The heat-softened plastic flowers, the withering balloons and the sightless stares of the teddy bears made me lose my appetite and feel faint. Who had placed these tokens there? Certainly not anyone who really knew the Kennedys or Bessettes. These offerings had been left by persons who wished to be connected to this event, who felt elevated by presuming this closeness to a famous family.

When did the misappropriation of mourning begin? Grieving was once a dignified condition—with privacy respected, seclusion secured. If I wrack my now tragedy-strained brain, I think the truly massive funerary gifts from strangers began in shrink-wrapped earnest with the death of Princess Di. I recall a telescopic long shot: acres of cellophane-wrapped bouquets, spread, rotting on the ground, then, later, the tales of mourners wading into her memorial pool, clogged with more “offerings.”

On the home front, I can conjure another disturbing, precedent-setting scene: the death site of Susan Smith’s two little sons, the ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union County, S.C., where Ms. Smith drowned her toddlers in their car seats. I was stunned to see the greeting cards and teddy bears piling up on this death pier. Television news showed these “mourners”—parents whose outrage had led them first to a Toys “R” Us, and then to the dock. What did this accomplish for two small boys who died? Was this a contemporary and egalitarian update of the ancient Egyptian belief that possessions might accompany the dead pharaohs? Could the purple plush Barney travel into eternity with Ms. Smith’s sons, acting as a stuffed sentinel into the afterlife?

In a moment on live TV, a man who had driven some distance was shown, yanking his own child to the death scene. I wondered if this wasn’t more severe a lapse of taste than ordinary rubbernecking? Why would someone go out of his or her way to pay such “tribute?” Did they wake up and say, “Hey, let’s go to that ramp where the mother rolled the car with her children into the water?” I had the thought—perhaps unfair—that the father had some dark impulses of his own, and he was expunging these urges through sanctimonious voyeurism. I could not regard this man as much “better” than Ms. Smith, who had at first sniffled on national TV to “find whoever took my children and bring ’em back.” She uttered the usual tearful pleas with a tinny insincerity that matched the cheap toys laid to rest on the dock.

The only innocents in the Susan Smith drama were the dead boys. The mourners—save those who really knew the children—struck me as emotional accomplices after the fact. Who, after all, sees the news and thinks, “Now I must run out and buy teddy bears to place at the spot?”

Yet these forensic “presents,” teddy-bear and floral placements, are now commonplace. The line between personal and public has been erased, as a talk-show audience nation has pre-empted the lives and deaths of anyone in the media for whatever reason. The grisly pleasure taken in this behavior is barely disguised. When the now-famous runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks turned up alive in Georgia instead of in the predicted culvert, the townspeople seemed outraged: The public displays of mourning had already begun, and there was a community rehearsing for her funeral. Her fiancé had the grace to welcome her home, but most of the town looked enraged. Not, I might venture, at the wasted expense of searching for her corpse, but at the disappointment in not having a corpse for a final vigil. The accustomed rhythm—search, ribbons, corpse, teddy bears—had been disrupted.

In the past few days, I was also troubled by a radio interview with a woman who was commenting on the death of a high-school hero in Iraq. She was busy manufacturing yellow ribbons. She was so busy with those ribbons that the true loss of a young life seemed a loose end. The industry of ribboning had wrapped up the grief process and tied the final bow of justification on the war that killed the boy.

In contrast, Cindy Sheehan, the “Peace Mom” who refuses to accept Presidential platitudes, is demonstrating an earned, and genuine, way to mourn—and also to channel her inconsolable loss into a meaningful action against the forces that killed her son. She is the personification of true feeling, as opposed to sentimentality.

Now, as mass tragedy engulfs us on several fronts, the magnitude may wash away much of the falseness that has taken over as a national habit. In New Orleans, death became mundane: “Turn left at the corpse.” Perhaps this pragmatism more accurately depicts the state of involvement of most strangers on the scene. In a sunken mass grave, there is no way to float kitsch.

With so many to mourn, it may be time to return to appropriate response, and acknowledge that flowers, poems and gifts are the province of the bereaved. In our accelerating new Dark Age, while we grieve for so many lives lost, we may also mourn grief itself.

