My father believed I should be possessed of the rudiments of a classical education. He believed so in distinct opposition to my mother, who, herself fluent in French and Italian, was certain that the duress of a more concentrated regime would constrict the development of my other “charms,” thereby insisting upon small bunkers of learning to be established in the drawing room—the sewing table, the tea table, the piano—like in importance to the several Stations of the Cross.

Nonetheless, Papa had persevered, setting my reading each week and establishing himself every afternoon at the top of our house in Brooklyn, where my dolls had given pride of place to the scratched covers of his boyhood schoolbooks stacked upon the old round table in the center of the room. “Commence,” he would say on entering, then seat himself in an easy chair by the window, tapping the sill with his long fingers. He carried into me the whiff of commerce—cigars and pipes and the sweet smell of his luncheon port still lingering in the air about him. And as I stood before him, reciting the Latin he had chosen, I watched him draw deeper and deeper into the old words I recited, closing his eyes and nodding to the cart-track rhythms and repetitions as I pulled him along upon the stories of another time, the brisk edges of his day falling from him as I spoke.

Having heard me, he would sit a bit in silence, until my words had nudged loose an answering scrap of poetry in him. Though he had been trained to follow first one path and then another, my course followed the accidents of his own intellectual meanderings. A reverie he sunk into while walking home across the Brooklyn Bridge would lead him backward to Schiller and then over across the waters into Wordsworth’s sublime perceptions—and so he brought me the German and the Englishman as fellow countrymen in a realm of thought. He’d rise and cross to where I sat, pull a book from off the shelves, and we’d begin to read together.

One afternoon that past spring, we were bent over a piece of work in silence, my eyes following as Papa traced the words upon his page, his finger beating time upon the table so I might hear the underlying song, when Mama suddenly entered. We were both so intent, we did not hear her. And when she gave a little cough, we must have turned twin pairs of blank brown eyes upon her, blinking like animals rustled from their cave by a crack of light.

“I do believe you hardly see me,” she said slowly to us, making as if to leave.

Murmuring her name, Papa leapt to his feet and led her to the table. “We were reading,” I offered.

“Yes,” she said, refusing to sit. “Mr. Colgate waits downstairs.”

“Mr. Colgate?” Papa was mystified.