Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page Thank you for buying this Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. For my mother, Joan Byrne Murphy, and my brothers and sisters: Cullene, Siobhan, Byrne, Finn, Brendan, Cait, and Meg The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow. —G. M. Trevelyan the fading squares with their deckled edges Polaroid photographs of my father, John Cullen Murphy, posing for scenes he would draw in his first comic strip, Big Ben Bolt, mid-1950s. PROLOGUE Click. That was my after-school job—pressing down on the shutter release—from around the age of six until sometime in my teens. My father had bought a Polaroid camera in 1949, soon after the first one came on the market, the only instance in his life when he had been an early adopter (if you don’t count Barry Goldwater). Every afternoon he took pictures of himself—maybe four or five, maybe a dozen or two. The camera, a portable Model 95, manufactured by a once-fabled company, was encased in molded leather veneer. Open the front panel and an accordion-like black bellows slid out on a track, the lens at the snout embedded in a proud silvery grille that might have graced a Bentley. Before I was old enough to hold it steady or to sight through the viewfinder, the camera would be positioned on the shelf of a ladder. Or it would be placed on a table, raised to an appropriate angle and height by a variable foundation of tattered art books—an old Harper & Brothers edition of Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates; a scuffed, leather-bound Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Doré; Arthur Rackham’s Aesop’s Fables; and George Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy or his Book of a Hundred Hands. My father would take his place in front of the camera and assemble himself into a pose. Click. Then he would pull out the exposed film from the end of the camera; wait thirty seconds for the picture to develop inside its sealed chemical packet; peel the finished photograph away from the moist, aromatic backing with a satisfying pfffft; and preserve the image with a swipe of chemical fixative. On the first try, something was usually not quite right with the picture. The rictus of terror was not horrifying enough, the laughter too demure, the pang of grief far below the level of heartrending pathos my father was seeking. He had acquired his mental map of emotional display from watching silent movies as a boy. These movies,