1 Episode One. Monday.

Four Days Before the Wedding.

The redcoats are coming! The redcoats are coming!”

Pim sounds the alarm. He’s decked out in Minuteman regalia: his sister’s old blue windbreaker, too big for him (mercifully, since it’s all he has on and Aunt Glad could arrive any minute now). Even so, the pale cabbage of his bottom flashes beneath the hem as he gallops along the upstairs hallway. The dark wainscoting and wooden floors are giving off a swollen, spiced scent and the window at the end of the hall shows a square of glaucous sky. It’s been raining for days.

Bennie, his mother, catches sight of the self-appointed sentry as his mission takes him past the open bathroom door. She’s kneeling on the bath mat, helping Mantha wash her hair. Mantha, previous owner of the windbreaker, is eight and would normally be able to handle this task on her own, but in her current state, sporting a blue fiberglass elbow-to-wrist cast on her left arm, she must submit to her mother’s assistance. She sits in the tub with her head thrown back, eyes pinched shut, mouth a perfect prune.

Pim, recently ejected from the tub himself, doubles back long enough to thrust his head in the doorway and repeat his echoic warning, and Bennie glances up at him, at five her youngest, hovering there still pink-skinned, damp hair sticking out every which way, imploring her to—what, exactly? express alarm? muster arms?—and a current of amusement ripples through her (his urgency, his nudity), but she issues only a short imperative: “Pajamas,” before turning back to her daughter and tipping a potful of water over the cream-rinse-clotted hair.

“When are they coming?” asks Mantha after she is done spluttering. She splutters ostentatiously after every potful, no matter how carefully her mother ensures the water does not run over her face.

“When are who coming?” Bennie, picturing redcoats, frowns.

“Everyone.”

Oh. Right. The invasion. Everyone—or something very close—will be descending on them in the coming days, summoned together by the impending revels: Clem and Diggs are getting married.

Clem, the oldest of Bennie’s four children, is planning, at the ridiculously tender age of twenty-two (never mind that Bennie was a bride at that very age), to wed her college girlfriend in four days’ time. Bennie still can’t quite believe it. With a not-uncheery sigh, she runs through the list of expected arrivals, a helpful reminder for herself as well as Mantha: there’s Aunt Glad, speeding here at this very moment (Walter left over an hour ago to pick her up at the assisted living center in Fishkill), then Clem and her two bridesmaids, due later this evening. Spread out over tomorrow and Wednesday, Bennie’s siblings arrive: Lloyd with his daughter and Aunt Carrie with her brood—

“What’s a brood?” Mantha wants to know.

“A whole bunch of chicks. Or in this case, Aunt Carrie’s kids.”

“She only has two.”

“I was being ironic.”

“What’s ironic?”

“Actually, maybe I was being sarcastic.”

Mantha tallies the kids in her own family: Pim, her, Tom, and Clem. “Are we a brood?”

“And how.”

Mantha laughs.

Anyway—Bennie resumes her itinerary—Thursday is when Diggs & Co. arrive, driving up from Falls Church, Virginia.

“Who’s Co.?”

“Short for company.” In this case, Diggs’s father and stepmother. The “& Co.” contingent, along with various other less intimately connected family members and friends, are putting up, thank goodness, not here but at the Garrison Inn in town. The future in-laws had been invited to stay here, but their demurral came, quite frankly, as a relief (a reflection not on them but on the haphazard hazards of daily life behind the scenes with the Blumenthals; Bennie doubted the Digginses would be well-served by witnessing at this early juncture just how chaotic a family their daughter was marrying into). Even so, their own house has been tasked with accommodating nine extra people in addition to the six who officially live here. Live(d) here. Because Clem, after next weekend, won’t.

What almost no one knows is that Clem is the tip of the exodus. It isn’t simply that Clem will presumably, in the natural order of things, be followed by the next oldest, Tom, and eventually by Mantha here and one day even by that little half-naked militiaman tearing up and down the hallway now hollering—what is he hollering?—Grab your muskets, men! It’s that very soon none of the family will live here anymore, here in the house where Bennie has lived her whole life, and where her mother grew up as well, and before her, Aunt Glad, who is in fact Bennie’s great-aunt. Walter and Bennie have agreed not to say anything until next week, after the wedding, after the meeting with the real estate agent.

For years they’ve had a running joke about putting the house on the market—mostly taking the form of idle quips about abandoning ship in the wake of some new thing going wrong, some not inconsiderable plumbing bill or carpentry bill or masonry bill (not to mention the great bat-exclusion fiasco, which led to the great chimney-rebuilding fiasco)—but over the past six months the conversation turned serious. And it wasn’t any longer just the house they spoke of leaving, but Rundle Junction itself.

Still, it hadn’t become real until the evening—less than a week ago—when Walter came home close to midnight from the village meeting, bearing a conciliatory pint of burnt caramel from Piccolo’s. Bennie had kept herself awake doing combat with the Thursday crossword; he found her glowering at it on her old wooden clipboard. “Sorry I’m so late.” He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, handed her one of two spoons and dug his own into the ice cream. “Public comments went on forever.”

She listened as he recapped the evening’s revelations, at the end of which she gestured with her spoon. “You’re saying it’s really going to happen.”

“I’m saying it already is. Ben—right down the road, you know Garvey’s old place? As of last week there’s a new family living there.”

“Black hat?”

He managed to combine a confirmatory nod with a reproachful wince at her use of the slang. Never mind that she’d picked it up from him; Walter had grown up around Orthodox Jews in New York.

“You’re saying it’s time, then. For us to move?”

He let a few more seconds elapse, out of respect or as a kind of condolence—after all, she is the one with roots here—before granting, “I am.”

She’d called the Realtor the next morning. Not being one to wallow.

So that’s two secrets she’s carrying around now—the second quite literally: she is ten weeks pregnant. Walter knows. And her ob-gyn. No one else, not until after the wedding. What a thing! Another fact she can hardly believe. As soon as she’d seen the plus sign on the stick she’d felt herself blush with the preposterousness of it, the unlikely foolishness of finding herself pregnant at age forty-four. And yet she’d felt this, too, in that first instant: utterly flush with good fortune.

In a gesture that is semi-involuntary and wholly uncharacteristic, Bennie now lays her hand flat against the wall at the end of the tub and runs it down, as if stroking the flank of some loved, ailing creature. In so doing she dislodges (oh yay) a few more flakes of paint where the wall is distended and discolored: signs of one more leak they’ve never quite managed, despite periodic attempts by assorted handymen, to vanquish.

“What are you doing?” Mantha queries.

“Oh you know”—airily—“just feeling the wall!”

“Whatever. Anyway, who comes then? After Diggs & Co?”

“Nobody much,” says Bennie. “Just all the wedding guests.”

For the wedding is happening here at the house, or at any rate on the lawn, on Friday at five o’clock in the afternoon; Clem had gotten it into her head that it would be auspicious to wed on the eve of the summer solstice.

Down the hall comes a tread too heavy to be Pim. Bennie looks up to see her older son toting the pretty leaded-glass reading lamp she asked him to bring down from the attic hours ago.

“Did you remember to bring down the night table like I asked?”

“Yes, Mother!” he flings back in a falsetto as mellifluous as it is unconvincing. Tom is sixteen.

They’ve decided to install Aunt Glad on the first floor of the house, in the room that has always been called the office but which has devolved over the years into more of a cold storage room, a place for stowing excess produce and off-season clothes. In preparation for Aunt Glad they’ve made it over: earlier Tom lugged down the folding cot and Bennie, in a rare instance of going beyond the minimum requirements for cleanliness and comfort, made it up with freshly ironed linens spritzed with lavender water. Mantha had plucked a nosegay of violas and put them in a jelly jar on the desk (these are already wilting; she having forgotten to add water) and even Pim had made a contribution: a windowsill tableau of battling plastic dinosaurs.

Back in 1920, the year of Glad’s birth, the residential part of the house had been entirely confined to the second floor, with the downstairs functioning as the village post office and general store. Photographs in the powder room off the foyer show what it looked like then—with the old service window that’s been reimagined as a pass-through between the kitchen and dining area, and the shelves where dried beans and coffee and rolled oats were once displayed now transformed into a pantry. One photo shows Bennie’s grandmother Joy and Aunt Glad as little girls out in front of the house. Glad sits in a Radio Flyer wearing a pair of fairy wings. Joy, holding the wagon’s handle, is costumed in a white dress with a diagonal sash that reads: Two o’Clock. The photo, as every generation of inhabitants has been able to recite, was taken on the occasion of the Spirit of Progress Grand Community Pageant of 1927, in which nearly the entire village was said to have participated.

More pageant pictures decorate the powder room, one whole wall of which is practically a shrine to that unabashedly multifarious event: here are men costumed as Wappingers paddling canoes across Ida Pond; there women in Grecian robes, posed Isadora Duncanesquely on a hillside; here Morris dancers with bells on their knees; there children skipping round a maypole; here a float carrying nymphs and satyrs; there—jumbled together in a single frame—a skeleton riding a donkey, a pilgrim churning butter, and a man dressed up as Father Time, cradling an hourglass in his arms.

All of the photos, it goes without saying, had been taken during the first four days of the pageant, before, that is, the fifth and final day, when an explosion in the grandstands killed eighteen children and injured some three dozen spectators of all ages. Collectively then, the photos, while portraying only the most shining achievements of the historic civic event, prefigure in some way the tragedy that was to cap it—at least for anyone who knows the story of that fateful day, as all Rundle Junctioners do—and this unarticulated presence, the weight of the event not depicted but nevertheless lurking within the proud images, lends the powder room gallery a faintly funereal dignity.

Among the children in this household, it’s the photo of Glad and Joy that compels the most interest, less for the sisters themselves than for the way it shows the exterior of their very own home looking at once the same as it is today and not. It gives them the chills. It’s like a magic mirror in which they can glimpse—not their fate, but what might have been their lot, if only the timing had been different. Over the front porch, for example, they can make out a sign that isn’t there anymore: ERLEND’S STORE * DRY GOODS * SUNDRIES * VILLAGE POST. Also they can see an elfin version of the shagbark hickory that stretches high above the roof today (or “in real life,” as Mantha insists on putting it, no matter how often people remind her life was real then, too).

In the foreground Joy stands with her shoulders back and her toes turned out, regarding the camera levelly, whereas Glad, in the wagon, has an arm flung across her eyes, either to shield them from the sun’s glare or to flout the photographer’s attempt to capture her. The seated girl appears, to her great-grandnieces and -nephews, defiant, mischievous. More interesting than her sister. She looks like a girl who might hit you if provoked, and they have each in their turn admired her for it.

MORE THAN EIGHT DECADES have passed and still, as the car conveying Glad Erlend back toward her family home rolls slowly past the sloping Green, marked at one end by the ruddy sandstone village hall and at the other by the moon-pale public library, the old alarm clangs in her marrow, scampers through her blood.

But why?

Beyond the sopping grass, down the hill, the surface of Ida Pond is sequined with rain. Glad finds herself straining to see through the drop-studded pane, intent on making something out, searching the visible curve of shore for the fatal spot.

Fatal spot?

She cannot pinpoint the source of her dread. It’s a smudge at her periphery. When she tries to get a better look it darts away. It breathes unease, flickers and fans up the side of her face, blazes across her shoulders, crackles against her breast. With a whoosh her ribs flare beneath her blouse.

Glad lifts a hand, presses it to her sternum. Her fingertips are cool.

