6

“OH! WELL, IT HAS to be arson, don’t you think?”

This was Liz, always so emphatic, so sure of her opinions. She was sitting with the rest of the adults, all but her husband, Clark, on the screened porch. Clark had gone down the hill to open the house in the meadow below, to drop off the duffel bags they’d arrived with, to turn the water on. The two older children, Daphne and Chas, were upstairs, exploring—you could hear their feet thudding on the floor overhead. The littlest, Gordie, was sitting on Liz’s lap in the rocking chair. His head was leaned back against her breasts, and his bare feet dangled over his mother’s knees, their soles a dusty gray. They danced a little with the chair’s steady, slow motion back and forth.

“I mean, two in a row,” Liz said. “Can there be any doubt?”

“Well, and they were empty houses, too,” Sylvia offered. She and Alfie had their predinner martinis, Frankie had beer in a bottle, and Liz was drinking lemonade, since she was still nursing.

Liz waved her hand. “Say no more.”

“Though it doesn’t make any difference to label it, does it?” Frankie asked.

“But then they can start looking for clues,” Liz said. And she went on to talk about a fire at the little prep school near Northampton where she worked as an admissions officer, a fire set, they discovered, by a student who was late with a paper and wanted an excuse not to have to turn it in. “It could be something as idiotic as that.”

Sylvia’s chair was turned to the view of the meadow, and now in her peripheral vision she saw a moving shape and focused on it. Clark, or a glimpse of Clark through the trees on the dirt road. As the conversation went on around her, she could see him making his slow progress back on foot, parts of his figure appearing and disappearing behind the maples and the clusters of birches that drooped over the road. She was fond of this son-in-law, the genetic donor of the children’s coloring: they were all silver blonds, like him.

And here came the older two, back downstairs. They stood in the porch doorway looking around. Like Gordie, they were wearing shorts and no shirt. To someone else they might have been nearly indistinguishable, these three, a mass of beautiful pale flesh and curly white hair, but Sylvia had a keen, loving sense of the differences among them.

She had been surprised by her love for her grandchildren but, more than that, surprised by their love for her. She felt an almost absurd gratitude for it—for its sweet lack of complication, and for some sense of forgiveness she found in it, which she welcomed without really seeking to understand it. Now Daphne, the oldest at five, came to stand by Sylvia’s chair. Sylvia touched her bare white shoulder, so warm and smooth. “Are you liking your school so much this year?” she asked, and listened as the little girl began to talk about her day care.

When she looked up a minute or two later, she met Frankie’s concentrated gaze on her and Daphne. Frankie looked away quickly.

What was she thinking? Sylvia wondered. Perhaps the wish for children herself? The sense she’d missed that opportunity? They had spoken of it a few times. Once Sylvia had asked her outright if she’d ever considered it.

“Absent the man,” Frankie had said, “I’m not interested.”

“So?” Sylvia asked. “What about the man?”

“Long story short: what man?” Frankie had said, and laughed.

The screen door in the kitchen slapped shut: Clark arriving. In a minute or two he appeared on the porch, carrying a bottle of beer. Like Liz, he was wearing what Sylvia thought of as their uniform—jeans and a well-worn T-shirt. Both had on thick-soled sandals. His blond hair was caught back in a ponytail, something Sylvia found unattractive on any man, even Clark, who was otherwise quite beautiful. He and Liz made an odd couple—he so large and blond, she so small and quick and dark—though her hair, cut in a short cap around her head now, was touched with white everywhere.

He went over to where Frankie was sitting, pulling one of the chairs with a reed seat between her and Alfie. He sat down and turned to his sister-in-law. He started asking her about Africa, about her work. His attention was absolute, encompassing, and Frankie leaned forward into it, her face more lively than Sylvia had seen it since she’d been home. This was Clark’s gift, this affectionate attentiveness.

Sylvia turned back to Daphne, who had started to sing her a song she’d learned in school about a man who washed his face in a frying pan. As the little girl started in on the second verse, Sylvia heard Clark say, “And when do you go back?”

