Joe met her for the first time when he was eleven years old. On Greenwood Avenue.
That was the year they bought the big house by the lake. His father was a professor of Musicology at the University. He was writing a book on Brahms. Mom worked for Hillcrest Realtors. She drove a scarlet Ferrari 328 GTS.
Joe bought an old canoe for eighteen dollars. The guy at the boatyard said it was a genuine Seneca imitation. He’d paddle it across the lake every morning to Dire Point and leave it there under the wharf of one of the summer cottages. Then he’d walk to school, past the chapel and the country club and along Greenwood Avenue to Washington Boulevard.
This morning she was in the middle of the block, standing under a tree beside a mailbox. She was blond, wearing a black raincoat, black boots and a black beret.
She smiled at him. They were all alone on the long, green, sunny avenue, just the two of them.
She had purple eyes.
‘Good morning,’ she said in a voice from Somewhere Else. Maybe South America. Or Asia. Or Canada.
‘Joe Egan.’
‘You’re Professor Egan’s son?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Enormous eyes! He could see himself reflected in the purple.
‘I heard him conduct Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem last year at Yale. It was magnificent.’
‘I know all the words by heart.’
‘You do? All of them? Do you speak German?’
‘Nope. I learnt the phonetics.’
‘Denn dies Fleisch est ist wie Cras,’ she sang softly, ‘und alle herrlichkeit wie des Grases Blumen.’
‘Das Gras is verdorret,’ he sang, ‘und die blume abgefallen.’
‘Do you know what it means?’
‘Nope.’
‘“Behold, all flesh is as grass … and lo the grass withers and the flower decays.”’ She stared at him, drowning him in her eyes. Eyes like the lake, like the sky in the lake. ‘Where does Mr. Morgan live, Joe?’ Like the sun, deep deep in the lake.
‘Over there,’ he pointed to Morgan’s house. ‘He’s sick.’
‘Yes, I am aware of that. Thank you. I’ll see you around.’
She crossed the street, humming the Requiem.
Coming back from school that afternoon at four o’clock, he saw a wreath on the front door of Morgan’s house.