Sally’s father had never once, for example, held Sally’s mother’s hand anywhere, let alone in public. Not that Sally could recall.
That first night she found herself watching him attentively when he came home, which was, as usual, after the three of them and our mother ate dinner. He sat in the living room with Johanna as he usually did, speaking pleasantly to the kids as they passed through, reading his art magazines and looking through his catalogs. How had the eighth-grade social studies teacher liked Harrison’s report on John Jay? Had Lewyn made up his mind about Androscoggin this summer? Was that a new shirt Sally was wearing?
Polite enough. Attentive enough. It was basically the way Salo had always behaved toward them, as if the fatherhood protocol had been explained to him by authorities, and he ceded to their expertise. Also, he was a benign sort of person, not at all a mean person. He’d probably never hurt anyone in his whole life.
And at the end of that evening, like any other evening, our mother and father went up the stairs lined by those birthday photographs and closed the door of their bedroom. Sally might hear David Letterman as she went up to her own room or down to the kitchen, but she never heard them speaking to each other （or—God forbid—any other kind of interactive activity）。 They were a quiet couple. We were a quiet family, that was all.
Except, as is now apparent, even to those of us who wouldn’t find out for years, that was obviously not all.
She began to pay closer attention. What, if anything, did he say about how he spent his time? And what, in particular, did he do with himself in the evenings?
“How come Dad never eats dinner with us?” she asked Johanna, once she’d worked up her nerve.
“He eats dinner with us,” our mother said, which wasn’t untrue, but it also wasn’t very common. Maybe one night a week.
“Would Dad take me with him sometime to look at the galleries?” she asked.
“Oh Sally, I think he’d love that.”
But for something he’d love, he never invited her, or either of the others.
“Dad,” she finally said, “are you busy tomorrow night? I thought maybe we could do something. Go to a play or something.”
But he had a work thing. He actually seemed genuinely sorry about it, too.
“What kind of work thing?”
“Just a dinner with some clients. They like Delmonico’s. Have you ever been to Delmonico’s?”
Of course she had never been to Delmonico’s.
“Well! We should go,” our father said. “It’s like visiting the nineteenth century.”
Sally, who had no great wish to visit the nineteenth century, just nodded.
One night, as he gathered up his catalogs at the end of the evening, an invitation fell out at her feet. He didn’t notice, and she picked it up and looked at it before handing it back. It was for the opening of a show at the American Folk Art Museum, for an artist named Henry Darger. The front of the invitation showed a line of little girls all tied together. Behind them was a row of men on horseback, each holding a flag.
“Who’s Henry Darger?” she asked, handing it over.
“An Outsider Artist,” her father said. “The most famous Outsider Artist, but not the only one.”
Sally had no idea what that meant, but those little girls seemed like more of an issue. “This is kind of sick,” she noted.
Salo actually smiled. “You’re not wrong.”
“They look like something he cut out from a magazine.”
“Yes, I think he did that.”
“And you’re going to buy something from this guy?”