Mrs. DeVry, Why Do You Cry?

When my father was a boy during World War II, he says, he was at the movies with his father one evening. The newsreel had just finished and the first chords of the feature’s soundtrack had begun, when the usher came down the aisle, shining his flashlight and saying my grandfather’s name. They followed him into the lobby where a policeman in uniform was waiting, eating popcorn out of a bag. My father was afraid.

“I thought Daddy was being arrested,” he says.

But instead the policeman said there had been an accident, and they got in my grandfather’s car and followed the policeman to the hospital, the same one where I was born, thirty years later, in a wing not then built. My father waited with the policeman while my grandfather disappeared down a hallway with a nurse. The policeman, still eating his popcorn between drags on a cigarette, talked to my father about school and baseball and a time he’d seen a man in a traveling show shoot sixteen peach cans off a woman’s outstretched arms with a .22 pistol. Afterward, she didn’t have a scratch on her, and each can had a perfect hole in it, right through the picture of the halved peach on the label, right where the pit would have been.

“Don’t that beat all?” said the policeman.

My father said that it did.

“What was the feature tonight, son? I’ve seen ’em all. I can tell you if you ought to be sorry you missed it.”

My father told him the name of the picture, which, all these years later, he says he can’t remember.

“And what did the policeman say about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know what he was going to say because that’s when Daddy came out holding Granny’s blue pocketbook, and I knew.”

They went the next day and looked at the stretch of dirt alongside the railroad track where my great- grandmother had been struck down at dusk by a freight headed North. My grandfather paced up and down for what seemed to my father an hour, studying the ground, his hands in his pockets.

“I don’t know if he was looking for something of hers or if he was trying to find the exact spot where she died—a bloodstain or an indentation in the dirt, something like that. He never said a word. He’d walk down the track twenty or thirty yards, and then he’d come on back and walk up the track twenty or thirty yards. I can’t tell you how many times. I stood by the car—he had a ’38 Ford then—and I kept my eyes peeled for a train. I was petrified he was going to get run over, just like Granny.”

“Did he find anything?”

“No. After a while, he came back to the car, and we went home, and a day or two later, we had a funeral.”

“What year was that?”

“1944. I was seven.”

About Walker’s age. Walker, my son, is eight. He’s with me half the time and with his father and stepmother the rest. My parents are very upset by this division, but to me it seems about right. I’m only able to be a good mother about half the time. I try to make sure it’s on the days Walker is with me. I try to make sure there’s healthy food in the house; I shower and put on real clothes; I pick up after the dog in the backyard so that Walker can run around out there if he wants to, but he never does. Like me, he’d rather sit on the sofa together, reading or watching a movie. He likes being in the house.

It’s a nice, two- story house with wood floors, a butler’s pantry we turned into a breakfast nook, and a stained- glass window on the stair landing, a funny window with assorted garnet and emerald and amber and...