But no matter how suburban and protected my baby was, no matter how Ivy League and graceful his father, no matter how influential and loving my own all-American parents, there was no denying the exotic look Jeremy had about his eyes, or the slight hint of darkness in his skin, or the blackness of his hair that wallowed, from the beginning, past his ears. There was something foreign about Jeremy from the start. There was his father’s blood that would not be negated, and the Salvadoran bibs that had arrived in plastic sleeves, and the Salvadoran linens, embroidered collars. There were the Salvadoran songs that somehow did get sung, and the endearments: bonito niÒo, buen niÒo, mucho gusto bonito niÒo. The slip of Spanish into a child’s ear. The electrochemical sparks of another language.

The first time we took Jeremy to El Salvador, he was four. It was February 1993, just one year into the cease-fire that had been cobbled together by an exhausted government and a depleted gang of rebels. I didn’t like the idea of going to a place still percolating with the memory of an 11-year civil war, and fought it. Aimless death squads, I cautioned. Choleric guerrillas. One percent of the population sacrificed to the fighting, their tangled, splintered, naked bones still barely hidden underground, or not hidden at all, but dumped inside mass graves. I argued that it was indecent, irresponsible to take a child to that place, that cease-fires had been marched out before in El Salvador but discontent had a mind of its own. Safety is here. The familiar is here. The things he’s grown accustomed to. All here. I argued, and of course I lost. A son should know where his father comes from. What he means when he says, Once upon a time I was a boy.

Jeremy was four. He liked cars, and he liked planes. I equipped him with a bag full of his favorite miniatures and did not let him out of sight for five protracted days. In the photographs of that trip that year, Jeremy rides the proud shoulders of his father and, sometimes, the shoulders of Rodi and Mario, Bill’s brothers. On occasion he wears the thin plastic helmet that he favored at the time, its imagined protection jammed down over his ears, its green plastic visor snapped forward over his eyes. He wears the shirts and overalls I loved dressing him in, comports himself in the chubby feathery cheeks that I’m addicted, still, to touching. I am not in any of the photographs, but Jeremy is there and, again, he is there: in the arms of his father and his father’s country.

Every marriage, my friend Sandy says, is a multicultural marriage. I think that’s true and right. My mother’s mother was Irish and her father was Italian; they learned, over a lifetime, to mix the spices. Bill’s parents were from separate places—the United States, El Salvador; they remained in separate places all their lives. Couples I know grew up one rural and the other urban, one Orthodox Jew and the other lapsed Catholic, one Canadian and the other a pure shot of Manhattan, one bothered and the other meditatively calm. There are no perfect photographs, there are only photographs, only evidence of the ways we dance, in and out, in and out, of one another. It is in the ways we love our children that they learn just how to love, and whom to love, and what family history is.