A close shot of Tommy, his lips stubbornly out of sync with the “He’s a cop!” crap. As the kids’ chanting fades out, the purity of Clara Swift’s singing fades in—until Tommy’s lips are perfectly in sync with her voice, singing Tommy’s song. The first time you see The Kindergarten Man, you think that’s the end of the movie—it could be. It should be.

But there’s a quick cut to Clara Swift in the shower, beautifully singing her unlikely one line. She is startled to see something, or someone, through the glass door; she stops singing, momentarily covering her breasts. Then she laughs. “You keep doing that—you just appear!” she says, to camera. The shower door opens, and the naked kindergarten man steps under the shower with her.

“I don’t like to interrupt you when you’re singing Tommy’s song,” Paul Goode tells her. She has started to shampoo his hair, the lather getting on his face and on her breasts; he closes his eyes.

“Well, you did interrupt me—I don’t mind,” she says.

“You know what I like,” he tells her shyly.

“What you like,” she says, as if she has no idea what he means—she’s teasing him.

“Go on—say it,” the kindergarten man tells her. She has rinsed the lather out of his hair. When he opens his eyes and looks up at her, she pulls his face to her breasts and he closes his eyes again. “You’re not too small for me—you’re just small enough,” she tells him earnestly, for what sounds like the hundredth time.

Fade to black. The kindergartners’ voices, singing Tommy’s song, play over the end credits. Both Em and I thought it was a cheesy ending—overkill noir with a schmaltzy sex scene, tacked on to reach the romance audience. The shower scene seemed to belong in a different film. One critic called the shower scene “almost European,” but what did that mean?

Our critical opinion of Paul Goode, as an actor or a screenwriter, was not on our minds that night in Bennington, Vermont, when Nora and Em and I saw The Kindergarten Man with Molly and my mother. All we wanted to know was the same old thing: Did Little Ray think Paul Goode was my father? Was he the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off her, just some kid who wasn’t shaving? “He was small,” she’d whispered to me once. “He would have been a pretty girl. What he meant to me, Adam, was that you would be all mine. That’s what ‘no strings attached’ means, sweetie,” my mother had said.