UNGRATEFUL CHILDREN

The phone was in the front hall, sitting on a small table we’d gotten from the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on San Pablo Avenue. It rang ten times before someone heard it over the music, went to answer it, and screamed into the living room that my mother was calling. I put down my bass guitar and came into the hallway to talk to her. I was nineteen, away from home for the first time, and buried up to the neck in my new life. I was also high on a chunk of hashish that a friend of a friend had stopped by with earlier that evening. Picking up the receiver and saying a tentative, “Mom?” I heard the voice of my childhood, the voice of what I suppose, up until that conversation, that I still believed to be my real life. My mother was calling to tell me that our dog had died. She cried, telling me, and I saw her standing in the breakfast room next to the kitchen where she always talked on the phone. Then I saw myself in my father’s library, sitting on the two carpeted steps that led down from the small upper portion of the room—where my father’s desk was, where he wrote—into the sunken center that was the library itself. Our dog, Inqui, was next to me. I was talking to him, telling him about some high school nightmare that I had to face the next day. I had often confided in my dog, perhaps because I’m an only child, but also, I believe, because he was a wonderful animal who understood me perfectly. I had named him Inqui when I was nine. I’d picked him out of his litter because he was chasing after a butterfly. In the car bringing him home, a little black ball of fur, I had said that I wanted to call him "Inqui, but q-u-i... because he's inquisitive." My mother loved to tell this story, as if it were an indication of the clever mind about to burst forth from her young son. I have no doubt that everyone else in our lives assumed that we had named a black dog In-k-y, and that none of them saw that as an indication of anything more than a failure of imagination.

In the room behind me here in this house on Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley, an electric guitar rang, out of tune. "It sounds like you're having a party," my mother said. "I just wanted to tell you right away."

I hung up the phone and went back into the room where my friends were waiting. For a long time, I had believed that one day I’d wake up and find myself back in my real bed, the bed in my room at my parents' house. That the months (almost a year) since I'd left that room would have been, if not a dream, then a mistake. Even now, there are times when I almost believe that this is true, but ever since that night when I was high on hashish and playing out-of-tune rock and roll when my mother called to tell me that our dog had died, those times are rare, and I often find it hard to believe in anything at all.

I’m not sure that I have ever made an actual decision in my life. That is, I find that I am in a thing, and usually swimming in it over my head, before I come to the realization that a decision has been made, presumably by me, to jump into the water. Increasingly, I've come to see this as a family trait, either as a genetic tendency to let life drag us around by the nose or as one of the several manifestations of a sort of psychic myopia—a turning inward that functions as a set of blinders and that is at once both incredibly self-involved and deeply, sometimes cruelly, self-critical. My father, for example, painted in the most unattractive light possible, was a self-centered man who despised himself. There was, of course, more to him than that, as there was to my mother, who, in her eighty-six years of life, had been a medical student, an actress, a reader for a movie studio, a writer of short stories, movies, and episodic TV, a librarian, a dealer in rare books and photographs, and a collector of some 2,000 editions of Alice in Wonderland. (You can visit her Alice collection at the Fresno State College Library where she decided to sell, rather than donate it, preferring cash to a possessory title of the collection). When she was eighty, she wrote a wonderful murder mystery. My mother obsessively made decisions, but I would argue that that’s merely the other side of the family coin.

In the spring of 1972, I was living in Berkeley, California. I had moved there to go to school, not because UC Berkeley was a good school, not because, at the time, the city was the center of the rapidly crumbling counterculture that I had been born into the tail end of, but because the girl I had loved in high school was going to school there. I had transferred from UC Santa Barbara and found that I was no longer in love with her. After going home to Los Angeles for the summer, I'd come back to Berkeley, at first taking classes with no particular pattern or plan (I think that, in my last quarter, I took Norse Mythology, Introduction to Astronomy, The Modern Novel, and something called Sociology of the Possible, while still listing my major as pre-med), and then, finally, dropping out of school completely, all the while looking, not particularly optimistically, to fall in love again. I was living in the house on Benvenue Avenue with two boys from San Diego whom I'd met in Santa Barbara, a friend of theirs from home, and a high school friend of mine from Los Angeles. We had decided to form a rock and roll band.

I do not think of myself as a leader, but there have been several times in my life—this assemblage in the house on Benvenue Avenue being the first—when the momentum of my blind, directionless dives into my own future has carried along those around me, always with disastrous results. I had seen A Hard Day's Night at an impressionable age. I had played guitar, poorly, in several bands in junior high and high school before switching to the bass guitar because it was an easier instrument on which to become competent. The music itself was not my driving interest. There was something in the effortless friendship that seemed to be part of having a band, the "us against them" factor that I wanted to be part of. This was in the days before people used terms like "male bonding," and so hanging around with a bunch of other guys, buffered against the heartbreak and confusion of an adolescence that never seemed to end, looked like much more fun than it does now that the evasive, magical quality of the protection that could be found in the hysterical, too long laughter at a bad joke repeated for the twentieth time has been given a name. It was also a good way to meet girls, or at least to show the girls who did not want to be met what a mistake they were making. They'd be sorry when you were famous.

So I'd moved to Berkeley to follow this girl and my friends had followed me. I was the only one who actually played a musical instrument and we spent most of our time in the house on Benvenue practicing separately, with a certain amount of slavish devotion in the hope of becoming competent. In the evenings, we’d sit together in the living room and work out songs, entering a heady world of possibilities that was ours for as long as we could find ways to postpone that inevitable moment when we would have to go out into the world and try to make them real.

