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welcome the child, lovingly and joyfully, and help her, and Damion if he remained involved, and I kept telling her that, even as I pointed out that she could always have a baby later, when she was better prepared for it, when her studies were finished, when she was in a stable relationship, when it would cost her less. She was the first to get angry: “No! You can’t have it both ways, Daddy! You can’t say this and then say that. At least be honest about what
you
want. You’re making me crazy!”
    That night our tense arguing ended with my raging and roaring at her that she was not facing up to reality, that she was about to ruin her life. Even as I destroyed the image of the warm, calm paternal advisor I had wanted to be, I knew that I’d allowed my worst fears to assume control of my behavior. It took several days for Veronica to accept my apology.
    â€œBut why didn’t she call me? I mean, I’m very happy for her, but what I can’t figure out is why you’re the one telling me this. Is everything all right?” Veronica was his only granddaughter and he doted on her.
    â€œWell, I guess she wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it.”
    â€œWhy should she care what I feel about it? I just want her to be happy. Is she happy?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œYou think so? She’s having a baby and you
think
she’s happy?”
    â€œIt’s complicated. I think she didn’t know if you’d approve. I mean, first of all, she’s not married.”
    â€œOh hell, that don’t matter no more. Not these days.”
    â€œAnd I guess because the father is Jamaican. He’s black.”
    â€œWell, what difference does that make? For God’s sake, you were never raised like that!”
    I almost dropped the phone.
    The first blow to my father’s assurance that he still had what he called “a long ways to go” came with the news of his brother Francis’s death in his early eighties. My father said, perhaps looking for an explanation, since their three older siblings were all healthy and strong and well into their nineties, “He was a bitter man. I don’t know what happened to him, but he became a bitter man. I don’t know. Did he strike you that way?”
    â€œWell, he was a POW, after all. I don’t think the Nazis treated their prisoners very well. Who knows what happened to him?” I also didn’t think that his bitterness, whatever its source, accounted for his dying; there were plenty of bitter nonagenarians in the world.
    â€œThe only thing he ever told me about that was how, whenever a new commander took over the camp, he had to kneel down and pray in front of him. He had to say the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, with the translator there, I guess, to prove he wasn’t Jewish. Francis had the Hoffman hair and he was pretty dark and Hoffman is a Jewish name. Except for that, I never heard him complain about it. But I guess that’s not the kind of thing you talk about.”
    That’s always been a long list in my family: “Not the Kind of Thing You Talk About.” On it is the disappearance of Francis’s daughter, Joanne. My cousin Joanne was my first love. Our babysitter, she made my brother Bobby and me laugh, think, wonder, and question. When we were small, before Bobby weakened and needed braces and then a wheelchair, she babysat when my parents went out to play pinochle or canasta with the neighbors. She always brought her portable record player that looked like a plaid suitcase and the latest 45s, and she danced and sang along with the Platters, Fats Domino, and Elvis. Soon we were doing it too, not dancing exactly but throwing ourselves around, goofy, laughing, just between imitation and mockery, weirdly uncomfortable but deeply pleasurable. We kept catching each other’s eye as if to say we knew how weird this was but it was fun so who cares? I was too