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seemed to have no effect on him at all.
    “Well, if you want the truth,” I said calmly, “we may not get into college if we don’t hand in this homework. That’s how important it is.”
    My father must have chuckled slightly at this point because we weren’t anywhere near college age yet. I think I was in sixth grade that year, Fletcher was in fifth. I wonder if he detected that the whole assignment had been a fabrication. I think he must have. I hope he did.
    “We need to know our family history,” we explained, “you know, all about the relatives, who they were, what they were like, if they had a job, what it was,” we said as casually as we could. “We need information.”
    “Make up whatever you like,” he said. “Really, I don’t mind.” He was smiling.
    Fletcher was already exasperated. “But we need the truth, Dad,” he said, “or we’ll fail.” There was that word again. “We’re serious.”
    My father put on his coat. “I think I’ll go for a walk, children. Please,” he said absently, patting our heads.
    “Come on, you can tell us,” we said in our friendly way, as Father knotted his plaid scarf, wishing, I think, that he had a dog he might call to his lonely side.
    “What’s the secret?” we yelled to him out the front door.
    “Yeah, what’s the big deal?” we shouted, and our voices seemed to echo against his receding body.
    “Hey, you can tell us!” Fletcher said, but Father, a brisk walker, could not possibly have heard him. Already he was far down the hill, out of reach of our voices.
    He looks to the sky, then down at his feet. I le picks up a few leaves from the ground as he walks. They look to him like the hands of children, and he closes his own hand around them and crushes them.
    Fletcher took out the family tree he had sent to Minnesota for. We studied it closely, each name with its own line, but finally the names were only ink on paper, they had no resonance, there was no flesh on their bones except what Fletcher and I imagined there. We stared at the page, then began our litany of questions.
    “You can tell us,” we said, sitting on the window ledge watching for the figure of our father to return. “Did Uncle Louie rob banks? Was Aunt Anastasia a drug addict? And Andrew here, who was he? Did he tight in the Boer War? Was he born out of wedlock? Was his real father a drunk? No, no, a man with one arm?”
    “May be a king,” I said.
    “I doubt it. Father would tell us about a king.”
    “Right,” I said, though I was not sure.
    “Did Frank rape college students across the Midwest in the 1950s? Did they call him Frankie? Was Aunt Virginia institutionalized? Did she open her wrists in the bathtub? Did she leave a note? And who is this Grisetti fellow? It looks like he married his sister here,” I said, pointing to a line on the chart. “He’s probably a hunchback,” I told Fletcher. “Look, his son only lived four years. What happened to the child? Did he wander in front of a car one day when the parents were arguing in the bedroom? What were they arguing about? Had the hunchback taken a lover? Or was it the wife who had, in some profound despair? What made them forget the child?”
    We could go on and on for hours like this some days. But in the end we never felt completely satisfied. There was something missing. I would never be as good at inventing as my mother, I thought. I would never see the Topaz Bird.
    The truth would be better, we thought. Inevitably though, when it came time to write my autobiography in ninth grade, mine was pretty good. It began:
    “Aunt Anastasia, a morphine addict, looked to the sky and sighed, though her eyes were still covered by the sleeping mask she wore to bed each night. Even in complete darkness, Aunt Anastasia saw what most people never did.”
    I liked my autobiography but agreed with the comment scribbled in the corner by some skeptical teacher: “This is good, but it lacks authenticity.” That’s what all those