Breaking the Rules

On Thursday, Anna was awakened by the thump on the bedroom door, the firm knuckle on hard oak. The brisk announcement “Morning!” was followed by footsteps receding down the carpeted hall and another, fainter, knock, on the next door. At the sound, Anna rose up into consciousness to find herself next to her husband in a high carved Victorian bed, in a shooting lodge in the Scottish borders, on the first anniversary of her father’s death.

Under the covers Tim put his arms closely around her. His skin was warm and faintly moist against her. He kissed her.

“Are you okay?” he asked. His face was close, his high smooth forehead, his wide patient mouth, his kind eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Tim hugged her again, but now briefly. She felt him moving toward his day.

“I’m up,” he said, and was gone.

When he went into the bathroom, Anna threw back the heavy bedclothes. Barefoot, shivering, she walked to the window and drew open the long gray-green brocade curtains. It was still dark outside; the day before her was impenetrable. The windowpanes were black, their lower edges thickly ferned with white frost. Anna pulled the window shut and stood for a moment, huddled over the old iron radiator. Warmth was starting noisily up inside it, flooding into the room. Anna, always cold, leaned into the invisible flow of comfort, trying to store up the feeling of warmth for later. She wanted to prepare herself.

Downstairs, breakfast was laid out on the big mahogany sideboard in the dining room: platters of glistening russet bacon, a basin of rumpled gray porridge, round cottage loaves of bread, stiff golden kippers. Silver racks of cold toast were flanked by clusters of jams and marmalades. Thermoses of tea and coffee stood on a tray. People served themselves and sat down anywhere at the long table.

Tim was already sitting between two of the other men, Otto Carpenter and an older man, Edward Drover. Otto was Tim’s college roommate, and the trip had been his idea. There were eight “guns” altogether, all Americans, all businessmen, all here with their wives for a week’s shooting. Tim and Otto were in their fifties, but most of the others were in their sixties—graying, heavyset, ponderously good-natured. All but Tim and Otto were strangers to one another, but they all seemed members of the same prosperous, comfortable tribe.

After breakfast everyone assembled in the gun room. This was small, low-ceilinged, and stone-damp, dense with the smells of oil, dog, and gunshot. The men clumped heavily across the flagged floor in their high rubber boots. Tweed caps were settled firmly onto heads, gloves tucked carefully into pockets. Beneath the hanging brass lamp, Tim carefully hefted his newly cleaned gun. He squinted narrowly up at the barrel, his face intent. Otto, florid and fair-haired, stood by the bins, scooping handfuls of green shells into his pouch. The men were quiet, frowning in concentration: the serious day lay ahead of them, death held in their hands.

Outside in the courtyard stood the muddy Land Rovers, square-nosed and powerful, with a military air. Field boys, with bright pink cheeks, wearing green quilted jackets, walked briskly back and forth, loading gear. Springer spaniels, with white cotton-fringed legs, whined with excitement. Their hazel eyes pleaded, their stumpy tails quivered. They leapt keenly in and out of the Land Rovers, and were sworn at.

At nine the Land Rovers drove off. The men were packed solidly inside, brown shoulder to brown shoulder. As the cars turned the corner of the stone lodge, the husbands looked back, waving. Anna stood among the other wives on the damp cobblestones, arms folded tightly against the Scottish chill, calling out good-byes. Anna waved to Tim as he vanished around the corner, and felt his warmth suddenly withdrawn from her landscape.

Two of the other wives had gone out with the guns, to watch. Some were going to Edinburgh; others had hired a car, to see the Border Country and to shop for cashmere in the Georgian villages. Anna had been twice to sooty, handsome Edinburgh and had bought several cashmere scarves for Christmas presents. She refused to go out on the shoot.

The other wives gone, the lodge was empty except for Anna and the kitchen girls. In her room, Anna curled up with a book. She sat in an armchair by the window, a plaid blanket over her legs. As the morning waned, the big house turned slowly chill: the heat was turned off when the guns left. Inside, it was entirely silent, and outside there was only the faint brushing sound of the wind.

