Part I

My mother liked to say Freud should have been strangled in his crib. Not that she had ever read one line of the eminent psychoanalyst's writing or knew anything about his life and times. She probably thought he was a German; she might have gotten his actual dates wrong by half a century. She didn't know about the Oedipus complex or the mechanics of repression, but she knew that when children turned out badly, when they were conflicted and miserable and did poorly in school, Freud blamed the mother. This was arrant nonsense, Mother declared. Children turned out the way they turned out and mothers were as surprised as anyone else. Her own strategy for child rearing had been to show no interest at all in how her children turned out, so how could she be held responsible for them?

Proof of Mother's assertions might be found in the relatively normal men her four sons grew to be, not a pervert or a criminal among us, though my oldest brother, Claude, a dentist, has always shown far too much interest in crime fiction of the most violent and degraded sort, and my profession, while honest, is doubtless, in some quarters, suspect. For the other two, Mother got her doctor and lawyer, the only two professions her generation ever recommended. My brothers' specialties have the additional benefit of being banal: the doctor is a urologist and the lawyer handles real estate closings.

My mother was a tall, beautiful woman, with dark hair, fair skin, an elegant long neck, and excellent posture. She was poorly educated and, as a young mother, intensely practical. My father had various jobs in the civil service in Stamford; his moves were sometimes lateral, occasionally up. She hardly seemed to notice him when we...