Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Royal Blue

AFTER CALLING IT QUITS with being a model and actor — his eyes were a bit too close together for the big time — Nicholas went into the business of acquiring and selling folk art. He and Daphne lived in Brooklyn, where she worked as a real estate agent, and in early autumn he had been up in New Paltz, at the country house of one of his clients, Mrs. Andriessen. Daphne referred to Mrs. Andriessen as “the Adult.”

The Adult, a childless woman of a certain age, owned a largish woodstone-and-glass house with a lap pool, along with views of trees and a lake. She had a crush on Nicholas, which evened things out slightly between them. Every month they ate lunch together in either New Paltz or one of the neighboring restaurants near her city place on East Eighty-sixth, where she spent the weekdays during the winter. On weekends, and during much of the spring, summer, and fall, she stayed put in the country, filling her days with gardening, reading, and bird-watching. The Adult had two degrees from Princeton, one in art history and another in Slavic languages, and she sat on top of several million dollars that she shared with her husband, who resided most of the year in Shanghai. He spoke fluent Mandarin and had a business that the Adult never referred to, because, she said, she was ashamed of it. His income allowed her a measure of indolence. Various accommodations had been made.

She was a tall, brown-haired woman who walked with the deliberation and poise of a former dancer. She laughed easily, but her beauty was complicated by her eyes, which were deep and haunted, and by her distracting habit of falling into thoughtful silences.

When you entered the Adult’s house, period-instrument Baroque music would usually be making its way out of the audio system in the living room, and in the foyer you would be confronted with a signboard painted in red on oak slats.

The chariots rage in the streets, they rush to and fro in the squares, they gleam like torches, they dart like lightning, they are the messengers, they are like stones thrown from the field for the plows straight path. Who shall tell the truth of the law and of righteousness? Only I, saith THE LORD.

Nicholas had found this signboard in Kansas a year or so after he had started up a private dealership. A retired dairy farmer, Nahum Fester Cobb, who had put up this sign and others alongside the dirt road leading to his cow barn, had painted it. Nicholas knew that the Adult, his best client, would like it, although “like” was not quite the correct word for the way she responded to these artifacts. He had once asked her if she wanted folk art around the house because it was cutting-edge, and she had scowled.

“The ‘cutting edge,’ ” she said, “has cut its way right out of what I’m interested in. I wish you wouldn’t use clichés like that, Nicholas.”

“What are you interested in?” Nicholas inquired.

“Terror and prophecy,” the Adult said quietly, taking a sip of her iced tea. Scattered around her house were little Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons riding their bicycles in processions with grinning voodoo dolls behind them, along with handmade coaches with spectral mad dogs and cats in the passenger seats, followed by more skeletons. Several signboards, with horrifying warnings and predictions printed on them, were hanging on the walls right above the beautiful expensive furniture. She had passed through irony a long time ago and had made a stop somewhere else.

Nicholas hadn’t heard about the Twin Towers until he got back into his car, after his lunch with the Adult, and had been driving back home when he had turned on the radio and listened to people being suddenly hysterical. Still on the freeway, he called Daphne to see if she was okay (she was), and then he had called Mrs. Andriessen.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was strange, with an odd stillness. “I just heard. Someone else, a friend, called to tell me.”

“Isn’t it terrible?” Nicholas asked. “My God.”

“Yes, it is,” she said calmly. “Quite terrible.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Nicholas said, imagining the smoke and the piles of the dead.

“Oh, you don’t?” the Adult asked him. “I do.”

Two weeks later, on the day that Nicholas flew up to Alaska, the airplane had so few passengers in economy class that the flight attendants were handing out free meals — this, from an airline known internationally for its stinginess. Nicholas himself had taken a seat in first class, suspecting (correctly) that no one would question his right to be there. The anxious, unattractive people clumping down the aisle toward steerage stared at him helplessly.

Once airborne, after eating the broiled chicken, green beans, muddy mashed potatoes, and brownie, and gulping back the last of his scotch, he turned off the reading light, expecting to see from his window the empty black familiar nothingness of space and the Yukon Territories. Instead, he gazed outward at a vast velvety array of northern lights folding and unfolding. Shimmering with color, purple and blue, as hideously majestic as a floor show in heaven, they kept up with the plane, not underneath or above but beside it, and beside him, somehow. He closed his book and for a moment felt deranged by humility.