All morning Anna read, blocking out everything but Trollope. Since they had arrived, on Sunday, Anna had felt the week steadily darkening toward this day. She had a sense of doubled time: the days here in Scotland seemed to be moving, side by side, next to the days of that other week, in America, one year ago. It was as though one week lay somehow inside the other, transparent but still present, the hours in that week giving troubling color to this one. As the hours went by dread pooled inside her like rising black water. Anna felt it approaching and struggled to keep herself above it, out of reach.

After lunch Anna set out across the fields. The house was down in a glen, and the surrounding hills rose sharply up from it, close together, their curves echoing each other. Narrow streambeds, now dry, hurtled down between the hills, into the burn, as they called it here. A wide stretch of shallow black water, cold and wild, it chattered through the flat bottomland and across the shepherd’s wintry fields.

The shepherd wore the hues of the landscape: dull green, brown. His rose-colored cheeks were the only bright spots in the afternoon. Anna stopped to watch his black and white Border collie, bushy-coated, small-boned, quick, bring a herd of mud-colored sheep up the paddock. The sheep, broad-bummed and stiff-legged, jostled wildly up the meadow. The dog shifted like water from side to side. Holding them in a tight, hurtling bunch, he wove himself into a flying fence around them. When a sheep bolted, the dog turned wolflike: ears cruelly flat, a black velvet lip lifted to reveal an ivory fang. His blue gaze was annihilating; he ruled by terror. This surprised Anna. She had imagined a sheepdog to be like a father, wise, tender, kind, but stern. The dog was not like a father but a fanatic.

Anna waved; the shepherd gave her a cheerful jerk of his chin. Anna went on, setting her shoulders against the cold and pushing her gloved hands into her pockets. The wind, even down here, was bitter. This cold was like nothing Anna had known before: deep, ancient, punitive. Anna wore layers for warmth—silk, cashmere, down—but even so, she shivered. It would be not layers but movement, her own blood rising, that would finally warm her.

The path led past the flat-roofed sheep shed and the shepherd’s stone cottage, following the burn’s glittering ribbon upstream. Anna crossed the water on teetering black rocks, then set off on the rutted trail that slanted up Ladyside Hill, passing a solitary tree. These Scottish trees were black and bare-branched, their limbs a fierce, chaotic tangle. The trees in America seemed more orderly.

Anna had grown up in the country, but not country like this. In Connecticut there were rolling fields, boggy cow pastures, scattered woods: mild farmland, not a dour ascetic emptiness like this. Anna had learned the Connecticut landscape with her father. Together they had skirted the plowed fields, laboring along the weedy hedgerows, through the thin scrubby woods. They walked silently and carried binoculars. They were stalking.

“Listen!” her father would whisper, urgent, his forefinger raised. “Hear that?” He would fix Anna in his blue gaze, not seeing her. “Hear it? Hear it? Wood thrush.” He would stay motionless, listening, vibrating with intensity. Anna often missed the birdsong, tangled as it was with wind, leaves, the creaks of branches, their own soft rustlings. She stood silent and watched her father listen. She watched the long, rocky cliff of his profile, his pale, radiant skin, the liquid gleam in his narrow blue eyes. The clean fold of white skin along his eyelid, his small, fine mouth, pursed in concentration. His authoritative finger still aloft, rigid. He was never wrong, her father, not about birdsong or about anything else.

Anna began the long steep struggle up Ladyside. There were no trees at all up here, and the wind was soundless. She began to hear her own breathing; the cold began loosening its grip. The track led through thick ferny bracken, waist-high, rust-colored. She trudged steadily toward the sky, her blood beginning to stir. She took deep breaths; the air was pure and sweet. Vast somber patches of heather spread across the flanks of the hills like the shadows of clouds.

A movement caught her eye on the next hill: a covey of partridge rocketed into the distance. The kitchen girls had instructed Anna to report any game birds she saw, for the shoot. Anna had nodded gravely; she would never dream of doing this. Now she looked away, so as not to see where the partridges had landed. Anna felt guilty merely being here. Her father would never have come to this place, where they killed living creatures for pleasure.

Anna’s father would not shoot birds or any other living creature, not even enemy soldiers, not even to save Western civilization, not even during World War II, a time when enemy soldiers seemed not human but like fiends from hell. His stance had made Anna’s father both famous and infamous—pacifists were widely held in contempt. He had broken the rules of the community; he had outraged his friends, his family. He didn’t care.

