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referring to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. “But everyone has a family, even in New York City.” She looked at me with alarming lucidity. “Do they ever talk to you about what happened?”
    “In New York?”
    “With Richard,” my grandmother said impatiently. She took my hand. She must have known that her own life would soon be over, and that whatever secrets she kept would then be known by no one at all. Her time to tell was limited. And she was selfish, as I imagine many people are at the end of their lives; my feelings mattered less to her than they had when she was well. “You poor boy,” she said, “do you even know Richard shot himself?”
    So it came out. One night in the summer of 1970, a police detective called from Denver and told Oliver that Richard Ente was dead of a gunshot wound, in all likelihood self-inflicted. The detective wanted to know if Richard had any next of kin. The only reason he called Oliver was because he’d found a check from him in Richard’s wallet. “We couldn’t help the gentleman,” my grandmother said. “Richard never talked about his family.”
    “They didn’t tell me,” I said numbly.
    “Exactly,” my grandmother said.
    This story flattened me, and it weakened my grandmother also: maybe she had come without knowing it to the age when her last few secrets were what kept her alive. She leaned back against the pillows of her hospital bed. Her eyes closed and her lips trembled, as though she wanted to say more, but when she did speak, finally, what she said was, “Ring for the nurse.” I did, and a minute later the nurse came in and chided my grandmother because she hadn’t eaten her vegetables. “These aren’t vegetables,” my grandmother said, “they’re,” and she shrugged, her face lit up with disgust.
    I called my mothers that night from my motel room in Syracuse and had a bad conversation. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had Richard shot himself in Denver? The first question was easier to answer than the second. My mothers had been trying to protect me from having to feel what they still felt, a kind of baffled sadness, which made Richard Ente impossible either to dismiss or to forgive. They wanted me to have two parents and not be haunted by the ghost of a third. But why did he do it? My mothers didn’t know. Celeste believed Richard’s suicide had to do with things that had happened a long time ago, before he came to Thebes. “Any fifty-year-old man who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl has serious problems,” she said.
    Marie sobbed into the phone; she didn’t know either.
    “Let him go,” Celeste said. “Suicide is a mystery with no solution.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Marie said. “I wish I could have done something to stop him.” She could have done something, but I wouldn’t know that until much later. Finally I got off the phone with my mothers, wiped my eyes and tried to take Celeste’s advice and put Richard out of my mind. Dead was dead. The fact that Richard had killed himself didn’t make him any more lost to me than he had been already. How could it matter if he died of a bullet or a heart attack? But I couldn’t let go of the question why?
    When I came back from Syracuse, I looked for my father in the Bleak College (not its real name, but that’s another story) library, but nothing I found cast any light on his death. The membership directories of the New York State Bar Association told me that Richard Ente practiced law in New York from 1949 until 1970. He worked for Silberman & Mischeaux, a personal-injury firm, then in 1961 he went into private practice. His office was a few blocks from Times Square, in a building that has since been demolished. Lexis, which was just becoming available at the time, and which I got access to with the help of a friend in the law school, confirmed that my father was of counsel in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc. The lawsuit, which my family had talked about only in vague