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shook Jay’s hand. Laurence insisted upon seeing Kate into a taxi; the meeting must not continue without him. And so, with a moment of meaningful eye contact, Kate and Jay Ebenezer—for she could not quite yet think of him as her father—parted.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    . . .thee my daughter who art ignorant of what

thou art, naught knowing of whence I am.
    Kate called Jay on the following day. She had, after some thought, decided that it was up to her to make the next move; reaching him by telephone, she suggested dinner in a quiet restaurant.
    “Lovely,” Jay said. “I’d like that. Soon. For now, what would you say to a walk in the park tomorrow? It’s supposed to be a breezy March day; I’ve always liked breezy March days. We can just stroll about.”
    “Might I bring my dog?” Kate asked. “She’s a rather large dog, but perfectly calm, either indifferent to overtures or casually friendly.”
    “Sounds the perfect companion to conversation. May I meet you on your corner whenever you say?”
    “How about two?” Kate said. On this Friday, as on most, she had some sort of meeting in the morning, but would be free by two.
    “Two it is,” he said. Kate gave him her address and the location of the nearest corner.
    “We’re going to meet a new member of the family,” she told Banny, who, deciding an immediate excursion was not being offered, stayed where she was.

    For once, the weather forecast had been accurate: it was cool and breezy, with a feeling of spring in the air. Banny stood still to be greeted by Jay, but then looked at Kate, reminding her that the park had been promised. They crossed the street and set off around the lake. As they walked, they talked, but only intermittently. It occurred to Kate that in a restaurant they could have gazed at each other; strolling side by side, their words carried more meaning than their expressions or their appearance. Not a bad way to become acquainted, Kate thought.
    In fact, their walk began in silence. Theirs was not a situation for which conventional or even mildly suitable dialogue had been established. Everything Kate wanted to ask she dismissed as outrageous even before it could be expressed. “How did you and my mother become lovers? How often did you sleep with each other? How, in sum, did it all come about?”
    He seemed to sense her perplexity through her silence. “Ask anything you want,” he said. “Or would you rather I began? I want to know so much about you.”
    “Perhaps we can take it by turns,” Kate said, smiling. She would have liked to add that what he wanted to know about her fit more readily into the bounds of ordinary conversation than what she wanted to know about him. “I’ll start. How old were you when . . . ?” She had been going to say when I was born, but she really wanted to know about the nine months before that.
    He understood her question. “I was not yet twenty when I met your mother. She was thirty-six. We became lovers soon after we met. It was the love of my life, and, I suspect, of hers. Sorry to sound so like a romance novel, but it does happen sometimes; I can testify to that.”
    Kate smiled at him. “Did you ever see the Noel Coward movie called
Brief Encounter
? I saw it on television not too long ago. It was the essence of impossible, perfect love, to the accompaniment of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. When they part, the man says to the woman: ‘I will love you all my life.’ Is that the sort of thing?”
    “I’m afraid it is. I adored her, and she was, I think, actually in love for the first time.”
    “Meaning, among other things, that she enjoyed sex for the first time?” Kate said, determined to be disgraceful and even scandalous. It was all very well, fathers turning up when one was getting along in one’s fifties, but they could hardly carry on as though this were a play by Noel Coward, however much the endurance of original passion in that play testified to Coward’s dramatic