“I HOPE TO DO all of you justice,” he said as we left my grandmother’s house. Back in the sitting room, my mother had retreated as she had warned, falling like a cloud on Etsuko’s willing breast. My grandmother, fulfilling her own prediction—that she did not have strokes—had listened to his explanation: “Those two dress boxes must have been marked wrong—one for the other—at the time they were stored. The one you sent to the dump had a cream-colored dress in it, much smaller than the green one. I presume—your wedding dress.” Then, making no comment on his maraudings, she had gone up the stairs alone, only leaning heavier on the banister. To me he’d said only, “Change out of that. Into your own clothes. And come. Out of this house.”

As we leave, it seems to me that all the women of our upstairs float eagerly along with us, hovering around his head to be verified. Along with all those before us. “No—” he will laugh, the day I say that—“the woman under present scrutiny will always hold back. She is nemesis. In the same way that one’s latest work effort always is. Until it issues,” he says, his eyes locked inward. “Then it is done for.” And smiles lightheartedly. By then I will not tremble at this issuance of women from his pen, or even from his bed, but I will know better. Men who write about women wear them like laurel leaves in the hair.

But that was late in our exchanges. Or lessons. This is the first of them. He has hurried me to a destination I still cannot believe, though we are chair to chair.

“Yes, that was melodrama,” he says. “And it depended on dress. Women let themselves be humiliated by that, I know. That their lives should so depend. And what melodrama—a switched box! An honorable ruse, but only if set by the gods. I had nothing to do with it. I wouldn’t dare.”

But the owner of that dress I had worn might have. I could still feel its peculiar quality. Those who instruct us, as he was instructing me, tend to forget that the young are not learning solely from them.

“What did it say on the box that did go to the dumpster’s?” I said. “The one with my grandmother’s dress in it?”

He doesn’t answer at once. He is never quick to. “Of course. Of course. I thought what was marked on that box was simply your grandmother being her lordly self.” He leans toward me. “When, all the while, it could have been—what I was looking for?”

What he starts at once is the collaboration. With anyone. It’s his way of looking at the world. Though flawed in him, as in any of us, I still see it as a great one.

See us there, then. The man who holds a person face to face, and if interested will work you over with his pen afterward. Yet to whom—if you have to have your story, you would go as to an internist.

But I had the safe feeling that the story he was after was not mine, or ever to be mine. For the past weeks, spent so much in the company of “The Three,” I had worn riding togs and those boots, half being, if tongue in cheek, what they may have thought of me. But leaving that house, shedding that dress as he commanded me, I had grabbed up the work jeans and T-shirt with the school’s insignia on it that a lot of us first-year students wore. The second year, we were told, is when you achieve your own style, or shed it; wait for that. I had no such needs, and from then on wore that uniform or a plain jumper straight through school. Such clothes keep one from thoughts of costume. The costume is the last part of a role, we were being told. Lack of it may even be a boon to any girl who is thinking herself out.

I thought of the dress I had discarded, lying on the bed back there, breastless but uncrushable. Like a shell waiting to be filled with meaning; Like me. And both of us could wait.

While I look at the floor here, which has been newly swept. The dead moth gone. Then at the desk, no longer hunched in solitude but covered with typescript. Then at the moonless window, vague now with afternoon.

“I finished the first draft of the play last night. I wanted to do that here. In the town.”

That last phrase has delicacy; the craggy face has a dainty tongue. And an economical one, when moved to tell you more than what it is saying. Acknowledging the town as an entity. Joining the two of us over it. And telling me the play is about the town?

While I am both gazing at him—oh, I shall get his every gesture—and enumerating this place.

“Yes, nice, isn’t it? They’ve sold the place to somebody, I understand. But nobody’s living here yet. I still have my key. Maybe we can go on working here.”

… If I were to jut my chin and neck now, as I did back then? No, after youth one can’t get away with it. But it’s not the limberness that goes; it’s the unselfconsciousness …

“You know.” He makes the two words equal. Brushing away non-intimacy is natural to him. Can he help it if each recipient takes it personally? As he leaned toward me, his shirt still had that fine-pored scent of a good laundry, the collar not like any I knew. Neither elegant like Mr. Peralho’s, nor button-down broker like my father’s, yet better than what Bill would buy even if he had money. Nor like Tim’s, whose lapels hung like field lettuce. “I can’t tell how much you know,” he said. “But you couldn’t live where you do and not know some of it. Nor be as you are.

