The room on Vernal street in Los Angeles was the last room my father rented for us. In that old green three storied house with pigeons and gables and fire-escape, he went over the line and his decline wasn’t anymore a matter between father and son.

My sister married Leo Brady because he was a merchant seaman and made good wages, and because he was gone most of the time. She and her five-year-old boy had been living on the sales of her cable-car etchings that tourists to San Francisco picked over in the little art galleries and