When did the misappropriation of mourning begin? Grieving was once a dignified condition—with privacy respected, seclusion secured. If I wrack my now tragedy-strained brain, I think the truly massive funerary gifts from strangers began in shrink-wrapped earnest with the death of Princess Di. I recall a telescopic long shot: acres of cellophane-wrapped bouquets, spread, rotting on the ground, then, later, the tales of mourners wading into her memorial pool, clogged with more “offerings.”

On the home front, I can conjure another disturbing, precedent-setting scene: the death site of Susan Smith’s two little sons, the ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union County, S.C., where Ms. Smith drowned her toddlers in their car seats. I was stunned to see the greeting cards and teddy bears piling up on this death pier. Television news showed these “mourners”—parents whose outrage had led them first to a Toys “R” Us, and then to the dock. What did this accomplish for two small boys who died? Was this a contemporary and egalitarian update of the ancient Egyptian belief that possessions might accompany the dead pharaohs? Could the purple plush Barney travel into eternity with Ms. Smith’s sons, acting as a stuffed sentinel into the afterlife?

In a moment on live TV, a man who had driven some distance was shown, yanking his own child to the death scene. I wondered if this wasn’t more severe a lapse of taste than ordinary rubbernecking? Why would someone go out of his or her way to pay such “tribute?” Did they wake up and say, “Hey, let’s go to that ramp where the mother rolled the car with her children into the water?” I had the thought—perhaps unfair—that the father had some dark impulses of his own, and he was expunging these urges through sanctimonious voyeurism. I could not regard this man as much “better” than Ms. Smith, who had at first sniffled on national TV to “find whoever took my children and bring ’em back.” She uttered the usual tearful pleas with a tinny insincerity that matched the cheap toys laid to rest on the dock.

The only innocents in the Susan Smith drama were the dead boys. The mourners—save those who really knew the children—struck me as emotional accomplices after the fact. Who, after all, sees the news and thinks, “Now I must run out and buy teddy bears to place at the spot?”

Yet these forensic “presents,” teddy-bear and floral placements, are now commonplace. The line between personal and public has been erased, as a talk-show audience nation has pre-empted the lives and deaths of anyone in the media for whatever reason. The grisly pleasure taken in this behavior is barely disguised. When the now-famous runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks turned up alive in Georgia instead of in the predicted culvert, the townspeople seemed outraged: The public displays of mourning had already begun, and there was a community rehearsing for her funeral. Her fiancé had the grace to welcome her home, but most of the town looked enraged. Not, I might venture, at the wasted expense of searching for her corpse, but at the disappointment in not having a corpse for a final vigil. The accustomed rhythm—search, ribbons, corpse, teddy bears—had been disrupted.

In the past few days, I was also troubled by a radio interview with a woman who was commenting on the death of a high-school hero in Iraq. She was busy manufacturing yellow ribbons. She was so busy with those ribbons that the true loss of a young life seemed a loose end. The industry of ribboning had wrapped up the grief process and tied the final bow of justification on the war that killed the boy.

In contrast, Cindy Sheehan, the “Peace Mom” who refuses to accept Presidential platitudes, is demonstrating an earned, and genuine, way to mourn—and also to channel her inconsolable loss into a meaningful action against the forces that killed her son. She is the personification of true feeling, as opposed to sentimentality.

Now, as mass tragedy engulfs us on several fronts, the magnitude may wash away much of the falseness that has taken over as a national habit. In New Orleans, death became mundane: “Turn left at the corpse.” Perhaps this pragmatism more accurately depicts the state of involvement of most strangers on the scene. In a sunken mass grave, there is no way to float kitsch.

With so many to mourn, it may be time to return to appropriate response, and acknowledge that flowers, poems and gifts are the province of the bereaved. In our accelerating new Dark Age, while we grieve for so many lives lost, we may also mourn grief itself.

My mother was never "Mom." I called my mother by her first name, Rosie, and Rosie was light years ahead of her time: a single mother, a 35-year-old "career girl" from a respectable family who had a baby on her own, long before such matters were routine or applauded. Tall and attractive ("People always say I'm 'attractive,'" my mother would muse aloud. "Does that mean ' not beautiful or pretty'?") …. In retrospect, attractive was the right word: Rosie attracted. She was tall for those days (5-foot-8), with a mass of dark curls and shining dark eyes. She wore Barbara Stanwyck–style suits and smart pumps. Her favorite job was as Thornton Wilder's secretary. I still have a note from Thornton Wilder thanking my mother "for her beautiful smile." Her smile was beautiful, because it was spontaneous. She sparkled when she smiled; her eyes crinkled, and her smiles often escalated to breathless laughs.  But as she walked smartly around on those smart pumps, Rosie left behind a trail of contradictions.