My half-sister, Catherine, her husband, Ben, and their three young children lived a few blocks up Shattuck Avenue. Catherine was twenty years older than me, the younger of my father's two daughters from his first marriage. It was his affair with my mother that had broken up that marriage. He had waited until both his daughters were grown to leave his first wife. For obvious reasons, I had never been close to either of my half-sisters. The older of them, Frances, hated me and despised my mother, but Catherine had always been very nice, in a distant way that seemed to be more about the twenty-year age gap between us and, up until I'd moved to Berkeley, the fact that she had lived half a state away. I don't think she had ever actively disliked me. It's hard, thinking about her now, to imagine her actively disliking anyone, and I believe that we had begun to be curious about each other, interested in the common blood in our separate lives. I can remember standing in her kitchen on one of the few times I’d visited. She’s bent down to take a pot roast from the oven and we’re laughing, for the first and only time, at some annoying habit that our father had carried with him into both of his marriages.

My father was born in 1901. He grew up first in a small town in Transylvania, then still part of Hungary. When he was eight, I think, his family moved to the larger town of Szeged. He was a brilliant child, but with a crossed eye and a spot on one lung that was diagnosed as tuberculosis. He was not expected to live to adolescence. He made extravagant plans, hoping to make up for what he believed would be his short life. He wanted to be a violinist, then a physicist, and then a writer. His eye was operated on by a specialist, the spot on his lung disappeared, and his father, having served in the First World War, came home and promptly died of the flu. My father came to America shortly after that with very little money and a minimal amount of English. His name was Endre, but in those first days in America, he called himself Andrew. There were still people who called him that, or even Andy. This was a young man who, on the boat from Le Havre to New York, had chewed gum constantly because he believed that’s what all Americans did.

His stories of his early days in this country were always a writer's stories. By this I mean that there was nothing of the lecturer in these tales, no stern message about hardships endured and character built. Instead, his were stories that he knew told well. There was the one about how he came from Ellis Island into Manhattan, and, lost downtown, found his way to Broadway there at its beginning and, believing it to be the storied Broadway he'd heard so much about, was terribly disappointed to see how small and dirty the most famous street in America was. There was the story of how he’d crossed a longshoremen's picket line (because at the time he didn’t know what that was) to get back to the steamer on which he was working his way to the West Coast, and the story where, having made it to Los Angeles, he had lived in a flop house on Bunker Hill until, so poor that he could no longer afford the fifty cents a night it cost to stay there, he’d spent his last money at the Grand Central Market on unripe grapes. For several weeks he lived on the grapes, eating a bunch of them in an all-night movie theater, making himself sick to his stomach so that the cramps would stave off his hunger for a few days, and then repeating the process with the ripening, and then rotting, grapes.

I remember looking through his closet for a necktie to wear to a school dance. I found one that was clumsily hand-knitted, stubby and square-bottomed and not at all like my father's many good ties. He told me that it had been made for him by the first girl he'd ever been in love with. That she was killed in New York on an icy day—hit by a streetcar as she crossed the street to visit him. There were many other stories. When your father is in his sixties by the time you are old enough to begin to know him, there is far too much of his life already lived for you to ever really know it all.

My father's limited command of English led him to the movie business. The movies were still silent, but he was sure that he could write stories for them while he learned the language. He started in New York, working for MGM as a reader of Hungarian books and plays, which he would recommend that the studio buy for the screen. He arranged for a Hungarian language newspaper in Cleveland to publish, in serial form, a book which he then began to write, in Hungarian, under an assumed name. After the fourth installment had been published, he recommended the book to the studio, and they bought it. He then went to his boss at what was then called the Story Department, confessed/bragged to having written those chapters, and asked to be hired as scenario writer. He was, and he never finished the novel. I love this story. I’ve known it for as long as I can remember, but, writing it down, I can’t help but doubt its veracity. It just tells too well. It tells like a story.But whether that tale is true or not, his time in New York was followed by a series of what I see now as the same sort of decisionless actions that have now brought me to wherever it is that I am in my own life.

After stops at the patent office in Washington and a post office in Himlerville, Kentucky, where there was a small Hungarian enclave, he found himself in Hollywood, working, at various times, as a writer, an executive assistant, and a producer. I may just be seeing my father's life through my own eyes, but it seems to me that he let life happen to him and then, disgusted with himself for doing so, looked back on it with a deep dissatisfaction. My father was a gentle, friendly man. He wanted, more than anything else, to be liked. He was also the most profoundly unhappy man that I have ever known.

My father never much liked the business in which he spent nearly all his life. He did not consider movie writing to be a worthwhile endeavor. He was fond of saying that screenwriting was to real writing like dishwashing was to being a fine chef. I’ve spent most of my adult life as a screenwriter, and here I am, writing all this as prose.

I have a photograph of my father taken when he was a producer at Paramount in the 1940s. He had just produced two fairly successful movies and the studio had given him some leeway in choosing his next project. My father had chosen Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In the photograph he is seen, earnest and dapper in a good suit and a studio haircut, leaning over Mann's shoulder as he assigns Paramount Studios an option on his novel. The Magic Mountain has yet to be made into a movie, and my father was fired a few weeks after that photograph was taken.

