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committed to his family. But while he was away in Fort Dix, New Jersey, he told his family he led a contented male existence. He refrained from the familiar indulgences of pool and poker because of the money they involved, instead going to twenty-five-cent movies on the post. He watched card games and smoked with a buddy at the noncommissioned officers club: his limit was two beers a night. Maud always had a clear view of her father’s life in camp.
    He hardly missed his family, it seemed to her. Florence was his second wife, his first having died of influenza. His two sons from his first family were now raised and ‘on their own,’ as he often said proudly. One was a toolmaker in Detroit, the other a machinist’s mate in the navy. It seemed to Maud, as she grew up, that her father had used his short store of domestic affection on his first family. When he was home now he was silent and withdrawn. His time with Florence and the children was spent doing repairs on the house and waiting for his meals to be served. His interest in the repetition involved in a second family was minimal. Sometimes he had trouble remembering Maud’s ‘fancy’ real name, as he called it. He too called her Beastie.
    Maud’s father was an absentminded man, always, Maud believed, thinking about the place he had just come from or was due to return to, never really entirely at home. He ignored his handsome son Spencer because he failed to show any interest in guns and things military. He patted Maud on the head now and then because, she thought, he felt sorry for his ugly little girl. But even with these gestures he was not entirely there. In later years, when Maud read Paul Valéry in Otto Mile’s class at college, she found that Valéry described a blank piece of paper as ‘the absence of presence.’ That, in retrospect, described her father.
    Joseph Noon’s content with his fatherhood was so silent, so reserved, that his children took him to be the model of a patient parent. When Florence went to visit her elderly parents in Gloversville or on her yearly vacation alone, Joseph kept house well, picking up after the children, teaching them to make spare, tight beds with squared corners and unwrinkled sides and tops. He fixed efficient, quick, army-type meals. Everything was accomplished, as he said, ‘in lickety-spit.’ Until she was older and wanted to use the word in a poem about her father she thought it meant cleaned by means of a saliva-coated tongue.
    In her childhood she considered her father’s withdrawn forbearance an adequate substitute for tempestuous love, an emotion she understood superficially from reading the novels of Warwick Deeping, her mother’s favorite author. When Maud had difficulty getting into her tight bed in the still-warm nights of September, her father would allow her to sleep on top, smiling at her feebleness before the rigidly tucked sheets.
    To the small Maud the words ‘leave’ and ‘post’ were synonymous with ‘duty.’ They were what her parents did. They stood for places and actions in the world beyond New Baltimore in which she played no part. Sometimes her father would turn up unexpectedly in his natty uniform saying he had been given a three-day pass. She extracted the word ‘pass’ from his arrival and stored it among her cherished collection of poetic words. Standing outside the back door before her sixth birthday, before the first grade rescued her from frozen mornings and the snow she had yellowed, she would recite her incantation: ‘duty,’ ‘leave,’ ‘pass,’ ‘post,’ a litany directed primarily at the scrawny cat Flo. Later, she came to believe those magical syllables initiated her into the vocation of poet. They taught her a respect for the force of fine, tough, short, Anglo-Saxon words. Her mature style was to hang upon them, solid, simple words, building to the last line of