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y earliest memories revolve around a handsome white house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Built around  by Richard (“Rich”) Freeman, it fronts on to Route , the main north-south artery of Cape Cod. Resting midway down a low-lying rise called Money Hill, it once boasted an English garden rooted in the rich soil brought as ballast in freightless ships returning to home port. Freeman was also the president of the Wellfleet Saving Bank. He and the bank’s vice president built houses on the hill, which came to be known, appropriately enough, as “Money Hill.” In contrast to his predecessor, Wilson never had enough money. This was due to financially irresponsible habits that included not paying income taxes, the lavish use of taxis (he never learned to drive), and copious long-distance telephone calls. The ranging three-story house had six bedrooms, a front and back parlor, a functional kitchen with a small telephone room placed between it and the front hallway, an ample dining room, and my father’s study, connected by a narrow stairway to an attic storeroom lined with bookshelves holding a red, multivolume Soviet edition of Lenin’s writings; multiple copies, sent by the publisher, of my father’s own work; old issues of Life and other magazines; and some materials that he seldom used. The storeroom connected to a little bedroom. Our elegant dining room had an air of formality; it was used only once a day, for supper. My father otherwise took meals in his study, while other family members ate at the kitchen table. The dining room’s appointments are worth noting. The table was of solid mahogany with lion’s paw “feet” supporting it, and on the walls hung two nautical pictures: one showed a clipper ship with all sails set (the medium was embroidered cloth rather than canvas or paper); the second was a Currier and Ives whaling print titled “the whale fishery: Attacking a ‘Right Whale’ and ‘Cutting In.’”1 After my grandmother ’s death in Red Bank, New Jersey, in , my father placed her imposing grandfather clock in the Wellfleet dining room. A few years 6 : REMEMBERING MY PARENTS AND CAPE COD M later it acquired an odd companion in the shape of a large white Filipino straw chair whose back was shaped like an enormous fan. Elena had seen the chair in a hotel and found it irresistible. My father had succeeded in persuading the hotel’s owner to sell it to him (see fig. ). Although my mother, and later Elena, served elegant meals in the dining room, the atmosphere surrounding them was often tense, due to my father’s alcoholfueled outbursts of temper. (On one occasion my sister Rosalind exposed him for trying to pass off as water a large glass filled to the brim with gin.) A midsize horse chestnut tree stood on the modest lawn in front of our house. It was the first tree I ever climbed. Every June, when its spiky, sticky green fruits fell to the ground, I broke them open with the same eager fascination—to find the same oily brown gleaming nuts with a white spot on the flat side. Our driveway led to a rotting barn behind the house, and then continued as a path though an overgrown clump of apple trees, out to a sandpit—the ideal spot for jumping and later war games. Beyond lay an impoverished farmstead belonging to the Roses (he was Portuguese and she, I think, Irish; I often played in the sandpit with their son Charlie) and a sparse landscape of marshland alternating with scrub pine–covered hillocks. We had two dogs, both male: a big one, Rex (Reckie), half German shepherd and half English setter; and a little one, Bambi, a reddish brown cocker spaniel. Rex was my best friend in moments of loneliness or unhappiness . He was brave and independent. He sometimes disappeared for days and nights on end—to return, wounded, bedraggled, but fulfilled. He was very affectionate toward family members and overwhelmed them with a greeting ritual of jumping. He loved my mother, who was not particularly fond of animals. Long after the divorce he welcomed her affectionately when she once stopped at the house to pick me up. It was part of the summer ritual for my father to detick the dogs. He did this, as he did most of his daytime activities, within the confines of his study. As a young child...

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