A noncommittal collar. And too close. I sit back in my chair.

Then he says the unforgettable.

“And besides—I saw you.”

Anybody in the theater knows what that means. I held my breath. How was I?—we students all said, crowding to each other after the performance—in which we had all been the same.

His arm reaches for the desk; his hand smooths its edge. One never knows which of his gestures come from intent. Behind them is that longest harbored intent of all, a medium he lives in, moving him to its dictates as water sways a fish. Yet he can move like any other man as well.

“You’re not Portia yet. How could you be? You’re a beginning animal.”

—I see myself back there, my face lifted, becalmed, in the way of those who want to cry but hold still. No one had ever said it so well.

“But you have what I want,” he says—and I approve the harshness. We are matched, I think. He too sees everything.

“There was a family picture Nessa showed me once. And wouldn’t show me again, once she saw it wasn’t her I was looking at. What you know—is there. And it’s in the dress you had on, that went into the wrong box. Or was put so. And in the letters she has burnt or got rid of this past year. No letters came to the dump.”

He could admit that. Then I could speak.

“When you stood up, there. At the top of the pile.” Like a statue a town has erected to itself without knowing so—and the man himself oblivious. “And my mother was at the bottom.” In her big hat. “And the ash and cinders began draining from beneath your feet.” And she, climbing, climbing toward you in the same seeping rhythm, remained always in the same spot. The dual question hung in front of me, fixed as that gray landscape and flaring sun. “You did start it, didn’t you. That anthill moving.” A slow seepage that could go on for days, which was why we children had always been chased from there. “And were you—moving toward her?”

Or back into his own life?

He smiled. When it comes to the world’s dump piles, that smile said—in that ashen landscape you are still a child. But I won’t chase you from it. “I moved toward what I saw. Toward Nessa and you. Once I saw you together. With the whole town behind you. I’ve been doing that ever since. That was the afternoon I came back here, and began.”

I got up and went to the hayloft’s window, away from the thrall he might put me in, safely back in my own. There are certain lonely paintings I love. Never any people in them, but haunted by the absence of people—in the angle of a footpath maybe, or under eaves brooding as low as guardian wings. Here the bottom of the town composed itself in a straggle of cobbles and warehouses chinked with light, at the base of one of those streets which incline up to the dots of personal houses, and a marketplace. I almost forgot him, there behind me, hunting his play. Or testing it. And hunting me?

I might be young, but I had an idea that the two should never be hunted together.

“Shall I tell you? What the play’s about?”

“I already know.”

“Who, then?”

“Somebody young.”

He laughed. “Don’t look so sullen about it.” But his voice was dashed. “Yes, young. In 1927. Come. Turn around. I’ll tell it—as I found it. In props. Prop by prop.”

I knew what he meant. In improvisation class, we were dealt situations to dialogue over—and sometimes a hasty assemblage of objects, perhaps a still life on a table, of ordinary objects, a handbag and a notebook, plus some oddity—a flute, a doll’s shoe, a knife. But he hadn’t found his properties merely, or been dealt them. He had burrowed. This was why our class improvisations were so weak, though no one at school could quite tell us why, not even our haughty mentor muttering of Aristotle’s unities, and of her own one succès fou—in Strindberg, at an age little more than we were now.

What was missing in our arranged prop fancies was the real dramatist’s lack of shame. And the real actor’s. Down in the mud, for the glory of the theater. Not to roll in it simply, but because it is there. And is not always mud. And what is mud, my dears? Stare at it long.

“First prop—” the voice behind me says.

He holds that yard-long farmhouse photograph from my grandmother’s upstairs hall. These stiff old shots are often that shape because of the length of the porches, and the size of the families disposed along them. Brownstone, on backgrounds aged to yellow, they harbor a stillness one doesn’t see in the modern technique. “I just now snitched it, from your grandmother’s. While you went upstairs to change.”

I had run up the backstairs, Etsuko vanishing out to her and Watanabe’s ell. He would have gone up the front stairs. To take the photograph, which had hung in the hall to the left, he would have had to pass my mother’s door.

“Was my mother already asleep?”

He will not answer me. Not because his former lover happened to be my mother. As I will learn, he will not ever talk about his lovers. His silence then would be his only acknowledgment that she had been one of them. To him, his lovers are inviolate, not for their own sake, but because they are his.

“Just face the camera.” He’s smiling broadly now. One of his forefingers reaches around the photograph’s frame, pointing to a head.