It was while working as a producer at Paramount that he met my mother. At the time, she was married to a doctor and the doctor had been asked to be a technical advisor on a project my father had been assigned to. My father had met his first wife, Corinne, shortly after he arrived in New York. I believe that he was working as a night clerk at a hotel in New York City and living somewhere on 14th Street between First and Second Avenues. Corinne lived on Long Island. She was Hungarian and he was homesick, and they were soon married. Another headfirst dive made before checking to see if there was any water in the pool. By the time he met my mother, he had two daughters, a good job, a nice house in Brentwood and, I imagine, although we never talked about this, no idea in the world how all of this had happened to him. When he would talk to me about his first marriage, he would offer simple explanations: “I never wanted to hurt her, I just wasn’t in love with her.” “When I met her, I was young and in a new country, looking more for a mother than a wife.” To me, the explanations sounded like things that my mother, who believed deeply in the Freudian, had told him to say to a child, or perhaps, had said herself to him, to try and explain how it was that life, the moment you aren’t looking, can get so awfully complicated. In that sense, explanations are just decisions made after the fact. They offer some hollow imitation of comfort, but ultimately serve no other purpose.

On the night my father met my mother and her first husband, he had been backing out of the driveway of his nice Brentwood house, hurrying to an evening meeting at the studio about the project that required a doctor as a technical adviser. In his hurry, he backed out of the driveway without looking and ran over the family dog. He felt awful. He met my mother’s first husband at the meeting and found a sympathetic listener. The two took a quick liking to each other and Jerry, the doctor, invited my father home to dinner. There, my father met the doctor’s wife.

My father told me once that he never meant to fall in love with my mother. He had just thought she had beautiful breasts. Years later, on a similar note, my mother cautioned me against having affairs. "You can start to care about the other person," she said, "and then you make a mess out of everything."

My mother and Jerry separated shortly after she met my father, but my father stayed with his family for another ten years, until an ultimatum from my mother forced him, against what I really do believe was his true nature, to make a decision. They were married in the spring of 1950 and I was born a little more than a year after that, in September of 1951.

In the Spring of 1971, two weeks after my mother had called to tell me about our dog, I was on my way home to Los Angeles. I had dropped out of college that quarter. I'd met another girl. Mimi. She had left school and was about to travel through Europe with her boyfriend, Roger. We'd spent one cold, gray day walking at Stinson Beach, in Marin County, with the sea crashing melodramatically against the rocky shore. She'd told me that she knew Roger wasn't the man she'd end up with, that she was going with him because she wanted to see Ireland. It was too late not to go.

I wanted to be perfect for her when she came back. This, as I saw it, meant quitting school and devoting myself, full-time, to the band. Mimi was to come back a few months later, but I never found a way of being anything close to perfect for her. I spent a great deal of my time over the next three years in a lonesome fog, deep in the kind of moping love that has very little to do with its object. I think that there were other forces at work in my drift away from higher education and into a state of suspended rock and roll fantasy, which were as persistent as my penchant for unrequited love. I had spent almost three years in college. If I stayed any longer, I would have had to decide on something—I would have had to choose a life. What I really wanted was to stay outside and play a little longer.

I somehow sucked my friends into this vortex with me. Soon, we were planning to move to Santa Cruz, to find a house, and to somehow become the Grateful Dead. By choosing a small town in which to pursue our musical future, we could hide, at least for a few more years, in that world of possibilities that opened up for us every time we plugged in our guitars. Of course, at the time, I wasn't aware of any of this. I wasn't much aware of anything. Mimi would come back from Europe and find that I had turned into her ideal. I ached thinking about her with Roger on the Irish coast, on a day colder, grayer, and more darkly beautiful than that one on Stinson Beach. It was all very simple—it was the only thing to do.

There was one problem, among all of the many things I hadn't bothered to think about, that had to be dealt with first.

The war in Vietnam had escalated. Troops were being sent into Cambodia. My draft lottery number was somewhere in the fifties. That was why I was going home to Los Angeles. I had been drafted two weeks after the University notified the draft board that I was no longer enrolled. Now, I had to take my induction physical.

I came home on a Thursday. The house was very empty without our dog. It was full of my father’s silent anger. When my father was nineteen, he had tried to attend a class at the University of Vienna—Freud was the lecturer–but my father had been grabbed by a group of students. They pulled down his pants, and, on seeing that he was circumcised, threw him down the stairs of the hall in which Freud was speaking. A Jew could lecture there, but a Jew could not attend the classes.

My father had come to America. He had married and had his children. He had never been able to go to college and the impossibility of his son having that opportunity and throwing it away both angered and terrified him. Of course, he didn't say this. When we talked at all, he tried to reason with me, to tell me that I needed an education, something to fall back on. That he knew nothing about the kind of music I liked and that he didn't think I had a very good voice. Again, he told me the story of the violin. When he was a boy, he had wanted to play the violin. He had studied hard and began to achieve a certain competence. But there was another boy in his class who also played the violin, and this boy was a prodigy. After a year, the other boy was invited to Budapest to study with Bartók and Kodály. He was to go on to become one of the great violinists of his day. My father put away his own violin and never played again. If he couldn’t be the best at something, he said, he saw no reason to bother trying it. I think that, in the years since my father’s death, I’ve managed to smooth the waters between us. I am no longer angry with him. I can't even remember many of the reasons for my anger or for his. But I will never forgive him for the story of the violin.

