By Nightfall

HER BROTHER

Rebecca’s family is, in its way, a country unto itself. Peter married into it as he might have married the customs and legends, the peculiar history, of a girl from a small, remote nation. The Taylor family nation would be solvent but not wealthy, devoted to regional dishes and handicrafts, lax about timetables and train schedules, tucked into the declivities of a mountain range daunting enough to have protected it from invaders, immigrants, and most ideas and inventions it did not itself engender. Mizzy would be its wounded patron saint, whose pale, glass-eyed effigy is paraded annually through the streets and into the central square.

Before Mizzy, though… There was, still is, the big old dormered house beginning to go terminally soggy under the accumulated heat and soak of eighty-plus Richmond summers. There is Cyrus (professor of linguistics, a small, quietly confident man with a head like Cicero’s) and Beverly (pediatrician, brisk and ironic, defiantly indifferent to housekeeping). And there were, are, three lovely daughters: Rosemary, Julianne, and Rebecca, five years apart. Rose was the beauty, solemn, not unfriendly but not available, either; the girl for whom some older boy with a car was always waiting. Julie was less stunning but more easily amused, a one-of-the-guys girl, loud and funny, a champion gymnast, unapologetically sexual. And then there was Rebecca, born famous thanks to her two older sisters; Rebecca, who was small and pale, gamine, the least beautiful but most intelligent; who had the same aloof, guitar-playing boyfriend since the eighth grade; whose girlhood is epitomized (for Peter) by the yearbook photo in which she, wearing the homecoming crown and holding homecoming roses, stands laughing (who knows why, maybe at the absurdity of where she finds herself) in a little sparkly dress, flanked by the two runners-up, the princesses, who smile mightily for the camera, and who are slightly stolid in their beauty, unremarkable, descendants of those sturdy “marriageable” girls in whom Jane Austen was not particularly interested.

And then. When Rebecca was about to graduate from high school, when Julie was in her second year at Barnard and Rose was already thinking of divorce, the Mistake arrived.

Beverly had had her tubes tied years before. She was forty-five; Cyrus was past fifty. Beverly said, “He must have been desperate to be born.” This statement was taken seriously. She was an expert on children, a doctor of children, and not prone to romances about them.

Peter had met Mizzy when Rebecca brought him for the first time to Richmond. He was nervous about meeting her family, embarrassed over the putative note of impropriety—wasn’t it a little creepy for a graduate student to date an undergraduate from his seminar, even if he had waited until after the semester’s end? Rebecca’s father was a professor, could Peter really and truly believe Rebecca when she assured him that her father didn’t disapprove?

“Just shut up,” she told him as the plane descended. “Stop worrying. Right now.”

She had that intoxicating, young-girl certainty; she had that Virginia lilt. Jest stop warying. Raht now. She might have been a nurse in a war.

He promised to try.

Then they were off the plane and there was Julie, vital and friendly in a cowgirl way, waiting for them outside the airport in the family’s old Volvo.

And then, there was the house.

The photo Rebecca had shown Peter had prepared him for its decrepit grandeur—its tangles of wisteria and deep, shadowy front porch—but not for the house in situ, not for the shabby wonders of the entire block, one lovely old matronly house after another, some better cared for than others but none done over or restored—it apparently wasn’t that kind of neighborhood; Richmond probably wasn’t that kind of city.

“My God,” Peter said, as they pulled in.

“What?” Julie asked.

“Let’s just say it’s a wonderful life.”

Julie lobbed a quick glance at Rebecca. Oh, right, one of those very, very clever boys.

In fact, he hadn’t meant to sound cynical, or even particularly clever. Far from it. He was falling in love.

By the end of the weekend, he’d lost count of his infatuations. There was Cyrus’s study—a study!—with its profoundly comfortable swaybacked armchair, in which it seemed you could sit and read forever. There was Beverly’s applauded (if failed) attempt to impress Peter by baking a pie (which was known afterward as “that goddamned inedible pie”). There was the upstairs window through which the girls had escaped at night, the three lordly and lazy old cats, the shelves crowded with books and elderly board games and seashells from Florida and framed, rather haphazard-looking photographs, the faint smells of lavender and mildew and chimney smoke, the wicker porch swing on which someone had left a rain-bloated paperback copy of Daniel Deronda.

