My Father’s House

In the early 1930s, a few years before I was born, my father bought a summer house. This was an astonishment to all our relatives and friends. For one thing, we were not the sort of people who “summered.” My father was a working stiff; even in the best of times we made do with city parks, the public pool, the fire escape, the air-cooled movie house. For another thing, these happened to be the worst of times, the years of the Great Depression, when it was a generally accepted fact that anyone’s father could join the jobless at any moment.

But my father didn’t believe this fact applied to him. It might apply to others—to his brothers-in-law, for instance—but he had never been out of work, not for a day, not even the day after he got off the boat as a 16-year-old runaway from the Pale, landing in Galveston, Texas, without a penny or a word of English. My father was his own man. Everyone who knew him knew that. If he decided he would have a summer house for his family, so it would be. Sixty miles north of New York City, where we lived, he found a bargain, a three-room bungalow on a full acre of land.

Upper Westchester County was a pretty area, almost rural then. Wild strawberries ran unchecked under the trees; an ancient-looking hickory, more than 50 feet tall,