The Genius

“I can’t tell whether he was sick or a genius,” she said.

“They’re not mutually exclusive.” I told her about the phone calls I’d received after Marilyn began spreading rumors.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all, actually,” she said. “It’s like those women who write love letters to serial killers.” She set aside the drawing she’d been looking at. “Would it bother you if he was guilty?”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.” I gave her my mini-lecture on artists misbehaving, concluding, “Caravaggio killed a man.”

“In bed,” she said and laughed.

Eight weeks might not sound like very long, but when you’re spending much of that talking to or sitting alone with the same person—we essentially learned to forget about Isaac—often engaged in an extraordinarily monotonous activity, your sense of time begins to distort, much as I imagine it does in prison. No matter how hard we tried to stay on point, we couldn’t talk only about the case. I can’t tell you exactly when the thaw began to accelerate. But it did, and we dared to make jokes; we chatted about nonsense and about important things, or things I’d forgotten were important.

“Jesus,” she said when I told her I’d been expelled from Harvard. “I’d never guess.”

“Why.”

“Cause you look so …”

“Boring.”

“I was going to say normal,” she said, “but that’ll work.”

“It’s a facade.”

“Evidently. I had a rebellious phase, too, you know.”

“Did you, now.”

“Oh yes. I was into grunge. I wore flannel and played the guitar.”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said gravely. “I wrote my own material.”

“What was the name of your band?”

“Oh, no. I was strictly a solo artist.”

“I didn’t know one could play grunge on one’s own.”

“I wouldn’t describe my own personal music as grunge. I would say that I was more inspired by the grunge lifestyle. Everything I sang sounded like the Indigo Girls. One time this friend of mine—” She started giggling. “This is actually really sad.”

“I can tell.”

“It is, but I”—giggling—”I’m sorry. Ahem. This friend of mine junior year had to have an abortion—”

“Oh, that’s hilarious.”

“Stop. It was sad, it was really sad. That’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is that I wrote a song about it, and it was called—” She broke up completely. “I can’t.”

“Too late,” I said.

“No. Sorry. I can’t.”

” ‘The Procedure’?”

“Worse.”

” ‘The Decision’?”

“I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that there was a lyric comparing a woman’s body to a field of flowers.”

“I think that’s very poetic.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Although,” I said, “Dalf said that the first man to compare the cheeks of a woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it may well have been an idiot.”

“In bed.” “In bed. Well,” I said, “I think your parents got off easy.”

“By the time I was old enough to rebel they were too busy imploding to notice. It really pissed me off.”

“Did you write a song about it?”

“About their divorce? No. I wanted to write a poem, though.”

” ‘The Separation’?”

“I’d call it ‘A Pair of Assholes.’ “

I smiled.

“I took photographs, too,” she said. “God, what happened to me. I used to be so creative.”

“It’s never too late.”

She got very quiet.

“What,” I said.

“What you said. Ian used to tell me that.”

I said nothing.

“When I complained about my job he would tell me that.” She paused. “It’s not like that’s a very unusual thing to say, but I remember him saying it a lot. Maybe because I complained about my job a lot.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I can think about him now without getting hysterical. That’s a positive step.”

I nodded.

“I think about him now and it’s warm, rather than hot. You know? Like he was a really good friend. He was. You don’t want to hear about this.”

“I do if you want to talk about it.”

She smiled, shook her head. “We have work to do… .”

“What was he like?”

She hesitated, then said, “He and my dad were good friends. I think my dad took it harder than I did. I sort of expected that something would happen to him eventually. That’s the nature of the job. I didn’t expect that, though. Who expects that?”

I said nothing.

“Anyway, that’s that,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Now I’m on the rebound.” She grinned at me. “You were just a temporary stop on my road to recovery.

“Whatever I can do to help.”

She smiled, started turning pages again. I watched her for a little while. Eventually she saw me staring and looked up. “What.”

“I don’t know why you’re unhappy with your job,” I said. “To me it’s way more interesting than what I do.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It is.”

“If you say so.”

“What would you do, if not this.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had a good answer to that part of the question. I wanted to do this and now I’m here. I had an idea that this was going to distinguish me from my dad. His father was a cop. My uncle is a cop. My mother’s father was in the Secret Service. Naturally, I didn’t want to become a cop, so I thought, oh, yeah, well, but a DA—now that’s different.” She laughed. “That was my final attempt at rebellion. I’ve accepted my fate.”

I said, “I think I felt the same way about my father.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I mean it,” I said. “Growing up I saw him as basically soulless and profit-driven—which he is. Unfortunately I chose the one line of work possibly more soulless and more profit-driven.”

“If you really feel that way, then why don’t you get out?”

“Lately I’ve been wondering. I don’t know what else I would do.”

“You could become a prosecutor.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a little old to start over.”

“I thought it was never too late.”

“For me it is,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked. “Why do you resent him so much?”

“My father.”

She nodded.

I shrugged. “I can’t give you one single reason.”

“Then give me a few.”

I thought. “After my mother died, I felt like a pet that belonged to her, and that he got stuck with. He barely spoke to me, and when he did it was to give me an order or to tell me I was doing something wrong. She was the only wife that he didn’t divorce, and whether or not they would have lasted—I have my doubts—when she got sick, they were still getting along. That’s why he’s hasn’t gotten married since: he idealizes her. I feel bad for him. I do. But I’m not going on Oprah or anything to make up with him.”

“Your siblings get along with him?”

“Well, my brothers work for him, so whether they like him or not, they kiss his ass. Amelia lives in London. I don’t think they have much of a relationship, but it isn’t overtly hostile.”

“That’s your specialty.”

“Correct.”

“You know anger shortens your life expectancy.”

“Then enjoy me while I last.”

She smiled wryly. “No comment.”

AFTER FOUR WEEKS IN MARILYN’S HOUSE the situation had become intolerable. Taking me in was incredibly kind of her, considering that things had already been tense between us before the attack. Although, looking back, I have to wonder if she didn’t extend the invitation primarily to keep an eye on me. If there were clues I missed them. When I returned home late at night, having spent the evening with Samantha, nothing Marilyn said or did indicated that she was silently building a case against me. And really, she had nothing to build on; even if she had somehow been able to eavesdrop at the warehouse, she would’ve come up with nothing concrete to hold against me. Everybody flirts, don’t they? If I flirted with Samantha while we worked, I did so under the assumption that it wouldn’t produce results. She had made that plain. So then what was Marilyn thinking, those nights when she greeted me in a kimono, pulled me up to the “boudoir” (her word), and threw herself on top of me? Did she think she would catch a glimpse of me with my eyes closed and learn the truth? She may have a keen nose for betrayal, but she’s not a mind-reader.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable. But I can’t help thinking that she set up the whole cycle of guilt and expectation in order to trap me, to make me ruin us, so that she could stand back from the wreckage and accuse me. The longer I stayed with her, the more indebted I felt; the more indebted I felt, the more resentful I felt; the more resentful I felt, the harder it was for me to pretend I was excited when we made love, and the more obvious my detachment became, the more petulant and biting she acted—which in turn fueled my guilt, resentment, detachment, etc.