My father had made his last movie three years earlier. It had been his dream project, in many ways a smaller version of The Magic Mountain from twenty years earlier. The movie was called The Paul Street Boys. It was based on the novel by Ferenc Molnár, arguably Hungary’s most famous author and an idol of my father’s. He described the importance of the book to Hungarians by calling it, "the Tom Sawyer of Hungary." He wrote a screenplay adapting the book and partnered with a man he’d met while working in television. Some of the money for the project was raised through my father’s partner, but the majority of it was borrowed from both my father's and my mother's families. The movie was co-financed by the Hungarian government and was the first American-Hungarian co-production. It was filmed entirely in Budapest and there was quite a bit of publicity in the country about the production of the film.

My father returned to his native land in triumph. He spent almost two years in Budapest setting up the movie and then making it. When the movie was finished, he brought the negative back himself, buying an extra seat on the plane for the canisters of film. The movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1969. It was up against a lavish Soviet production of War and Peace, and it lost. It was picked up for distribution by Twentieth Century Fox and it bombed horribly, buried in the wake of a miserable year for the studio that had included the disastrous Dr. Doolittle. My father always suspected that his film was used as a write-off against that loss.

My father saw his failures as proof that he was as mediocre as he was afraid he might really be. He was more unhappy than I'd ever seen him. He had spent the three years since the movie's release trying, listlessly, to pick up the pieces. To find a new project. But he was seventy years old and his last picture hadn't opened. A career that had begun with writing scenes for John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, a career that he had never really wanted but now was all he could do to make a living, was coming to an end. And now his son had dropped out of college and was planning to move to a small town in Northern California where he would play the bass guitar—an instrument he had never heard of—in a rock and roll band. I know now that, seeing so much of himself in me, my father had been frightened for me. He had not wanted to see me tossed about, broken, and cast aside by a life in the arts. He was unhappier than he'd ever been and he saw that same dark cloud of unhappiness sweeping in to envelope his son. He was much more frightened than he was angry, and so was I. But neither of us knew about this, knew any of it in any way that could keep us from the screaming, ugly scenes that we inevitably fell into as soon as either of us said much more than a word to the other.

This time, our fight started in the car on the way home from the airport. It began as a discussion about my upcoming physical for the army. My mother had spoken to our family doctor, and she, as well as my father's ophthalmologist, had written letters to the draft board, letters they’d hoped would make me seem medically unfit for service. The idea that I would be inducted into the army had never really occurred to me. My parents would take care of it. It was the last thing in my life that they would ever be able to fix for me. I think we sensed that, and all three of us clung to that fact. We knew, once this draft business was taken care of, that I would be, finally and irrevocably, on my own. But it was suddenly, in the car on the drive home from the airport, seeming like a problem that might not be so easily solved. We were, of course, lucky to be in the privileged position of being able to afford doctors who would lie for me. Lucky to be the kind of people who had options. And truly fortunate that Vietnam was such a bad war. It relieved me of the burden of another decision. I'm not a brave person. I was afraid of Vietnam—I'm sure that I would have been just as afraid of World War Two—but here, thankfully, there was no choice. The war was bad and I could save my ass, or have it saved for me, with pride. The problem was that, by the spring of 1972, a lot of doctors had written a lot of letters for the children of a lot of patients and the letters were no longer guaranteed much success. My mother was frightened for me. What if the letters didn't work? Then, I said, I would go to Canada. Perfect, my father said. All your friends can move with you, and you can have your little orchestra up there in Canada. And that was how our fight started in the car on the way home from the airport.

It was going to be a long and complicated weekend. The next day, Friday, was my parents' wedding anniversary. My father had invited both of his daughters to come to dinner that evening.

This was not to celebrate my parents' marriage. Their mother had come home the day before from a long stay in the hospital. She had been very sick—a metastasized breast cancer—and had not been expected to live. But the cancer was, miraculously, in remission now, so she was coming home. Catherine had come down from Berkeley with her three kids and Frances was driving up from Orange County. My father had decided that it would be nice to have all three of his children together at dinner. I'm sure he was the only one involved who thought that it would be nice.

My father's first wife had never remarried after he left her. She lived in an apartment on Third Street near La Brea. He would go to see her every month, I suppose to drop off the alimony checks, but I really don’t know if that was the reason. Sometimes, when I was little, he would take me with him, and I would swim in the apartment complex’s pool. Years later, when I described this to a friend, it seemed like an incredibly cruel thing to do, to wave me in the face of his ex-wife, but I am certain that my father didn't mean to be cruel. He wanted, desperately, for everything to be fine. For everyone to like each other. For him, bringing his new son along was more of a peace offering than a red flag, although I am also certain that his first wife never saw me as anything more than the proof of her husband's desertion, or, in some Old-World bit of misery, as her own failure to give him a son.

It was to this apartment on Third Street that my sisters brought their mother from the hospital. Catherine and her children were staying there with her. Frances had driven into Los Angeles to help her sister with their mother and then had gone back home. She was driving up again from Orange County with her two daughters and her husband to come to my parents' house for dinner.

The dinner was predictably awful. My father and I were in an armed truce after our blow-up in the car. The fact that my mother remained friendly and hadn't actively taken his side upset him. He was jealous of the easy friendship that had begun to develop between my mother and myself since I'd left home. My mother seemed to be the only one of the three of us who believed that I would land on my feet. My father and I were just aware that I was falling.

We came home and my father went to lie down while my mother retreated to the fortress of her kitchen and piled up mountains of food to protect her from the arrival of my sisters. I went with her. Next to the kitchen was the breakfast room and, in that room, the phone where I had pictured her calling me to tell me that Inqui was dead. I noticed that his food and water bowls were gone, cleaned and put away somewhere. My mother began to cook. She was making sauerbraten and potato pancakes. It was my grandmother's, my father's mother's, recipe. The meat had been marinating for two days. I helped her by grating the potatoes for the pancakes.

