In the interests of truth, with the rapacity of an invading army, my brothers belittled my childish claim of remembering my mother. "You! You were too little, only a baby when she died. We knew her." They hated me for having been born; having been born, I caused our mother's death; yet they could see I was just a little girl; I wasn't a worthy enemy. They argued it was only in snapshots of my mother that I knew" her, not in my own true memory; confusing the sallow-faced mature woman with the younger, much prettier woman of the snapshots in the family album, dark hair bobbed in the sexy-boyish style of the Twenties, hands on her hips, knuckles inward. A brash smile flying to the camera like a bird flying toward a window. I did not wish to consider that this striking young woman was not, precisely speaking, my mother. But these early snapshots were the ones I adored. Others, taken in the Thirties, my mother with my brother Dietrich who was eleven years my senior, my mother with my brother Fritz who was ten years my senior, my mother with my brother Hendrick who was seven years my senior-these engaged me far less, though they were nearer in time to my own birth. For I couldn't bear to see my mother with babies not myself. Young children in her lap, clambering about her legs. She was beginning to look tired, drawn, her smile had become forced, in the later snapshots. Her chic bobbed hair was gone, now flyaway hair, or skinned back severely from her face and knotted at the nape of her neck. Her body had thickened, grown shapeless. After my birth, my mother's health was so poor that no snapshots of her with me were ever taken. No snapshots of the little one at all. Yet I claimed to remember my mother and held firm in my obstinacy against all detractors. My German grandparents who were old, old, old all my life like trolls peering at me in pity and reproach. It was clear that they hadn't liked my mother yet they liked me less for killing her and for making their only son deeply unhappy. Muttering together in that language I could not comprehend, and had no wish to comprehend, would never study in college, though sometimes they spoke in heavily accented English for me to overhear-"That one! Where does she get her ideas!" Inwardly I answered, "Not from you. None of you."

Rarely did my father speak of such personal matters to anyone. He was hurt, sullen, angry, and baffled. He was a big man, well over six feet, weighing perhaps two hundred twenty pounds. His footsteps made the house vibrate. A deep inhalation of his breath could suck most of the oxygen out of a room's air. My mother's death was a livid wound in his flesh. He would not have wished it healed, though it maddened him. He would seem to forget my name; never would he call me by name; "you" would have to do; "you" was as much as I could hope for; "you" was much more desirous than "I" for "I" was uttered only by me, and "you" might be uttered, if only in a slurred, negligent voice, by my father. "You!-didn't see you in here." Or, "You?-not in bed?" My eagerness to be with my father, even if he collided with me in a darkened hallway, or stepped on my feet entering a room, was not matched by a corresponding eagerness on his part to be with me. It was not just (I believed) that I had killed my mother but, without my mother, a woman, to mediate between him and me, there was no way for him to comprehend me. A girl? A little girl? And those eyes! He was wary of me as one might be wary of a puppy that might leap against legs and dribble saliva onto hands and whine piteously when abandoned. If my father discovered himself alone in my presence his startled eyes would shift a few inches above my head as if seeking out-who? (Our vanished Ida?) My father smoked Camels, lighting them with kitchen matches scraped noisily against the iron stove; I can see still, always in my mind's eye I will see the sudden leaping bluish flame that turned at once transparent orange, the mysterious and indefinable color of fire. At such times my father was obliged to squint against the smoke he himself exhaled; it was a curious ceremony, hurtful, yet profound, the way my father squinted, coughed, sometimes coughed at some length, as a result of this smoke. (My youngest brother would claim he'd never smoked, never wanted to light a single cigarette, having heard my father "cough his lungs out" every morning he'd been at home, but I had only a vague memory of such protracted coughing; my relationship to my father's cigarettes, like my relationship to my father, was hopeful, never critical.) If I dared to squint or cough myself or wave weakly against the drifting smoke, my father would say at once, flatly, "You don't like smoke, better go somewhere else." It was not a command, still less a threat: it was a statement of fact.

Don't like smoke, go somewhere else.

This remark I would pretend not to hear. Children are so resourcefully deaf, blind. We smile in the face of hostility, that hostility will turn into love. I was fascinated by my father's left hand that had been injured in what he called a work accident; the knuckles were grotesquely bunched as if they'd been squeezed together in a vise, and most of the nails were ridged and discolored; the smallest finger had been amputated to the first joint, and it was this hand he used to smoke with, bringing it repeatedly to his mouth.

I imagined this hand touching me. Caressing my small head.

My mother I knew didn't I? But not this man. Father.

He never kissed me. Never touched me (even with the disfigured hand) if he could avoid it. My brothers he might punch-lightly, yet hard enough to make them wince-on their biceps, in greeting or in farewell. ("O.K., kid. See ya.") For always our father was going away. His car was backing out of the driveway, more swiftly and purposefully than It had turned in. Cinders flew behind its spinning wheels, in rainy Weather the windshield wipers were already on. It came to seem only logical-I mean to a child's primitive, wishful way of thinking-that my father would have to return to the farm in Strykersville if he wanted to leave it. The zest in leaving it depended upon the reluctance in returning, didn't it? You could not have the one without the other, could you? It was something of a joke, the degree to which my father hated farm life. The dairy cows. Since the age of six he'd been made to milk their long rubbery udders. Not a task for a boy. Well, yes: it was a task for a farm boy. But my father didn't want to be a farm boy. Those slippery teats, tits. And the smell of the cow manure, so much stronger when fresh and liquidy, than it was after it had settled, solidified. My father had infuriated his father by hurting the cows, yanking the udders, causing these large placid beasts to bawl and kick; some of this would be preserved in family legend, for even families deprived of warm, happy times, mythic significance, cherish some legends, however threadbare. "Hurting the cows" as my father had done would be a way of indicating, decades later, that my father was "independent in his mind." For at the young age of seventeen he left the farm to work at Lackawanna Steel, a notorious mill that paid high wages for that time and place but was known to be dangerous, especially for unskilled workers. He'd driven a truck. He'd joined unions. He'd made money gambling and he'd spent money and he'd married a city girl who knew not a word of German. He had something of a reputation among men of his generation in the Strykersville area. He was a "fighter"-"a tough son of a bitch"-he "took no shit from anybody." By the time I was in high school my father was older, ravaged; he had "problems" of some ambiguous kind, no doubt associated with drinking and its consequences-tavern fights, vehicular accidents, arrests, brief stays in county jails. Hospitalizations in cities too far for any of us to visit. In a drawer I collected each of the postcards my father sent us: from California, a cartoon of loggers sawing down redwoods subtly shaped like women; a card from Anchorage, Alaska, depicting cartoon salmon leaping into a fishing boat; cards from British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. (From Saskatoon my father sent six one-hundred-dollar bills in Canadian currency which my brother Dietrich took to a bank in Buffalo where, it turned out, they were worth 10 percent more than American dollars.) Yet there were times when my father called home after 11:00 p.m., collect. My grandmother whose heart was a dry root vegetable hardy as a turnip burst into tears when she spoke with my father at such times: he was her only son. My grandfather would snarl over the phone in elderly impotent fury Ja? What? What tricks of yours? If my brothers were home they would speak with my father one by one; Dietrich spoke for the longest time, in the most somber voice; Fritz was slow and inarticulate; Hendrick, the youngest, murmured in a dazed boyish way Geez Dad, you are? Gal-ves-ton? On the Gulf of Mexico? No kidding! Anxiously I would wait beside Hendrick for my turn to speak with my father but often it happened that my father "ran out of coins"-"was cut off by the operator"-before I could take the receiver.