FOURTEEN

It’s a beautiful old machine, long and gleaming white, with an elegant running board and a spare tire set into the front fender like a silver moon half-sunk into a rising ocean wave. Perched on the radiator cap is a statue of a naked figure, wings swept back. The front seat is a glassed-in compartment for a chauffeur.

It’s winter, 1940. Wearing a smart uniform with a jacket and cap, I drive Mrs. Miller, my employer, along the water to the cottage where she’s been going with Mr. Langley since 1924. All very discreet, of course. He’s got to protect his “position in the community,” as I’ve heard him say. Sometimes they forget to switch off the speaking tube between the back seat and the front.

Lately, she’s been spending hours wandering around her apartment in New York listening to records of operas with slowly expiring heroines in them: La Boheme, Adriana Lecouvreur, La Traviata. About the only times she goes out in the city—besides when she sees Mr. Langley—is to volunteer at the children’s hospital. She loads up the back seat with stuffed animals on her way over there, and dabs her eyes with a handkerchief all the way back. When she and her husband were first married, she set up a big nursery in their apartment. It never got any use. She was a glamourpuss in those days—lots of fiery red hair, jewelry twinkling all over her, nice round behind and bosom—but Mr. Miller was more interested in the Market.

She’s gotten plumper over the years, but not Mr. Langley. Fit and angular in his dark suit and silver tie, he strides along Wall Street from his office as briskly as always. His watch-chain’s tight across his vest. His hair’s gone gray, but he hasn’t lost any of it. Though he’s always polite with me, he never smiles—not until he climbs into the back seat with her and clicks the door shut behind him.

Sometimes they get carried away before they reach the cottage. I hear the curtains slide over the side windows and the glass partition behind me. She’s all over him with high-pitched squeals like a little girl pulling open birthday-party favors. He’s a musical grunter; he keeps the back seat thumping mile after mile, Henry Hudson Parkway to Cross County to Merritt Parkway, right through the toll booths. The collector gives me a look; he must feel the vibrations. Then as we drive along a back road, the car’s full of whispering and zippering-up. I catch a glimpse of them in the rearview mirror through a crack in the curtains behind me. Her eyes are rolled back as if she’s seeing visions of angels flicker on the ceiling. He’s adjusting his watch chain over his vest.

Today they don’t go into the cottage when I stop the car. She reminds him he’s promised her a decision—she’s been wanting him to leave his wife for years. He’s told her he has to wait till the wife’s more “stable.” He’s afraid she’ll do something strange if he takes off, and everyone will think it was his fault.

I remember his wife. Back in the ’20s, I used to drive her and Mrs. Miller to Macys, Bloomingdale’s, Lord & Taylor. Mrs. Langley wasn’t happy until she’d filled nearly the whole back seat with hatboxes and packages. She was always bursting with ideas about books; she must have saved them up for her pal. They were like a sparrow and a toucan, the two of them: Marian Langley twittering and bobbing in her gray suit and pearls, Laura Miller nodding and preening her feathers.

Then suddenly the excursions stopped. Mrs. Miller told me it was because the Langleys were moving to Connecticut, but I’m not so sure of that. I missed Mrs. Langley; she always had a smile for me. And without her, Mrs. Miller seemed to lose the will to shop.

“Marian’s got everything she needs in Ridge Haven,” Mrs. Miller is saying now in the back seat. She always speaks the name of the town as if it’s coated with vinegar. “You can give her an allowance for Robert, and hire a gardener to keep the place going.”

“I’ve planted the last of the trees. They’re growing up like weeds.” He sighs. “Yes, I think the time has come, Laura.”

What’s this? I can’t let this happen!

“So you’ve really decided?” Mrs. Miller leans into his lap.

“Yes.” He smiles. “Yes.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I’ve broken out in a sweat. I hear happy sighs and clothes rubbing together in the back seat.

“Dean, let’s go away—today!”

Silence. He pounds the seat. “Damn.”

“What?”

“The cruise tickets. They’re already ordered.”

“You can cancel them, can’t you?”

“They’ll be in this afternoon’s mail. If Marian gets them, and then I suddenly tell her the cruise is off.…”

Mrs. Miller sniffles. “Oh, God!”