"Your father," she began.

"Why doesn't he just trust me?"

"He's worried about you."

"Yeah, well I'm not him, all right?"

A pause. My mother turns the oven on. She brings out an onion to add to the potatoes.

"Have you thought about what you'll do? If you don't flunk the physical?"

"I'll go to Canada".

"Alex, honey, you don't know anything about Canada."

"I don't know anything about Cambodia, but I know I'm not going there."

More silence. The onion chopped fine. The eggs added. I begin to shape the pancakes.

"Make them smaller and thinner. We'll cook some now and keep them warm in the oven."

A longer pause. A pause full of dread. "They'll be here soon." Then, thinking about that, my mother turns to the cabinet where my parents keep their small supply of liquor. She hands me the bottle of good Scotch. "There's a cheaper bottle in the cabinet over the washing machine. We don't want to waste your father's good Scotch on Phil."

I go back past the kitchen, to the laundry room and the cabinet above the washing machine. This is Siberia. A cabinet to which my mother, who cannot bear to throw anything out, exiles those things she'll never use again. I open it. There is a bottle of supermarket Scotch and next to it, piled one inside the other, are my dog's bowls for food and water.

Frances was married to a hard man named Phil. I don't know whether she'd chosen him simply to punish my father for leaving her mother, whether, out of pure anger, she'd chosen the man least like my father on the face of the earth, whether she'd felt herself responsible or unworthy because, in her mind, my father had left her, too, and so she had decided to punish herself with a hard man, or whether she just thought he was cute. For a time, Phil had been a high school teacher, until he'd been fired, either for drinking or for striking one of his students. It was never quite clear which. He believed strongly in corporal punishment and had told my mother and father on more than one occasion that the reason I was growing up so wrong was that they had never raised a hand to me. Phil considered himself a brilliant man. He spoke very slowly and deliberately. More slowly and deliberately the more that he drank. He lectured. "Well... Margaret..." he would say to my mother. "You can't really be sure... that that’s the case... unless you consider... the other... eventualities...” After Phil was fired from his teaching job, he and Frances both enrolled in law school. My sister was now a lawyer with a small practice in Orange County. Phil had taken the bar seven times and was preparing for an eighth attempt at the test. My sister had converted to Phil's two religions when she married him. She was now both a Lutheran and a Republican. My father saw this as absolute proof that Frances had done what she had done to strike back at him.

Frances and Phil would be at least an hour late. They were always late, and my mother always made sure that the meal that she carefully prepared was ready right on time and was cold and overcooked by the time they arrived.

Catherine came over promptly at six, her three kids trailing after her up the stairs. They were happy kids, three of the happiest I can remember knowing. They were bright and funny, and they seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of each other and the world around them. My mother fussed—"aren't they getting big-ed?"—and Catherine and I, who had just seen each other a week ago in Berkeley (the pot roast and the conversation about our father), said shy hellos, thrown back by the house and a version of our old, uncomfortable relationship. My father came out of his bedroom looking tired. He kissed his daughter and his grandchildren. My father was crazy about his grandchildren. He showered them with presents. He wanted his love for them to make up for all the hurt he'd caused his daughters. He wanted for everyone to like each other. For everything to be fine. I think that he really believed that one night he would have everyone over to dinner and we would all have a nice time.

The grandchildren, for their part, were crazy about him. Children always liked my father. There was something in his gentleness that they immediately responded to, even though he only had a few tricks to pull out when they were little and had no idea at all what to do with them once they were past the age of seven.

He was particularly fond of Logan, Catherine's youngest. Logan was a very bright boy, with a sort of wide-eyed openness that is often assumed to be the natural state of children, but rarely is. My father's only hobby was photography. When my parents had moved to this house, he had converted part of the basement into a darkroom. He spent hours down there developing photographs. He had often tried to get me interested in this hobby, and so, of course, I hated everything about cameras. I hated posing for pictures. I hated the smell of fixer and developer. I hated looking at the photographs once they were developed. To this day, I cringe when I see a camera. There are few rungs of Hell lower for me than the one made up of a cleared dining room table and an album full of "memories." My father had given Logan a camera for his last birthday and now, when his grandson asked if they could go to the darkroom, my father hurried him off with an exuberance that made me feel almost abandoned.

My mother was talking to Catherine, asking, with all the correct medical terms remembered from her years as a medical student, about her mother. "You must be so relieved," she said. I sat with Catherine's two daughters, but we didn't really have anything to say. It seemed like a long time before there was the sound of Frances and Phil's van pulling into the driveway.

My mother put on her gamest face as soon as Frances and Phil arrived. She used exuberance to deal with the difficult She had, for a short time, been an actress. "How are you? I have a legal question for you, Frances. Would you like a drink, Phil?" I busied myself, "helping out," spending as much time as I possibly could hiding with my mother in the kitchen. Frances' daughters were ten and seven. They were the sort of sullen children you would expect from such a father. They liked their Berkeley cousins, and you could feel the kind of awe with which they watched happy children, sensing something in their cousins' lives that should have been a part of their own. When the older one called my mother "grandma," my mother and Frances very carefully didn't look at each other. A little while later, I saw Frances in the living room, saying something angrily to her daughter and then spanking her sharply.

I helped my mother bring the dinner to the table and then she asked me to go and call my father, who was still downstairs in the darkroom with Logan.