This is what they were all used to: Frankie would come to the country for a few weeks, be back and forth to the office in New York for a few weeks after that, and then leave again. She couldn’t hear Frankie’s response.

“What?” Clark said sharply.

Sylvia looked over at them.

Frankie spoke more loudly. “I don’t know, this time.”

“Don’t know what?” Sylvia said. Daphne stopped singing.

Frankie looked at her. Her mouth opened, then closed with a little noise. She lifted her hands and made a helpless, embarrassed face. She said, “When I’m going back. If I’m going back.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Liz said, “Cool. You’re going to stay.” She was grinning at Frankie.

Sylvia was suddenly aware of Alfie, shifting forward in his chair. He was watching Frankie, frowning. He cleared his throat. “But you … you live in Africa, don’t you?” He seemed alarmed.

“I have, until now,” she said.

He nodded, then smiled. “Yes. That’s just what I thought.” He leaned back, the discussion over for him.

Sylvia looked quickly around at the others. Liz was watching Alfie sharply, appraisingly, but Clark and Frankie hadn’t seemed to notice how odd this exchange was. He’d already started to ask her questions about her decision, and she was responding.

She was dismissive. Maybe she was just a little burned out, a little overwhelmed by the never-ending quality of the suffering, by the corruption. By the way in which aid work became complicit in all that.

“But what else would you do?” Clark asked.

Frankie shrugged. “New York is a possibility, I guess,” she said. “Something administrative there. Either with Hunger Relief Action or with another NGO.”

“New York!” Liz said. “But that’s so expensive.”

Frankie lifted her hands: What can I do?

“You’ll end up in an incredibly small apartment in some marginal neighborhood,” Liz said.

“Which sounds kind of romantic, actually,” Frankie said.

“That’ll wear off quickly,” Sylvia said drily. She turned to the others. “Frankie had a house to herself in Nairobi. She had servants.” Sylvia had visited her once for a week and stayed in Frankie’s house. It was set in a garden with a lawn encircled by five other bungalows. The whole compound was surrounded by a wall overgrown with bougainvillea, the top set with glinting razor wire.

“I had a housemaid, Mother.” Frankie’s gaze across the porch was level.

They had had this conversation several times before. Sylvia had been uncomfortable with the colonial aspects of Frankie’s life in Africa, with the privileged white world she inhabited when she wasn’t at work, with her ease instructing the people who worked for her. She had been surprised at Frankie. Disappointed in her, in some way.

“And a gardener, as I recall it,” she said now to Frankie. “And a guard.”

“But those weren’t just for me. They were for the compound.” There were, in fact, two guards that manned the entry gate, one during the day, one at night. Both carried AK-47S, Sylvia had been shocked to see.

“You would have had those things, too, if you’d lived there,” Frankie said. Her voice was cool, clipped. She sounded almost British, which Sylvia suspected was something she could turn off and on at will. Something that was, perhaps, useful to her.

Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t think I could live with someone always in the kitchen or always cleaning up after me. Much less guarding me.”

“You’d love a guard if the crime rate here shot up. If people were getting shot up.”

“Who’s getting shot, Mama?” Chas asked. He had come out onto the porch, too. He was looking from Frankie to Sylvia.

Liz wrinkled her nose at him, shook her head rapidly. This is adult stuff. Nothing for you to worry about.

Frankie persisted. Her voice was harder, actually angry now. “And I can’t imagine you and Daddy, say, brush hogging the pasture yourselves.”

“Mumma, who?” Chas persisted.

“No one, hon. It’s just a turn of phrase.”

“That’s something you won’t need to worry about once we get up here,” Clark said to Sylvia. She must have looked puzzled somehow, because he explained: “Brush hogging.” He was smiling at her, eager to please her, eager, perhaps, to change the subject.

But Sylvia’s irritation was immense now, general. She said, “Ah, but then I’ll worry about your taking work away from the locals.”

“Ah, but then I’ll be a local.”

A little silence fell. Liz said, “I think I’d ask a local about that.”

“Yes, I think that’s a club you might have to be asked to join,” Frankie said.

