Grace had sunk so far from the foreground of my life: call it a highly successful and worked-at denial. I had not invited her to my college graduation or to my wedding, fearing she’d actually turn up. Wearing red. Grace was now the Christmas bulletin (news about an active couple’s latest ballroom-dance trophy; her board sponsorship of a road show reviving some forties musical worthless even then). Finally officially rich, she could FedEx me my birthday card; lately of the comic “You’re Really Over the Hill Now” variety. Despite my silence, her memento always arrived exactly on the day itself. My new bride claimed this surely showed some forethought and initiative, didn’t it? But, reading Grace’s breezy red-inked description of an impulsive Caribbean cruise taken with her latest Texan (“Buck is seventy-three going on twenty years young!”), I again felt the bitter arbitrariness of parentage.

  I had one parent. And he, apparently, was not.

  Lately—wandering myself so near the privileged vista of Fifty, fretting now as the worrywart father of two—I can only marvel at Grace Meadows Delman, her grief-stricken carelessness in shipping me north five days after Dad’s funeral. She is still alive, she is yet sexually active, and (natch) a resident of Florida. I must tell you later: At our curious seaside reunion last year, the woman at least started to explain.

  II.

  Age eight, arrived by train wearing a brass-buttoned maroon uniform that made me feel like both a chimp and a chest of drawers, I found myself standing at attention on the muddy windblown soccer field. I had been banished here to march in something called the Junior Color Squad. I had no idea what any of this meant. I’m sure I still don’t. But, feeling confused while hoisting the snapping flag at a forty-five-degree angle, trying to keep its pine staff upright as my own child-spine never could remain for long, I did accidentally achieve at least one minor-chord form of early immortality. (I guess you could call it my first publication.)

  Near the back of last week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine, beside the Crossword answers, opposite a quaint section devoted to diet camps for the troublingly chubby kids of the persons glazedly svelte, a column is given over to those also-ran boarding schools that still need to advertise. And there you’ll find a listing for my make-do alma mater.

  The ad’s boilerplate photograph—timeless and yet slightly dated in some way now adjudged half classy—shows two uniformed boys. The brunette to the right stands blowing his trumpet. And, beside him, holding a huge flag, heraldic if unfamiliar, another male child squints at you, a blond kid appearing very bullied if noble, mild.

  Pitifully pretty, he looks embarrassed at discovering himself far too visible and this overtly Caucasian; the kid stands half lost under a black-billed cap. My worldly daughters look it up every Sunday. They tease me—oh, they’re merciless. They call this uniformed child “The Salt Shaker.” I guess because he seems the paler half of some matched set. A real little “whiteyhead,” he is.

  I pretend to whine at all of this; I hide my face behind “Sports” and then go nose-down into the “Book Review.” My girls enjoy such fond and weekly ribbing. But sometimes, when they’ve left the room for a few more gallons of Diet Coke, I’ll slowly turn toward the ad. I feel suspense almost—squinting over my now-necessary bifocals.

  A few pages earlier, find come-ons for sponsor-seeking outfits that intend to stamp out international hunger. As bait, they offer photos of darling grieved third-world kids. You’re being asked to adopt one in exchange for cute snapshots of “yours” shown in his cleanly rags. You can expect your kid’s biannual letters written directly to you, and in his own dear crabbed (if now-protein-stoked) handwriting.

  I study the picture of my own young somber face. And I now feel willing to send any monthly amount to keep this orphaned kid fed, housed, as far out of uniform and off the gusty lacrosse field as possible. It is in this strange context that—middle-aged, sitting amid the clutter of one daughter’s trimming new reeds for her oboe, another’s perusing works on Degas sculpture and fan mags showing the latest teen blond actor-sensation—I still marvel at the forlorn beauty (so up for grabs) of one stark parade-field boychild.

  Back then, that much a kid, I as yet masterminded the resurrection of my father. Surely we buried the wrong person? A white man who only outwardly resembled my real Dad. Might Clyde not simply Packard through the gates of this pretentious prison camp for delinquent changelings? Couldn’t he abduct his child safely back to Falls, return me to civilian clothes, enroll me at a school so near our house that you could always hear the early, then the late bells?

  Sundays in particular, at a window seat in the hall of the third floor, staring out the tilting fan-shaped Palladian window just under our roof’s central peak, I habitually watched all approaching traffic. I sat waiting for the next waxed black car to activate its blinker, turn in.

