My husband, Ray, who comes from a more forthcoming family, has never understood how this could have happened. Was this grandmother, this short, fat-faced woman-we have only the photographs to inform us-kept in a state of innocence because of her status as Mother, the being most closely tied to the legless man? Or was she a woman with a singular sensitivity to life’s darker offerings? Would she have screamed if she’d been told? Might she have fallen into a faint or slashed her wrists or sunk into years of melancholy? Or might she have shrugged-did anyone consider this?—and said, well, that’s a shame, but other boys have lost their legs and some are a lot worse off than Harvey. On one occasion the truth was almost discovered. Uncle Harvey, home for a Thanksgiving dinner, was sitting at the table lifting a turkey wing to his mouth. His mother, who was setting down a bowl of peas, put her hand on his shoulder and felt through his shirt the heavy leather strap that held the artificial leg in place. “What’s this?” she said in a sharp voice.

There was a moment’s awful silence. Then Uncle Harvey said, “It’s for a hernia, Ma. Nothing serious.”

My grandmother set down the peas and went back to the stove for the potatoes; nothing more was said. Perhaps she didn’t know what a hernia was; perhaps she thought it was too delicate a subject to pursue; maybe she had her suspicions but resisted them. This, after all, was a woman who could not be told about her daughter’s mutilated finger. How was she expected to bear the news of a son’s lost leg? But what if suspicion gave birth to a secret, and what if the secret became part of her, like a small, benign tumor under the skin that had long since been accommodated? Turning to the stove, serving out potatoes, keeping her back turned, she may have been saying: I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know.

Whew, the aunts and uncles must have said afterwards; whew, that was a close call. I can imagine they made adult faces at each other over the table, mock expressions of shock and guilty amusement as though they had brushed close to something unspeakable and also foolish, something they were deeply ashamed of, but could do nothing about.

In 1925 my mother recovered from her mysterious year of illness and came to Chicago to teach school. She and Aunt Ingrid and Mary Morgan and another girl called Gladys Heinz found an apartment on the third floor of a house in Oak Park. The house was on Kenilworth Avenue, just north of Lake Street.

And the strange part of this is that the house belonged to the Hemingway family, the parents of Ernest Hemingway.