It’s amazing how fast things can collapse. For the longest time, I had been unable to imagine anybody better suited to me than Marilyn. Now, though, I had basis for comparison. When Samantha and I talked I felt better—about myself, about the world. She was no Pollyanna; perhaps more than anyone, she was familiar with the awful things people did to one another. But she believed that not giving up the fight was what kept us from devolving; she believed that right and wrong had no expiration date and that five dead boys were worth giving up her lunch breaks and evenings and spending them with a man who made her uncomfortable. She was her father’s daughter, and you know how I felt about him.

With Marilyn I found myself repelled by the effect we had on each other, the way we feasted on scorn. Irony has its place. But it can’t be everywhere. And it disturbed me greatly that I could not recall a single unironic conversation between me and Marilyn. Everything that had transacted between us—seven years of dinners and sex and arm-in-arm appearances and talk, reams of gossip—started to feel artificial. I never wanted to look stupid in front of Marilyn. How well could she really know me? How well did I really know me? I never wanted to feel stupid, either. And that’s simply not realistic, not unless you turn everything into a joke.

Thanksgiving dinner was atrocious, the two of us sniping at each other across the table while the rest of her guests—all art people—kept trying to steer the conversation back on track. Marilyn got very drunk and began to tell ugly stories about her ex-husband. I mean truly savage; she mocked his inability to sustain an erection; she imitated his pillow-talk; she railed about his three daughters and how stone-dumb they were, how none of them had scored higher than eight hundred on their SATs and how he’d had to bribe their way both into and through Spence, piling detail upon humiliating detail, all the while staring at me, so that if you’d walked into the room midway through her speech you would’ve likely figured me for the buffoon in question. Finally I couldn’t stand any more. “Enough,” I said.

Her head swiveled loosely toward me. “I’m boring you?”

I said nothing. “Am I?”

I said—I couldn’t help myself—”Not just me.”

And she smiled. “All right, then, you pick a topic.”

I excused myself and left the table.

Knowing she’d be hungover, I got up early the next morning and told Isaac that I wouldn’t be needing his services anymore. I packed my things and went downstairs to catch a cab back to TriBeCa. The clothes from Barneys I kept.

AS I MENTIONED, work wasn’t going so well, either. I shouldn’t say that; I actually have no idea what the gallery was like during those months, because I was seldom there. While it was true that I had been gone a lot longer dealing with the Cracke drawings, at least then I’d been working for the gallery. Now what could I say? Mornings when I should have been able to step into a suit, I couldn’t bring myself to leave my apartment. At the time I told myself that the cause of my lethargy was physical. I was tired; I needed to rest; I had just gotten out of the hospital. But by December I was feeling mostly fine, and I still didn’t want to get back on the floor. Having missed Alyson’s opening, I had a hard time getting invested in her show; and at moments, I couldn’t even remember what was hanging, let alone muster the energy to sell it.

This surprised me, most of all because I had so recently felt better than ever about my job. Victor Cracke’s work had reawakened my love of art and made the exercise of buying and selling seem worth more than the dollars involved. But I suppose that that was the very essence of the problem. Without the kind of charge that Cracke provided, I was back to pushing work that I didn’t fully believe in, lots of cleverness and allusiveness that now rang hollow. And since I couldn’t count on a Victor Cracke coming along very often, I looked at my future and saw one big blank.

So there you have it, a neat dichotomy: Marilyn and my gallery and my day job on the one side; and on the other side Samantha and Victor and five dead boys. I’ve wrapped it up neatly in story and served it to you on a bed of symbolism. You’ll never really understand how profoundly that winter changed me, though, because to this day I don’t understand it myself.

With time I have come to see that these changes were lying in wait longer than I realized. When people we know do something radically out of character, we force ourselves to revise our impressions; we look back and the insignificant becomes illuminating. It’s hard to look at yourself critically, objectively; but as a narcissist, I’ve spent a lot of time examining my own life, and I know now that I had been dissatisfied longer than I realized. When I entered the business I thought I had found the place for me. Until that point I was half a personality, unformed and uninformed by anything except my desire to distance myself from my father. He was cold and art was hot. Art was—so I told myself—as different from real estate as possible. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I thought that. You might be laughing at me; I know Marilyn would. But the fact that I tell you what I thought and not worry whether you’re laughing is, I think, a pretty good indication of how far I’ve come.

IT WAS THE THIRD WEEK OF DECEMBER before the DNA results started coming back in, and we met with Annie Lundley to review the forensics reports. It was a frustrating afternoon: none of the evidence allowed us to draw firm conclusions. All of the hair recovered from the room, for example, matched samples taken from the excluded group—including me.

Samantha looked at me. “You know what this means.”

“What.”

“It means your hair is falling out.”

The old pair of jeans yielded two DNA profiles, one from the bloodstain and the other from the semen, the latter presumably belonging to the perpetrator. Although the state crime lab still hadn’t gotten back to Samantha about her request to check the profile against CODIS (see how fast I was learning?), Annie had been able to scrounge up dead skin cells from the sweater found in Victor’s apartment. That profile did not match the profile taken from the jeans. Although we had been assuming that the sweater belonged to Victor, we had no proof; and we furthermore could not rule out the possibility that the wearer of the sweater (if it was in fact Victor) had been present at the crime scene but failed to leave DNA.

The most promising lead was the partial fingerprint taken from the inside of the weather journal. At my request, Annie had tried to be as nonin-vasive as possible when handling the art; and, going slowly, she had page by page examined the journals for usable evidence. The print had also been sent to the FBI, request still pending. As Samantha and Annie talked it once again became clear to me how much of what they did was paperwork, how much time got wasted in leaving messages and sending follow-up e-mails. In that sense, our jobs had a lot in common.

When Annie left, Samantha and I turned our attention to the group of comparison cases. She had whittled it down to three, one of which left a surviving victim. The two other murders were cold, their evidence in storage, and we planned to get those boxes out of storage once the holiday had passed. The survivor was a boy—a man now, assuming he was still alive— named James Jarvis. At age eleven he had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and choked, and left for dead in a park four miles from Muller Courts; this happened in 1973, six years after the presumed final murder. So far, Samantha had been unable to locate Jarvis, but she was determined to keep trying. When she told me that, she got the little familiar bulge in her jaw.

It was December 21. We were in a booth at the Chinese restaurant, tired of talking about homicide, content to watch the traffic. It was dark out, the sidewalk slush painted red and green by the stringlights in the window. I never found Queens beautiful, but at that moment it seemed realer than any place I had ever been.

” ‘You will endure a great trial,’ ” she read.

“In bed.”

“In bed.” She chewed loudly. “Your turn.”

” ‘You have many friends.’ “

“In bed.”

“In bed. Please,” I said, holding up a hand, “don’t even bother.”

She grinned and reached for her wallet.

“On me,” I said.

She studied me. “Is this a ruse?”

“Consider it a gift to the working class.”

She gave me the finger. But she let me pay.

Outside we stood shivering and talking about the upcoming holiday. Samantha was headed to Wilmington with her mother and sister and their respective spouses. “I’ll be back on the second,” she said. “Try not to miss me.”