Though ahead of her time, she was old-fashioned enough to hide most of the crucial information. She mentioned my father only in the vaguest romantic terms. He'd been handsome, blond, a flier (how apropos this was, I can only guess). When I was 4, she announced that he'd been shot down in "the war." The single problem with this story was that, at that time, there was no war-save, perhaps, the war between the sexes. 

But something happened that spring day when she told me on the sunny street that my father would not be "marching home."  As a grown woman now, I can guess that day marked the day she decided not to wait for my father any longer. Not only was he dead "on a flying mission," but his medals had been burned, his uniform was ashes, and there was nothing-not a charred ribbon-to be sent home to us.

Having never known my father, I recall being less devastated by his alleged death (even then I think I suspected he was very much alive, only dispensed with) than by the possibility that his alleged dog, a boxer named Butch who had been described by Rosie as "his canine co-pilot," might also have perished on this same Air Force mission. How kind of her to spare Butch from the conflagration. Butch was  "reassigned," she told me. "The Air Force needs dogs like Butch." Of course, I would love to ask her to tell me the truth about my father-a truth I have yet to discover. For a while, I speculated that my father might have been Thornton Wilder, but as an adult playwright, knowing more about Thornton Wilder now, I think that's unlikely.

I now believe, in a profound sense, that my father did "die" the day that Rosie said so.  That day marked the beginning of my life with my now-declared-single mother. She lit a memorial candle that flamed for 24 hours, and that was it. I asked if we should pray for him, and she said, "That won't be necessary."

In fact, Rosie was very soon on the lookout for handsome men. We went out to spot them in the park. It was like bird watching: "There's a handsome one," she would whisper. "Look over there-he's playing tennis!" We would often picnic on these man-watching expeditions and, once prone, she would speak her bedroom voice; she could take pauses with a sexual hush. "You have his eyes," she once said. My mother had a come-hither look, but when men came hither, she looked away.

I remember her dating only once, an occasion I fear I ruined. I couldn't believe she would desert me for a strange man.  How was it possible? Yet she had hired the teenage girl from the next-door apartment to "sit" me. I almost immediately flattened to the wall, red-faced and screaming. Rosie returned to an Exorcist-style scene of tossed crayons and recriminations.

The only other time I recall Rosie going out with a man, she took me along for the ride. We went to City Island and sat at a garden restaurant. I recall digging evilly in the tableside fernery and exchanging looks of complete understanding-pure hatred-with her new "Isn't he handsome?" friend.

From then on, our weekend expeditions around the city were twosomes-I had my mother to myself, but not for long. The last outing was, in a way, the most prophetic. Rosie, dressed as always in a smart suit and city heels, took me for a long walk in Central Park's Ramble. Somewhere deep in an urban version of a glen, we spread out our blanket; my mother lay back, semi-formally attired as she was, and "dozed off," as she would put it. I seized the moment to explore the shadows that surrounded us and, in a few short steps, entered a cathedral quiet: a vast outdoor amphitheater shrouded by a canopy of dark leaves. I had lost my way. I was 8 years old, and time and distance could become illusions. Would she ever find me? 

I employed a magic trick. If I concentrated on her name and image, I could will my mother to my side.

I summoned, and Rosie appeared-for the last time.

The next day, she entered a white brick hospital on the flank of the Bronx and never returned home. She left wearing a navy suit and high heels. She waved from the corner. 

Two weeks later, she was buried "somewhere on the island' in one of those congested cemeteries.

The next Mother's Day, I wished I could skip school: Everyone's head was bent over hand-drawn cards. I recalled my previous year's effort: a real seashell from our last trip to Rockaway Beach, pasted with tulle on a drawing of my mother as a mermaid. The card said, "Oh to love a mother fair, combing her hair, with a comb of pearl … and her little girl."

I still have the card, and now two daughters of my own-ages 12 and 14. I reflect that my girls have had me-also a single mother- x number of years longer than I shared my life with Rosie. Motherless children tell time by a different calendar: All dates are measured against one fatal day. This year, I will receive the hand-drawn cards, embellished by roses and sentiments, and vow to save them for as long as I live. For some of us, May 8 is Mother's Day; for others, every day is.

