While we walked Mom and Dad back to their hotel, Dad told Michael some anecdotes about his father, Dixie, my grandfather. Dixie attended two colleges, one of them Columbia, had studied advertising, but had to drop out from lack of funds. An old parody newspaper I’d seen as a child announcing my grandparent’s wedding had been an in-house organ for Citibank in Manhattan, where they both worked. “British Beauty Weds Texas Somnabulist,” read the headline. My Portsmouth-born grandmother, the president’s secretary, had descended from the rarefied top floor office where she worked to the main floor to look for something. (As late as the early ’60s, office layouts typically included a large room with rows of desks where the white-collar peons labored. You can see that kind of office plan in the classic film The Apartment.) She came upon Dixie at his desk, “eyes closed as if in prayer, mouth open as if in song.” According to the story, she’d rapped him over his head with a pencil and said, “Hey Morpheus…”

The Depression was not as hard on them as it was on many people. Even after Citibank let him go, my grandfather always managed to find something, and he didn’t really hit a low point until 1936, in Louisiana, when he was fired from his job in the advertising department of a furniture store — terminated, he used to say, for over-zealousness. A terrible fire had destroyed the store’s warehouse, and my grandfather, young, eager, and Johnny-on-the-spot, had written and run out flyers announcing a fire sale while the building was still smoking. The advertisements hit the papers a little before news of the fire did. It looked bad.

It’s possible, Dad observed drily, that the store owner “had a bad conscience” about that fire.

I believe Dixie dropped out of college because his father had died of the same heart disease that eventually killed Dixie. I wish I could find that old parody, which I recall as dominated by a headshot of my grandmother, young, beautiful, dark-haired and in a fashionable cloche hat. They were a couple who came of age on Manhattan in the 1920s, and that decade and place always left its mark. Their house in 1960s Lousiana, on the bucolic banks of a bayou, always had the last few issues of THE NEW YORKER somewhere, along with the latest compilation of NEW YORKER cartoons. I remember lots of elegant ashtrays and cigarette holders. My grandmother’s Sunday bridge parties were regularly visited by the local police because she insisted on serving alcohol on the sabbath. (These “raids” took the form of two apologetic young officers knocking on her kitchen door and giving her and her guests plenty of time to hide the martini glasses before they came in briefly and said hello to everyone.)