“Bullshit,” Clark answered genially.

Sylvia was thinking abruptly of a child she’d seen earlier today when she went to the village to get some stamps. Trailing his mother into the post office, he wore a T-shirt that said, FLATLANDERS GO HOME. She said, “I wouldn’t take anything for granted, Clark.”

Frankie laughed, abruptly.

“What?” Sylvia said.

“Oh, you’re just so … contrarian tonight,” Frankie said.

Clark was nodding, smiling at Frankie. Liz grinned.

Sylvia said, “I wasn’t aware of that.” A lie.

Suddenly Daphne bent forward and kissed the back of Sylvia’s hand where it rested on her lap, a soft, light fairy touch. Sylvia, startled, looked at her, and she looked back, smiling, showing her small, scalloped teeth.

“That’s a magic kiss,” she said.

After a quick beat of silence, Sylvia said, “Thank you,” washed with love for the little girl, and with shame.

“Hey, may I have one of those kisses?” Clark asked. He was grinning across at his daughter, his delight in her game—in her very being—visible in his face.

“Yes!” Daphne answered. She threaded through the chairs around to her father. He leaned over to receive the kiss on his cheek, but she said, “No. On your hand.”

He held his hand out, and she bent over it quickly, and then stood straight.

“Magic!” he cried. “Did it change me?”

“Yes,” she said gravely.

“Into a prince?” he said.

“No, Papa! It made you happy.”

“Oh, yeah!” He nodded. “That’s just what it did. I feel it.”

“And now I’ll kiss Mumma.” And she went to her mother and kissed her hand, and then, more shyly, Frankie’s, and finally Alfie’s. He seemed not to notice, Sylvia thought.

“What about Gordie and Chas?” Liz said.

“Mumma!” she objected.

“What?”

“Kids don’t need magic kisses. Only adults are not happy.”

Frankie laughed. “From the mouths of babes.”

Now Liz turned to Clark and began to tell him about the fires, two in a row, the first one so close, the second only last night. She repeated the local news her mother and Frankie had offered her earlier—that this second fire was, like the first, in an unoccupied house, the Ludlows’, and that, like the fire at the Kershaws’, it had essentially destroyed the place.

While they talked about all this, Sylvia was remembering the night before. The fire horn had waked her this time, though Alfie slept through it. When Sylvia got up and went into the living room, she could hear that Frankie was awake upstairs, moving around. She’d called up to her, and Frankie had come down. They’d sat together for a while, speculating about the possibility of a second fire.

Afterward, lying in bed again next to Alfie’s still form, Sylvia had realized how happy she had been for that hour or so, sitting with her daughter in her pajamas in the middle of the night, talking in low tones in the light falling into the room from the kitchen. It had taken her a long time to get back to sleep—some combination of that deep pleasure and then the disturbing notion of a second fire somewhere in the town.

Now Sylvia excused herself to go to the kitchen to put supper together. A little while later, she was moving from the kitchen to the dining room with a stack of plates in her hands when she saw Alfie walking quickly down the hall to his study. And heard Liz’s voice from the porch: “Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake!”

What? she thought. She went to the doorway to the porch, the plates still in her hands. What had happened? They were frozen, Clark standing, Liz and Frankie looking up at him.

And then she saw what it was: Liz was nursing Gordie. The little boy was half lying across her lap, and her T-shirt was hoisted up on the side where he was suckling. A sliver of her white breast showed, but most of it was covered by Gordie’s head.

“Mea culpa,” Liz said to Sylvia. Her expression was of a tired amusement. “I just forgot how much it bothers him.” She turned to Clark. “Forget it, sweetie.”

“Oh. Yes, Clark,” Sylvia said. “You know Alfie.”

“Well, Jesus, though. It’s just so … ridiculous.” But he sat back down.

“Did he say anything?” Sylvia asked.

“No, just upped and left,” Liz said.

“But you know he’s always been that way. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t even like it when I was nursing. As a matter of fact, I think he usually left the room then, too. After Frankie, I didn’t try again. Bottles for Liz, poor thing.”

