Being White: A Memoir

By Doug Power

When Dougs father refuses to return to suburban New York from one of his lengthy business trips, his mother swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and Doug and sister Constance move in with their mothers mother in Rochester, who takes them in temporarily. At the end of the school year, Constance goes on to college and Grandma unloads Doug, putting him on a plane to Chicago to live with Carleton, the father he barely knows, and his fathers young, beautiful, Native American wife.

Doug finds himself living two blocks from the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, in an area where whites had mostly fled and black gangs are taking control. Carleton moved in with Mary a year earlier, marrying her two weeks after his wife died, and they remain in her apartment in the changing neighborhood because hed lost another job due to his drinking and because Mary didnt like to be surrounded by white people anyway.

Doug is immediately thrust into a world of petty crime, violence, and racial hatred, some of which emanates from Mary, who loves his father but despises herself for living with a white man. And yet, on her good days, she becomes more of a mother to Doug than hed ever had, teaching him how to treat a lady and how to find his way in the inner-city. On her bad days, she locks him out of their apartment.

So Doug comes of age in the streets, dates girls who live in the projects, and sees people beaten and killed. The people he comes to trust and learn from are people who are not white. Theyre Indian, theyre Hispanic, and mostly theyre Black.

So who is he, he wonders, who thought of himself as White?

This is the story of how it turns out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477217498

Doug Power

Doug Power has been a paper boy, grocery clerk, camp counselor, union member, Congress of Racial Equality member, warehouse laborer, FBI-labeled revolutionary, steamfitter apprentice, University of Chicago dropout, bartender/bouncer at Seattles Blue Moon Tavern, improvisational actor, advertising copywriter, Assistant Chief of Staff for Mayor Harold Washington, Sunday School teacher, creator of Chicago CivicNet, creator of fiber networks for rural hospitals, and through it all, still, sometimes, a writer. He has cut deals with the Chicago City Council, the Illinois General Assembly, the Mayors Office and the Governors Office. Hes knocked on doors for Harold Washington, Richard M. Daley, Congressman Rostenkowski, and Congressman (now Mayor) Rahm Emanuel. Hes had stories published in the New Orleans Review, TriQuarterly, Witness, and Other Voices, and, as a proponent for community empowerment, has made presentations about broadband and economic development at conferences throughout the US and Canada. He is passionate about politics and the evils caused by personal and corporate greed. He is frustrated by racists and aggravated by political correctness. He loves the Seinfeld series and wishes Larry and Jerry would get back together, and while considered a lefty, is known also to be annoyed at slow traffic caused by pointy-headed intellectuals riding their bicycles (the only valid thing George Wallace ever said). He loves his wife and children and is happiest when theyre together. And for his epitaph, an old friend suggested this: He was always good for a Rolaids.

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© 2012 by Doug Power. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/21/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1748-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1665-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-1749-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910535

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Douglas Gilmore Power

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE  NEW YORK

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

PART TWO  CHICAGO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For Jeanann, and our son, D.D., and our daughter, Alessandra – with all my love and gratitude for so many years.

And for my parents, all three, and my two talented and courageous sisters.

With deeply sincere thanks to Anne Edelstein and Krista Ingebretson, who helped in more ways than they know. And thanks also to Molly Daniels-Ramanujan, and Reginald Gibbons, and Carol Anshaw, who are gifted and who share their gifts.

And for Harold and Bill, who knew before I did what I’m trying to say.

Portions of this book were published previously in slightly different form in the literary magazines Witness and Other Voices.

PROLOGUE

I come from a long line of respectable white people. Lancaster Syms was the land surveyor who accompanied the Duke of York’s envoys to New Amsterdam in 1664 to negotiate with the Dutch, which resulted in its being renamed New York. As a reward, what is now called Staten Island changed control from Indian hands to my ancestor as a gift from King Charles, who was under the impression he owned it. Syms, for reasons not recorded, thought so little of the gift that he promptly gave it to someone else.

Another ancestor, William Whipple, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Hampshire. He also happened to own a slave named Prince, who fought in the Revolutionary War and achieved a measure of fame both before and after he was freed by my forebear. I recently discovered this last item and it makes me feel peculiarly grounded. On the one hand, anyone who was anyone in early America probably owned a slave or two, or at least had indentured servants. On the other, many of my subsequent ancestors were passionate abolitionists. So do I owe reparations or not? And what about severance pay? Did Whipple do right by Prince when he let him go? What about health care?

