He said, “Mighty, me in dust distressed.” Or that is at least what the doctors thought that he had said. One of them happened to know that it was a quotation from Faust. Sylvia wasn’t there to hear him say it, and so her father’s affinity for poetry would always remain a rumor. Like his love for her.

Daddy was borderline morose, quietly breathing fire, butt in hand, pink-rimmed eyes averted, but this is what endeared him to his daughter. A jocular father might have created her in order that she serve as a cheerful distraction. Even as a child she could not see herself playing such a role. So many men in her life would evidently be incapable of seeing her as playing any other. This proved unequivocally that romantic love was the extravagant misunderstanding that she had suspected from childhood that it was. In the years before she met Ted, she would gauge the success of her relationships by the savagery of their dissolution. And yet her agreeably morose beekeeper father had dissolved his relationship with her by way of a sort of capstone and crescendo of masochistic frivolity. Otto smoked merrily in his hospital bed with the great plaster nub of his sawed-off metatarsus swaying slightly in the rigging above. He looked like a mariner in a hammock. What a callous disregard for his other bodily parts, she thought at the time. Herself, for instance.

One glowing in the tray when the nurse pulled up the sheet, to hear her mother tell it.

And when her mother did tell her of it, at bedtime on a night of her eighth year, she said, “I will never speak to God again.” She would soon take up writing poetry to prove the truth of her statement. For the time being, she refused to get out of bed. Her mother tried to grapple her limp, lifeless daughter awake to no avail. Finally, after two days, she did the one thing that she would ever apologize to Sylvia for. She stood there in the little girl’s room and lit one of her husband’s cigarettes.

Soon afterward Sylvia discovered Ovid. Maybe one of the faceless old-maid schoolteachers, who doted upon her intelligence to the detriment of her popularity with the other children, gave her the copy with the imitation gilt panel that she remembers. Ovid had the poet’s healthy mistrust of the corporeal. If the universe, the invocations of the human heart, the temperaments of the deities, and the molecular structure of language were not in any way immutable, then why should anyone suspect that human form was moribund and invariable? In subtext, therefore, Ovid turned the deathbed to a magic carpet. Daddy died in the air.

She had already lost her heart to Lewis Carroll. She searched the text of Metamorphoses for an auxiliary identity. Ovid’s Princess Myrrha loved her cold father King Cinyras beyond station and shame, while he raised her in disinterest, sooner sharing his kingdom than his humanity. A dutiful daughter, she tried suicide. The underworld, not systematized until medieval times, was unsure how to classify her and did not view itself as a suitable intermediary in what was obviously a family quarrel. They turned Myrrha from their gates. Thus, in her mind, both heaven and hell had spurned her. Her dignity, it was now evident, had been a casualty of her birth. Death was not a solution, but only the final complication of the problem.