She is facing the camera too, my great-aunt Mary Leona, in her family called Leo for short, the last born. As often with those, she appears the handsomest, and to me, the most modernly near. When I was born she was still alive.

My grandmother, in the photograph still a young woman, has her left arm raised so that it may rest around her much taller youngest sister’s neck. Nessa—as I will grow used to hearing my grandmother named—is still alive. But in the photo Leo next to her seems as vigorous. A photograph can be made to do this, the person in it toning forward to whoever will agree to revive her or him. We are maintaining Leo. First Nessa, in the long, long run that travels away from a grave. Then Craig Towle, arrived like a bolt out of the blue. And now me?

Does he know that in grandmother’s eyes I have long been what silly old women, leaning over my cradle or bemusedly gripping my soft, untutored hand at graduation have sometimes exclaimed: “The living image!”? When did she start not being able to look at me square?

Or does he think he has discovered me all himself? He sets the photograph flat on the desk, and reaching into a drawer, places a magnifying glass on its surface. “If the photo itself weren’t under glass this would do better. But see there.”

“No.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I mean—I don’t have to look.”

Actors dislike authors with reason. When the material is good enough we begin to forget it is theirs. They begin to stand between us and what we must make our own. They themselves shadow it—sometimes even against what they want of it. And we, outside both it and them, are the ones who have to make it be.

And in this case—I was the material. At the same time enraged—as a target might be—and proud. “I’ve been in that dress.”

In how many greenrooms, in how many theaters, he must have heard the cast chattering of their positions in the play, confirming or inveighing against those as people in real life discuss their destinies. And had been grateful to overhear, or desperate?

“You’re an actress all right,” he says. “But how much do you know? I mean—of this?” He tapped the picture. “Of—Leo.”

I thought of the pottery in the garage. Of the apartment my grandmother now inhabited, scattering her flowered dresses—why did female ancients so often wear jungle prints?—on all that severe wood and manly green leather, one sight of which had stayed in my mind like part of an archive not yet gathered. One dating all the way back to Phoebe Wetmore and me fiddling in bathrooms like small girls do, she the leader, giggling to me what her grandmother, once a layer-out of dead bodies, had reported. Or to my mother’s account of my grandfather’s dance with her: “little pots of those flowers like pansies with the mumps, set out all around the dance floor.” Flowers—the aunt who had lived there then had had a way with them. Flowers also then always kept in the empty niche where I had hidden this afternoon. Once, my father, coming down the stairs white-faced after a bout with my grandmother, had stopped dead in front of it to say: “Leo always kept that niche full of flowers.” Who was Leo? “My Aunt Leona,” he had replied, but had never again spoken of her. Why had I not forgotten any of it?

“I remember everything about her,” I said.

He smiled. It’s his business to know where all the lies come from. And though it may seem strange in an actress, I have never properly learned to lie. That’s from having been with the blind, he’ll tell me later. But I am not sure.

“I haven’t told you what was on the box that did go to the dump,” he says. “In that old-fashioned writing they used to call ‘Palmer script.’ In black crayon. Ha. On yours too, eh. But first—what did your box say?”

“Not mine.” Any more than that other box, all those boxes, wrong, or belated, opened or bound up again—were his.

But he could wait; he knew what he wanted. I didn’t have that advantage. And that’s when we give in, move with the tide, even marry. Hoping we’ll learn from the tide itself what we want of it.

So I tell him.

“Ha. Just ‘WEDDING-DRESS. NESSA’S’—eh? How the womenfolk used to mark things, in the old days. Even the stuff in their own dresser drawers. As if they knew all the epitaphs beforehand.” He bends toward me and takes my cold hands in his. My extremities are colder than normal. Tim, my brother, used to tease that the blood had to go so far—until I found out that his hands are as cold. My profession warms mine. His is no good at that.

But no matter. Craig Towle is talking to me. And will not stop. “Those boxes, those bundles at the dump. They are yours. And they are mine. Don’t forget, I come from this town.” He let go my hands then and said low, like a creed: “We inherit them.”

The hayloft window frames him. What do we inherit, what did we acquire? This window—how divide it? If the moon comes up I’ll leave now, I think—I’ll take myself out of his grasp. But the moon did not rise.

“The boxes would have been marked and mixed up at the same time,” he says. “Maybe at some crisis.”

At once I knew what day that had been. Glinting down all our lives, even mine. Why don’t we go see the farm, girl? Because we came from it.

“What?” he says sharp. “What?”

