“Jerr’s comin’ over to watch the Mets and Pirates with us,” he said.

“Got a date,” I said, expecting him to say what he’d been saying before every one of my dates since high school: Be nice to the girls. Remember, you got a sister. Instead, he came back with “A date? With the Mets on and Uncle Jerr coming over? Must be some girl. She a stripper?”

In my excitement about Glenna, I’d overlooked his potential objection to my breaking our Sunday baseball-season ritual. “She’s a med student,” I replied, letting some pride seep into my voice. “She’s at Columbia.”

“What’d ya know. If my son can’t be a doctor, he can marry one. I used to figure that’d be for your sister. Not for you.” He shot me his caustic sideways glare in case I was unaware that his wisecrack was intended to piss me off.

“Elaine marry a doctor? She’s bumming around Europe with a guy who has braids down to his ass. When you met him, you told her he looked like he belonged in a Turkish prison.”

“That kid—what’s his name, Gary?—he’ll shape up. His father’s a big tax attorney.”

“That’s logical, Dad.” In her last letter to me, Elaine wrote that she was about to dump Gary. He had gotten a gig as a drummer at the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, a club in Paris, and he was shooting smack three times a day.

“Stick around,” my father said. “Tell me about this article Mom says you did for the Long Island Press.”

“It’ll be in Sunday,” I said, and dashed out of the den as my father said, “What’s the hurry? I got your Dr. Brown’s black cherry here.”

GLENNA HAD predicted it was an hour ride from Brooklyn to the house she rented. Since she didn’t strike me as being on eastern standard time, I was skeptical, but her prediction and her directions were accurate, which gave me a rabbit punch of paranoia to go along with my appreciable first-date jitters; she undoubtedly passed out directions to guys by the hundreds.

I would’ve gone nuts with that line of thinking, except that exiting the bucolic stretch of the Henry Hudson Parkway and driving into the cityscape of Riverdale was jarring, with all those opposite images collapsing on each other. Along Kappock Street, the apartment towers formed a concrete skyline worthy of a Russian prison complex; it was cold and gray and dead despite the reddish-gold patina of sunlight. Then the concrete horizon suddenly surrendered to a silver-blue stretch of the Harlem River with the span of the Henry Hudson Bridge above. Glenna lived on Edsall Avenue, and circling down the narrow, leafy winding lane that dipped toward the railroad tracks along Spuyten Duyvil Creek, I felt as though I’d been transported to an earlier century.

The houses were terraced into a hillside overlooking the water, and after parking on a wooded slope along the creek, I opened a rusty iron gate and climbed a steep set of cracked stone steps to Glenna’s house, an old, white colonial with a big bay of four-paned windows on the third story and a yard shaded by gnarled oaks. I rapped on the door with the brass knocker and had the feeling that once she let me in, I wouldn’t want to leave.