Our house was often empty. It had been that way even when my father was alive; both my parents worked long hours at the magazine, and my afternoons had always been quiet, myself and Mrs. Cooper attending to separate business in distant rooms of the house. My loneliness now, in my junior year of high school, had an almost narcotic quality; I lost hours of time lying diagonally across my bed, listening to records. Sometimes I went to my father’s old office and looked at the photos in his desk. My parents’ wedding photos were there—punch and cake in the wallpapered front room of my maternal grandparents’ home in Texas—and their college yearbook photos, the two of them dark-eyed and soft, their faces impossibly smooth. My father’s family photos were there as well, crooked and blurred photos of a ranch, of jagged mountains white with snow, women in dark clothes gathered in doorways. There was a portrait of my father’s mother in an oval frame; it must have been taken not long after she came to America from Armenia, disembarking from a steamer alone in 1909. My father always said how much I looked like her. I had her big, confident nose, the tan that persisted into the winter, the large dark eyes with corners that turned down. My hair even curled like hers. She died when I was seven.
My paternal grandfather killed himself in 1919 by eating a plate of arsenic, which ranchers kept around in those days for poisoning rats. They lived on a homestead somewhere on the plains of northern Montana. My father was four when it happened, and he never talked about it. I heard about it from his brother, my uncle Clement, who came to visit when I was thirteen and told me about it in a confidential tone while my mother was in the other room. Uncle Clement’s arms were thickly scarred because when he was young, a half-trained horse had dragged him through fifty yards of barbed-wire fence. Because of stories like that, I always had an impression of Montana as a barren waste populated with monsters, even though I saw photos in magazines that contradicted this belief—blue mountains, prairies dotted with yellow flowers, happy cowboys.
My father also had a sister named Beverly and another brother, Zachary, who had gone away to college on an engineering scholarship and later, as a graduate student at Berkeley, worked on a small piece of the atomic bomb project. He didn’t know at the time what he was working on, but he found out later, and the information seemed to fill him with something like megalomania, a confused state in which pride and guilt were indistinct from each other and both were dwarfed by an enormous sense of personal power. He divorced his wife and then had a spiritual epiphany at Yellowstone—it had something to do with a bear—and joined a Pentecostal church, then married a twenty-year-old from Manitoba. My mother thought it was ridiculous. “A lot of people worked on that bomb,” she said. “They didn’t all leave their wives.”
What was there on my mother’s side? Mostly silence. She rarely spoke about her own father, and when she did it was elliptical, more scoffing and snorting than words, with a single point emerging for my benefit: you have it easier than you know. He was dead too. A stroke at fifty-four. “Don’t let me catch you smoking,” she said.
My mother was an elegant woman, but she had grown up in the pine barrens of northern Louisiana and east Texas, her father moving the family from year to year to follow the oil fields, and she could be hard. She beat me for bad grades, for the incident with the schnapps, for being mouthy and sad and not as tough as she was. When I was seven she bloodied my lip and knocked out one of my loose baby teeth. She cried for an hour afterward, and I lied to my father about it, telling him I had fallen off my bicycle. That was what I could do for her.