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alone. I buy two tickets when I have the money because I like to have an empty seat next to me, but, well, surely you’d be much better than an empty seat.”
    “Well, if you’re sure,” my mother says, smiling.
    Already my father is cultivating his numerous eccentricities, watering them, feeding them, making room for them, so that by the time I knew him they were enormous and in full, brilliant flower.
    I bet my mother liked Waiting for Godot . I’m sure she liked the idea that my father went to plays at all—daring plays, “mysteries wrapped in enigmas.” He must have seemed risky to her, exciting and intelligent and also quite handsome in his gray flannel suit—the opposite of most of the other men she had met, the presidential cabinet members and investment bankers and other miscellaneous shareholders of the future.
    I hope they were happy that weekend, against that elegant backdrop of ivy and dark wood and mountains, with less than a month left until their graduation.
    They dance together the rest of the night, and when my father finally looks at her full face, he is silenced by what he sees and hardly speaks at all again after that.
    They must have looked lovely together as they swirled around the center of the dance floor for all to see.
    “Look, Turin’s stopped talking,” Teddy says to Joel, and they shrug.
    My father becomes even more lost as he hugs my mother and they listen to the silence outside, alone during the band’s break, standing precariously on the verge of their adult lives.
    The band returns for one final song. And yes, my parents indeed look lovely together—like figures of marzipan poised on the top of a wedding cake. As the heat rises, my father’s new jacket blurs slightly. He seems to be melting into my mother’s arms. He breathes one last deep breath and looks for the first time directly into her bottomless blue eyes. She takes him in and he holds on tightly, as the wafer-thin dance floor slowly begins to spin.
    A few notes of the guitar—the bass—my father gets up, a small flurry of motion. He smiles, swings back and forth on his heels, snaps his fingers: a trumpet, snare drum. He starts to sing with Billie Holiday.
    “The way you wear your hat,” and he gestures to his head.
    “The way you sip your tea,” and he picks up an invisible cup, his pinkie in the air.
    A tinkling of piano.
    “The memory of all that”—and extends his arms—“no, no, they can’t take that away from me”—and brings his arms to his chest.
    He does a little soft-shoe on the deck of the ship. The first touches of silver gray at his temples shine in the moonlight.
    “No, they can’t take that away from me.”
    Sometimes, to get our father to speak, we would invent homework assignments in which it was necessary for him to answer questions. This to us seemed the ultimate in legitimacy, and we could not imagine how even our father could refuse under these circumstances to speak. We could not picture him standing like some fullback in the way of our educational progress. Surely, we reasoned, Father remembered the importance of homework. There were some things no one forgot.
    We were wildly, obsessively interested in the things he would not talk about and, while at times I enjoyed imagining what he might be thinking as he drew lines on graph paper or lay on the floor staring at the ceiling, some things we wanted—needed—real answers to.
    “Sit down, Daddy,” we’d begin. “There’s something we’ve got to ask you.”
    “It’s important,” Fletcher would say.
    “Sit down, it’s for school.” Father seemed impatient. He smiled a little but we didn’t know why. Fletcher looked behind me to see if someone else had entered the room. My father’s preoccupied look always alarmed him.
    “We’ll fail if you don’t help us,” Fletcher said, and I knocked him with my elbow. The word fail , a word meant to be saved for the final summation, the best word we had, slipped out early and