I took a slug of Michelob. “Like public relations?”

Uncle Jerr said, “Alex, you gotta give the boy room to grow.”

“What is he?” my father said. “A plant?”

Uncle Jerr said, “Gordie, so you want to be a writer?”

“Butt out,” my father said. “Quit tryin’ to raise my son. You don’t have any kids, so you got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

With their thick bodies, intense, dark-eyed stares, and the Yardley pomade in their wavy, graying black hair, my father and uncle looked so much alike it was as if one person were arguing in a mirror. I drank my beer and listened. Once those two got going, there was no percentage in my getting involved.

My uncle said to me, “You wanna write, you can try journalism; I got contacts with some papers.”

My father snapped, “He’ll do it on his own.”

Uncle Jerr ignored him. “I’ll help you, Gordie. But you gotta buckle down in school and hold on to that student deferment.”

“I told you to butt out,” my father said.

“I’m tryin’ to keep your son out of a goddamn war.”

“Go back to your peace march, Jerr. Don’t tell me about war.”

Aunt Lil walked out the back door of the house with a wooden bowl of salad. Under her bleached, brassy bouffant, her face was as round and sweet as a cider doughnut. Her miniskirt didn’t flatter her stubbiness, though it did testify to her abundant courage.

“Darling,” she said to me, “you stay in college till you’re a hundred and seven. That Two-S can save your life.”

My mother, small and slender in an ivory summer dress dotted with sunflowers, came out right behind my aunt with a platter of corn on the cob. “What’s this deferment talk?”

“Relax, Renée,” my father said.

He must have mentioned my reading Bernard Fall to her because my mother glared down at me, her light blue eyes suddenly as cold and colorless as frost.

“Gordon,” she said, placing the platter on the table, “I sat home worried sick while my husband went to war. I don’t want to do it for my son.”

All these years later, it was still painful for me to recall the fear and resentment in my mother’s eyes, and as I cut across Rockefeller Center, passing the glass angels blowing trumpets and the Christmas tree shining like a pillar of flame, I was grateful for the wind whistling through the dark spaces between the skyscrapers, the wintry blast proving that I was no longer at a summer cookout in Brooklyn.

Glenna’s office was only a few blocks away, but as I stopped on the terrace above the enormous gilded statue of a reclining Prometheus and watched the skaters in brightly colored knit caps gliding through the lights of the ice rink below, I had a disquieting moment of sanity and asked myself two questions: What was I doing here? And what could I possibly accomplish by seeing Glenna?