Photographs of My Father. Paul Spike

the Civil Rights Bill.

      I sit in the Tenafly kitchen. It is eleven o’clock at night. My father has just come back from Washington and is upstairs talking to my mother. I am home from Keaton for a glorious few days of freedom. I hear him close the door to their room. He stops in the hall and listens to my brother snoring lightly in his dark room. Then he comes down the few stairs and into the bright kitchen. He has taken off his jacket and tie, wears his dark suit pants and a Brooks Brothers shirt, striped, with no pocket, which is half unbuttoned. His eyes are bloodshot and the skin on his face is etched with what I think are new wrinkles. “You look tired, Dad.”

      “I had an exhausting two days.”