Liz grinned. “No doubt that’s why I’m so much shorter than Frankie. But we’re almost done anyway, aren’t you, sweetie?” she said to Gordie’s still form.

She looked back up at the adults. “You know what it is,” she said. Her voice was full of mischief.

“What?” Clark said.

“He doesn’t like that reminder that we’re all animals.” She made a rooting, piggish sound, then stopped. “Well, that women are anyway.” She smiled meanly.

Frankie laughed.

“Well, he’ll have forgotten about it already,” Sylvia said quickly. “Why don’t you all go in and sit down? Just about everything’s on the table. I’ll go get him.”

Liz readjusted Gordie, lifting him to a sitting position and pulling her shirt down. He looked sleepy as he slid off her lap. Frankie and Clark were standing up, and now Liz got up, too.

“That’s the good news,” Liz was saying. “That he will have forgotten already. The bad news is, he’ll have forgotten it already.”

“Liz!” Frankie said, but she was smiling.

“So he’s worse?” Clark asked, his voice lowered.

Sylvia went to fetch Alfie, leaving the room before she had to hear Liz’s answer.

He was at his desk, in his study, looking out at the view, at the mountains. She spoke to him softly, and he turned to her. “Dinner’s ready,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “Delighted.”

She turned away quickly and went back toward the noise of the rest of the family. She didn’t want to look at Alfie, at his bland, empty face, so unaccountable for the feelings he’d stirred up on the porch.

Always so unaccountable, she thought.

An engagement photo of Alfie and Sylvia standing in a lost garden, blowsy, blurry roses growing over an arbor behind them. Standing at least a foot apart, each looking directly into the camera, as if unaware of the other. Both of them are squinting just a bit against the bright sun.

Oh, but they are aware of each other. Both are smiling, smiling in precisely the same way—shy, secretive, sexual. The picture is charged with the connection between them, and with their wish to hide it, to keep it invisible, for themselves only.

They met the year after Sylvia finished college, when, because it seemed to her that she could become anything in the world she wanted to be, she was working at a small bar and restaurant on the South Side of Chicago as a waitress. She had done this more or less in defiance of her parents, both well-known academics and intellectuals. She wanted to claim a life as different from theirs as she could, though, as it would turn out, the next year she would apply to graduate school in English, and through the years after that, while she began to raise her family—first Frankie, an accident, then Liz—she would struggle to complete her master’s degree in order to have a version, anyway, of their life. A version that turned out to be different from theirs primarily in its lack of distinction—they had plenty of that—and its marginality.

Alfie was the part-time bartender at this restaurant, while he worked the rest of the time on the first of the three master’s degrees he would eventually earn. The year was 1953. He was twenty-nine. She was twenty-two. They fell in love for all the usual reasons. They were both handsome and unattached. They were working together, the kind of work that requires a sense of almost dancelike physical partnership, particularly at the busiest times of the evening, and they had the sense of dancing well together. And they liked each other’s stories, though later Alfie’s story was the least important part of who he was for Sylvia.

But at the time, it was completely compelling to her—it was what did the trick. He told it to her over a series of late nights in the restaurant after they’d closed up and finished shutting things down. The other waitresses, the cook, and the dishwasher would all have left, slowly putting their coats on, sometimes having a drink or two before they went. Alfie and Sylvia would try not to seem as eager as they were for the others to go. When they were finally alone, they’d sit at a table out of sight of the front window, in case the manager came by to check on things—which happened every now and then—and talk.

Or Alfie would talk, and Sylvia, rapt, would listen.

This is what she learned: that he’d grown up in upstate New York, taken in at two months as a foster child by an older Italian couple after his mother abandoned him. There were other foster children in and out of the house, some of them troubled or delinquent, but none of them stayed for more than a year. Alfie was Francesca and Antonio’s forever, they made this clear to him. He felt himself marked by this, he told Sylvia. Chosen. He believed in himself because they believed in him.