And there was Mizzy, about to turn four.

No one liked the word “precocious.” There was something doomy about it. But Mizzy, at four, had figured out how to read. He remembered every word he heard spoken in his presence and could, forever after, use the word in a sentence, often as not correctly.

He was a serious and skeptical boy, prone to occasional fits of hilarity, though it was impossible to predict what might or might not strike him as funny. He was pretty, pretty enough, with a high pale forehead and liquid eyes and a precise, delicate mouth—it seemed at the time that he might grow up to be a beautiful princeling or, equally plausibly, a Ludwig of Bavaria, with a great dome of vein-mottled forehead and eyes too full of quivering sensitivity.

And (thank God) he harbored childish affections and inclinations along with his spooky proclivities. He loved Pop Rocks and, with an unsettling devotion, the color blue. He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, who Mizzy understood to have been president but who he also insisted had possessed superhuman strength, and the ability to conjure full-grown trees out of barren ground.

That night, in bed (the Taylors, it seemed, just assumed), Peter said to Rebecca, “This is so incredibly lovely.”

“What?”

“All of it. Every single person and object.”

“It’s just my crazy family and my creaky old house.”

She believed that. She wasn’t being coy.

He said, “You have no idea…”

“What?”

“How normal most families are.”

“Do you think my family is abnormal?”

“No. ‘Normal’ isn’t the right word. Prosaic. Standard.”

“I don’t think anyone is prosaic. I mean, some people are more eccentric than others.”

Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, there’s nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they’re good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big, dangerous ones; no heroism, no genius, no terrible yearning for anything you can’t at least in theory actually have. If you were young lank-haired, pustule-plagued Pete Harris you felt like you were always about to expire from the safety of your life, its obdurate sensibleness, that Protestant love of the unexceptional; the eternal certainty of the faithful that flamboyance and the macabre are not just threatening but—worse—uninteresting.

Is it any wonder Matthew got out of there two days after he graduated from high school, and had sex with half the men in New York?

No, don’t do that, it’s poisonous, it’s wrong, Milwaukee did not kill your brother.

Rebecca said, “If you grew up here, you’d probably feel a little less romantic about it all.”

“Then I want to feel romantic about it all for as long as I can. Mizzy told me the story of Abraham Lincoln, before dinner.”

“He tells everybody the story of Abraham Lincoln.”

“Which he seems to have mixed up with Superman and Johnny Appleseed.”

“I know. He has to make a lot of it up as he goes along. We’re all gone, and Mom is a little, I don’t know. Over it. She loves him to death. But she could barely manage the maternal bit the first time around. When I was little, it was Rose and Julie who read me stories and helped me with my homework and stuff like that.”

“Julie doesn’t like me, does she?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. A feeling, I guess.”

“She’s protective, is all. Which is funny. She’s the wild one.”

“She is, huh?”

“Oh, probably not so much anymore. But in high school…”

“She was wild.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How wild?”

“I don’t know. Regular wild. She had sex with different boys, that’s all.”

“Tell me a story or two.”

“Is this turning you on?”

“A little.”

“This is my sister we’re talking about.”

“Just tell me one story.”

“Men are such perverts.”

“And you’re not?”

“Okay, Charlie. One story.”

“Charlie?”

“I have no idea why I called you that.”

“One story, come on.”

She lay on her back with her head cradled in her hands, slim and tomboyish. They were in what the Taylors called the junk room, because it was the only room except Cyrus and Beverly’s that had a double bed. It had once been a guest room but, the Taylors having more use for junk than they did for guests, had long been devoted to storage, with the understanding that the occasional guest could always be installed there, with apologies. At the room’s far end, wan Virginia moonlight partly illuminated a shrouded sewing machine, three pairs of skis, a pile of cardboard cartons marked “Xmas,” and the Taylors’ collection of objects that would be repaired whenever someone had time: an improbably pink bureau missing its drawer pulls, a stack of ancient quilts, a chipped plaster St. Francis meant to stand on a lawn, a mounted marlin (where in the world would that have come from, and why would they want to keep it?), and, sitting on a high shelf, like an extinguished moon, a world globe that would light up just as soon as someone remembered to pick up the special bulb it required. There was more, considerably more, waiting like a troop of souls in purgatory, in the deeper dark beyond the window’s tentative beam.