“I will.”

“Miss me, or try not to.”

I shrugged. “You decide.”

She smiled. “And what are your big plans?”

“Marilyn’s having a party this Thursday. Yearly thing she does.”

“That’s the twenty-third,” she said. “I meant Christmas itself.” “What about it.”

“Are you going to be somewhere?” “Yes,” I said. “At home.” “Oh,” she said.

“You can hang on to your condescension just a little longer, if you don’t mind.”

“Why don’t you call your father?” she asked. “And do what, exactly.” “You could start by saying hello.” “That’s it? Say hi?”

“Well, if that goes okay, you could ask how he’s doing.”

“I don’t see this scenario playing out in a way that leaves anyone happy.”

She shrugged.

“We never celebrated Christmas,” I said. “We never even had a tree. My mother used to give me presents but that was the extent of it.”

She nodded, although I sensed something vaguely accusatory. I said, “If I called him up and said hi, he’d expect more. He’d start asking why I hadn’t called before. Trust me, you don’t know him.” “You’re right, I don’t.” “No thank you,” I said. “Whatever you say.” “Why are you doing that.” “Doing what.”

“You’re making me feel guilty for something I haven’t done.”

“I’m agreeing with you.”

“You’re disagreeing with me by agreeing.”

“Will you listen to yourself?” she said.

I walked her to the subway.

“Enjoy the canapes,” she said. “I’ll see you next year.” Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I remained standing there long after she’d gone.

TO CALL MARILYN’S ANNUAL WINTER BASH a “holiday party” verges on sacrilege, insofar as that term implies drunken co-workers standing round the punchbowl, fondling one another to the strains of Bing Crosby. The event that takes place at the Wooten Gallery the week before Christmas is more like an opening par excellence. Everyone comes out for it, even when weather makes getting there a misery. Whatever the theme—”Underwater Cowboys” or “Warhol’s Shopping List” or “Yuppies Strike Back”—Marilyn always hires the same band, a thirteen-piece ensemble made up entirely of transvestites whose songbook never deviates from note-perfect Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald covers. They’re called Big and Swingin’.

Busy as I’d been with the case, I’d forgotten to get my costume. For the life of me I couldn’t find my invitation, which meant that I didn’t know the theme. (I couldn’t very well ask anyone without making it scandalously clear that Marilyn and I weren’t talking, which at that point I still believed was a matter between the two of us.)

When I arrived at the gallery in a suit, however, I found myself improbably appropriate, wading through a sea of revelers all dressed like members of the newly reelected Bush cabinet. Without a mask, I attracted a lot of attention, as people tried to guess my identity. It’s a real test of one’s patience to listen to someone insist that you look exactly like Donald Rumsfeld.

“I’m sure he meant that in the nicest way possible,” said Ruby.

“What way would that be?”

“He has nice cheekbones,” Nat offered.

I mingled. Some people asked if I was feeling well; I touched the one remaining Band-Aid on my temple and said, “Minor brain damage.” Other people tried to involve me in conversations about artists and shows that I hadn’t heard of. The pace of the contemporary market is such that you can be away for a little more than a month and find yourself completely out of the loop. I didn’t know what people were talking about and I didn’t care. After two or three minutes of group banter I would find myself drifting, my attention drawn by the surreal spectacle of a kickline consisting of Dick

Cheney, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney. When I did try to follow along, I could not help but get annoyed. Regardless of who or what was under discussion, the true subject was money.

“I hear your murderer’s developed a strong following.”

“How much of that stuff do you have in a vault, Ethan?”

“More than he’s telling.”

“Have you sold any more?”

“Have you sold any more to Hollister?”

“I heard he unloaded his.”

“Is that true? Ethan?”

“You went to the house, didn’t you? I know someone who’s been there, he said the place is too tacky. He hired Jaime Acosta-Blanca to paint all these tacky copies but he gave him seventy percent up front and Jaime ran off with the money to Moscow where’s he defrauding neo-oligarchs.”

“Who’d he sell to, Ethan?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Ethan, who did Hollister sell to?”

“Rita said it was Richard Branson.”

“Does that mean you’re going to get shot into space, Ethan?”

After two hours Marilyn was still nowhere to be seen. I made my way through white rooms covered in red canvases, white rooms covered with pink canvases, white rooms ready to be filled. As the Wooten Gallery has grown, it has gobbled up its neighbors, left and right and upstairs and downstairs. It takes up nearly a fifth of 567 West Twenty-fifth Street, not to mention the overflow space on Twenty-eighth or the Upper East Side prints gallery. As I fought through a clutch of John Ashcrofts, it struck me that I’d never be as big as Marilyn; even had I the ambition, I lacked the vision.

I buttonholed one of her many assistants, who, after consulting a series of people on walkie-talkies, returned with the verdict that Marilyn had retired to the fourth floor.

In the elevator I prepared an apology. My heart wasn’t in it, but it was Christmas.

Marilyn has two offices, much in the way she has two kitchens: one for

the world and one for herself. The big office with the high ceilings and the immaculate desk and the Rothko is downstairs, and she uses it to make deals and to impress her grandeur upon the uninitiated. The real one, with the Post-its and the coffee rings and the corner table mosaicked with slides, is off-limits to all but a few. I didn’t learn of its existence until we’d been dating for a year.

I found her slumped in her rocking chair, a quaintly mismatched piece of furniture and the only thing she kept when she sold the house in Ironton. Her fingertips dangled near a tumbler of scotch sweating into the rug. The room vibrated with the noise of the band four stories below.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked. “Everyone’s wondering what happened

ť

to you.

“That’s funny. Lately people have been asking me the same thing about you.

I waited. “Are you going to come downstairs?”

“I don’t really feel like it.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

I wanted to deliver my apology, but I didn’t feel ready. Instead I knelt by her and put my hand on her arm, as hard as a crowbar. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Marilyn’s beauty had a sharp, almost masculine edge to it, all strong features and sharp angles. She smiled, her breath scalding me.

“I hate these parties,” she said.

“Then why do you give them?”

“Because I have to.” She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. “And because I like them. I just hate them, too.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Do you want some water?”

She said nothing.

I went across the room to the mini-fridge and got a bottle of Evian, which I set on the floor near the scotch. She didn’t move.

“You’re not having fun, are you,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here if you were.”

I leaned against the edge of the desk. “I’d have more if you came downstairs.”

“I bet you’re seeing a lot of people.”

CCT ť

I am.

“People have been asking about you,” she said. “You said.”

“Like you went off to war or something.” “I haven’t.”

“Mm.” She sighed, her eyes still closed. “I tell them I don’t know a thing.”

I said nothing.

“What else am I supposed to tell them,” she said. “You can tell them whatever you want.”

“They ask me like I should know. They assume I have a direct line

ť

to you. “You do.” “Do I?”

“Of course you do.” She nodded. “That’s good.”

“Of course you do,” I said again, although I don’t know why. “Did you have a pleasant stay, living in my house?” “You were wonderful,” I said. “You know I can’t thank you enough.” “I don’t remember you trying.”