All that had happened before Anna was born, but her father’s ferocious pacifism had not ended with the war. As she was growing up, Anna had often heard him holding forth, his neat mouth tight, his pale blue eyes incandescent—dangerously bright, like burning phosphorus. He raised a warning forefinger. “I believe,” he would say, and then pause, for impact. “That killing,” he would say, and pause again, for drama. “Is wrong.” Triumphant, he would fold his lips together, his eyes aglitter, like the sheepdog’s.

Her father was a man of principle; he never wavered. He seized the moral high ground and held it, spurning the gentler slopes of compromise. Nothing swayed him, no argument made him doubt. His blue stare was lofty, implacable.

On Ladyside’s broad crest Anna struck out cross-country, leaving the rutted trail. The vast rounded top of the hill felt like the curvature of the earth. There was nothing now around Anna but sky. The air was still, and each cold breath stung sweetly, deep inside her chest. The hills spread out, repeating themselves into the clear blue distance. She was alone up there. Anna was warm now, from climbing. Her chest rose and fell steadily in the warm cave of her clothes. This was exhilarating: the height, the solitude, the ringing, limitless distances. The austere and glowing day.

On the far side of Ladyside, Anna started down, though she could not find the trail. The ground was rough, the heather dry and springy underfoot. The colorless tussocks of wiry grass showed no usage, no footsteps of any sort. Still, Anna thought she recognized the flat-roofed sheep shed below and began to make her way down the vertical plunge of a dry streambed.

Her father had died of a stroke, one year ago today. The hospital in Hartford had called her at ten o’clock that night. There was no one else to call: Anna was an only child, and her mother had died six years earlier. There had only been herself and her father in all the world, it seemed right then. The nurse said brusquely that it was bad, that he might not last until she arrived. Tim was away, and Anna put on her coat and walked straight out of their apartment.

During the solitary nighttime drive up from New York, with the dead roar of high speed steadily in her ears, Anna began to cry. Tears rose up in smooth swells, over and over, covering her cheeks, sliding down her neck. She was afraid that she would be too late, that her father would be gone when she got there. She was even more afraid that she would be there in time. She was afraid that when he saw her, her father would set his small, fine mouth and, without speaking, turn his face away to the wall.

The streambed went straight down Ladyside. As Anna descended, its slanting walls drew in and it steepened. Anna clambered down clumsily, finally using her gloved hands, gripping the cold turf with her cold fingers. She was no longer sure of the sheep shed. Nothing seemed familiar now, but she continued; she had come too far to go back.

At the time of his death, Anna had not spoken to her father for over a year. She could hardly now remember how their quarrel had begun, but she remembered exactly how it had ended. After her father’s shouting, her own furious stammering response, her father’s imperious gesture, Anna left his living room. She strode across the front hall, grabbing the heavy newel post at the bottom of the stairs, yanking it so hard that she felt the solid shaft give, creaking. She marched upstairs, her blood pounding, and packed.

When Anna came down, her father was still standing in the living room. He was motionless, the newspaper in one hand, trailing on the carpet, the other hand upraised, his finger pointing like a prophet’s at the sky. His blue eyes glittered, triumphant. Anna saw him from the corner of her eye as she went through the front hall. Her coat was on, her suitcase in her hand. Neither spoke. Anna, her face burning, strode out the front door, slamming it behind her.

As Anna climbed awkwardly down the hill, the glen below grew dimmer and dimmer. There were no lights anywhere. The hill became steeper and steeper, nearly vertical. Anna’s footsteps turned cautious and she stepped twice on each hummock, testing it for strength. She could no longer see her way down.

On this night a year ago, Anna arrived at the hospital, her heart racing. After speeding wildly along the highways, she found the slow pace of the local roads intolerable. Each minute was crucial and endless. When she reached the hospital complex she turned frantic, trying to find her way through the maze, searching for the right entrances, the right buildings, the right parking lot. She found, at last, the parking lot, then a space in it, in the last row. The entrances were not marked, the arrows not clear. She entered finally through a service door and discovered inside that it was the wrong building. Minute after minute was lost. She blamed herself. Her panicky heart raced at the delays: she might miss him by a few minutes, by seconds.