And they believed he was brilliant. He was bilingual—Italian was spoken at home. He could read at three. He was a math whiz. After his junior year at the regional high school, his teachers recommended he be sent away to boarding school—he needed more than they could give him to have a chance at a scholarship to a good college. And so he went to Hotchkiss for two more years, his first time mingling with people from a world other than his own. It made him realize, he told Sylvia, how much of what was understood to be intelligence and good breeding in American life was simply a matter of money. Money, and luck. He had to scramble to catch up with the other boys, both in his classes and socially, but by the beginning of the second semester, he had mastered this world. Talking to him, you wouldn’t have been able to guess his background. Only something a little wrong here and there—the ties he chose, his shoes, and then something odd, something slightly distanced or amused, in his stance toward the other boys. It took him a longer time, he said, to get in control of these details.

After two years at prep school, he went to Harvard, a full ride, where it was much the same story. Success on success, strength to strength.

Sylvia had felt her own life so completely ordinary next to his that she barely sketched it in. She didn’t stop to consider until later, much later, that this had seemed ample information to him, that he didn’t press her for details the way she had pressed him—though it was clear he was taken with the ease and privilege of her background. By the family roots in New England, the academic parents who traveled and had taken her and her brothers to various communities in South America; by her summer in France with the Experiment in International Living. Taken, too, by her recklessness and carelessness about all that. Certainly her story compelled him, but he was content with the outline, the bare bones.

No, it was her feeling for all of his story, his past, that allowed their life together to happen. Her curiosity about every detail. Her belief in him and in his own version of himself. Brilliant Alfie! Who’d given the Latin oration at his graduation from Harvard, who could freely quote from Donne and T. S. Eliot, Kierkegaard and Freud, Marx and Dante. Who was an enthusiast, in contrast to her own, regretted coolness. Who was passionate, exacting in his acquisition of each universe he set out to understand.

How could he do it? Keep straight the tics of various of Dickens’s characters, argue the politics of the Gilded Age or the NAACP, explain the difference between the atomic and the hydrogen bomb, care so much about all of it.

When they went to hear Schubert, Liszt, Beethoven at Orchestra Hall, Alfie would get the scores beforehand and study them. While the music played, while Sylvia struggled just to listen, not to let her mind wander—to sex, to the question of whether they would marry, to money: how they would live if they did—Alfie’s attention was absolute. His fingers stirred restlessly on his legs as if with the urge to be a part of the music: to conduct, perhaps, or to play an instrument.

They went to smoky bars on the South Side of Chicago and danced to Otis Rush, Little Walter, Muddy Waters. They went to the Near North Side to hear Max Roach, Dave Brubeck, Anita O’Day. They walked along the 57th Street Beach on a rainy day and came home to make love, their flesh chilled and damp. They went to street fairs, to jazz festivals, to little art galleries, to lectures at the university, to concerts downtown, to the Compass Players at Jimmy’s bar. There was nothing that Alfie didn’t want to know about, to talk about—politics, poetry, comedy, music, race relations, science.

By the time Sylvia finally finished her master’s degree in English, with time off to have Frankie, Alfie was well into his own second master’s degree, in world religions this time. The first had been in economics. They moved to New Haven for his third master’s—in history—and Sylvia started the part-time teaching that would constitute her career, working as an adjunct in various small public and private colleges.

Liz was in second grade by the time Alfie got his doctoral degree and, finally, his first full-time teaching job, at a little college in Iowa. By now Sylvia had come to understand that the restiveness, the eclecticism, of Alfie’s intelligence were going to be liabilities in the academic world he wanted to inhabit. More, she saw the wide-ranging quality of his many interests as, finally, self-absorption, a sort of armor against any deep human involvement. She had come to understand how distractible he was, which she hadn’t noticed at first. How he was always hurrying to the next universe to read about, to master, but never quite deeply enough. She was like her own one-person, skeptical tenure committee. What she wondered now when he launched himself into something new was What on earth will this lead to? What is the point?

He was denied tenure in Iowa, and at four other colleges he taught in for various lengths of time. But finally, after his book on Jacob Burckhardt was published by a university press, they went to the small, not very distinguished school in Connecticut, Wadsworth College, where he was granted tenure and where they lived until his retirement.

