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alone.
    “Of course,” he replied. He placed his hat on the hall table, then shuffled aside to let me pass. We separated to go to otherrooms in the house. As I climbed the stairs, I could hear his footsteps in the kitchen. It seemed to me then that my father had taken the decision to keep walking, walking away from his previous self.
    There are any number of ways to lose the people who make up the fabric of one’s life. Sometimes the alteration is slow, internal, almost invisible, so that one does not notice until years later that the other has been gone for half a decade. Sometimes the person one has become attached to changes so radically it is as if he or she has died, to be replaced by someone else altogether. In the next few months my father’s personality altered dramatically, and permanently, as he burst into a world I would never understand. He spent his days in the offices of brokers and promoters; the serenity of our evenings vanished as his non-business hours became filled with committee work relating to hospitals and museums. Women entered his life, coaxed him away to lengthy dinner parties in the neighbourhood where I now live. He started to purchase expensive clothes.
    For a brief period at the beginning of all this, he began, inexplicably, to speak. As if money were the key he needed to unlock language, he confessed details he had previously withheld. He would climb the stairs late at night, shake me awake, and talk about the past: his childhood, his journey from the south to the north, his first glimpse of Mother, their marriage, her increasing strangeness after they had set up housekeeping. He remembered the oddest things: how the roped wood of abanyan tree trunk outside his childhood home interlaced like the decorated borders of a medieval illuminated manuscript; a Pullman porter he had spoken to on a train called
The Orange Blossom Special;
the mauve hue of gaslight in the fog outside the Rochester Temperance Hall where he and Mother had met. She had been working, he said, for less than a year in a garment factory near the river, and he prided himself on having rescued her from all that. I was hungry for the information he was giving me, and often, after he had padded away to his own room, some of it would work its way into my dreams, where the stiff young couple in my parents’ wedding photo would relax and laugh and embrace.
    Then, as abruptly as it had begun, this interlude ended, and although my father continued to talk, it was only of the present. I came to understand that by telling me about the past, he had been removing it; that I had been a kind of receptacle into which he discarded his old self so that there would be room for the new person he was becoming. A well-swept, clean, and empty space for the present, for the dinners and meetings and boardrooms, the new world to which I had no access.
    I hated this. I wanted the familiar routine, wanted my father to leave the house promptly at 8:15 and return promptly at 5:45. I wanted his quietness, his solitary whispering, wanted either the comforting rustle of his papers or his words about the past just as I was sliding into sleep. As he spun noisily away from me, I gradually began to distrust entirely the motivation behind the delivery of words. I stopped talking, responding, dove deeper and deeper into myself, the world of my drawings, until I wasout of the house as often as possible, recording waterfalls and ravines on pale sheets of paper, just as I believed my mother had hoped that I would.
    My father, in the middle of his life, was transformed from a shy clerk into a jolly, boisterous, and, in the end, overconfident, almost foolhardy entrepreneur. He who had never related to anyone was suddenly relating to everyone. Except me. I related only to the paper, to the pencil in my hand, to the tangle of lines that trapped a sampling of energetic water under my fingers, the contour following the edges of rock.
    At the beginning of the summer of