For longer than I can believe now, I’ve taught Latin, Greek, and literature. I’m presently Dean in Charge of Admissions at a fine undergraduate women’s college here in New Hampshire. My beautiful, somehow teenaged, daughters now spend more than half their college vacations with my ex-wife and her doctor husband. Preparing for those weeks when my girls turn up, I’ve rented a farmhouse, one big sunny bedroom for each of them. While my daughters are away at school or are staying at Bethany’s upstate, I can at least stroll into their quarters; I can sit on either ruffled four-poster, can look around at their pictures, their makeup, their stray sheet music. During such solitary Sunday afternoons, I feel (at least) the curator of the Small Museum to Deirdre and Sara. It is, incidentally, a Museum to Fatherhood. I feel close to my girls’ cultural claptrap, even their stash of female products large enough to stanch the Israeli Ladies Army Corps. Each colorful sock drawer reassures.

Like Clyde, when it came time to marry I fell in love with Beauty. As with him, it did not end happily. But maybe there’s been at least some minor class progression? I mean, Clyde Melvin Delman’s wife went after a cow doctor, whereas mine proved serially unfaithful with her own highly respected, world-renowned gynecologist. Small steps. Stirrups. Boot straps. Whatever.

Just prior to the divorce, Bethany, Deirdre and Sara, and I were headed south on that single requisite American middle-class trip to Disney World. Walt’s first park was called a “Land”; his second, “World”; Christ knows what’s next.

I didn’t want my daughters someday saying I’d been too much a penny-pinching egghead to have granted them this flashy, trashy experience. (I’m convinced the Disney organization trains schoolkids to perfect this tacit threat.) I checked the map. I found I could probably drive a leased car from Orlando to Boca. I said “Uh-oh” aloud.

My frustrating surprise meeting with Aunt Naomi, the sound of some phantom’s two-toned shoes, all these urged me on toward Grace Meadows of the Castalia Meadows clan. To judge from legwork, from my continuing detective fantasies, I struggled harder to find my black kin than to accept the white ones. If I now felt some duty toward my girls, there was also a long-standing embarrassment before my wife of fifteen years. Bethany had never once laid eyes on Grace. I might pretend to be some waif out of Dickens, but my natural mother did still live and breathe, if within arduous driving distance.

I remembered Doc Dix calling me “you little mongrel bastard.” True as that’d likely proved, I told my therapist (the seventh) that by shunning Mom I might be avoiding the single living, legitimate (or illegitimate) member of my small, short-lived tribe. In the end, I didn’t care to be known as a grievance lister and professional orphan.