‘How Many of Us Do You Think Are Out There?’

We met by accident .

I mean that literally—a Yankee friend of mine blew a tire while driving south and swerved into oncoming traffic.

He came out of it untouched, and wound up in Atlanta while his car was being serviced.

I live in Atlanta, and he called to see if I wanted to go out to dinner with him and his Aunt Maura to celebrate his survival.

Maura was around my age and fairly new to town.

We talked for a few minutes before dinner and she asked what I’d been writing.

I told her I’d just finished a book about my father , Lou Junod.

“What’s so interesting about him?” she asked, and I gave what had become my standard answer: “He was a philanderer.” And then, because that word didn’t seem to do Big Lou justice, I added the usual modifiers: charismatic, reckless, ruthless, relentless, irresistible, unrepentant, prolific.

Maura’s reply did not require as many words.

Her father also happened to be a philanderer, she said.

But he wasn’t like that —he didn’t play the field.

He was, by all appearances, an upright man.

He just had a woman across town, and with her he had a second family, who knew him better than Maura’s family ever did, because at least the children the world deemed illegitimate knew his secrets.

“It haunts me,” she said.