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stirred faintly deep down in my consciousness. “Selena, I wondered—”
    “Oh, yes, your father.” Selena’s glance had moved from my face and she was talking rather quickly. “What else about him? Well, as you can imagine, he was awfully dismal to live with. And then, ten years ago, when you all thought things were just about as lugubrious as they could be, your father met the Aurora Clean Living League and fell in love with it.”
    The disquiet had gone again. I had almost forgotten it. “Did he have sex with it?” I asked.
    “Gordy, don’t be frivolous.” Selena was smiling down at me again. She had tucked my hand into her lap. “The Aurora Clean Living League is a nationwide organization to make America pure. It publishes dozens of pamphlets called: Dance, Little Lady — to Hell and Satan Has a Deposit on Every Beer Bottle  and things like that. It runs jolly summer camps where youth can be hearty and clean-living. And, of course, they’re frightfully against…”
    “… lipstick, tobacco and dancing and liquor and sex,” I said.
    “Exactly, baby. Well, the head of all this gloomy business was a repulsive man called Mr. Heber. Mr. Heber was the Aurora Clean Living League in St. Paul. And Mr. Heber loved your father at first sight and your father loved Mr. Heber at first sight. Your father started deluging the League with money and made St. Paul cleaner and cleaner and cleaner by the minute. And all the time, he made all of you cleaner and cleaner too.”
    She fell back again on to the pillows, her fair hair shimmering close to my cheek. “Darling, you can’t imagine what life was like. I mean, I suppose you will imagine when you get your memory back. Every morning you were all inspected for seemliness of attire. Your father scrubbed powder off Marny’s nose himself in the bathroom. You weren’t allowed to go to the theatre or the movies. You spent long, crushing evenings at home listening to your father recite pure poems and quote from Mr. Heber’s nauseating pamphlets. And as for sex—well, your father was particularly against sex.” She sighed, a deep, reminiscent sigh. “Baby, if you knew how pent-up you all got.”
    “I can imagine,” I said. “But how did I, the drunken heel, fit into that picture?”
    “You didn’t, baby. “She had picked up my hand again. It seemed to fascinate her. “That’s the whole point. The more clean living your father got, the more dirty living you went in for. At college, you did the most shameless things…”
    “Like switching clothes with Marny and having Mr. Heber proposition me in a canoe?”
    Selena sat up, amazed. “Darling, you remember?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “Marny told me.”
    “Oh.” She sank back. “Well, yes, things like that—and worse. Mr. Heber pronounced you permanently unclean. Father would have loved to throw you out for good. But there he was in a cleft stick. You see, The Family is one of the things the Clean Living League has a passion for. And one of your father’s favorite compositions was a long poem about your son is your son and you forgive him seven times seven, nay seventy times seven. You know—all that.”
    “I know,” I said.
    “But after college he tried to keep you away from home as much as possible. He got you a job in Pittsburg. Somehow you managed not to be fired. But, boy, the things you did to Pittsburg.” She looked dreamy. “That’s where you met me. Darling, what a night.” She snuggled against me cozily. “Gordy, how long is the cast going to be on?”
    “Don’t know. You’ll have to ask your buddy Nate.”
    She frowned. “Oh, well… Where was I? Oh, yes, you met me. We were married. I wasn’t at all the sort of thing your father relished, of course. But we scrubbed my face and I bought a perfectly hideous brown dress like a missionary in China and you brought me home and I was wonderful and your father adored me and I wrote a poem against sex