“She’s been planning this trip for months.” He looks stricken. “I hate to think what she might do, she’s capable of such craziness—”

I clench my teeth. There’s barely enough air in my glass compartment to breathe, but I don’t dare move to open the window. If he doesn’t go on the cruise with his wife … well, I feel as if my very life’s at stake. Which—considering what needs to happen on that ship—it is.

“What time does the mail come?” Mrs. Miller asks.

“About five. I usually pick it up from the mailbox if I get home before supper. If I don’t, Marian gets it.”

“We’ve got time, Dean! It’s only four. You could take the tickets out of the mailbox and say the cruise has been cancelled. Give her a few days to calm down, and then tell her.”

“Yes. That’d work.”

I sit up suddenly—the speaking tube is clicking.

“We’re going directly to Ridge Haven,” Mrs. Miller tells me, “but not to the train station this time. I’ll give you directions. And, oh—please hurry!”

I pull away from the cottage, my mind racing. I know a stretch of road near Greenwich where there isn’t a house for several miles—that’s the route I take. I roll down the window, gulp the cold air and the sharp scent of snow-laden pines. A long stone wall flickers by me like a corrugated snake. I’m aware of the smooth hum of the engine, the feel of this beautiful old machine as it clings loyally to the curves.

Here’s that long stretch of road. Nothing around but dark frozen woods. I slow for a turn. And then my target identifies itself before me: a single boulder just beyond a patch of shimmering white ice.

I slow to twenty-five miles per hour … twenty … fifteen.… At the edge of the ice, I ease my foot onto the brake pedal. The car begins to slide. I steer slowly into the skid. The boulder drops below the level of the hood. Gripping the steering wheel, I absorb the impact with my chest.

Something bumps against the back of my seat. Not Mrs. Miller, I hope. The engine’s hum has stopped. All is silent … except a faint silver hiss in the air. Smiling, I watch the spray fall against the windshield. The winged hood-ornament has sprung a magnificent geyser.

“Back in a flash,” I tell them, setting out to go for help. Then I take more than an hour to stroll through the woods, find a house, have a long cup of coffee with the maid, and finally telephone a towing service. By the time I return to the car to wait for the truck, night has fallen.

Mr. Langley has stopped looking at his watch. “When I get back from the cruise, Laura, there’ll be nothing to stop us,” he tells her.

I smile.

“All right, darling,” she says with a catch in her voice.

The spray has made a lovely pattern of frozen drops on the windshield. In the front seat, I settle back and watch the darkness roll in toward me like dancing ocean waves.

After I got back from Gettysburg, school was as alien a place as home. During lunch period I sat against the wall of the music room listening to Tina play the piano. She smiled at me during the difficult passages as if my presence were helping her through them. For some reason, I felt as if I’d already said good-bye to her, though we wouldn’t graduate for more than six months. I imagined running into her somewhere years later and telling her how much she and her music had always cheered me up.

I sometimes cut classes and lay flat in the tall grass, out of sight, near the place Miss Gilly had parked her car on Tuesdays. Across a field, dwarf deer grazed among some birch trees beyond a nearly invisible wire fence. Did they know, I wondered, that they were never going to grow any bigger, that they were destined to spend their entire lives in this little artificial grove that had been so beautifully landscaped for them?

I looked forward to Fridays—a weekend of mindless yard work awaited me. That Friday seemed no different from others. I carried Tina’s briefcase to her bus and kissed her, perhaps longer than usual, before getting on my own bus. I must have dozed on the ride home. I remember stumbling down the aisle when the bus stopped at my mailbox; the waiting engine made the floor vibrate under my feet.

I was still rubbing my eyes as I started up the hill toward the house. Then I halted, wide awake, my sneakers crunching on the gravel. Someone was sitting on the stone wall at the bottom of the front lawn. I veered across the field toward him. The man looked like no one I’d ever seen before. A beard darkened his jaw; he wore jeans and a worn brown leather jacket. And yet I knew who he was.

He stood up and called to me—“Jerry!”

I knew that voice. I broke into a run, my books dropping behind me in the long grass. It was Robert.

His arm went around my neck, hard and strong. I felt his wiry beard push into my forehead, a sensation that made me want to scream with laughter. I wrapped my arms around his waist and hung on tight.

