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staring. Later, when I show friends the pictures, it is obvious to everyone that he’s my father—“Just look at the face, look at the hands, the ears, they’re the same as yours.”
    Are they?
    Norman hands me a copy of my book to sign. I autograph it for him and suddenly wonder what kind of a meeting we are having. I feel like a foreign diplomat exchanging official gifts.
    â€œTell me a little bit about you,” I say.
    â€œI’m not circumcised.”
    Okay, maybe it wasn’t the first thing he said, but it was certainly the second. “My grandmother was a strict Catholic, she had me baptized. I’m not circumcised.”
    It is strange information to have about your father. We’ve just met and he’s telling me about his dick. What he’s really telling me, I guess, is that he’s distanced himself from his Jewish half and that he’s obsessed with his penis. He goes on to tell tales of his great-grandmother, a nineteenth-century East Prussian princess, and other relatives, who were plantation owners on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—slaveholders. He tells me I’m eligible for the Daughters of the American Revolution. He says that a family member, a British admiral, came over on either the Arc or the Dove and that there’s also a connection to Helmuth von Moltke, who according to Norman said, “We will leave them with only their eyes to cry with,” when leading Prussian soldiers into France in 1870. Then he goes on about our connections to the Nazis and the Death’s Head Troops, as though they are something to be proud of.
    â€œAnd the Dragon Lady isn’t Jewish either. She likes to think she is, but she went to Catholic school.” They are both half Catholic, half Jewish. He identifies as one and she as the other.
    He tells me how beautiful Ellen was when she came to work in his store. When I mention the age difference between them—she was in her mid-teens, he was thirty-two—he gets defensive, saying, “She was a slut who knew more than her years—things a young girl shouldn’t know.” He blames her for his lack of self-control. I ask if it ever occurred to him that something might be going on in her mother’s house, something with the stepfather. He shrugs it off, and then, when pressed, says, yes, she tried to tell him something, but he didn’t really know what she was talking about, and yes, maybe there was something going on at home and he probably should have tried to find out.
    I ask him about their relationship: How often did he see her? Did he ever really think he might leave his wife?
    He is sweating, stuffed into his good suit.
    His wife knew about the affair. Ellen has told me that. Ellen has also told me that Norman sometimes brought his oldest child along when they went out. She met the younger ones too but never knew them very well.
    Did Norman think he was such a big guy that he could have it all? I picture the affluence of the early sixties, highball glasses and aqua blue party dresses, Cadillac convertibles, big hair, Ellen doing a kind of demented Audrey Hepburn girl thing, Norman the swaggering football hero and veteran, the guy with a gleam in his eye, a wife at home, a young girl on the side, thinking he’s got the good life.
    â€œAnd what did you do for fun?” I ask, and he just looks at me. The answer is evident. Sex. The relationship was about sex, at least for him. I am the product of a sex life, not a relationship.
    â€œShe had a problem,” he says. “She was a nymphomaniac. She went out with other men, lots of men.”
    Here I believe Ellen. How much of a nymphomaniac could a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl be? She was clever, crafty, probably trained by an expert—her mother. (I have a mental picture of Ellen’s mother as Shelley Winters playing Charlotte Haze in the film version of Lolita .) But what Ellen looked for in Norman was comfort.
    It is