  III.

  … If it were not so, I would have told you.

  I go to prepare a place for you.

  John 14:2

  The rest is one wing beating, when two wings are required for flight.

  The rest becomes my own story, but ghost-written. I had not believed in ghosts. Till Clyde died.

  I became, without quite knowing it, a somewhat conservative scholar. My enjoying any career at all still offers me a weekly source of wonderment. It would delight Dad. And yet, compared with certain stellar work in the field, my own can look, even to me, merely “respectable.”

  I am not, as my daughters now indiscriminately use the term, a “sexy” scholar. All the same, I have published nineteen articles and the two books. Teaching’s made a dent in my output; but giving energy away to students isn’t something I regret very often. I’m regularly consulted by my peers. I like being a tie-breaker between warring camps. Clyde’s son, after all.

  My subjects range from Tacitus to the problem of prosaic words in Lucan. Of course, our field’s real movers and shakers are those now working on such cutting edge topics as “Gender Theory.” Though I’ll bet you anything—not one of them has ever come close to seeing his own mother even near her horse-sized weekly veterinarian! Still, these sexual-identity “experts” are the stars presently asked to give the keynote addresses to the American Philological Association Meetings, and I am not. Oh well.—When I’m about to mail some final version of my newest article to a good periodical, I send one copy off to my first boarding-school classics teacher. She still double-checks my facts, my amounts. As Clyde and his fellow givers of the Word phrased it during our prayer breakfasts at Janine’s American Bar and Grill, “Blessed.” Lord, sir, but I’ve been blessed.

  Approaching fifty, needing to lose fifteen surplus pounds, I confess I find my present age’s physical slackening almost a relief: if your hair has gone white, it doesn’t much matter whether that hair began as African black, platinum blond, or merest dishwater brown. By now, you’ve aged beyond your troubling starter beauty. Like some geological Mineral Age—following a newly passed Vegetal one—traces of once-ferns still cling across my roughened rock-facings! I’m glad to be exactly this old. My favorite two ages so far: eight and forty-eight.

  Swift said, “No wise man ever wishes to be younger.”

  Or, I might add, lighter-skinned.

  First week at the academy, I got assigned a history theme, “State How White Americans Have Benefited Culturally/Economically from the Enforced Labor of American Negroes.” The very topic made me feel singled out, criticized. It also made me marvel afresh at all he’d done for Mom, then me. He’d been our willing wage-slave. But why? In researching my paper, I came across one chapter that exclaimed over how rare armed revolt had been among the slaves. So few had killed their masters and, rarer still, their masters’ kids. Somehow “the human element” only seems to work up the ladder, never down.

  Fourth year at school, my roommate’s father was one of Richard Nixon’s presidential-campaign managers. And my buddy, in a phrase I still remember and enjoy, forever called Nixon “Vice President Weasel Breath.”

  Hoping to defeat and bankrupt said weasel, my roomie gave everyone at school the secret telephone credit-card number for Nixon’s headquarters. He passed this code along to dozens of long-distance boys and girls our age at far-flung schools. Before our dorm’s busy wall-mounted pay phone, lines soon formed. I made quick use of Nixon’s account. Civil disobedience. Plus so darned convenient.

  Clyde’s posthumous funds paid for my room, board, and notebook paper but little else. I earned my way with silver polish, elbow grease, and a little salesman’s charm. But pocket-change, I lacked. So, I further justified my free phone service: the more extravagant Nixon’s phone bills grew, the less likely we’d have that in the White House a full four years. “Trixie, would you rather be a dead dog or Vice President Nixon?” So—for Jack Kennedy, really—I dialed directory assistance: Manila.

  I requested the private number of a “Meadows Delman.” Because I could. I felt half disappointed to find myself unlisted as a Filipino. We had been told that, the day after the election, especially if Nixon won, his phone police would come seeking us lawbreakers; this proved literally true. Only my having used an untraceable dorm pay phone saved me. But while I still had license to chat up anyone on earth, I found the Registrar of Employees for the City Government of Washington, D.C. (I’d always meant to, but couldn’t while stuffing a pay phone with uncouth dimes and nickels; I couldn’t while still sounding like a child.)

