IN THE CITY’S PARKS the trees stood holding the late-summer light, glowing with it, giant natural lanterns. Scattered blankets spread out over the lawns, covered with people, the afternoon flowing out from them in a soft current. Children walked by bodies of water and stuck their hands in the wet rushing. A kite jerked in the wind, spermatozoically. In the air was the contentment of people inside a mystery that they did not need to understand. The kite rose frantically higher, then softly fell.
The House of Steve fell not softly but with theatrics, like the final scenes of a complicated saga. Investments were unwound, properties sold off, debt restructured. A certain slide in social standing was endured as part of the loss of financial power. Some friends disappeared. Some advisers shrugged and stopped returning phone calls. Others flew in to assess the rot, pick the bones, and save some meat. Not everything was lost. Through the secular miracle of world markets, bonds, banks, rehypothecation, mortgages wrapped in credit wrapped in words, funds were salvaged, some real estate retained. Damage was done and yet the individuals survived. Even the worst of them, Jonathan, never went to jail. This was, like one of the conundrums Felix puzzled over, unbelievable. And yet it was true.
As it turned out, Patrizia had discovered in the examination room that she was pregnant with Steve’s child. She never had a chance to tell him. But it was what she had longed for and in spite of the shock of Steve’s death she carried the baby to term. She named him Stefano. Roman ignored the infant but Felix enjoyed him, its wobbly head, its alien eyes. Felix grew up quickly as a result of the birth of this sibling, and came into his own, found music and a sense of purpose. He learned how to make guitars. He painstakingly bent and molded the wood. He began composing electronic symphonies. He chose a new name for himself: Phoenix. He wrote a wildly ambitious orchestral piece and dedicated it to his late father.
One of the movements of his symphony is inspired by Han-shan’s Red Pine Poem 253:
Children, I implore you,
Get out of the burning house now.
Three carts await outside
To save you from a homeless life.
Relax in the village square
Before the sky, everything’s empty.
No direction is better or worse,
East just as good as West.
Those who know the meaning of this
Are free to go where they want.
Poppy often finds herself hearing this music, these words, in her head.
Alix fell in love, truly, for the first time. She had run into Genevieve a few days after the benefit for Ian’s show, and eventually Genevieve left her husband. She moved out of the townhouse with the room of baseball caps—her children were grown and had left home—and into Alix’s apartment. Alix finished the monograph on medieval art she had been thinking about her entire adult life. It was published. She saw much less of Ian. But she was a devoted aunt to her niece, Miranda and Jonathan’s daughter, the precocious and surprisingly unspoiled Greta. Alix took Greta to the Metropolitan, the way she had taken Poppy, and the two of them sat on the steps licking ice cream, Greta’s buckled shoes planted firmly on the worn stair.
Alix doesn’t remember, sitting on the steps with Greta, the time she had met Poppy on the same steps, the chilly air messing Poppy’s hair around, Poppy’s forehead furrowing into a series of unspeakably pretty commas. What Alix knows is a kind of comfort with Greta—who looks much like Poppy did as a child, although whenever this is mentioned Alix says she doesn’t see it—and with this child she feels an ease far removed from competition or tension, a second chance, a playful love.
Perhaps Greta was fortunate that Jonathan had lost nearly everything after Steve died. Short-selling, poor investments, the real estate slump in certain emerging markets. But Steve had saved him from total ruin, had put certain trusts and executors in place, ensuring that the benefits of various loopholes and tax advantages would soften any blow. Nevertheless, Jonathan’s circumstances were reduced. And the company was destroyed, he would have said. Creative destruction, others might have countered. His losses tempered him and forced him to become slightly less selfish, less vicious. It wasn’t so much the money as the social recalibration. At one point he had to ask Patrizia for financial assistance, which pleased her and irritated her in equal measure. He sought her attention at a family gathering, cornering her in a quiet room, while Stefano and Greta were on their way to Mars, packing lipstick, trucks, candy, and socks in a shopping bag. They were off. It was raining on Mars. They didn’t have an umbrella.
