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another, of the explorers who had broken into his tomb—felled by a curse, the papers thought, wafted toward them from the dark air of the violated sanctuary. Frightening as the curse was, it also had a certain attraction for my mother, and consequently for me, since it confirmed in some remote but implicit way her belief in spirits. The air was far from empty, and to the end of her days she wouldbe trying to penetrate the future. In the twenties it was the Ouija board craze. Three or four people would sit with this magical board touching their knees, one of them holding out his hands to make it levitate. A lot would depend on weather, wet air being a better spirit conductor, and especially upon the tranquility of the participants’ concentration. If she never succeeded in getting the thing to rise off her knees, it proved only that she was not doing it right, not that it was a fraud. She knew perfectly well that the whole business was imaginary, but it was her nature to be blind and sighted at one and the same time, to leap off the cliff and stand there watching herself fly downward through the air, and I was learning that credulousness and detachment even when I was still spending much of my time on the floor. In effect, of course, she was being an artist, but it was a process that could wreak havoc upon the search for authenticity any child’s mind must crave.
    Much later I would see that there was a certain direction to the tide we were all so unknowingly riding in those years of sublime confidence. My father, deep in his Sunday nap on the living room couch, toward whose kindly face I looked up from the floor as to a bison, an albino buffalo that blinked softly at my loudest outcries and moved in measured pace when everyone else was rushing around hysterically, had arrived in New York all alone from the middle of Poland before his seventh birthday. Nowadays he had a National and a chauffeur waiting for him at the curb to take him downtown to the Seventh Avenue garment district every morning. Such a transformation had nothing strange, nothing even noteworthy about it then, nor would it for many years to come, life being accepted as an endless unfolding, a kind of scroll whose message was surprise and mostly good news.
    Logically, I suppose, Isidore’s lone-boy trip across Europe and the ocean should have evoked all kinds of negative feelings in us, like outrage at the parents who had left him behind, or resentment toward the three brothers and three sisters who had been taken along on the big exodus to the New World. But it was just part of the saga, unquestioned like everything else in our fable. The official explanation was that Grandpa couldn’t afford to buy Papa’s ticket and figured on sending the money as soon as he had made some in America, a matter of a few months at the most. Meanwhile, the little left-behind boy was stashed with an uncle who would soon die. The child was then passed from family to family, allowed to sleep with the aged grandmothers and the feebleminded, who soiled their beds and howled half the night and didn’t mind whothey slept with. Poor Izzie, after many months of this, must have felt effectively orphaned, something I have only lately come to surmise, after over sixty years of knowing the story. Indeed, his orphanhood may well have contributed to the special warmth my second wife, Marilyn Monroe, never ceased to feel toward him; she was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents as a child or had spent time in orphanages, and I acquired this instinct of hers, but not as unerringly. There is a “Do you like me?” in an orphan’s eyes, an appeal out of bottomless loneliness that no parented person can really know.
    My father’s, ticket arrived at last, and he was put on a train for the port of Hamburg with a tag around his neck asking that he be delivered, if the stranger would be so kind, to a certain ship sailing