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became expert skiers; Alison qualified to be an instructor when she was only fifteen. Today, in our forties, we are still avid skiers (except me) and have passed our enthusiasm on to our children.
    In the springs and summers of our childhood, Pa taught us to swim, sail, play tennis, and paddle a canoe properly—at around nine we all learned to execute aproper J-stroke, which enables one person to keep the canoe going forward in a straight line. Some of these skills were acquired at my grandmother’s lakeshore house in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, others on the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound. As we grew older, we developed special interests in addition to learning the basics. Somehow Pa found time to work and play with each of us individually. Ben was fascinated by all things mechanical and electrical, so he and my father spent hours maintaining the car, an old secondhand Peugeot. As far as I remember, it never went to the shop: they repaired faulty wiring, adjusted the brakes, replaced worn shock absorbers, and gave it routine tune-ups as needed.
    Mark liked baseball and beachcombing. He and Pa used to sneak up into the attic, where the old black-and-white rabbit-eared television lived in exile, to watch the Yankees. (The TV was not allowed in the living room as a precaution against bad habits.) Down in the basement the two of them created a museum where the most interesting rocks and seashells collected on cruises from Connecticut to Maine were on display.
    Alison (always called Alya) and Brock were very musical. Both played the piano, and Alya played the flute as well. Pa played the recorder. Visitors who dropped by in the late afternoon or after dinner were often drawn intothe house by the sound of them playing together. Brock and Alya both took riding lessons when they were still quite young. Alya eventually lost interest, but Brock carried on and still rides today. Although he wasn’t a rider himself, my father used to drive them to the stables, where he watched with a critical eye at ringside as they worked with their instructor. When Alya dropped out and Brock progressed into show jumping, riding became a unique part of his relationship with our father.
    My special interest was the theater. As a youngster I did well in skiing, sailing, and tennis. But by the time I was fourteen, I spent my summers first in acting workshops, then as a theater apprentice, and before long, on tour in a play or performing as a member of a repertory company. Pa generally liked my work. His critique after a show was usually kind and constructive: he was the first to point out that I often stood onstage with my knees hyperextended, which made me look tense and inhibited natural movement. After a performance of
The Complaisant Lover
, an obscure English drawing-room comedy in which I attempted to play an upper-class gentleman in his forties (I was seventeen at the time), he approved of my accent but pointed out that I obviously had no idea how to smoke a cigarette, which would be second nature for my character. However, my comic timing received high marks.
    No one in our family had ever been an actor, which made me feel truly unique. Pa particularly enjoyed productions in theaters not too far from the water so he could get there on
Pandion
, our twenty-six-foot Pearson sloop. That worked out pretty well: one summer I worked in Boston, another in Boothbay, Maine, and one tour played in four theaters on Cape Cod. It wasn’t until I left postgraduate studies at Juilliard and entered the commercial world of film and television that acting became a source of contention between us. As a pure academic, he cherished the theater as a place for language and ideas. He was never very interested in film, even as an art form, and had nothing but contempt for television (except as an outlet for the Yankees).
    I’m very grateful that he supported me as I began to learn my trade, and that, for a time, we shared something unique. Without