“You’re here!” I staggered back a step to look at him.

“Hard to believe,” he said.

“I—I knew you’d come back!”

He grinned. “You’ve gotten big. You look great.”

“So do you!” I blinked. “Is the beard—are you in disguise?”

Robert rubbed his chin. “It started out that way. Now I wouldn’t feel right without it.”

“You’re not fat anymore.”

“I worked it off.”

“Where?”

“Alberta, Saskatchewan, other places out West. I did a lot of ranch work and clearing land for pipelines.” He sat down on the stone wall again, his grin fading. “How’ve things been around here? Not so great, I guess—from your letters.” They’d been forwarded to him from the address I’d sent them to; he said they were one of the main reasons he’d come home.

I sat down next to him. He rested one foot on the worn canvas knapsack he’d leaned against the wall. I liked the smell of his leather jacket. I talked fast, as if I expected him to turn into an empty space beside me before I’d told him everything—Miss Gilly’s departure, the new school, even the Halloween vandalism. His steady gaze absorbed the agitation in my voice. He wasn’t surprised or angry that I’d gotten in trouble. I told him how bitterly my parents had been arguing lately.

“What makes them fight so much?” I asked.

For the first time since I’d seen him, the tic appeared around his eyes. “I used to believe it was because of me, but I know better now.”

“Did Dad beat you up?”

“Yeah, especially after that cocktail party. The one when the woman in the white fur showed up. He scared himself as much as he did me.”

“But why did he do it?”

Robert looked up slowly from the ground. “Do you know about Mrs. Miller?” he asked.

“I think so. From the way Miss Gilly used to talk, I sort of figured it out. Is she the reason Dad missed so many trains?”

“Sure.” Robert leaned back, glancing up the hill. “She was the woman at the party,” he said. “Miss Gilly heard her talking with Dad about running away together. They were talking just up there.” He stood up to point to the forsythia bushes beside the garage. I stood up with him. “Miss Gilly’d come out to get me in—I was tossing a ball against the toolshed. She told me what she’d heard. Then I did one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.”

My head was spinning from taking in so much information and trying to remember the party at the same time. I recalled the way Mrs. Miller had held her cigarette holder like a wand as she glided up the front walk. “What did you do?” I asked Robert.

“I told Mother what Miss Gilly had heard Dad and Mrs. Miller talking about.”

“I remember I heard you speaking with Mother on the stairs. Just before her door slammed.”

“I remember that slam.” Robert winced. “Dad got to me the next morning. I went away to school early. The next thing I heard from home was that Mother had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.”

“Miss Gilly told me about the pills.” I glanced at the driveway where I’d seen the ambulance. “Was that the first you’d known about Mrs. Miller?” I asked.

“Oh, no. I used to sneak into Dad’s room when I was little. Just to get close to him. I’d hide in his closet. Once he found me, after he’d just gotten off the phone with her. That was why.…” Robert shook his head slowly. “Lord, it’s strange to be back here!”

“Laura Miller.” I’d never spoken the name to anyone. To say it out loud made her real. I was angry and sad and curious all at once.

“Dad left a few times more, and came back. He always chose his home and family. And his position here in town. To run off with another woman would have wrecked everything he’d worked for all his life. And in his way, maybe he cared about us.” Robert sighed. “We’ll find out.…”

“But he still saw Mrs. Miller?”

“Yeah. I suppose he could never give her up.”

I suddenly couldn’t talk about her anymore—I felt overloaded with the past. And there were things I wanted to know even more about. Robert and I sat down on the wall again. It was a chilly fall day, but the stones were still warm from the sun. I asked what Robert had been doing while he’d been away.

At first it seemed hard for him to speak, as if he, too, were saying some things out loud for the first time. “I passed the Air Force basic training, at last,” he said. “But then I found out what I’d been in training for.…”

He’d learned, he told me, that he wasn’t destined to be a heroic Air Force pilot. Or to be a paper-shuffling company clerk who got pounded with nightsticks in the MP van after blind-drunk rampages in town. He’d decided that if he was going to be a fuck-up, he’d at least be a free one. “So I jumped a freight train and took off,” he said.

“You really rode the rails?” I remembered Wayne the radio Night Owl’s hoboing stories.