Some—many—would have found this room disheartening, would in fact have been unnerved by the Taylors’ whole house and the Taylors’ entire lives. Peter was enchanted. Here he was among people too busy (with students, with patients, with books) to keep it all in perfect running order; people who’d rather have lawn parties and game nights than clean the tile grout with a toothbrush (although the Taylors’ grout could, undeniably, have used at least minor attention). Here was the living opposite of his own childhood, all those frozen nights, dinner finished by six thirty and at least another four hours before anyone could reasonably go to bed.

Here was Rebecca, lying next to him. Rebecca who inhabited this house as unthinkingly as a mermaid inhabits a sunken treasure ship.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see… One night, when I was a sophomore…”

“And Julie was a senior.”

“Yeah. One night Mom and Dad were out, and I was off with Joe…”

“Your boyfriend.”

“Mm-hm. He and I had had a fight…”

“Did you and Joe have sex?”

She said, with mock indignity, “We were in love.”

“So you did.”

“Yes. Starting the summer after freshman year.”

“Did you discuss it with your girlfriends before you slept with your boyfriend?”

“Of course I did. Would you rather hear that story?”

“Mm, no. Back to Julie.”

“Okay. Julie thought she had the house to herself. I have no idea what Joe and I had fought about but it seemed huge at the time, I’d stormed off, I thought we were really and truly breaking up and that at sixteen I had already wasted the best years of my life on this moron. And I let myself in and right away, I heard this noise.”

“What kind of noise?”

“Like, this thumping. Coming from the garden room. Like somebody stomping his foot.”

“Really?”

“I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what sex sounded like, and if I’d thought I heard Julie having sex with some boy in the garden room, I’d have left her alone.”

“But somebody was stomping a foot in there.”

“I couldn’t tell what it was. I didn’t know Julie was even home. I think if I hadn’t just had this huge fight with Joe, I might have been scared. But I was so furious. I sort of thought, All right, if you’re an escaped lunatic and you’ve got an axe and you’re sitting in my house stomping your foot, you have no idea who you’re messing with.”

“You investigated.”

“I did.”

“And found?”

“Julie with Beau Baxter, who she’d been dating, and Beau’s best friend, Tom Reeves.”

“What were they doing?”

“They were having sex.”

“All three of them?”

“More like, the two boys with Julie.”

“Details.”

“Are you touching yourself?”

“Maybe.”

“This is so wrong.”

“That’s part of what’s sexy about it.”

“I feel like I’m betraying her.”

“This is making me love Julie, if that makes any difference.”

“If you put a move on my sister…”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Just tell me what you saw when you walked into the room.”

“This was a mistake.”

“Okay. Tell me what the thumping was.”

“Hm? Oh. Beau was kicking the floor.”

“Why?”

“He just was.”

“Come on.”

“Okay. Because he was… screwing her. From behind. And, I don’t know, I guess when he got excited he was a foot-thumper.”

“Where was the other guy?”

“Guess.”

“Julie was sucking his dick. Right?”

“I’m not saying another word.”

“What did you do?”

“I left.”

“Do you want to make up a version where you stayed?”

“Not for all the money in the world.”

“Were you upset?”

“Yes.”

“Because you saw your sister having group sex.”

“Not just that.”

“What, then?”

“It all seemed so… ugly. Joe had been an asshole to me and here was my sister just sort of servicing these two idiots…”

“You don’t think they were servicing her?”

“She and I talked about that, after.”

“And?”

“She said it had been her idea.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I wanted to. I mean, it was her senior year, she’d made the national finals and she was going to Barnard. She seemed sort of… heroic, to me.”

“So?”

“I still didn’t buy it. She was the most competitive person I’d ever known. And really, I figured out how it must have gone. Even dumb old Beau Baxter was capable of understanding that after a few drinks, she wouldn’t turn down a dare. I knew she’d have to think of it afterward as having been her idea. She’d have to tell herself she’d been the one in power. Which sort of made it worse.”

“You were a nice girl.”

“I was not.”

“Nicer than Julie.”

“Not really.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I had sex with Beau two days later. Correction. I fucked Beau two days later.”

“You’re joking.”

