I figured it was Charles. I thought somehow he’d found out or Lilly had decided to tell him; but instead, when Lilly let me in, there was a gray man with wire-rimmed glasses and Lilly’s mouth wearing a three-piece suit. He was standing beside a chair that was lying on its back, and he and Lilly were blushing in the same way. After he apologized for disturbing me, Lilly said that this was her father, Walter Preston, but at that point introductions were unnecessary.

Lilly’s father had arrived from Penn Station. Lilly explained in a voice like a coiled spring that he had two tickets for the evening train. He wanted to take her to a place in Cincinnati where she could stay until the baby was born, and then give it up for adoption.

She told me she wasn’t going, and her eyes reached out to me like hands. Her old man was looking at me, too, their gazes pulling at me from opposite sides of the room.

Walter asked would I talk to her. He was her father, so of course she wouldn’t listen to him. He smiled when he said it. Beneath the bad energy I could feel the kindness, could see where Lilly got her interest in people.

I watched as he took in the crooked wooden table with its two chairs, the busted couch we’d scavenged from one of Leon’s plays, furniture Lilly had been so proud to carry past her door. How could she want to give birth to a bastard and raise him in these conditions? he wanted to know. They’d brought her up with a sense of decency, as someone who knew the difference between wrong and right. She’d be disgracing him and her mother, not to mention an innocent child.

He glanced around the apartment and his face went soft. Lilly, he said. It’s time to come home.

I am home, she said, and her father flinched.

Who did this to her? he wanted to know. She used to be a good, respectable girl; but then Lilly stomped her foot, and two people who had spent their whole lives being polite finally stopped.

No one did this to me, she said.

Her father hissed that someone most certainly had.

It was quiet then. In that moment Lilly was ferocious and proud and mighty. She towered over us both.

Father, she said. He wanted to marry me, but I didn’t want to marry him.

Those words drained the color from poor Walter Preston’s face, until he was as pale as Lilly leaving that house in Canarsie. He put a train ticket on the table.

I don’t know who you are, he said to her in a voice gone hollow, but please tell my daughter that I’ll be waiting for her. Then he put on his coat and walked out the door.

32. Self-portrait (eighteen weeks), New York, 1954