All of us kids had our own lives by then. I was in college, Lori had become an illustrator at a comic-book company, Maureen lived with Lori and went to high school, and Brian, who had wanted to be a cop ever since he’d had to call a policeman to our house in Phoenix to break up a fight between Mom and Dad, had become a warehouse foreman and was serving on the auxiliary force until he was old enough to take the police department’s entrance exam. Mom suggested we all celebrate Christmas at Lori’s apartment. I bought Mom an antique silver cross, but finding a gift for Dad was harder; he always said he never needed anything. Since it looked like it was going to be another hard winter, and since Dad wore nothing but his bomber jacket in even the coldest weather, I decided to get him some warm clothes. At an army-surplus store, I bought flannel shirts, thermal underwear, thick wool socks, the kind of blue work pants that auto mechanics wear, and a new pair of steel-toed boots.
Lori decorated her apartment with colored lights and pine boughs and paper angels; Brian made eggnog; and to demonstrate that he was on his best behavior, Dad went to great lengths to make sure there was no alcohol in it before he accepted a glass. Mom passed around their presents, each wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher’s twine. Lori got a cracked lamp that might have been a Tiffany; Maureen, an antique porcelain doll that had lost most of her hair; Brian, a nineteenth-century book of poetry, missing the cover and the first few pages. My present was an orange crewneck sweater, slightly stained but made, Mom pointed out, of genuine Shetland wool.
When I passed Dad my stack of carefully wrapped boxes, he protested that he needed and wanted nothing. “Go ahead,” I said. “Open them.”
I watched as he carefully removed the wrapping. He lifted the lids and stared at the folded clothes. His face took on that wounded expression he got whenever the world called his bluff. “You must be mighty ashamed of your old man,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You think I’m some sort of goddamn charity case.”
Dad stood up and put on his bomber jacket. He was avoiding all our eyes.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
Dad just turned up his collar and walked out of the apartment. I listened to the sound of his boots going down the stairs.
“What did I do?” I asked.
“Look at it from his perspective,” Mom said. “You buy him all these nice new things, and all he has for you is junk from the street. He’s the father. He’s the one who’s supposed to be taking care of you.”
The room was quiet for a while. “I guess you don’t want your presents, either,” I said to Mom.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I love getting presents.”
BY THE FOLLOWING summer, Mom and Dad were heading into their third year on the streets. They’d figured out how to make it work for them, and I gradually came around to accepting the notion that whether I liked it or not, this was how it was going to be. “It’s sort of the city’s fault,” Mom told me. “They make it too easy to be homeless. If it was really unbearable, we’d do something different.”
In August, Dad called to go over my course selection for the fall semester. He also wanted to discuss some of the books on the reading lists. Since he’d come to New York, he’d been borrowing my assigned books from the public library. He read every single one, he said, so he could answer any questions I might have. Mom said it was his way of getting a college education along with me.
When he asked me what courses I had signed up for, I said, “I’m thinking of dropping out.”
“The hell you are,” Dad said.
I told him that while most of my tuition was covered by grants and loans and scholarships, the school expected me to contribute two thousand dollars a year. But over the summer, I had been able to save only a thousand dollars. I needed another thousand and had no way to come up with it.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Dad asked.
Dad called a week later and told me to meet him at Lori’s. When he arrived with Mom, he was carrying a large plastic garbage bag and had a small brown paper bag tucked under his arm. I assumed it was a bottle of booze, but then he opened the paper bag and turned it upside down. Hundreds of dollar bills — ones, fives, tens, twenties, all wrinkled and worn — spilled into my lap.
“There’s nine hundred and fifty bucks,” Dad said. He opened the plastic bag, and a fur coat tumbled out. “That there’s mink. You should be able to pawn it for fifty, at least.”
I stared at the loot. “Where did you get all this?” I finally asked.
“New York City is full of poker players who wouldn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Dad,” I said. “you guys need this money more than I do.”
“It’s yours,” Dad said. “Since when is it wrong for a father to take care of his little girl?”
“But I can’t.” I looked at Mom.
She sat down next to me and patted my leg. “I’ve always believed in the value of a good education,” she said.
So, when I enrolled for my final year at Barnard, I paid what I owed on my tuition with Dad’s wadded, crumpled bills.
A MONTH LATER, I got a call from Mom. She was so excited she was tripping over her own words. She and Dad had found a place to live. Their new home, Mom said, was in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side. “It’s a tad run-down,” she admitted. “But all it really needs is a little TLC. And best of all, it’s free.”
Other folks were also moving into abandoned buildings, she said. They were called squatters, and the buildings were called squats. “Your father and I are pioneers,” Mom said. “Just like my great-great-grandfather, who helped tame the Wild West.”
Mom called in a few weeks and said that although the squat still needed a few finishing touches — a front door, for example — she and Dad were officially accepting visitors. I took the subway to Astor Place on a late spring day and headed east. Mom and Dad’s apartment was in a six-story walk-up. The mortar was crumbling and bricks had come loose. All the windows on the first floor had been boarded up. I reached to open the building’s front door, but where the lock and handle should have been, there was only a hole. Inside, a single naked lightbulb hung from a wire in the hallway. On one wall, chunks of plaster had crumbled away, revealing the wooden ribs and pipes and wiring. On the third floor, I knocked on the door to Mom and Dad’s apartment and heard Dad’s muffled voice. Instead of the door swinging inward, fingers appeared on both sides, and it was lifted out of the frame altogether. There was Dad, beaming and hugging me while he went on about how he’d yet to install door hinges. As a matter of fact, they’d only just gotten the door itself, which he’d found in the basement of another abandoned building.
Mom came running up behind him, grinning so widely you could see her molars, and gave me a big hug. Dad knocked a cat off a chair — they had already taken in a few strays — and offered me a seat. The room was crammed with broken furniture, bundles of clothes, stacks of books, and Mom’s art supplies. Four or five electric space heaters blasted away. Mom explained that Dad had hooked up every squat in the building to an insulated cable he’d hot-wired off a utility pole down the block. “We’re all getting free juice, thanks to your father,” Mom said. “No one in the building could survive without him.”
Dad chuckled modestly. He told me how complicated the process had been, because the wiring in the building was so ancient. “Damnedest electrical system I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The manual must have been written in hieroglyphics.”