I grin and look down at my cappuccino and eat my biscuit. Odd. Usually, I don't mind if Peter sees me interested in a woman. So long his mom and I have been apart. This time I feel flustered. I keep her face lit up behind my eyes, and as I do, it changes, and now I get it, I get it and look up. "Excuse me, Peter." I stroll over. "Sylvia?"
       I can see she doesn't know me. But looking into her face, I'm sure. "I'm sorry?" she says.
       "Sylvia. I'm Daniel Rose. We were kids, I used to come over to your house; your father, the doctor, he played in a quartet. Thursday nights, remember?"
       "Oh, Daniel-- Daniel, for godsakes!" She laughs and stands, a small woman -- I'd forgotten that -- strong and lean, a runner, I'll bet, wearing a mauve cashmere sweater as if needing the sweater to soften her act. She squeezes both my hands in both of hers. "Oh my God."
       "Your father played viola, right? When Joseph Roismann was in town, he'd come by and sit in. Out of friendship."
       "That's right. And the cellist was my Uncle Leon."
       "He had long hair."
       "Oh! Very long, for those days."
       "He was a truly terrible cellist." We laugh together. I remember Uncle Leon's hair wild over his eyes, making him feel, I think, like a passionate, serious musician. "But I loved those nights," I tell her. "I can see your father getting furious, stomping his foot to keep poor Leon in time . . . "
       Peter comes over. "Sylvia, this is my son," I say. "This is Peter, my son. Peter, I knew this woman, I knew Sylvia Gold when I was your age. It's been twenty, twenty-five years since we lost touch."
       I go back to our table to get our trays and give them time to meet, and I watch her face, as I always do when I introduce Peter to someone.
       We sit together. She says, "Your father and I were good good friends. So long ago . . . I have a son and daughter," she says to me, "both grown up. My girl is married already."
       "And your father?" I ask. "What a sweet man. What a dear man."
       She nods. "Dad died three years ago. My mother's moved to Florida. And -- your father?"
       "Many years ago. Well . . . You know he was much older than my mother."
       "He did what he could," she says solemnly. "I mean afterwards." And I see out of the corner of my eye that Peter's curious. I know without seeing.
       "He tried to be a good father," I say mechanically. And the snakes in my belly start their old shameful gyrations. Shameful -- I'm ashamed to be at their mercy like this, and I try to give Sylvia a Look, but she doesn't see.
       She says, "I remember like it was yesterday."
       "Yes . . . yes. So -- are you living in New York -- all this time in New York?"
       Now she gets the drift, and she changes her tune, begins to tell me about her career as an historian, about her book on nineteenth century women's diaries and photographs. I tell her about my work healing sick companies, growing healthy ones. I tell her about Peter's history project. This lights her up; she wants to ask more.
       I exchange glances with Peter, and I tell her, "We've got to go, I'm afraid. Well, you look lovely, Syl."
       "Oh. I'm . . . really sorry," she says. I know what she means. I nod -- it's okay, it's okay -- and shake her hand and look around for the best way through the tables, we stand, and there's that girl again, the blonde girl we met upstairs, she's looking all around and Sylvia stands and waves her over.
       Now we laugh, the four of us, and go through three minutes of a flustered dance. My goddaughter, Sylvia says, Alicia O'Connor. The daughter of my dearest friend, she says, Ruth's daughter. . . and Peter's grinning and they shake hands, Peter and Alicia, can you imagine, how funny . . . and now the two of them go off for pastry.
       "I am sorry," Sylvia says again. "So Peter doesn't know?"
       "He knows she's dead."
       "I suppose that's enough . . . "
       "I've always thought so. I suppose I intend to tell him someday. But even then -- why?"
       She nods and stops nodding. Now: "What are you afraid of?"
       "Nothing. Nothing, really. But why? What for?"
       "Of course I understand. I do understand."
       I take that in. "Yes. How wonderful you were to me!"
       "Not so wonderful. I felt for you. Daniel? I felt for you."
       "You were what? -- fourteen, fifteen. And we weren't even dating. It's unusual for kids to feel like that for other people."
       "Oh, I don't think so. No, I don't find that to be true at all. You were a person with heart. You were. And now Peter, too. I'm sure of it. Don't you feel that about him?"
       I feel as if I've revealed some defect in my way of seeing, in my heart now. "I'm saying it wasn't . . . ordinary, that's all. I want to say thank you, I've never forgotten, Sylvia. You listened, you didn't try to smooth it over. My father needed me to tell him it was all okay."
       "Your poor father."
       "Poor everyone. Right? Poor goddamn everyone." We sit there, mourning. Finally I say, "And your husband -- what does he do?"
       "I'm no longer married. Not for many years. I'm Sylvia Gold again."
       The kids come back, Peter's carrying Alicia's tray and they're talking as they come, talking rock groups and sitcoms to check out each other's taste. I tell Sylvia that I, too, have been divorced for a number of years. And right away I find myself playing with the idea of seeing Sylvia again, of starting something -- as I do so often when I see an attractive woman. And I think how automatic it is for me and what a riot -- because even when we were young she and I were never lovers. We talked for hours when we could get away with it, we came here to the Metropolitan, we sneaked into second acts of Broadway shows. I told her things in Village coffee shops.