  Just tracking down the Registrar took me nine bureaucratic follow-the-dot detective calls. I asked if he would put me in direct touch with a member of my family, please? Emergency. Death-in-the-family-type situation. Female, worker named Delman. She might’ve married and taken another name. I said we’d been out of touch too long, I said our family sure regretted that. (Was this in any way a lie?) The man explained just the one Delman was listed. First name: Naomi. That somehow felt right. “Clyde and Naomi,” yes. I thanked the fellow, effusive while fighting to sound businesslike.

  Though I was young, my voice had lately dropped. I now felt drunk with all the master-of-ceremonies power this gave me (if only by phone). I was also proud of my recent report card, pleased with the school’s faith in my quiet orphaned poise.

  Now, standing at the dorm pay phone, having “cut” Color Guard maneuvers to do this during office hours, glad for midday quiet from a dorm shower room dripping nearby, I imagined myself as some short espionage-youngster. Almost five feet one now, suave yet playful, irreverent if basically straight-A, “Name’s Bond, Jim-my Bond.” I imagined what pinstriped and paisleyed Sunday clothes Clyde would choose for my costume in this scene seeking him. Clearing my throat to find my voice’s most male brown-velvet lowpoint, I dialed Naomi’s work number.

  I remember wishing I had urinated first. Too late. A woman’s voice came right on line. Half husky, her gentle Piedmont accent still held: “Special Consumer Services: Licensing. Miss Delman, may I hep you?”

  “Yes, please. I believe you have a brother named Clyde? Your mother is Sutie and lives in a house covered with this whole collage of beautiful signs, I believe?”

  (I had once audited Twentieth Century Art Crosscurrents.) There followed the longest sort of pause. I could hear a distant water-cooler conversation; D.C. traffic; one metal file-drawer opened, then slammed.

  “Who’s this, really? Because I don’t have a brother. We all got mothers. But my brother broke her heart. Visited her, made some kind of scene, never did drag back. Mom felt like he kept away over something she did to him or his brat. He quit even sending her the food boxes. It worried her to where she’s dead.—Who is this?”

  “Miss Naomi? It’s the brat. Clyde’s son, Meadows Delman. I’m thirteen almost. Aunt Naomi? You’re my only kin. I’ve been looking and lookin. I’m mighty pleased to hear you. I live near you. When would be good for us to get together?”

  There came a click. I refused it. I continued the conversation … just as I’d run skidding, Roadrunner-like, past the sight of Mom, legs up, beneath that bad man on our couch.

  I twisted hard against enameled dorm wall, I pressed as with some wish to sit, recline, be held, burrow direct into the plaster. I told her dial tone: “I attend a school in northern Virginia. I can get into Northwest easy by bus.—Ma’am? Every other Friday they turn us loose. Would you consider maybe letting me buy you a nice lunch somewhere? Aunt Naomi? I already know where Dupont Circle is. We could meet there. The fountain. I have a letter I wrote Sutie. There’s so much to tell you. To ask, I mean. See, what’s awful … Clyde is dead. Gramma Sutie shouldn’t blame herself. I’m sorry to call you about this at work and all. But I miss our Clyde to where I dream he’s sitting in his car out in my school’s annex parking lot. It’s the far one, where our faculty with sailboats and campers leave those? And he’s there all night looking at his watch. In the dream what’s most important is my being tardy, not his being dead. But all I have to do is hike over there barefoot, wearing PJs. He died of a heart attack, we think. Or lungs, the lungs, too. He wasn’t but forty-three. So, see, the only reason he stopped visiting his mom, yours, is because—right after I met Sutie?—Clyde got killed on the road. Died, I mean. That simple. Nobody’s fault. I’m sorry about our Sutie. Please, ma’am, meet me just the once. We’d like each other. I’ll be in the maroon uniform, I’m not that tall yet, okay? Clyde’s still the best person ever. Please see me, Aunt Naomi. I need to know things. Our meeting’ll go good. Because we’re kin. Hello?”

  When I think of my late father, I remember that first Bible verse he taught me. It contained the mystery: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I felt I understood the first two, having always before my eyes our own examples; but who could comprehend the spare tire of that invisible third party? Our necessary “Ghost”?