Now she is passing the center of the Green, where a hulking granite monument displays a plaque.

A plaque?

No plaque is visible through the rain. Memory supplies the element she cannot see, affixes it to the rock. A copper plaque gone lichen-blue. Engraved with eighteen names.

GLAD IS SEVEN, Joy nine. Everyone in the village is here. Many more people from out of town are here, too, come by train and car to see the spectacle, which has been advertised as far south as New York City, as far north as Poughkeepsie:

THE SPIRIT OF PROGRESS GRAND COMMUNITY PAGEANT

OUTDOOR DRAMA OF RUNDLE JUNCTION’S PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE PERFORMED DAILY BY ITS RESIDENTS ON THE SHORE OF IDA POND

JUNE 20–24

It’s Friday, the last official day of the weeklong extravaganza, but post-pageant celebrations are set to continue into the weekend (at their own house they have a party planned; Mother is baking an angel food cake with penuche frosting), and already, this early in the morning, the path to the grandstands that have been specially built for the occasion along the eastern shore of the pond is thicker with foot traffic than on any of the previous days. The Garrison Inn is full to capacity. New Ashkelon and other neighboring towns’ inns have no vacancies either; some residents have rented out spare rooms to strangers.

The mist is still rising off the pond, the sun just beginning to make butter on top of her head (this is what Joy calls it when you reach up your hand and feel the oveny hotness there), and it’s rousing, she loves it all, the feeling of importance, the hordes of strangers that, having heard about the great thing her village has done, have flocked here from afar, masses of people milling on the sidewalks and streets and making their way across the Green, a great pinwheeling confusion of trousers and skirts. Above her head their voices interlace and ricochet, a potpourri of human tongues, some speaking in unfamiliar accents, some in unfamiliar languages. Voices thick and sweet as condensed milk, voices soft as ashes swept from the grate, voices like salt and pepper, voices like a box of tacks spilt across the floor.

Stay close, Gladdy, Mother keeps reminding. It’s your responsibility not to get lost. It’s her responsibility to keep her eye on Joy’s lilac sash, the trail blaze she has picked to follow as they thread through the crowd. Daddy left before sunrise to assemble on Moose Island in the middle of the pond along with the other men playing Wappingers. Their part is to paddle canoes across the water during the second episode. What a revelation it has been to see their ordinarily practical and retiring father transformed by the fringed trousers and beaded tunic Mother sewed for him. Mother is the only one in the family not acting in the pageant (As if I don’t already have enough to do), but she has taken on the task of chairing the Costume Committee and serving on the Public Communication Committee; in addition she has been in the kitchen all week, turning out batch after batch of hermits and her famous no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies for the Performers’ Refreshment Tent.

Glad and Joy hold hands while Mother carries her bundle and together they make their way, along with the multitudes, across the Green to the path that wraps around the pond, heading as they have on each of the four preceding mornings toward the grandstands. The dancers in the first episode, “The Birth of the Hours,” assemble on the far side of the stands under the copper beech tree. Joy in her lilac sash is one of the Hours: Two o’Clock. Glad, initially pouty over being informed she was too little to play an Hour, has come to relish her part, which, anyway, has a longer, fancier, and more romantic name: Little Fairy Attendant Upon the Hours.

She may not have a sash like Joy’s, but she has something better: wings. Mother made them out of wire and netting and decorated them with cloth flowers and real feathers, the latter gathered and contributed by Glad herself (Wherever did you find these? Mother had looked askance: They’re sure to be riddled with contagion, but Glad begged, Please, please, I promise they’re clean, won’t you sew them on?). The wings are attached to an elastic harness that fits around her chest and crisscrosses over her shoulders. The elastic bites into the side of her neck every time she turns around, which she cannot help doing often, in an effort to admire them. She stops in order to adjust the elastic, trying to route it along her dress instead of her bare skin, but it keeps working its way back up against her neck. Finally she succeeds in securing the collar of her dress underneath the elastic. That’s better.

When she looks up her limbs go hollow.

She is lost. Not lost—she knows where she is—but although her feet have not budged it’s as if she’s traveled to a distant land, for the crowds have continued to flow around her and no one looks familiar. She’s become dislocated while standing in place. Mind you keep up, Mother’d said. It’s your responsibility. She tries to think matter-of-factly. When you’re lost you’re supposed to stay put. Or no: you’re supposed to find a policeman. Failing that, a woman with children. Failing that, a kind-looking woman. Failing that, a man with children. She looks around. Such a terrible abundance of faces and fabric, hats and gaits and voices and smells, such a dizzying thrum. Her stomach spins, her gorge rises.

And then: Joy. Through the crowd, Glad spies her sleek brown bob, her organdy dress. She darts forward, frantically pushing past waists and bottoms until she catches up and with a flood of relief seizes her sister’s arm. But the girl who spins around is an impostor. She has Joy’s dress, Joy’s height and hair, but—the vision assaults Glad with a kind of hallucinatory violence, a nightmare logic—she is Joy wearing the head of a stranger. Not-Joy glares. Glad releases her arm, and someone brushes roughly against her and a few feathers tear loose from her wings and drift to the ground.

Then, sweetest of sounds, she hears her own name—Glad! Gladdy!—and running, overcome with gratitude, dizzy with it, she dodges legs, pushes without pausing to say excuse me and arrives, panting, tears threatening, beside the real sister, her own Joy, who, taking her by the hand (not without a reproachful squeeze), tugs her forward.

But whose voice called Glad! Gladdy! for it wasn’t Joy and it wasn’t Mother—it was a boy, surely, a little boy with a voice like a silver trumpet. Who could’ve called her? She searches her memory (but this is old Glad now, the nonagenarian craning her neck to see out the window and straining to remember as she glides through the center of the village in the rain in the car all these decades later, searching, scouring the recesses of her mind for something that belongs there, something that should be there but is missing, has been irrevocably lost. Or not irrevocably. For it’s something to do with the voice, isn’t it? Little boy blue, come blow your horn.

But we mustn’t speak of that.)

Only once they reach the old copper beech on the far side of the grandstands does the forest of bodies thin out enough for a small person at last to breathe freely and perceive the wider view: the three maypoles that have been erected along the shore of Ida Pond, their Easter-egg-colored streamers rippling in the morning breeze; the brass band on its wooden platform under the crooked willow whose branches weep into the shallows of the pond; the tents set up behind the red sandstone Village Hall, which serve as dressing rooms for the performers; the vendors assembling along the snow fence—installed to control the crowds—just beginning to set out their concessions: sandwiches, popcorn, lemonade, and bags of peanuts in their shells; pageant ears to enhance one’s hearing; celluloid eyeshades and paper fans to mitigate the effects of the midday sun; and souvenirs for children—handkerchief-size Old Glories on sticks, clackers, toy horns, and pinwheels of red-white-and-blue.

What on earth did you do to your costume? Mother tuts. She sets down her heavy bundle (Whatever is she carrying? Old Glad, peering uneasily down the narrow corridors of memory, cannot make it out) and stoops to reshape the wire frames on Glad’s back. Then she rotates the child, inspects her front, and straightens the dress collar. Licks a finger to tame the cowlick that will within minutes reassert itself in the center of Glad’s bangs. While Glad submits to the grooming, not altogether begrudgingly (For how often does she receive Mother’s undivided attention, not to mention her touch?), she squints into the grandstands, interested not in the bodies seated upon it but in the dim recesses beneath. Already half a dozen children are playing within that cavernous hidey-hole, which has served all week as the private domain of the children of Rundle Junction.

Joy and Glad, like most of the children in Rundle Junction, have bit parts early in the pageant but are not required for the rest of the performance, which stretches out over the course of each day, broken up by intervals during which spectators promenade about the pond or partake of picnics on the Green. On Monday, opening day, the sisters had watched the entire performance, but as early as the second day they, like many of their peers, had already grown bored by the long, slow repetition of the numerous episodes and tableaux, and preferred to spend the hot afternoon in the cool dim area beneath the grandstands.

To their surprise, Joy and Glad have not been forbidden to play there. It’s the sort of activity Mother would ordinarily declare off-limits on the grounds of its being dangerous, dirty, and unsupervised. But she has been unusually lenient this week, swept up like everyone else in the spirit of novelty and adventure and community effort. She has seemed younger, looser, has smiled more, laughed more; the sisters even saw her weep, openly, without shame or embarrassment—she was not alone; many of the townspeople touched handkerchiefs to their eyes—during the final episode on the first evening, as the sun lowered and reflected off the pond and the clouds bled apricot and cherry and the chorus sang an original composition by Mr. Frank M. Brown, the high school music teacher and organist at the First Methodist Church. How luminous, how soft and strangely pretty their mother has appeared to them this week.

In any case, she has allowed Joy and Glad uncommon liberty—Be responsible! Make sure to stay together!—and they have taken advantage of this to clock many ungoverned hours playing with their compatriots in that place of mystery whose terraced ceiling, the inverse of the raked seating above, is so low at its lowest points that even the littlest children have to crawl and at its uppermost extreme rises to a vaulted, churchly height. Some direct sunlight comes through at the back, yet even there it remains relatively dim and atmospheric, for bales of hay have been stacked high all around.

Who stacked them there?

Who knows.

Bales of hay on either side of the grandstand serve the purpose of providing extra seating; those who don’t arrive early enough to secure a spot on the bleachers can clamber up on the hay to get a view of the pageant proceedings from there. But the bales stacked in back? Perhaps their placement was intended to prevent people from doing precisely what the children of Rundle Junction have done: gaining access to the space under the stands. Or perhaps they were simply extra, an excess of hay having been hauled over from neighboring farms that answered the call for donations. Perhaps they wound up forming a wall along the back of the grandstands merely for convenience’s sake, to avoid taking up space needed by the performers, the vendors, and the police who are responsible for maintaining clear paths of ingress and egress for all the spectators (over two thousand each day so far, according to official reports, with this final day of performance—word of mouth having spread—expected to draw close to double that number).

Who could have foreseen what would happen?

Only in hindsight would it seem inevitable that children would find a way to burrow in. Only in hindsight would it seem foolish that no one thought to question the prudence of encircling the spectator seating with all that flammable material.

It was a sixth grader named Percy Oglethorpe who, a little past noon on that Tuesday, discovered that if he shouldered through a narrow gap between two stacks of hay that had been set down at a slightly cant angle, the opening quickly widened into a passageway, which led in turn to a fantastically capacious arena, shaded and hushed, directly beneath the main mass of people attending the pageant.

Once in, he gave a whistle and within a minute was joined by three of his more rowdy friends who, muscling after him, widened the gap between the bales. Upon registering the magnitude of Percy’s discovery they’d issued whoops, inadvertently or not summoning other children to come see what merited such fuss. Soon the space was full of kids of varying age and size. Some discovered there was decent treasure hunting to be had here directly beneath the audience: coins, buttons, an embroidered handkerchief, the odd hair ribbon or pocket comb. Others yanked out handfuls of the already blanched, sun-starved grass to clear the way for games of marbles, readily produced from trouser pockets. The older girls established their own separate territory within the dimmest recesses of the place. In the days to come, this would be encroached upon, timorously at first, then with greater boldness, by their male counterparts; in time an empty pop bottle was introduced, along with some resultant kissing. But because the entire realm was a contiguous open space, it offered no real seclusion; the intermingling of little and big kids seemed to ensure a kind of wholesomeness, which was likely why, although a handful of grown-ups did poke their heads in briefly from time to time to gauge the nature of the goings-on within, no one ever thought to issue an out-and-out ban.

