"People are crazy," he says. "They hurt each other. That's family history. That's you and Mom. That's my history."
       "I'm sorry I told you. I'm really sorry."
       "No. You should have told me before this. How could you not tell me?"
       "You think I'm crazy, too?"

       We sleep late -- or Peter sleeps late and I go down to the hotel gym and work out. I saw my father's face in dreams last night, first time in years. But in my dream it was a handsome face, not thick, bulbous-nosed. It was the face she must have loved once. I see it again as I jog the treadmill. It's almost half-past eleven by the time we get to Sylvia's. Riverside in the eighties, high up over the river, a big, bright apartment just a couple of blocks from where she grew up.
       The three women fuss over us a little, and I can see from the foyer the dining room table set with white linen and crystal. It makes me glad. Today, especially, I need all the formality I can get to enter any kind of dance.
       Peter's brow is furrowed; I want to touch my fingers to his forehead.
       Ruth and Alicia go off for coffee and come back carrying silver trays. The apartment is decorated to my soul's taste, in books and sunlight through plants and a hodgepodge of mahogany from any-old time. The Sunday Times is piled in sections by the old couch draped with Turkish kilim. I feel at home with Ruth. She's a doctor, in family practice for an HMO, she's soft, a little heavy, comfortable in her body but firm in her carriage. She doesn't look at all like long, blonde Alicia. Things amuse Ruth; she holds them up for inspection: the muddle of their books by every chair, the talk of the young people about SAT's and college applications.
       We have coffee, and Sylvia goes off, comes back with a large black leather album embossed in gold. "This is what I wanted to show you." She pats the couch; Peter sits on one side, I on the other. "Look." She turns past pictures of her childhood, her father as I remember him, except that then he seemed old, now young. Her generous mother, who for a time, afterwards, became my mother. And then I see myself in black and white, maybe twelve, thirteen, a handsome kid, a little pudgy, no teenaged acne yet, mouth twisted up in tough-guy irony at the camera, and next to me, Sylvia smiling full-face. We're in front of her old apartment house on West End.
       "Look, Peter, you see?" I say, though what it is I want him to see I'm not sure. We turn the book around for Ruth and Alicia.
       Sylvia turns the page. "This one," she says. Sylvia as a young girl, maybe thirteen, wearing a flowered dress, so pretty, her hair long and dark, my parents behind her. I must have taken that one. Vaguely, I remember there were times our parents got together. The next picture is in a park. My mother's all dolled up, she's wearing a broad summer hat, pale linen I think, and a silk dress -- I remember the dress, navy blue, silk -- perhaps she was trying to impress Sylvia's parents.
       But Sylvia sighs, "She was always so stylish, your mother. Do you remember that? And look at that hand on her hip. The grande dame."
       Peter's bent over the photograph so I can't see. "Sorry," he says, sitting back. "That's practically the first picture of your mother I've seen. Except for her wedding picture. You know that, Dad?"
       "Stylish . . . " I say. "Look, Syl, look at how false. You and I look like boyfriend and girlfriend here, and they -- they look happy. Now, I'm sorry, but that's simply not the way it was. My mother? -- I told Peter last night," I say, "about my mother's death." I announce this to all of them, as if assuming they've talked about it among themselves, and I see I'm right -- there's no surprise. I catch irritation in my voice -- as if Sylvia had forced me to tell Peter. As if she had intruded, as if she had a long history of intruding. "No, not so happy."
       "I know," she says. "But look at her. How proud of you . . ."
       I see what she means. My mother's putting on an act, of course, smiling, face tilted to be charming, but she's got a hand on my shoulder, in possession and pride, I see the look Sylvia means. And instantly I feel heavy, I catch the scent of her powder, I feel smothered. "Well, you're getting a history lesson," I tell Peter. "About the unreliability of photographs."
       "Maybe they were happy that afternoon," he says quietly, as if it were simply one logical possibility. I hear annoyance.
       "I do think so," Sylvia says. "You know, I liked your mother. She was very loving to me."
