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In the fall of 1991, I flew back to boarding school in California from our home in New York; my father had driven me to the airport. Once at my dorm, I called home, and my mother sounded strange on the phone: "Your father never came home." He'd hugged me at the United terminal, then gotten in his car and driven all the way to Arizona, to his mistress. I remember thinking, How could he not tell me he wasn't coming back?

But then he did come back. A few months later, he showed up at my graduation -- tan, fit, wearing a linen suit, his white hair longer than I'd ever seen it. I never spoke to him about his family sabbatical.

My father died 10 years ago and, to be fair, he was a great deal more than his infidelities. He had a Dickensian childhood -- raised in an orphanage, knew only poverty, never dreamed of going to college. He was highly intelligent (he invented film-processing systems that revolutionized photography), generous and so handsome that Catherine Deneuve flirted with him and Audrey Hepburn tried to buy him a drink. (He declined. I never learned why.) I take after my father in many ways -- I got his dark eyes, his hot temper, his taste for burned toast. And I understand why he cheated: There wasn't enough love in the world to make up for what he'd missed as a child. I just wish I wasn't doomed to repeat it.

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