During the 30 years since my father vanished, the tyranny of facts has eroded, but several remain as clear as the spring day on which he disappeared. I know my mother didn't have enough money to pay the bills. I know that she called my aunt in Chicago and arranged a personal loan for a very large sum. My father's disappearance was the first glimpse I had of the connection between the emotional life he only vaguely supported, and my mother's and sisters' total physical dependence on his livelihood. It was my first glimpse at the folly of adoration. Like those car rides to Brush where the angels couldn't protect us from my father's lead foot, the Burma Shave signs forewarned us of our vulnerability.

Two days after my mother had secured a personal loan, there was word of my father via his closest friend, who called my mother from an undisclosed spot somewhere on the plains east of Brush. I was not home when the phone call came, and its substance was not reported except in a terse "Your father is well" at the dinner table. That was all my mother would say, and from the look on her face, my sister and I knew that was all the information we would learn. In that terse, brittle line I knew that she had taken on a new character, one that she would keep and perfect for years after their divorce. That evening, as I lay in the dark listening to the walls in my room crack and settle, I saw my father in a crowd of happy people, recognized his customary swagger as he rearranged the drape of his slacks, his image reflected in the beautiful pools of the sultan at the Alhambra, the familiar smell from his Camel overpowering the fragrance of orange blossoms in the groves around the fortress. The momentary sense of betrayal lifted, eased by the exotic possibility of my father's travel, his savoir faire, representing the family in Europe like that, his head framed in the polished mosaics and tiles laid in praise of Allah. How fortunate we were, I thought as sleep finally came, to have such a worldly father.

My father ran away because he lost his business in a high stakes poker game where he had wagered against an incredible hand of cards. My first thought as an adult is always about the fictional ethics of such a wager, but ethics, as regards the ethics of family or responsibility, seldom enters into the fact of a Royal Flush. Years later, a member of that small coterie who held its card games in the storm culverts underneath the northside of Denver would remember my father as a "nickel and dime" player, though his business, when he lost it, was worth more than small change. He did not go to Madrid or Granada nor even Cadiz, the root of our ancestral blood line. He went on a wild, hopeless spree to all of the tracks--early season greyhound tracks--in eastern Colorado and Nebraska, hoping to win back his lost fortune.

My father was an incredibly lucky man--he had parlayed General Mills stock early into enough capital to buy his own business and his touch with quarterhorses was superb, with greyhounds sublime. He had paid for several semesters of my older sister's college tuition with strikes from the Twin Quin, a two race win-place quinella pick in the last two races of the evening at the Cloverleaf Dog Track, and kept her quartered in a sorority house with his belief in the fact of numbers. Not a few of the mortgage payments came from the Twin Quin, and our synagogue membership and High Holy Days tickets. So it was not entirely out of line for him to imagine that--had luck been with him--he could have earned back some of his wealth. The bitterest irony is that of all the sprees and junkets he took throughout his life, this was the only month-long period where he did not even scratch the surface of success. If I were to perform a strictly statistical analysis of his winnings, the period would show up as only the briefest anomaly in an otherwise charmed life.

*

When my father ran away, he took his friend Sammy Kahn with him. Twice Sammy Kahn called my mother as my father's surrogate, the first time on May 30 to tell her my father was all right and that he was trying to win back the money, the second time on June 10 to say they were both broke and they were coming home.

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