       I don't say anything. I wish we could leave. I look out at the Hudson, that grayest river. Ruth finds a crack on the ceiling to stare at. Alicia and Peter avoid each other's eyes. Peter's been staring at me whenever I look elsewhere. The brunch about to be served feels like an ordeal. Now one more photograph, this one in color, the color fading.
       "This must have been a different afternoon," she says. "She's wearing the same dress but look, there, there's our Mr. Ornstein at the picnic table. You remember?"
       I shrug. "No."
       "You don't remember? He played violin those Thursday nights?"
       "No."
       "Your mother was very fond of him. Daniel. You don't remember?"
       "No, I don't remember. There must have been a violinist, but I don't remember." What do you want of me? The man is in a dark suit. He looks seedy but interesting. His face is long, handsome, hawk-like. He has heavy, black eyebrows. It comes back a little. "I don't remember him exactly, but I think I remember his face." I look more closely at the picture. My mother and father, Sylvia's mother and father, are posing by a tree. The man is seated, he just happens to be in the picture. He's smiling up at them.
       "Maybe I remember so well," Sylvia says, "because we used to gossip about it. My mother and my father." She glances at Peter, and seeing the look, I puff out my lips, give a toss of my hand, as if to say, Go on, say what you want -- what can it matter?
       "There's nothing to tell."
       "She liked him?" I prompt.
       "Well, yes. Yes. He was a man of culture. A scholar, a musician. He taught at N. Y. U. He spoke I don't know how many languages. She began coming over on Thursday nights to see him -- that's how it was that you came at first. They spoke German for hours. Your father . . . didn't like him."
       "I bet. I'll bet he called him a 'goddamn refugee.'"
       "But you did -- you liked him very much."
       "Ornstein."
       "That's right."
       I go inside the picture. Ornstein. Now, saying the name, I feel his long hands, long fingers. I remember his heavy breath, or imagine that I do. I look at him looking at her. He wanted to marry her, I wanted him to marry her? . . . Am I making that up? I don't know. This memory, the sense of their relationship, holds together like the skin on a pudding, as if, were I to breathe, it would dissolve.
       Sylvia says, "My father worried your father felt humiliated."
       "You remember one hell of a lot," I say, and Ruth looks over at me; I know she's hearing something in my tone. She nods to Alicia, they go off to set the food on the table. From the kitchen, Alicia calls, "Peter? Will you give us a hand?"
       He excuses himself. He doesn't meet my eyes. I close the album and sit back, shading my eyes from the bright day outside, my stomach turning over.
       "Remember a lot?" Sylvia repeats, very serious. "I suppose I do. Maybe that's why you stopped returning my calls, stopped writing. Was I too nosy?"
       "You went away to college. That's all. Kids lose touch."
       "I was home on vacations."
       "Who knows after all this time?"
       "Your mother stopped coming over," Sylvia says, "after Mr. Ornstein went to the West coast. And wasn't it just a few weeks later . . . "
       "So that was your family's story?"
       "Yes."
       "I have a different view -- I can't remember a time she didn't talk about doing it." I say this flatly, authoritatively, a little bitterly.
       "I'm sure we romanticized the situation. I don't mean to argue with you, Daniel. It doesn't matter."
       "Maybe it was a catalyst. Ornstein leaving her. I didn't even remember that this Ornstein left, but maybe. We never put that together . . . Or maybe my father did. Who knows after all this time? . . . Sylvia, you're still upset with me, aren't you? That I disappeared. You're getting back at me!"
       "You know, I suppose I really am." She laughs as if she's surprised. "It's odd, Daniel. It's been bothering me a little all these years . . . "
       I find something funny in this. I take her hand in my two hands. "I'm sorry."
       She encloses my hands. "It's so long ago."
       We're called in to the dining room, and we spread great, starched white napkins and Ruth sighs, "We do love Sundays. We stitch ourselves together into human beings every Sunday morning."
       A Schubert trio is playing. I can't help thinking of my mother: how she would have loved to be here; but how she would have lost everything -- the smell of good breads and the music, and the young people Peter and Alicia, and Ruth and Sylvia -- by trying to establish herself as The Duchess, by experiencing this Sunday grace merely as what-was-lacking in her own life.