It was as if the whole town had caught pageant fever.

PERCY OGLETHORPE. One of the eighteen names on the granite monument that marks the center of the Green. He’d been twelve that summer, practically ancient as far as a seven-year-old was concerned, and certainly not anyone Glad knew well, yet the population of Rundle Junction was small, and after all they’d attended the same elementary school, played on the same playground, walked the same sidewalks, swum at the same sandy beach down at the western edge of Ida Pond in the summers, and as she is being conveyed past the Green now, these eighty-seven years later, the car maneuvering carefully down the rain-slick street, tires swishing round the curve beyond the Village Hall, a surprisingly clear image presents itself. Tousled carroty hair. Copious freckles. Jutting ears. A narrow face that tapered to an almost elfin chin. A perpetual squint. Perhaps—the thought occurs to her with freshness and vigor, as if it were important, as if it mattered one jot—perhaps if he’d lived longer he’d have wound up with glasses.

A granite monument with eighteen names, eighteen lives, all belonging to children.

Or rather: each belonging to a specific child. Each child possessing a singular assemblage of features, idiosyncrasies, memories, hopes, a distinct lineage, a unique destiny. But that’s oxymoronic, no? What is the word for a destiny that never comes to pass?

And what of her own scars prickling as the car rolls past—do they really prickle, does her rib cage really kindle? Do the shiny pink-and-white gathers of skin on her face and neck and side really tighten? Or is it only her imagination, a trick of the mind? These many years later.

Glad has studied herself all too closely throughout the years of her life; she no longer needs a mirror to picture just how the burned areas look, the white parts ropy as curdled milk, the pink parts livid as baby mice. The scars are the sole part of her skin that has never noticeably aged, the sole part of her that remains preserved almost exactly as it has been since she was seven.

Yes, she remembers being there. Under the grandstand. The magnificence of that cool, inverted space with its soaring ceiling, its great private mote-streaked dimness. She remembers the mounting trepidation and excitement she felt as she and Joy burrowed in past the packed bales that first time and found themselves in that child-only underworld smelling of dirt and hay. She remembers the way each subsequent day they felt more at home there, more at ease, more entitled. All of them, collectively, developing pride of ownership in the space they’d conquered and settled. And she remembers how the pale golden spears of light had slanted down to reach them there, slanted down, far down through the firmament formed by the tiered seats, the mystery of those shafts of light cast from so far away, beyond any space they’d ever traveled or known.

Of the explosion she remembers nothing. Has only the vaguest memory of the fire, vague jumble of flame and smoke and heat, of children’s cries and screams within what had become a deadly enclosure, of panicked adult exhortations from without. Who knows what of these memories is real and what conjured, suggested, subscribed to after the fact? Only Joy she knows she remembers for sure. Joy holding on, squeezing her hand so hard it hurt. Joy not letting go. (It’s your responsibility, Mother had reminded them, and Joy was good and minded her responsibility, she got Glad out of the fire and would later be praised. Thank God, thank God, people would say, Thank God Joy at least was responsible. No one would ever call Glad responsible on that day.) Joy pulling her with two hands away from the darkness of the blaze, away from the choking foul grit of the smoke, out into the open, out into the brilliant smash of cymbal-throb sun and lung-shock blue. (But whose hand had Glad been meant to grasp, who had she been meant to hold on to and not let go?) Open your eyes, Gladdy. That had been Joy. Open your eyes, you’re safe, I’ve got you. And somewhere the sound of a siren, and somewhere the sound of bleating.

But where is the little boy tending the sheep?

He’s under the hay-cock fast asleep.

Will you wake him? No, not I,

For if I do, he’s sure to cry.

Scientists, she has read, say memory does not exist independent of thought. Any notion of it as a separate entity, a substance that can be secreted away in the body like bits of grain, is fallacy, fantasy. Romance. Memory’s sole physical province, they insist, is the brain. Yet Glad does not believe this. Glad has never shaken the conviction that her body harbors memories long hidden or lost from her conscious mind. Could it be a coincidence that the body repairs its wounds by forming something called granulation tissue? Granulation, grain. The fine grain, the fineness of grain. To be engrained. Of all the words she never wanted to learn—debridement, necrosis, proud flesh, grafting, adhesion—of all the words she was subjected to, words that issued from the mouths of doctors and nurses for many months afterward, words that became part of her parents’ vocabulary, and Joy’s, and her own—granulation was the one that seemed to hold some promise, some consolation.

Glad touches the fingers of one hand to the scars on the side of her face, glides them lightly down her neck, over her heart, across her breast and ribs and around beneath her arm—a gesture so commonplace, so many times repeated over the course of so many decades, it holds the unconscious grace of ritual, of rite.

“We’re almost there.”

She startles. But of course: a car cannot drive itself. She swivels toward the driver’s seat. A large, jovial-looking man with a sonorous voice and a head of thick silvery-white hair, rather too much of it. His face more youthful than his hair would suggest. She cannot place him, quite. For some reason he makes her think of a walnut.

“Pardon?” Glad, who has excellent hearing, finds it sometimes useful to feign otherwise. A stalling technique. She dislikes these moments of disorientation, but has learned that with time and patience she is often able to gather clues from her environment. Surely she ought to be able to piece together enough information to recall who she is with, why she is here with him, and where they are driving. She has a sudden inspiration—might he be taking her to the train?

Lately she has been visited by a not-unpleasant dream in which she is in some kind of station. A vast metal-and-glass structure alive with porters and pigeons, plumes of steam and plaintive whistles. Sunlight streaming through a skylit atrium in steep silver-white shafts. In the dream she is standing under a wooden departure board, whose split-flaps make a great rattling noise every time the schedule is updated, and she is trying without success to decipher the numbers of the platforms and the destinations of the trains, all of which seem to be written in a language—an alphabet—she does not recognize. And yet she is devoid of anxiety. She is filled with the peaceful knowledge that she will recognize her own train when it comes.

“We’re almost at the house,” the driver says.

“I know that.” A little tartly, it comes out. She didn’t mean to be rude. But the sound of her own voice pitched in such a manner turns out to be comforting. It reminds her of something about herself, makes her feel capable, unassailable.

Sure enough, now a piece of the puzzle presents itself:

By “house” he means home. As in her childhood home. The white clapboard building whose first floor houses the village post office and general store, and whose upstairs houses the private rooms where she lives with Mother and Daddy and Joy. Or lived. She doesn’t live there anymore. She is returning as a guest, returning for a celebration, some sort of reunion or gathering . . . a holiday . . . a festival? A wedding! The wedding of her great-grandniece, the eldest of all the great-grands. Clem, Clementine, a skinny little thing with hay-colored hair. Who must be in some way connected to this man—she glances over again—this rather nice man driving her; she knows he is someone she feels warmly toward. Even if he could use a haircut. But what is his name, this nice, large silvery fellow who reminds her for some reason of a walnut?

And who is the interloper?

For a wedding always involves an interloper. By definition. A wedding means a stranger getting inside the gates.

Surely someone has told her the name of Clem’s intended. She could ask. Could inquire of this man; probably he would know. But—with a little jolt it hits her; she almost gasps—why, he is himself an interloper! The only reason she’s in his car now is that he married Bennie, her grandniece. That’s who he is, her nephew-in-law. What is his name? She peers at him. Surreptitiously, she thinks—but no. Instantly he responds, turning to her and daring to grin broadly.

“Watch the road!”

He laughs. Obeys.

Well that was more than tart. She was overly severe. Really quite rude. Ought she apologize? She steals another glance. He appears to be biting back a smile. No, then, she decides. And scowls out the window. After all there are rules to follow, proprieties to observe. And now for no apparent reason (sometimes it works this way, the mischievous, on-the-lam facts just surrender themselves, turn all of a sudden meek and compliant) his name comes to her: Walter. He is Clem’s father and Bennie’s husband and his name is Walter. Walter the Walnut. In spite of herself she lets loose a great chortle. And then—how undignified, how merry—they’re in it together, the two of them, Walter and Glad, not exactly kin, not exactly strangers, joined in helpless, primitive laughter.

BENNIE EMPTIES A LAST POTFUL of water over Mantha’s head and rubs an expert thumb across her daughter’s crown. “Squeaky,” she approves.

“Can I stay in?”

“Better not. Water’s getting chilly.”

“It’s summer!”

True, or nearly true. The first official day of summer is Saturday. But how dark the sky looks outside the bathroom window, and how unseasonably cool it is. Both sides of the indoor-outdoor thermometer have given readings in the sixties all day. If the rain doesn’t let up, Clem and her bridesmaids may have to abandon their plan of staying in a tent out back. Bennie can see it now: everyone crammed inside the house, sleeping bags unfurled in every bedroom, wet towels draped over the furniture, clumps of mud and sodden grass tracked in faster than they can be wiped up. All of which would be headache enough even without a wedding, a wedding over which she has little say, for—despite bountiful inquiries and offers of help—the happy couple has insisted on handling all the planning and preparation themselves. Bennie is certain this includes zero provision in case of rain.

Another sigh, not not-uncheery this time.

“Hop out now,” she insists, for no real reason except that exercising control over something at this juncture, even a proxy something, seems a good idea. She plucks the rubber stopper from the drain and rises, slowly, a hand on her lower back, making careful allowance for the recent shift in her center of gravity.

Mantha’s bottom jaw slides forward in her trademark sulk but she obeys, leaning her good arm on her mother to leverage herself upright. Water sheets oilily off her skin, which glistens from the bath bead they dissolved in the tub. At eight, Mantha is still wholly without a sense of physical modesty and everything is on careless display: the frank curve of her stomach, the nearly colorless flat nipples, the florid welt on her left buttock where an insect bit her. Her hair, normally a wiry mop, cleaves to her scalp. She smells of strawberry (the bath bead) and coconut (the cream rinse) and her indifference to her own loveliness produces in her mother a wistful flare of feeling that wicks out again without ever taking form as thought.

Now, as a hundred times, a thousand times before, on so many other evenings, with this child or that, Bennie shepherds her daughter through the familiar routine, which has the pleasing rhythm of a shuttlecock: out of the bath and into a bath sheet. Out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Out of the bath sheet and into pajamas. And, “Hey,” Bennie calls to the other one, still streaking up and down the hall, “out of that jacket now, young man”—(“Mine!” Mantha protests)—“and put on your pajamas before I have to say it one more time.”

“One more time, one more time,” parrots Pim, coming to a brief halt in the doorway of Mantha’s room. He flirts with obedience—letting the windbreaker puddle to the floor—only to eel away again naked.

“Your rotten brother,” Bennie observes.

“I know!” They listen to his wayward footsteps clomp down the stairs. Then Mantha covers her mouth and joggles her shoulders up and down, a pantomime of laughter: yuk yuk yuk.

Everything is vaudeville in this house.

Bennie drapes Mantha’s head with the bath sheet and towels vigorously. Flaps it away. Damp thatch sprongs in every direction. “Comb,” prompts Bennie, holding out her palm.

WALTER’S MONDAY-NIGHT RITUAL is making baguettes. Ordinarily three; tonight five times that number, in anticipation of the delegations of glad-tiders set to arrive this week. Originally he’d envisioned doing all the baking for the wedding celebration itself: bread and rolls, a ricotta orange cake, rosewater and spice cookies, a blackberry galette. This was a couple of months ago, when the RSVPs started rolling in. He’d begun sticking little torn-newspaper bookmarks in cookbooks, making and revising lists, asking whoever happened to be passing through the room, “What do you think about hazelnut torte with espresso frosting?” and “Does this sound good: lemon and almond semolina cake?”