       She must see something in my face, I must have given myself away, because what she says now is so clearly for information, clearly so I won't make a mistake. "You'll have to come over and see me. And meet Alicia's mother. Meet Ruth. We live together, we have for five years."
       "Sylvia's my co-Mom, as well as my godmother," Alicia laughs, and it's obviously a well-used line. Now, maybe embarrassed, she touches Sylvia's arm, and says, "mostly, she's my friend. She's always been."
       "Well, you're lucky. I know. She was my friend," I say. "In a way, she still is. You still are," I say. "Funny how it is, how nearly all the cells in our bodies change every few years -- not to mention marriages and careers and children -- and here we are, still the same people. You're still Sylvia. Or I'm the same, I mean I see you the same. More and more this afternoon, your face; it's like a special effect in a movie, the way your face has turned into the face of the girl I knew."
       "Will you stop by? There's something I'd love to show you," Sylvia says, putting her hand on mine. I understand the gesture: now that she's told me about Alicia's mother, she can chance it. "What about tomorrow? We have a show tonight."
       "Please. Tomorrow. Come for brunch about eleven. Will you do that?"

       I feel a little uneasy walking back across the park now that the sun has slipped behind the rooftops of the grand apartment buildings of Central Park West. Looking back we see the upper stories of the buildings along Fifth Avenue glowing. When I'm in the park, old habit -- I keep my eyes open for danger. But it's still bright out, and we're not alone. Strollers. A karate class all in white. Homeless men, strollers loaded with plastic bags. Warm fall day, Peter's feeling expansive. He stops in the middle of the Great Lawn, looks around him 360, and says, "In-cred-ible!" And he spins as he used to when he was ten, arms spread, head back, floating, letting Manhattan issue from his fingers.
       "So how did you lose touch?" he asks, returning to earth.
       "With Sylvia? Oh. She went away to college when I went to Columbia. Then I went away to grad school. Then your mother and I moved away and . . . we made different lives, that's all. It happens. You'll see."
       He laughs. "Dad! I wasn't criticizing you. You're so funny."
       I show him the rocks I used to climb; once they seemed like a cliff, now a small granite outcropping. We leave the park and walk up Central Park West and down a side street to the small apartment building where I grew up. The same and not the same. I remember shabby: the street littered, the canopy torn, tile of the lobby filthy, the walls faded and soiled, the enamel-metal door of the elevator scored with curses. It's not fancy now but clean, cared for. I don't say any of this to Peter -- just tell him, into the tape recorder, "This is where we played stoop ball. And Chinese handball! A lost art." -- I describe how the hollow rubber ball had to bounce. I show him the brownstones along the street, nice now, kept up; those days, before they were bought up and refurbished, walkups of the poor.
       "So? What was it like, you and your parents?"
       I shrug. I point out our windows on the facade. Our building had an elevator, but the line between us and them was too thin. I hear the words, "You see how he makes me live? You see?"
       What can I do about that now?
       And the poor giant roaring in pain, roaring at me out of his pain, poor father I wished dead for her, for both of us. She wanted her real life back. As if there were some Real Life, meant for her in heaven, stolen by Hitler, stolen by my father.
       "So your father -- " Peter prods " -- your father sold dresses."
       "Wholesale. He sold for a manufacturer. It was a struggle."
       "And your Mom? You never said."
       "Mothers didn't usually do back then," I explain.
       "I know. But wasn't she educated in Vienna?"
       "Budapest. Yes. She was a student of literature. She was never a professor, but she said she was. She came from money, she spoke half a dozen languages. Why did she marry my father? He was handsome, he looked like a success. But he was a disappointment. He became her exile. She came over just before the war. Her family was mostly lost in the camps. He was . . . a handsome disappointment. Now I don't see things the same way, I see him as some kind of broken hero, because every damned day, Peter, six days a week, you understand, he put on his pants, went down on the subway and sold his heart out for a bastard named Meyer, and brought home a paycheck that kept us going."
       I can feel it wanting to spill out, and I take Peter's arm and change the subject to tonight's musical comedy as we walk back toward the corner, toward the ornate apartment building in yellow stone that served as one more pretext for my mother's bitterness. My mother and I would walk past on the way home and she'd sigh, "You see? That's where we should be living." But in the last years, when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, before she went silent, what didn't serve as image of her condition?
       Now, father and son, we walk past those ghosts, mother and son, on our way to the subway. And in the roar of the train coming into the station, rumble and grinding down as we go from station to station, 86th to Columbus Circle, I discover I want to say something over the noise, as if, as if, if I don't, something between us, Peter and me, will be lost. And I'm amazed. I realize I've been holding my breath; now my breath comes deep, like when you make love. Am I really going to do this? I find myself in panic, rehearsing phrases, phrases that begin sentences I can't imagine myself saying.
       We walk Central Park South to the St. Moritz, where we're staying, and glancing over at the tape recorder in his hand to make sure it's off, I say, "All right. You want to know about your grandparents."