“If I didn’t say it before, then I’m sorry, and I’ll say it now: thank you.” “I shouldn’t need any thanks, but I do.” “Of course you do.”

“No,” she said. “I shouldn’t need anything from you. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

I said, “It’s manners, Marilyn. You’re a hundred percent right.” She said nothing. She said, “Is it.”

“Is it what.” “Manners.”

I said, “I don’t understand.”

“Is that how we’re supposed to behave toward one another? Decorously?” “I thought so.”

“I see,” she said. “News to me.”

“Why wouldn’t we be polite to each other?”

“Because,” she said, looking at me, “I love you, you fucking idiot.” She had never told me that before.

She said, “When people ask me how you are and I can’t say, I am humiliated. But they ask and I’m supposed to know. I have to tell them something. Right?” I nodded. A silence.

She said, “You’ll never guess who called me.”

“Who.”

“Guess.”

“Marilyn—”

“Play along, will you.” The drawl crept into her voice. “Have a little holiday spirit.” Holidee spurrut. “Kevin Hollister,” I said. “No.” “Who.”

Guess. “George Bush.” She snickered. “Wrong.” “Then I give up.” “Jocko Steinberger.” “He did?” She nodded. “What for.”

“He wants me to represent him. He said he doesn’t feel like he’s getting enough personal attention from you.”

I was stunned. I’d known Jocko since he burst onto the scene as part of a group show organized by the late Leonora Waite. First her artist, then mine, he had always been a stalwart member of the gallery roster. I considered him moody but by no means treacherous, and the fact that he had gone to Marilyn, without speaking to me first, cut deeply. Losing Kristjana had been my doing, and no tragedy, but now I was down two artists in six months, an alarming rate of attrition.

Marilyn said, “He has new stuff and he wants me to show it.”

“I hope you told him no,” I said. “I did.”

“Good.”

“I did,” she said, “but now I think I’m going to tell him yes.”

A silence.

“And why’s that.”

“Because I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of representing him.”

“Really.”

“Nope.”

“Don’t you think you should give me the chance to talk it over with him before you make that decision for me?”

“I didn’t make the decision,” she said. “He did. He approached me, remember.”

“Tell him to talk it over with me,” I said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Well I’m not doing that.”

“What’s the matter with you, Marilyn.”

“What’s the matter with you.”

“Nothing’s the m—”

“Bullshit.”

A silence. My head throbbed.

“Marilyn—”

“I haven’t seen you for weeks.”

I said nothing.

“Where have you been.”

“Busy.” “With what.” “The case.” ” ‘The case?’ ” “Yes.”

“How’s that coming.” “We’re making progress.”

“Are you? That’s good. That’s wonderful news. Hooray. Are you going to shoot any guns?” “What?”

“You know,” she said. “Bang bang bang.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Yes you do.”

“I honestly don’t,” I said, “and if it’s all right with you, I’m not done talking about Jocko yet. Just where do you get off thinking you can—” “Oh please,” she said. “Answer me, how do you think you—” “Stop talking,” she said.

A silence. I stood up to leave. “Drink some water,” I said. “You’ll have a headache if you don’t.”

“I know you’re fucking that girl.” “Excuse me?”

“‘Excuse me,‘“she mocked. “You heard what I said.” “I heard it, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah.” “Goodnight, Marilyn.” “Don’t you walk out.”

“I’m not going to stand here and listen to you make a fool of yourself.” “You walk out of here and you do not know what I will do.” “Please calm down.” “Tell me you fucked her.” “Who?”

“Stop that,” she screamed.

A silence. “Tell me.” “I fucked her.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” I said nothing.

“You can’t lie to me. I know. I get reports from the field.” “What are you talking about?” Then I said, “Isaac?” “So don’t bother.” “Jesus Christ, Marilyn.”

“Don’t act so goddamned entitled,” she said. “That’s your problem. You’re spoiled.”

“Yes, well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not getting your money’s worth with him. I slept with her once, and that was before any of this got started.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want, that’s the truth.”

“You weren’t fucking me,” she said. “You have to be fucking someone.” “For God’s sake I was in the hospital.” “So what.”

“So I wasn’t—I’m not going to indulge this.”

“Tell me you fucked her.”

“I already—do you have to keep saying that?”

“What.”

” ‘Fuck.’ “

She started laughing. “What would you call it?” “I call it none of your business.”

In a single motion she was up out of the chair, tumbler in hand. I ducked and it shattered against the wall, bits of glass and water and scotch spraying across the top of her copy machine.

“Say that again,” she said. “Tell me it’s none of my business.” I stood up slowly, my hands raised. In the carpet was a wet spot where the tumbler had been.

“When did you fuck her.”

“What’s the purpose of this.”

“When.”

A silence.

“About two months ago.”

“When.”

“I just tol—”

“Be more specific.”

“You want the time and date?”

“Was it during the day? Was it at night? Was it on a bed or a couch or the kitchen counter? Do tell, Ethan, inquiring minds want to know.”

“I don’t remember the exact date.” I paused. “It was the night of the funeral.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, well, that’s extremely classy.”

I quashed the impulse to snap at her. Instead I said, “You can’t be this upset. It’s not as though you haven’t slept with anyone else in the last six years.”

“Have you?”

“Of course I have. You know that.”

She said, “I haven’t.”

I didn’t know what to say. Under normal circumstances I doubt I would have believed her, but just then I knew she was telling the truth.

She said, “I want you to leave.”

“Marilyn—”

“Now.”

I stepped into the hallway, into the elevator, my head racing with esprit d’escalier. Obviously, there had been some sort of miscommunication, a root misunderstanding of the terms of our relationship. Someone had not spoken up. Mistakes were made. I reached the first floor. The doors parted and music flooded in. The party was in full swing. I got my coat and went into the street. The snow was like cream, and I could see we were in for a blizzard.

interlude: 19Ç9.

Like most people, doctors tend to fear him, and in that fear, they never come right out and say what they want. It drives him mad. The one on the telephone, the superintendent, keeps talking in circles, such that Louis cannot fathom the reason for the call. More money? Is that it? He can give them more money. Already he pays fees that Bertha deems extortionate, a peculiar position for her to take, considering that the arrangement was entirely her idea, and that those fees come out of bank accounts to which she has never contributed a penny.

Louis would not mind paying more. He would, in fact, be happy to pay much more, give and give and give until he has left himself bloody and shattered. But here is the punch line: he has too much money to ever be broken. Writing checks will never be an effective method of expiation, and unfortunately for him, he knows no other way.

As Louis listens to the superintendent, he tries to convey the message to Bertha, who stands nearby, grinding her teeth impatiently.

“He says—one moment. He says that she—what was that?”

Fed up, Bertha seizes the receiver. “In plain English, please,” she says. Over the next minute and a half, her face shifts from exasperation to incredulity to fury to determination and finally to the blank, chill mask she puts on during difficult times. She says a few short words and puts down the phone.

“The girl is pregnant.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Well,” she says, pushing the button for the maid, “obviously, it isn’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t see what choice we have. She can’t stay there.”

“Then what do you inte—”

“I don’t know,” says Bertha. “You haven’t given me much time to think.”

