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spouse—charming and charismatic, but overbearing, unfaithful and demanding. (She improved somewhat on a diet of witchy-sounding pills, extracted from the urine of a horse.) She might have been an artist (she has that unforgiving temper) but for her tragic flaw—everything shetouches turns beautiful. She became, of course, a gardener and rules her dominion like a tyrant. She represses roses and astilbe, withholds water from strawberries, which produce tiny deep red fruit of exquisite intensity. She serves them, in season, at breakfast, in a fluted white bowl. God eats more than his share because she takes less than hers.
    She’s austere. She prefers the single to the double, the pure marigold to the hybrid that’s had the yellow bred out of it, the modest gloxinia to the arrogant giant. Chrysanthemums, yes, dahlias and gladiolus, no. She is devoted to unruffled petunias and her mauve queens. Winters, she reads seed catalogs and leaves lists all over the house—in the telephone book, on the tank of the loo. Names show up like coded messages in the margins of the morning newspaper, folded out to the half-finished crossword: Penn State marigolds, early prolific straight-neck squash, delphiniums, penstemon, butterfly bush, black lilies and fall-blooming rue. He knows all this because she records the little details in a diary, which God occasionally peruses.
    His wife could raise a rose from a rake. She throws bleak kindling into a bucket, then calls it a centerpiece—and so it becomes. The sticks leaf out and flower on the piano. She spends whole evenings in the garden, cutting slugs in two and pathologically coaxing nature to an unnatural intensity; she’s stuffed forget-me-nots and oxalis in among the ferns.
    How can she leave him after all these years? She gives him telephone numbers, instructions on the house and garden, everything he needs written on a lined canary pad.
    Now she puts a hand on his arm. God’s eyes cloud over and he weeps. He can’t stop. She has to sit down awkwardly in a chair, in her coat and gloves, and hold him.

1964 and after
T HE S TRANGLER
    W hen my father drowned in the ocean off Cape Wilde wearing a pair of Keds sneakers and carrying a dollar in his wallet, the tragedy propelled Mei-Mei and me out of the ordinary even as it sunk us. We were liberated instantly and forever. Life became extraordinary, surreal, unpredictable, and our senses grew acute, like those of wild animals. Mei-Mei, only twenty-nine at the time, fell in love with Tragedy as she had once fallen in love with my father. Tragedy consumed her, wrote his story in lines on her face, comforted her at night with his constancy. Tragedy has been her lover ever since. The story of my father’s death was, in this sense, a romance: the story of two bold and irrepressible athletes in a German kayak crossing the eight-mile stretch between Cape Wilde and Capawak Point, a proving ground for generations of Wampanoag braves; the glowering weather on a rainy March afternoon; the dramatic rescue of the other man (by a swimming champion from the public high school); the way the ocean drank my father down and spat him out; the dollar in his pocket when he died.
    Mei-Mei has yellowed copies of the newspaper articles from the
Capawak Gazette
and the
Globe
that tell the story. (The reverse of one clipping shows an ad for an outfit that made products out of whalebone: “Ladies Cinched Their Corsets Tight and Danced the Polka in the Mansions of the Nation.”) My father’s whole life is there in a couple of columns: pitcher on the baseball team in high school and college (he pitched a winning game against Milton Academy the day his father died), almost ayear of medical school behind him. Goddard Byrd, head of the Goode School and my father’s English teacher, wrote a verse poem called “Anguish and Assuagement,” casting Heck Hellman as a heroic athlete in an idealized Greek style:
    Heck, in brief you were too loved to lose
    Bold hero never