I’m a reverse commuter. I live on West Seventy-ninth Street in Manhattan, in a small second-floor apartment in a converted town house. It’s about as big as a minute, but it has a working fireplace, high ceilings, a bedroom large enough for a bed and dresser, and a kitchen area that is separate from the living room. I furnished it from garage sales held in the tonier parts of Englewood and I love the way it looks. I also love working at the library in Englewood, and, of course, that means I get to see a lot of my grandmother, Margaret O’Neil, whom my father and I have always called Maggie.

Her daughter, who was my mother, died when I was only two weeks old. It happened in the late afternoon. She was propped up in bed nursing me, when an embolism hit her heart. My father called shortly after and was alarmed she did not answer the phone. He rushed home to find her lifeless body, her arms still cradling me. I was asleep, my lips contentedly suckling her breast.

My father was an engineer who, after a year with a bridge-building company, had quit and made gardening, previously his avocation, his full-time career. He used his keen mind to achieve a different kind of engineering triumph in the local estates, creating gardens with rock walls, and waterfalls, and winding paths. Which is why he was hired by Peter Carrington’s stepmother, Elaine, who disliked the unyielding rigidity of her predecessor’s taste in landscaping.

Daddy was eight years older than my mother, thirty-two when she died. By then he had established a solid reputation in his field. All might have been well enough except that after my mother’s death, Daddy began to drink too much. Because of it, I began to spend more and more time with my grandmother. I can remember her pleading with him, “For God sake, Jonathan, you’ve got to get help. What would Annie think of what you are doing to yourself? And how about Kathryn? Doesn’t she deserve better?”