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of a memoir, Sleeping Arrangements; a novel, Beautiful Bodies; and a just-published young-adult novel, The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume (HarperCollins), about a girl whose mother vanishes one night.

Above ground, the I.M. Pei–designed tower stands as a citadel devoted to inconspicuous/conspicuous consumption. The hotel is famous for its capacious rooms, 60-second steeping baths, $2,900-a-day suites and complimentary shoeshines.

Before the spa closed temporarily last April, I rode the elevator down to what seemed like the center of the earth. I felt a sense of decompression, a pressure at my ears. I have hallucinatory memories of a chic Hieronymous Bosch-a supermodel's clenched buttocks, her buns of steel. There was a tunic-clad man with mortuary good manners, a Romanian woman attendant who rubbed me with Dead Sea salts. As a finisher, I had been wrapped in a Mylar shroud, my "Astrofoil." The massage room was devoid of features, save a round wall clock that seemed to chart my decline. I imagined myself in an episode of CSI . I recall the electrocution-chamber appearance of the foot-pool chair and the upside-down wash, gel and soap dispensers. Sybaritic yet sterile, the old spa seemed a sensuous version of same-day surgery. Would the new installation, I wondered, soften or extend this original forensic-chic concept?

Now, in summer, the Four Seasons seems even more Deco-dent, the indolent air of the lobby reminiscent of my favorite old film, Land of the Pharaohs . The limestone columns provide a vanishing-point perspective …. While I feel dwarfed upon entering, dwarfing is not an inauspicious start. I've been sitting at a computer, writing non-stop for four years; I carry my book fat as love handles. I recall Colette, in Cheri , and her description of a truly "crushing ass."

I re-enter the Four Seasons in a voluminous summer dress with primary-colored tulips, a shriek in this neutral setting.

"We have no colors," the hotel spokeswoman, Leslie Lefkowitz, says. "We are monochromatic." I note that even the floral decorations are "discreet"-gray, curly willow arches bearing infinitesimal neutral buds. The willow is lit so that the twigs' shadows reprise the veins in the marble below.

Leslie, a pretty, black-ringlet-haired woman (cast as an Egyptian/Jewish princess in Land of the Pharaohs ?), points to a faint moss-tinted settee. "That is as close to color as we dare. I.M. Pei had this concept to emphasize the Deco design above the inhabitants." And so, like extras in a pyramid scene, we cross the soaring lobby.

I will be the first, I'm told, to meet the Inova team in charge of the renovation and learn their hitherto-secret plan. I am mellow from a hot-stone massage in the temporary spa quarters. Until the netherworld is complete, hotel guests are being offered bargain $135 to $255 "in-room massages and wraps," and I took advantage. A fifth-floor hotel suite has been temporarily adapted to serve "outsiders." There, Suk Mancinelli, the Korean-born spa manager, personally administered to my wounded body, working with lava stones heated in her Cooks Essentials roaster, which she had lugged up from the sub-basement. Suk, who's been overseeing the subterranean spa for 10 years, seemed refreshed by the chunks of daylight upstairs. "I have a window now," she said. "I always went out once a day to see the sun." Suk is a compact woman, with neat short hair, glasses and a gentle, firm manner that matches her touch. She imparts an unusual degree of empathy throughout the treatment. We had murmured, to the chiming of "Bliss Aeoliah from Spa Sound Scapes," of our respective lives. Suk had remarried, an Italian widower; I had adopted two baby girls.

The soft touch and tender confidences exchanged upstairs contrast with the spa executives, bristling with enterprise, whom I meet in the lobby. Joseph Conant and Diane Hess are fresh from their triumphant creation of the Four Seasons Spa in Chicago. Now they've been summoned to New York to surpass themselves. "Here at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, we must be"-Joseph introduces the concept-"the first, the only, the best!"

"The first, the only, the best!" echoes Diane as she glides into the seat beside me.