There were quite a few men of the cloth in my family. One was assistant minister of Trinity Church in New York from 1764 to 1774. Another, Alexander McWhorter, was a pastor in New Jersey and became George Washington’s personal chaplain and crossed the Delaware with him at Valley Forge. Others taught religion at Brown University and founded Colgate Divinity School and wrote the hymn He Leadeth Me. Joseph H. Gilmore, the father of the hymn writer, was a U.S. Senator and then Governor of New Hampshire, and one of our great aunts was president of the DAR.

As is evident, my people were WASPs through and through, and yet my last name tends to be Irish Catholic. This is part of the family history of which I have no information, other than the date when Joseph Power married into two clans of early colonists. My suspicion is that he was Catholic and a quick study, recognizing the social and economic advantages at the time of disavowing Rome.

Things continued to take a different turn when my father, who attended Hamilton College, left my mother, who went to Middlebury, to live with Mary, who had been born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Mary’s father, as will prove to be significant, was also part Irish, but her mother was Yanktenai and over the years, in addition to moving to Chicago and founding the American Indian Center, my stepmother-to-be married my father and gradually evolved from something more than half Indian to becoming almost full blood.

While some of that was going on, my older sister really took a leap. First she got involved in civil rights, including a tense freedom summer spent in southwestern Tennessee, and then she went straight to the source, you might say, and married a fellow student at Cornell University who was from Tanganyika (soon to merge with Zanzibar). Her husband wound up being a key advisor to Julius Nyerere, and she became a professor at the University of Dar Es Salaam and an activist and author on behalf of the economic role carried out by agrarian women inside developing countries.

So this is going to be the story of my two versions of parents and how they saw themselves and the world in which they lived.

I mentioned the evolving bloodline in my stepmother. She often talked about her father and him being part white when she was angry at my father, pointing out the degree to which they had objectionable qualities in common. But then, when their daughter Mary Anne was born, Mary wished her to be half Indian, which meant, of course, that a transfusion within Mary would need to have occurred.

As a result of this and the fact that we lived in an inner-city neighborhood, the topic of race, of being or not being white, touched myriad aspects of our lives. Besides serving as fodder for daily discussion, it was in Chicago where I came of age and saw Dr. King speak at Olivet Church across the street, and found myself in the middle of Cabrini Green, playing baseball. So the question stayed stubbornly in focus: What did it mean to be white?

I’m referring here, it’s important to note, not simply to the phase that many of us traverse on our jagged path toward maturity, rebelling against that which is familiar and attempting to claim kinship with whatever cultural or political movement is, for us, considered other.

Because of the change in my circumstances, that which might typically have constituted the other, with which I might have been tempted to identify myself in order to annoy suburban whitebread parents and demonstrate independence, had suddenly become the place where I lived. I didn’t need to leave home to find Greenwich Village. Our apartment was one block from Old Town and two blocks from the projects, and what had previously been other became, in my teens, the new norm, and it was white people living in the suburbs who came to seem to me like strangers.

It was a wonderful learning experience, which turned out somewhat awkwardly when the self-empowerment of Black Nationalism overtook the thrust and sharing of the civil rights era, and I could no longer even pretend to be included, at which point I commenced to mistrust everyone equally.

I must take care to avoid overstatement. Certainly, as a product of a white social structure, I knew the safeness of being a white male in a white-controlled country. But I was adrift.

Then, as it happened, my first-year roommate at the University of Chicago became, two decades later, the chief of staff for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and I became his assistant, and was thereby inserted into the City Council wars that were sometimes referred to as Beirut on the Lake, immersed happily, once again, into the midst of racial turmoil. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

So I started out as a white kid. And at an early age, I had a sense (as one does) that I was of my parents, but it wasn’t clear that they fit successfully into the world, and that leaves one unsettled. We are all anthropologists, born into our individual space and time that we study day by day as we absorb information and our experiences shape us, akin to a student of the social sciences who relocates into a tribe to learn their beliefs and habits, whether it be in the Amazon Forest or Westchester County. You take note of the accepted modes of behavior, and in the case of a child, the result becomes not an academic monograph but your personal template for living.

I know that, even as a six year old, I was aware that my parents were not a loving couple, and that it was possibly not going to come to a happy end.