“He came up to me at a party to apologize, supposedly embarrassed but actually so damned pleased with himself.”

“And you…”

“I told him to follow me.”

“Where’d you take him?”

“Into the garden. It was this big house where they had a lot of parties, and there was a garden.”

“And…”

“I told him to fuck me. Right there, on the wet grass.”

“No way.”

“I’d had it. I’d had it with my asshole boyfriend and I’d had it with my slutty sister who thought she had to win every single contest and I’d had it with being the innocent younger sister who got hysterical when she saw people fucking in the garden room. That night I still thought I’d left my boyfriend forever, plus I’d drunk almost a full pint of cheap vodka and I just wanted to straddle the dick of that big stupid boy who’d humiliated my sister. I didn’t like him, but at that moment I wanted to fuck him more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life.”

“Wow.”

“You like that, huh?”

“Uh, what happened next?”

“He was scared. As I’d suspected he’d be. He was all, Um, hey, Rebecca, I dunno… So I gave him a little shove on the chest with both hands and told him to lie down.”

“Did he?”

“You bet he did. He’d never seen the power of a girl, possessed.”

“Go on.”

“I pulled down his pants and pulled up his shirt. I didn’t need him to be naked. I got down on his dick and I showed him exactly what he was to do with his fingertip on my clitoris. It wasn’t clear that, until that moment, he knew what a clitoris was.”

“You’re making this up.”

“You’re right. I am.”

“No.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Really and truly?”

“Do you care?”

“Sure I do.”

“It’s a sexy story whether it’s true or not, right?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“Men are such perverts.”

“You’re right. We are.”

“Anyway, story time’s over for tonight. Come here, Charlie.”

“What’s with Charlie?”

“I really and truly don’t know. Just come here.”

“Where?”

“Here. Right here.”

“Here?”

“Mm-hm.”

Six months later, he married her.

Twenty years later, he is sitting at his dining room table across from Mizzy, who’s fresh from the shower, wearing cargo shorts. He hasn’t put on a shirt. There’s no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze—the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition, and not the rarest of mutations. Mizzy has dark pink nipples (there’s some sort of Mediterranean blood in these Taylors, somewhere) about the size of quarters. Between his neatly square pectorals, a single medallion of sable-colored hair.

Is he being seductive, or is it just his regular carnal heedlessness? There’s no reason for him to think Peter might be interested, and even if there were, he wouldn’t get sexy around his sister’s husband. Would he? (When was it that Rebecca said, “I think Mizzy is capable of just about anything”?) There is, of course, in some young men, a certain drive to try to seduce everybody.

Peter says, “How was Japan?”

“Beautiful. Inconclusive.” Mizzy has retained the soft Virginia burr Rebecca lost years ago. Bee-oo-tiful. In-con-cloo-sive.

Out of the shower, Mizzy looks less like Rebecca. He has his own version of the Taylor face: hawklike thrust of feature, jutting nose and big, attentive eyes (which, in Mizzy, are ever so slightly crossed, giving his face a stunned, ever-questioning quality); that vaguely Ancient Egyptian aspect they share, apparent in neither Cyrus nor Beverly, evidence of some insistently repeating snarl in their combined DNA. The Taylor brood, three girls and one boy, variations on a theme, profiles that would not be entirely surprising on millennia-old pottery shards.

Peter is staring, isn’t he?

“Can a whole country be inconclusive?” he asks.

“I didn’t mean Japan. I meant me. I was just a tourist there. I couldn’t connect.”

He has that Taylor presence, that thing they all do (with the possible exception of Cyrus), without quite realizing it. That ability to… command a room. Be the person about whom others ask, Who’s that?

Mizzy went to Japan for a purpose, didn’t he? To visit some relic?

Where the hell is Rebecca?

“Japan is a very foreign country,” Peter says.

“So is this one.”

Score one for undeluded youth.

“Didn’t you go there to see some kind of holy rock?” Peter says.

Mizzy grins. Okay, he’s not as self-important as he might be.

“A garden,” he answers. “In a shrine in the mountains in the north. Five stones that were put there by priests six hundred years ago. I sat and looked at those stones for almost a month.”

“Really?”

Mizzy, don’t kid a kidder. I was once a self-dramatizing young romantic, too. A month?