       We talk about larger sadnesses. Children who grow up without nourishment of body and soul. The way hope seems to be closing down in America. A meanness that first degrades, then blames and punishes those who are degraded. Like something out of Dickens. Oddly, as we speak of these things, my stomach calms, I rest in our shared sadness.
       I think this larger pain is seductive. I think I need its music in order to permit myself to feel my own sorrows -- but put them in perspective. Our collective sorrow -- feeling it, speaking of it this way -- is like a penance for self-indulgence. It comforts.
       Only for awhile. As I drift down into the griefs we share, I find my breath heavy and damp, and I see a hotel room not a mile away, cheap hotel, respectable, no flophouse but not the Ritz, God knows. God knows, no place for a Duchess. I turn away to other music, the Schubert trio this Sunday morning floats upon, and I snatch a piece of smoked white fish, my first in years. Now something in the music or in this food, European-Jewish, something in the bookcases full of new and ragged books, something in the dark woods and crystal in an old glass-fronted breakfront I seem to remember from Sylvia's old apartment, something brings me a word: foreigner, I hear it in my father's voice, not refugee but foreigner, and all at once I see Mr. Ornstein and I think, Oh, Mr. Ornstein, that Mr. Ornstein . . . and of course I know Ornstein, and now I see him by the oval sailboat pond in Central Park near Fifth Avenue, I see him pushing off his handmade schooner with a pole tipped like a cane, with rubber.
       They're talking, Sylvia and Ruth, about public indifference to children. Peter tells them, "My history teacher says, 'We reap what we sow.' But the thing is, We reap what They sow. I'm not the one who's indifferent. But I'm going to be the victim of their indifference." I've never heard Peter speak like this. The Peter I knew was a child.
       Sylvia fills our cups with coffee, and touching my forehead I say, "Sylvia -- I just remembered: Ornstein made a beautiful wooden sailboat; not just a sloop -- a schooner. It was his weekend hobby. It was all fitted with brass cleats and winches and white sails. The hull glowed under layers and layers of shellac. Did you ever see it?"
       "I don't think so."
       "Funny! -- now that I can see it, I can see him." I stop. Goddamn foreigner, I hear in my father's voice. Am I inventing? I don't know. "He gave me that boat," I say.
       "When he left New York?"
       "I don't know. Maybe. We used to sail it together, I remember that, I remember the three of us going often to the little pond, he rented a berth for it -- you know that brick building by the pond?"
       "You and your mother and Ornstein."
       "And he gave it to me. Where is Ornstein now? Is he still alive?"
       "Oh, Daniel, I don't know. We lost touch."
       I nod and stay silent and talk drifts away, I take part, oh, but I'm not here now. Alicia and Peter are talking about their futures. I'm remembering my mother and Mr. Ornstein. I remember them sitting on a park bench together by the pond, I remember how proud I was to borrow his pole and sail his boat for him. And I'm wondering -- that boat, what could have happened to that beautiful boat? He gave it to me, I'm sure of that, and it was precious, I would never have gotten rid of it -- then what?
       While the others are still lazing over brunch, I go look out the window, it's not polite, but I do, and I watch a big cabin cruiser making a V wake down the Hudson, and I watch the Sunday traffic heading out of the city for family Sundays and I remember family Sundays, the silent drives, and Sylvia stands next to me and touches my arm, and I realize I've been waiting for her.
       "You came to the funeral," I say.
       "Of course."
       "I can't remember much. Can you?"
       "No. I remember you."
       "They didn't want me to see her, but I did." There's a velvet cushion on the radiator; we both sit there and stare out at the river. Laughter from the dining room. I look into Sylvia's face. "You know, I guess by the time I got to Columbia, I wanted to be somebody else, not that boy you felt sorry for. I suppose that's it. Why I stopped calling."
       "I think so, Daniel."
       " . . . Finally, she looked like a Duchess. Lying there in blue silk. I was afraid I was going to laugh and they'd send me to a psychiatrist."
       "But you handled things. I mean -- not perfectly, but well."
       "I did. I made my accommodations."
       Now we don't say a lot of things for a long minute. But it feels comfortable. "Isn't Ruth wonderful?" she says finally. She kisses my cheek. "You'll come back and see us?" I take her hand, we walk back to the others.

