He was a kind man with whom it was hard to talk. So I listened. I followed, somewhat, his periodic sentences as they wound to their elegant ends. My visit was years too soon. I did not make the most of it. I should have pressed him about the difference between originality and creativity, about his feeling that confusion was caused by the lack of genuine feeling.

One morning he had business in town, and told us we should inspect his studio. Feel free, he said, to pull canvases out of the racks. Turned loose like that, I looked at everything he had done. It felt like meeting relatives. It was a lesson in revision and amplification, in devotion and experimentation. The irony everpresent: that my mother was the reason we were there. She was the one who, twenty years before, had directed my father, in New York on business, to the gallery that was showing Brookmyer’s work.

We embarrassed him Christmas Eve. It was too much, he said.

On Christmas morning when we went to the main house before leaving for the city, there was a large sheet of heavy paper rolled and tied with red ribbon on the dining room table. It was an artist’s trial proof, inscribed with Christmas wishes to us.

I was entrusted to hold it, rolled, in the front seat of the rented car. When another car cut suddenly in front of us, I struck out my arm reflexively when my father pressed the brake, and put a dent in the painting which was eased out, at no small expense, by a framer.

On a day early in the New Year, I looked through the catalogs my father kept in his basement. I found the transcript of a talk that Brookmyer had given in his youth, and entered in my diary this fragment of a quote about the importance of an artist’s capacity to absorb “the shocks of reality” and to “reassert himself in the face of such shocks, as when a dog shakes off water after emerging from the sea.”

I have heard that when you taught, you were considered an excellent teacher. Every so often my mother and I tried to teach ourselves something from a how-to book. Mostly I did things around her, the way nurses change the sheets with the patient still in bed.

When I turned fifteen, I asked if she would teach me how to drive. My mother wore pigskin gloves to drive, even though she drove a station wagon. She told me to ask my father for lessons. We made a date for a Saturday morning. I was ready before my father woke up. After a quick breakfast, we backed his car down the driveway. My mother appeared in the opened front door and called to my father that she needed his help. He called back to her that we would only be an hour. She yelled that she needed him now. She had been reading a magazine when we left, and had not looked up when we said good-bye. And there she was screaming for him as though she had opened a vein.