"Yes, we'll be using brain waves to really hit that R.E.M. stage," explains Joe, as he likes to be called. He's a tidy man, perhaps in his early 40's, balding, who wears glasses and is distinctive for a dewiness of complexion and a zealousness of tone. Diane is a monochromatic blonde in the prescribed taupe and gray, attractive, with a coordinated buff tan that gilds her serious manner. She blends beautifully into the backdrop. Long habituated to one another, Joe and Diane execute a business version of yin and yang. Joe tends to lofty ideas ("The brain-wave technology will relax!"), while Diane slams hard on past errors ("I have no use for incense"). As I sit flanked by the pair, information whizzes past my head in a series of sci-fi volleys, with occasional shots down the alley of a more ancient past. "We weren't interested in the old Geisha facial paste made of nightingale droppings," Joe says, and Diane slashes forth with a derisive, "Bird poop!"

I review the top-secret plans (so secret they are whisked out of my hands, but not before I see the words "mechanical kneading thumbs").

" Give that back ," Diane says, her slim tan hand snatching the plans. "You should not be looking at that!"

Back on message, Diane says, "The brain-wave room will be the first, the only …. "

" … the best," I say.

"You'll be connected to a box," Joe tells me. "The electrodes will send brain waves to hit your R.E.M."

Me: "Will I be wearing a helmet?"

Diane: "No helmet!"

Joe: "Goggles and a head set. Sonic therapy … sound waves …. "

"Color goggles … pulsing lights!" murmurs Diane.

"We will have soft massage tables … preheated, " Joe says.

" … a new kind of table-beyond a water-bed feel," Diane says.

"A cocoon of hot gel!" cries Joe.

"Your body will sink down and disappear," adds Diane.

"Will any part of me be showing?" I ask.

"Your head."

With the goggles and the head set, I will enjoy the subtle pulses of sound and lights-waves that match the mental state I want to achieve ….

"Forget incense, Muzak, crystals." Diane spits the words as if into a cuspidor.

"We are moving away from 'beauty' as a concept," Joe and Diane agree. "The beauty spa is old," Joe says.

"And with the sonic waves, what music?"

Joe: "Synthesizers, shakuhachi flutes, Tibetan bells …. "

There will be electronic shiatsu massagers. Those mechanical kneading thumbs, it turns out, "will pulsate in your electronic shiatsu pillow," Joe confides.

"On the bottom neck roll," Diane adds, "the pillow itself kneads."

And the pulsing eye goggles? "What color will I see?"

"The spectrum," Joe assures me.

"Pulsing lights induce more flow," Diane says. "The eyelids connect to your brain."

"Oh," sighs Joe. "The electrodes we couldn't talk about, name the vendors …. Some of this is so new, the patents were not yet applied for. We couldn't say a word till now. There will be three paths: to revitalize, rejuvenate, achieve longevity."

I can't wrap my as-yet-unelectroded brain around the difference between rejuvenation and longevity.

"It's about looking younger, unwrinkling. We're getting the best cosmoceuticals," Joe explains.

Cosmoceuticals?

"Yes! Cosmetics merge into pharmaceuticals."

Joe gives a sneak preview of the décor: "Very Zen-like." A sculptured glass wall-"I won't call it a waterfall … it will suggest water."

I stumble onto 57th Street. The city steams, a mirage wavering above the softening asphalt. I can still feel the impression of Suk's fingers massaging Jojoba oil into my skin. I hear, as if on cross-circuits, her whisper about her second husband-"He adores me"-cut with the news of a newly discovered gaseous planet, a hitherto-unknown galaxy of "burnt-out stars." And I think of this portion of the globe, 57th Street, where we will soon see through pulsing goggles, surf brain waves and "hit the R.E.M."

Where I can have these treatments now ? I want to know.

"In a lab," Joe and Diane respond.

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of two memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country , and the recently published novels Beautiful Bodies and Dreams of Rescue .

While today the motif at the card counter lists toward the nautical, at my home, the theme was always military. My father vanished "in the war" before my birth. My mother, single in the time before single mothers were not scandalized, wore a plain gold wedding band, fibbed and said she had married a soldier. I gathered from her bedtime stories, told always in a special breathless bedroom voice, that she loved my father, Larry.

There were several flaws to her marvelous tale of the aviator who flew with his pet dog in the cockpit. Would the Air Force really allow a pilot to bomb an unknown nation while flying with a pedigreed boxer named Butch? I bought the Butch angle entirely, but even at 4, I knew the United States was not at war, and "overseas" was a touch vague.

