He said it came to him as an epiphany. Like something that would happen to a saint, I thought, but that’s not how my father put it. He didn’t believe in saints. That was the epiphany he had, one day while sitting in church, that he didn’t believe any of it. Not the prayers or the rites or the big book or the tithing or the homilies or the Nicean Creed or the fellowship. He had been going to church for forty years, and it was just on that day it came to him. After that, he stayed in on Sundays while my mother and I went off to church. I wondered why mom hadn't stopped going, and why I still had to go. I definitely didn't believe any of. I knew a tall tale when I heard one. I wondered if it was like believing in Santa Claus. You just get to a certain age and you realize it’s not true anymore.

The first night my mother worked in the ER, the ambulance brought in a little girl who was unconscious and suffering from a bad concussion. Mom said she was maybe six or seven years old. The girl’s arm and face were broken, and she was bleeding from her vagina. People found her like that on the side of a road, where she had been dumped and left for dead. Social Services thought maybe the parents—there were scars on her where she had been burned before and places she had been cut—but it would be difficult to prove unless the girl talked, and even then. The girl made it through the night and her parents came for her the next day. Mom said the girl cried like nothing else when they took her out of the hospital. She stayed on at the hospital for ten years after that, my mother, and she saw a lot of bad shit. Probably worse than what happened to that girl, but she never talked about it. She just tucked it away into some pocket in her mind we never got to see. The only one she mentioned was the girl. I don’t think she ever got over that. It was too much for my mom to take on her first night. It took something from her.

There is one, I have seen it, of you dancing in a ballerina's uniform. The photograph is still, but you are somehow still in motion, and you are graceful and light as air.

I know that I was conceived one night on a hilltop in Cinque Terra, while my parents were camping on their honeymoon. They mercifully left out the details of the actual conception, but they told me that the next morning, my father’s hair was full of dew and the sunrise was something spectacular to behold. They took it as a sign something special had happened the night before.

Per istam sanctam unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam adiuvet te dominus gratia spiritus sancti, ut a peccatis liberatum te salvet atque propitius alleviet.

Dad went to Catholic school for the first eighteen years of his life, and then went to a Jesuit college for the next four. Even though he didn’t believe in any of it by the time I was born, dad still said it was the best education he ever could have had. The brothers were excellent teachers, and he learned a kind of discipline that he never could have gained, had he not been so rigorously taught from a young age. Also, he learned Latin, which helped him later when he was learning Italian for his honeymoon.

Mom told the story of how she and dad met like this:

“Your dad was casting a variety show for his high school, which was the boys school a town over from mine, and he needed someone to distract the audience by screaming. That’s all he needed, just someone to run down the aisle screaming, so that the audience would turn their heads at the right moment for them to pull of some magic trick or whatever. Anyway, as it happened, he walked by me and heard me screaming, so he cast me in the show. That’s how we met.”

Why were you screaming, mom?

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably someone was tickling me. One of my friends, maybe. I can't remember.”

When she’d tell me that story, I would tell her I never knew she was into performing. She’d say, “Oh, I wasn’t. I just screamed the one time,” but that’s a lie. I’ve seen the boxes of pictures, and I know you were up on that stage more than once.