Furthering My Education

In 1965, a Connecticut doctor, after 25 years of practice, posted a note on his office door reading, ""I have gone to further my education,"" and dropped out of sight. A rumor-which turned out to be true-said he ran off to Baghdad with a woman named Gloria. He left behind a wife, substantial financial debt and two sons-one of whom wrote this surprisingly dispassionate memoir. Corbett, a poet, memoirist (Phil Guston's Late Work) and the poetry editor for Grand Street, writes not only of what this loss of a father meant to his family in years to come but also of the dysfunctionality of the family's life before the disappearance. Corbett made a career of being ""bad"" in prep school and college, although he had the good luck to encounter a teacher who steered him into a love of books. His brother turned to drugs. Their father, rumored to have mob connections, had dabbled in get-rich-quick schemes and owned a construction company that built gimcrack tract houses on speculation. Their mother, perhaps for good reason, chose not to see life realistically. After both their parents died, the boys learned that their father's last days were spent cooking in a Vietnamese restaurant he owned in San Diego, married to a Vietnamese woman, and owning real estate worth about $5 million. Corbett's strengths as a writer are his embrace of simplicity and his use of understatement; combined with psychological acuity, they result in a cleanly told, penetrative work. His conclusion: no matter what F. Scott Fitzgerald said, there are indeed second acts in American lives. (Apr.)