Before Beatrice, my parents went through a sometimes-together, sometimes-apart phase, but by the time she was born, he wasn’t living with us anymore. We saw Dad less after that, but I still worked with him, cutting lawns and raking leaves. He stayed in the Philadelphia area and lived in different places, but never anywhere for long. Then a distant cousin offered him the job and place in the Bronx; he had a contracting and landscaping business. We went there just once—Marie, Thomas, Ellen, and me. We took the Amtrak train from Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, and he met us at Penn Station in Manhattan. He was standing at the top of the escalator as we came up from our platform. He had showered after work and put on a shirt and tie, something old-fashioned that he’d done when he lived with us if we were going anywhere. He never wore casual clothes, like my friends’ fathers. He’d never owned a pair of jeans or khakis or shorts. Not even sneakers, which would have looked wrong on him. He wore white short-sleeved undershirts, but never a T-shirt with writing on it; he wore work trousers when cutting grass, and he always had his wavy hair parted on the side and combed back.

“Dad’s 1950s,” Marie would say with pride. She said it was weird how grown men in America had started to dress like little boys and had no sophistication.

We took the subway out to Woodlawn in the Bronx, where Dad had moved. The houses were close together, with chain-link fences between them. The streets and yards seemed naked. There were no trees, a few scattered thin shrubs, and it seemed strange for my father to be in a place without leaves. At some of the houses where we’d worked with him, the leaf fall would be so thick, I could wade through it up to my waist. Dad would turn on the blower, and the leaves would swirl up all around us and fall again. In the Bronx he’d rented what he called an efficiency apartment, a room attached to another house with its own separate entrance. It had a little kitchenette by the window. He made us a steak dinner and mashed potatoes on a two-ringed electric stove. There was a tiny bathroom with a shower, and he had a couch that doubled as his bed. He pulled out foam that he kept behind the seat of his pickup truck and rolled it out on the floor, and we all spent the night, the four of us and him, in that one room together in the Bronx. He had bought new plates and forks and knives for our visit, so that he’d have enough to feed five. I sometimes still fall asleep remembering that night. All of us together, lying in the dark, talking, breathing in the one room.

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