Robert told me how it had really been. As he spoke, I pictured him riding in a boxcar—a real hobo, sitting with his boots beside him, the sooty wind blowing in his face as the towns flew by the open door. But there were no romantic tales being swapped, no lonesome night-owl harmonica tunes drifting through the night air. Men lay sprawled on splintery boards, belching cheap liquor fumes. One dark figure knelt over Robert, trying to yank the boots out of his hands. The man stabbed him in the side—Robert lifted his shirt to show the long scar. He knew that if he lost his boots, he’d be walking for miles along railroad sidings with the gravel turning the soles of his feet bloody. So he had to hit the dark figure over and over until the man didn’t fight back anymore. He’d learned to never, never take his boots off again in the dark.

He also learned the freedom of having no last name and no past. He had only one purpose now, to keep moving: slipping out of bars when they were raided, ducking into roadside meadows as police cars stopped to check hitchhikers. Finding work, he walked out into the mountains with a chain-saw to turn mile after mile of dark forest tunnel to a green sky-lit path. He slept dreamlessly under bunkhouse blankets, rising at dawn to gulp scalding coffee among other men with no last names.

He learned, too, about the craziness, as he called it. Sometimes it was the terror of being followed by ghosts—a frowning skeletal pilot and a tipsy weeping crone. Sometimes the craziness had to be soaked up with alcohol that made the specters back off, their accusations fading into the garble of voices around him. Sometimes the figures had to be screamed at, kicked, punched. Then he learned how a jail cell floor felt slamming up into his face.

Once he landed in a cell that reeked of despair and rubber walls and shook like a boxcar hurtling through the night. The maze of hospital corridors gradually became home; it mirrored the puzzle of passages inside his head. He learned that this echoing maze didn’t end in a tunnel to vanish into, as he’d always thought. The maze emptied like a sewer pipe into a place that was just the mirror image of the hospital world: a place of ordinary streets, alleys, bridges, of people, noises, smells, a place that was simply life.

I began to see even then that this craziness was not so very foreign to me. I’d seen it in me during my Halloween rampage. I’d seen it in Robert when he’d smashed the car through the garage door. I’d noticed it when my mother had thrown the burnt chicken against the wall the night after my father left. I’d seen it in my father, as, stalled in honking traffic after picking me up at my friend’s house, he’d rambled on about the shame that his own father—the original family hobo—had caused him.

Such craziness wasn’t supposed to enter this quiet town, or this beautiful estate into which my father had tried to barricade himself and his family with lines of trees. The barricade had turned to a high prison wall that made even him feel trapped. Robert had cut a swath through it on his way out, giving me a wider view of the sky.

A gray car rolled up the driveway and pulled into the garage. Robert and I saw the kitchen lights go on, though the afternoon sun was still bright. My mother was home.

When Robert and I walked into the kitchen, she was unloading a bag of groceries. Her mouth flew open. A bottle of olives rolled off the counter and skidded along the floor. I’d never seen her embrace anyone like that, but as Robert wrapped his arms around her shoulders, she clung to him, her fingers digging into his back. She couldn’t speak; all I heard were little gasping sounds. Robert helped her sit down at the table in the breakfast room. He pulled a chair up, and I sat at the end of the table.

“Are you—are you home for good, now?” she asked finally.

Robert sighed. “Not for good.”

“Are the military police after you?”

“Always.”

She swallowed hard. “What will you do?”

“I’ll stay for a while.”

“But—how long?”

Robert pressed his fingernails, black with dirt, into the table-top. “Until they come for me,” he said. “Then, we’ll see.”

My mother wiped her eyes with a napkin, and seemed to notice me for the first time. “You sent Jerrett postcards,” she said. “You didn’t send us any! We never knew where you were!” Her lips stretched wide at the corners. “You hurt me so, Robert!”

He nodded slowly. Then he looked steadily at her. “You hurt me. We all hurt each other.”

“He—” My mother’s eyes narrowed. I knew she was talking about my father. “He—”

“Yes.” Robert rested his hand on her arm.

She dropped her head. I heard the hum of the clock in the kitchen.

“Why did you come, after all this time?” she asked.

“You gave up on me, didn’t you?” Robert asked suddenly, and an angry wildness flashed in his eyes. “You gave up on me years ago.”