But it has been an interesting parade of elements, in and of themselves and in a succession of society’s milieus, and in the manner via which events played out within the context of the United States, and the world, and among some considerable few of the varied species of humankind.

PART ONE

NEW YORK

CHAPTER ONE

In the autumn of 1960, on a Monday morning two weeks after I’d turned fourteen, my mother slept late. I rapped on her door in our new apartment in Rochester because she was going to be tardy to work and because she was just barely holding on to this first job she’d ever had. She was scheduled to take a third typing test which it was likely she was again going to fail (this daughter of the former owner of Staten Island), and hearing no answer to my second knock, I opened the door.

She was still in her double bed, which had been moved up from Eastchester, the suburb where we’d lived just outside New York City, with our beds and the dining room set and the couch and the hi-fi that one of the relatives had then appropriated because Constance had a portable hi-fi/alarm clock and why would a family need two.

Mom’s eyes were closed, though she looked quite peaceful. A glass of water on the night table contained no water.

Constance, I called, but not loudly. I think you should come in here. I had been the one designated by my sister to knock on mother’s door because she and Constance got into frequent fights.

Why? she argued as though arguing with our mother.

Just come here.

It felt jarring as I heard myself speak as if the person in the room with me was not capable of hearing. Constance came in, appearing to be confused, and looked at our mother and she walked to stand next to me at the foot of the bed. We stared silently at her and surreptitiously watched one another, wondering how we were going to decide what to do.

I think she might be dead, I said finally in a low voice, not sure what that was going to feel like, to say it, as though you’re about to open the biggest door you’ve ever come to.

Constance looked at me and I was thinking about where we would go, that morning, if she was dead. We wouldn’t have to go to school; we would go to Grandma’s, probably. Perhaps we’d move in with her; she’d almost have to take us. Dad didn’t seem like a viable option; who even knew where he was?

Then I worried I shouldn’t have been thinking of these practical concerns. Did it mean I didn’t love my mother? Was it loathsome of me?

It was possible to understand how she might have taken such a step, which I was reluctant to think about but one wants to know why things happen. I’d seen it in her every night, anybody could have, sitting with a shorthand textbook in front of her, but she couldn’t make herself do it because she couldn’t accept the reason. He’d left, and now she was supposed to learn how to be a breadwinner because he was never going to return. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do it. It was the reason why, that had convinced her not to want to live here any more.

I felt guilty, also, because it had been good timing for me personally, that we’d moved. I had been fortunate to escape from Eastchester, where I had hit bottom in my confused efforts at social interaction with my peers. But moving abruptly to Rochester, where she had grown up and left for Manhattan with a lofty wave goodbye, had been for my mother a shameful disaster. And it hadn’t been fair for Constance, who had finally, after intense struggle, achieved becoming a high school cheerleader even though she wasn’t one of the prettier girls. She’d worked hard at it, not for frivolous purposes but simply because she was determined, and now she’d had to start all over again, and because she was a senior there was little time to catch up.

I don’t mean to suggest that staying in Eastchester had been an option; Mom had ceased to function. She’d stopped her golfing and painting and going to the women’s club and even ordering groceries from the store. She wouldn’t leave the apartment and she couldn’t bear to see her friends because she’d been exposed as a fraud.

It wasn’t as though my father hadn’t been gone for months at a time before that. He had and she’d motored on, as long as she could maintain that they were happily, or at least marginally, married. The façade wasn’t just for her friends, it was for her. Being married to him was the ideal she clung to. Even if toward the end he came home only rarely, he was the single handhold in her life, ever since her father and grandfather had died within days of each other, that she considered worthy.

And now she lay alone in their double bed that had been moved to Rochester, to this wrong room in this wrong place, under covers drawn to her neck. She rested on her back with her face up, dyed red hair in the middle of a clean white pillow, her body alarmingly thin—but of course she had lost a lot of weight. Her legs were not akimbo or showing signs of duress, just under the covers like anyone else’s would be.

I think you ought to check if she’s okay, I said, because Constance was three years older and thought she ought to be in charge and once in a while I could take advantage of it.

What do you mean?

I knew she didn’t want to try to wake her. She didn’t want to acknowledge that this was a question. It felt like we were in a Greek myth; we’d come across our mother, sleeping and silent, in the path to the rest of our lives.

You should feel her heart.

That was the thing; one of us was going to have to touch our mother on her breast. She was going to turn out to be dead or else be really unpleasantly angry.