       "I don't mean to push you, Dad. I know it's not your thing."
       "It's okay. Well, my old man was a hardworking, old-fashioned guy. Not very smart, Peter. I've told you that. Not smart. He was crude. He used to brag that as a young man he and a buddy would pick up 'faggots' just to beat them up -- but at parties he wore lamp shades on his head. You know what I mean? He played handball and stayed away from home as much as he could. My Dad hated everybody in categories -- not just 'faggots,' 'pansies, 'mamas' boys' -- I was a 'mama's boy' -- but 'Wops,' 'Micks,' 'Chinks,' 'Spics,' 'Coons' -- even 'Kikes.' But with individuals, it was different. He was kind to the men at work -- Cadillac pushers they called them -- black, Hispanic, guys who rolled those huge racks of clothes around the street. Really kind. They liked him. I could see it. Then he'd talk like that. So . . . I hated him a lot . . . He smacked me around. But he meant well. God, he was like a big bear trapped in a zoo instead of off in a woods somewhere."
       "He hit you?"
       "Ahh, not much . . . People make such a big deal out of hitting. Hitting's no good, but that was the least of it. Anyway, that's not what I want to tell you." I glance over at his tape recorder again. He sees me, and he puts it in his book bag. "It's about your grandmother. She suffered a lot. See, she was supposed to have a different life. She'd wander through the house muttering to herself in languages I didn't understand. So she made him suffer. When it got too bad, and she couldn't express any other way how terrible, she used to get on her bony knees and stick her head in the oven and turn on the gas."
       "She did? She did that?"
       "Imagine -- a parent doing a thing like that? Dramatizing her suffering like that in front of her child?"
       "'Her child'? Dad. You make it sound like it's somebody else."
       "You see, Peter . . . Christ . . . see, I'm as old now as she was then. How long do I have to hold onto it all? You've got to let it go eventually. There's nobody to complain to. How long can you keep a chip on your shoulder against the dead? And she could be so funny and charming . . . "
       "But it must have been so awful."
       "She would have loved you. She would have been so proud. My mother. She'd put on a formal dress she hardly ever got the chance to really wear, she'd sit on top of the rented piano, cigarette dangling, legs crossed, and sing to me in a breathy German or French. Cafe songs. I loved it. Only a long time later I understood she was playing Lotte Lenya or Edith Piaf. . .
       "Well, as I say, partly it was drama. She was always telling the poor guy she was going to leave him. And he'd roar and shove her through the apartment, and this would justify her vision of her life, 'Go back to Europe, you crazy woman, maybe Hitler would take you back.' This was after the war, you understand, there was no Hitler. But there had been Hitler; so her eyes would roll up in her head, she'd maybe go into a faint or she'd rush to the medicine cabinet -- 'Say -- which bottle do you think will do the job best?'"
       "And then she died of a heart attack."
       "Not exactly . . . I know that's what I told you. No."
       Peter waits for more. We pass the pompous architecture of the exclusive New York Athletic Club. More like a palazzo or a bank. No Jews, my mother used to tell me whenever we passed. No Jews.
       Horse-drawn hansoms wait at the curb and carry lovers and families amidst the taxis. "Actually, honey, actually, she killed herself, your grandmother. When I was fourteen. That's what Sylvia was talking about before. Your Mom never told you, did she."
       "Dad, how awful. Dad? You never, never told me."
       "No."
       I hear his silence, and it makes me want to smooth things over. He doesn't ask and I don't say: how. I pick up the pace, I tell him I've always loved Central Park South. I tell him about Fitzgerald splashing in the fountain in front of the Plaza. Glory Town, Promise Town. "Peter, we're going to do New York up and down tonight. We'll have a snack before the show, but after, we'll take a cab down to Windows on the World and have a spectacular goddamn supper up on top and look out at all the lights."

       And we do everything I wanted us to do, and the show is Gershwin and the taxi driver is a flamboyant Lebanese who used to be a trapeze artist, and we get the table I've reserved, at a window, and from a hundred-something stories up, New York looks like the promise of glory I used to think I wanted. But Peter is quiet. He keeps looking me over whenever I'm looking away. It isn't until the taxi ride home he says anything -- then it's to ask what's wrong.
       "With me, Peter? Wrong with me?"
       "I guess it was telling me -- I guess that's it? You've been so different. I don't think of you as ever heavy and sad like this. It's like you're somebody else."
       "Oh, honey."
       "No. I'm not stupid. I know you get sad, everybody gets sad."
       "I didn't know it showed. I don't want it to spoil our weekend."
       He looks at me so seriously, so new, that my mind falls into a gap; for half an instant I don't know this young man across the table. "Dad, it's all right. You got to be sad thinking about something like that. Your mother."
       "Funny -- and I thought you were the one feeling bad."
       "Well, maybe. I guess. Maybe. I mean, it's so weird," he says. "Like all of a sudden you told me I was adopted or something."
       "This isn't about you, honey."
       He stares out of the cab. "It is. Sure it is."
       "I guess it is. Well? You were the one wanted family history."
       "Sure. History."
       "What do you mean, 'history' like that?"

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