All the Finest Girls by Alexandra Styron

the same Fatherness. I mistook the back of every graying head for his. But I’d never seen a family resemblance between the two of us. And I knew no other Abrahams who might have given additional clues, Hank being an only child whose parents had died long before I was born.
    On my mother’s side of the family, nobody looked alike. Where other families are known for how their members resemble one another — generations of golden hair or button noses, square jaws or widows’ peaks — the Kanes resisted replication. When I was a little girl, my grandmother Edith was squat and muscular, wearing her red hair no-nonsense short like a man’s. My mother was all long legs and blond tresses, her siblings a variety pack of brunets. And then me, hair black as pitch and skin so blue white that for a time I misread the label on the milk my mother drank, thinking it was named for the pallor it resembled. Skin milk. Even my grandfather, whom I knew only from pictures, was wholly dissimiliar to anyone else. Like a loose confederation of changelings, we were none of us alike and startled even ourselves that we shared a family tree. It is why, I’ve often thought, my grandmother seemed always disappointed in us but never surprised.
    That day at the counter, something particular in my father’s countenance got me up from my stool. His eyes, gray like mine, held a queer startled expression. The quality made me think of a face trapped inside a scientist’s jar, a mad scientist whose victims were preserved at the moment of capture. The hint of panic was entirely familiar. I saw it all the time when I looked in the mirror.
    I began to make my way over to him, a little slick of sweat erupting on my forehead. Nerves, I suspected, since my teeth were chattering like a teletype machine. The meeting suddenly seemed lucky; I’d actually had Hank on my mind just a few days before. He’d recently published a new book, the first in ten years or so.
Morality and the Millennium
was a collection of his more recent essays, most of which were political in nature. A disciple of James and Dewey, Hank had taken his former pragmatic position — that the intellectual left could no longer afford to wait for the Ignorant to see the Truth, that time was past due to concentrate on the suffering of our poorest citizens — and turned up the heat to a full scorch. I hadn’t read the book myself, but from the damning reviews, I gathered that Hank had attacked not only his enemies on the right but his friends and compatriots as well. I remembered one critique in particular by the conservative commentator Arthur Block in a newsweekly. Block dubbed the book peevish and a flaccid effort from an old warrior. He also scolded Dad for wandering far afield from the courage of his lifelong convictions, even though those convictions had always been disagreeable to Block. He charged Dad with regressing into an “infantile rant” and feebly bolstering his argument with attacks on the Republican congress that were “beneath reproach.”
    I had also read a quote somewhere from my father’s old friend Max Rubinstein, whom Hank had apparently excoriated as a coward. Hank labeled him a cop-out who’d gotten fat in the groves of academe.
    “Hell was his heaven and earth,” Max rejoined. “Thus spake Zarathustra.”
    I felt sorry for my father, knowing how sensitive he was to criticism. And I figured as well that at his age, a radical intellectual with unpopular views had a pretty dark future himself. I’d considered calling him but decided that that would only make him feel worse.
    When I got around the crowd at the counter, I touched his elbow. He immediately recoiled. It was too late to turn back.
    “Oh. Addy,” he said, peering over his misted lenses. “Jesus. I … I thought you were trying to mug me.”
    “No, Dad. Just saw you and thought I’d say hi.”
    The frame of his glasses had broken and was being held together by a fat swatch of duct tape. They bent as