In Fairbanks he checked into a Holiday Inn near the airport. The next morning, he decided to take a walk after breakfast. The sky had acquired a peculiar royal blue, and when he returned to the hotel lobby, an airline pilot told him that the sky looked that way thanks to the ban on airplane travel that had been in effect for the past two weeks. The upper atmospheres had cleared themselves. Deep colors had returned overhead, at least for now.

The trees around Fairbanks were in full autumnal display. Leaf gold was everywhere. There were no maples up here, so all the usual reds had gone permanently missing. Nicholas drove north of Fairbanks to the house of Granny Westerby, one of his regular suppliers. Like Nahum Fester Cobb, Granny W. was a bit of a graphomaniac, and like him — like all of them — she imagined up for herself Blakean angels, devils, and end-times. A retired cleaning lady whose husband had worked for the Alaska Railroad, Granny painted words on the sides of jug lamps and bottles, though she also made the occasional message board. Her specialty was visionary Eros.

I AM COME INTO HIS GARDEN WHERE MY LOVE HAS BREATHED MY NAME. MY LOVE IS LIKE UNTO THE CLIMBING VINES, FOR HIS LUNGS INSPIRE THE FAIREST WINDS AND HE BLOWS HIS GOD-BREATH AGAINST MY CHEEKS. I AM FAINTED FOR HIM & XIST. I AM HIS LILY SECRET, I AM PLANTED AS A SEAL UPON HIS LIPS, HE WATERS ME. G.W.

The sources for these feelings, the words themselves, stumped him. Nevertheless, that blue love-craziness on a painted closet door happened to be the first piece of folk art Nicholas had bought from her. Shipping it down to the lower forty-eight had cost him hours of trouble. A client of his in Connecticut, a lawyer, had bought it and used it as the door to her guest room. When Nicholas had paid out the sum Granny W. had demanded in cash, he had asked her who the lucky guy had been she was referring to on the door. Was it Grandpa Westerby, rest his soul?

Granny Westerby had given Nicholas a look. “Nicholas,” she had said, “don’t be that way. The blessèd words are there for all to see, these words.” Occasionally she treated him like a schoolboy. He was used to this treatment from women, who doted on him.

Of course, she didn’t really want to sell her art. None of these proletarian folk artists did, and they wouldn’t have parted with their signboards and dolls and little sculptures, their private expressive outbursts, if they hadn’t needed the money, usually for advanced — that is, optional — medical procedures, or if they had owned personal computers hooked up to the Internet and a blogosphere on which they could have editorialized. The art they made was dying out, as they were. Most working-class oldsters had cancer and diabetes and heart troubles from lifetimes of labor-intensive work and carbo-overloaded diets. Sometimes the income from their art rescued them from the crowds at the outpatient clinics and got them some form of private care. Anyway, he liked to think so.

Granny Westerby was out in her backyard, seated on a bench in front of what looked like a picnic table scattered with brushes, paints, bottles, brake drums, and turpentine, when Nicholas arrived in his rental car. A radio playing rural white gospel was blasting away from inside the house. The old lady’s gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and she had one eye shut as she finished painting a phrase on the side of a wine bottle. Beside her, her golden retriever, Roscoe, eyed Nicholas as he approached. But the dog did not get up; he seemed to lack manners in this respect. Everyone in Alaska had at least one dog, Nicholas had noticed. The dogs seemed to be instrumental in getting their owners through the winter. On the Alaska license plates, Nicholas thought, the state motto should have been “The Dog State.” Granny W. looked up from her work.

“Oh, good,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Well, I told you I was coming. Hi, Granny,” Nicholas said, presenting her, suitor-style, with a clump of cut flowers he had bought at the florist’s on the way out. She glanced at them, grinned briefly, and nodded. “Thank you kindly. Would you please put them in water?” she said. “Inside?” With the slightest movement of her head, she indicated the back door of her house. Like her dog, Granny W. lacked conventional hospitality. Nicholas scritched Roscoe on the head before going inside. The dog continued to ignore him.