“The day they left the farm. For here.” And then I give up. “Okay, tell me what it said. On Leo’s box.”

“It said, ‘Not a Wedding Dress. Mine.’”

I am looking at him from a long, long distance. I am leaving the farm, with them. Am I crying over that box? For her?

“Yes, yes, yes—” he said. “Come sit down. And let me tell you a story.”

For the first time I think of him as a man with children, the ones we in town never seemed to see. My father, when a very young one, used to say that very phrase to me at bedtime. Although his stories were always about the little girl who was me, I never accused him of want of imagination, indeed helping him fill in. And now tell me about being a little boy, I said once, startling him. About when you were one. He never did. Perhaps that was kept for Tim—who would never say.

“Any story,” I say, hardening. “As long as it’s not mine.”

When this man is about to make a killer remark, he telegraphs it with the slightest lift of chin. Fencers do that, almost as if they want to. Craving the rhythm, not the kill. “Planning to avoid yours, hmm. By marrying?”

So he pulled out like a thorn what had been drugging my days, puzzling my nights. “How do you know?”

“That you’re marrying young Wetmore? Heard it at Walsh’s. Everything’s on the menu there.”

“I mean—why I am.”

“You just now told me. You’re avoiding—something else.”

“Did I?”

“But you yourself—hadn’t caught onto it?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a common enough cause. For marrying.”

I toed the floor. The workmen had cleaned well. “Yours too?”

Few beard this man on his own motives, I would find—he being the professional grandee of motives; I saw him hesitate because of that. And speak the truth because of it. “No, I did it to find out. That’s what I do.”

So I find out from him early. How the animal hides in the professional.

“Well—” he says, “aren’t you ever going to sit down?”

I leave the window slowly. I hear the breath drawn between his teeth. “The same fairy-tale gawk, it would be. The way you move. I can see it. I got in as deep as anybody can after thirty years—but maybe I’m not done yet.” He watches me sit. “I knew it when I saw you. I could write a line for each one of your bones.”

“But I am not—like that person.”

“I guess not.” Did I hear though that he had had a wild hope? “But—with what you are—and with what I could do—perhaps you could be.”

It takes me a minute to understand he might be offering me the part. That sometimes did happen, even to beginners, in some agent’s grubby office, or in the producer’s dreamboat motel. Otherwise—it would be tryouts for tryouts, showcase theater for the lucky ones willing to work for free, and the gossipy grapevine at the unemployment office. At school we were all coached on the odds.

“Oh”—I say—“Pygmalion.”

“Christ Jesus,” he says. “Education.”

“No. Movies.”

He laughs. “You’re a worthy—”

“Opponent?”

Only a phrase, tapped out in the rhetoric class at school, along with “mortal enemy” and “fast friend.” But it told him, he said later, that I too watched language.

“Collector.”

He watches me examining his desk, no longer bare, as I first saw it, stacked now with typescript at one end, a typewriter at the other, and in the middle, retreated to a last stand, a long yellow pad scrawled in a black as heavy as subway graffiti, and a felt pen.

“I play Russian roulette with those pens. I seem to be able to buy only one at a time.”

But has squandered two years, he tells me, tracing Leo everywhere. Town records. Town newspaper. One photograph—at a flower show. “Of the winning plant only.” A music society that by rumor once sang for a year or two here but had no history. Two ancient shopkeepers, now retired, who remembered the best customer of their apprentice days; the grocer who recalled most a telephone voice; and the past owner of the bookshop, who supplied a list.

“How do you describe a recluse the whole town knew?”

Who baked cookies with rosewater, but once ordered a whole sheepshead in order to taste the eyes—cooking it according to a Turkish recipe—and read Milton’s Areopagitica.

And wore men’s underwear ordered from Switzerland.

Who gave handouts anonymously, the source being known to all, but must never be thanked—which induced a shyness almost hysterical. Who once traveled, it had been thought, but thereafter never would hear news of the world—only of the town. “Yet who did not faint at the sight of blood”—once rushing from the house to pick up a child seen to fall from a neighbor’s window—and once taming a young bear that had wandered in from the Poconos and was scavenging the garbage cans. “Who—according to the minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, whom I tracked to his nursing home in Reading, was the happiest person they all knew, and not at all strange?”

