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The fact that he’d even noticed such things would have struck me, earlier on, as odd, since my father was notorious for his indifference to clothes; he had as an unerring a sense for wearing the wrong thing as certain people do for wearing the right thing. On the first night of the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, as we were dressing for the captain’s cocktail party, he started to button himself into a shiny brown shirt, and I said, Daddy, we’re on a Mediterranean cruise, you can’t wear brown polyester, and I took the shirt and walked to the balcony and threw it into the sea. Whaaat!?! he cried, that was an expensive shirt! He strode across the stateroom to the balcony and looked forlornly down as the shirt, which on contact with the water had taken on a dense animal gleam, like the skin of a seal, briefly bobbed along until it finally sank under its own weight. Only when he was entering his late, nostalgic phase—I must have been in my mid-thirties at the time—did he surprise me with an anecdote that explained his fastidious attention to his long-ago teacher’s dress. While he was studying as an undergraduate at NYU, he said one day (a university, he liked to remind us, that he’d been able to attend because of the GI Bill; which, in turn, he had been able to take advantage of because he had joined the army at the age of seventeen, precisely for the purpose of being able to go to college, to get an education)—while he was in college he had worked at Brooks Brothers. He gave his tight little grin when he saw me reacting to this news. Well, he said, it was only in the packing room, but I learned something! As he said this I could feel the presence of a shy, stubborn pride just beneath the surface of his self-deprecation, a slight vainglory about his brief entrée into the rarefied world of patrician American taste: as if to say, See where I got? Not bad for a boy from the Bronx. When he said, but I learned something, I had a sudden vision of him as a youth of twenty, impossibly slender as he was then, his trousers awkwardly crimped around the narrow waist, held in place by a belt, tiptoeing through the vast mahogany-paneled sales floors on Madison Avenue, clutching some paper-wrapped package as he loped beneath the coffered ceilings and the chandeliers, gawking at the gleaming paneling with its sleek brass fittings—not at all very different, I like to think, from the way in which, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus’ young son goggles at the rich decor of the palace of the Spartan king Menelaus, the long-suffering husband of Helen of Troy, when Telemachus visits him as part of his fact-finding mission about his missing father. “Zeus’ court on Olympus must be like this!” exclaims the naïve youth, who in the poem is twenty, the age my father was when he worked at Brooks Brothers.

      So, my father would repeat as he recalled his German-refugee Latin teacher, the one who’d tried to dress with flair even though his clothes were so poor, so he asked us who was going to go on into the fifth year, to read Virgil.

      Here my father would pause. He was re-creating the silence that had fallen in the classroom in the Bronx all those years ago.

      Nobody said anything, he would then say, not quite meeting my eye. The teacher asked the question once, and then he asked again, and no one said a word.

      Sixty-five years after this event took place, long after the teacher and his frayed collars and dashed hopes had disappeared, long after many of the boys who had squirmed in that embarrassed Bronx silence had become men and then fathers and then grandfathers and then, like my father, old men who had become, suddenly and improbably, nostalgic about old and unredeemable mistakes—sixty-five years later, my father shook his head and pursed his narrow lips into the tight familiar line.

      I still remember the room, he said, because it was so quiet. We were too embarrassed to talk. And the teacher suddenly looked at us and pointed his finger at each of us like this—(here my father put on a stagy German accent) and said, “You refuse de riches of Fergil! Diss, you vill regret!” And then he closed his briefcase and walked out of the room.

      After a moment my father said, As I remember it, that was the end of Latin instruction in that school.

      Remember, he added, it wasn’t the best high school, but still it was a good school.

      I did remember, dimly: some story that someone had once told us, my mother, my aunt, I can’t recall who, maybe one of my uncles. Daddy had been the smartest kid in junior high school, a math whiz, but for some reason he hadn’t gone on to the most competitive high school, a place called Bronx Science, which is where math and science whizzes went. But I couldn’t remember the rest of the story, and didn’t know why he hadn’t gone to the best school.

      So it was a very good school, my father was saying. There weren’t many of us who were taking Latin, so the program depended on us! But we didn’t go the distance. And I think that a couple of years after that spring, Latin just petered out and died.

      You could see that it still bothered my father, after all those years—the way he and his classmates had rejected the teaching of the mild-mannered German Jew who’d come so far with only this rarefied knowledge to give. You could see, when he told this story, that he was still angry with himself for the way in which, having come so far himself in his study of the ancient language, he’d failed to travel the final leg of his classical journey and read the greatest work in that language—a work about a man who rescues his aged father from the burning ruins of his vanquished city and then travels far to a new and unknown land, carefully keeping both his father and his young son in tow, in order to make a new life with them there. Aeneas, that paragon of filial dutifulness; which quality, as my father knew well, is no trivial thing.

      When I was a child and first heard the story of my father’s failure to pursue Latin—and, even later, when I was in college and then graduate school and the subject of higher education or advanced degrees or Classics would come up, which would occasion his telling this tale again, speaking in the slightly musing way that he had, almost as if by telling it over and over he might finally understand why the rest of his life had come out the way it had—when I was young and used to hear this story, I was so taken with the drama and the poignancy of it, the poor German Jew and his narrow escape, the heedless teenagers looking longingly out the windows on a warm day in New York City just after the end of the war, indifferent to the riches of the past, above all the almost unbearable image of a teacher filled with knowledge that no one wanted, that it never occurred to me to ask why my father would have given up studying a subject at which he had excelled, had been a star; just as it hadn’t occurred to me to ask why such a star had ended up in the second-best school.

      A lonely boy sits off to the side of a crowded room, dreaming of his absent father.

      The boy is Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. Two decades have passed since his father left for Troy, never to be heard from again. Since then, the palace has been overrun by dozens of young men from Ithaca and the islands beyond who, assuming that Odysseus is long since dead, are courting the still-beautiful Penelope, hoping to become her husband and assume the kingship of Ithaca. But their presence there constitutes a grotesque violation of the laws both of courtship and of marriage: for instead of observing custom, instead of bringing offerings and bride gifts to Penelope, they have made themselves at home in her palace, draining its stores of food and wine, carousing day and night, seducing the servant girls. The social fabric of the island kingdom has frayed, too, its government ground to a standstill. Some citizens are still loyal to the absent king, but others have chosen to throw their lot in with the Suitors; meanwhile, no assembly of the island’s citizens has been held since Odysseus left.

      The missing king’s family is falling apart. The dejected queen has withdrawn to her chambers above the banquet hall, having long since exhausted her repertoire of tricks designed to keep the Suitors at bay: as the pressure mounts daily for her to make a choice, she swoons and weeps. As for Odysseus’ careworn father, Laertes, he is so disgusted by the mayhem in the palace that he

       no longer comes down into town,

       but toils alone in the countryside, far from men;

       an old woman-servant is there to serve him food and drink

       when his arms and legs are gripped by weariness

       from scrabbling up and down the vineyard’s slopes.

      So

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