In the kitchen he found himself surrounded by a welter of antique kitchen equipment: a bread box, flour sifters, rolling pins, popover trays, a flyswatter, a manual toaster. A soiled teddy bear looked down from one of the cabinets. He found a flower vase in a heavily painted blue cupboard above the radio, from whose loudspeaker the gospel music had concluded and some maniac was now shouting rubbishy doomsday predictions. Nicholas cut the stems of the flowers with a steak knife, filled the vase with water, and dropped them in before noticing that, on the side of the glass, Granny had written, in her characteristic royal blue lettering, MY GOD WILL HEAVE ME.

“Heave”? Granny W. sometimes had the diction of a rustic religioecstatic prophet. Maybe she meant “heare.”

Okay. So be it. He saw an unplugged TV set in the corner of the kitchen, next to the dog dish. Across the glass face of the picture tube, Granny had painted, DO NOT GIVE OVER YOUR HEART TO IGNORANCE. The set would not be turned on again anytime soon, not with this lettering on it. It was like a personal admonitory test pattern. Nicholas loved it; the altered TV would be worth quite a sum on the open market.

Back outside, he sat down next to her and waited while she finished decorating the wine bottle with words. “I used to like autumn,” she said, without looking up. “I always loved the spiritual requirements. Not anymore. How about you?”

“Oh, actually, no,” he said. “I’ve never thought that. I like warmth better than cold.”

“Of course you do,” she said, with a crone’s smirk. “You belong in the tropics. Do you know where I get this blue paint? This hue?”

“No,” Nicholas admitted. “I don’t.”

“From the sky,” she said, pointing upward. She was an old tease. “I paint with sky.” She finished inscribing the sentence on the side of the bottle and gave it a hard professional look. FEAR AND LOVE HIS LOINS, the bottle instructed. It was perfect: wacky lovelorn profundity written in beautiful blue lettering. The Adult might want this one. Finally Granny W. sat back and looked directly at Nicholas. “You can’t have this,” she said. “The paint’s all wet.”

“I can wait,” he said. “I can just sit here patiently.”

“Only if I let you,” she said. She put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. “You’ll have to learn about patience, Nicholas. Everybody has to learn about that. I was beautiful and short-tempered, once, if you can imagine it. You take this backyard here. I’ve always lived here. I was birthed here. I died here and then I came back, and that’s why I’m so patient. Do you ever sit quietly? Do you ever contemplate the mountains?” she asked, nodding in their direction. “They say that He lives in the hills.”

“There aren’t any mountains where I live,” he told her. “As you know.”

“I expect you’re right. Too bad,” she said, smiling. “You do realize,” she said, after a lengthy pause, “what a pleasure it is for me to see you? I like to sit here and stare at you. Do you mind that?” She rubbed her forehead as if she were embarrassed. “You make me girlish.”

“No, I don’t mind.” Vanity constituted his central spiritual problem. He was ball-and-chained to his good looks. “You know I love you, Granny,” he told her. “You know I love what you do. By the way, is the kitchen TV set for sale?”

“The TV? No. The only show I watch is those words,” she said, shaking her head and clearing her throat with a bleating sound. She gave off a perfume of turpentine. “So many are giving their hearts over to foolishness that I thought I’d better remind myself not to do the same. It’s a little sermon I give myself, up here. A few words are all I need. What do you need, Nicholas?”

“A correction. And doors,” Nicholas said, without thinking.

“Beautiful Nicholas,” she said, smiling at him. “Stuck forever in the foyer, stuck in the mudroom.” Then she gestured at the wine bottle with the message about loins and love and fear on it. She named a price, Nicholas made a counteroffer, which Granny accepted, and which Nicholas had conveniently brought along in cash. This was their routine. She always sermonized in his direction, often about his appearance or his lifestyle, until she named her price. Then she was all business. When the wine bottle’s paint was dry, he wrapped it up in newspapers, inquired again about the TV set, received a firm response, said good-bye, and went off to his next appointment.