The maid appears in the doorway.

“Call for the car.”

“Yessum.”

Louis looks at his wife. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s Sunday,” he says.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

He has no answer.

She says, “Do you have a better idea?”

He does not.

“Then run along. You’re not dressed for an outing.”

AS HE PERFORMS HIS TOILET, he wonders how he has gotten here. The events of his life do not seem connected in any way. First he was there, then somewhere else; now he is here. But how did he arrive? He does not know.

He reaches for his comb; his valet steps forward and hands it to him.

“That’s all right,” Louis says. “I’ll be alone now, thank you.”

The valet nods and withdraws.

Once he has gone, Louis removes his shirt and stands bare-chested. The last eight years have aged him. Once he had ringlets so dense that the teeth of the comb would get stuck. He had smooth skin, not the elephantine wattles that appear at his waist as he bends. His is not the dense, cannon-ball belly men of wealth and power should have but a soft paunch, a loosening around the ribs. His hips are wide and feminine, and his trousers must be let out at the seat. He repulses himself. He did not always look this way.

He puts on his shirt and his shoes and descends to the foyer.

The Home is near Tarrytown, a few miles off the Hudson. Once they leave the city, the roads become lined with deep ruts that the car is ill equipped to handle. The drive takes several hours; his suit is stuffy and his back stiffens; by the time they arrive, he can hardly move. It’s hard to say what would be worse, getting out of the car or turning right around and going back to Fifth.

The superintendent stands outside the gate, indicating where they may park, a gesture that annoys Louis, insofar as it implies that this visit is the Mullers’ first. Bertha might not come, but he does, at least once a year.

The grounds are lush and colorful, thick with wildflowers and weeds that make Louis’s sinuses buzz. He blows his nose and glances at his wife, staring impassively out the window at a building that did not exist the last time she was here. He knows this to be true because he paid for a portion of its construction. Anonymously. Bertha would not allow him to disgrace the family name. Another irony, that little bout of possessiveness, for it is he who turned her from a Steinholtz into a Muller.

She has changed, too, although he has a hard time putting his finger on how. Everything that made her a beautiful girl has lingered, more or less, into middle age, without the need for heavy investments in cosmetics. Other women spend half their day staving off wrongs done by time and childbearing. Not so Bertha.

What, then? Louis watches her gazing out the window and notices that all of those lovely features are still there—but more so. The beauty mark a touch larger; the nose a trifle rounder. It is as though the real Bertha, for years tightly wrapped in youth, has pushed her way through to the surface, causing tiny ruptures all over, individually imperceptible but together enough to render the whole grotesque. Perhaps these changes are real, or perhaps familiarity has bred contempt. Whatever the case may be, what scant desire he could conjure up for her, back when he was supple and highly motivated, has long since dried out and blown away. His appetites in general have waned, leaving in their stead regret, a multipartite regret made up of all his poor decisions. Because although he has a hard time understanding how he came to the present, if he is honest with himself he will say that the path has been of his making. What seemed like inevitabilities he now understands as choices. When, so many years ago, they brought him into the room to meet her and they told him she was to be his bride, and he agreed, and the whole machine swung into motion—that was his choice, wasn’t it? His father said to him: marry or go to London. Well, why not London? At the time he told himself that marriage would follow eventually, so he might as well accept his fate and be allowed to stay on. But perhaps his father had been giving him an out. Perhaps he could have spent his life in bachelorhood, like great-uncle Bernard. What might have happened in London? Louis wonders. And when Bertha sent the girl away—hadn’t he had a choice? He argued and argued and finally gave in, but he could have stood his ground. He could have done something. What, he does not know. But something.

In business he never second-guesses himself; in life he has no peace.

The car rolls across the gravel, slows, comes to a halt. Bertha gets out but he is impaled on regret.

“Get out of the car, Louis.”

He gets out of the car.

The superintendent’s name is Dr. Christmas. Though normally full of good humor, today he has a bilious look about him.

“Mr. Muller. Mrs. Muller. Did you have a pleasant drive?”

“Where’s my daughter,” Bertha says.

They pass through the lobby. Louis allows his wife to take the lead, and she does, pushing out in front of everyone else, as though she knows where to go. Her daughter. Preposterous. An insult to the effort he has expended over the last twenty years. The girl has never been hers, not since the moment they parted company on the delivery table. But does he really want to claim that the girl is his? If so, then that makes her his responsibility; it makes everything that has happened his fault.

Dr. Christmas has decided to turn their walk into a tour, pointing out the Home’s prouder features, such as the hydrotherapy rooms, with their hippopotamus-sized tubs and stacks of linens. They perform more than a thousand cold wet sheet packs every year.

“Recently we’ve had some success with insulin treatments,” he says, “and you’ll be pleased to know that thanks to your—”

“What I will be pleased to know,” says Bertha, “is where my daughter is. Until then I am not pleased to know anything.”

They walk the rest of the way in silence.

Or—not silence. From other rooms, other floors—from far away on the grounds—muffled by concrete and plaster, oozing through ducts—come the most ungodly sounds. Screams and weeping and a jagged laughter that stands Louis’s hair on end, and a variety of noises that no human being should be able to produce. He has heard these noises before but they never fail to unnerve him. They do not have a daughter, they have a son; Bertha has repeated this mantra enough, forcing him to recite it with her, and he has come to believe. Thus every visit to the Home brings fresh horror.

Their child, their real child, David—he is growing up handsome and articulate, a model young man. At thirteen he has already read Schiller and Mann and Goethe in German, Moliere and Racine and Stendhal in French. He plays the violin and has a knack for mathematics, especially as applied to business. While it is true that education at home has left him shy around other children, he is nonetheless charming toward adults, fully capable of engaging in conversation with men thirty years his senior.

By comparison, what hope does the girl stand? Bertha made the pragmatic choice, and she made it without hesitation, excommunicating her from her heart, something Louis has never quite managed to do. And yet what has he done except wallow in self-pity? Where has all his suffering gotten him? Surely it hasn’t improved the girl’s lot.

Thank God David is away, visiting his mother’s relatives in Europe. Louis shudders to imagine inventing excuses for this afternoon jaunt. Mother and I are going for a ride in the countryside. Mother and I need to take the air. More than anything, Louis hates to lie to his son.

As far as he can tell, David remains unaware of the girl’s existence. There was that one awful night, eight years ago, when Delia left the door unlocked and the girl wandered downstairs, attracted by the sound of the radio. For a time Louis had wanted to put a radio in the girl’s room, but Bertha had exercised her veto. A radio would serve no purpose, she argued. The girl wouldn’t understand anything, and the noise might draw attention. Instead they gave her picture books and dolls, which seemed to occupy her. But Louis knew that books and dolls weren’t enough, a suspicion borne out when she appeared. If Bertha had only listened to him and bought a damned radio, the girl might never have come calling, none of this ever would have been necessary… .

That awful night; the arguments that followed. He lost them all, with one exception: he managed to get rid of Delia, whom he had always considered indolent, sensuous, and untrustworthy. Even Bertha had to admit that leaving the door unlocked constituted grounds for dismissal. Although no longer employed, Delia remains on the payroll. Her continued silence costs Louis seventy-five dollars a week.