My mother, Rosie, announced my father's death to me one day on a New York City street. "We had sad news this morning. His plane went down …. " She hesitated, improvising: " … in Europe." My father became nonexistent in a profound manner. Now, of course, knowing the story is false, I speculate regarding my mother's enhanced detail: "He burned, without a trace. His uniform, the ribbons-even the medals melted." My father's dog? Surely Butch had not gone down with the plane? He flew with a bandanna round his neck; he was an ace. I still thank my mother for sparing Butch. I might have had to lose a fictional father, but I could not have recovered from the death of his mascot. Thank God, my mother reported, "Butch did not go on the final mission."

The specter of my military-hero father faded like the photograph we kept: The blond man, almost invisible in the initial overexposed image, paled by the light that had damaged the original photograph, soon vanished altogether, into the smoke of the cigarette he held. My father seemed to become a negative of himself; an apt metaphor, for each year, as I grew, I doubted his authenticity more, wondered more who my "real" father was. I had what is called a "twist" of fate: When I was 8, my mother died, and I was left to be raised by her two bachelor brothers. So a dual fathering began, albeit late. But the two sweet men who raised me were my uncles, known as "unkies" in our home; I never called anyone "Dad." The Father's Day cards remained unpurchased. My uncles hoisted me high on their shoulders-I rode the surf at last. And for that, I remain grateful.

The father story frayed and cracked with the photograph. At 18, I did not qualify for benefits for the children of veterans. At 19, I married a man who was blond and whose name rhymed with Larry. Lost father found down the aisle? Literature abounds with daughters seeking the unknown father, the good father, the bad father. Enacting the drama that never played, I was reluctant to give up on my teenage marriage; it lasted for decades, then ended in divorce.

One thing my husband did for me, though, was to uncover more facts about my father. My husband did what I lacked the nerve to do: quiz my uncles. And so, at 23, I discovered that while my father had been in the air corps (how apt), he was not shot down (except by my mother), and there had been no war, save the one between the sexes. The news bulletins continued: His name was not the name on my birth certificate. My mother had, again, fantasized and named me Laura Shaine; my father's name was actually Laurence Moore.

For some years, I searched the phone directories in his alleged birth state of Alabama, and I envisioned that blond man, bleached in the glare of Southern afternoons, languishing like a Tennessee Williams lead on an ante-bellum porch. In the visions, there is always a reunion in which I appear, wearing a picture hat, in bridal white, and his eyes meet mine. An unseen woman behind him asks: "Who's there, Larry?" And he answers, his gaze turning away from me: "No one."

I have no idea why this fantasy, so filmic, is also so complete. Perhaps it bears some flimsy relation to an untested truth-that my father, having never appeared to claim me, would reject me on sight.

Father's Day is now marked by the current craze for televised reunions between parents and children who have never met. I'm always seeing Leslie Stahl stand in some small town, perhaps by a gazebo, declaring: "In a few minutes, we will see the father [or mother] she never knew, who walked away from this gazebo 32 years ago …. "

Until recently, those of us who were parentless had few options. Now, cyber-searches are easy, adoption agencies in several states have relaxed the laws that once sealed records forever, and parent-child reunions are taking place at quite a clip. On the news, famous football coaches are reunited with the sons they never saw, who now become devoted fans. Physical resemblances are noted. On prime time, there always seem to be huge extended-family cookouts: "I have a father! I have a sister! I have a daughter!"

I haven't had the reunion or the cookout-and, perhaps to my own surprise, I don't want one. My dad can remain in the dark. I don't want to go on Dateline to surprise him. Perhaps I find some value in the mystery; maybe I even resent the extinction of wonder that might occur. I feel similarly about overly detailed family videotapes. Who will need to see in 2025 the images of everyone gnawing chicken legs, indulging in unedited conversation? My own maternal grandparents appear, with dignity, in their posed portraits of the distant past. I prefer them that way. No doubt my forebears gobbled goulash and screamed "Get over here, Hymie!" But I don't have to relive their mundane moments. As far as Father, I clutch my single sepia photograph, with its dubious authenticity, and know that we did not become a sideshow.

I have a more cynical Dad Day apparition: Trailing television cable, I find my father, an ignorant cracker, no longer blond but bald, red-faced and screaming, in a nursing home in Alabama. This time, he does want me-to spring him, and support him.