In Seattle, on the connecting flight back, his plane was stuck on the ground at the gate. Several Arab-American men had boarded and had been seated at different scattered locations. An alarmed passenger, hearing the men speaking Arabic in the waiting area, had alerted the flight attendant; the flight attendant had alerted the gate agent; and the gate agent had called the FBI and the Seattle Bomb Squad. Nicholas, up in first class, finished his first scotch and asked for a second. A voice came on the public-address system: “Please do not pat the bomb dog. This is a working dog. Please do not pat the bomb dog.” A big grinning yellow Labrador wearing a police department scarf, obviously happy with his job and his authority, padded up the aisle, then back and forth in the plane, sniffing in a show-offy way for bomb materials. He passed right by Nicholas without noticing him. Dogs did not seem to care for him anymore.

In due course, the Arab-American men were escorted off the airplane to some dim destination. The Airbus door was shut and latched, and the flight took off. The flight attendant, sitting in her forward jump seat, stared at Nicholas and licked her lips as he read his magazine. He had that effect on people.

Hours earlier, when he had boarded, he had told Daphne by cell phone that the airport looked so empty that the terminal might as well have been the Museum of Transportation, there were so few people in it. Forlorn little passengers could be seen scurrying down there at the ends of the corridors, on their errands. The vendors of hot dogs and newspapers presented the public with expressions of end-of-the-world nihilism. From the TV sets hanging from the ceiling came the unreassuring voice of the president of the United States, encouraging the terrified citizenry to help the economy by buying things. It was all very grungy and Amtrak-ish.

“ ‘Fear and love his loins’?” Daphne asked. “What’s that about?”

They were eating in their favorite Brooklyn sushi restaurant, and Daphne, sitting next to an orange window curtain, delicately nibbled at her California roll, held like a prized specimen at the tip of her chopsticks. Beside her, the curtain’s folds blew in lightly, ruffled by a mild breeze, and, watching the fabric, Nicholas thought of the northern lights he had seen from the airplane window, and of how Daphne’s hair sometimes looked like that, too, a magical electric shivering beyond anyone’s descriptive powers. Thinking of his girlfriend’s hair, he himself shivered.

“What?” He had lost track of the topic.

“The thing she wrote,” Daphne said, noting his inattention. The curtain brushed against her arm. “On the wine bottle.” She pointed her chopsticks at him. “Do I even know what loins are? I don’t think I do. Why should I fear them?”

“They’re down here, I think,” Nicholas said, glancing in the general direction of his waist and crotch. “In French I think it’s ‘reins’ or something like that.”

“Oh,” Daphne said. “Those.” She chewed thoughtfully. “Loins. Like a cut of meat. I wonder if she was ever assaulted. Well, probably not.”

Following a respectful pause, Nicholas said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s about that. It’s about her husband, or God, or maybe her husband-as-God, or God-as-her-husband, one of those messed-up dirt-road deals. Beats me.”

Daphne scowled at her sushi plate, while she fiddled with a piece of raw salmon. “Hey, guess what? I’m pregnant again,” she announced with the flat apologetic tone she always employed for big declarations. “What do you think of that?” She tried on a quick, blissful expression for him. “I threw up this morning,” she said, trying to disguise her happiness. “But I knew a few days ago.”

The calamari in Nicholas’s mouth went a little dry as he leaned forward to kiss her. They had been through this whole business a couple of years ago, so in a sense he was prepared, and he remembered to resume chewing. Somehow, they both had been negligent when it came to reproductive issues down through the years, and they had slipped up before. They had known each other since high school and had a devotion to each other that neither of them could quite accept. The last time Daphne had found herself in the family way, the problem had been disposed of rapidly and efficiently, and they had — or at least Nicholas had — chalked it up to one of those unexpected outcomes of sex. Love was one; babies were another. Something told Nicholas it would not go that way this time around. Easefulness, ever so gently, was slipping out of his grasp. He gazed at her hair again. Somewhat against his will, he felt the voltage of his love for her pass through him.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s great. I’m … happy, I guess. Oh, honey. It’s so …” He searched for an adjective. “Decisive.” He gave her one of his great grins, out of his arsenal of grins and smiles. “I hadn’t expected.”