David has never said anything about that night, never asked about the girl. If he somehow discerned her identity—and Louis cannot imagine how he would have—then he seems to have forgotten all about her. They are safe. Hundreds of lies, each one thin, but layered until their accumulated strength allows passage across the chasm.

Dr. Christmas holds a door. Bertha and Louis sit on one side of the desk. On the other side is a seedy-looking fellow with an ostentatious pocketwatch. Christmas locks the door and takes the remaining chair.

“Allow me to introduce Winston Coombs, the Home’s resident legal counsel. I hope you won’t mind if he sits in on our little meeting. As a matter of course, I—”

“I don’t see my daughter anywhere.”

“Yes, Mrs. Muller. I have every intention of—”

“I came here with one purpose, and that is to see my daughter and what you idiots have managed to do to her.”

“Yes, Mrs. Muller. I would however like to inform you that—”

“I don’t care what you would like. This is not the time for you to express preferences.”

Says Coombs, “If I may—”

“You may not.”

“Mrs. Muller,” says the superintendent, “all I’d like to do is reassure you and your husband of our intention to take the appropriate punitive measures toward the young man responsible, and—”

Then Bertha says something that surprises Louis. “I don’t care one bit about him. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t exist. I want to see my daughter. I demand to see her, this instant, and if you continue to do anything other than take me to her I will call my own attorneys, who I can assure you will make Mr. Coombs very sorry that he ever entered the profession.” She stands. “I take it you don’t have her in that closet.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then walk.”

They exit the building and step onto the back lawn, neatly mown and hemmed in on three sides by trees. Golden light pools in the grass. They follow a stone path into the woods. Fifty feet hence they come to a small house enclosed by a whitewashed fence, a place new to Louis and certainly to Bertha.

Dr. Christmas finds the correct key from a clanging set and holds the gate open for Bertha, who pushes past without a word. The house requires another key, which requires another minute or so of noisy fiddling. Bertha taps her foot. Louis stuffs his hands in his pockets and gazes up through the leaves at the bloody sky.

“And here we are,” says the doctor.

In the foyer they are met by a nurse, who stands as Bertha enters.

“This suite is reserved for patients during their most sensitive or stressful episodes,” says Christmas. “And our finest staff—”

Bertha does not wait for him to finish but goes on to the next room. Louis is close behind, bumping into her when she stops short on the threshold.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, God.”

Louis looks over his wife’s shoulder and sees his daughter. She is lying on a cot, wearing a blue gown through which her belly bulges visibly. Her entire trunk, already short and squarish, looks ominously distended. She blinks at them woozily.

Louis would like to step into the room, but Bertha is gripping the doorposts. Gently, he pries her hands free and enters. The girl sits up, watching him curiously as he drags a chair to her bedside and sits.

“Hello, Ruth.” She gives a bashful smile when he touches her cheek. “I’m very glad to see you. I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. I don’t know what’s kept me.”

The girl says nothing. She glances over Louis’s shoulder, at Bertha, who has begun to make a series of low, mournful chuffing noises.

“Ruth,” Louis says. The girl looks at him. “Ruth, I see that—that something has happened here.”

The girl says nothing.

“Ruth,” he says again.

Bertha turns and leaves. From the next room, Louis hears her threatening the superintendent but he tries to focus on his daughter. “Ruth,” he says. He had wanted to call her Teresa, after a great-aunt of his; Bertha had a Harriet to name for, as well as a Sarah. But Bertha insisted on a name with no connection to either of their families, which was precisely the point.

Still, love adjusts, and he has come to hold the name dear. Ruth, he says. He picks up her hand and begins to rock back and forth. Ruth. She watches him guilelessly, confusion spreading over her face as he sways and says her name.

THEIR OPTIONS ARE LIMITED. Dr. Christmas hints that he has the capacity to end the pregnancy right away, but when he does so Bertha spits at him. She of the expedient solution; apparently, she clings to some taboos.

The next day their family physician—the one who delivered the girl, the one who recommended the Home—arrives on the afternoon train. He takes a taxi to the hotel and is shown to Mr. and Mrs. Muller’s suite, into which he steps with no small amount of trepidation. Hat literally in hand, he begins to offer an apology-cum-defense.

“Never mind that,” says Bertha. “You’re going to need clothes. We have moved the girl to a nearby cottage for the duration of her pregnancy. There is a nurse with her. The adjacent cottage isn’t for sale yet but we’ll have it soon enough. You will live there until this is finished. Once the baby has arrived we’ll decide what to do with the girl. In the meantime, you will have whatever supplies you require, and we will cover your expenses, as well as whatever losses you incur being away from your practice. Until you can further determine your needs this ought to suffice. Give it to him, Louis.”

As the doctor takes the check, his hands begin to shake, the way they did that night twenty-one years ago. Louis is dismayed. There must be someone better—someone younger, with more energy and greater expertise. But Bertha will not budge. No specialist, no matter how good his training, has as much experience as Dr. Fetchett in one area: discretion. He has kept the family secrets well, and now he will be punished for his loyalty.

“I understand your urgency,” says the doctor, “but I can’t possibly leave New York for—”

“You can and you will. She’s already quite far along. Why they waited until now to telephone us is another matter, for discussion at another time. Right now I’m concerned only about her well-being and the well-being of the child. Your room key is there, if you’d like to refresh yourself. We leave for the cottage in thirty minutes.”

SHE HAS SO MUCH TO LOSE. The woman the world sees is the product of many years of hard work. In becoming that person, erasion has played as great a role as creation, a lesson she has never forgotten.

On their honeymoon, Louis took her to Europe for six months. They visited his ancestral homeland, over the Rhine from where she still had relatives. They rented chateaux; they were received by heads of state, escorted in grand fashion from one magnificent edifice to another, shown the world’s greatest art in private sessions, allowed to press their noses right up against the canvas, to run their fingers along the gold and silver surfaces. What she remembers most of all are the Michelangelos. Not the muscular David or the languid Pieth but the rough, unfinished Florentine sculptures, human form struggling to wrest itself from a solid block of marble. That has always been her great battle, a lifelong battle, won by divestiture. We shed; we lighten and rise.

She came over at the age of five, and in the beginning she was friendless. The other girls teased her about the way she said the letter s. It came out as a z. Or when she said shpelling instead of spelling. They would tease her about that, too. Shhhh they would say, laughing their little heads off. Shhhhhh. A clever joke, at once playing on her shortcomings and telling her that what she had to say was of no interest to anyone.

Her accent, then—that had to go. Day in and day out she sat with the tutor. She sells seashells by the seashore, the shells she sells are surely seashells. The exercises made her jaw ache. They numbed her with boredom. She worked. She chipped away at herself—the z’s and sh’s falling off, bits of stone and clouds of dust—until she sounded like any other American girl. It was a painful process but a worthwhile one, certainly after the War broke out.