“Are you demented?” Bennie’d inquired. “You’re going to bake desserts—excuse me, not only desserts but also breads—for fifty-odd people? Have you been laid off work and forgotten to tell me?”

It had taken considerable effort to talk him down, but in the end he’d consented to stick to baguettes and let the cake, singular—“One wedding, one wedding cake,” Bennie decreed—come from a bakery.

He fills the kettle and sets it over a medium flame, preheats the oven, ties on his blue-and-white-striped apron. Removing the tea towel from the bowl of dough he’d left rising before heading off to Fishkill, he lifts the yeasty mass onto the counter and begins working it with the heel of his hand. Soon the air is particulate with flour. Walter sings as he shapes three more loaves, lays them on the oiled tri-part pan, scores them, slides them into the oven. His bass-baritone does not so much rise over the chorus of rain bearing down on the porch roof as join it in song. The Warsaw Ghetto resistance song. He substitutes freely for the Yiddish he can’t remember: “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg / Something himlen blayene something bloye teg / Something something undzer oysgebenkte sho / Ah la lum tee dum tee dum: mir zaynen do!”

The kettle shrills; he fetches a mug and pours Glad’s tea, sweeping aside the baguettes he baked earlier that afternoon and taking the cover off a new bowl of dough, each action flowing so smoothly one into the next they feel of a piece, feel like one large continuous action; already he’s forming the next trio of loaves. A fat bottle fly buzzes around his head. His is a large head, thick with prematurely snowy hair and well-balanced by a barrel chest, a hefty girth, thighs like fire hydrants. He carries thirty more pounds than his doctor would like, but he carries them well. Even the fly becomes part of his seamless choreography; he swats at it with a tea towel, keeping time with his song. He might be conducting rather than shooing. Now in English. “Oh never say that you have reached the very end,” he sings. Singing is not the right word, though. Insufficiently oomphy. He bellows, he booms. He rends the air, swirling the flour motes into hoary whorls. “Though leaden skies a bitter future may portend!”

Another balletic swoosh of the rag; once more the fly is diverted. In English, too, he is untroubled by forgotten lyrics. “Ba dum the hour we bee da dum will arrive / And our marching steps will thunder: We survive!”

Tom saunters in from the porch chewing a long stem of wild onion grass, his T-shirt darkened with spatters of rain.

“Prop that door open, will you?” Walter doesn’t glance around. “Zog nit keyn mol . . .”

“Mom says keep it closed so flies don’t get in.”

Without breaking tempo, by brandishing his tea towel Walter indicates the extant fly.

Tom shrugs, props the door, then comes around the counter. “Hey Dad. We getting one of those signs?”

Walter finishes the verse before inquiring, “What signs?”

Tom, having faithfully if delinquently set up both the reading lamp and the night table in the office, had rewarded himself by going out to sneak a smoke in his usual spot, around the side of the barn, from where he’d spotted in McElroy’s yard an unfamiliar object: a large corrugated plastic lawn sign. McElroy, their nearest neighbor, an unsmiling widower with a putty-colored crew cut and an unwavering allegiance to Chevrolet, is nothing if not reliable. Every two years he replaces his pickup with the latest-model Silverado, always in black. Every four years he plants in his front yard a sign promoting whichever presidential candidate the Blumenthals are not voting for. Today’s sign, unrelated to any election cycle, had not been there on the occasion of Tom’s last cigarette, meaning McElroy must’ve staked it sometime this afternoon. Meaning in the pouring rain. Meaning with some degree of dedication, or passion, or something. “They’re kind of everywhere,” says Tom. “Have you noticed? Like overnight everyone got one. It’s weird.”

It’s true. Along with all the American flags that have proliferated in recent weeks, flapping from porches and garage roofs and on lawns (but this is a regular seasonal occurrence in the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July), another emblem has spread prodigiously throughout the village, a spate of corrugated green signs with gold lettering: CITIZENS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF RUNDLE JUNCTION. Below that, in smaller font: SAVE THE SILVER MAPLES. “So are we?” repeats Tom. “Getting one?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“It’s not—”

“We’re anti-preservation?”

“It’s not really . . .” But here Walter trails off under the guise of multitasking. Nestles newly formed loaves in the spare pan. Grabs the mister, opens the oven, spritzes the batch currently baking.

“Not really what?”

“It’s less about actual concern for the environment than about political opposition—or really, ideological opposition—to the new devel—”

“Oh I know, I know about this,” Tom interjects. “The new housing complex. They want to build where the wetlands are.” Truth be told, a month ago Tom hadn’t even known there were wetlands in Rundle Junction. But in May his bio class took a field trip to the swampy tract out behind the dead bowling alley, and lo and behold: it turned out to extend fifteen acres, all the way to the shore of Ida Pond. These wetlands, Ms. Srivas had explained, functioned as a natural sponge that helped keep the residential and business districts of Rundle Junction from flooding. And the silver-maple forest provided a wildlife corridor for all sorts of other animals—otter, mink, coyote, fox.

“I’m impressed with your knowledge,” says Walter, with a small and un-ironic bow.

“And now some developer wants to convert it all into luxury apartments.”

“Well,” says Walter, “it’s a little more complicated than that. For one thing there’s also a class component here. An issue of economic diversity.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a shortage of affordable housing in the area. The plan is for a new development to include subsidized units for low-income families.”

“Which is a good thing.”

“In my view.”

“Dad.” Tom sounds offended. “Mine too. But don’t you think . . . I mean not at the expense of the environment, right? Because mainly”—he repositions the onion grass in his mouth—“mainly this is about saving the silver-maple forest.” Close listening reveals this to be a question. Lately Tom has taken to inflecting his questions in the manner of statements.

“Mainly”—Walter pauses to run his tongue contemplatively along his teeth—“mainly it’s about the Jews.”

The developers are said to be Haredi—or at any rate to have close ties to the ultra-Orthodox community. From Brooklyn to New Jersey to Rockland County and beyond, the various Hasidic sects—Satmar and Belz, Vizhnitz and Skver—are bursting the seams of their environs, and the fast-growing community nearby in New Ashkelon is rumored to be seeking a foothold in other towns with affordable housing and space for shuls and yeshivas. This, Walter says, this specter of invading Otherness, more than concern for wetlands or wildlife, is what Citizens for the Preservation of Rundle Junction is really about.

“Come on, Dad.” Tom pulls a face. “No one’s like that.”

But Walter can vouch for it. Playing to anti-Semitism is precisely how Jeff Greenberg stirred up opposition to the developers’ plans at last week’s village meeting. One might think with a name like Greenberg he’d be less quick to play on people’s vilest, most deep-seated aversions, no matter how assimilated he himself may be, but he hadn’t hesitated to fan unrest with talk not of silver maples but of Jews. Greenberg had hung his hand patiently in the air until he was recognized by the chair, then stood and dropped his bombshell in a move you could call a reverse-Tom: putting a statement in the form of a question. “Is it true,” he asked, “that the new development’s going to have two kitchens in every unit?”

Two kitchens? The whispers licked like flames around the room as people turned to their neighbors for clarification.

One for dairy, Jeff explained—he sounded almost embarrassed—and one for meat. Jeff Greenberg, built like a crane, unimpeachably unimposing in his faded dungarees, his faded plaid shirt. His wife’s father’s friend knew the building inspector or the village engineer or some such; at any rate someone had reportedly seen the floor plans and every unit had been drawn with two kitchens. “When we think of other communities,” he’d continued in his reedy voice, “where large groups of ultra-Orthodox have settled, when we look at the impact such influxes have had on schools, property values, local businesses, even local governance . . .” And here he’d paused and spread his palms in a great, fatalistic shrug.

There was no need to finish the sentence; everyone in the room was surely envisioning New Ashkelon, whose school board and town council had, over the past decade, become majority ultra-Orthodox. As the demographic had shifted—and with the birthrates being what they were among the Haredim, the shift was swift; the joke was that the community’s median age, fourteen, was also the average number of children per family—the character of the town also swerved dramatically. More and more of its local businesses had begun closing early on Fridays and remaining shuttered all Saturday in deference to the burgeoning Haredi clientele, who boycotted stores that stayed open during the Sabbath. Public school enrollments had declined and property values had first soared, then plummeted as non-Orthodox families moved out, leaving one of the elementary schools to be converted into a yeshiva and freeing up houses for the growing Haredi population, who received tax breaks for designating them places of worship. Driving through New Ashkelon on any given afternoon had become an exotic experience, an inadvertent form of tourism. There was a newly built mikveh, and eruv wires had been strung around a nine-square-block section of town. Even Walter felt unwittingly voyeuristic, seeing groups of men in fur shtreimels and peyos walking along the side of the road, with separate groups of women in dark, loose-fitting clothes and flocks of children in long sleeves, long skirts or long trousers, no matter the time of year, no matter how high the mercury in the thermometers.

Without making explicit reference to any of these factors, Jeff had simply paused, then added, again with near-apologetic gentleness, “I think we’d be making a grave mistake if we didn’t ask ourselves whether that’s what we want for Rundle Junction.”

You had to hand it to him, he was good.

“But there’s public money going into this,” someone said, already with—not a snarl, not yet, but certainly a tone of indignation. Righteous indignation. “I mean, fair housing laws and all. Right? They can’t just rent exclusively to their own kind; wouldn’t they have to allow anyone who qualified based on income?”

Jeff—really he was a canny sonofabitch—hadn’t even needed to respond to that—not verbally, anyway. Nodding, he’d mashed his mouth up against his teeth in a kind of rueful grimace—In theory, he seemed to be saying. And we all know that and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee—then slunk back down in his chair as other voices around the room took up the debate, the hashing and rehashing of intention and actions, the statutes on the books versus the reality of human behavior, the law of the land versus the law of numbers, until the chairman of the meeting had to call for order.

That night the citizens of Rundle Junction sat in their kitchens and discussed kitchens with a fascination they could not recall the subject ever previously warranting. They sat in their kitchens and also in the booths at Shady’s Coffee Café and on the benches outside Piccolo’s FroYo, and they stood outside their cars in the lot behind Village Hall, the weight of their keys forgotten in their hands as conversations between spouses and neighbors and friends lengthened and divided, some shaping themselves around terms like tax base and high density and public assistance, others around hats, wigs, and shawls, and still others around melting pot, freedom, and democracy.

Walter insisted on telling Bennie all about it when he arrived home, disregarding for once her well-established indifference to civic affairs. Whether despite or because of the fact that Rundle Junction was Bennie’s lifelong home while he was only a transplant, it was Walter who had always felt impelled to invest in the community, subscribe to the local paper, and keep abreast of zoning changes, budget override votes, yard waste collection dates, police blotter items, food pantry needs. Over the years, anytime he suggested she accompany him to a village meeting (This’ll be an eventful one—they’re going to discuss whether moneys donated to the schools can be earmarked for specific sports teams), she’d scoff. More precisely: she’d close her eyes and fake-snore. Stalwart, she liked to call him, at once a blandishment and a jibe. As in, You go, Stalwart. You go and keep our village safe. And she’d slip into a kind of botched frontierswoman accent. Ah’ll stay home and tend to the young ’uns.

