9

      Alcove

      Dashing, spontaneous, irrepressible, my father, James Wendell Orr, must have swept my mother off her feet when they first met. He was darkly handsome, with thick black hair, dense eyebrows, and an open, grinning face. Everything about his manner said that life was fun in a wild kind of way and should be enjoyed. Coming from her pinch-faced, teetotaling New England background, my mother couldn’t possibly have ever seen anyone like him before. Grammie Howe, my mother’s mother, hated him from the start, which may have made him only that much more irresistible to my mother. Within months of their meeting, my parents were married.

      My father’s father had begun as a homeless newsboy on the streets of Detroit and risen to become city editor of the New-York Tribune and later, secretary to the governor of New York. My own father had grown up as the spoiled youngest child of his rich Yonkers family.

      Somewhere in the story of my father’s privileged childhood something is missing: Is it a simple bump in the road, or a secret point on which his whole life pivoted? Somewhere in his early adolescence is his own story of responsibility for the sudden death of a loved one. It is not a story he has ever told to anyone I know. Not a single word about it has ever passed between him and me in all these years. My mother spoke her single, cryptic sentence about it to me the day of Peter’s death, and then she, too, would never mention it again. I could tell from the way she spoke that it was a dark and shameful secret. And yet, now I do know something about it; I even know the victim’s name. Six years ago, I called my father’s older sister, a woman I knew as Aunt Doe. She and my father hadn’t talked in forty years, though I didn’t know why.

      “Aunt Doe,” I said, “this is your nephew Greg. If you don’t mind, I need to ask you an odd question.”

      “Well, go ahead.”

      “When Peter died, my mother told me something like that had happened to my father, too, but she never said what. Do you know anything about that?”

      “You mean, your parents never told you about Charley Hayes?” she asked incredulously. No, I assured her; I had never even heard his name before. And she told me all she knew:

      “Charley and your father were inseparable. They were best friends. They must have been ten at the time. It was at our country house; we’d just come up the day before from Yonkers. The two of them snuck a rifle out of the house, one that the chauffeur kept in the trunk of the Packard. And some paper plates from the kitchen—they were going to go skeet shooting in a back field, you know, throw the plates into the air and pretend they were clay pigeons. Then it happened, somehow your father shot Charley. We don’t really know the details of it. Your father ran back to the house and then the chauffeur went out to the field and carried Charley’s body back. Your grandmother packed us up that same day and took us back to the city. I don’t know whether that was right or not, but something like that is so terrible. It was awful. I can’t believe they never told you about it when Peter died. It was the first thing we all thought about, the awful coincidence of it.”

      And that was all she could tell me, though I sensed in her voice questions about how her family had responded to Charley’s death, whether Dad’s mother was right to whisk them so quickly back to the city. Behind that act, I could sense a familial response I knew from my own childhood: the sudden flight from the scene that is the first concrete step toward denial of the horror.

      And so my father’s adolescence continued. Even in the middle of the Depression, he was dropped off by the chauffeured Packard at a fancy New York private school. By the time he went on to Hamilton College, his spirited and irresponsible tendencies had acquired a wilder, more dramatic cast. He flunked out before the end of his first year, then started over at Columbia College. But shortly after, when World War II began, he joined the Navy Air Force and was sent to Ithaca for flight training.

      My mother’s maiden name was Barbara Howe. Her solid, straightlaced family traced itself back, with somber vanity, to an English ship that arrived off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630. My mother’s father worked as an executive for Boston Sand and Gravel, devoting his bland working life to selling off by the truckload soil mingled with his ancestors’ bones. Somehow it was apt—except for his big adventure as a young man in the First World War, he himself was a colorless, basic man who might have been made of the substances he sold. After high school, my mother became a scholarship student in architecture at MIT. I’ve tried to imagine her back then—what a serious, even brilliant student she must have been to have gained entrance into that bastion of male science and technology back in those prefeminist days. In her high school graduation portrait, she’s wearing a string of pearls and a simple, short-sleeved sweater. She has a wide, plain face, high cheekbones, and clear, intelligent eyes that make her quite beautiful in an unassuming way. In the photo, she’s wearing her hair in braids wrapped around the top of her head like a rustic halo. After her first year at MIT, America entered the Second World War and she was lured to Cornell by the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company, which was training women to work in aircraft design. It was there she met my father, and by the time he was transferred to navigation training in Indiana, they were married.

      In Indiana, he ran into disciplinary trouble and washed out. He started over again, testing so well that he was put in a “Ninety-Day Wonder” school at Northwestern University that put extraordinary enlisted men through intensive officer training and graduated them as ensigns. Again, he misbehaved and was demoted, though he somehow managed to graduate. From there, he was sent to underwater demolition training in Florida. One night, he smuggled my mother onto the base disguised in a sailor’s uniform and took her out with his crew and several cases of beer for a midnight cruise in the small landing craft he commanded. Drunk, they ran across a coral head and sank ten yards off a beach. He somehow escaped the full consequences of that escapade, only to find himself at war’s end on Guam, without ever having fired or been fired upon.

      When Dad returned to the States, he went back to Columbia, where he was still only a sophomore. But he was admitted—rather inexplicably he thought—into medical school while he was still a junior premed. As far as he knows, he never completed his undergraduate degree but simply