Anna reached the bottom of the hill and saw, through the dimness, the burn. She was not lost, then, though dusk was rising fast, and the lodge was still distant. She picked her way quickly across the black, teetering stones, through the fierce dark water. Shadows were filling up the narrow valley. The remaining light, vast and vague, came from high above the hills. The hills themselves now towered above her, black and unknown. The cold had set in with a passion, and Anna could feel it creeping again inside her layers, though she was walking fast. Night was closing in.

At the hospital, swearing and crying out loud, Anna found at last the right building, the right entrance, the right bank of elevators, the right floor, and when she found the right ward, she began to run. She ran down the long, tiled hall, her feet pounding, loud and undignified, past more decorous people. She saw that her father had been right: She was disorganized, ineffectual. But it had seemed, right then, that this was all that was left for her to do for him. This was the last thing she could do: run to him through the tiled hospital halls.

In the darkness, Anna hurried across the rough bottomland, stumbling. She could see the lights of the lodge, but in the dark the way seemed longer. She quickened her steps, the vast cold empty landscape behind her. She kept her eyes fixed on the lights, and gradually they grew brighter. Finally the small steep bank rose in front of her, and with her heart pounding, she clambered at last up out of the fields, onto the paved road in front of the lodge, as though she had made a narrow escape.

Anna pushed open the hall door and stepped inside. Everything was different. The lodge was now expansive, alive. Everyone was back, the heat was on, there was noise and movement in the halls. In their bedroom, Tim’s muddy clothes lay on the floor. He was in the bath down the hall, leaving their own tub for her. She felt a pang of gratitude as she leaned over and turned on the taps. The water began to thunder in, steaming, important. Anna was in the deep claw-footed tub when Tim returned.

“Are you there?” He peered around the door. He was wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, and his hair was plastered untidily against his forehead.

“I’m here,” she said. “Thanks for leaving me the tub. How was your day?”

“The best,” Tim said fervently. His skin was pink, glowing.

“Where did you go? I’ve forgotten.”

“Bow Hill, at the Duke of Buccleuch’s. The country is just ravishing,” said Tim. “The hills go on and on.”

“Lovely,” said Anna. “And the birds?”

“The birds went on and on too,” said Tim ruefully. “Regardless of my efforts. Though I had a couple of good shots, good or lucky.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t luck,” Anna said, sloshing slowly in the tub, basking in the heat.

Tim picked up a towel and began working on his hair, rubbing vigorously. “Oh, right, of course,” he said. “I’m sure it was skill.”

“I’m sure it was,” Anna said, smiling up at her glowing husband.

Tim’s shooting had troubled Anna at first. It would not have troubled her father: he’d have seen it very simply. Killing for pleasure is brutal and wrong, he’d have declared. But Anna knew that Tim wasn’t brutal, and that the point of shooting wasn’t killing, for him. What Tim loved was being in the landscape, just as her father had. As to the killing, the birds shot here ended up on the table. Unless you were a vegetarian, which Anna was not, how could you condemn killing for food? And this system was more humane than meat factories and abattoirs.

Anna had reached this conclusion with relief. It would not have satisfied her father, though, and knowing this, Anna felt proudly rebellious. She had escaped the peaks of her father’s convictions. She had abandoned his grim, cold landscape and found her way down to warmth and comfort, accommodation, other people. Here she was, luxuriating in the hot water, smiling at her husband, who had spent the day shooting. She felt daring and successful.

Every evening at the lodge everyone gathered for drinks in the sitting room before dinner. A fire in the iron grate lit up the heavy curtains, the faded rugs, the Scottish landscapes on the walls. For dinner the men wore gray flannel trousers and tweed jackets, the women, ruffled silk blouses and velvet pants. A silver tray on a sideboard held bottles, an ice bucket, heavy crystal glasses. People fixed drinks and then settled onto the vast faded sofas, against the soft, collapsing pillows. It was exactly like an English house party, except that they were all Americans, all paying guests, and almost all strangers.

Still, it was like a house party in that everyone understood the rules. They were all from similar backgrounds; they all knew the dances that allowed them to move easily, without a stumble, through an evening with a stranger. For a woman, it was simple: You followed your partner’s lead. You yielded to his pressure; you slid smoothly away from the risk of collision.

That night Anna was seated for the first time next to Edward Drover. He was a favorite in the group, Tim had told her. The oldest gun, in his late seventies, he was staunch in the field. He labored gallantly up the long hillsides, trudging through the heavy plowed furrows without complaint. Everyone liked him.