“No, Robert!”

His hand tightened into a fist. “It always seemed that way.”

“I gave up on myself.” My mother shut her eyes. “I shouldn’t have. I was scared.…”

“Me, too.” Robert sat back in his chair, facing the window. “Then I got even more scared of forgetting everything. That’s what brought me back, I guess.” He stared at my mother. “Do you understand that?”

“I’m going to try. I hope it’s not too late,” she said. Then she sat up straight. “Where’s your suitcase?”

He pointed to the knapsack he’d dropped in the corner, and pulled a wallet from his back pocket. “That and six hundred dollars,” he said.

“Do you—did you steal it?”

“I have, once or twice, when I had to,” he said. “I worked for this money, though. I know how to work for what I need now.”

She gazed into his face. “Do you want some food? Are you hungry?”

“Hungry.…” Robert scratched his beard. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept for days. “Yeah, I’m hungry.”

“We’ve got plenty—plenty of everything—” She turned toward the kitchen, and I saw for the first time the tears streaming down her cheeks.

My brother walked slowly around the house touching things as if each china ashtray or silver candlestick was a relic of some lost civilization preserved in a museum. I was beginning to think of them that way, myself. He took a shower, and while his clothes were in the washer, wore a pair of corduroys and a flannel shirt he found in the closet in his room. With his beard and long wet hair and flat stomach, he didn’t look like the brother I’d watched shuffle off to the Air Force so long ago. He no longer moved as if he was about to make way, smiling apologetically, for anyone who stepped in front of him. His tic was almost gone. But he looked exhausted. My mother kept asking him if he didn’t want to take a nap and he kept saying no; then at one point, he went into the basement, turned on the television, and fell asleep on the sofa. I sat in a wicker chair beside him watching the shows with the sound turned off.

I fell asleep, too. I woke to hear rumbling voices above the ceiling. Running up the stairs, I found my father standing beside the living room fireplace.

“You can’t keep it, Robert,” he said. He sounded adamant, as if he were telling Robert he couldn’t keep a filthy stray animal he’d brought home. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t lean—please!” My mother, standing in the middle of the carpet, pointed to the mantelpiece. Carved wooden grapes, vines, and leaves twined along its edge; once it had crashed to the floor when Robert had rested his arm on it, and had cost over a thousand dollars to have repaired. My father stepped away from the mantelpiece, his elbow still sticking out at his side as if not knowing where to settle. He hadn’t changed out of his dark business suit and silver necktie. His watch-chain drooped across his vest.

“Your opinion of my beard.…” Robert, sitting forward on the sofa, gazed up into his face. “I realize it can’t harm me.”

“It’s mad to be talking about something like this, Dean.” My mother shook her head. “It’s not as if we’re going to take him to the club for Sunday lunch—as if nothing had happened.”

“Only bums and—and beatniks look like that,” my father said. “Is that what you are now?”

Robert looked around the room, his eyes narrowing. “I hoped I could just be who I am here. Here. But maybe that’s crazy.” Then his head snapped back, his mouth open. He screamed at the ceiling: “Shit! I’d forgotten how awful it could feel!”

His voice seemed to knock flakes of ceiling plaster onto my parents’ heads. Their faces froze in shock. They stared at the carpet, the walls, everywhere but at Robert. I felt trembly, myself, I watched him.

“He needs his beard for a disguise,” I said finally. “If the MP’s recognize him, they’ll beat him up and take him away.”

My father turned to me. “Listen, Jerrett, your brother and I need to talk—”

“Please don’t lean on the mantelpiece—” My mother pressed her fingers against her forehead.

My father moved away from the fireplace and sat down hard in an armchair. “All right, the beard’s not the issue—it’s just the shock of seeing you looking so different. What matters—well, I don’t see how we—you can’t expect us to hide you indefinitely!”

Robert turned his head slowly toward him. “You’d turn me in?”

“You’re putting me in a terrible position!” My father cleared his throat. “It’s a legal matter. And I have a loyalty to the Air Force—”

“We’re not turning him in!” my mother said. “We’re not.”

“Marian, this is too important a decision—”

“Too important for me to have any say in it?”