Off came her baby fat. She kept herself away from certain foods, and gradually she emerged as a woman who could turn heads in the street. Boys wanted to be by her side, and girls wanted to be by the sides of the boys. She shed her timorousness, shed her resentment, generously extending friendship to those who had maligned her in childhood. She shed her inhibitions, becoming known as a girl not only of exceptional beauty but of great wit. She tamped down an unbecoming tendency toward sarcasm and built up a tolerance for the inanity of social niceties. She entertained drawing rooms with lightning-fast passages from the Goldberg Variations. Everyone applauded. She learned to enjoy parties, to laugh on cue, to reflect in others what they most wanted to see.

By her eighteenth birthday, several men had asked for her hand. She turned them down. She had bigger plans, and so did her mother.

Her father thought them both ridiculous, and said so.

“I don’t see why you say that,” said Mama. “They like German girls. And I know that they will want to marry that one off as soon as possible.”

Mama was right. Bertha marveled. One moment she was a debutante; the next she was a bride, dancing with her husband in a ballroom as big as her imagination.

The first years of her marriage were her happiest. She barely noticed her husband’s lack of interest in her; she was too busy making the most of her newfound omnipotence. Papa was rich, but nobody was rich like the Mullers. It became a challenge for her to dream up new ways to spend. And still she continued to rise, cultivating important relationships and pruning dead ones. She invited and was invited by others. Her wardrobe was the envy of all, her clothing cut closely in homage to her figure. She became a regular in the society pages, noted for her grace but also for her charitable work. In her name grew a concert hall and a collection at the Met. She endowed functions and sponsored schoolchildren. She was only twenty-one but already she had done so much good. Her parents were proud; her life was full; and if her husband did not desire her, so much the better. It freed her up to work on refining herself, a new person, reborn as a Muller. It was she who had to ensure the bloodline. Louis could not be trusted. He had done everything in his power to sabotage his family’s future. She came to stitch up the damage, and in doing so, she took possession of her new name in a way that he—a Muller by dint of Fate—never could. Unlike Louis, she had to work, to position herself, to choose; she became more of a Muller than he ever was; and thus her obligation ran much deeper than his, her mandate divine. How else to explain the rapidity of her ascent? Someone wanted her to succeed.

And she made sure Louis did his duty when the time came around.

During the early part of Bertha’s first pregnancy, Mama died. Before she went, she said, “I only hope your children take such good care of you.”

The disappointment, then, was twofold. Bertha felt as though she had denied her mother’s deathbed wish. After all, no defective child could ever take care of her. And the shame she stood to reap: oh the shame. Her whole life would fly apart, springs and gears and hinges scattering. All the good she did would come to naught. Who would give the kind of charity that she did if not her? Who would throw the Autumn Ball? Who would be the focal point? She had obligations to the people of New York City.

An accent, an inch of waistline, a recalcitrant husband—the problems she fought always had clear and concrete solutions. She likewise approached the problem of the girl with a level head and a steady hand. This, too, was merely another problem to solve; the real question was how. The Home gave her her answer. Dr. Fetchett told them that such a decision was not uncommon, and she took comfort in knowing that she was following a well-beaten path. For every hurdle rising higher.

What she finds so troubling about the latest turns of events, this abomination, is the sense that she has stalled. Or worse—begun to sink. She sees now that the problem of the girl will never be solved, not as long as people have the capacity to reproduce themselves. Family is the problem that recurs.

IN AUGUST, DAVID RETURNS FROM BERLIN. He entertains his parents with stories of his travels, and shares his firsthand account of the rising political turmoil. Louis, who has been following the news closely, speculates about their economic effects. Several high-ranking officers in his Frankfurt branch have been forced out of their jobs, a trend that Louis disapproves of. Jewish or not, they were fine businessmen, and nobody with half a brain can believe that stripping a nation of its most qualified and experienced workers will lead to greater prosperity.

Having left at so young an age, Bertha has no strong feelings about the annexation of Austria or the breaking of synagogue windows, events that she does not regard as having any direct impact on her. She is happy to have her son back, to have the tableau of her life reestablished. Lately, she and Louis have spoken even less than usual, and his willfulness angers her. He has never fought back as hard as he is fighting now.

His chief complaint is that she has not gone to visit the girl. He goes every two weeks. Would it kill her, he wants to know, to show her face?

But she can’t. There are so many reasons why. Somebody needs to stay at home. What if a guest drops by unannounced. They couldn’t both be out of the house, now could they? People would want to know where the Mullers had gone in the thick of summer. The Mullers live fashionably, and what they do influences the whole crowd of Good People. Inquiries would be made; a rumor would ignite. One of them, at least, has to stay behind, and she is the more reasonable choice.

Besides, how could she help? Having been pregnant herself, Bertha knows that it is a highly individualized form of suffering. She knows how to soothe only one pregnant woman: herself. Whereas the doctor has soothed hundreds. Let him do his job.

And most of all she is afraid, afraid of feeling the way she felt for those few short minutes at the Home, afraid of feeling the way she felt during the drive back to New York, afraid of having her heart once again turned upside down.

Would it kill her to show her face?

It might.

One night they are eating when a maid appears with a folded note, which she places on the table. Madam. Bertha is about to scold her for interrupting dinner when she notices that the note has opened slightly, revealing at the bottom the name E. F. Fetchett, M.D. She slides it under the base of her wineglass.

After dinner she sequesters herself in her sewing room.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Muller—

Kindly request your immediate attention by telephone.

Sincerely,

E. F. Fetchett, M.D.

She picks up the line and asks for Tarrytown four-eight-oh-five-eight.

The doctor answers. In the background there are sounds.

“This is Mrs. Louis Muller,” she says.

“Labor has begun. I thought you might want to know.”

Bertha fingers the phone cord. “Mrs. Muller?” “I’m here.”

“Will you be present for the birth?”

She looks at the clock. It is eight thirty. “Will she last til tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Then I won’t be present,” she says, and hangs up.

THE NEXT MORNING, she orders a picnic packed. She and David spend the day in Central Park.

WHEN LOUIS RETURNS FROM TARRYTOWN late that night, he looks as though he has run the entire distance on foot. His tie is gone, his shirt sweat-stained and missing studs. He goes directly to his suite and shuts the door.

“What’s wrong with Father?”

“He’s ill. Did you have a good time today?”

“Yeah.”

“Excuse me? I didn’t understand that.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“You’re welcome. Who loves you more than anyone else in the world?” “You do, Mother.”

“That’s right. What are you doing after supper?”

“Practicing my violin.”

“And?”

“Reading.”

“And?”

“Listening to the Yankee game.”

“I don’t remember that being on the agenda.”

“Can we put it on the agenda? Please?”

“Practice first.”

“Yes, Mother. May I be excused?”

“Certainly.”

He lays down his napkin. Good boy.

“Mother?”

“Yes, David.”

“Can I visit Father?”

“Not tonight.”

“Will you please tell him that I hope he feels better?”

“I certainly will.”

When he is gone, Bertha lingers at the table, rubbing her temples. The maid asks if she would like anything else.

“I am going to see my husband. I don’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

“Yessum.”

She steps in the elevator and girds herself for battle.