Edward drew Anna’s chair out for her, his manner courtly.

“What a pleasure, Anna, to sit next to you,” he said, half-bowing over her chair as he pushed it in.

“Thank you,” Anna said, sitting down, smiling at Edward. His gesture made her feel comforted, cherished.

Edward smiled back. He was a handsome man, with smooth pink cheeks and a long, fine profile. His hair was bright white and was parted cleanly on the side. His lips were blunt, like a sheep’s.

Anna began the first steps of the dance. “Now, tell me, Edward, is this your first time here?”

“This is my first time here,” Edward answered. “But it’s not my first time shooting. I’ve been on many shoots, on many, many shoots.” He said this smiling, forgiving Anna her ignorance of his vast experience. He took the next step, offering Anna the silver basket of rolls.

“I won’t have one myself,” Edward said. “I’m on a diet.” He looked sideways at Anna, for her response. He was not plump; in fact he was quite trim. He was rather dandyish, in a pale yellow cashmere sweater, a polka-dotted silk ascot. His tweed jacket had an eccentric stitched-down self-belt in the back. He thought himself a bit rakish, Anna saw.

“Goodness,” Anna said politely, “why on earth are you on a diet? You don’t need it.”

Pleased, Edward held up his index finger. “That’s just why, you see. I don’t need it because I’m always on it. My doctor told me, years ago: ‘Never finish the food on your plate. Leave a third, and you’ll never worry about your weight.’” Edward smiled again. A profound satisfaction surrounded him like a halo. He was pleased by everything he said. “And he’s right. I never have.”

“What a good idea,” said Anna, as she was meant to do. She waited, but he said nothing more.

“Have you been shooting all your life?” she asked, setting out again.

“Practically speaking, yes,” said Edward, his manner now pompous. “My father taught me when I was very young. It’s a great education, I promise you. You learn safety and respect. For the birds, for the guns, for the environment. All hunters are environmentalists, you know. We care very much about wildlife. That’s something many people don’t realize.”

The kitchen girl set down soup plates before them.

“Of course that’s true, isn’t it,” said Anna.

“Hunters are very strong lobbyists for the preservation of open land,” Edward said. He raised a spoonful of clear broth and blew on it carefully. “Hunters are often unfairly maligned, you know.” His manner was wise and kindly.

“Yes, I suppose they must be,” Anna said peaceably. Edward’s instruction was somehow soothing and comforting. She raised her own spoon to her mouth. “And tell me what it was like, learning to hunt from your father?”

Edward smiled confidingly at her. “It was a great experience. It was the way I got to know my father. He was a rather distant man, and I think I might never have known him at all if it hadn’t been for shooting. On the days that we went out together, he would come to wake me up, very early. It would still be dark, and I knew everyone else in the house was asleep. I would see my father standing over my bed, and it would come to me that my father was waking me up because he wanted me to go with him, he wanted me beside him in the woods. He had chosen me. It meant a lot to me. I think I would never have known my father loved me if it weren’t for hunting.”

Touched, Anna smiled at him. “It must have been wonderful.” She had not expected this candor, vulnerability.

Edward, taking another spoonful, blinked and smiled back. “It was the only thing he taught me. He was a distant man. You learn what someone is like by having them as a teacher. And that was the way I learned my father.”

“How lucky you are,” Anna said, “to have had that. And did you teach your son to shoot?”

Edward raised his forefinger. “Now I believe you’re being what’s called sexist,” he said, ponderously jocular. “I have no son, but I’ve taught my daughter to shoot.”

“Oh, you’re right, I am,” Anna said, charmed. “I apologize. And does your daughter love to shoot?”

Edward beamed. “She loves it. She’s a wonderful shot, and a wonderful companion. She’s been hunting with me ever since she was twelve. I take the greatest pleasure in hunting with her. I invited her to come here this week, but she couldn’t. She’s a judge, you know, in Massachusetts.”

“A judge?” said Anna, impressed.

Edward nodded, proud. “U. S. district court.”

“How very distinguished,” said Anna.