“Too important to get so emotional about. We can’t lose all track of what’s … right.”

“What’s right,” she said, “is that our son’s come back to us.”

“I know, I know.” My father suddenly stood up. “I can’t have dinner in this suit,” he said, and strode out of the room.

My mother sat on the sofa and picked up her glass from the coffee table. “Do you want a drink?” she asked Robert.

“I’m leaving it alone these days,” he said. “Jerry wrote me that you were, too.”

“You wrote him that?” she asked me.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Oh, dear.” She stared at the floor. “I only started again a while ago. And only after five o’clock.”

“But it sneaks up, doesn’t it?” Robert said.

“The question is, which sneaks up faster, the drinks, or whatever it is they’re supposed to chase away.”

“I think they get to be the same thing.” Robert said.

My mother swirled her ice cubes in her glass. “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

“There’s a lot you never knew about me,” he said. “We’ve got a few days to learn things.”

“If the cops come, you could hide under the eaves in the attic,” I said to Robert. “Like that time—”

“Jerrett—” My mother looked up.

Robert turned to me. “Thanks, pal. But I’ve spent too much time in places like that.”

My mother wanted to know what he meant. Then he told her about the jail cells and the mental hospital, in less detail than he’d told me but fully enough to produce sharp intakes of breath from her. As he finished, my father walked in wearing his dinner clothes—flannel slacks and a sports jacket. He’d forgotten to change his silver tie.

“Dean.” My mother stood up. “I know how we can get Robert off! We can get a psychiatrist to talk to the Air Force—”

“What the hell are you talking about, Marian?” My father stopped halfway across the carpet. “It’s out of the question!”

“You don’t know what’s happened. Robert—” She turned to him. “Tell him—please!”

Robert shook his head. “I don’t want you to get me off. Forget it.”

“I think we should have dinner, a nice family dinner.” My father turned toward the door. “We don’t have to decide anything tonight.”

Dinner was like a strange underwater dream or a play set inside a huge fish tank. My father made baritone gurgling sounds, my mother made higher pitched ones, Robert nodded like some sort of branch coral. The grinning Toby mugs, a school of thick-lipped poisonous fish hovering along the wall, nibbled at the tension that floated by like algae. Manta-like again, I blended into the flickery darkness out of candle range.

My father wanted to catch Robert up on the activities of his friends whose fathers he knew. Names of people Robert had known kept bubbling up, bursting against the ceiling. Food was passed slowly; the room was awash with politeness. When dinner was over, the last bite of partially defrosted cake eaten, a silence settled over the room like the shadow of an ocean liner passing overhead, its engines stalled.

My father lined up his placemat along the table’s edge. “Well.…” He looked up. “Maybe you’d like to take a walk, Robert. You’d be surprised how the yard’s changed.”

“Dean, he’s tired. He’s not interested tonight.” My mother started to gather in the plates.

“Why shouldn’t he be interested? It’s his home, isn’t it?”

Robert gave me a glance and stood up, pulling his leather jacket off the back of his chair. I watched him follow my father outside.

For the next few nights, he and my father went for walks. They didn’t talk about much, Robert said. I had the feeling he was waiting for my father to say some special thing to him, and when he did, Robert would be able to leave again. I dreaded this terribly, though I also feared that the longer he stayed, the more danger he was in of being caught. People must have seen him on his way to Ridge Haven.

I began helping my mother with the dishes after dinner, something I didn’t usually do, but it seemed appropriate now. One night, I was putting some glasses away when the telephone rang in the hall. The jangling sound startled me, as it always did—what if it was the military police calling? My mother, her hands soapy, asked me to get it.

Picking up the phone, I heard a high indistinct voice like a tiny animal trapped inside the receiver. I loosened my grip, as if that would help the sound get out.

“… Dean?”

“My father’s outdoors,” I said, relieved that it wasn’t the Air Force. “Who is this, please?”

“Oh—Jerrett, it’s you.” There was a pause. I heard faint music in the background. “How’s your turtle?”

“What?” I frowned. “Who is this?”

“You met me years ago, at a party.…” I heard a long breath. “We had a talk. There was … a model airplane, and a turtle.”

