Forty minutes later, I could sense the atmosphere palpably change inside the Oldsmobile as we approached the town, where low one-story cottages and five-house rows of brick homes still shared peaceable blocks until the streets dipped underwater and reappeared in the distance, a few miles on.

His house, when I finally saw it, was a ruin of the building in the photograph. It stood in a row of condemned homes that, though slated for demolition, had been left in place year after year. The only remaining access was by a patched asphalt road that fell off on either side into culverts eroded by water. Trying to avoid the yawning potholes meant that he wove the car in and out of lanes like a drunk might. To me it was a sickening carnival ride.

At last we stood outside the front door, and he took my hand as we picked our way up the rotting stairs.

“This is where you stood in the photo,” I said.

“Nature takes things back,” my father said. “Watch your step on the porch.”

And sure enough, the planks, stripped over time of their protective paint, were all but rotten. Someone-my father, I realized-had placed a new sheet of plywood down so you could make it to the front door without falling. I saw the sawed edges of a faulty arabesque and recognized it as what remained after he had carved out the arching back of a rocking horse.

We walked into the front hall, and I spotted a propane lamp sitting on an old mule-ear chair. It was from his workshop.

“There’ll be things in here,” he said, “that we don’t need to tell your mother about.”

I had begun to vary my reading at school with squirreled-away paperbacks that did not appear on our reading lists, and I knew, I thought, what comprised “men’s needs.” I pictured what Natalie and I loved the sound of: a den of iniquity. There would be velvet drapes and throw pillows and some sort of women smoking things out of pipes that looked like vases but weren’t. That’s as far as my imagination went, but I thought I was prepared.

I wasn’t.

I didn’t even know what to make of them at first.

Not in the hallway or the front room but in the back rooms on the first floor and in the bedrooms of the floor above, I saw and understood what my father had been doing over the years in his workshop when he was not busy with his rocking horses. He had been making figures out of plywood.

When I walked into the kitchen and saw wood nailed to the wall-a finely articulated shadow of two adults and a child sitting at a table-I stepped back.

“Dad!” I said.

“I’m right here,” he said.

And he was, standing right behind me just inside the doorway.

“That’s so cool,” I said.

I could sense his rare smile even though I wasn’t looking at him.

“I’m glad you like them.”

I went up and traced the head of the child lightly with my index finger, careful of splinters. They were rough and unpainted, and what held them fast was a variety of screws and nails.

“Is this supposed to be you?” I asked, my palm spread flat against the chest of the child.

“Yes,” he said. “And that’s my mother and father. This is the second one I made. You were very little then.”

It must have struck me at some point that this meant he had been building a family out of plywood over a stretch of about a dozen years. At the time I felt the adrenaline rush of the shared secret between us, something my mother wasn’t privy to.

“Is this where you went that time?”

“No,” he said, and gave the standard line. “I was in Ohio, visiting friends and family.”

By thirteen I sensed this was a lie my parents told, but I still didn’t know why.

It was cold in the rooms, as there was no heat, and the plaster around the plywood people was nearly down to the boards, but I could see why he liked it here. It was deathly quiet except for the tree branches scraping against the windows. Occasionally, a pane would break, my father said, “from the trees’ desire to occupy the place.”

“Are you ready to go upstairs?” he asked.

“This is so weird, Dad,” I said.

“I can count on you, can’t I?” he asked. His eyes drew together in anxiety for just a moment.

“I’ll never tell if you don’t want me to,” I said.

We climbed the stairs together, as if on the way to an important party just beyond the landing up above. Here there were more people. In a room to the left, there was a bed with a figure propped up. I could see the space between the angle of the elbow and the wall. A figure was standing at the end of the bed.

“That’s my mother, coming to wake me up,” my father said.

“And who’s that?” I pointed to a gaunt plywood figure holding up something that, without paint or shading, looked like a cord or snake.

“That’s the doctor. He had come to sound my chest.”

I turned and looked at my father.

“I was often sick,” he said. “It was hard on my mother.”

In another room I thought I spotted myself, and without speaking, I pointed to a figure tacked to the wall.

“Yes,” he said.

There were two other figures in the room-the smallest room on the second floor-and I did not ask who they represented. If I was the larger one-the size of myself at eight or nine-then the two bundles on either side of me were my unborn brothers or sisters.

In the middle of the largest room, where two adults stood with their arms gesticulating in the air, was a rocking horse like the one he had once made me and those he made and painted each year for the Greek Orthodox Children’s Fair. This one was plain, save for the pencil work that would mark out the separations between colors.

“Why didn’t you paint it?” I asked.

“I thought about it,” he said, “but I wanted it to feel at home here. Go ahead and ride it if you want.”

“I’m too big, Dad,” I said.

His eyes saddened behind his heavy glasses.

“Not in this house,” he said. “In this house, you’re ageless.”

I looked at my father and felt a pain right in the center of my chest, as if all the air in the room would not be enough, could not fill me up.

He smiled at me. I did not want to disappoint him, so I smiled back.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

He took off his glasses, folded the stems carefully, and handed them to me, his thumb and forefinger on either side of the nose bridge. I took them in both hands on the outside of the frames. His world without them, I knew, was merely fuzzy shapes and colors.

Carefully, he got on the rocking horse.

“I have to admit,” he said, “I haven’t tried this before. I don’t know how much weight it will support.”

He sat on the flat back section of the horse and kept his feet on the floor instead of curling them up to the dowel that stuck out on either side. I was grateful that I held his glasses. If I winced, it might look like a smile.

He rocked the horse back and forth gently, keeping his weight, I saw, mostly in his legs. “Hilda says I put so many screws in them that these horses would hold a horse!” He laughed at Mrs. Castle’s joke.

The plywood curve mashing against the wooden floors didn’t sound right to me. It went against everything my mother had taught me about putting furniture on rugs and coasters under cups.

“I’m going to go farther up,” I said.

My father stopped rocking the horse.

“No, sweetie,” he said. “This is it.”

“But there’re more stairs,” I said.

“That’s just a cramped attic space. No people there.”

He stood but still straddled the rocking horse, and I knew he had another secret.

“I’m going up!” I said gleefully, and turned and ran, his glasses still in my hand.

I could hear my father stumbling as I put my hand on the newel post and gained the bottom stair.

“Honey, don’t!” he called out.

At the top of the stairs, there was a closed four-panel door. I put my hand on the cold porcelain knob.

“You won’t like what you find in there.”