“And I got what I should have expected. Which was nothing.”

And now: the lecture on the superiority of Eastern culture.

“Nothing at all?”

“A garden like that is part of a practice. It’s part of a life of contemplation. As it turns out you can’t just go and, I don’t know. Pay it a visit.”

“Would you want a life of contemplation?”

“Ah’m contemplating it.”

This is a Southern gift, isn’t it—tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That’s what they mean by Southern charm, right?

Peter expects a story, but no story, it seems, is forthcoming. A silence catches, and holds. Peter and Mizzy sit looking at the tabletop. The silence takes on a certain decisiveness, like the interlude during which it becomes apparent that a date is not going well; that nothing promising is going to happen after all. Soon, if this awkwardness doesn’t resolve itself, it will be established that Peter and Mizzy—this Mizzy, anyway, this troubled, world-scavenging boy who has supposedly been clean for over a year—don’t get along; that Mizzy is here to stay with his sister and that his sister’s husband will tolerate it as best he can.

Peter shifts on his chair, looks aimlessly into the kitchen. Okay. They won’t be friends. They have to get along though, don’t they? It’ll be too hard on Rebecca if they don’t. He can feel the stillness turning from failed affinity to combat. Who will speak—who will fill the silence with whatever comes to mind?—and by so doing declare himself the loser, the bitch; the one willing to devise some conversational gambit so that everything can be okay.

Peter looks back at Mizzy. Mizzy smiles mildly, helplessly.

Peter says, “I was in Kyoto, years ago.”

And really, that’s all it takes. Just a tiny declaration of one’s willingness to dance.

“The gardens in Kyoto are amazing,” Mizzy says. “I got fixated on this particular shrine because it was far away. As if, you know. It was going to be holier because there were no convenient nearby hotels.”

Something about the released tension makes him love Mizzy, briefly, soaringly, the way he imagines men love their comrades in battle.

“And it wasn’t,” Peter says.

“I thought it was, at first. It’s insanely beautiful. It’s way up in the mountains, they have snow more than half the year.”

“Where did you stay?”

“There’s a dumpy rooming house kind of thing in the town. I’d hike up the mountain every morning, and stay till just before dark. The priests let me sit there. They were so sweet. I was like their foolish child.”

“You went every day and sat in the garden.”

“Not in. It’s a dry garden. It’s raked gravel. You sit to one side and look at it.”

Yew set to one sad and look et it. No denying the musky sweetness of that Virginia tone.

“For a whole month,” Peter says.

“At first, I thought something amazing was happening. It turns out there’s this noise in our heads, we’re all so used to it we don’t hear it. This sort of static of information and misinformation and what-all. And after about a week of just looking at five rocks and some gravel, it starts to go away.”

“And is replaced by?”

“Boredom.”

It is so not what Peter expected that he emits a strange, phlegmy little snort-laugh.

Mizzy says, “And other things. I don’t mean to be flippant about it. But I… this’ll sound corny.”

“Go ahead.”

“Huh. As it turns out, I don’t really want to wear a robe and sit on some mountain halfway across the planet looking at rocks. But I also. I don’t want to just say, okay, that was my spiritual phase, now it’s time to apply to law school.”

The mystery of Mizzy: Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he’s considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

Peter says, “Would it be too horrible and embarrassing if I asked what you think you want to do?”

Mizzy frowns, but amusedly. “I think I’d like to be king of the underworld.”

“Hard job to get.”

“Don’t let me get all cryptic. I need to shape up a little. People have been telling me that for years, and I’m finally starting to believe them. I can’t really go to one more shrine in Japan. I can’t drive to Los Angeles just to see what happens along the way.”

“Rebecca thinks you think you’d like to do something in, um, the art world, is that right?”

Mizzy’s face colors with embarrassment. “Well, it seems to be the thing I care most about. I don’t know if I have anything, exactly, to offer.”

It’s a pose, isn’t it, all this boyish abashment? How could it not be? Mizzy, why do you refuse to summon up your gifts?

“Do you know what you want to do, exactly?” Peter says. “In the arts, I mean.”

That was a little Dad-like, wasn’t it?

Mizzy says, “Honestly?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I think I’d like to go back to school, and maybe become a curator.”