       We have a couple of hours before the train to Boston. "There's a place I need to see, okay?" I ask. "Please. For me. It's just a few blocks away."
       Peter shrugs, he humors me, but I feel he's walking by himself. We walk from Riverside over to Amsterdam, up Amsterdam and down a side street to a refurbished hotel on the corner of Columbus, flat gray stone, with new steel-banded windows. I haven't been here for thirty years. At first, I went out of my way to come by after school -- maybe to see if I could. Then, never.
       There used to be wood-cased sash windows, the hotel name engraved in the glass door was different, and the glass, I remember, was cracked diagonally, corner to corner on the door. "This is the place . . . My mother walked out one night, I don't know why, I mean why then -- a fight, I suppose."
       "Maybe this man she liked?"
       "That's what Sylvia thinks. I don't know. She took her fancy suitcase. She had this one Louis Vuiton case from Europe. With fleur de lys. . . "We called all over the city, but my father and I were imagining the Plaza, the Pierre -- high drama, you know? Instead, she came here, I don't know, because it was nearby, because, maybe, it expressed her spirit that day? I don't know. Or maybe because of the gas. Those days, residential hotels, some of them, still had gas. I think she figured on that."
       "So that's how she killed herself?"
       "No. No, I think that's what she imagined, you see? Gas. But no. This place had electric kitchens. No. I'm simply guessing she imagined . . . because she used to talk all the time about gas."
       It takes him three or four breaths to ask. "Then -- what, Dad?"
       "Oh . . . well, she used a razor blade." I stop.
       It's night in my mind. Ambulance and a cop car, whirling red lights. I don't speak about this. My father driving around the neighborhood, hunting, when the call came. I don't tell Peter it was me, I was the one got the call and left him a note and came down here. Columbus Avenue in the night.
       And a Police Lieutenant didn't want to let me up, but I started screaming at him, I acted crazy beyond what I was feeling, I watched myself doing it, crazy for effect, or I so thought, and he gave in and put an arm around my shoulder and took me up. He had whiskey on his breath, he needed deodorant. I can feel his hand around my shoulder, I wanted to make a gesture of shrugging it off but I was afraid he'd really take his hand away, and he was all I had.
       They'd cleaned up the worst of it, she was lying on a rubber sheet, there was still blood, blood on the floor, handprints of blood on the wallpaper, and the room stank of cigarettes and everything else. There was a bottle of sherry; it was more than half full.
       I said, That's my mother, the way it was said in the movies. Deadpan. I felt deadpan. I think I wanted to make some kind of theatrical display equal to the situation, but I couldn't. The room was bare, the bed was covered in what looked like a brown Army blanket. The shade was up. I could see the throbbing red light of the Police cruiser, I could see Columbus Avenue. I think now she condemned herself to a prison to carry out sentence.
       My father came and took me home.
       Suddenly, I know what happened to the boat. What must have happened: my father. I don't know exactly, but I understand. And I understand that in the turmoil, I decided to pretend to forget about the boat until, after awhile, I really couldn't remember.
       We walk down Columbus towards eighty-first. Across the street, the old saloon, plate glass windows still framed in heavy, dark, shellacked wood, where the man with bloody face got tossed out into the gutter.
       Peter says: "Dad? Are you all right, Dad? You want to go somewhere and sit down?"
       I stop on the street. My hands are cupped, held up to Peter as if they contained the story. "She went out without stockings. I don't think she ever in her whole life . . . I think she was playing Ophelia -- remember? -- the mad scene from Hamlet? You know . . . maybe I would like to sit down, Peter."
       Peter's hand is planted on my back all the way to a bench on Central Park West. I let it stay. "Afterwards, she was less absent in the house than before; she was always there."
       He's frowning in sympathy, I feel cheap for requiring sympathy. I touch the knot between his eyes with my forefinger, and he smiles with irony at my solicitude. But what I'm feeling isn't just solicitude. It's shame. This isn't the father I want to be. I've been the adventurer father. Now I feel my own sad father filling my living bones.