“Me, neither. Well, listen, Nickie. We can talk about this more later. You know? We don’t have to talk about it now. Not over sushi. I didn’t mean to stop the conversation. I didn’t mean to drop a bombshell. Well, of course, I guess it is a bombshell, but I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Daph, it’s not a bombshell,” he said, speaking out of his one general principle that a man should never appear to be fazed by anything a woman does. “We’ll deal with it. I love you, right? Everything fixes itself when two people love each other. Which we do.”

“Speaking of loins and money,” she said, “when are you next going to be seeing the Adult?” She had a way of changing the topic when Nicholas didn’t expect her to. Even the fact of her pregnancy didn’t have a long conversational shelf life with her. Happiness made her shy.

“In a few days. I’ve called her. I’m taking that wine bottle to her. It strikes the right note. She’ll love it. I’ll drive up on Tuesday.”

“It’s you she loves,” Daphne said, looking at Nicholas tenderly, as the gangster’s wife might look at the gangster. Next to their table, another couple glanced over at them, and Nicholas realized that Daphne had been speaking more loudly than she usually did. “You and that face of yours! It’s mean, actually, what you do to her — making her all … I don’t know, gooey. And then you take her money and go home. It’s not cruel, but it is mean.” She used her bad-girl tone on him. “You’re such a rascal. She just pines and sighs for you. Poor Mrs. Andriessen. Poor Adult.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas said. “Well, that’s life, honey. It’s what people expect of me. It pays various bills.”

“I pay the bills, too,” she said, her voice modulating, and as the curtains continued to blow inward, Nicholas thought of a piece Daphne used to play occasionally on the flute, when she had thought that in order to be hired as a session musician, just out of Juilliard, she’d have to be versatile. She’d sit in the apartment’s bathroom, because she liked the acoustics in there, on the edge of the tub, wearing her flowered pajamas, and this miraculous music would come out, the most beautiful music Nicholas had ever heard up to that point in his life, Debussy’s “Syrinx,” about a girl turned into a reed. “They buy from me, too,” she said, spearing something white on the plate. She smiled at him. “You and me, we just can’t be resisted.”

An hour or so after he had arrived in New Paltz and had shown her the Granny-inscribed wine bottle, the Adult asked Nicholas to do a favor for her. She wanted him to clamber up into her backyard apple tree and cut off one of its dead branches. He gave her a skeptical look. Didn’t she realize that he was an art dealer, not a tree service? He was miffed. And he wasn’t dressed for the job, the sort of chore you’d ask your husband or boyfriend to do. But some complicated subtext had probably attached itself to her request, and he felt a roiling of curiosity. By the time she mentioned the dead branch, they had already had lunch and had talked about the relationship between Granny W.’s work and the famous road signs of Jesse Smith, now on display in several museums, and he wanted to close the deal and get home. Still, there was that gleam in her eye. The Adult had studied Granny W.’s bottle as if she were unsure whether she would purchase it — as if she were waiting for him to do this favor as an act of friendship, or masculine graciousness.

He unbuttoned his white shirt and took off his shoes and socks. The Adult stood on the perfectly mown grass in her running shoes and slacks and blouse, observing him with precise attention. As a boy, he had been an avid tree climber. What had happened to that prehistoric skill, now that he lived in Brooklyn? The proficiency had gone dormant, like all his other childhood aptitudes. Holding on to the handsaw, he made his way up into the tree, and he heard the Adult say, “Be careful.”

The dead branch, scaly and virus-ridden, was located about halfway up. The tree branches felt pleasantly rough on the soles of his bare feet, and when he reached the dead branch, after an easy climb past ripe autumnal apples about to fall, he realized that sawing through the dead wood would be effortless. He glanced down at Mrs. Andriessen, and then up at the sky. He began to work.

He had almost finished when he heard the Adult say, “Nicholas, I really do appreciate what you’re doing, believe me.”

Maybe he was tired, or feverish, but he heard her utter the sentence in blue, royal blue, the color of the northern lights and Granny W.’s inscriptions, and he felt himself spiral into light-headedness. The blue words, having entered his brain, had a sky-feeling to them, a spirit of clarity. But that was crazy. Spoken words had no color to them and never would, in this world. The first words spoken by God had been in color, according to the ancient texts, but who believed in that now? He gripped a branch in order to stabilize himself, to keep himself from swaying. The dizziness left him, but the blue, somehow, remained.…

He dropped the handsaw. The Adult hopped out of the way of it, though it had landed nowhere near her feet. Nicholas clutched a branch to keep himself from falling.