“That’s about the same odds as becoming king of the underworld.”

“But somebody has to do it, right?”

“Sure. It’s just. It’s a little like setting out to become a movie star.”

“And some people get to be movie stars.”

Here it is, then—the armature of hubris over which this skin of uncertainty is stretched. Then again, why should a smart, beautiful boy pursue modest ambitions?

“Sure they do,” Peter says.

“And, well. I’m sort of… Thank you for taking me in like this.”

“Egyptian” isn’t quite right for the Taylor face, is it? There’s too much pink-tinged Irish pallor about them, and too much strong Creole chin. El Greco? No, they’re not that gaunt or severe.

“We’re glad to have you.”

“I won’t stay long. I promise.”

“Stay as long as you need to,” Peter says. Which he does not exactly mean. What can he do, though? He’s a sucker for the whole damned family. Rose is selling real estate in California, Julie quit her practice to spend more time with her kids. Those are not terrible fates. Neither Rose nor Julie has come to a tragic end, but they are, both of them, living unexpectedly usual lives. And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter’s care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylors’ grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost—to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world’s most promising children.

He must have been desperate to be born.

“That’s kind of you,” Mizzy says. The rinsing formality of the South…

“Rebecca should take you to see the Puryear show. At the Modern.”

“I’d like that.”

He looks at Peter with those off-kilter eyes, which somehow manage not to render him foolish-looking, though they do produce an effect of slightly crazy intensity.

“Do you know his work?” Peter says.

“I do.”

“It’s a beautiful show.”

And then, now, Rebecca is back. Peter startles slightly when he hears her key in the lock, as if she’s caught him at something.

“Hello, boys.” She walks in with the milk Mizzy will need in his morning coffee and the two bottles of extravagant cabernet they’ll all drink tonight. She brings the vitality of herself—her offhand sense of her own consequence; her perfectly careless jeans and pale aqua sweater and the nape-length tangle of her hair, which is going wiry with its infusion of gray. She still carries herself like the pretty girl she was.

Is it the Taylor curse to peak early, is there some magic in that decrepit old house that fades the moment they leave it?

Kisses and greetings are exchanged, one of the wine bottles is opened. (Should Rebecca be serving wine to a drug addict, what’s up with that?) They go and sit in the living room with wineglasses.

“I’m going to ask Julie to come up next weekend,” Rebecca says.

“She won’t,” Mizzy answers.

“She can leave the children for one night. They’re not babies anymore.”

“I’m just saying. She won’t do it.”

“Let me work on her.”

“I don’t want you to have to work on her.”

“She’s going to drive them crazy. Those kids. It’s not even about them, it’s about Julie being the greatest mother who’s ever lived.”

“Please don’t force Julie to come to New York. I’ll go see her.”

“No, you won’t.”

“One day I will.”

Mizzy sits cross-legged on the sofa, holding his glass in his lap as if it were an alms bowl. He is, no denying it, another Rebecca, but it’s more about incarnation than it is about resemblance. He’s got her youngest-one ease, that sense of unquestioning self-possession—Behold me, the promised child. He’s got her tilt of the head, her fingers, her laugh. He isn’t tall—five nine, probably—and his body is compact, sinewy. It’s not hard to picture him sitting disciple-ishly at the edge of a holy garden. He does, in fact, look a little like one of the swoony Renaissance Sebastians. He has those waves of mocha-colored hair, those pinkish white, sinewy arms and legs.

Peter hears his name.

“What?”

Rebecca says, “When did we go see Julie and Bob?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine months ago, I guess.”

“Has it been that long?”

“Yeah. At least.”

“It’s hard to feel all that enthusiastic about going down to D.C.,” she says to Mizzy. “And spending the weekend stuck with them in that monster house.”

“I’m a little scared of the house, too,” he answers.

“Are you? It isn’t just me, then.”

Peter drifts out again. It’s catch-up, it’s Taylor-talk, he can’t be expected to stay tuned. He watches Rebecca lean in toward Mizzy as if she were cold and he gave off heat. All three sisters insist on Mizzy as their familiar, their daemon, the one in whom they can confide about the irregularities and infelicities of the other two.

