Though my mother romanticized her parents’ relationship, she was a lonely child on the Yerba Buena, pained by her father’s absence during World War II, when he served in the Pacific as a captain in the navy. She once told me, after one too many Pinot Grigios, that when she was a little girl, she walked into her parents’ bedroom and thought her father had come home because an officer’s uniform was crumpled at the foot of the bed.