       You want family history? Here's family history. My father coming home like a rag and slumping by the stove, cooking hamburgers and homefries, night after night, with canned peas, rye bread from the bakery at the corner, or -- when he was just too wiped out -- taking me to the deli, roast beef for me, liverwurst for himself because it was cheap. Smell of brine from the pickle barrel. Smell of my father's sweat and dirt after a day dragging samples store to store. Walking home along Columbus after dark, he didn't talk. Sometimes he patted my shoulder -- a beat and two half-beats over and over. He had a big belly, his "corporation." It was an effort to carry it home. Still, usually he'd poke me and grin as if he were suggesting an illicit drug -- we'd stop for ice cream. Then he'd fall asleep in the big chair, newspaper, over his belly. I'd do my homework. And my mother wouldn't prowl, cigarette in hand, in her old blue housecoat. She wouldn't light Yortzeit candles for her family that didn't get away from Hitler. She no longer sat on the toilet gazing into inner space, tapping the ashes from her cigarette between her legs.
       I sit on the bench by Central Park patting my son's shoulder. A beat and two half-beats, over and over. "My father needed . . . reassurance. Now she was gone, he wasn't so angry, he didn't need me as something for them to quarrel about. He needed me to keep him getting up in the morning, going down in the subway to his job. I said he was a kind of hero? See, he kept doing his job, coming home and cooking terrible dinners. My aunt came from Los Angeles, she offered to take me off his hands. He said no. You see?"
       There's a filthy, chemical cloud soaked in sun just starting to set over Jersey. It's gorgeous -- I want him to feel how splendid so I can feel it. I want to borrow Being. I want Peter's smile to dissipate what's going on in my heart. I point at the sky, Peter nods, uninterested. He looks serious, looks sad. Backlit by the late sun he himself glows but he doesn't know it.
       "She didn't mean to leave me -- but she left," I say. "And he didn't want to stay -- but he stayed." Now, as I say this -- say it to put it away in my pocket with an encapsulating irony -- a silence brews underneath the city music. There's no beauty in this silence. Into the silence something thick and grim and dark seeps, and I'm dizzy and can hardly breathe; for an instant I wonder am I having a heart attack. But it's not that -- it's what we're neither of us saying. I say it: "Yes. All right. My father stayed, at least he stayed."
       Peter looks at me with the new intense look. "You left."
       I sit with this. It takes me time to look at him. "I knew you were thinking that. It's not completely fair. I drove hours on weekends to see you. Didn't I? I had to leave for my work, I mean Brattleboro, what kind of place for a business consultant was that?"
       He doesn't argue.
       "Yes. All right, I know there's more, Peter."
       He shrugs.
       "I know. The truth is, your mother and I, when we separated, I wanted to be anywhere else. So I went to Boston. I'm sorry, Peter. I am sorry."
       "'Sorry' won't cut it. You left. You did leave. I never said anything. Did I? I never did. But I guess 'Sorry' won't cut it."
       He says this gently, and that makes it worse. "No, it won't. I left. I did leave you. And I know what that feels like, don't I?"
       "Oh, I know there's no comparison, Dad." But he says this as if he's angry that it's true.
       "I know there is," I say.
       Now the silence we share grows different; strange; not angry, not peaceful. Oh, there's no radiance, forget about radiance. But it's become something we do share, Peter and I, this silence, full of grief but ours -- a third party on this park bench. Some of it is purely my own, I know that. I'm the only one sees my mother so ashamed of her life she punishes herself by walking around the house all day in the same housedress streaked with sour cream, her face ravaged, the pencilled lines of her eyebrows blurred; and the ash gets so long at the end of her cigarette I wait with a hollow in my stomach for it to crumple into the bowl. The hollow is still there; that's mine. And the fact that it's mine means that Peter can never know what I know, as I can never know what he's gone through.
       But in a way this gap is itself part of what we share, and what we look into. We sit with it as the families pass by on their way to or from the park, kids rushing ahead, we nurse it between us like our sick child, and once in awhile Peter looks at me or I lift my eyebrows like a gesture in some code I don't know how to translate, until it's almost too late to pick up our things at the hotel and catch the train for Boston.

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