If she’s always treated his sense of civic engagement as a source of amusement, lately she has expressed blatant incomprehension. Ever since their late-night, hushed conversations about selling the house (whose deep family history has become dwarfed by its deep structural problems, which they now understand have flagrantly outrun the capacity of their bank account ever to remedy) have come to include not simply leaving the house but also the village, and to use the parlance not of whether but of when (these discussions shaded in turn by the growing certainty that sooner—before the character of the town is patently altered—rather than later will likely result in their getting a better price), Bennie has treated his continuing attendance at village meetings—his continuing allegiance—as a cause for something like baffled pity. Walter himself can’t explain why Rundle Junction’s future remains important to him. He’s not even sure what motivates him more: the well-being of the village itself, or his need to regard himself as a good steward.

“Dad.” In the kitchen, Tom recovers his wandering attention by clapping a hand on Walter’s shoulder: universal sign of masculine solidarity. With this as with so many of his gestures these days, it’s hard to tell whether he’s trying on the vestments of manhood in earnest or spoofing them in wiseassness. But when next he speaks, he sounds sincere. “I think it really is an environmental thing. Ms. Srivas says there’s something like fifty species of birds alone that live there.”

Walter registers the clumsy puppyish weight of his son’s hand and looks him in the eye. Tom’s face has morphed rapidly this past year, the twin promontories of jaw and brow asserting themselves more squarely. His neck has thickened; his nose, too. Who needs time-lapse photography? Just get yourself a teenager and pull up a chair. “Maybe.” Walter doesn’t believe it for a minute but wants to be fair. Or at least model fair-mindedness. “Maybe,” he allows, “for some people that is the concern.”

Tom responds with kindly reassurance. “I’ve never experienced any anti-Semitism in Rundle Junction.”

It’s frankly rattling, an upset to the natural order, to be comforted—condescended to—by one’s own son. The implication being that Walter’s getting doddery, susceptible to paranoia. With a deliberate exhale he changes the subject. Working to keep his tone neutral, unedged by accusation (but really, could anyone fail to notice the tobacco on Tom’s breath, even under that masking whiff of onion grass, even under the mingled scents of June rain and yeasty dough?), he says, “What were you doing out in the rain just now?”

“Me? Nothing—uh, Mom wanted me to count how many folding chairs we have in the barn.”

The delivery’s a little too quick to be believable, but Walter lets it slide.

“WHAT’S THAT?” Pim, bare-bottomed, sits on one hand. With the other he points to the shiny pink splotch on Aunt Glad’s face. It spreads down her neck and disappears beneath her blouse, as if someone threw an egg and it broke against her cheek and ran down and never got washed off.

They’re side by side on the ancient gold settee. Aunt Glad holds open on her lap a picture book, Ant and Bee Go Shopping—Pim delivered it so she could read to him, but it turns out he is not very interested in the story.

“What’s what, dear?” Aunt Glad gazes at his finger, then turns to follow its aim. He seems to be pointing at nothing more specific than the south-facing living room wall, which is covered with little brass doors, a hundred fifty-six of them. This is another number she knows by heart, or by marrow, by her very grain. Each door bears its own tiny pane of glass and a combination lock in the shape of a ten-pointed star, its points labeled A through J. “Why, those are the letterboxes,” she says. “People come to collect their mail from them.” Even as she speaks she feels the dials between her fingers, the specific resistance of the cool brass knobs as she turns them. She and Joy do this when their parents are busy or elsewhere; they’ve taught themselves how to pick the locks, how to feel the wheels catch as the notches line up on the other side of the door. They do this not to remove the letters (if they wanted to steal mail all they’d have to do is sneak behind the counter and pluck it from the open back side of the boxes; however this, they know, would be not simply mischief but an actual federal offense), but for the spark of elation that comes with success, that little in-sip of victory whenever a lock releases and the door yields.

“No,” says Pim, “what’s that?”

She turns back, trying to see what else the child could mean, and his fingertip grazes her face. She has a quick urge to bite it. Instead she places her own hand, heaped with veins and animated by a benign tremor, over his and guides it to his lap. “Don’t point, dear.” It has been thirty-four years since she taught kindergarten. She retired in 1980, at age sixty. They gave her a pension and a party with sherbet punch and hummingbird cake. Mr. Striker, the music teacher, choked on a piece and turned red as the punch.

It must be the pecans, someone says. But could that be true? This is before the days of nut allergies. It must have gone down the wrong way, someone says. He has to be guided to a chair, have his tie loosened, a cup of water held to his lips. Someone is kneeling before him—is it she? Mr. Striker, are you all right? Feeling better now? He is the only male teacher at Rundle Elementary—the only man in the whole building except for the custodian, Mr. Mangoli, whose teeth are stained brown and who keeps a spittoon in the boiler room.

Pim decides it must indeed be naughty to point out Aunt Glad’s eggy splotch. He’d had a notion it was, had a notion his parents would reprimand him for it. Also he decides that she herself must be unaware of the splotch, which fills him with such pity that he reaches out and pats her arm.

“Well!” Aunt Glad gives a pleased little cry.

Her skin is a fascination to him. Not only the pink-and-white part that runs down the side of her face and vanishes beneath her blouse, but all her skin, the way it drapes from the bones, crosshatched by tiny grooves, as if someone took a fork to candle wax, the way it smells like the inside of the linen closet upstairs when you slip in and latch the door behind you in a game of hide-and-seek.

For her part Aunt Glad peers at him, her chest suddenly tight. There is something familiar about the child, the sweet rudeness of his stare, the dampness of his hair, the way his whole body, all that translucent bare skin, the whole package of his body, seems to flicker. She has a quick conviction she is responsible for him. His name is on the tip of her tongue.

Then the small book in her hands recalls her to the moment, to the matter at hand. “Now, where were we?” And turning the page, she resumes reading aloud. “‘Then Ant and Bee and Kind Dog went to choose some fruit. And Ant and Bee and Kind Dog all chose . . . plums!’”

But Pim has lost every ounce of interest. He reaches over and presses the book shut.

“Oh,” says Aunt Glad, extracting her thumb. “Gently.”

“My sister is being a bride,” he informs her, hopping off the settee.

“Yes.”

“Mantha is being a flower girl.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Tom isn’t being anything.”

“He will be a proud brother of the bride.”

“I am being a soldier.”

“Not a ring bearer?”

“I have a rapier and a musket and a lightsaber and a crossbow.”

“My.”

“It shoots real marshmallows. I will shoot everyone that comes that I hate.”

“Oh! Well . . .” Aunt Glad feels suddenly tired. “I suppose no one will come whom you hate.”

The little boy is hopping about the room, slashing the air with an invisible sword. His body, though no longer damp from the bath, is slippery-looking, nimble and bare, flitting through the watery greenish light of the downstairs. Little boy blue, come blow your horn. Rain drums on the flat porch roof, loud as the leaden feet of toy soldiers. The soldiers they make out of lead, she and Joy, pouring the molten stuff into casting molds, molds that make members of the Coldstream Guards in five different poses. Molds that had originally been a birthday gift, or were going to have been a birthday gift, molds that had already been wrapped in colored paper and tied with ribbon, intended for a little boy—but we don’t talk about that. Daddy works his jaw quickly as they unpack everything from the kit: molds, clamps, ingots, a special little pot and ladle. It’s after supper, wintertime, the corners of the room webbed with shadows, the Glendale stove giving off its heat. Mother, sitting on the new gold settee, reaches into the basket of mending at her feet. Carefully Daddy and the girls lay the pieces on the long wooden table.

You go ahead and put one in, Daddy tells Glad. Mother sucks in a breath like a needle of air. You’re not going to let her do it. Meaning Glad, home at last after so many months in the hospital, after so many operations. She can do her part, says Daddy softly. He clenches and unclenches his jaw so fast it looks like he has a heartbeat in his temple. You go ahead and put one in, he tells Glad, holding out the pristine little pot, and she picks up an ingot—round and fat as a shortbread cookie—and plunks it in. He sets the pot on the Glendale and begins to speak in an almost mechanical rumble. As if for no other reason but to banish the silence. We call this a melting pot, he says. For reasons that are clear. But it also happens to be what we call our country. A nation where people from all different lands come together as one.

A queer, muffled sound from Mother on the settee.

Glad’s skin prickles. The graft scars tighten around her neck and ribs, squeeze like an angry grip, punishment for something no one will name; the shadows at the edges of the room dance.

Daddy goes on. The metal we use—interrupting himself to clear his throat, baharruum! like a bullfrog—is part tin, part lead antimony. When the ingot has become silvery-black liquid he says, Come, Joy. You can pour the first batch. With an abrupt, ragged sound, Mother leaves her sewing and the room. Daddy holds his big hand over Joy’s small one and together they pour what will become soldiers.

In front of her, the naked little soldier boy hop-pirouettes, kicking out violently behind him. “Hi-yaa,” he says, baring his teeth. He repeats the move several times, completing a tour of the room before turning to Aunt Glad and confiding in her severely, “The Han army is on the move.” Hands cupped in her lap, she watches him continue his maneuvers, faintly aware of being the recipient of his chivalry, for which it is her duty to pay grateful attention. In truth, she is a little bored. Pim’s penis flops around independent of the rest of his body’s torsions, a scrap of whimsy at the center of an otherwise bellicose display.

“William Myron Erlend Blumenthal!” The roar makes them both jump. Bennie stands at the bottom of the stairs holding the bath sheet still damp from Mantha. “Oh, Aunt Glad, hello! Hello! How was the drive? Have you been here long? I didn’t hear you come. And you’re sitting here all alone!”

“Oh!” Glad gives a little laugh as if to say she’s undeserving of such fuss. “Tom was here just a while ago. He stopped for a chat.”

Bennie stoops to kiss her great-aunt and breathes in her smell, a scent that is neither good nor bad but cherished by virtue of familiarity, some mixture of school paste, lemon drops, and VapoRub. “Sorry, Aunt Glad.”

“Whatever for?”

Bennie narrows her eyes at the naked boy. “That scoundrel.”

Pim shrieks delightedly at this. He does another twirl, shows off his deadliest kick.

“One,” counts Bennie, spreading the bath sheet wide.

From the kitchen comes Walter’s voice, resounding with enjoyment of its own virility. “Spanish heavens spread their brilliant starlight / High above the trenches in the plain!”

“Spare us,” mutters Bennie, “the Spanish Civil War songs.”

“He was just telling me the Huns are coming,” explains Aunt Glad, making a valiant if vague effort to connect the dots.

“The Han army!” Pim corrects.

“Two,” counts Bennie. How she despises herself for resorting to counting out loud. In front of this gentle soul who famously taught kindergartners for thirty-three years without once (the story goes) having to raise her voice.

Walter, sonorous, from the other room: “From the distance morning comes to greet us / Calling us to battle once again!”

Bennie draws a deep breath, clear harbinger of “three,” and Pim at the last moment dashes into her arms. She wraps the towel around him, pinning his limbs so that he can safely pretend to struggle while she growls with her lips just touching the rim of his ear, “I’ve got you now, my pretty. You’ll never get away.”

MANTHA IN HER BEDROOM gazes down upon them all. She is the one. The grand surveyor. Good elbow on dresser top, chin on fist, she squints into the dollhouse that has perched there since before she was born, mentally locating the members of her family in the rooms they inhabit at this very moment in Real Life.

