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they had bought in a town called Lindon, as well as their savings. As in the case ofmy mother’s death, my father proved himself a capable and efficient administrator. He sold off the store and the house in Peet, paid the taxes, arranged for the burial, and established a savings account for his sister. Sybil, who was graduating from high school, used some of her money to pay for Wellesley. My father, lazier, made it through the rest of his term at Purdue, graduated, and moved to Lindon, where he built a house and every year added a few more acres to his land. While Sybil began medical school at Northwestern, my father grew soybeans, flat beans, and yellow beans. He fathered his sons. Eventually he began working for the local railroad as a timetable administrator. He had accomplished all he would in life.
    My father proved as frustrating to me as my mother was elusive. He was, so far as I could determine, interested only in achieving a state of complete and total inertia. This was almost indescribably irritating to me. For one, we lived in a country in which a person’s worth was measured by his industriousness. Not that either Owen or I particularly cared what the townspeople thought admirable; it was simply that we happened to feel the same way—that there was something shameful, and perhaps even obscene, in my father’s behavior. It was, after all, the Depression. We heard stories of children abandoned by their parents, saw photos of defeated and exhausted-looking men waiting for a bowl of soup, a job, a loan. And yet my father, unambitious, placid, spectacularly unmotivated, somehow emerged utterly unharmed. I remember many nights sitting at our kitchen table, prickling with impatience for a father who would shout, berate me, beat me to do better, to work harder, whose ambitions for me would be greater than my own. Instead my father merely sat there, dreamily humming the latest popular song and rolling his cigarettes. Corn, the remnants of a hastily constructed meal, nested in his brushy mustache, and when I pointed it out to him, he would languorously poke his tongue out and sweep it around his mouth and nose in a serpentine and graceful movement, humming all the while. This careless, carefree gesture irritated me more than anything. It makes me laugh a little now, my self-righteous disapproval: I, of course, greatly benefited from my father’s continual dumb luck, but back then it seemed to me that he was doing Owen and me something of a disservice. Growing up in our home, you would have assumed that fortune fell from the sky with a reassuringthump and that nothing, not even the prospect of amassing a great fortune, was worth aspiring to. My father did not in fact accumulate his money out of any sense of capitalist zeal—no, if it happened, it did, and the few times he made poor business decisions, he didn’t seem to mind that either.
    The entire situation enraged me, as indulged children yearn for nothing more than the romance of poverty. Often I found myself dreaming of parents who were hardworking immigrants, for whom I was the sole hope. I was very moved by sentimental children’s stories such as The Silver Skates and rendered my own family as characters in a similar narrative. My father would be the lumpish stroke victim, helpless and slobbering, and Owen my crippled, idiot younger brother. I was the pioneer and the hero, ruthless and resourceful as well. Education would be my family’s sole hope. My academic success would be a necessity; I would become a doctor and yank us all out of despair and filth and into tight, square houses. In my fantasy, my hands, made magical by years of American education, would cure my poor father, who would immediately set to work despite my protestations. My mother, strong and determined, her beauty restored, would smile for the first time in years, and my brother, once proper schooling was paid for, would gain language, learn to move like an athlete. How I yearned for such