Mizzy does, in fact, possess a certain aspect of disembodiment. He’s a little spectral; he feels like a fantasy he’s having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others. That’s surely due, in part at least, to a childhood spent alone with Beverly and Cyrus in that big house, as Beverly grew worryingly neglectful of domestic particulars and Cyrus, who turned sixty the same month Mizzy turned ten, lived increasingly in his study, the only refuge from the amassing evidence that his wife’s eccentricities were hardening, with age, into something darker. The girls came when they could, but they were starting lives of their own. Rebecca was at Columbia and Julie was in medical school and Rose was engaged in her epic battle with her first husband out in San Diego. What must it have been like for Mizzy, who came too late to the party; who spent his adolescence in barely lit rooms (thrift having become one of Beverly’s fixations) among the leavings and artifacts? On a visit there when Mizzy was sixteen, Peter wrote his name in the dust on a windowsill. He found a very old dead mouse behind the ficus in a corner of the living room, scooped it into a dustpan, and disposed of it secretively, as if he hoped to protect the Taylors from some feared diagnosis.

Mizzy. It’s hardly beyond understanding, neither the straight A’s that led to Yale nor the drugs that led elsewhere.

If anything, he looks to have come through surprisingly well, in the fleshly sense at least. When he was a little kid he was slightly odd-looking, but as he grew older a sharp-faced handsomeness manifested itself almost as if it had been called down for protection, as a fairy godmother might bestow an enchanted cloak on a troubled prince. Girls, or so rumor has it, started calling before he’d turned eleven.

Rebecca is saying, “… and into the great room, which is what she calls it, with a perfectly straight face.”

Mizzy smiles sadly. He does not, it seems, take the same sour pleasure in Julie’s bourgeois tumble, her uncritical embrace of things enormous and immaculate.

“I suppose she feels safe there,” Mizzy says.

Rebecca isn’t having it. “Safe from what?” she says.

Mizzy simply looks at her, questioningly, as if he’s waiting for her to resume her natural form. His color is deepened by discomfort (Rebecca really is on a tear about Julie, hard to say why), his eyes gone glisteny and black-brown.

Peter says, “From everything in the world, I guess.”

“Why would you want to be safe from the world?” Rebecca asks.

Rebecca, why would you be looking for a fight?

“Pick up a newspaper. Turn on CNN.”

“A castle in the suburbs isn’t going to save her.”

“I know,” Peter says. “We know.”

Rebecca pauses, gathering herself. She’s obscurely angry—she herself probably doesn’t know why. Mizzy has upset her, reminded her, made her feel guilty of some crime.

Peter risks a glance at Mizzy. Here it is again, that flash of secret affinity. We—we men—are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rebecca sighs. “I just hate it that she’s gotten like this.”

“Most people do,” Peter says. “Most people end up wanting children and nice houses.”

“Julie is not most people.”

Hm. Another of those impossible marriage-moments. Feign agreement, or risk implosion.

“Most people think they’re not most people,” Peter says.

“It’s different when they’re your sister.”

“Got you,” Peter says. He knows how to arrange his face.

Your sisters and brother are all still alive, aren’t they? Don’t you think I’d love to be able to sit here and complain about fat old Matthew and his not-very-bright boyfriend and the bratty adopted Korean child they refuse to discipline?

It’s unfair. Of course it’s unfair; unseemly, even, to stop an argument by trotting out your dead-brother credentials. But there shouldn’t be a squabble, not on Mizzy’s first night.

Question: Does Rebecca want a fight precisely because she knows Peter’s unhappy about the visit? They can take that up later. Also the question about serving wine to a former addict. Or they can just get tipsy on the cabernet, and go to sleep.

Rebecca says, “I forget, was it a Shinto or a Zen shrine?”

Mizzy blinks, twice, in the glare of the beam that’s been aimed at him. “Um, Shinto,” he answers.

And there, on his face, is the clearest of convictions: I don’t want to be a monk and I don’t want to be a lawyer but more than anything I don’t want to end up like these two.

Dinner passes, Mizzy is put to bed in Bea’s old room (which has been more or less preserved as she left it, for when she comes home, if she comes home). Peter and Rebecca, in their bedroom, call Bea. No, Rebecca calls Bea with the understanding that Bea will agree to speak to Peter, however briefly.