Real Life is a distinction she insists upon because there are so many other kinds. For instance: Past Life, Future Life, Dream Life, Make-Believe Life, Private Life. Pim lives in Make-Believe Life most of the time, except when he is sleeping. Aunt Glad drifts between Real Life and Past Life; sometimes you can actually see her crisscrossing. Tom lives with one foot in Real Life and the other pitched forward into Future Life; this, too, you can see with your own eyes, the way he tests the ground ahead of him, trying out new walks and voices, new ways of presenting and absenting himself. Her parents most often and quite categorically claim the territory of Real Life. This is why, whenever she chances upon them believing themselves alone, it produces an elevator-drop sensation in her stomach: to glimpse them inhabiting Private Life. To glimpse her mother, reading a paperback on the couch, break into a smile of such rare tenderness over—what could it be? a line, a phrase?—and then gaze into the middle distance, working her lips almost imperceptibly. To glimpse her father doze off with the newspaper in hand, to see the paper fall aside and his mouth go slack, to see nothing but slits of white between his eyelids for a moment before he jerks awake, clears his throat, returns to the article at hand.

People in the same house, at the same moment—even immersed in the same conversation with each other—can be inhabiting different realms. Mantha alone, by studying the special dollhouse until her eyes go out of focus, has the ability to locate the members of her family in their various realms.

The dollhouse is special for the following reasons:

Her grandmother built it. Her grandmother who died when Bennie was just nineteen. Many years ago, when her grandmother was no older than Mantha is now, she built it with the help of Aunt Glad, the same Aunt Glad who is at this moment sitting downstairs on the gold settee with her sparse cottony hair and her goldy-brown eyes and her small feet that do not quite touch the floor. They built it together, just the two of them.
They did not use a kit.
It’s this house. Not only is every room replicated in miniature, with aspects of the old post office faithfully included; so, too, are many of the actual furnishings they still have today. The cane chair on the porch. The claw-foot tub in the bathroom. The Morris chair in the living room. The floor lamp, with its stained-glass shade decorated to look like a bowl of fruit, that stands beside it. (The miniature version is molded sugar. Mantha has touched it with her tongue.)

The house is split and hinged like a bivalve. Its permanent position is wide open, everything on view. At night from her bed she can see into the tiny replicas of rooms set aglow by the moon-shaped nightlight plugged into the wall. Every night from her bed she performs this ritual preamble to sleep: she travels through the rooms, through the house that passes generation to generation, she flies down the staircase and up again, in and out the windows, over the roof, over the moon.

The house is doll-less. At least it came to her unpopulated. Two years ago, when she was six, Mantha claimed a pair of wooden clothespins from the laundry basket and made them her children. One has a bit of yellow yarn tied around its neck, the other a bit of red yarn. Their names are Fear and Sadness. Hello, my Fear, she’ll murmur, she’ll coo, even today, picking up the one and placing it softly in the white bathtub carved from a bar of soap. Good morning, little Sadness, she’ll greet the other, giving it a kiss before propping it up against the tiny perfect maple-stained balsawood kitchen table in the breakfast nook. I made your favorite, toast and eggs.

“Isn’t it strange?” Bennie’d said at the time to Walter. “Isn’t it worrisome?”

“What are your dolls’ names?” she would ask Mantha (who was still called Sammy then) from time to time, hoping the answer might have changed.

It never did.

“Would you like another clothespin?” Bennie would offer. “Do you think they might want a sister named Happiness?”

No was ever the answer.

She didn’t seem like a depressed child.

“Do you think she ought to see someone?” Bennie said to Walter.

The pediatrician referred them to a psychologist who specialized in play therapy. She was a grandmotherly sort with an Israeli accent who watched Mantha-then-Sammy take apart and reassemble separately a set of matryoshka dolls. Do they have names? the psychologist asked.

Yes.

Can you tell me what they are?

They were Jenny, Judy, Jean, Bobby, and Foofoo.

Do you have any dolls at home?

Yes.

How many?

Two.

Will you tell me about them?

They’re sisters.

What are their names?

But Mantha-then-Sammy appeared not to hear this question. Having finished with the matryoshka family, she moved on to a box of little wooden cars, which she began to unpack onto the richly colored kilim rug.

What do you do when you play with them?

She arranged all the little cars in a ring before answering. Take care of ’em.

How do you take care of them?

Oh—now she was driving the cars one by one out of the ring, parking each on a separate part of the kilim—cuddle, sing songs. Take ’em to the zoo. Cook ’em pudding.

What kind of pudding?

Lima bean. Popcorn. Beep.

I see no reason for concern, the psychologist told Bennie and Walter after two more sessions. I find her to be securely attached. Able to self-soothe with imagination and creativity. Also—but I don’t need to tell you this—she’s a pip!

Before Mantha was born the dollhouse had belonged to Clem, just as this room had once been Clem’s, and the apple-and-pear-patterned wallpaper, and the bed and the dresser and the radiator and the window seat and the closet and the mirror that is so old the silver backing has come off in places so whoever is being reflected is afflicted with vacancies like a leper or a ghost. Before Clem, the room belonged to their mother and Aunt Carrie. Before that, to their grandmother, who died before they were born. Even longer ago it was shared by another pair of sisters, Glad and Joy, their great-grandaunt and great-grandmother. And one day Mantha herself will be the mother who comes into this room to kiss her own little girl good night.

Now, beyond the drumbeat of rain, which has been falling for days, hammering the roof, swelling the doors fat against their jambs, making chocolate soup of the bald parts of their lawn, Mantha listens for clues as to what is happening throughout the house. She hears:

Pim and her mother in the living room (there is his piglet squeal; there Bennie’s low, matter-of-fact retort).

Aunt Glad on the settee (her throaty chortle; Pim must have done something funny).

Her father in the kitchen (caterwauling one of his protest songs).

Tom on the stairs (here he comes galumphing).

And now an engine (growing louder: coming up the drive)—and Mantha gives the shout: Here’s Clem!

THE CAR, a long-nosed Buick wagon, lurches to a stop. The rear passenger door opens. A foot, Doc Martened, plants itself in chocolate soup. “Shit.” This is Hannah. “Thank you for parking in the Hudson.”

From the front passenger door another foot emerges, this one bare, balletic, describing an arc over the puddle. The rest of the body follows as if poured. “I have to pee, I have to pee!” This is Chana, owner of the car but (as she readily professes to any and all) an abominable driver ever grateful to default to the passenger position. “I’m serious, you guys, I really have to pee.”

“So pee,” Hannah tells her.

“I have to!” She gallops laughing toward the house.

Now the engine cuts off. Headlights, too. The driver’s door opens. Out steps our ingénue.

Let’s give her a real entrance. She’s twenty-two, yellow-haired, brown-eyed, with the tiniest gap between her top front teeth. Seven weeks ago yesterday she strode across the stage at her small liberal arts college, wearing a shiny black gown and a mortarboard upon which she’d glue-gunned a dozen real mauve tea roses, and received a diploma conferring upon her the degree of Bachelor of Arts (concentrations in anthropology and theater, senior thesis: “From Flash Mobs to Pop-Ups: Paratheater Since Grotowski”). Since then she’s been crashing on Hannah’s couch in Brooklyn, helping her make jewelry out of playing pieces from vintage board games (Risk earrings, Trouble necklaces, Life charm bracelets), then helping her sell said jewelry at farmers markets all about town. Hither and yon. In neighborhoods she’d never heard of, one day in a magical pocket of green space, the next on a baking expanse of asphalt. Evenings they’d either meet up with Hannah’s friends or stay home and cook great unbalanced meals. They developed an obsession for experimenting with outlandish pestos (mint, parsley, ramsons, beet, even—surprisingly fabulous—blueberry), concocted from whatever had looked good at that day’s market, then twirl up their pasta and suck down cold forties out on Hannah’s fire escape, barely big enough for two plastic milk crates, a potted grapefruit tree strung with colored lights, and a life-size cardboard Betty Boop who watched over them like a patron saint. She has, in other words, these past seven weeks, been marking time.

Now she can hardly wait to get on to the next thing: four more days until her Chosen Life begins! Not that she doesn’t love Hannah, not that the Bushwick interregnum wasn’t a lark, but truth be told it had started to wear thin, an undifferentiated, aimless string of peripatetic days and beery nights, as if life were no more than a single extended improv, all spontaneity, zero goal. Whereas Clem has a very definite goal, an immediate goal. That is, to wed. In a manner of speaking. In an irreverent manner. In a manner in keeping with all the convention-flouting, pot-stirring, expectation-upending character of the love she and Diggs have for each other in the first place.

Clementine Esther Erlend Blumenthal, firstborn child of Walter and Benita Blumenthal, soon to become Mrs. KC Diggins (not that she’s actually changing her name)—at any rate soon to become her college girlfriend’s wife, her helpmeet, hausfrau, old lady (how thrilling, all the words she will soon be able to apply to herself, even the distasteful ones, especially the distasteful ones!—it has become a private joke between her and Diggs to refer to each other as chattel, even calling each other by the pet name Chat—a sign of their temerity in looking the history of bride-as-property dead in the eye, a sign of how freely, cheekily, and brazenly they choose to assume the mantle of this ancient, oppressive tradition: not haplessly but subversively, not as defectors but as infiltrators!), this maiden, this bride, bedecked in clogs, cutoffs, a Mr. Bubble tank top, a belled ankle bracelet that tinkles when she walks, and a tiny peridot stud glinting in her nose: our ingénue steps from the car, spreads her arms and throws back her head to receive the rain on her face.

“Yo, Gene Kelly,” Hannah says. “Want to pop the trunk?”

So she does, and the girls (they still default to thinking of themselves as girls, try as they might to get into the habit of referring to themselves as women) each retrieve an armload of gear and scurry up toward the porch.

THE ROOM IS FULL, as Aunt Glad remembers it frequently being, and that in itself feels right and calming, even though there is nothing especially serene about the medley of voices and confusion of faces tonight. A basket of hot bread has been passed around and now sits on the coffee table, giving off visible threads of steam. Aunt Glad has demurred; Walter’s baguettes are too crusty for her, hurt the roof of her mouth, but she feasts on the sight of the children devouring it, the youngest girl with the cast on her arm slathering far too much butter on her slice, and crumbs exploding willy-nilly whenever someone takes a bite. Walter, still in his apron, sits in her father’s old Morris chair, a bottle of beer on his knee.

The little boy has finally been persuaded into pajamas, which are decorated all over with some kind of machine she doesn’t know the name of. He is no longer fighting armies but leaning against his mother at the other end of the settee, sucking his thumb. “Perfume’ll cure that,” confides Aunt Glad. She keeps a bottle of Nuit de Longchamp in her desk for just that purpose. Whenever one of her students turns out to be a thumb sucker, she calls the boy or girl over, speaking to them always in private, never to shame, and explains, before applying a drop to the troublesome digit, The taste will help you remember to keep it out of your mouth.

The young ladies sprawl inelegantly around the coffee table. The little lithe one who bounded in ahead of the others, trumpeting without embarrassment about her dire need of the powder room, sits cross-legged on the floor. The one wearing men’s boots, her legs splayed wide, is taking up half the couch. She looks like she belongs to a game of checkers, with her hair and boots so black and her lipstick red as crayon. Clem sits beside her, looking almost lovely. The length of her bare limbs, the length of her yellow hair—nearly to her waist. What a shame about the thing in her nose. Glad keeps wanting to offer her a handkerchief, only to remind herself it’s a piece of jewelry.

