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with revelation. “Took me one when she was out shoppin’ on the Rue de Rivoli. Had a big ol’ surprise waitin’ for her when she got back to the George Cinq.” My stepmother’s expression was flawlessly deadpan. “Now there’s an image we could all live without.”
    “Tell me,” I said, offering her a crooked smile.
    Darlie looked good for fifty-three, I thought. She had trimmed down considerably, and her strawberry-blond hair was cropped stylishly short. We had never been close, but I admired the way she let the old man’s crap roll off her back. My mother had spent her marriage tiptoeing around his anger and intolerance, making endless excuses and hoping, I suppose, for a miraculous conversion. Darlie just saw Pap as something elemental and unavoidable, like hur-ricanes and pluff mud, to be endured with stoic humor.
    Maybe it helped that Darlie wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t white trash, or even “common,” as we used to say, but had I brought her home during high school, she would surely have been assessed as someone whose family didn’t “go to the ball.” Darlie’s father had been a chief yeoman at the naval base, her mother a bank teller.
    Perfectly respectable, unless you grew up south of Broad, where
    “nice folks” were ruthlessly delineated by their attendance at the St.
    Cecilia Ball. Nowadays Darlie was nice by marriage, but Pap behaved as if she’d been born to the job, and defied anyone—from any class—to suggest otherwise. No one in his family could ever be less than aristocratic, just as no one could really be gay. When the truth locked horns with my father’s prejudices, it was always the truth that suffered.
    “Sometimes,” my sister, Josie, once remarked, “I wish I’d given him a black grandchild, just to see how he’d make it white.”
    Our food had arrived, but my father’s eyes had wandered out to the Embarcadero. A line of signal flags—plastic and strictly decorat-ive—was snapping in the night air like forgotten laundry.
    “India, Echo, Charlie,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Those three next to the lamppost. Right?” Pap and I had both served in the navy, once upon a time. This was our common currency, so I doled it out judiciously whenever I wanted to feel closer to him. Thirty years earlier, I had written long letters home from Vietnam, shamelessly dramatizing my circumstances, just to make him proud of me. Nothing could soften his heart like the memory of war.
    He squinted at the signal flags for a moment, then grunted. “Who the hell knows? That’s why you got signalmen.” I turned to my stepmother. “He found out about me that way, you know.”
    Darlie looked puzzled. “That you were gay?”
    “No,” I said with a brittle laugh. “That I was born.”
    “Christ.” My father flinched in delayed reaction to that word .
    “He was on his minesweeper in…where was it, Pap?”
    “Guadalcanal. Well…no, Florida Island, Tulagi…”
    “Anyway, he got word from the flagship that I’d been born. And they had to use semaphore to do it.”
    “No kidding,” said Darlie.
    I always loved the romance of this: the blue water and blazing heat, a strapping young signalman in his white sailor suit, brandish-ing flags with the news of me. It was the South Pacific of Nellie Forbush and Mr. Roberts , a showbiz entrance if ever there was one.
    “What was the message?” asked Darlie.
    “Hell,” said my father. “I don’t remember.”
    “Yes, you do,” I said. “‘Baby born, mother and son fine.’”
    “Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”
    I wondered if I’d embarrassed him with the mention of my mother; he rarely brought her up around Darlie. For years, I think, he’d felt guilty about remarrying after Mummie’s death, judging from the number of disclaimers he made to his children. “You know,” he would tell us, “this doesn’t change how I feel about your mother.” We understood that perfectly, and we approved of Darlie—age difference and all—in a