An Excerpt from A Family of Strangers

What I Know

That my father is an orphan. That he has no surviving family.

That he vanishes for months at a time during the Cold War to Greenland, Alaska, and England to work on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System—radar to protect us from the Russians.

That it is his business to know the future, what catastrophe might be imminent.

That he knows more about the future than the past.

That often we can’t find him.

What I Don’t Yet Know

The theory of relativity.

How many relatives I have.

The cost of his sole survival.

The level of peril.

That our normality is an invention.

Signs of the Times

It is the fifties in suburbia. The ground’s been bulldozed free of inconvenient trees and hillocks. The houses are brand new, ident­ical, laid out in rows on streets named for birds and flowers that reside elsewhere.

Everyone is about the same age with two or three kids in the elementary school at the end of the block, the men all vets of World War II, wound a little too tight. No one talks out loud about the war.

Because every house in the subdivision has the same layout, we always know where to turn when we visit our friends. Every thermostat is set within the recommended “comfort zone.”

Outdoors, the terrain is bleak, corralled. In our back yard there are just two trees, fresh from the nursery: a willow and a mimosa, mere saplings, thin and anemic.

The willow comes closest to serving as a tree-house shelter, a small temple of herbed air I can hide in to sulk or dream.

The mimosa, austere, queenly, is a lesson in tact. Its leaves close up the moment I touch them, withdrawing from any offer of companionship.

Anatomy of Secrecy

My father likes to be alone. He escapes into one of our two bathrooms with a paperback bestseller or crossword puzzle for an hour at a time. “Where’s Max?” my mother wails, exasper­at­ed, as she and my sister and I stand by the front door, coats on.

He is an engi­neer, a math whiz. But for all his cerebral speed, my father is a fairly slow man, sedentary, a three-pack-a-day smoker. His every move is deliberate, a calculated part of a larger plan.

Maybe a person has to move slowly to think as fast as he does.

He’s an expert, knows things we ca­n’t begin to imag­ine. He knows that there is life on other plan­ets.

“How do you know?”

“I’m not allowed to reveal that,” sotto voce.

Because his work is vital to nation­al security, it would be dangerous to test his reticence with my childish probing.

His ability to keep secrets is in part what he’s well paid for.

Signs of the Times

Levittown was the most perfectly planned community in America. The automobile enabled father to commute to work while the front-side kitchen window enabled mother to watch her children playing on the wide, cement sidewalks while she washed the morning dishes. When not in use, the family automobile rested snugly in its port.¹

Radar

Thule—in Greenland—is where my father most frequently disappears to work on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning radar system.

He calls the project by its insider acronym, BMEWS, pronounced “b’ muse.”

Each radar dish, he tells us, is the size of a football field. The ring of dishes between us and the Soviet Union will be able to detect the trajectory and target of a missile approaching at 12,000 miles an hour. It will give us 15 minutes to prepare for the bomb.

The idea of the bomb is much more immediate than remote, ice-gripped Thule.

When we rehearse for the apocalypse at school and beg for a bomb shelter at home, my father is dismissive, authoritative—“Don’t be silly. No one would survive.”

Then why does he work so hard on the radar?

Thule: the name given by the...