She’s supposed to be up early, to take her typing test at work, I said in a louder voice, hoping she might hear and wake up and it would remind her that Constance and I didn’t have any choice.

Uncle Bob had gotten her a job working for a fellow big-shot at Eastman Kodak, which had been hugely helpful. She’d be able to make a new life for herself, according to the theory endorsed by him and Aunty Betty and Grandma. The man’s son was in my freshman class at Monroe High School and had introduced himself. He had a long face and dark hair and his father had obviously told him something of the family situation (new to town because of a failed marriage) and instructed him not to brag about his father being my Mom’s new boss.

Constance walked around me to the side of the bed, between it and the window shade that was drawn like always in this apartment because our mother didn’t want anyone to see her. She hadn’t worried about such things in Eastchester, where she used to walk around the apartment naked part of the time, but here in Rochester, she was locked up from being ashamed.

The shade was yellowish-brown from the damp light outside and the warmer glow spreading from a small lamp on the bedside table, which lent a sympathetic countenance to Mom’s face and hid her pinched creases. Or maybe it was that the cracks in her forehead and her cheeks and around her mouth truly were gone, and she had magically, suddenly, become younger.

Constance stood near her, studying the face that was looking up with eyes closed and the vaguest of smiles in the shape of her mouth. Not a sarcastic or bitter smile, a kind one.

Feel her heart.

What if she wakes up?

It’s not our fault, I said, meaning that was what we would say, and finally she bent over.

Mom? she said, close to her, and we waited, but something more was going to have to happen and Constance touched her shoulder under the covers and pulled her hand back as if it was very hot or very cold and I looked for the compression of a muscle around Mom’s lips or a tendon tightening in her neck or the flutter of an eyelid.

Constance pushed down then on her shoulder, and someone who was sleeping would have turned onto their side, would have curled defensively against the intrusion, and Constance backed away, waiting to see movement. But there was nothing to see, and finally Constance reached to grasp the comforter and the sheet that were shielding our mother and slowly inched them down.

She’s not wearing anything.

In Eastchester, in the earlier years when my father had been home more of the days, she had often not worn anything to bed, but in recent months she had taken to wearing baggy cotton pajamas and Constance paused before continuing. Then she slid the coverings further and our mother’s breasts were bare and they were flatter than before and her skin was pale and smooth, and where her shoulders and upper arms used to freckle in the sun, she was alabaster. There’d been no more golfing with her friends, and cocktails afterwards on the patio.

Constance glanced at me as if to corroborate on the next step and she moved her hand toward our mother’s left breast and touched with her palm and her fingers and listened with all the nerves in her hand. Then, using both hands, she pulled the edge of the sheet up again, past her breasts and shoulders, all the way to her neck where it had been before we’d come into the room. She didn’t cover her face, like you see people do in the movies. It would have been rude.

I’ll call Grandma, Constance said in an uncertain voice, and she dialed on the phone that was on the table next to the bed.

Why, good morning, I heard from the handset because Grandma’s voice carried as the voices of strong grandmothers can and she was surprised to hear from Constance so early.

I think Mom might be dead.

She listened but I couldn’t hear as well this time, and after a few moments she hung up and dialed again. She said to call Uncle Bob, she relayed tersely and waited for him to answer. Mom won’t wake up, she informed him and I heard his voice tinny through the earpiece.

No, I mean there’s something wrong, she added, as though he was arguing that we ought to be trying more forcefully. I felt I needed to give evidence of my being present in support of Constance’s message, so Uncle Bob would believe her, and I howled briefly. It seemed like a reaction he’d be expecting but it felt fake and I regretted it, and suspected that I wanted him to feel sorry for us, orphaned from the cradle of our birth.

We remained at the foot of the bed and waited for the police, whom Uncle Bob had told Constance he’d be calling. We could have gone into the dining room, but we stayed near her because she was our mother. But as soon as the police arrived, it changed, and Mom turned into a body that had been her but she was no longer in it, and what was left had to be taken somewhere to a place where something would be done with it.

Uncle Bob arrived in time to supervise this phase of the procedure and looked around the bedroom responsibly, as if for clues, and toured the apartment with evident irritation that things domestically hadn’t been kept up to muster. A policeman said Probably suicide, into the phone and Uncle Bob looked furiously at him because he’d said such a thing in front of the children.

It was just an accident! he barked at us and then instructed that we leave the room immediately, as though a little of this had perhaps been our fault after all.

