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Reform Jews I knew, ate pork, often celebrated Christmas in addition to Chanukah (complete with Christmas trees), had Sabbath dinners combining fried chicken with matzo balls, and more or less assimilated into Christian society. Growing up, I never heard my father utter a single word of Hebrew. I never saw him wear a yarmulke. When a friend of the family went to the temple gift shop to buy a mezuzah to hang on her door, she said, “I want a mezuzah, but one that is not too Jewish.” Everyone in my parents’ circle was proud of being Jewish, but they didn’t want their Jewishness to show.
    The other social activity of this crowd was the “puzzle hunt,” also carried out in the summer. Each evening’s host would have the responsibility of devising a number of challenging and “damn wicked” clues. The answer to each clue had to be the name of a person or business listed in the Memphis telephone directory. Upon guessing the answer, a player would look up the name in the telephone book and drive to the address given. If the answer was correct, the contestant would find a sign-up sheet nailed to a building or house at the address, write in his name to prove he’d been there, and pick up the next clue. The players grouped themselves into several teams, each team withits own automobile, telephone book, and flashlight. The cars raced all over Memphis through the hot summer nights, roaring down Poplar or Union Avenue, often going to a wrong address and waking up innocent people, the players hollering and cursing and ripping pages out of their telephone books. In the early morning hours, the exhausted contestants would reconvene at the host’s house, refortify themselves with Jack Daniel’s or Johnnie Walker, and dance the rumba.
    My father, I’m told, was a genius at the puzzle hunts, and he quietly concocted and solved the most brilliant clues. One of his clues was “If Paris’s main squeeze had been a Southern belle …” The answer was “Helen of Memphis,” a tony dress shop on Union Avenue. Dad was the one who came up with the answer to the difficult clue “GWIJKLMN.” The answer was “Washington,” arrived at by noting that the given letters are the alphabet from
G
to
N
, but with
W
substituted for
H
. This observation can be stated as
W
as
H
in (the partial alphabet of)
G
to
N
. Unlike the other players, Dad’s ingenuity seemed to get better and better the more he drank. “After a couple of hours,” he once said to me, “I was the only one who could still read.” For many years, I found small scraps of yellowing paper in our family car with words written in my father’s hand, odd-sounding names, juxtapositions, destinations in the night.

Sun Room in Late Afternoon
    In the boiling summers of the American South, passions could not be contained. Franklin Gray, a man who once worked for Malco, was twice found naked with a particular female usher in the beverage storage room of the Crosstown theater. It is almost certain that M.A. bedded one woman after another while away at bridge tournaments. My grandmother Celia, a cultured woman of great bearing and warmth, may or may not have known of her husband’s infidelities, but outwardly she remained devoted to him. Regina, M.A.’s sister, had numerous husbands. Lennie, in her long career of affairs, slept in so many different hotel rooms that she frequently didn’t know where she was when waking in the morning and, even in her own house, would sometimes open the wrong door to the bathroom.
    Some of my relatives slyly went off for “little drives” with their secretaries or bosses, calling back a week later to have someone water the plants. It was in such a manner that Lila’s first husband, Alfred, took his leave one morning in September 1976, on a little drive into the country with Genieve, his legal assistant. Alfred continued on to California, not bothering to call back about the plants, or the children. Lila was so embarrassed that she didn’t talk