My Parents’ Marriage

I was the model for a group of mischievous, neglected, wise-before-their-time prepubescent girls who did everything from getting lost to nabbing the nuts put out for cocktails, and my mother was my father’s one-woman university for the study of women—especially pretty, selfish women. “The Enormous Radio” was written in early 1947, and it features the superficially attractive family that often opens my father’s short stories, whether they are set in New York City or in the suburbs that line the Hudson River—the Rhine of America. In this story, written when we lived in the brick apartment building at 400 East Fifty-Ninth Street near the East River, Jim and Irene Westcott and their two children live in an Upper East Side apartment building near the East River. They are an ordinary family except for one unusual thing: their love of music. They share an eccentric passion for Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. They love the Chopin études and thrill to the Fifth Symphony. How can this be a problem? How could this enthusiasm unravel their perfect lives?