Much of that winter I spent kicking through the wreckage. Snowfall was unusually heavy that season and, trekking up the long driveway, I sometimes sank hip-deep into drifts, stumbling and lurching until, at the end of a curve, the remains of what had been my father’s house came into view.

The chimneys were now blackened. The shell of the place was gone. The interior was left open to the elements. Wallpaper seared off the walls in ice-glazed scrolls. With nothing visible to support it, a section of the second floor cantilevered into thin air.

People often say houses burn to the ground. In truth it doesn’t work that way. Fire is a hungry and alive thing, devouring what it wants and brushing past what it can’t be bothered to consume. Seeking fuel, the flames licked across a floor and up a stair leading to my little sister’s room and then stopped. Everything around it was torched, yet her bedroom remained as though nothing had occurred. Her canopy bed was covered with a favorite patchwork star quilt, rumpled as if she’d just left it. Hanging above it was a lithograph of a red fox crouched atop a mossy hummock, lying in wait for two rabbits huddled below.

At the three windows overlooking what had been a dense hedge of yew bushes, curtains still hung from their rods, rigid ice flutes frozen in place. The view from those windows took in the trampled mounds of the bushes, which opened onto the broad rear yard, itself backed onto a hedge separating our property from that of an adjacent estate. The yews now resembled filthy bread loaves, blanketed in ash.

Part of the roof remained intact so, tenuous as it was, it provided me with some kind of cover as I prowled through the gutted remains. Here were the charred dining room chairs, their sleek modernist splats burnt to spearpoints; here, in the pantry, the homely Pfaltzgraff everyday dishes—relics of an earthy sixties phase of my mother’s—stood molten together by heat in a lopsided accordion; here, an Italian modernist dining table my parents shipped home from Rome, its figured rosewood surface dulled with frost, legless and flat to the floor, bedded in a heap of soot.

What exactly I was looking for was not altogether clear. Much was destroyed or had been stolen. Vanished were the contents of a silver cabinet in the pantry that curiously remained otherwise intact. Its locked door had been pried and the contents of the shelves, with their linings of felted fawn Pacific cloth, cleaned out thoroughly. I looked further to see what, if anything, was left behind from among those fancy, useless objects we possessed: the deep walnut box containing a seldom-used set of Gorham silverware in the King Edward pattern, presented to my parents on their engagement along with objects like a filigreed sterling Georgian cake basket; twelve stemmed silver goblets suggestive of a future in which, for a newly married couple barely in their twenties, sterling champagne coupes would be thought essential. Such were the things we had, and now there was nothing. Whatever the fire spared was carried off by firemen, who helped themselves to our stuff once the flames were out.

It surprised me at first to think that firemen steal. Later I would learn that it is not so unusual for things to walk away with the heroes in high boots. Some of what was taken had never amounted to much more than props suggestive of a life and class not ours to claim in the first place. Some of it may even have been “borrowed” from its original owners by the givers, though I could not know that then. Standing amid what was left of all that, I realized it no longer mattered.

Yet what weighed on me as I surveyed the scene was a sense of greater inevitability, as if the fire were a natural progression in a chain of disasters that occurred during a year of my life that stretched and compressed like a bellows, culminating in December 1975 with our house ablaze. So odd would these events seem in the retelling that I seldom mentioned them. In truth, I had begun to take for granted that a house that burns in the middle of a winter night was the sort of thing that happened to us.

The cause was straightforward. An ice storm striking the East Coast had taken out electricity in a string of bay towns along the North Shore of Long Island. Manhattan, where I lived, had been unaffected. Sometime during the night power had flashed on and then abruptly gone dead, the surge strong enough to short old wires in a wall and, as they began to smolder and burn, to set the house alight. Its layout accounted, in a sense, for why certain parts of the structure burned while others were left unscathed. A low rambling structure built in the twenties as the gardener’s cottage of a Gold Coast estate, the house had gradually expanded and been added to through the decades until it spread across three levels, a shingled up-and-down place, with additions that eventually stretched it to twenty rooms—more if you counted a large garden shed and a caretaker’s apartment above a garage converted from a carriage barn.

