There's a photograph, black and white, the way everything was then. My father is standing in

front of the house on Lakeland Drive, squinting a little into the light. He has his jacket off.

He looks like a man who has just been called in from the yard, slightly impatient, good-humored about it.

He looks like a man with somewhere else to be.

I have studied that photograph for most of my life.

I was born on November 4, 1935.

My father, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, died on September 8th. You can do the arithmetic.

He knew I was coming. My mother was eight months along, but he never knew that I would carry

his name, Carl Austin Weiss Jr. I never heard his voice. That is the simplest version of what I'm going to tell you,

and also in some ways the only version that has ever felt completely true to me. Everything else is

interpretation. People have been interpreting it since before I took my first breath. Here's what

they say, that on the evening of September 8, 1935, in the corridor of the Louisiana

State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, a young doctor from a respected family approached

Senator Huey Pierce Long and shot him, that the senator's bodyguards then shot the young

doctor, that the young doctor died immediately, that the senator died two days later,

that the young doctor's name was Carl Austin Weiss, that he was my father. What they cannot agree on,

what they have never agreed on in all the decades since, is why, or even in the end, whether, I grew up in the wreckage of that question my

mother raised me in it the way you raise a child near water carefully watching always to

see how close I was getting to the edge there were things she said and things she

didn't say and the difference between them was its own

kind of education.

I am 89 years old.

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