My father, of whose face and voice I had no memory, who was preserved in my childhood recollections only as a tall form, enormous, eminent, and dark, could not have walked out of our apartment in 1969, could not, closing the door behind him, have left the weeping woman I could only vaguely picture but whose sobs, whose despair, in the tiny entryway of that modest apartment, had always had for me the sting of a genuine memory. My father could not have abandoned her, my mother claimed, since in the first month of that year she herself had gone to live with another man, a certain Denis, who with the deepest goodness had also taken in the very young child that I then was.
It was she, my unsteady-minded mother asserted, who had left my father, not the other way around.
And how, she murmured in a voice now disappointed, now accusing, depending on whether the morning had found her weak and drained or full of vigor, how was it that I had not the slightest memory of that exceptionally kind and decent Denis?
Denis, a custodian at the Malakoff primary school where my mother had spent a few months substituting for the fourth-grade teacher, had immediately agreed—since he’d fallen in love with my mother, had even fallen under her spell, she would say with a sort of pained modesty, and apparently had no children—to learn to love and care for me as if I were his own daughter.
This story is from the December 18, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the December 18, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
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STUNTED
\"The Fall Guy.\"
MOTHERS OF US ALL
Paula Vogel's \"Mother Play,\" Shaina Taub's \"Suffs,\" and Amy Herzog's \"Mary Jane.\"
PURE PLEASURE
The \"Radical Optimism\" of Dua Lipa.
PARADISE LOST
The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud's new novel.
ORIGIN STORY
What do we hope to learn from our prehistory?
DEATH IN VENICE
At the Biennale, the past dignifies the weird, desperate present.
WE'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I
\"You'll never get away with this!\" Ultra Man vowed as he wriggled in his chains. \"You may destroy me, but you'll never destroy what I stand for!\"
STONES OF CONTENTION
The British Museum faces accusations of cultural theft-and actual theft.
A CAMPUS IN CRISIS
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
ARROW RETRIEVER
I am an arrow retriever. After a batrows are costly and time-consuming to make. It seems like a terrible waste-and maybe even a sin―for an arrow to fall to the ground without hitting someone. Even if the arrow kills somebody, it can be reused to kill someone else. As Randolf the Scot famously said, \"Arrows don't grow on trees.\"