We stood uselessly in the dining room, and I looked where Constance had done her homework on the dinner table and where our mother had not done her practice exercises on the typewriter as often as instructed, and after Uncle Bob talked to the police about moving the body, he drove Constance and me the few blocks to Grandma’s house, and that was pretty much that about Mom.

I should mention the memorial service. It was at our grandmother’s house because, everybody said, it really ought to be more intimate than having it at Grandma’s church. Simply not appropriate, was what they meant. This was not to be a typical commemoration saluting the dearly beloved and departed. It was clear that everyone wanted to get it over with as soon as possible because it was not a pretty story, and you didn’t want to act as though it hadn’t been shameful, because it had. She’d been a failure who’d showed bad character and lacked spine, and no one wanted to have to try to soft-pedal that to a lot of curious people.

As it was, Uncle Bob was concerned about how he’d look at Eastman Kodak, having introduced such an upsetting disruption into their professional atmosphere, and Grandma would have to inform all of her bridge and canasta friends, and what were Constance and I going to tell the kids at school?

That sounds as though we were resentful. It wasn’t that, and in many ways it was the lifting of an oppressive weight, so heavy was her joylessness, but you can’t explain that to other people, that you knew why she might have done it.

So the brief service was in the living room, where the wedding reception had been held when our mother married our father twenty years earlier, and many of the same people were attending as had attended then, and no one seemed terribly surprised.

CHAPTER TWO

What Came Before

My father was called Bud even though his name was Carleton. He and my mother had met while still in high school, and they met at church, my Aunt always liked to point out. It was Baptist, but not Baptist the way we think of them now—it really should have been Presbyterian or Congregational because it wasn’t too awfully serious.

My father, we’d always been told by Aunt Betty, was a handsome rake, and my mother Catherine a cool blue-eyed and auburn-tinted brunette, and on the surface it had been a fitting relationship, in that both their families traced their roots back to the Colonies and to Scotland and England before that.

They were among the best people in upstate New York, and perhaps because of it, my mother and father let it be known (even to Constance and me) that they were rebels. There was a way families were supposed to be in the fifties—that had already become a cliché by the sixties and the fifties even today are defined by it—but Bud and Kay were never only that. They had, in their own eyes and by conscious decision, risen above it and were not bashful about advertising such. Our mother was president of the Women’s Club but also of the Eastchester League of Women Voters, and she painted and golfed and never went to church and was addicted to tranquilizers, while our father traveled the country in turboprops, selling books and enjoying various lady friends in the cities he visited and never going to church and his addiction was booze.

Constance and I knew enough about the accepted norms to be ashamed of our home life that did not fulfill suburban standards. Aunt Betty used to seek excuses to examine our teeth to see if we’d been ferried with sufficient frequency to the dentist’s chair, and was reassured, as far as I could tell, to see implants of dull metal. So if it seemed, as it did in our self-perception, a little different for Constance and me, if our parents didn’t talk with us about school or religion or whatever it was people discussed at dinner, if our apartment seemed more of a rooming house, it did open our eyes early on to those elements of mythology that people like to pretend exists in every family’s life. And it seemed equally clear to us that Bud and Kay had also seized upon analogous findings at an early age in their own lives, though I didn’t know how this had transpired inside their prosperous households nor all the reasons why. But it was evident to me that each of them had questioned society’s dictates and the smothering influence of upstate New York’s clucking upper crust; whereupon he had decided upon numerous women and alcohol to be his route and she had fixated solely upon him, and somewhere in the middle of all that is perhaps as good a place as any to pick up the story.

My father was a bookman. He sold fiction and non-fiction to bookstores and wholesalers, and to those department stores of quality that chose to have serious and thoughtful book sections (these no longer exist). It was a different business in 1954, a profession for gentlemen who were more interested in the fine arts of writing and the intricate alchemies of boozing than focusing on profit. There were drinks named Sidecar and Tom Collins and Highball, and rich old men owned most of the publishing houses, where editors were able to choose the manuscripts they valued and enjoyed, and as long as the A list performed respectably, the B and C titles were theirs to mold.

It was the third year of I Like Ike, and Joe McCarthy was enthusiastically rooting out communists and their fellow travelers, which concerned me at first because my dad travelled on sales trips much of the time. My fears rose when I saw him scowling at the TV one night as Senator McCarthy was expressing anger about Hollywood. Some people had gotten into trouble because they wouldn’t testify in Congress, and it seemed that anyone the Senator didn’t like was not a good American. I hoped no one would notice us, because I assumed we would not stand well under close inspection.