I choose not to search further for the man who walked away so long ago. Let his fate remain unknown, his records sealed. Leave me to my imagination, my romantic aviator or the squawking redneck, whichever Dad I conjure this day. I choose fantasy over an attempt to eclipse time and accelerate love that would have taken a lifetime. This may be my idiosyncrasy or even my failing, but I think, as I study the card racks full of rudderless boats and golf bags awaiting the clutch of a male hand, that it is a matter of taste. I pass the Dad displays and, cardless, go my way on Father's Day.

Everyone is responding in character-even me. Caught in the suspense, I wonder: Am I too suggestible? Why does a light burn late at night when the house is said to be uninhabited? Who is the short, bald man who drives the maroon Ford Expedition with diplomatic plates? And what went on behind that stained brick façade all these years? Dinner parties, or discussion of weapons of mass destruction? Why did they throw out that armchair and the taped bundle of almost comically huge knives? And why did I feel compelled to collect them in the lunar glow of the street lamps? Was it the former Bronx urchin in me that couldn't overlook something serviceable left on the street, or did the journalist in me understand that the hot seat and cutlery might become significant ? I have the chair in my possession-it's ugly but solid, with an unremovable stain-and the knives, too. (They need sharpening.)

East Side Gothic is the mood on the block now: Humpbacked rats, bigger than cats, emerge from behind the townhouse. The remaining neighbors buzz and peer through their windows. Where is the life-sized portrait of Saddam that sulked back at us for so many years? The Hussein visage, so prominent that I could see it from the street, seems to have vanished along with Mr. Al-Douri. And while some 80th Street residents mutter that their neighbor might have had poisonous gas, most of Mr. Al-Douri's former blockmates seem more preoccupied with disputing the news descriptions of the house as "posh."

"Posh?" asked Mario Buatta, the "Prince of Chintz," who "shared a wall" with the mansion. "There was no décor at all," Mr. Buatta said. "Sad, very sad. The Iraqis did not do a thing inside. It's in sad shape-has been since they got in '77. The house could have been beautiful; it was beautiful before they bought it. These are historic houses-Astor had them for his friends. There was a beautiful communal garden."

Did the Iraqi presence, so close by, unnerve the famous interior designer? Did Mario mind being a brick-and-plaster partition away from a nation accused of hiding weapons of mass destruction and maybe collaborating with Al Qaeda, too?

"No, no, they were very quiet," the amiable Mr. Buatta reflected last week, "except for all the tapping at 1 and 2 a.m. That kept me up, the tapping. What were they doing-making a tunnel?"

"Posh?" repeated the mansion's other next-door neighbor, Mary Beth Tully, the manager of the Junior League. "Please. It's the worst-looking townhouse on the block. These were 'the four super townhouses,' landmarks, but the Iraqis let theirs go."

Not so super, then, is No. 124. Oh, it has five and a half stories and gracious lines, but it looks like the sallow stepsister of the stars on either side. At the Junior League on its east flank, chandeliers glow. "We always look like candlelight," said Ms. Tully. What bothers her most is the Iraqis' garden, "decorated with propane tanks."

"Big ones?" I asked, imagining some fearsome incendiary device.

"No, the kind you use for barbecues."

Even when inhabited, the house seemed deserted. I would note the occasional motion-a servant's hand reaching out to accept a package. Occasionally, a family-Mr. Al-Douri's?-would arrive for a visit. Bags would be pulled into the foyer; the diplomatic cars would appear and disappear. Very little light shone from within. The upper windows remained dark, shuttered most of the time.

At first, I was simply curious. Later, I began to appreciate the availability of parking places, as some block residents feared an explosion and parked elsewhere. In the last half of the 90's, my interest grew as an atmosphere of international intrigue descended on East 80th Street. Fidel Castro suddenly appeared on the block one night-hustled through, hidden in a Jeep Cherokee. He visited the house two doors away from the Iraqis. While the Secret Service cleared the block, whisking cars off to the never-never land on the docks, police ordered residents, "Don't go near your windows." Entering my building, I was questioned: "Which window are you?" I told them, and the officer said, "Stay back." But even standing a few feet back in my dining room, I could watch from my window as Mr. Castro put away a good dinner and sloshed down a ruby red wine.

I never did decipher who it was that hosted Fidel, and if he was in some way connected to our Iraqi neighbors. The host's house was said to be rented at the time, for $43,000 a month, and whoever lived there then threw all-male parties, for men I imagined to be C.I.A. operatives. It looked like that kind of party, anyway-too serious to be gay. Bulky jackets. No Armani.

