I tore up the check and the envelope with it.

During the months that followed, I was quite naturally preoccupied with Regina. And with Frank. His energy astounded me. He hired a plumber from the university and the two of them went to work rebuilding and modernizing the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom. By the end of the summer, he was buying the materials for building a recreation room and laundry room in the basement. Yet when classes began, he assigned himself extra office hours and tutored the poorer students in our living room for midterm and final exams. Still, there was always time for the house and for the baby. He worked incessantly, sleeping only four or five hours a night, but the harsh routine he set for himself seemed to nourish rather than debilitate him. Within a year, the basement was completed, every floor in the house refinished. My initial reservations about having taken on an old house instead of a new one dwindled each time I drove up to it. The neighborhood was settled and comfortable, with fully grown oaks and maples that stood like sentinels on both sides of the street. The houses were all large and quite modest in their trimmings: standard white was the reigning preference for wood and brick alike. Ours was a dark green, but within two years we would paint it white, following suit. And within five years, our adjoining empty lot—the sunniest patch on the block—would contain a vegetable garden. Having that extra property gave us a certain prestige among the neighbors, but the feature I loved most about the house was its location at the end of the block, where the street dead-ended. I liked the feeling of being tucked away even from the minimal traffic on the rest of the street, minimal because most of our neighbors were much older, with their children already grown. However, our empty lot did attract children from neighboring streets, and I was happy that Regina would have playmates close by. Frank, in fact, encouraged kids to play in the lot by hanging old tractor tires from the oak limbs to serve as swings. “When she has friends,” he would say, “I want them to feel comfortable here. I want them to come to her.” I thought at the time she would always be surrounded by friends if they came to her the way her father did. When Frank was finished preparing his lectures and reading his students’ papers, when he put aside the hammer and the sandpaper and the paint, his total recreation was Regina. I was instructed to take a nap or read or go to a movie while he played with her on the living room floor. He bought a couple of dime-store wigs, a rubber nose, wax lips, and kept her entertained for hours with impersonations. He built a little stage with a cloth curtain and put on shows for her with hand puppets. I was not the entertainer Frank was. For Regina, the drawing and coloring and games I taught her were inferior substitutes for her father’s performances. As soon as she heard Frank come up the front porch steps, she would scramble to her feet and toddle to the door with hand puppets dangling from her fists.