By the time he came out of the shower and had dressed, Mrs. Andriessen had brewed some espresso and was sitting in her living room reading Edith Wharton’s stories. “Want some?” she asked, glancing at him and holding up her cup.

“Espresso? In the afternoon? No, thanks,” he said, shaking his hands to dry them. He was still barefoot, because one of his socks had a hole in it, which he did not care to display.

She put her book aside, having placed a marker on the page where she had stopped, and rubbed rather violently at her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to climb up in that tree to cut that branch. But a few weeks ago, I had a dream about you, Nicholas. In this particular dream, you were aloft in an apple tree, and you were surveying the countryside. God knows how you got up there, but then you were sawing away at a dead branch, and I was down below, and when I woke, I thought: Well, maybe I should see to it that the dream is … I don’t know, enacted.” She said the last word with a slightly embarrassed inflection. “A person rarely gets that chance.”

“I used to climb trees,” Nicholas said. “When I was a boy.”

“Yes, I know,” the Adult said. “You once told me. Perhaps that’s what led to the dream.” She gazed at him quickly, as if a longer gaze would incriminate her. Mrs. Andriessen had a spooky way of suffering silently in Nicholas’s presence, but her reticence appeared to be impregnable. Now she looked over at Granny Westerby’s wine bottle. “ ‘Fear and love his loins,’ ” she read. “That’s a royal blue she used.”

“She told me that she painted it with the sky,” Nicholas offered.

“Did she actually say that? That she painted it with sky?”

“Yes. And it was strange, just now, when I was up in that tree, you said something — about how you appreciated what I was doing, and when I heard those words, when I heard you say them, they were … I can’t explain it. They were blue. I heard them in color. I heard them in blue.”

The Adult leaned back and closed her eyes. “I’m not surprised. Do you know the origin of the phrase ‘royal blue’?” He shook his head, but she didn’t open her eyes to see. She seemed to know perfectly well where the gaps in his knowledge lay. She knew what he didn’t know. “It was a particular tint used in the fabrics set out to greet the visiting heads of state, royalty — in the decorative regalia, the canopies, for example. Royal blue was a color associated with the aristocracy and with hospitality. I don’t know if it’s related to the phrase ‘blue blood,’ but I doubt it. That particular phrase, as I remember, is from the Spanish. Do you know how a person would demonstrate blue blood?”

“No,” Nicholas said. Outside, the wind was coming up, and the trees beyond the yard swayed gracefully.

“By staying indoors,” she told him, turning toward him and speaking urgently. “By not getting a tan in the fields doing fieldwork, so the skin would stay white and the veins would remain visible. Also, the phrase refers to purity, freedom from … Arabic bloodlines. Which would have been considered an infection, in those days. In Spain. You know: the Moors.” She seemed bored by her knowledge, the length and breadth of it. “Isn’t that interesting? Considering recent events? Free of Arabic blood? Blue blood?”

“Daphne is pregnant,” Nicholas told Mrs. Andriessen. He stood up to pace for a moment. “She told me a few days ago.” He sat down again. Their conversations had, over the past year, acquired a stream-of-consciousness effect, two people thinking as one, although Nicholas knew that the Adult was usually thinking for both of them. Most of the time, he didn’t really know what Mrs. Andriessen thought, except when she cast her glances on him.

“Is she? Lucky you,” the Adult said. “Daphne pregnant again. She won’t have an abortion this time, will she? Will you? Of course not. You’ll have the most beautiful child, the two of you. Just a glorious thing. But everything changes now. Love is tested. Can’t go on as before. You’ll have weight, my dear.”

“Weight? I don’t—”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. You shouldn’t take me literally.” She reached out and touched his knee. “I meant ‘weight’ in the other sense.”

“Yes, I know.”

