On that day, too, over Selma’s birthday cake, when the conversation was actually about Mon Chéri candy and the Piedmont cherry filling and Elsbeth declared that the liqueur-soaked cherries didn’t come from Piedmont at all, it was just something she claimed when tipsy, my father responded, “Speaking of psychoanalysis . . .” He then told us that Dr. Maschke was a luminary in his field, something that had been proven yet again just the day before. Previously, the patient whose session was just before my father’s had always come out of Dr. Maschke’s office with a look of profound despair in his eyes.

“I’d never seen a look of such abysmal despair in anyone’s eyes,” he said. And now, a mere two sessions later, the very same patient practically skipped out of the office as if liberated. “So here’s to psychoanalysis,” my father said, and raised his glass. “And to the birthday girl, too, of course.”

Sad Marlies asked, “Do you see despair in my eyes, too?”

My father turned to her, took her chin in his hand, and gazed into her eyes for a moment.

“No,” he replied, “just an incipient eyelid inflammation.”

The sound of my mother’s steps echoed in the landing.

“Here’s Astrid,” my father said, “with the surprise.”

My mother opened the kitchen door and walked in with the dog. My father jumped up, bounded over to my mother, and let the dog off the leash.

The dog looked around and ran to Martin and me. He greeted us exuberantly, as if we were old friends he had missed for a long time and unexpectedly met again at a lively surprise party in his honor. Martin put his arms around the dog and lifted him. Martin beamed with delight as I’d never seen him beam before.

Selma stood up abruptly, as if an invisible person had just said, “Please rise.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” my mother said. “Happy birthday, Selma.”

“What is it?” asked Elsbeth, who had started to wash the dessert plates and raised her rubber-gloved hands high, as if that would stop the dog from jumping up on her. He jumped up anyway.

“A mutt,” my father said. “Part Irish wolfhound.” Irish wolfhounds are the largest dogs in the world, as everyone in Selma’s kitchen knew. My father had told us. “A shoulder height of thirty-six inches,” he’d said.

My father liked to comment on the heights of humans and animals. As far as people were concerned, his estimates were often wrong, but he wouldn’t let anyone correct him. He found Martin and me small for our age, even though we were both of average height. Even as a child he would say to Selma, who was taller than everyone around, “You’re so small, Mama,” when she bent down to him.