Through all this, his relations with the girls were another source of Sylvia’s disappointment and anger at him. While they were small, he was delighted by them in the odd moments his attention happened to light on one or the other, but he wasn’t really interested in them in any steady way—though, of course, being Alfie, he read Piaget, Erikson, Ariès, Winnicott. And he certainly wasn’t interested in any of the physical labor involved in their care. He had never changed a diaper, only rarely prepared a meal for them or helped feed them. Sylvia held herself partly to blame for this. They had had Frankie while she was still in his thrall, and she had felt then that his time, his work, were too important for him to assume any of these duties. By the time Liz came along, this had been established as their division of labor, and it seemed too late to ask for anything different.

When the children began to have interests in the wider world, though, they commanded his focused attention, and each of them flowered under it. Sylvia could watch it, feel it happen—their turn away from her to him. She, who’d been overwhelmed by the work and responsibility of raising them on their erratic income while she also tried to have a work life of her own, she who’d managed all their moving around, she who’d changed their diapers, bathed them, fed them, read to them, sat up with them at night when they were ill or frightened, helped them with times tables, phonetics, costumes for school plays, who’d gone to field-hockey games, soccer matches, swim meets, theatrical productions, recitals—she began to fade into mere backdrop in their lives. While Alfie—brilliant Alfie!—stepped forward, center stage, to engage and dazzle them, as he’d once dazzled her.

She understood the way she seemed next to Alfie: fretful, rigid, concerned with things they thought were of no real importance—money, deadlines, laundry, their SAT scores, their grades, groceries, getting things fixed around the house—who would choose these for preoccupations? Certainly Sylvia hadn’t. But they were things that had to be attended to, that someone needed to be responsible for.

She was bitter about all this, she knew that. Jealous in some way, she supposed—an easy, hateful emotion she struggled with. She tried not to let it creep into her daily life, into her interactions with all of them, but she could hear herself sometimes—impatient and demanding, occasionally contemptuous—and she felt a dislike for herself more intense than anything she sometimes felt for Alfie.

It was in these years that she thought of leaving him. It was beginning to happen all around them—in Alfie’s department, in their church: the separations, the divorces, the messy rearrangements of the marriages and friendships of couples their age. Even on their street in Connecticut there were two couples who had, in essence, swapped spouses. It took Sylvia several months to get straight which new couple was living in which house, with which children.

She wasn’t sure whether she ever would have done it—left Alfie—and it didn’t matter in the end, because at about that time Sylvia’s mother died, of cancer. Her father had died several years earlier, so now a modest inheritance came to Sylvia and, more important, the house in New Hampshire, a house she loved, as she’d loved her grandparents, who had seemed, more than her parents ever had, to own it—and also, more than her parents had, to love her. Sometimes even now when she looked around, when she touched things, she felt their presence, particularly her grandmother’s.

But mostly the house arrived in her life as a place where she could be alone, free of Alfie and whatever his current distraction or passion was. And it seemed this solitude was what she had needed all along. She’d go up and stay by herself for a weekend, occasionally a week, and return feeling glad to see him, ready for his energy to rescue her again, as it had when she was younger and unsure of her own direction. More occasionally Alfie used it as a scholarly retreat, a place to work, which left her alone. And this was enough, this and her work and her friendships, to restore her to a sense of herself.

After a noisy dinner, dominated by the children’s conversation, by Alfie’s discussion of various books he was reading and his explanation of the Harper Prize, Frankie started to shoo everyone out of the kitchen so she could do the dishes. Clark said Liz should stay up for a while to visit with Frankie—he’d unpack at their house and get the children ready for bed. Sylvia persuaded Alfie to join her in walking down the hill with him and the children.

She and Daphne walked slowly behind the others. Clark and Alfie were talking up ahead. Clark had Gordie on his shoulders, and Chas was running in circles around them, exploring things on one side of the road or the other.

Down below, they looked at the state of the house, and Clark explained what he planned to do while he was here this time. As he began to run a bath for the children, they said good night and started up the road together.

