Anonymity

How a mother and her daughters sustained the trauma of the 1983 death of 45-year-old Don Heche, husband and father, an early victim of AIDS, and how they coped with the discovery of his long-hidden homosexuality, is arrestingly told by poet and essayist Bergman, the eldest daughter, married and a mother of four. The prose narrative, often poetic in style, slips back and forth from childhood and family memories to young adulthood, eloquently reconstructing the father's duplicity and suffering and attempting to reconcile conflicting images of the devout family man, church music director, itinerant salesman and the gay lover denying his illness. As the mother turns to other men, and each daughter in her own way seeks to go on with her life, Bergman's comment, ``Recover from the lie, and you must heal from the truth,'' presages the story's disturbing ending. (Feb.)