He reached behind the desk. “Then at last I lucked in. Those old biddies and geezers Nessa began bundling the effects to—they’re not Nessa’s friends. Poor old war-horse, she may have none but me. They were the music society.” He brings up a couple of framed pictures, cabinet-size, and holds out one. “The old Austrian says Nessa gave it to him. More likely he sneaked it. Nessa had them all up there this year, he said, one by one. They’ve never seen the place. Asked me not to tell his wife about the picture, which is why I have it. He had been in love most with Leo’s voice. But his wife would never forgive. Ah God, know them? They must be in their eighties.”

“They come to grandmother’s for tea. She’s younger. And eats without speaking. Nothing in common with each other—and it has gone on so long. But they still act out their domesticity. Scary.”

I see I have thralled him. He’s slow to hand me the picture. “Yes—scary.” Then comes that shift—a professional screen dropped—which even his children when grown will never learn to anticipate. Tarquin, who often comes to stay with me these days, especially.

“Well, my dear, here you are,” says Craig Towle. “In 1923.”

Yes, the dead hold very still for interpretation. The heavy cardboard that even then maybe only provincial photographers still used makes it easier. Am I looking at myself three years ago, but long-skirted instead of short, calico instead of my tartan, in the background a barnyard instead of a riding stable, hair cropped close instead of my new bob? They say the twin always looks different to the other twin. If I could see the hands I would know how far likeness can go—surely no two people have the same hands, but these are thrust in the pockets, ungirlishly. I used to do the same. Farmyard boots.

“The hair was cropped because of scarlet fever. Then, Nessa let drop once—for a while Leo wouldn’t let it grow out. The old guy had never seen it like that.”

“No?” But I might have done the same. You are fifteen, and you don’t know what you are, much less who. At the same time you are full of life. The only people you know to have a crush on are other girls. Every day your features vary, seeming to grow on different days, the nose your mother’s, a small woman’s, the chin—your father’s, as a youth. Let’s cut your hair mannish, says Phoebe, who has been taking a mail-order course in beautician stuff. Then let’s go in the bathroom, and fiddle. The nurse isn’t home to catch us, but later, when she sees my hair, she crosses herself, then comes to twitch my cheek. “Any spots? No. Creatures like you don’t get spots, even at the age they should.” And I’d thought she meant diet—the lamb chops and beef juice they didn’t get on Cobble Row. Granny says not to hang around girls like you, Phoebe says next day, fiddling, her face hot.

And all the time, the person you are in love with is yourself.

“See anything?” he is saying.

“So what if I do?” I have to swallow, though. “Leo looks like a modern girl.”

Maybe it’s my expression makes him hand over the second photo so silently. The music society, taken in the downstairs hallway of my grandmother’s house. The young women are all in dark surplices, the men wear flowing ties. The Austrian has high color and light wavy hair.

“They all got a copy of this one,” Towle says. “He had his tinted.”

Leo is in the center, leaning against a niche from which palm fronds spill. It is a pose in which divas of that era used to let themselves be “caught,” as if staring at a basilisk from which they cannot look away. The gaze is deep, the lengthened eyes lucent enough to compete with their jewels, and in the best of them the brow is broad, the cheekbones well planed and easy to highlight, the mouth mobile. Leo has no jewels, only the structure of a face I know too well. Though mine was not destined to attain what Leo’s already had—gone past a girl’s curve or a boy’s narrowness to that questionable human marble which unites. Leo’s hair, superabundant even in the pulled-back 1930s coif, keeps the question alive.

Nowadays my own face is my dear machine. Make-up battered, speech-inflected to the smallest muscle under the skin—I watch it daily, but only for age. It is mine; I have earned in it. But in those days it was only what had been given me. Down home had been the first to approve of it, though dismayed at my other growth. Behooves you to keep yo-seff mo-ah a lady than most, heah?—the dear sweet ladies said. The Evamses had approved of my face almost as if for good conduct—and it had helped me get into drama school. Seeing Leo’s face did not scare me. I felt myself safe from that kind of beauty. Or if safe is not the modern word, say then that my body had already declared what its intentions were. What I felt, looking at Leo, was awe. My face, too, would someday be mine alone.

I turned the framed photo over. On the manila-papered back all the names had been inscribed above the date—May, 1932, and in a young hand the name of the taker too.

“Do you sing?” the voice at my side asks. I shall resist letting the man who owns the voice become more than that.

“I have no ear.” Such a good strong instrument, our school impresario said, holding his head. And listen to her shift key twice in ten bars. “But I can imitate—even opera singers, for a bar or two. It’s not really singing.”

“Which singers?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Try me.”