There was another hullabaloo, which had nothing to do with us, about a lady named Rosa Parks who didn’t want to go to the back of a bus, and who, because of it, had gotten in some trouble. I’d never been on a real bus, only gone on trips from school, but apparently you had to sit in the back if you were a Negro and Rosa Parks didn’t want to. I wasn’t sure why Negros were supposed to sit in back, but it seemed that her not wanting to do it had caused so much noise that I wondered if she really thought it was all worth it. Then all the Negros in Montgomery, Alabama, stopped riding the buses and there was more trouble, and meanwhile in the Supreme Court something or someone named Brown won versus the Board of Education, which turned out to be about schools in Little Rock and whether a Negro child could go to the same school as a white one. (It was just by chance, I eventually discovered, the name Brown being part of the wrangling, but prior to that it had added to my confusion.) As with the buses, I wasn’t sure what all of it had to do with us in Eastchester. We didn’t have regular buses and no Negros lived there, so of course there weren’t any in our school.

There were other things in the news; I had drawn a picture I’d named Indochina, with soldiers crouching behind a low stone wall between farms, pointing rifles at an unseen enemy in the trees beyond the field. The picture was what I thought wars looked like because of the photographs from World War II, but actually it was a different kind of battle at Dien Bien Phu, where the French were involved. But before long they slunk out and left, which seemed kind of shiftless of them because we had to try to take their place to keep it from becoming another Korea.

Which was in itself confusing, because we’d already learned from that war that there were good Koreans and bad, good Chinese and bad, and now the same thing was happening again in Indochina, which was located at the bottom of Asia where no one even understood anybody else’s language, and we’d thought it hadn’t mattered because it was all just jungle anyway.

Some things changed as time passed: Joe McCarthy went too far with the shouting at people, and everyone finally got tired of listening and decided there weren’t as many communists as he’d said. Marilyn Monroe became famous, and I compared how she looked in tight dresses to how my mother looked in dresses and they didn’t seem that different, which was both intriguing and disturbing. And I became aware for the first time of youthful rebellion, when she took us to see Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier in Blackboard Jungle.

My father took the train to work when he wasn’t travelling, and I went once with my mother to pick him up because it was raining and the station was in Tuckahoe, which wasn’t as nice as Eastchester even though it was apparently included. There were colored people on the street and the houses weren’t as nice, and I wondered if train stations were always located in the bad parts of towns, or if, instead, wherever the station was built it became not so desirable afterwards.

My father, I had come to understand by overhearing brief conversations, was a valued editorial reader of galleys at his job and could have become an editor himself and come home to Eastchester every night.

Isn’t it nice like this, Bud? my mother said as he settled in the passenger seat. I’d be happy to pick you up every day.

I know you would.

"You’d be just a wonderful editor. You’ve got the best eye for good writing I’ve ever seen. Think of the writers who might never be discovered. I almost think you’ve got a responsibility, dear."

"Yes, but I can do that even more thoroughly when I’m out on the road. And I’ve got more time with which to do it, the long plane rides, eating dinners at the hotels. What else would I be doing?" he added and smiled at my mother.

But you read manuscripts at home, she said, and that way we can be together.

He looked out the windshield and didn’t answer, because of course he did read at home just about every night, sitting in his leather chair with bulky manuscripts, which at that time were printed on long sheets of paper that rolled up, because the book, if it was destined to become one, hadn’t yet been divided into pages. Mom drove up the long hill that left Tuckahoe in shadow and reached the grassy field adjacent to Eastchester High School on our left, with the flow of frame suburban houses on our right. I knew what Mom hoped for; she wanted it to be like it was for the families living in the pastel houses, where the father figure came home every night and sometimes they’d all go out for ice cream.

When we got home, Dad went to their room and changed clothes and then started the night’s reading and drinking, and Mom settled on the couch after yelling upstairs to Constance as to why she hadn’t started on making dinner.

Is it okay for me to turn on the TV? I asked.

Ask your father.

Is it okay if I-

Sure, he said, concentrating to make sure he didn’t lose his place in the galley.

We always went to Grandma Power’s in Albany for Thanksgiving. When I was six and Grandpa Power was still alive, whenever he looked at my father, his son,