  John 3:16 was one I never could get my head around, not while he still lived. It’s the cornerstone passage Clyde kept trying to re-explain during our many Sunday missions. “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  At eight, I naturally believed this verse must be about me, us. It seemed to imply that true love requires a father’s own sacrifice of his son and, in turn, the son’s giving up the father, and incidentally each man’s surrendering himself to save the other. It largely confused me at age twelve. And I admit, now half a century along, this passage as yet bewilders but still holds me.

  Had my father saved my soul, any soul, so he might later gain his own? Or was Clyde Melvin Delman, Sr., just trading in a shanty life near swampland for something ever-so-slightly flashier uptown with pretty easy Gracie Meadows? Did my presence in his life help make things turn unexpectedly rewarding? Or was I why he got stuck?

  (I’ve slowly come to guess, this very uncertainty might’ve been my dad’s best possible legacy to me. Which tribe must be most mine?—Is either? Aren’t both?)

  Even dead, Clyde’s attendance record outranked the living Grace’s.

  My school roommate snitched a pack of Marlboros during our class outing to a commercial pottery of no interest except its being in hiking distance. Gathered on our room’s fire escape at 2 a.m., we would learn to seriously inhale. Three boys slouched out here wearing short pajamas, legs dangling down into the summer night. Cicadas now made such a racket we could talk at normal volume without fearing detection by tonight’s duty master. My smooth Manhattan roommate produced his platinum lighter, a Tiffany one filched from his father. He lit up, inhaled with a comical sophistication, sent forking smoke-streams out both his nostrils, smiled glee at us over this effect, then burst into a fit of coughing complicated by his own pitiless laughing at himself.

  Others, lighting theirs, faked a certain quirky clubiness as we idled outdoors on this rickety metal balcony. Our mismatching PJs were still covered with images of ball-club pennants, Indian canoes, duck decoys. But, armed with cigarettes and a platinum flame-thrower, we lounged squinting like a cell of worldly undercover agents.

  The lighter, cool to the touch, was finally passed my way. I’d had much experience watching Dad puff. I’d fired up at least a few weeds for him. Now, to impress the others, I beat the lighter against one upturned palm (a gesture whose purpose remained obscure but whose authority, learned from Clyde, produced exactly the silent steely-eyed male respect I’d hoped). Having tamped the pack, I flipped out one weed, cracked our lighter open, and flame … but the damned cigarette wouldn’t light.

  Soon others got involved. “Maybe it’s a dud one,” my roomie suggested. So, in the manner of “Take a card, any card,” I urged my friend to choose the next. Again I tried igniting it. It might’ve been made of marble.

  On attempt number three, just as others bent around this (for boys) intriguing problem, combining as it did physics, pyromania, and addiction, our fire escape—loaded with so much squirmy boy-weight—gave one cranking drop. A single wall-mounted bolt jerked loose and commenced spilling all its mortar’s powder. So fast, we scrambled through that open window!

  My best friend would mention it for weeks: something’s preventing me from lighting a regular flammable cig. He said he wanted to try it all again. Would my weed go out if he lit the thing, then passed it to me? But, by dawn, that pack was all smoked up. And I had been … prevented.

  The morning after, I woke, hands locked behind head, feeling oddly wonderful. I seemed to be reflecting on a visit Dad had made to school. I somehow knew, and via some way of knowing tucked far in, that Clyde’s lungs, not just his heart, had fatally failed him. Understanding this (but how?), I found myself gladly volunteering, as in a promise offered someone eternal, never, ever to smoke. If it’d please him, dear me, no. And I’ve always kept my word.

  As with a blind boy trusting his painted stick to find the world while putting it on notice, classical languages somehow led me back to Clyde. But so slowly. A maze built like a crossword puzzle, it seemed an unlikely way to find your missing traveling salesman. But Latin then Greek came to seem some form of string-and-tin-can code we’d always held in common. Stretched taut, if by a filament, it daily linked us. After nine months’ work, I felt certain barricades lift. After two full years, partitions dividing Scotch-Irish-English from some imagined lyrical African-American language gave way. Unlikenesses between Europe and Africa could be posited, their differences split, between and among these ancient languages. I don’t expect this to make much logical sense—beyond a child’s own faulty absolutist logic. These languages were generally considered dead. So was my Clyde. And yet … Fellow cadets watched my progress with a certain sneering pity. Scrawled across one bathroom partition: “Latin killed the Romans and Now it’s killing Us, except that little grind Meadows!” So be it.