Peter waits beside Rebecca on the bed as the phone rings up in Boston. Forgive me for hoping she isn’t home, for wanting to just leave a message.

“Hello, darling,” Rebecca says.

“Mm-hm. Yes, we’re fine. Ethan’s here. Yes, Mizzy. I know, it’s been years since you saw him. What are you doing?”

“Right. Sure. I guess they’ll give you better nights when you’ve been there longer, don’t you think?”

“Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Well, don’t panic, you know your obsessive mother is always good for a few bucks if you’ll deign to take them.”

Apparently, Bea laughs on the other end. Rebecca laughs in response.

Bea, love of my goddamned life. How did you get to be a sad, lonely girl working at a hotel bar in Boston, wearing a red jacket, making martinis for tourists and conventioneers? Did we commit our first mistake in utero, was the name Beatrice too much for you to bear? Why did you leave school to take a job like this? If I drove you there, I’m sorry with my whole heart. With whatever’s left of my heart. I loved you. I love you. I have no idea how or when I fucked it up. If I were a better person, I suppose I’d know.

Rebecca says, dutifully, “How’s Claire?”

Claire is the roommate, a girl with an armload of tattoos and no discernible occupation.

“Sorry to hear that,” Rebecca says. “I guess April really is the cruelest month. I’m going to put your father on, okay?”

She hands him the phone. What can he do but accept it?

“Hey, Bea,” he says.

“Hi.”

This is how she’s been with him lately. She’s gone from open resentment to bland friendliness, like a stewardess talking to a needy passenger. It’s worse.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, really. Staying in tonight.”

There is a spiky blossoming in his chest. He’s seen this girl’s soul, he’s seen the tiny flickering essence of her when she was brand new. He’s seen her driven to paroxysms of delight by snow, by the neighbors’ stinky Lhasa apso, by a pair of red rubber sandals. He’s consoled her over uncountable injuries, disappointments, expired pets. The fact that they are now slightly awkward acquaintances, making small talk, means the world is too strange and mysterious, too dreadful, for his own minor heart.

“Well, that’s what we’re doing, too. Of course, we’re elderly.”

Silence. Okay.

“We love you,” Peter says helplessly.

“Thanks. Bye.”

She clicks off. Peter continues to hold the phone in his hand.

Rebecca says, “It’s a phase. Really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She has to separate from you. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”

“I’m getting worried about her. I mean, worried worried.”

“I know. I am too, a little.”

“What should we do?”

“Let her be, I think. For now, anyway. Call her every Sunday.”

Gently, Rebecca takes the phone out of Peter’s hand, puts it back on the night table.

She says, “We seem to be a halfway house for confused children, don’t we?”

Oh.

The idea arrives suddenly—Rebecca prefers Mizzy. Mizzy has had the good sense to be elusive, and charming, and repentant, and (say it) beautiful. Rebecca and Peter did their best with Bea but she’d arrived so early (yes, there had been talk of an abortion, has Rebecca ever forgiven him for pressuring her?), and almost as if Bea sensed that she was not quite wanted, she was always prone to wounded solitude, to the sporadic little-girl tantrums that were replaced, during adolescence, by peevishness and outright rancor, by long condescending diatribes about the plight of the poor and the crimes of America, made extra strange by the fact that Peter and Rebecca gave to charities, and agreed with all but Bea’s most paranoid convictions, about AIDS as a government experiment, about secret prisons into which she herself might disappear some day, because she was so vocal about the conspiracies we were meant to ignore.

How did that happen? It seems that at one moment she was a child squealing ecstatically in his arms, and the next she was a tough, sharp-faced girl with machete and pistol, come down from her village to confront him with his crimes. He was indifferent to the needs of her people, he grew fat at their expense, his glasses were pretentious, he forgot to pick up her dress at the cleaner’s.

It seems that he missed a step. He’d been innocent and then, mysteriously, had found himself in Kafka-land, where the only questions were concerned with determining the extent of his wrongdoing, and the damages sustained.

Peter turns to Rebecca, almost says something, but thinks better of it. Instead he kisses her and settles in for sleep, knowing she’ll read for a while, glad about that, happy in a funny, childish way to be going to sleep as his wife—his perfectly cordial, increasingly remote wife—keeps her little bedside lamp lit, and turns her pages.