At dinner, Phil asked me about school, and I coldly told him that I was no longer going to school.

"Doesn't that cause... problems... with the military... in terms of your... service..."

"It doesn't cause me any problems at all," I said.

"He's decided to be a musician," my father said. "He doesn't think an education is important." He stared sullenly at his plate. I stared sullenly at mine. The kids, all sensing trouble, were quiet.

"I've decided I want to think of life in terms of seasons instead of semesters," I said. It was exactly the sort of stupid, profound thing that angry teenagers always say, and, of course, Berkeley was on the quarter system. "If you people don't like it, I really don't give a shit."

I picked up my plate and my glass and took them angrily into the kitchen, where I threw them, breaking loudly, into the sink.

"Well," I heard my mother say, too brightly, from the dining room, "who's ready for dessert?"

———

In the morning, I took my father's car and drove to see my doctor. I played the radio loud. I drove past the clothing store where I'd worked the summer before I'd started college. The radio was playing a song that had been popular while I was in high school. It sounded old and tinny. The store had changed owners and it had a new name and a fancy new sign. Everything was changing very quickly. I had learned so many things that were no longer true. No one had told me that was going to happen.

My doctor had developed a strategy to keep me out of the army. Based on the fact that Ihad certain allergies, she had written a letter adding a few more, saying that I was allergic to eggs, milk—to everything that the army put in its food. She reasoned that, in much the same way that the army had a height restriction so that they would not have to build special bunks for exceptionally tall men, they would not want to have a special chef assigned to cooking my meals. She had added some further complications that would make me look like someone who would, as a veteran, cost the Army a great deal of money in long-term care. She went over her letter with me and she coached me carefully.

"They'll ask you when your last allergic attack was," she said. "Tell them that you were visiting friends. They served tuna salad... and you asked if there was any mayonnaise in it." She paused, making sure that I understood what she was telling me to do.

"Mayonnaise?" I asked.

"You want to show them that you know which foods have eggs in them, that you try to be careful. Tell them that people never take other people's allergies seriously, and that your friends told you that there was no mayonnaise in the salad, but someone must have added a little. You went into anaphylaxis. Your throat swelled shut and your eyes did too. Fortunately, you had your prednisone with you... we're lucky I actually prescribed that for you, although I doubt they'll check."

I looked around the office. The degrees on the wall. The drawing of Hippocrates with his hands on the shoulders of a young boy. This woman was risking her career for me. I'd never had to thank anyone for something this important. I was thanking her for my life.

"I... Um..." I said. That was as far as I got.

"It's a stupid war," she said. “We've all got to do whatever we can to help. You remember what I told you about the mayonnaise?"

My mother was waiting for me at the door when I got home. I thought that she was there to ask me what the doctor had said, but she had something to tell me.

"There's been an accident," she said.

I waited, stupidly, for her to tell me what had happened.

"Your sister, Catherine. Their mother wanted to go for a walk. They were crossing the street to go to Ralph’s. They were with Logan. It was a girl in a VW. She ran straight across Third. Corinne is dead. So is Catherine. We don't know yet about Logan. Your father's at the hospital with Frances. Phil's taken the girls back down to Orange County."

"Jesus," I said.

"Yeah," my mother said. "Happy anniversary, huh?"

We took my father's car and I drove us to Children's Hospital on Vermont. We said some very odd things to each other on the drive there. I remember wondering who the girl was who hit them, just how bad she felt. We talked about surviving cancer just to get hit by a car. I told my mother about Catherine and me, laughing by her stove in Berkeley.

"It's terrible," my mother said. "I know I should feel more, but I don't. I felt worse when Inqui died." It was something that I understood at the time. Remembering it later, I thought that it was a cruel thing to have said, but now, having lost both people and pets, I understand again what my mother meant.

Frances was in the waiting room. She hugged us both stiffly. "Dad's with Logan," she told us. "The doctors don't know if there's brain damage."

My father spent that night at the hospital, sitting by Logan's bed, holding his unconscious grandson's hand. My mother and I had brought leftovers from the dinner she'd cooked for Catherine and Frances the night before.

"So, what did the doctor say?" my mother asked after dinner.

"She told me a story to tell about my last allergic attack."

"Maybe you should tell it to me. Practice it a little."

"I was visiting some friends and they'd made a tuna salad," I began.

Catherine's husband, Ben, arrived late that night. He'd been in Chicago on business, and he had flown in as soon as Frances had gotten in touch with him. He was going to be staying with us. My mother and I had sat up, watching T.V., talking and waiting for him. We had watched In a Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham. It’s still one of my favorite movies. Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter with such a bad temper that he is suspected of murder. It’s a very sad movie. Although the writer, played by Humphrey Bogart, didn't remind me of my father at all, it was strange to watch a movie about my parents' Hollywood with my mother.

Ben had gone straight from the airport to the hospital, and it was very late by the time he got to the house. He looked confused.

"Is there any news about Logan?" my mother asked.

"They won't know anything for at least a week. He's pretty badly hurt. One of his legs may never be right."

He looked out the breakfast room window at the view of Downtown Los Angeles. "I have to make the arrangements in the morning and then go out and see the girls." He turned to me. “Your dad said he’d stay with Logan.” He looked back out at the view again. If he'd known, and if he’d wanted to, he could have seen the corner where his wife had been killed. "Alex," he said. "Do you think you could go out to Frances' tomorrow and stay with the girls? Phil's working or something and no one will be home."