She leaned back. The Adult often gave the impression that she was both excited and dismayed by Nicholas. “Do you? Well. Here’s a little story. When I was a girl, we lived close by a Swedish immigrant family, the Petersons. They were the neighborhood laborers and lived in a coach house. He worked as a caretaker and she took in laundry. She also acted as everyone’s part-time nursemaid, if you know what I mean.”

Nicholas nodded, bewildered.

“They had a son, about my age, an angelic type, beautiful, and a prodigy, or so everyone said, though I don’t remember in what — maybe in everything. A terrible fate. Children like that catch the attention of the gods. He could draw and remember word for word whatever you said, and he had every athletic gift you could imagine: running, balls and bats, the works. Terrible! Also, he was manifestly smarter and more alert than his parents, and they were so proud of him, and he could sit down at the piano and play short Bach and Chopin pieces by ear, and no one even knew in that environment where he had heard them. Gustav, this boy’s name was. And then when he was ten years old, he developed a brain tumor, fate being what it is, and when he died of it, his father became so blind with rage and grief that he began to throw all their worldly goods, everything they owned that could be picked up, out of the coach house window. He’d throw out the coffeepot and the lamp, and his wife would calm him down, but the next day his grief would return, and he’d break up a kitchen chair and throw it out the window, poor man, and then the radio and the kitchen blender and the telephone. Whatever he could get his hands on, anything that could be mobilized, he threw out that window. You’d see this little heap of household objects on the driveway. Some languages have a term for grief madness, but English doesn’t. Isn’t that a shame?”

Nicholas nodded again. What on earth was she talking about?

“When those airplanes hit those buildings,” she said, “on that day when you were up here a month ago, do you know what I did?” She didn’t stop to look at him or to wait for his response. “After you left, I took the mower out and mowed the back lawn, by myself. It didn’t require mowing. The grass had been cut two days before. But I had to do an ordinary task. I had to anchor myself to daily life. To make a routine, to recapture what I love about banality. Then I drove into town, late afternoon, and I gave blood. And what did you do, my darling friend?”

“I drove home, as you know,” he said. “It took a long time.”

“Ah, Nicholas,” she said. “Your foot is bleeding.” She reached out and took his foot in her hand and gave him an expression of sweet concern. From a pocket, she drew out a piece of cloth and daubed at a small bloody scratch on his instep.

She was beautiful enough to sleep with, he thought, and it wouldn’t exactly be demeaning or patronizing, but he wasn’t going to make that particular pass at her and take her into the bedroom and undress her and sleep with her underneath one of Granny W.’s signs. Another blue motto. It had been hung above the bed, a cryptic sentence: SORROW ABIDETH BESIDE MY JOYOUS HEART. He wouldn’t willingly give the Adult the Nicholas-treatment in that bed no matter what, even if there were no possible unforeseen complications — and there were always unforeseen complications. If he made her momentarily happy, she would no longer be herself. And if Mrs. Andriessen were no longer herself, she would not be interesting; she would no longer be the Adult but just like the rest of them, and he himself would lose his bargaining chips. Besides, some women simply required suffering. She was, Nicholas thought, one of those.

“Patricia,” Nicholas said, “I should really go.”

“Should you?” she asked, releasing his foot. “All right. I suppose you should.”

He and Daphne were walking around the Great Lawn in Central Park when the thought occurred to Nicholas that the woman he was holding hands with should marry him. Or — what was the wording? — he should marry her. “Make it official,” as they used to say. “Make an honest woman of her,” they also said. Most of the leaves had changed color and fallen by now, but a few clung to their branches, and he could feel a rough cooling in the air. He didn’t quite know why he and Daphne needed to be married; he just felt that they should be. They had known each other forever, almost since they were kids. What he felt for her was as close to love as he was ever going to get. Something stood between him and the full blast of it, but nothing he had ever done for anybody had brought him closer.

On the baseball diamonds, the groups of boys who were playing softball yelled and smiled and pantomime-slugged each other, coached and encouraged by their parents, mostly the fathers. It was getting too late in autumn to play baseball, but apparently no one wanted to give it up. One team, the Slickers, was wearing white uniforms with green letters, and the other team, the Backpackers, wore white uniforms with blue letters. One of the Backpackers stood at the plate, wearing his batting helmet. He swung at a pitch and missed.