And where is her friend Tom? She looks around for the older boy. There he is, he’s brought a stool in from the kitchen and perches up high, laughing at something someone’s said. The way his jaw opens reminds her of something—one of Lester Vilno’s marionettes. Several dozen of them he must have made, each adorned in an elaborate costume he stitched himself. Wickedly clever contraptions, Mother calls them. Every year at Christmas he gives a show in the children’s room at the library. All the characters speak with the same accent (Lithuanian, some say, or is it Latvian? something foreign anyway, full of lilting vowels and crimped consonants), but they each have their own personality. Some perform tricks: the mouse marionette pedals a wooden tricycle; the ballerina walks on her toes; the boy with measles drops his jaw and unrolls a pink felt tongue for the doctor.

There are those who cast aspersions on Lester Vilno; Glad has heard them cluck their tongues (Queer old bachelor to invent all those fanciful figures). Others speak with sympathy (Poor fellow lost his entire family back in the old country, struck down by disease or something worse; What’s worse? Glad asked, only to have Mother shoot Daddy a look—Little pitchers!—before answering, Never you mind). In any case the sight of Lester Vilno riding his bicycle, long black coat fluttering out behind him, long grizzled beard reaching midway down his chest, is familiar to everyone in the village, and even those who disparage him do so with a kind of pride, as if to say, He may be strange but he’s our stranger.

Glad cannot recall when he stopped coming around the post office or how much time passed before it occurred to her he was gone for good. Did he vanish gradually, or all at once? Even this she does not know. Eventually she had become aware that it had been ages since he’d come to buy twine or tea or sandpaper, ages since she’d spotted him pedaling along the streets of Rundle Junction, ages since he’d stopped giving his annual Christmas puppet show. By the time she got around to asking Whatever happened to Lester Vilno? she wasn’t really surprised that Mother, darning socks by the fire, answered simply, Gone.

Gone where? No one knows. Mother sews. Daddy feeds the fire another log. The pine sap pops and the rain drums and Glad’s head bends forward until her chin reaches midway down her chest.

Clem’s leg stretches forward. Her bare toes prod her sister’s back. “Hey Sammy. How much longer you gotta wear that thing?” Meaning the cast.

“Mantha,” corrects Mantha. She is kneeling rather territorially in front of the bread basket, swabbing butter on a torn hunk.

“Mantha!” Clem smacks herself on the forehead.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

“I keep forgetting that’s what we call you now.”

“What are your pronouns?” asks Hannah.

With hauteur: “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“How much longer with the cast, honey?” repeats Clem.

Mantha, shoving bread in her mouth, hums the three-note melody of I-don’t-know.

“We go back to the doctor in two weeks,” answers Bennie. “Hopefully he’ll take it off then.”

“Two weeks! How you s’posed to be my flower girl with that thing on your arm, huh? How’m I s’posed to get married if you can’t perform the duties of flower girl?”

“Clem,” chides Bennie. “Don’t.”

“She knows I’m kidding. Don’t you, Man?”

Mantha, with exaggerated dignity, rises, brushes crumbs off her pajamas, hooks the handle of the bread basket on her cast-arm, and mimes strewing flower petals with her good one. “What do you say to that?”

“Phew.” Clem wipes her brow. “I can breathe easy.”

Mantha gives her a neat kick.

“A better question,” says Bennie, “is how are you going to have an outdoor wedding if this rain doesn’t stop?”

“Oh it will,” promises Chana, very earnest. “It’s supposed to!” Working her smartphone, she rattles off: “Twenty percent chance of thunderstorms Tuesday, fair on Wednesday and Thursday, Friday just partly cloudy.”

“Anyway,” declares Clem with blithe optimism, “there’s always the barn.”

Bennie indicates the utter preposterousness of this suggestion by altering her expression not one whit.

The barn’s list of woes has grown dramatically since Clem first left for college. Dry rot, leaks, fungus, broken windows, partial foundation collapse, carpenter ants. But it’s the list to the west that’s most dramatic: it looks like a lover going down on one knee. Or at dawn, with the mist rising off McElroy’s field, like a ship being tossed at sea. A few years back they had an engineer out to inspect the structure and give an estimate for repair. When he explained the only viable solution was to tear it down and start fresh—and named the cost of such a project—Walter and Bennie decided on the path of benign neglect. Ever since, whenever the subject of the barn comes up, they’ve made a sport of indulging in a kind of gallows humor. It’s as if, having resigned themselves to eventual catastrophe, they’re impatient for it to occur. After a big storm one of them might say, “How’s the barn?” which is the cue for the other to respond, “Critical but stable. We’ll know more if she makes it through the next twenty-four hours,” or, “There’s no medical explanation for it, but she’s still hanging on.” Once Walter obtained a real DNR form from his primary care doctor, stuck it to the barn door, and managed to keep mum for two whole weeks until Bennie noticed. He was rewarded by a hoot of laughter so loud he heard it from the kitchen.

“Whatever,” Tom says now. “Umbrellas, people. Chillax.”

“We brought a chuppah,” mentions Hannah.

“Really?” says Walter.

“Yeah, we made it.”

“Out of clay,” Clem cannot resist chiming in.

“Out of cheesecloth,” says Hannah. “In actual point of fact.” It had given her a kind of masochistic pleasure to construct it for Clem, whom she loved, during their time together in Bushwick. She had trimmed it with classic board game pieces, metal Monopoly tokens and the tiny weapons from Clue.

“And cheesecloth will keep the rain out how?” Bennie wonders.

But, “Really?” Walter repeats, his voice dense with emotion. “You made a chuppah?”

“Yeah,” says Hannah.

“You guys are Jewish, aren’t you?” asks Chana.

“Más o menos,” says Tom.

“It depends,” says Clem.

“On what?”

“Who you ask.” In truth—and perhaps irrationally, since she’d been raised outside any religious tradition—she was still kind of stung from the time the Chabad guys, on campus with their mitzvah tank, refused even to speak with her after she answered truthfully that her mother wasn’t Jewish.

“If you ask Hitler,” Mantha interjects knowledgeably, “we are.”

“Basically,” Tom qualifies, “we’re Jew-ish,” indicating the amount between finger and thumb.

Bennie’s ancestors, the Erlends, originally hailed from Norway; they’d arrived in this country in the late eighteenth century as—at least nominally—Lutherans, but any adherence to that particular denomination had faded into WASPy generality soon thereafter. What vestiges of their old-world rites had endured (the felted gnome ornaments they hung on the Christmas tree, the cardamom-scented gløgg they heated each New Year’s, the wildflowers the little girls picked and tucked under their pillows on midsummer’s eve) harked back more, in any case, to paganism than church. Nor had Bennie herself ever technically been an Erlend, that name belonging to her maternal side. Before becoming a Blumenthal she’d been a Jansen, thanks to a father of Dutch descent; his religion, as he’d never tired of informing all who inquired, was football.

Walter’s family, the Blumenthals, had arrived in the New World from Czernowitz much later, in 1915, and had remained observant—if to a steadily diminishing degree—almost up until the current crop of kids. Walter’s great-great-grandfather was said to have been a rabbi in the Old Country. His great-grandfather Chaim had kept kosher. (Walter has a single dim memory of a wordless figure sitting hunched in the kitchen of some relative’s row house in Flushing, disdaining the treyf everybody else was eating and accepting only a baked potato, which he’d eaten with a plastic fork off a paper plate.) His grandfather David, who lived until Walter was well into his teens, had gone to shul on foot every Sabbath, no matter the weather. Even his father, Myron, who as far as Walter knew harbored not the merest shred of belief in a divine being, never once entered or exited their apartment without reaching up to touch the mezuzah nailed to the door frame, then kissing his fingers.

Walter has vague recollections of his own years at Hebrew school: the classroom smell of sweaty boys, sweaty Converse, and disintegrating books. He remembers the wet-palmed struggle to learn his haftarah portion, the halfhearted slog of composing his d’var Torah, the feel of the necktie against his newly protrusive Adam’s apple, but somehow nothing of the bar mitzvah itself. All that remains of his Judaism now is a handful of Yiddish songs, some commemorative fasting on Yom Kippur, a weakness for pickled herring, and a pronounced socialist bent.

Nevertheless—or perhaps all the more—now, sitting with his daughter days before her wedding, he is touched by the idea of Clem’s wanting to incorporate something of his religious tradition into the ceremony.

“That’s very nice.” He takes a long, rather misty swallow of beer. “And you made it yourselves.”

Hannah, bowing, gives a courtier’s flourish with her hand.

“Dad’s gonna cry.” Tom the Comedian.

Walter spreads his arms: So sue me. “I’m moved.”

“Do you know,” Aunt Glad remarks with sudden interest, “I think Lester Vilno might have been Jewish.” Heads swivel in amusement. Hadn’t she, just a moment ago, been fast asleep?

“Who’s Lester Vilno?” Mantha wants to know.

“Oh . . .” She trails off uncertainly, seems to search the room for an ally, someone who might help her explain. Finding none, she says, a touch reprovingly, “You know. He always sits right there”—gesturing toward Tom.

A current of giggles—quickly transformed into coughs—flows through the room. Tom, marvelously straight-faced, thumps his fist twice against his chest and flashes Aunt Glad the peace sign.

Devilish Tom! She has at least one like him every year: cutups, in need of careful monitoring and frequent reprimands, but how lively they are, how—she tries not to let on how much claim they have on her affection—delightful to be around, with their cockiness, their pluck.

Now Tom turns to Walter and asks with a concertedly ingenuous air, “Gee, Dad, think it’s safe to use a chuppah where the neighbors can see?”

Of course this sets off among the bride and her maids a flurry of questions, and a briefing on the local political scene ensues: the Citizens for the Preservation of Rundle Junction signs are described, McElroy’s allegiance noted, the wetlands and silver-maple forest explicated, the proceedings of the most recent village meeting recounted, the two-kitchen apartment plans detailed, Jeff Greenberg’s reedy voice mimicked.

“I don’t get it,” says Clem. “Are you saying this is anti-Semitism? Or there’s real environmental concern?”

“There’s real environmental concern.” Tom shoots a look at his father. “With a little anti-Semitism on the side.”

“It may be that there’s both,” Walter concedes. “But I find it hard to believe there’d be this much energy around the silver maples if it weren’t underpinned—maybe unconsciously—by anti-Semitism.”

But: “I don’t think it’s either,” says Bennie. They all turn toward her, those who know her long-standing indifference to local politics with added curiosity.

“No? What do you think it is?”

She meets her husband’s gaze from across the room. “Justified wariness.”

Tom lets out a low whistle. He might be being funny, but by the time it peters out, nothing feels funny about the tension in the room.

Bennie goes on: “Of an influx—”

“Of anyone different,” proposes Clem.

“No . . .” Bennie speaks as if finding her way word by word. “I don’t think Rundle Junction is categorically unwelcoming of difference. Look at the Freedom to Marry Ice Cream Social. Look at Cuentalo en Español.” Referring, respectively, to the annual gay marriage celebration held on the lawn of the Unitarian Universalist Church and the bilingual story hour held Thursday afternoons at the public library; she still takes Pim to the latter. “What I was going to say is an influx—”

“Of high-rises,” tries Tom.

“Of just more people?” guesses Mantha, buttering more bread.

“An influx an influx an influx,” Pim chants softly around his thumb. He leans against Bennie, nestled into the soft, warm meat of her arm.

“Shh—she’s getting mad,” Clem admonishes, only half joking.

Bennie sets her jaw. She looks not unlike Mantha when Mantha is doing her sulky face.

