William S. Lycheck [sic] of Holton Road, North Franklin, died Sunday evening unexpectedly. He was born July 1, 1925, son of the late William and Rosie (Palamar) Lycheck. He operated a window cleaning service in Putnam for several years prior to retirement. He was a veteran of World War Two, served in the Marine Corps from 1943-46. Surviving are one son, William J., of Putnam; one brother, Daniel, of North Franklin; two sisters, several aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. [Reprinted courtesy of the Norwich Bulletin, Norwich, Conn.]

A set of keys, a Mercury-head dime he carried for luck, and his wallet. That's my inheritance, the effects that would remind me of my father's absence, along with the cast-aside stories that my mother rolled out for holidays. Like the story of their pet raccoon, Basil, who bit him on the back of the neck and was put to sleep. Or the night he dangled me, a baby seven months old, over the edge of the patio until my mother gave him back his car keys. Or how he held her by the wrists and said, "I'll kiss you in your coffin, Alice," my mother apparently spitting in his face. And she told me — or did I just imagine this? — that she could bring him back to life with a whiff of Mennen after-shave. She never spoke of him without emotion in her voice, her chin trembling as she remembered a shaving-cream fight, a summer evening they slept out in the orchard, the winter they sold sandwiches from a truck in Greenpoint. And there were those visits to the farm, my mother casually tossing out this one detail to me, so many years later: she and my father would make love while I was outside playing.

Now what on earth was I supposed to do with that? How is a sentence like that supposed to lie still? Or the fact that my father died, of all days, on my mother's birthday? I'd always imagined my mother and father having a contentious relationship, to say the least, the kind of marriage in which one always had to get in the last word, but taking her birthday from her seems a bit much to me, a little too perfect, so over the top it almost makes me smile.

As I grew up, everyone I met in town seemed to have a word about my father. The window washer, right? A real shirt-off-his-back kind of guy, your old man. We'd hide his cleaning equipment on him. They'd squint and say they saw his face in my face, while my mother would practically spit the man's name at me if I unwittingly revived some habit of his. "You never even knew him," she'd tell me, "and you're just like the damned man!"

How could such scraps not whet my appetite for him? How could I not have worried and wondered about this man I never knew? How could I not try to conjure the magic ifs? What if my father didn't want to leave us? What if we had one last hurrah together?

Just what the world needs, another story about an absent father. But for a long time it seemed like life or death to me, the struggle to write this story, to recover something that was, ultimately, unrecoverable. In what must have been a fit of despair over the novel, I unloaded all the accumulated doubts and worries I had about the book (and my life) on one of the many fathers I borrowed (or tried to borrow) over the years, William Maxwell. In a letter back to me, amid snippets of advice and news, he wrote:

Probably the reason your novel disappears on you is that there is really no model for it, and this makes you lose confidence. Possibly you are thinking that you don't know enough about your father — about the facts of his life. This is not true, or if true, beside the point. There is so much that we know that we don't know we know. Try to listen to your feelings as you would to the sound in a seashell, and then put them down on paper.

For six, seven, ten years I had that letter on the wall in front of my desk and tried to dowse my father's feelings, only to realize that they were my own feelings, that it was my own dream to bring him back to life, to undo everything, to lay him to rest finally. In the end, I tried to write the book that I needed most to read, the record of a time my father and I never had together.