She had expected something more conventional from Edward’s daughter, not something so bold and powerful. Clearly he had encouraged his daughter to excel, and in difficult territory. She had underestimated Edward. She had assumed that all these portly jocular businessmen were conservative, chauvinist, reactionary. Anna, who was very liberal, had carefully avoided dangerous subjects with them all week. Now she thought her assumptions were unfair: Tim, after all, looked like a member of this tribe, and he was a moderate. And now here was Edward: maybe she was wrong about them all. Chastened by her error, curious about its extent, and comforted by Edward’s calm sensibility, Anna took a risk. She stepped outside the decorous line of dancers.

“It must be very satisfying to learn from your father how to handle a gun, the way you did,” she said. “But how do you feel about these boys in the inner city with guns? How do you feel about gun control?”

But she had made a mistake: Edward’s face darkened at once. “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” he said abruptly. “Gun control is a terrible idea. Any restrictions will set a dangerous precedent.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin, prim and final.

“Even in the inner city?” Anna asked. She kept her voice neutral. “Even handguns and assault weapons?”

“Those are just the thin edge of the wedge.” Edward spoke loudly, with authority. “There should be no gun control in the United States.” He turned and stared at her, his blue eyes now hooded. The corners of his mouth twitched.

“But children are killing each other in the streets,” Anna protested, her voice still mild.

Edward set down his soup spoon and looked at her. “Any ‘child’ who kills another should be put in the electric chair,” he said with angry satisfaction. “That should slow them down.”

Angry now herself, Anna said nothing. Her empty soup bowl was replaced by a dinner plate rimmed with blue and gold. “Thank you,” Anna said to the kitchen girl, her voice full of rebuke, for Edward.

Edward did not hear it. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, friendly again, instructive. “The real problem, you see, is not the guns. The real problem is the equatorial types.” He looked at her, proud, his mouth ready to smile. “That’s the problem.”

“‘The equatorial types’?” Anna repeated. The kitchen girl held out a platter of sliced lamb. The slices lay in overlapping waves, like soft pink scales.

“If you look at the problems we’re having today, around the globe, you’ll find it’s all caused by the people who live along the equator, or who come from there.” Edward raised his finger again, teacherly. “They make the problems. All of the problems: inner city violence, civil war, invasions. That’s the root of the problem, you see.”

“Really?” said Anna. She began to cut up her lamb carefully and slowly, to avoid looking up at him. She should not go on with this, she knew. It would only end in an argument, anger. She should shift gracefully and steer them in a new direction.

Edward nodded solemnly. “For responsible behavior, you must look to the northern peoples, the northern Europeans.”

“Two world wars in this century?” asked Anna pleasantly. She was unable to resist. “I’m not sure I’d call that responsible behavior. Those weren’t started by the equatorial types.”

Edward frowned. “The equatorial types don’t have the initiative to start world wars. They’re too lazy!” He looked to see Anna’s response. “I know about them. I used to work in Caracas, for many years. Those people are lazy, and deceitful. They have no sense of responsibility.”

“That’s not my experience of them,” said Anna. She was being inflammatory, but she could not stop. “The Latinos I know, the ones in New York, are hardworking. They’re incredibly brave, to have come there. The ones I know are polite and diligent.” Now she must stop. She must change the subject. She would, right after Edward answered.

“The Latinos you know?” Edward repeated, his tone insulting. “Who are the Latinos you know?”

“Just, just the ones in New York,” said Anna. At his contemptuous tone, she felt the familiar infuriating stutter begin. She felt anxiety rise. “The men who run the garages, the delivery men. The cleaning women.”

Edward smiled loftily. “Anecdotal, I’m afraid,” he said dismissively. “That’s like saying ‘Some of my best friends are Jews.’”

Anna felt luminous with rage. She concentrated on her food, on the blue-and-gold-rimmed plate. She cut meticulous bites and placed them carefully in her mouth. She chewed soberly, not talking.

Men like Edward, she thought angrily, were like loose cannons, spraying their loathsome opinions all over the field, heedless of whom they hit, whom they disgusted. No one held them to account.

But she was also angry at herself. She had broken all the rules by raising this dangerous subject, challenging Edward’s views. What would she accomplish, fighting like a child at the dinner table? Nothing. And what had she expected, bringing up gun control to a rich old man who loved to shoot? What had she expected him to be? A liberal pacifist, like her father?

