what Rex called the Arlington Street Dog Wagon, better known as the Ritz. Best of all were Sunday-morning visits to Rex’s lab at MIT or accompanying him on teaching rounds at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Ice cream sodas at the drugstore on the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets always followed.
But Rex had his limitations as a father. When I was five or six, I summoned my nerve and approached him at his desk in our cavernous living room.
“Rex,” I had always called him by his first name, “the kids in my class call their fathers Dad or Daddy. Could I please call you Daddy?”
“No. Absolutely not.” Young as I was, I got the message.
* * *
The summer I was six, my mother drove me to a small sleep-away camp in New Hampshire, where I was parked for six weeks. I remember little about this experience other than the terror of being away from my parents for so long. At the end of the six weeks, my parents collected me and dropped me off at Rex’s parents’ house in Washington, Connecticut, leaving me in their care. During that visit my grandmother rescued an ailing bird and was feeding it with an eyedropper. She laid the dropper on the table and I picked it up. She was certain I had put it in my mouth, and I would soon be infected by whatever had ailed the bird. She insisted on giving me an enema immediately. I resisted fiercely but she held me down and jammed the enema applicator past my clenched anus. Every morning that followed she gleefully examined my stool for signs of irregularity. I hated her.
* * *
By second grade I could read and was even asked to help the first graders with their reading. Home life was the same as the prior year: breakfast with my mother in the kitchen but only irregular sightings of my parents in the evenings and on weekends. Annette had a new, elderly admirer from New York who sported spats and a cane, and one of Rex’s blondes was more in evidence than previously. The good news was that nasty Kathleen had been replaced by Lena Howard, a stocky, warm-hearted, middle-aged woman who knew how to smile despite her bad teeth. Lena and her husband lived in Watertown. I loved Lena. On one of her weekends off, she asked if she could take me home with her.
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