He seemed to be about ten or eleven years old. Nicholas thought of Gustav, the story the Adult had told of him, and of the piles of household items lying in the driveway.

The boy swung again and missed. “Strike two,” announced the umpire.

“Something is wrong,” Daphne said to Nicholas. She reached for his arm.

“That boy isn’t watching the ball,” Nicholas told her. “He’s distracted.”

“Something is wrong,” Daphne said again.

The pitcher stood on the mound and studied the batter. Daphne’s hand dug into his biceps. “Ow,” he said. “That hurts.”

All at once Daphne bent over, winced, and then began screaming softly. “Oh god oh god,” she said, between deep breaths, and at first Nicholas thought she might fall to the ground in pain, but, no: she had sufficient resources to take his arm and to stagger to Fifth Avenue, where he flagged down a cab to take them both to the emergency room.

“We lost it,” Nicholas said to the Adult.

Mrs. Andriessen let the pause go on for a long moment until Nicholas found himself able to say something else into his telephone. “She had a miscarriage,” he said. “She miscarried.”

“No, not quite,” the Adult told him, rather firmly. “You both did, didn’t you? You both miscarried.”

What did she mean this time? What did she ever mean? “Daphne’s still in the hospital, Patricia. She’ll be there overnight. She’s going to be there overnight. She’s very weak. She lost a lot of blood.” How rare for him to repeat himself, he thought. He felt more of his composure slipping away, following the composure he had already lost. “I’m going right back over there.”

“Why aren’t you there now? In the hospital? Why are you in Brooklyn?” the Adult asked him. “Why are you at home?”

“I had to feed the cat,” Nicholas told her. “I had to feed Plankton.”

“The cat can live. You should be with Daphne now. You should be sitting next to her in the hospital and you should be holding her hand and kissing her on the forehead and on both cheeks. You should try to revive her. Poor thing, she’s lying in bed with no one with her, and she’s kissing the air. Desperate women kiss the air, did you know that, Nicholas? When they’re alone, they kiss the air.”

“They do?”

“Yes. Or you could always pray to Saint Anthony. He’s the saint of lost things. I was raised Catholic, did you know?” Another pause. “ ‘Dear Saint Anthony, please look around: something is lost that must be found.’ That’s the Saint Anthony prayer. It works. It’s the only thing in Catholicism that still works for me, that prayer.”

“It can’t be found,” Nicholas said. “It’s not lost. It’s gone.”

“They kiss the air, Nicholas,” she repeated. “My darling friend, you are such a dilettante with us. You have just watched us, all your life. You have watched us as we fell in your direction.”

“Us?” It was a habit, this repetition. Of course she was right.

“You should go over there right now, where Daphne is.” Outside the apartment something was stirring, perhaps just down the block.

At the foot of Daphne’s bed, Nicholas stood gazing at the pale green wall behind where she lay. He stared at the wall because it was so hard to keep his eyes on her. Inside and within the room were tubes and pipes and expensive stainless-steel machines, some of which were breathing softly, while outside the room, many floors down, Manhattan traffic beeped on like the errant sounds of children playing with toy cars and plastic noisemakers. Daphne, for the moment, was unwatchable: on her face had been placed an expression he had never seen before. Her skin had taken on a terrible pallor. He couldn’t stand to see it there. It hurt him every time his eyes swept across her. Every time he took her in, he felt as if he aged another year.

He approached her and tried to do as the Adult had advised: he kissed Daphne on the forehead and tried to bend over the sides of the bed so he could kiss her. When he bent over, he thought he would pass out.

Daphne did not open her eyes. “The next time you go to Alaska,” she whispered, “you can tell Granny Westerby about us.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yes, but we have a story now.” She opened her eyes to look at him. She did it slowly, as if it were a great effort — a terrible amount of work — to do so. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said tenderly, almost with pride, “you look awful.”

“Do I?” he asked.

“You look all broken and sideways,” she said disconnectedly. The medications had started to affect her speech. Still, no one had ever used those adjectives about him before. Rather desperately, he turned toward the window, but there was no refuge there, either, not for him. He felt himself fading toward Daphne in an effort to comfort her. He lowered himself again and touched his lips to her cheek.