The two-star T-bird must’ve enjoyed a clientele made up exclusively of prosperous, erotically driven, short-lived, lonely widowers. At its entrance find Gracie Delman smiling, fully made up, wearing drop earrings and a long dress, greeting gents fondly, inventing nicknames for pet regulars. (It was a trick I had learned early from Janine. I knew how well it’d worked on me at six. I’ve since tried it on my sad-sack freshmen.) Mom, in turn, married four of these old fortune-packing seabirds. And she always invited my latest girlfriend and me south to attend her latest surprisingly elaborate nuptials.

Two of her husbands had been named Buck. Then she’d upped and remarried Buck #1. Even for a scholar with a fairly good memory, I found my mother’s complete moniker was getting hard to track. At the edge of her most recent engraved wedding invitation, Grace had jotted in the red fountain-pen ink she now affected, “Meadows? I plan wearing white this time. Can you believe it! But Buck #2 insists. Am I crazy, honey? Do you mind much?”

I did not. Nor did I ever attend.

At least she’d improved her situation financially. Look on the bright side: Maybe Grace could now afford sending some little kid through boarding school. Still pissed? Me? I’d once asked her why my trust fund had faltered after that first year of education elsewhere. Why had she forced the boarding school to set me working at age nine? My chore? Twice weekly, all Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, shining huge old silver lacrosse trophies, nut dishes for the Parents’ Day she attended once with “a new friend.” Mother answered, “Honey, what was I supposed to do, sell jewelry at Woolworth’s?”

Well … now you mention it …

Grace had sunk so far from the foreground of my life: call it a highly successful and worked-at denial. I had not invited her to my college graduation or to my wedding, fearing she’d actually turn up. Wearing red. Grace was now the Christmas bulletin (news about an active couple’s latest ballroom-dance trophy; her board sponsorship of a road show reviving some forties musical worthless even then). Finally officially rich, she could FedEx me my birthday card; lately of the comic “You’re Really Over the Hill Now” variety. Despite my silence, her memento always arrived exactly on the day itself. My new bride claimed this surely showed some forethought and initiative, didn’t it? But, reading Grace’s breezy red-inked description of an impulsive Caribbean cruise taken with her latest Texan (“Buck is seventy-three going on twenty years young!”), I again felt the bitter arbitrariness of parentage.

I had one parent. And he, apparently, was not.