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dark-coloured clothing — and so my father’s change of sleeping quarters had little effect on me. For a while, when I was still quite a young child, and when I was certain my father was not near, I would quietly enter the abandoned room, approach the dressing table, and play with my mother’s music box. I would twist the metal key at the bottom of the small instrument, listen to the Minuet in G until the music slowed, then began to falter, then ceased altogether with one last, sad plucked note. Once, just as I carefully folded down the hinged lid of the box, I felt two large arms encircle me. My father lifted me away from the dressing table and collapsed on the bed with me on his lap. I looked in the mirror, the same mirror that had so often held my mother’s image, and watched with a kind of horror as my usually restrained father weptawkwardly into my neck. I knew better than to try to squirm out of his embrace at this moment, but as I felt tears stinging my own eyes, everything in me wanted to do so.
    My father released me eventually, rose and, without saying anything at all, walked quickly from the room. We never spoke of the incident.
    Years later something else remarkable and disorienting happened. I returned one day from high school to find my father pacing like a penned dog across our small entrance hall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and he was never back from the office before six: routine, of course, was the engine that drove our lives. But his presence in the hall at such an hour shattered all that; it was completely out of character. I was as shocked as I would have been had I found him standing naked on the lawn.
    When I asked him why he wasn’t still at work, he looked up in a startled sort of way, as if he were surprised at
my
appearance, or as if he didn’t recognize my voice, my face. He opened one hand, palm upwards, shrugged and said, “No more work for me, I … we are ridiculously rich. I won’t ever need go to work again.”
    We stood facing each other in a small, square, useless space, physically closer than we had been since that afternoon in my mother’s room, staring into each other’s eyes as we never had before. I remember he held his hat in his hand, as though not quite sure whether he was arriving or departing.
    The word “rich” was so foreign to me I barely understood its implications. “Are you certain?” I stammered.
    He nodded slowly. I noticed his mouth was quivering, his skin ashen. The pattern of his life, I realized even then, had beensmashed. He had the appearance of a man in the midst of a great emergency. I half expected him to call an ambulance, or the police.
    “Silver,” he said. He was still looking directly into my eyes, his expression almost angry. “Some godforsaken place in Canada called Cobalt.”
    “Cobalt,” I echoed. All I could see was a particular shade of blue.
    If I had been, at the time, interested in portraiture, I should have wanted to capture my father as he looked then. Much later Robert Henri would teach me that the features of a face incline towards the one expression which “manifests the condition of the sitter.” But there was more than that in my father’s face. Instinctively I knew that I was seeing him on the brink between all that he had been and all that he would become. It was there with us in that modest hall, balanced between us for a moment in the late part of an autumn afternoon.
    It was very quiet. My father passed his hat from hand to hand, and, once or twice, he opened his mouth and cleared his throat as if there were something else he wanted to say to me. Then the angle of his vision altered slightly, almost imperceptibly, and I realized he was withdrawing, looking past my shoulder towards his new life.
    “I have school work,” I muttered.
    I became terribly aware that I had no idea what we would say to each other in the hours between four and six, hours during which I had, until now, occupied the house