She was angry at herself and at Edward, and beneath that was the sense of something else, some other emotion, rising within her. Whatever had been gathering itself, all week, was imminent. She had thought she had escaped when she got back to the lodge, but she found now it was still there, waiting for this final dark evening to fill slowly inside her. Now it was beginning to move, rising and expanding without her permission, taking over.

“No,” said Edward, “let me tell you.” He smiled again, ready to forgive her if she behaved. “I lived in Caracas. I know those people. Latinos are lazy and deceitful. They have no idea of fiscal responsibility, for example.”

Up and down the long table, glittering with silver, glinting with crystal, the others were deep in agreeable conversation. They were interesting each other. Across the table, Edward’s wife, Nina, sat next to Tim. Nina was small and neat, her short blondish hair in stiff whorls. She had a pleasant, doggy face, with a pointed nose and bright dark eyes. She and Tim were smiling, and as Anna watched, Tim leaned back to laugh comfortably. Nina, feeling Edward’s eye on her, looked over and smiled at him.

Edward set his knife and fork down on his plate and went on. “When I was in Caracas,” he said, “I worked in a beautiful brand-new office building. Clean, dazzling white. And you want to know something?” He paused, but Anna refused to commit herself. “By noon of every day,” said Edward. He paused again and lifted his index finger authoritatively. “By noon of every day those bathrooms were filthy. Filthy,” he repeated with satisfaction. He nodded, looking at Anna. “It’s their culture. They don’t care about the same things that we do: morality, cleanliness, order. You have to go to the Nordic peoples for those things.”

It was too much. “Oh, I see,” said Anna, nodding. “You think dirty bathrooms are worse than Hitler? Dirty bathrooms are worse than the Holocaust? I have to say I disagree with you.”

Edward’s face changed again, closing down completely. Anna had broken the rules again, this time unforgivably. She had been hostile and challenging; she had directly attacked him. He faced her, drawing his fine white eyebrows together. His eyes were tightly pouched with anger.

“Why don’t you talk to the person on your other side,” Edward said roughly, his own manners now gone. “You don’t seem to want to have a conversation with me. I think you’ll do better on that side.” He turned away from her, his head high. He drank aggrievedly from his wineglass.

Furious and mortified—Edward had now broken the rules as well—Anna turned away from him. The man on her other side, of course, was deep in conversation with the woman on his left. Anna was spurned, wallflowered, alone and silent among the brisk and animated voices. The kitchen girls glanced curiously at her as they passed. Tim looked up and caught her eye. He raised an eyebrow interrogatively at her and she smiled fiercely. Nina looked up too, sensing something. Edward, like Anna, was sitting stony-faced, staring across the table. Nina, automatically solicitous of her elderly husband, mouthed at him, “Cover up.” She mimed pulling a scarf closely around her own throat; she smiled, and went back to Tim.

Anna looked back at Edward, who had spurned her so publicly. Humiliated, she let herself hate him. He was chewing grimly, staring straight ahead, revealing his chilly handsome profile, his long, distinguished nose. The plump little hammock of flesh beneath his chin, the hoary crumpled ear, a tiny spray of white hair at its core. From this close, Anna could see the intricate webbing on his pink cheeks, the ancient delta of small rosy veins. His old skin was clean, soft, used, like kid gloves. His neat white hair was thin, she could now see; it was only a fragile veil over his spotted scalp. And his skull stood out beneath his skin. The bones were clean and visible: year by year, the flesh had been leached away by age. His dry pink hand, the fingers shrunken, shook as he picked up his wineglass.

Anna sat, burning with shame, filled with anger. And whatever was stirring inside her rose to meet her shame and anger: she felt in full spate, as though something she could not control was taking over. Struggling for control, she stared furiously at Edward’s long, jagged profile. She found another image intruding, overlaying Edward’s, like double vision.

Another twinning, transparent world was set confusingly on the one she saw. The vivid shape of her father’s profile, the rosy skin of her father’s cheek, seemed like an afterimage, an echo of Edward’s, haunting his face. The querulous voice, the frail, translucent skin, the clean, scrubbed old man’s look, pink and tender-skinned as an infant: the more she looked, the less Anna could quit herself of this other presence. Edward’s raised forefinger, rigid, tyrannical, as though he quoted God. The implacable blue stare, like the fanatical sheepdog’s.

