Thirty-seven years later I’ll have dinner with my father in a Tucson steakhouse, and we’ll set to reminiscing about East Twenty-second Street, that raw, dusty corridor where the wind pushed the tumbleweeds down the middle of the street. He’ll say, “Remember when that woman killed her family?” And I’ll say, “Wasn’t it the father? I remember it as the father,” but in fact I’ve got it wrong. And maybe that’s why I can’t remember the reaction of the boy I was to the erasure of a family, to the detonation of a parent’s rage: I wasn’t paying attention, exactly, to the facts of the story; I was revising it into something I could bear.

5

Firebird

My mother’s taking art lessons at Helen Doyle’s Hacienda Bellas Artes. The Hacienda’s an arched, fired-adobe manor in the desert east of town, every room elevated by Mrs. Doyle’s handiwork; she glazed these geometric floor tiles set into the steps, and worked the mosaic in a niche in the room devoted to yarn; she forged these heavy wrought-iron gates that cover the glass doors of the gallery, my favorite room, cool, terrazzoed, usually closed, its walls hung with Mrs. Doyle’s important paintings. Here’s a cubistic rendering of three musicians, their fragmented cello and violins rendered in bronze and dull blues, for which she won a prize of several thousand dollars; here some Western landscapes of blue mountains and spiky palo verde trees in their yellowy spring green. Here, best of all, a painting both elegant and disturbing: a portrait of Mrs. Doyle’s daughter, in a low-cut yellow dress from which her long pale neck rises to the white oval of her face, which is topped by ringlets and a loopy-looking yellow hat, a Regency affair crowned with white ostrich plumes. Beside the elongated young woman is an equally stretched-out Afghan hound; heads turned at the same angle, three-quarter profile, woman and dog both display large, nervous eyes.

I don’t know what’s become of the daughter, but the skittish Afghan or its descendant is with us still; Mrs. Doyle has to keep the wooden gate that leads from the garden to stairs up to the flat roof latched, or otherwise, she says, the dog will run up and attempt to fling itself from the top of the house. Encounters with the beast—a Modigliani dog animated by Disney—confirm that it really is both shockingly elongated and suicidally nervous.