My father didn't come home that night. He stayed by the bedside of his unconscious grandson. I was shaving in the morning, using his bathroom. I had shaving cream all over my face. Ben, who had the family reputation for being extremely penurious, stopped in the bathroom doorway, dressed in a suit and tie, on his way to make the funeral arrangements. "You know," he said, "you can make a can of that cream last three times as long if you don't use that much lather. You don't need that much, you just put it on because that's how they do it in the commercials... and they only do it that way to make you use more cream."

I drove out to Anaheim, and found Frances's house. I'd only been there once, many years before that. Frances met me at the door. "Did you bring your trunks?" she asked, coldly cheerful. "The kids are in the pool."

I didn't answer right away, and she said, "that's all right, you can use a pair of Phil's." She showed me where his trunks were, and what there was to eat in the refrigerator. Then she went off to work.

I went outside. All four girls were in the pool.

"Hi," I said.

They said hello and went back to playing. I sat and watched them. Then I went back inside and put on Phil's trunks. I came back out. "I know a game," I said. "Somebody find me a stick."

Frances' older girl brought me a stick. "No," I said. "Smaller, like this." I broke a twig from the stick. "One person takes this stick, and everybody else stands on the side of the pool. That person dives in and hides the stick, lets go of it wherever they want in the pool. Now, as soon as you see the stick, you can dive for it, and whoever gets the stick is the next one to hide it."

"What's this game called?" Catherine's older girl asked me. Her name was Susan, and she looked a lot like her mom.

"It's called the stick game," I said. "I'll go first."

Phil came home a few hours later and found us all still jumping into the pool, screaming, and tearing at each other to get our hands on the little stick. "Hey..." he said, coming outside. "Hey... I SAID HEY!"

We all stopped and looked at him. His younger daughter glared angrily and dove back underwater after the stick.

Phil looked carefully at the ripples she'd left when she went back underwater. Then he looked at his two nieces and at me. "I don't allow any splashing in my pool," he said.

When I got home, Ben and my mother were finishing the last of the leftovers.

"We saved you some," my mother said.

"I should be getting over to the hospital,” Ben said. "I'll be back later."

"You have the key?" my mother asked.

"Andy gave it to me earlier," Ben said.

I realized that Ben was not going to see his daughters, that he hadn't seen them yet, and it occurred to me that he was afraid to see them.

"How was your day?" he asked me.

"We had a good time," I said. "We swam."

My father had still not come home from the hospital. My mother had been to see him. She'd taken him a change of clothes.

"He hasn't left Logan's bed," she said. "He keeps talking to him, trying to bring him out of it."

I nodded.

"He's going to feel very guilty about this," my mother said.

"Why?” I answered. Stupid, arrogant, young. "He wasn't driving the car."

———

My father didn't come home on Sunday either. The hospital brought in a cot for him, where he slept a little and took his meals. On Monday I woke up early. My mother was already up, and she had fixed me a large breakfast. We didn't talk about the physical. I ate and then I left.

I drove my father's car down Crescent Heights to Wilshire and then turned left towards Downtown. My grandparents, my mother's parents, had lived near here until my grandfather's death, and the neighborhood looked much the same as it had ten years ago when I had walked to Newberry's with my grandfather and my cousin, Liza, to buy marbles or some other small toy. Now, I drove past this neighborhood and towards the office buildings along Miracle Mile. I parked in a lot across from the building where the Army physicals were held. I crossed the street and went inside.

There were about seventy-five other boys there. We were barked instructions, given some forms to fill out and a clipboard to carry with us. Then we were told to strip to our shorts. We were lined up and it’s my memory that we were given a vaccination, although I have no idea if that’s what it was. I remember the soldier who gave the shots. He couldn't have been more than twenty. A young man angry as hell to have drawn this shit assignment. He relished being the first in a long line of young men who got to instill fear in younger men.

We were given various tests. Blood pressure, hearing. Several others. “Turn your head and cough.” Then, we waited for our individual interviews with the Army doctors.

I can remember nothing about the doctor who interviewed me. I have a picture of an older man, matter of fact, hard to read, but I don't know if this is a picture drawn from some obscure fold in my memory or from a sense of what the doctor should have been.

"Mayonnaise?" he asked me at one point.

"Yes," I said. "It's made with eggs, you know."

He wrote. He looked at the chart I'd carried from test to test. He wrote again. Asked me a few more questions. There was a space on the form in front of him for classification. I saw him write something in that space. I was trying to read it upside down. It was, I think, "3-Y". Not 1-A, the classification that meant fit to serve, but also not 4-F, the one that meant unfit for service. I didn't know what whatever he’d written meant. He kept the clipboard, and I was sent back out into the hall. I was told to put my clothes on and come back. I did this. I waited, sitting on a folding chair, for almost an hour. Then the doctor who had examined me came out of his office and, reading my name from my chart, asked me to step back into his office. I did this and he motioned me to the seat across from his desk.

"I am excusing you from military service," he said.

I tried hard to look disappointed.

"You're a very unhealthy young man. Your allergies appear to be chronic, but they aren't really what concerns me. Your blood pressure is extremely high. You should see your family doctor immediately. I believe that you should stay under constant medical supervision."

I sat for a moment, stunned. The imaginary allergies hadn't really mattered at all. I had been so frightened that I had quite literally scared myself out of the Army.

"I'm sorry," the doctor said, misunderstanding my silence. "I know you must be terribly disappointed. The truth is, as I said, you're a very sick young man."

