“How did you and Mom do it?” Don’s sons and daughters asked him, with genuine admiration, of his old servantless four-child household. His children as they homed in on forty lived in city apartments or virtually gated New Jersey enclaves, with one or two children of their own whose nurture and protection required daily shifts of women of color—tag-team caregivers, one to achieve the dressing and the administration of breakfast and safe passage to nursery school, and another to supervise the evening meal and bath and bedtime video. Nevertheless, his daughters were exhausted by motherhood, which had come to them late, as a bit of progenitive moonlighting incidental to their thriving professional careers; conception had been rife with psychic tension and childbirth fraught with peril. His sons spoke solemnly, apprehensively to him about the education of their children and, even more remote, the job prospects available to these toddlers in the year 2020. They both, his two sons, performed some inscrutable monkey-business among computers and equities, and they thought in long-range demographic curves. Don had to laugh, being interviewed by them as a kind of pioneer, a survivor of a mythical age of domesticity, when giant parents strode the earth. “You were there,” he reminded them. “You remember how it was. Our key concept was benign neglect.” But they would not be put off and, indeed, half persuaded him that he had been an epic family man, chopping forests into cabins amid the wilderness of the baby boom.

Tracking their own children’s progress, they asked him how old they had been when they first crawled, walked, talked, and read, and he was embarrassed to say that he could not remember. “Ask your mother,” he told them.

“She says she doesn’t remember, either. She says we were all wonderfully normal.”

An only child, born in the Depression, Don had been honored at his birth with the purchase of a big white book, its padded cover proudly embossed Baby’s Book, in which pages printed in dove-colored ink waited for the entry of his early achievements and the dates thereof. July 20, 1935. Donald took his first step. A shaky one. September 6, 1938. Off to kindergarten! Donny clung and clung. Heartbreaking. He was surprised to discover that his mother, in that little curly backward-slanting hand that seemed to his eyes the very distillation of methodical maternity, had entered everything up through his various graduations and his first wedding; she had noted her first two grandchildren but had not bothered with the second two or with his second nuptials. How odd it is, he thought, that America’s present prosperity, based upon our outworking the Germans and the Japanese, has produced the same pinched, anxiously cherishing families as the Depression. His children’s individual developments had become in his failing mind an amiable tangle while he daily dined on the social equivalent of buffalo meat.