In the hospital, panting, her blood pounding in her ears, her face now slick with sweat, Anna had paused at the nurses’ station to ask for her father’s room. At his name, the nurse’s round pasty face changed: a crumple of concern appeared between the brows, the skin around the eyes tightened, and the mouth compressed. Anna did not want to see this. She wanted to shout, Just the room number, don’t tell me anything more. That was all she wanted to know, only the room number. But the nurse’s face had changed, and she had seen it.

“Which room number?” Anna repeated, angry. The nurse, inside the square well of the station, had looked across it for help, but the other nurse was on the phone.

“What number?” Anna asked again, now loud and accusatory, as though she might bully things into being better.

“Five seventy-two,” the nurse said, looking at a chart. She picked up a clipboard and headed for the gate to let herself out and come with Anna, but Anna, desperate to escape the nurse and whatever dreadful knowledge she now held, went on alone.

In her father’s room she found what the nurse’s face had warned her of: the end of everything. The end of all her anger, all her strong, pulsing indignation, the urgency of her run. This, what she saw there, was the whole and only point of the blood pounding in her ears, the tears now rising endlessly up in her eyes. It was the end of that long, vital cord she had thought would connect her to her father forever. Anna had thought she had the rest of her life to make up their quarrel, but she had only had the rest of his.

On the bed lay her father, an old man gone. Only his body was left. His beautiful white hair, now limp and thin, was ruffled. The skull was now strong; the buried bone had risen like a boulder through earth; it had outlasted the flesh. The fold of immaculate white skin along her father’s eyelid, the pale lashes fretted modestly against the withered cheek: each detail of his body seemed now miraculous and heartbreaking, like those of a newborn.

Anna put up her hand to stroke her father’s head, a gesture unthinkable while he had been alive. His temple was cool, hard against her fingertips. The pale skin had a bluish cast, like modeling clay. The long hollow of his cheek was slack and terrible. He was gone. Anna looked up at the room with its pale green walls, the visitor’s chair where she had never sat. The glazed gray eye of the television hung huge and bulbous in a corner. Angled toward her father’s face, poised, it waited for him to summon up its gaudy blare. This would never happen. Her father was gone.

If she had known, if she had known, she could have called him. If she had called, even yesterday morning, she could have prevented this terrible moment. She could have called him to say things to him, things that were now clear in her mind, so clear she could not imagine that they had not been said. They rang now in her head. She had not said them, had not called him. She could have called her father at any time, to apologize, to end their quarrel, and she had not. She had let him die unforgiven, her heart still set hard against him. What she had thought she’d felt for him was rage, but she was wrong. There was no rage left, she now knew, only something else, much stronger.

Anna glanced sideways at Edward. He was chewing steadily, his eyes fixed unforgivingly away from her, his expression angry. He set his knife and fork to one side with a final gesture. He had not finished what was on his plate. Anna, looking down, saw the tidy heap of food that he denied himself. He folded his hands meekly on the table.

Anna looked down at her own plate, the slivers of soft pink meat. What she was eating was lamb, killed for her dinner. What right had she to judge anyone?

Anna thought of Edward in the silent woods with his father, Edward setting out in the early morning with his small daughter. She thought of him now, out in the field, toiling up the long, deadly hillsides, struggling upward against the heavy earth, his breath unsteady, his heart knocking ominously. Each thump inside the cavern of his chest like that brisk morning knock, loud, alarming, reminding him relentlessly of the time.

Looking now directly at Edward, his craggy profile, his pink skin, Anna saw again the image of the other man. Opinions, the tyrannical raised finger, the outrage: all that was only part of the man. There were other parts, and she, Anna, was not his judge. Now the thing she’d been dreading, this rising feeling, had caught up with her at last, it rose up to her throat. Here she was, with another old man, fragile, soon to die. Here she was beside him, angry, arrogant, judgmental. Here she was, rigid and intolerant, shameful, worse than he.

Edward’s speckled hand rested, next to Anna, in a loose fist on the linen tablecloth. For the third time that evening, Anna broke the rules, this time the worst of all. Embarrassing Tim, Nina, everyone who watched, most of all Edward, Anna placed her hand on top of his, pressing the frail breadth of it beneath her palm, feeling its warmth, covering his dry, wrinkled fingers with her own.

“Forgive me,” she said.