I got up and walked solemnly out of his office. I walked through the room full of waiting young men and towards the door beneath the "EXIT" sign that led to the stairs. I didn't want to wait for the elevator. I was already one flight down when the door slammed closed above me. I was dancing down the stairs, bouncing off the railing and the walls. As soon as I heard the door slam, I let out a small, defiant whoop of joy.

When I came home, my father was sitting on the couch in the living room. He had a pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes on the table in front of him and he was smoking. My father had smoked since his adolescence and had only quit two years ago. My mother had quit a few years before that. I was standing, watching my father smoke when my mother came out of the kitchen.

"I'm out," I said, still looking at my father.

"Thank God," my mother said. She stood for a moment, watching me watch my father. "He came home just after you left," she said. "He took a cab. He wanted to take you to the physical."

"That’s all right," I said. "I wanted to go by myself."

"Go and talk to him," my mother said.

I walked into the living room, and I sat down next to my father on the couch. "They didn't take me," I said after a long time.

"That's good news," my father said.

We sat for a very long time in silence and then my father gave an awful, shaking sob. Something that he pulled from somewhere deep. I put my arms around him. I could smell the familiar smell of cigarettes and my father's hair. I held him while he continued to sob.

My mother and I ate dinner alone that night. My father had gone back to the hospital to sit with Logan. Later, after dinner, I was down in what my family called the "end room" of the house. My parents' house was built along the inside curve of Crescent Heights Boulevard, a street that winds up into the Hollywood Hills from the Sunset Strip. Although it appeared to be very big from the street, it was just very long, and one room deep for its entire length. At one end were the kitchen, breakfast, dining, and living rooms. A door separated this part of the house from the two bedrooms and the little den, which my father had converted into his bedroom when we moved in, and which was now, since he had moved into my old bedroom, turning slowly into a huge storage closet. On the far side of that room was my father's library, with its small upper portion where my father wrote, and then the two steps down into the main, book-lined center of the room. The house had originally stopped at those steps; the sunken library had been added later, as had the little room beyond it where my mother kept her jars full of mosaic tiles—all that was left of a long-abandoned hobby. You went out the door of this little room, into the front yard, and down a short path to the basement room that my father had converted into his darkroom.

I don't know how I'd found myself in this end room with all its jars full of tiles, but I was here, picking up the little pieces of glass, poking through the jars, spilling out tiles onto the table, sorting them by size, then by color, then mixing them up and sorting them again some other way.

"You're not going to start making mosaics," my father said. He had come home and, pulling into the driveway, had seen the light on in the little room at the end of the house and had come up to see who was there.

"No, I don't think so. The tiles are pretty though."

He nodded and he lit a cigarette. "I never understood why your mother did that. She has such a wonderful mind, and she spent all that time gluing tiles."

"Maybe she liked doing it."

"You think that's a good enough reason?"

"I think it's the only reason."

We were silent for a long moment. Finally, I said, "Why don't you move? Why don't you sell the house and get out of this town that's done nothing but shit on you? Go someplace with air. You don't have to stay here." He looked so sad that I wanted to offer him something and this was all that I could think of.

"You take your Hell with you, wherever you go," my father said.

"Thank you," I said. "I'll store that one right next to the story about giving up the violin as soon as you knew you couldn't be the best."

"Feri was very good," my father said. "He played for the Emperor Franz Josef."

"I don't give a fuck if he played for God. You were stupid to give up."

"You shouldn't call me stupid."

He finished his cigarette and then he lit another one. He said, "We're going to have to choose another day to celebrate our anniversary."

I didn't know what to say, and so I didn't say anything.

"You're not going to say anything?" my father said.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I guess I shouldn't expect anything from you."

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"You don't ever think about anyone else. All you care about is yourself."

"Me? You're so fucking conceited you think I dropped out of school just to hurt you. You think Frances married Phil for the same reason. You think this fucking accident was your fault. You think Catherine walked in front of that car just to make you unhappy. There are other people in the world, Dad."

"I'm just asking you to consider my feelings. Maybe you could think about going back to school."

"Oh, suck my cock," I said and walked out the door, down the back stairs to the street and up the street to the vacant lot behind my parents’ house, a steep hill overgrown with brush and weeds. I stood there, looking at the lights of Los Angeles for a long, long time.

When I came back, my father had gone to the hospital again. He spent the night at Logan's bedside, staring into the blank face of a little boy who didn't know that he was there.

I hurt my father badly that night. Hurt him more than I have ever hurt anybody before or since. I loved my dad, and I tried many times to make what had happened in the little room at the end of the house go away, but I didn't know how, and sometimes when I tried, I would find myself as angry as I'd been then, and I would have to walk away.

My father was to live for another twenty years, but he never got over his daughter's death, and, although we were to mend our fences and to spend at least a few of our remaining years together as friends, neither of us was ever to understand the rift that I had placed between us, or to imagine any way across it and back somehow to the people we had been.

———

Catherine's funeral was the next morning. I came into my father's room as he was getting dressed. He didn't look at me.

"I need a tie," I said.

He threw back his closet door without saying anything. All his ties were hanging there. He began to sort through them. He stopped, holding the tie that had been made for him by his first American girlfriend. The one who had been killed by a streetcar while crossing the street to see him. He stared at the tie for a long time.

"I wish you could have known Catherine better," he said finally, putting away the old tie and moving on to a blue one with a very thin red pinstripe.

"We laughed once," I said as gently as I could, and when he looked at me, asking "Laughed about what?" with his eyes, I told him. "We laughed about you."