I nodded. I got it. Dad continued.

Though she could still hardly speak a word of English, my grandmother hooked up with my grandfather number two after only six months. It’s debatable whether this should be a source of pride or a source of shame, but he was a man who could trace his family back to the last boatload of English-born convicts dumped on Australian soil. While it’s true that some criminals were sent down for petty crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, my father’s ancestor had not been one of them- or that is, he might have been, but he also raped three women, and if after raping those women he swiped a loaf of bread on his way home, it is not known.

Their courtship was fast. Apparently unperturbed by acquiring a child not of his own making, within a month, armed with a Polish dictionary and a book on English grammar, he asked my grandmother to marry him. “I’m just a battler, which means it’ll be us against the world, and the world will probably win hands down every time, but we’ll never give up fighting, no matter what, how does that sound?” She didn’t answer. “Come on. Just say, ‘I do,’ ” he pleaded. “It comes from the verb ‘to do.’ That’s all you need for now. Then we’ll move you on to ‘I did.’ ”

My grandmother considered her situation. She didn’t have anybody to help look after her baby if she went out to work, and she didn’t want her child to grow up fatherless and poor. She thought, “Do I have the necessary ruthlessness to marry a man I don’t really love for my son’s welfare? Yes, I do.” Then, looking at his hapless face, she thought, “I could do worse,” one of the most ostensibly benign though chilling phrases in any language.

He was unemployed when they married, and when she moved into his apartment, my grandmother was dismayed to discover it was filled with a terrifying potpourri of macho toys: rifles, replica pistols, model war planes, weights and dumbbells. When immersed in bodybuilding, kung fu training, or cleaning his gun, he whistled amiably. In the quiet moments when the frustration of unemployment settled in and he was absorbed with anger and depression, he whistled darkly.