The leaflets hit the wastebasket. “We have buyers for you! We want your house!” I’d been a baby when my parents moved into what was at the time a run-down neighborhood near Dupont Circle. During the middle-class flight to the suburbs they had stayed put. My father taught high school social studies, my mother mostly fourth grade; ten-year-olds were her limit, she said. When the middle class returned, it was only a matter of time before there were sidewalk cafés and a farmers’ market. Burned out twice in the riots, Fourteenth Street was now a boomtown for condos and restaurants; overnight a laundry had been turned into a Belgian brasserie, its ceilings installed prestained with cigarette smoke. Rose and Walter’s house remained largely unchanged: the same unadorned brick, stout black door and arched portico, whose lining, I noticed as I followed my father down the steps onto Corcoran Street, had started to crumble.

Three doors down, workers were hosing the hostas of the house with the face on it. The green man was the work of a hammered-metal artist and had been there for as long as I could remember, inserted in the recess of a small window. Smile half hidden in his beard, he gazed knowingly down at us as we passed. For young Maddy, the face had been a source of awe. She never went by without stopping, hands behind her small back, to face him. “He’s mad at me, Mom.” “He’s so sad today. He wants to come down from there.” “Does he ever go indoors?” “Does he know what I’m thinking?”

We put Barney in the car, parked behind the elementary school in whose playground Maddy, aged six, had fallen off the jungle gym and broken her arm, and drove up Connecticut to Tenleytown.

“It’s a long walk from here,” I pointed out. We could have parked further on, but my father said why take the dog for a walk if we’re not going to walk? He stopped frequently on the long incline up Mount St. Alban to catch his breath. I did not like to hear my father’s labored breathing. I stopped whenever he did, pretending to admire the view, and took the leash from him, although Barney’s impatient straining was no doubt a help on the hill.