They were silent as they walked. Sylvia was thinking back over the events of the evening—feeling again her joy in her grandchildren, her private pleasure in her own children. Remembering, with a pinch of shame, how things had played out with them tonight, her tiresome public resistance to them. Yes: her contrariness. For this, too, she knew, she somehow held Alfie accountable, fair or not: surely she wouldn’t be as she was if he had not been as he was, would she?

Now, as they walked slowly back up the hill, she was remembering the walks she and Alfie and the girls had taken many summer nights after dinner, before the evening activities started—those mild summer vacation activities: reading or doing a puzzle or playing a board game.

On the walks, Liz usually ran ahead, as Chas had tonight, but Frankie would often lag behind to walk with Sylvia and Alfie and sometimes try to join in their conversation. Thinking about it now, Sylvia felt sad at how irritated she had often been with Frankie—with her clinginess, her wish to please, particularly her wish to please Alfie.

She looked over at him now, frowning in concentration, as if he saw something that commanded his attention on the dirt in front of him. Or perhaps he, too, was thinking of all that had happened this evening.

More likely something he’d read, or whatever he’d been talking about with Clark on the walk down.

In the old days, Alfie wouldn’t have allowed the silence that had fallen between them. Neither of them had spoken since they left Clark’s house, and more and more now this was how they lived—side by side, silently.

She could feel the low sun warm on her back. Their long shadows moved ahead of them on the dusty brown road.

And then she noticed that he was walking oddly, jerking his leg and arm on almost every step. She watched him. Was it some sort of little seizure, perhaps? Should she say anything?

“What are you kicking at, Alfie?”

“The dog.” He sounded angry.

“What dog?”

“The goddamn dog.” He kicked, swatted out with his hand, and his shadow moved convulsively.

She was without a response, confused. By what?

Everything.

His tone! When had Alfie ever used that tone? She watched him, she watched his shadow’s convulsive movements.

And then she understood, abruptly, that that was what he was irritated at—his shadow. His shadow: the imaginary dog. Who leaped away every time he threatened.

She was so shocked she didn’t know what to say.

They walked on, Alfie lurching, grunting, Sylvia stunned to silence, until finally they arrived at the shadow of the stand of white birches at the end of the driveway and their own shadows were swallowed by the larger one of the trees. Alfie calmed down almost instantly. She could feel herself relax, and she realized she’d been holding herself in horrified attention.

They turned into the driveway together, and when they emerged from under the trees, they were almost facing the sun as it was about to disappear behind the ridgeline below the meadow. This meant that their shadows were behind them and to their right, invisible to Alfie. He walked calmly the rest of the way home, his face seemed at peace.

I should have said something, Sylvia was thinking. I should have helped him. But part of what she was feeling was that she hadn’t wanted to help him. She didn’t know how to, for one thing. But also she didn’t want to assume responsibility for him yet again. She was tired of being responsible.

Wasn’t that it?

When they came in, Liz and Frankie were sitting together in the living room. They hadn’t yet turned the lights on, and the room was bled of color. There was some odd tension in the air. Liz looked up brightly at them, and said, as if warning Frankie of something, “Here are Daddy and Mother.” There was a pause, all of them looking at one another.

“And not a moment too soon, apparently,” Alfie said. Sylvia turned to stare at him. Back, it would seem. Back from wherever he’d been only moments before.

“I’m off to bed now, my girls,” Alfie said. A faint smile played over his face. A mischievous smile. “So you can talk about me all you wish.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Liz said. But she was smiling.

“It’s true. Feel free.” He turned into the kitchen, passing Sylvia without looking at her.

She heard him say, “Why is it so goddamn dark?” and the light behind her came on.

Sylvia turned and went into the kitchen, too. Alfie was gone, down the hallway to his study, or maybe, as he said, to bed. She was aware of not caring which, of relief just to have him away, somewhere else, beyond her purview.