“Mrs. Miller.” I said. I sat down hard on the chair my mother kept beside the phone. I felt as if I should hang up, but the small, high voice kept me intrigued, as if Mrs. Miller had turned into a pretty red-haired young girl. I pictured her with a soft white fur over her shoulders. “How are you?” I managed to say.

“Not very well, I’m afraid.…” Another long breath, like sandpaper being pulled along a ribbon. “But I’m glad … we got a chance to meet that time.”

“Me too, I guess.” I peered through the window beside the terrace door. “I don’t know where my father is right now.”

I heard a sigh. “It’s hard … to keep my head up to talk.”

“Are you sick or something?”

“They let me go home from the hospital, there was nothing more.…” Her voice grew faint, and I had to press the receiver hard against my ear to hear. “It would be lovely, if he could come see me. Tonight.…”

“Does my father know where you are?”

“Yes, he does. I’m sorry to call. Just tell him … please tell him I haven’t got much time.”

“All right.” I heard the slow breathing. Then it faded. I could picture the phone slipping from her fingers onto a pillow. The dial tone’s sudden buzz made me pull the receiver away from my ear fast.

I started out the terrace door. Fog was rolling in from the woods. Two figures approached. They walked side by side, their footsteps silent in the wet grass. I thought the bent-over figure was Robert, remembering his old walk, but then I saw it was my father, and that Robert, walking taller, was slowing his pace so as not to leave my father behind.

“I believe you have some homework, young man,” my father said when he spotted me in the doorway.

“I need to talk to Robert,” I said.

“He’ll still be here tomorrow.” My father patted my shoulder, an uncharacteristic gesture.

I went to the attic and took out my books. But as soon as I heard Robert’s footsteps on the stairs, I went down to his room. He was sitting at his desk, the glow from the lamp shining in his face.

“Someone called for Dad,” I said, and sat down on his bed. “It was Mrs. Miller.”

“No kidding—she called here?”

“A little while ago.”

Robert turned in his chair. “I met her once,” he said.

“Where?”

“In New York. Miss Gilly called me when Mother was in the hospital, and I went from school to New York to tell Dad—at Mrs. Miller’s apartment,” Robert said. “I expected to hate her. But I just felt bad for her, in spite of everything. No easy job for anyone, being in love with Dad.”

“You think she’s really in love with him?”

Robert nodded.

“What about him—does he love her?”

“I guess. It’s always hard to know what he feels. It’s probably just as hard for him to know as for anyone else.”

I shifted my position. “She’s sick. I think she’s about to die. She said she didn’t have much time.”

“Damn!”

“You know, I heard him talking to her on the phone once—when we were on that trip to Gettysburg. He suddenly got upset. He made a terrible noise. Maybe it was because she told him she was sick.”

“It must have been serious, if he carried on like that.” Robert walked to the window. “Did she ask for him to come see her tonight?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to tell him.” I watched Robert turn around. “I thought I might start yelling it at him,” I said.

“Maybe I’d better do it.”

“What about Mother?” I glanced in the direction of her room. “How are we going to keep her from finding out? She’s going to flip.”

Robert headed for the door. “She’s not the one I’m worried about.”

I went up to my room and burrowed under the eaves, not sure what I was looking for. I took out the carton of toy soldiers, the ones with which Robert and I had populated the battlefields of World War I France. I forgot all about the time. Then all of a sudden the carpet looked like a dusty field strewn with tiny corpses. No amount of arranging men in formations could make them look heroic any more. I kicked them all over the floor. Then I hurried down the attic stairs.

The house was nearly dark. Where was everyone? I felt as if I’d woken after a long sleep. My father’s room was empty. My mother’s door was shut. No sounds of movement came from inside. I checked my watch; it was past midnight. I went downstairs to the living room. Robert was sprawled on the sofa in his jeans and old shirt. He still didn’t want to sleep in his own room, but he was closer to it than the basement where he’d been sleeping all week.

The moonlight streamed through the windows and made the place look like a big tank drained of water—or an empty stage set. In the dining room, the candlesticks stood on the table like left-behind props. I hurried toward the garage.

My father’s car was gone. He’d been in such a hurry to leave that he’d left the garage door open, something he never did. This man who never did anything on impulse, who never revealed himself capable of a whisper of passion—he must have driven away in the middle of the night to be with Laura Miller.