I have tried to fictionalize that month my father was gone, but the stories are seamy and I always find myself lured by the hypnotic pull of facts that wait in a long line like the monosyllabic stories on Burma Shave signs. The last charge on the Mastercard billing invoice before he turned west again came from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and twenty years later as I was heading home from the Midwest for a visit with my mother and my father and each of my sisters, I saw the destination of that Council Bluffs charge--a greyhound track with its sign of an animated greyhound in slate-blue neon perpetually running after a mechanized rabbit not depicted on the sign. It was only then, seeing that sign, that I realized the borders of my father's disappearance.

What was fact and what was lie? The greyhound outlined in slate-blue neon was a fact. I saw it. The rabbit it chased was a fact on the track, was what made the dogs run around and around, but real rabbits were unpredictable and too bloody when a pack of greyhounds caught it. By 1968 a mechanical surrogate had replaced the real rabbit at all dog tracks in the West, a kind of lie. The mechanical rabbit was always called "Rusty," and at the beginning of every race, the announcer would shout, "Here comes Rusty!" with the same enthusiasm and blood-lust as if the rabbit were real. We have to stretch to know the greyhound on the sign was chasing an imaginary rabbit, and we are capable of doing so, happy even in the facility of doing so. We know the game that greyhounds play. That my father had run away to Council Bluffs rather than to the calming sound of running water surrounding the Alhambra was my own lie, my own fiction--not one he ever told. I have to mix them, the facts and the lies, so that the facts take on flesh, so that they breathe as we all do. I must posture the way Joan Didion does in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," when she explains the disparity between her family's and her own recollection of a "shared event." For Didion, distinguishing "between what happened and what... might have happened" is irrelevant. My father's disappearance was not irrelevant, but the fact of it is merely a date on the calendar, a few days out of 365 days, a small fraction of a year. The understanding of the chaos and fear during that month can not be skimmed by the recitation of the dates of his disappearance.

In true Jamesian fashion, I went home this past summer hoping to see through another window into my father's life. My mother has taken to talking to him at his grave at Fort Logan National Cemetery. I do not know what she says because the times I have gone there with her we approach his stone, each of us alone, she to speak and I to grieve. I watch her from the curb where we are parked, trace for a while the flight of a pelican who lives among the cattails in the pond at the south end of the cemetery where my father is buried. The pelican flies out of sight and a cormorant skims along the shoreline where it stops, perches upright, and spreads its large, black wings. Both birds seem perfectly content around the small, artificial pond and the thin belt of grass, yet how perfectly out of place those water birds are, like my Sephardic father in a community of Eastern European Jews, the Double-crested Cormorant having chosen this little cemetery pond in the middle of Denver instead of the coast, the White Pelican having found its way from the real marshes west of the Continental Divide, both flying and fishing in this little bit of park meant to comfort the living out visiting their dead.

I see my mother patting her hand on my father's regimental white stone, an odd kind of intimacy since they did not touch for the twenty years after their divorce. I watch her lips asking him to intercede in this summer's family enmity. Her face is pleasant and calm, happy even, and I know she believes she is truly speaking to him. He has become an oracle in her eyes, rebbe Benjamin, his miracle the serenity of his death. To the right of his stone lies Roland W. Worley, Sergeant, U.S. Army Air Corps, WWlI, February 3, 1919--July 20, 1994. The irony of their parallel lives, and now their deaths, is inescapable. My father was also a sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps during WWII, born a day after Roland W. Worley--probably a man he never met in life--died two days before. To the left of my father's grave, Matthew L., July 20, 1994, son of Major and Mrs. Bernard Ela, USAF, an infant who lived one day. In a confusing moment, I think the death date on my father's stone, July 18, 1994 is inaccurate, and the ramifications of the inaccuracy make it difficult for me to think clearly. The inaccuracy of a day or two has never meant much to me, but to my father, a man devoted to the fact of numbers--all those quarterhorse numbers, all those greyhounds, numbers and batting averages from 75 years of baseball devotion--a mistake like that in a national military cemetery would have been unconscionable! And to my mother, the bookkeeper whose ledgers always balance? It's too much to fathom! Of course, it is I who have remembered the date inaccurately.

Seeing my mother there performing the rites of the dead, sensing the pleasure the visit gives her, I know that whatever she remembers or feels about my father's disappearance is a fact she would like to forget. I could no more ask my mother to fill in the details about his disappearance than I could claw up the turf above my father's cement-encased casket and ask him just what, anyway, was on his mind. With my sisters there is a similar void. My older sister was out of the house and already married when my father disappeared. Her sense of loss and abandonment date much earlier and have nothing to do with his gambling, but there is great irony in the fact that my sister is part of a program that rescues and relocates greyhounds once they reach two years of age and so are deemed unsuitable as track-worthy racers and usually destroyed. Every day she runs alongside Gracie, her new greyhound, the two of them pacing one another along Denver's tree-lined boulevards.

My younger sister is a fact person herself. She was twelve when my father disappeared. I waited for most of my last visit to Denver for a good moment to bring up a bad memory. I finally asked her as her old, overheating car was winding down Boulder Canyon from the Indian Peaks Wilderness, where we had spent the day with all the nephews and my husband and sons in a summer thunderstorm that produced amazing quantities of rain. The question was barely out of my mouth before I had my response. "It was 30 years ago. I don't remember anything."

*

I take solace in the words of the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge, when he says...

I remind myself that behind every composed, serene Buddha there is a draftsperson who cast or chiseled, scraped and polished the Buddha's perfect hands, and that draftsperson might well have been, in another lifetime, me, my sisters, my mother, my father.

The grave has swallowed up Joseph McCarthy, and AIDS has claimed his loyal henchman Roy Cohen, and Irving Peress, "The Pink Dentist," is in comfortable retirement, soon to follow his accusers. Sarkisian was released from prison and now his son runs Sarkisian's, renamed Sarkisian's Oriental Rugs, complete with Website and links to other antique dealers in the Rocky Mountain Region, who may or may not have trafficked in contraband with each decade's villain. And Quizzac? The whys of my childhood are questions Quizzac, that cardboard lover of facts, even in its heyday before its core went wrong, would have none of.

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