The Whore's Child

had no idea she’d ever known: how I’d fallen in with a pack of hoodlums, how I’d stoned a helpless animal, how my father had to pay for the repairs on our neighbor’s car, how—in short, if she hadn’t got me out of Camden when she did, I’d have been arrested and put in reform school like the rest of my so-called friends.
    It’s not the purpose of this narrative to suggest what kind of man I’ve become. I will say this much, though. I was sent to Vietnam during the last hopeless year of that war, and there I learned that I wasn’t the abject coward I felt destined to become starting that night in a New Mexico parking lot. Vietnam provided opportunities for every imaginable cruelty, and these I discovered were not in my true nature. Although it must be said that my mother does consider me cruel, harsh in my recollections. And when we argue about the past, there are times when she can almost convince me.
    But the worst truths are contained in our many silences. Too often the past will cause our eyes to meet furtively, guiltily, as they did one afternoon during the last days of my father’s illness, after he’d returned home from a chemotherapy treatment. “The worst thing about chemo,” he said thoughtfully, in that painstaking manner he had when reporting on some discovery in a dictionary or encyclopedia, “is the metallic taste it leaves in your mouth.” He said this without irony, and then the shiny silver washer appeared on the tip of his tongue.

Buoyancy
    For some time they’d been sliding from lush green into sepia, summer into autumn. Everywhere there were downed trees, slender birches and lindens caught up on power lines, trunks chainsawed into cross sections and stacked on the roadside, broken limbs, piled up next to gray-shingled houses. Even trees that had survived the hurricane were damaged, their trunks stripped naked and pink under the early September sky. In the wake of their car, brittle leaves danced and twirled along the shoulder of the road like distant memories.
    â€œOh dear,” said the professor’s wife, her voice a rich mixture of sadness and disappointment. She’d been worrying the white, scarlike crease of skin on the third finger of her left hand.
    At the wheel, her husband, Paul Snow, eyed her gravely but didn’t say anything, waiting instead for her to elaborate, though he was not surprised when she didn’t. June had always been given to small exclamations that she left dangling, incomplete, and her “Oh dear’s” were usually the tip of some emotional iceberg. To keep from colliding with them head-on, Professor Snow acknowledged their existence, as he sensed he was supposed to, then navigated around them with care lest his wife reveal the full nine-tenths below the waterline. She’d done so only once, years before, when her litany of lifelong grievances and womanly disappointments had come out in an amazing torrent, beginning with rage against him, but ending in almost unbearable regret and sadness, from which, it now seemed, she had never fully recovered her old self. Their family physician had assured him that his wife’s moods had stabilized, that she was right to wean herself off her medication and he needn’t watch her so carefully anymore. Professor Snow had been relieved to hear this, though it seemed to him that June’s equilibrium was fragile still and could collapse without apparent, immediate cause. It was, of course, the immediate cause he was always trying to locate, having no wish to revisit the remote or universal.
    â€œWhat is it?” he said.
    By way of response, his wife failed to entirely suppress a shiver.
    â€œPerhaps if we opened the windows,” he suggested, rolling his own down and turning off the air conditioner. When the warmer air outside began to swirl through the car, he realized that he himself had been cold for some time. “Is that better, June?”
    â€œYes,” she said unconvincingly. “Much.”
    But with the warmer outside air came the rich odor of decaying leaves, and once more Snow felt the disorienting approach of winter and shivered himself. At first he thought his wife hadn’t noticed, because she was looking straight ahead and took such a long time to say, abstractedly, “We’ve come too late, haven’t we.”
    On the ferry, though, under a bright late summer sky, the breeze on the upper