“What were you going to say, Mom?” Tom, angelic on a dime. “We really really want to know.”

A dignity-reclaiming pause. “I was going to say an influx of fundamentalists.”

“Fundamentalists,” Walter echoes. Now he is the one to set his jaw.

“Yes. I think it’s wise to be wary of fundamentalism. Of any stripe.”

Walter gives a short, wounded laugh. “What about the fundamentalism of not wanting the demographic makeup of your town to change?”

Bennie opens her mouth. Closes it. Seems to have a new thought, tries to catch his eye. But Walter has become preoccupied with the label on his empty beer bottle.

They all feel it, the rift. Even Aunt Glad, who isn’t following the content. Even Hannah, who didn’t grow up with the Blumenthals and might not be expected to pick up on nuances. Even Chana, who’s never met Clem’s family until this evening. Walter and Bennie are the custodians of this house and home, the paired sentinels who guard the gates. Their children are accustomed to thinking of them as a unit, a single continuous entity. Even when discord unsettles an entity it remains an entity, one thing. This is different. Never before has it struck the children so clearly, the vast distance separating the realms from which each parent hails: Bennie of the Erlends, established for generations in Rundle Junction; Walter of the Blumenthals, one family among myriad wandering Jews.

Inharmonious silence coats the room. The rain, dauntless, continues to play its four-piece timpani: roof, panes, branches, earth.

Of all people it’s Chana then, funny little Chana with her cloud of marmalade hair and her wistful cluelessness and squeaky voice, the most outsidery person in the room, who suddenly has the clearest vision of what is happening in it. It sweeps her up, the funny-sad timeless truth of it. Us-and-them-ness. “It’s the old Mel Brooks routine!” she blurts. They all look at her, nonplussed. Turning bright pink, she nevertheless presses on: “The 2000 Year Old Man? When they ask, ‘What was the first national anthem?’” Still nothing but dull stares from all over the room, but she cannot extricate herself from finishing now. Her own nervous laughter punctuates the punchline: “‘Let ’em all go to hell. Except cave seventy-six!’”

Clem looks flummoxed; Hannah, scornful; Bennie, inconvenienced; Walter, distant. Tom laughs but only because he’s embarrassed for her. Mantha laughs but only to be like Tom. Glad emits a ladylike snore, which makes Mantha laugh harder. Then she proclaims, “Well I’m striped.”

“Huh?”

“Mom said ‘of every stripe.’ Like me.” She stands to display her pajamas, which are indeed candy striped. “And Dad. He’s striped, too.”

They all look at Walter, who glances down at the blue-and-white-pinstriped apron he still has on. “So I am,” he says. “So I am.”

Bennie extricates herself from sleepy Pim, gets up, and crosses to the Morris chair. She removes the empty beer bottle from her husband’s grasp and replaces it with her hand. Is this détente? In its inelegant deliberateness, it is perhaps the most intimate gesture the children can recall ever having witnessed between their parents. And while none of them is privy to the wealth of history behind it, while none has knowledge of all the secrets Walter and Bennie have shared, or indeed knows that in this moment they happen to be holding between them two rather important secrets that will in time affect all their lives, still it is not lost on them—anyone can see—how firmly they are clasping hands, how deeply meeting each other’s gaze.

“Aw shucks,” says Tom. “Looks like weddings just bring out the romance in everyone.”

The young people laugh. Bennie brings Walter’s empty, along with a few spent glasses, into the kitchen. The sound of the sink, the sound of dishes.

“Guess I better take that one to bed,” says Walter, nodding toward Pim, who looks to have fallen fast asleep. He hoists the little boy from the couch, limbs loose as sacks of flour, and starts toward the stairs. The movement causes Pim’s thumb to fall out of his mouth, waking him just enough to mumble a warning to the room at large. Or is he talking in his sleep, speaking from within the pocket of some dream?

“The black hats are coming, the black hats are coming!”

Clem goes googly-eyed and claps a hand over her mouth.

“Did he say black hats?” whispers Chana.

“Where’d he pick that up?” Tom tries not to laugh.

“Where did you hear it, Pim?” Walter asks.

But the little boy’s eyelids have drooped inexorably shut, like the weighted lids of a doll.

ornament FIRST NOCTURNE

THE MOON

The stationary front responsible for four straight days of rain over Rundle Junction finally ends. Around two o’clock in the morning the waning gibbous moon, color of butter, appears over the old post office.

Bennie wakes lucid and all at once. This is how she always wakes, never any groggy in-between for her. But what has summoned her from one state to the other at this moment, what has changed?

Beside her: the long, sloping mountain range of her husband’s body rises and falls, emitting low rumbles so familiar to Bennie they’re no more than white noise. On her other side: the plump hillock of Pim, who nightly vacates his own bed to come burrowing in beside her. Little does he know how imminently he’s about to be evicted from this spot. For now, his untroubled breath ruffles delicately in and out between his parted lips: a tranquil taffeta snore. Bennie listens for another sound, a top note of distress coming from one of the children’s rooms or from Aunt Glad—what if she’s awake and confused about where she is?

But no.

Nothing.

There is light on her face, light streaming across the bed. Always they sleep with the curtains drawn across the lower sashes but the top portion of the windows left uncovered. Rising up on her elbow now in the narrow channel left for her by the blithe sprawl of these two bodies, she spies the moon. Freshly scrubbed, throwing off a light so piercing and pure for a moment she thinks she hears it: a struck bell.

It’s the silence, she realizes. The absence of the drumbeat of rain. This is what has changed. She inhales: the air is fresher, finer than it’s been in days. Thin as skim milk. She falls back on her pillow, instantly asleep once more.

MEMORY

In fact Aunt Glad is awake, as she often is at this and many other hours of the night. Wakeful moments pock her sleep like holes punched in the lid of a box. (Like the holes she and Joy make for the salamanders they collect. So they can breathe, says Joy. And so they’re not in darkness, adds Glad.) The inverse is also true: dream moments pock her waking hours and light shines through those holes, too. Light from life and light from dreams filters back and forth, and in their needle shafts of illumination, specks of memory and mismemory mingle and mill.

She lies on her back under the departure board, listening to its wooden slats rattle, trying to read the names of trains and their platform numbers as moonlight streams through the glass atrium, blinding her.

She lies on her back under the grandstand, listening to the pageantgoers’ muffled cries, trying to see through the smoke whoever is calling her name as a tiny toy trumpet drops out of the sky.

She lies on her back on linen sheets as soft as cream, listening to footsteps travel through the house, trying to track them, to suss their aim as they move back and forth, nearer and farther, round and round. Always she is unsuccessful. Always she falls asleep again before they find their destination.

They’ve put her in the office, though it isn’t an office anymore. Mother used to sort the mail in here, and frank the envelopes and file the receipts. No mail’s come through here for years and years now. But she can still see the bins they’d use to store incoming and outgoing first-class. She shuts her eyes and sees them, and the canvas mail sacks with their tare weight stenciled on, and the stacks of catalogues that pile up: Montgomery Ward; Sears, Roebuck; and—Glad and Joy’s favorite—the seed catalogues, Burpee; Farmer’s Wife; Childs; Dominion. Shelves of parcels too big to fit in any letterbox. For a week or two in early spring the room is filled with peeping: cartons of live chicks. Sometimes an order of bees.

But what is that noise she hears now? Neither chick nor bee. From behind her head, from within the wall behind the cot they have set up for her here: miniature clicking, ticking sounds. At first she thinks she must be causing them herself, setting the bedsprings, the old rusted coils, against one another. But even holding perfectly still she hears them. Quick little movements, efficient, industrious. A mouse’s jaws, its tiny mandibles, its exquisite, minuscule paws. A vision of a sunflower seed and then she cannot imagine the sound linked to anything else. Certainly it must be a mouse, a fat gray fellow settled on the tripod of haunches and tail, whiskers quivering, cracking one by one its stash of seeds and nibbling, nibbling.

THE MOUSE

In fact it is a mouse, a young female who gave birth to her first litter last week on the night when the rains began and who lost all five pink hairless pups to flooding before they’d opened their eyes, before their ears came unstuck. She’d built her nest underneath the porch, where the water swirled up fast on the second day of rain and washed it away. She’s begun constructing a new nest in this drier place between the wallboards, and has paused her work not to crack a sunflower seed but to eat a beetle that happened by.

THE LOVERS

And in fact Glad had heard footsteps, real footsteps in real time. In the living room now Clem is talking softly, privately, in the dark. The oblong moon hangs like the palest of apricots in the sky. Clem speaks barely above a whisper into the cell phone pressed to her ear. Every sense is heightened in the smallness of the hour. Her own voice arouses her, its vibrations traveling through her chest and throat, across her tongue and lips. Everything is erotic, the shadows and the breeze. She’s lying across the settee with her head thrown back, long hair dangling over one end, long legs dangling over the other. She is saying I can’t talk any louder, Chat, it’s a house full of people . . . No, I’m in the living room . . . because my aunt’s sleeping in the next room . . . a T-shirt and underwear . . . I don’t know, I don’t memorize these things . . . my my how insistent we are . . . all right, hold your horses . . . She shines the light of the cell phone on her crotch, brings it back to her ear. They’re blue . . . I don’t freaking know, rayon maybe, okay? What about you? . . . Oh Chat, I miss you so much . . . I missed you like crazy the whole time in Bushwick . . . mm-hmm . . . that’s right, baby, I missed your bush, your cinnamon spice—yo girl! . . . que t’es méchante! . . . not if I lick your wick first . . . Hushed laughter. Clem switches the phone to her other ear.

Now her voice softens and slows, and she utters these next words in measured, attentive cadences, as if the person on the other end is saying them, too, reciting in concert with her; it is impossible to tell who has initiated the move, so smooth is the shift from spontaneous conversation into this poem, this canticle, these words of prayer: “I am come into my garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk.”

A pause. During which Clem does not speak. Neither do any words come through from the other end of the line. A shared silence, pregnant with peace and longing. Then Clem sighs. A whispery voluptuous sound. And resumes talking, barely above a murmur she says, Ah, Chat, when are you getting here? . . . it’s okay, she’s like a hundred years old, I think we’re good . . . no, no, I couldn’t stand staying there a minute longer. I love Hannah but it got seriously old, her place, her life . . . all those damn farmers markets, for real. Oh wait I have to tell you something important, okay? May I tell you something deep? With profound implications for our future conjugal bliss? We are never going to make pesto together . . . More soft laughter. I do love Hannah . . . I am not a mean friend . . . no I’m not, I was just so homesick for you . . . I know . . . I know! I know, but baby? It’s hard to feel at home when you know it’s only temporary.

BUT THAT ISN’T TRUE, thinks Aunt Glad with clarion conviction from her cot in the next room. Ninety-four years old she may be; nevertheless she retains excellent hearing. She half rises, as if to go into the living room and tell Clem she is wrong. For a moment she feels driven, feels it’s imperative she explain, her responsibility to make the child see. It’s your responsibility, Mother is telling her, and Gladdy is saying dutifully, I know, Mother, yet something always manages to distract her, or her memory manages to fail her, and oh won’t Mother be disappointed in her now, oh won’t she be furious. Won’t she be racked with grief.

Somehow, despite her intentions, Glad has let the mattress receive once more the full, if negligible, weight of her body, has let the creamy sheets soothe and cool her burning skin. It isn’t time, in any case—she’s gotten her timetables confused. Clem’s too young to hear the truth (How could one so young be expected to understand?), that the world itself is no more than temporary.