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were many adventures he had longed to pursue, but he had curtailed his own driving passions (“which might have led to nothing”) in order to be a good provider, a husband, and a father to Warren and me. Yet, when he was a young violinist, long before he married Mother, a famous teacher had plucked him out of an amateur symphony orchestra in Front Royal, Virginia, and offered to take him to Europe to teach him and start him on a career as a soloist. But Dad had decided against it, fearing that after long yearsof musical training, he might just possibly end up playing in the pit of some Broadway show.
    “The competition was too rough, Monkey,” he had explained to me. “And that would have been no way to make a living. It wouldn’t have been dependable. Sure, I would have seen Europe, maybe been wined and dined by royalty, but if I had done it, I probably wouldn’t have met and married your mother and we wouldn’t have had you and Warren. So I think I did the right thing.”
    Somewhere underneath that story I had always sensed a deeper reason, something much stronger than his fear of competition, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Obviously, I had had nothing to do with his career decision. Yet I had felt a sense of inevitability when he first told me the story as a teenager. Indeed, there had been an inevitability to everything he had done with his life, and in that I was certainly a participant. Whenever I looked at Dad, I felt that our relationship had been almost preordained.
    Mother gave me the same feeling too. It was as though she had chosen to meet Dad and marry him. There was a quality of intense predetermination about the way they related to each other. Or so it always seemed to me.
    Many times Mother had described to me the moment when she said good-bye to her mother in Canada. Her father had died when she was a teenager. She had adored him and had done all she could to help her mother with the raising of the rest of the children (two girls and one boy). Mother was the responsible one. But she had met a professor of psychology and education at Maryland College where she had come to teach dramatics. His name was Ira Owens Beaty. He was intelligent, witty, had a good set of values, and a warm sense of humor, and she had fallen in love with him. And felt compelled to marry him.
    She had brought her new love to Canada to meet her family. His mother came with them, and asMother was saying good-bye to her mother, setting off on a new life in America, she was horrified at the raucous argument Ira and his tyrannical mother were having while packing up the car. Mother told me that for the first time she felt a flicker of fear. She knew Dad had had an “unhappy” childhood and she was now a chilled witness to some of the drama he had grown up with.
    “Am I making a mistake?” she remembered asking herself. “There’s no telling what kind of damage that woman has visited upon her son—and I will very likely inherit it.” She wondered if she should make a life with someone who had a mother like that.
    But she said she couldn’t help herself. It was something she had to do, not only because she loved him and it had already gone too far, but because she also felt Dad needed her. Over the course of her life Mother was always willing to sacrifice herself when she felt she was needed by others.
    So, she stuffed herself in the car with the new family she was marrying into and had a torturously confusing trip back to Virginia.
    She felt compelled to endure each mile of that journey. The dynamics set in motion by meeting Dad were somehow beyond her control. She just knew what she was doing was right, even though so much of it seemed questionable. Again she said she felt “this compulsion” to go through with it. She couldn’t let anybody down. And then when Warren and I came along, she understood why.
    I have always been interested in what caused the “compulsion.” Of course there are all the psychological