The best sources for Iraqi-spotting were my doormen, who were mostly Albanians. They would become excited when Mr. Al-Douri was in town, and even more so when Tariq Aziz visited. "He's here!" they'd say. "They had to stop opening the Park garage till he passed!" As an unmarried woman who tended to return home late at night from the theater, I found the presence of police, Secret Service and unmarked cars a security boon.

My interest intensified, of course, with the deteriorating situation over Iraq. After 9/11, a creeping suspicion of all connections in the Arab world made the curious turn ominous. That fall, I watched the only gala I ever observed held at No. 124 with disbelief-what were they, who had remained so hidden, suddenly celebrating?

Of course, I was a writer working on a novel, Dreams of Rescue , that features a mysterious neighbor who signals from his window in the wee hours … so perhaps it was my imagination. Some nights, a shadowed figure seemed to stare back from behind the tattletale gray window veils. What if they were watching me watching them? Many nights in a row, my phone rang at 3 a.m. Collect calls from Saudi Arabia. I refused the charges.

Proximity to the Iraqi house provoked subplots. On Sept. 14, 2001, while the city moved in somnambulant horror after the attack, I drifted, trance-like, to resume copying my manuscript at the Kinko's two blocks away. If the Iraqis had not been my neighbors, would I have been so startled to see the trash beside the copier piled high with torn papers scrawled in Arabic? I reported the huge amount of ripped Arabic material to the staff (the Kinkons, as I think of them), who, three days after the terror attacks-and one day before it was reported that the terrorists had used out-of-state Kinko's to conduct their business-were unconcerned. I insisted the police be summoned to collect the Arabic papers. No sooner was this done than I spotted a sealed FedEx overnight letter left on the counter. Had my comings and goings with the police frightened someone into bolting and leaving behind the evidence?

Strange, I thought. I noted an Arabic name as the addressee. But it was the alleged sender that truly threw me-Kofi Annan. Surely, three days after the World Trade Center collapsed, the head of the U.N. was not doing his own mailing at Kinko's? I read the rest of the address-the Moroccan consulate. My mind went into a le Carré whirl. The men who had assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud in Afghanistan only two days before the Sept. 11 attacks had carried Belgian papers and claimed to be Moroccan. Connected? Maybe. I phoned the police and told them to return. Two officers collected the FedEx; a few days later, a man who identified himself as an F.B.I. agent called me at home as I cooked pasta and said, "The envelope you found has been entered into evidence for a task force investigating the destruction of the towers."

I spoke with a friend who said that someone using copying machines for illicit purposes would not use a machine in a private building, where information could be retrieved. The closest public copy center to the Iraqi house? My Kinko's.

A paranoid leap, or a neighbor's intuition? I will never know. There remain the Iraqis' good-neighbor deeds of recent months. Two bodyguards shoveled out my Subaru, impacted in six feet of snow on Presidents' Day. Our eyes met over the white-domed car. If there could be peace on 80th Street, why not the world? Even today, the mystery servant who remains in the mansion is known to offer the ultimate street courtesy: "He saved me his parking place," my doorman told me. "Not just gave it to me, but waited …."

And so I watch at my window as No. 124 sits, sullen and stained, a rusted TV antenna listing beside a black mesh "dish" on the roof. A vent fan swivels, its metal head rotating atop the otherwise still building. White cables dangle like severed bonds. The windows remain shuttered or veiled with those soiled see-throughs. The Iraqi house sulks, its frontal brass hospitality pineapple posts tarnished, the black enamel door shut.

This dour post–Al-Douri décor is in direct contrast to the springtime gaiety of 80th Street between Lexington and Park. The tulips, bright yellow and red, nod their double-blossomed heads, as if in affirmation of our new, uneasy peace, our undeclared victory.

Meanwhile, the street value of the house is debated. "If that's worth $18 million," cried Ms. Tully, "what is the Junior League worth?" It must be under $10 million, holds the consensus, as the townhouse opposite squats, for that price, on the market. But the Iraqi house is not for sale. Whoever is governing Iraq has the right to occupy it. The neighbors hope, in true Upper East Side style, that whatever else happens, redecoration-or even restoration-is in the future.

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of seven books, most recently Dreams of Rescue (Atria Books). She is also a playwright and journalist.