Threading the Needle by Marie Bostwick

and with good reason: tuition was free. The family would never have been able to pay for Dad’s education otherwise.
    The courses were demanding and the discipline was rigorous, but there was still time for Dad and his shipmates to go into Manhattan on weekends. He met my mother in Greenwich Village, at the White Horse Tavern, where beatnik poets, writers, and hangers-on liked to drink. In the same year my parents met, the poet Dylan Thomas would collapse at the White Horse Tavern. He died a few days later.
    My mother made fun of Dad’s short midshipman’s haircut and starched uniform, but he didn’t care. He was smitten. Every time he could get leave, Dad made a beeline for the city so he could see her.
    Edna heaped the whole blame for all that happened on my mother, but I have my doubts. Dad was a good man, but he was a man, and young, subject to the same tricks and traps of biology as any other healthy, normal, not-quite-twenty-year-old male. I’m sure my mother didn’t have to tie him down to get him to sleep with her, but you could never have gotten Edna to believe it.
    I’m not saying my mother was an angel. I don’t know what she was; I never met her. Neither had Edna, but that didn’t stop her from painting my mother as a conniving tramp who had lured my father into her bed—and probably plenty of other men as well. Scores of them. Who knew which of my mother’s revolving door of lovers fathered me?
    â€œYou don’t look like anyone on our side of the family, that’s for certain,” she’d say. “A girl like that could have put anything over on him. Tommy was always too softhearted for his own good.”
    I suppose it’s possible, but I do have his eyes. As far as my mother being able to put something over on him? That’s possible, too.
    Within a few months of meeting Dad, my mother was pregnant. Whether Dad was the only one or only one of many, I have no idea. But he insisted on “doing the right thing” and marrying my mother.
    I’m a little unclear on what happened next, but I know the wedding never took place. In due course, my mother gave birth, dumped me with Dad, and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Dad dropped out of school to care for me, which made my grandparents furious. It didn’t happen until I was three, but Edna insisted that stress over Dad’s quitting school caused my grandfather’s fatal heart attack.
    Dad rented a house in Groton and found a job in maritime construction. Welding hatches onto submarines was as close as he’d ever come to seafaring. His hours could be strange, but the work was steady. The Cold War was good for business.
    Dad hired a babysitter, Mrs. O’Dell, to look after me while he was working. Other than that, it was just Dad and I, living in a little house just a few blocks from the Connecticut shoreline. Most of the time, I was happy.
    When I was in the second grade, my school held a mother-daughter tea. Mrs. O’Dell offered to go with me, but Dad took the day off work and came himself. He was the only father there. I remember how funny he looked sitting in a second-grader-sized chair, drinking pink lemonade and eating a pink-frosted cookie shaped like a tulip. I remember all the women in the room smiling as they looked at him, and feeling so proud of him. Dad was very good-looking.
    Amelia Jessup’s desk sat next to mine. Her mother looked at my father, smiled, and said, “Amelia, aren’t you going to introduce me to your classmate?”
    â€œThis is Madelyn Beecher,” Amelia replied dutifully. “And this is her father, Mr. Beecher.” Smiles and handshakes were exchanged between the adults.
    Then Amelia turned to her mother, and in that hoarse stage whisper that seven-year-olds have, she rasped, “Madelyn’s father came because she doesn’t have a mother. But Teacher said we aren’t supposed to talk about it.”
    The