At the start of his convalescence he focused with invalid closeness on the workings of his family—the four children nosing ahead like earthworms in the world’s substance, encountering pebbles like bad school reports and the deaths of pets, but pushing on, growing, speaking in ever more complete and complex sentences. Gregory turned nine and suddenly was full of sports statistics. Iris at seven and a half was given to undressing her Barbie dolls and then finding she could not put the tight little clothes back on the unyielding plastic bodies. Owen more than Phyllis had the patience to tug the bits of cloth within reach of the fasteners; some of the outfits reminded him of ones Faye used to wear, playfully.

He was a good father, the mothers of their circle told Phyllis, she in turn told him; but he knew he was not. An only child, helplessly self-centered, he could not bring to these four little souls—strangers to the towering cosmos, each a different mix of his and Phyllis’s genes and each varyingly susceptible to the surrounding culture—the same morbidly hopeful concentration his parents and mother’s parents, stripped of hope for themselves, had brought to him. He had been outnumbered, four adults to one child, and now four children outnumbered him. He felt less their progenitor than their brother, and this fraternal lightness, a love leavened by distraction and pinches of sadism, for good and bad characterized his fatherhood. On the one hand he did not sit heavy on his children; on the other, he did not strive to shape their lives, to inculcate patterns of behavior. There was little in the children’s lives like the tiring, tedious, but impressive Sunday walks he took with his own parents. Instead, all was tumble—squawks and shouts and squalling appeals for justice. Television and other children, first from the packed Common Lane neighborhood and then, ferried to and from the Partridgeberry Road place, the children of their friends, filled the little time left over after sibling interaction and school. Phyllis’s schooling had been all private, and his all public; they agreed to begin with the latter, which was handiest and most democratic, reserving transition to paid private schools as the child’s needs seemed to indicate. He was proud of being able to support these dependents, from above as it were, but in most respects he dwelt among them, sharing in both the entertainments—Captain Kangaroo, The Sound of Music—and the moral bafflement of the era, as a rising political fury shadowed a holiday giddiness. Still, after Faye he was noticeably more of a paternal presence, all summer taking his lunch hour at Heron Pond once or twice a week, there among the dragonflies and peanut-butter sandwiches and gossipping near-naked mothers.