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doesn't grow on trees."
    Bertram, I was beginning to see, was intending to marry Ninel.
    In the morning he denied it. "Not possible."
    "But you want to," I said.
    "What I want doesn't count. Ninel doesn't believe in marriage. She's against it on principle."
    Ninel was with us on a night in early March when Bertram opened the door to a seedy fellow in uniform and cap. Bertram gave him a quarter, and the man handed him a yellow envelope. It was a telegram from the dean at Croft Hall. My father had broken the rules: he had taken a group of four third-formers to Saratoga in his car. One boy sat in the front seat next to my father. The other three were in the rear. It was dusk when they headed back to school. A hard rain, propelled by a hard wind, hastened the dark and pelted the road. They drove through swiftly forming lakes, one of which concealed the heavy branch of a middle-sized fallen tree. The wheels, spinning through the black water, struck the branch; the car was brutally flung on its side. The windshield splashed out a fountain of glass splinters and two of the doors were crushed. The three boys in the back seat survived. My father and the boy nearest him were dead.
    There was no funeral. My father was in posthumous disgrace; the dead child's parents called him a murderer. Bertram arranged for the burial with an undertaker in Troy, and with no ceremony at all my father's remains were dispatched. A week later the mail brought a package from Croft Hall: it was a box containing my father's papers. In it I found my mother's death certificate and a hospital bill dated February 15,1921—they were folded into the pages of a ragged children's book. Now there was proof: my mother had not died in childbirth. She had succumbed to blood cancer when I was three years old. Lena's disclosure, and my memory of the sofa and the rag doll, were vindicated.
    I kept almost none of these papers. They were impersonal and faintly shaming—old grade books, wrinkled lottery tickets, racetrack stubs, a dirty pack of cards, two pairs of scratched dice. Not a single item hinted at my existence. I did not recognize the children's book as mine, though I knew its fame; it was the first of a well-known series. A pair of nearly new shoes was in the box; I wondered when my father had acquired these. They were not the kind of shoes he usually wore. An inscription on the inside of the heel read HAND-MADE IN LONDONQ. I imagined something horrible: had he thrown dice for them, had he won them from one of the bigger boys, had he taken them in lieu of cash? I was relieved when Bertram carried them away and gave them to an orderly.
    It was Bertram's idea that I should compose a phrase or two for a headstone. On Bertram's typewriter I wrote:
    JACOB NEHEMIAH MEADOWS
    l887–1935
    LOVING FATHER
    FRIEND TO YOUTH
    Words as conventionally sentimental as these ought to have scandalized me as I set them down, but the irony of their falseness did not touch me. It seemed right to attribute plain virtue to a man whose miniature vices could no longer do harm. I thought of my father's small life, and of Lena and the birthday cake, and the Tricolor, and my father's gambling. Most of all I thought of his lies. His lies took aim but had no point; they seduced risk; they were theatrical, though enacted on a tiny stage for a tiny audience. My father had been a kind of daylight robber. He robbed dailiness of predictability, so that my childhood's every breath hung on a contingency. Living with him had never felt safe.
    In another three months my first year at the college would be over. In the classroom I sat self-enclosed, in a mist of indifference. Or else I recoiled. All those theories of pedagogy, I told myself, were no better than a shrine streaming with phantasmagoria. An alien faith, like Ninel's Jupiter. Its liturgy and rites were abhorrent, and whatever was declared to be truth was fakery.... But I knew I was only bored.
    I was afraid to confide any of this in Bertram. My