Oh I would, again and again. What I wanted was for Craig Towle never to come near enough to drop out of the myth that the town, and I too, had made of him. Never to become an ordinary man, in a room with me. Or even an extraordinary one, unimaginably near. And I was afraid that I wanted him nearer.

“Chaliapin.”

He didn’t laugh. “Where from? Boris Godunov?”

“No. I don’t know that. ‘The Volga Boatman,’ just the Yo-o-oh’ part. And Kirsten Flagstad. Not the Valkyrie cry; it’s too sustained. But the first bars of the Love Death—Mild und leise, and a few words on—I can do that. And John McCormack’s ‘Jeanie with the li-ight brown hair’—not always, but sometimes. That’s the hardest.” The Evamses, though they couldn’t take opera in performance, had a wall of old records I was free to play, and had listened to me with glee.

“Tenor—” he said. “You have quite a range.”

“It’s not singing. It’s like—talking. But from the diaphragm. And with what they call timbre.”

“Do one.”

“Uh-uh …” I give it that down-home lilt. You can snow people with Southernism, if you’re good enough. From me, it surprised him. But he caught me looking in my lap anyway, and looked over my shoulder.

“Why—your father took that picture. That long ago.”

“Wasn’t that long ago. Or not for him.”

Then he does laugh and laugh. “That you—should have to tell me.” He sobers. “Maybe I’ve been thinking too much that way. Of a period. I don’t want a play to be that; I never do. Yet even my own early life here seems to me out of a family album. It’s the town—and the reason I left it. Still forty years behind.”

“No!” I say. “It’s not.”

We sit as if over a chessboard. At the window is the town I could never paint as it should be. “It’s not like that,” I say, in a deeper voice than I have ever before let myself find. And deeper yet: “Not at all.”

What an old trick, dropping the voice with each repetition—but I didn’t yet know this. All the tricks were passion once.

“I’m the one who bought this place,” I say, with the same alto joy. Now that I see why I have bought it. To own what you love—and can’t get away from. As people do, never sure of which comes first. “That’s why there’s nobody living here.”

Has he heard me? His head is cocked—he might be one of those students the Evamses crave most, who at the height of practice appear to be listening to decibels beyond the ken of the sighted. He isn’t yet sure of what brand of creature I am.

A flush creeps from my neck to my temples. Old-style actors in the sticks used to hold their breath to turn themselves red, we were told—and were applauded as they reddened. But this crept of itself. If he wasn’t sure what I was—I would never tell him.

“Leo wore gloves half the time, claiming an allergy. Know any reason why?” His tone is strange.

I hate him for it. “Kid in my sixth grade, white kid, her arms were all liver and pink; said her mother was frightened by a stoat in her sixth month. But that’s just the town, eighty years behind.”

“Your round,” he says—and seizes my hands.

They are comely, and small for my size. “I have my mother’s hands,” I say. And I’m a bitch. Let him know that.

He puts my hands back in my lap, slowly. “The part’s yours—Portia. Now—let me walk you through it, though. That a deal?”

How will I feel when I inform them at school, I wonder—proud or shamed? Answer: I will know what bribery is.

“And then—you’ll walk me through it, my girl. With every thing you know about it. Or feel.”

Why do I tremble, like a prisoner offered a cigarette? Answer: because you are savagely learning more about the business of life than you have it in you to confess.

“So—you’re my landlord.”

It was my window, even if I couldn’t make the moon rise in it—the same limits under which the rest of the town owned its property. The Row will buzz no more than it always has about me and mine. He leans toward me, a shorter man than he seems. The crown of his head hasn’t lost a hair. He doesn’t gossip; he takes one into the ways of the world. The back of his head is not as well-shaped as Bill’s.

I face him squarely. Again I hear that intake of breath, and this time I know what I have done. I have assumed that pose. There are divas who must go to school to become one. There are those who come out of the town.

He tosses a key in my lap. I let it lie. Then toss it in the air and catch it. Then toss it back. I will hear his story to the end. As he gives it, I will add to it, until at times it will seem that I am playing all the parts in this family. In many voices. The voice of young Nessa, grandmother-to-be, and the harsh crank of her when old. The twanged Boston of old medical records never resolved—and how should they be, when nature itself has refused to?

“Some facts I’ll imagine,” he says. “Some I know.”

And will it also be the other way round? Some I will imagine, and he will confirm?

Through the air the packages will come flying toward us, under the glare of an ashheap sun.

As he begins, both our faces are incredulous. He has given me the part. I have inherited it.