On the train from the city and then in a cab from the station I had already begun to feel as if made of lead. It was not sadness about the fire itself that weighed me down so much as a sense that, different from the placid lives I fantasized others having, in ours the conventional progression of familial milestones had been replaced by a parade of calamities.

What I had come looking for that day was a suitcase. Pebbled caramel leather with a rigid frame, saddle-stitched handles, and stiff leather bumpers at the corners, it had accompanied my mother for a brief stint at college and, when that dream was shelved in favor of marriage and motherhood, repurposed as photograph storage. Even empty the thing weighed a ton, and from its heft alone you could infer the existence of a world in which redcaps, bellmen, and porters were always on hand to carry your stuff.

Over a succession of weekends I had come looking for the case, trudging through the snow and then up the long driveway to what had been our red-painted door. My feet numbed quickly and, immediately upon entry, the acrid smoke smell caught in my nostrils. Ash stuck to the bottoms of my rubber-soled duck boots, and frozen vertical ridges formed in the seams of my jeans. While my sense of what the suitcase held was blurry, I recalled clearly a black-and-white snapshot of my mother carrying that very same suitcase to her all-girls Franciscan college in Joliet, Illinois. First in a graduated lineup of bright young women posed for a campus photographer, each with a valise at her feet, she was exceptionally and brightly pretty and more full-cheeked than she would ever again permit herself to be. In the style of a period when young women could not put girlhood behind them fast enough, she looked forty at eighteen.

They all did. Shiny-faced and with Lauren Bacall pageboys, wearing dark lipstick and an air of precocious maturity, her classmates in the photographs were lovely and somehow interchangeable. There had been plenty of pictures of my mother from those days and also from high school, a happy time for her, documented in dewy portrait poses and snapshots from the convent school she attended in Manhattan, images that confirmed what she was always too modest to mention, that she had been valedictorian of her class, captain of the drama and debate clubs, and the star of her swimming team.

That she was a beautiful swimmer was one fact impossible for her to downplay. Anatomically, she was built for the sport; at five feet eleven she was tall for her age—or for any woman in the 1940s—and with a broad, natural wingspan. She had learned to swim in early girlhood from her older brother, Bud—if you can call it learning to be dragged into the Atlantic off the Maidstone Club beach in East Hampton and dumped into the surf.

“Anyway, it taught me not to drown,” she once said, laughing and dragging on a Pall Mall. Yet what did she know of safety, she who had been raised without it, who had at the best of times known herself to be provisional, at least since that day when, age five or so, she and her older brother had been sent temporarily by their unemployed parents to a charity institution in the Midwest—not an orphanage, because she was no orphan, but a “home” that can never have felt to her like any such thing. I can recall only once her mentioning that time as an abandonment that marked her for life.

Eventually my mother, the former Lucille Carole Foster, would pass along to me and my three siblings what she could of swimming, focusing on form and the long, easy strokes that, though natural to her, I could never master. Because we mostly swam in the Atlantic Ocean off Fire Island she also instructed us how to survive a riptide, repeating the common wisdom about disciplining yourself to suppress the instinct to fight. Relax and release. Let the current carry you, no matter how far. Eventually, she explained, the force of the current will dissipate and weaken. Then you can make for shore.

I did learn to swim well enough, although I would not entirely lose my fear of the ocean, not in childhood or ever. My mother’s fearlessness in the water passed me by, and I sometimes think perhaps she was less brave than indifferent to danger—as, in a way, both my parents were. Children raising children, they taught us few enough practical lessons, favoring instead a sense of boldness through action. While their timid friends bodysurfed the inshore waves, they would plow through head-high rollers and swim straight out as though headed for Portugal.

They had met when he was a young lifeguard at a City Island yacht and beach club where her school swim team sometimes went to practice. The Long Island Sound surf there was pathetic, they agreed, so in a borrowed car they sometimes drove to the ocean looking for...