She got a glass from the cupboard. In the pantry she poured it half full of gin and took a long swallow. She went back into the kitchen and got a tray of ice from the refrigerator. As she noisily popped three or four cubes out of it, she called out to the living room, “Do you girls want wine? Anything?”

“No, nothing for me,” Liz said.

“I’d have a beer,” Frankie called back. “If there are any left.”

Sylvia poured herself a little more gin, enough to cover the ice cubes, and got a beer out of the refrigerator for Frankie.

When she came back into the living room, Liz stood up, as if she’d been waiting for Sylvia’s return. “I’m going to head down,” she said. “Clark has his hands full. Plus I’m tired. Too much excitement around here for me.” She came over to Sylvia, embraced her quickly, a kiss on the cheek. She turned to Frankie. “See you in the a.m.,” she said.

When Liz was gone, Frankie asked Sylvia if she wanted to sit on the porch. “The sunset looks to be one of those cinematic jobs,” she said.

“Yes, lovely,” Sylvia said, distractedly.

And it was cinematic. The very word. Almost garish. It went on and on, the moving cumulus clouds first golden, then a flaring orange, then slowly more pink. She and Frankie were talking through all this, but peacefully, lazily. They discussed the children. Frankie thought they were beautiful, and part of that, for her, was how fat they were—that was the word she used. How healthy, “in that lovely American way.” Her voice sounded sad, and Sylvia thought of the children Frankie worked with then, how the images of them must come to her here from time to time.

They talked about Clark’s ponytail—Frankie agreed with her, voted a resounding no, which gratified Sylvia. The pink of the sky had become a fading lilac by now. As they talked on, the scattered low clouds slowly grayed, until all the heat was out of them and you suddenly noticed the sky behind them, a clean blue again, almost turquoise at the horizon, rising to a darker overhead vastness, pierced and made familiar by the stars.

Sylvia thought she was looking at the Big Dipper, but she didn’t mention it. None of them but Alfie was good at identifying the constellations, and her primary weakness in this regard was her capacity to see the Big Dipper everywhere. They had fallen silent, surrounded by the night noises and the creaking of one chair or the other, the lazy clinking of ice cubes in Sylvia’s glass as she lifted it or set it down. She had the impulse to apologize to Frankie, but she wasn’t sure she could have named the thing she was sorry for.

But then Frankie got up to go to bed anyway. She was exhausted, she said. “Maybe by tomorrow I’ll finally be in your time zone.”

Sylvia sat on alone in the dark. Finally she got up. She went down the hallway into the unfresh warmth of her bedroom. As she was undressing, she had a sudden memory of an evening like this with her grandmother, during that period of real trouble with Alfie, the time when she had thought divorce might be the answer.

She had come up to New Hampshire without him. It must have been near the end of the summer, because the evening was chilly. She and her grandmother had both put jackets on to sit outside. Sylvia had had a drink then, too, one of several she’d put away over the evening. Her grandmother had noted that and had asked about it, about why she was drinking so much.

“Is it so much?” Sylvia had asked. “It feels like not quite enough.”

“Sylvie.” A gentle reproach. It was dark out by then. There was a lamp on in the far corner of the living room, but its light barely reached them on the porch.

“Oh, I just … can’t stand myself, Gram. I’m so mean. I’m so unpleasant.”

“To whom? Not to me.”

“No. Not to you.”

“To whom, then?”

“I suppose to the children, mostly.”

“Not to Alfie?”

“No, there’s no point in being unpleasant to Alfie. He’s impervious.” She laughed quickly, bitterly. “His gift.”

They had sat in silence for a while, the easy silence she had with her grandmother. Maybe she’d come up just for this, Sylvia thought. To be at ease, finally.

“That’s not a gift,” her grandmother said at last in the dark. “It’s a great failing.”

“Yes,” Sylvia had answered, and this suddenly seemed the truth to her. The explanation for everything.

“Do you still love him?” her grandmother asked.

Sylvia felt a wide gulf open under her. A blackness. “Yes,” she said, as if she could save herself with a lie.

After a while her grandmother said, “Well, it’ll be all right, then.”

And Sylvia had chosen to believe her.