Relay: The Thing With Faye

About two years after my mother died, at the unfair age of 58, my dad, who was in his early 60s, found himself pursued by a phalanx of age-appropriate widows.

When I say pursued, I’m not kidding. Hardly a day went by when he was not invited to a home-cooked dinner, a reading or a talk, a Broadway show or a Carnegie Hall concert for which they just happened to have an extra ticket, and on and on.

I remember one woman who used to run into him “accidentally” at least twice a week. Also one who requested the pleasure of his company for an entire winter’s Metropolitan Opera series (he didn’t accept); another who turned up in a nearby cabin after he told her he was going on a cruise, and yet another who actually bought an apartment in his same building.

I am an only child. After my mother’s death my father used to call me every night precisely at 6. “Hi, baby, what’s new?” “What’s new with you, Dad?” and out it would come: “Well, I was looking forward to a quiet evening, but (Florence/Serena/Mildred/Bel) called and suggested we take in a movie, so. . . .”

“Bel,” by the by, was Bel Kauffman, who wrote a wildly popular novel called “Up the Down Staircase” that nobody today remembers unless they’re about 103, which she was when she died last year. She had a career as a teacher in the New York City public schools and, after the book was published, financial security for the rest of her long life. I seem to recall that she wanted an escort, not a husband, and Dad, whose 32-year marriage to my mother was one of consummate contentment, seemed fine with that.

And then there was Faye.

I blame my Aunt Maybelle for Faye. They were friends from high school, but then Faye got married and went to live in Texas. When they reconnected many years later, after Faye’s husband died and she moved back east, Maybelle gave her, oh, at least a day to settle in before calling her widower brother to set them up.

Texas, which at the time seemed to me about as close to the real world as Mars, really did a number on Faye. She was as different from my mother — who was stylish in a classic ’50s way, great with design and decoration and entertaining though not so much with crossword puzzles, dark-haired with a striking white streak in front, absolutely unaffected, and happiest when Dad and I were happy — as two women could be. Faye, “five-foot-two, eyes of blue,” had platinum hair, an I-dare-you-to-disagree attitude, a broad Southern accent that faded when she was “all riled up,” as often happened when the talk was about something that didn’t interest her, and, for my lawyer-father — high-minded, conservative, a wearer of vests — a come-hither crinkling of the eyes and an inexplicable, to me, attraction.

She was altogether unlike the other women of his generation and crowd. I suppose that had a lot to do with it.

They’d known each other for several months when he caught me by surprise one day with a question.

“What do you think of Faye?”

The question seemed casual — he wasn’t given to subtlety — and I answered it casually, without thinking.

“Not much.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I mean, she’s smart and pretty and everything, but there’s something, I don’t know, fake about her.”

I don’t remember any more of what was said — probably there was no more — but a few months later he told me Faye was going to marry a judge in New Jersey. That was the last time I heard her name mentioned, except for when Aunt Maybelle, a world-class guiltmaker, told me Faye had fallen very hard for Dad and had got engaged on the rebound.

My father lived another 10 or 12 years. He seemed older, now that I think of it, after the thing with Faye, as if some spark had gone out. He never remarried.

Looking back from a distance of decades, knowing with every year that passes a few more friends who have lost their spouses or longtime partners and seeing them ill with loneliness, I find myself thinking more and more about that conversation. I know that lots of children object to a parent’s remarriage for all sorts of reasons, not all of them bad, and every case is different, but I wonder.

Why did I say what I said? And why did he ask me?

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large. She is at large in Amagansett for the time being.