Ian’s show stole the season. The critics rhapsodized, audiences spread infectious word of mouth, a cult following developed, and even Angus, usually so spiteful and patronizing, praised it in a lengthy piece. It captured the moment. It made sense of the times. And it moved people. Night after night they experienced emotions coursing through their bodies. Hot reds and cold blues, cool greens and warming yellows, traveled down their arms, through their torsos, burst out the tops of their heads. It wasn’t just sensation, it was feeling, and it was thought. The consolations of art could be found in a simple candle on a stage, a voice rising up, the communal catharsis of the gathering. Ian watched from the back of the theater as the players gave themselves over to the music, to the story, to the human beings watching them. Together the actors and the audience rose up, ripped outside of time, elevated themselves like beams of light, and, like flames, set the house on fire.
He talks to Poppy at night when he is alone. For now, that has to be all right. He doesn’t expect her to care. He keeps talking. He whispers, he cries, he won’t forget.
She does care, she does wonder, although she wishes she did not. She begins to care about herself again, to wonder about her self. She begins to put herself back together, saying her own name over and over.
The love they have is an attempt to express the inexpressible. There is no word for it.
Eventually, Poppy was able to forgive Ian and have a relationship with him. It was not exactly a father-daughter relationship. He had not raised her and she had known another father, Steve, whom she would always think of as her father. But Ian knew her and their connection grew and deepened when she finally allowed it. He helped her when she decided to apply to college. He listened to her weigh her options, complain about deadlines, talk through her essay, and resolve her plans. He did not pressure her. He did not advise her. He only listened. He listened and reflected, and communication moved between them like satellite intelligence reaching back and forth across oceans. They were relieved to discover who they were supposed to be to each other, and in time they moved forward. They moved on.
You have to keep going, he told her without saying it. He told her by showing her, by continuing to try. He let her know she would always have him, that he would always be there for her to talk to. You’ll see, his actions said, I am here for you.
Poppy and Ian and Phoenix walk together in a park, near Poppy’s apartment. They make an odd kind of family but it is an arrangement that works. Poppy and Phoenix loop their arms around each other’s backs, Phoenix has grown, Ian ambles a few feet to the side. The distance between them is like the distance between letters, between words in a sentence. Irregular but with a logic. Relaxed and elegant in its simplicity. It makes sense, this empty space. It makes meaning.
Their shadows stretch out in the late-afternoon light as if for miles, like a wake running behind them.
When she leans on the railing and looks down into the Hudson River, Neva sees an emptiness which contains everything: the mountains she came from, this city she has made home, and the other rivers she visits when she travels. She goes back to visit Russia. She stares into the River Neva and sees the Hudson.
The river is always moving on, always emptying itself out. In this emptiness is the washing away of meaning to find the deeper meanings, the stillness, the unburning fires at the bottom of the river. She looks for them, catches glimpses, colors, glints of red and orange rushing past, turning blue, then black, into eddies, swirls, clear and cold.
And like a river Neva moves on, flows forward, continues. She carries children. She carries Angel’s daughter in her arms. She helps their family. She moves on from Patrizia and Stefano because Patrizia decides to do it differently this time, to spend more time with the baby. But Neva will never lack for children to carry. She finds a girl, back in Russia, on T. Street, and she saves her. She saves others, from Russia and from other countries. She works with people around the world, hoping to build a highway of freedom. She gives her life to the movement. She is a movement.
Neva walks along the Hudson River. She sees a vibrant violent calamity of light rain down on the water, smashing into it, sending electric radiance into the air. She keeps walking. She goes on. She feels her heart move outward like an army of roses, marching, ablaze, on fire. She runs with the strength of feeling. She rushes with the meaning of emptiness. She flows with resistless force. And she carries beauty with her.