HE ARRIVED IN THE VILLAGE as the heat peaked. The air blurry with gnats, the sweet rot of manure, half-naked children throwing water at one another. The chauffeur steered along the rutted road and forked onto the rural byway leading to the cottage they chose—Bertha chose—their advance halted by a cattleguard and a swing-arm gate that necessitates stopping the car, getting out, opening the gate, driving through, and stopping again to close the gate behind. Louis ordered the chauffeur to leave it open. He didn’t care who might wander in. Let them.

As he stepped inside the cottage, he felt nauseated and dizzy, and his instinct was to reach for his wife’s arm. Since his last visit, the place had been converted into an operating theater. A pile of bedsheets, rank with antiseptic and bodily fluids. The quiet disturbed him: shouldn’t there be crying? Ruth herself barely made any noise as a newborn, and he had always understood that to be symptomatic of her condition. What if her child is the same way? What untold miseries will he endure?

Dr. Fetchett looked cadaverous, although he had only good things to say. The baby was a boy, his heartbeat strong and regular. The mother’s health was excellent; better, in fact, than many normal mothers after a similar ordeal. In the interest of cleaning up, they had moved both mother and child to the neighboring cottage, where nurses were attending to her.

“How is she, is she happy?”

The doctor rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. “Who can say, really.”

They went first to see the baby. Red and squashed and swaddled; black, spiky hair on the top of his head. Utterly ordinary.

Actually, he looked a little like Bertha.

Dr. Fetchett explains that it is indeed possible for a mongoloid mother to have a normal child. “Of course, we can’t say for sure that other problems won’t arise down the line. I say that not to disturb you but because I’m trying to prepare you for any eventuality.”

Louis asked to hold him. In his arms the baby felt like paper.

“Should he be that red?”

“It’s normal.”

At first he is relieved. Normal, normal, everything normal. But the longer he holds the sleeping boy in his arms, the more clearly he comes to see that normalcy is the worst curse of all. If the child is normal, he represents a claim on the estate and a threat to David’s sovereignty. Louis can only imagine what Bertha might do.

The doctor asks if Mrs. Muller will be coming to visit.

Louis said, “I don’t believe she will.”

Now, lying on the floor of his drawing room to quiet his screaming back, looking up at Bertha—she towers over him, standing behind two armchairs she has pulled together like an embrasure—he says, “The child is dead. The girl is dead, too. They both died in childbirth.”

A MONTH LATER, under the pretext of business travel, Louis goes back to the Home.

“I want to know the name of the father.”

Dr. Christmas’s eyes dart around the room, in search of his missing legal counsel.

Louis says, “My wife doesn’t know I’m here. The least you can do is help me give the boy a proper name.”

After a moment, the doctor goes to a cabinet and takes out a file. He hands Louis a photo of a young man with wild, dark hair; wild, dark eyes.

“His name is Cracke,” says the doctor.

Louis compares features. “A patient.”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t look defective.”

“He had other problems. Many of them. A troublesome boy.”

Louis puts the photo down. He should be feeling something. Anger, perhaps, or disgust. But he feels nothing, only mild curiosity.

“How did he know my daughter?”

The doctor shifts uncomfortably. “I can’t say. As you’re aware, we segregate the sexes. Sometimes for a concert we bring everyone into the main hall. Presumably, they slipped out together unnoticed.”

Louis frowns. “Do you mean that she went consensually?”

“I would have to think so,” says the doctor. “She asked for him repeatedly.”

Louis says nothing.

“He’s no longer with us.”

Louis is confused. “He’s dead?”

“I ordered him moved.”

“And where is he now?”

“At another home, some miles outside Rochester.”

“Does he know?”

“I don’t imagine so.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Please don’t.”

As he opens the car door for Louis, the doctor smiles unctuously and says, “I hope you don’t find it rude of me to ask how Ruth is. We were all quite fond of her.”

“She’s right as rain,” Louis says.

The doctor offers his hand. Louis declines.

HE HIRES A STAFF OF THREE, overseen by an anvil-jawed Scotswoman named Nancy Greene, a former employee at the Home. She is kind to Ruth, kinder still to the baby; she understands—or seems to understand— when Louis presses upon her the importance of keeping secrets. No good could come of anyone knowing, he tells her, and she seems to agree. He pays her very well.

IN 1940, THE WORLD IS AT WAR. David has entered his first year of formal schooling at the N. M. Priestly Academy, and Bertha has been reelected president of her women’s club, a position to which she devotes increasingly large amounts of time once her son leaves the house on Fifth. The Frankfurt office has been closed since the invasion of Poland, and the Muller Corporation has begun to shift its priorities from international banking to domestic property management, which Louis regards as a more stable arena for investment. His instincts will prove prescient when American GIs begin coming home and the demand for housing skyrockets. But that will not happen for years. At the moment, he is operating on a hunch.

November is wet and cold. The worst storm in a decade comes and goes, leaving Manhattan smelling of earthworms. Louis sits in his office on the fiftieth floor of the Muller Building.

Few people know the number for the phone that rings directly at his desk.

He answers. It is Nancy Greene.

“Sir, she’s very sick.”

He cancels his afternoon meetings. When he arrives at the cottage, he spots a dire sign: Dr. Fetchett’s mud-spattered car.

“I can’t control her fever. She needs to be moved to a hospital.”

Despite their best efforts, the infection rages out of control, and within a week Ruth is dead of pneumonia. Dr. Fetchett attempts to console Louis by telling him that in general, people with her condition have a short life expectancy. That she lived as long as she did—and went as fast—is a kind of blessing.

Louis buries her on the grounds. No clergy are present. The nurses sing a hymn. Mrs. Greene stays inside to mind baby Victor.

20

Ó didn’t talk to Marilyn for several weeks. When I did call, a few days after the new year, I was told by her assistant that she had gone to Paris.

“For how long?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m not actually supposed to tell you she’s in Paris, either, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

I suppose I didn’t have the right to be angry at her, but I was. I felt as though I was the aggrieved, that she had no right to be hurt; as far as I knew, I had been acting with her permission. I reacted the way I did after my mother’s death, the way I always have whenever I’ve felt, or been made to feel, rightfully ashamed. Narcissism can’t stomach too much guilt. It vomits back up rage. I thought of all the times Marilyn had wronged me— all the gibes I’d taken, the condescension I’d swallowed with a smile. I thought of how she often treated me like arm candy and how she interfered in the running of my business. I thought of her forcing me to kiss her when my head felt like a rock tumbler. To this list of crimes I added others that had nothing to do with me; I labeled her a homewrecker, a vengeful divorcee, a liar, a bully. I erased her kindnesses and inflated her cruelties until she seemed so bad to me, so thoroughly corrupt, that her unwillingness to overlook my tiny indiscretion became the height of hypocrisy. And just as I got through holding her responsible for global warming and the

burst of the dot-com bubble, I reached into my jacket to take out my phone and leave her a voicemail telling her exactly what I thought, and instead of the phone I found a stray price tag that someone at Barneys had forgotten to remove. The upper portion of my outfit had cost Marilyn $895.00, plus 8.375 percent sales tax.

To my surprise, my lengthy apology e-mail brought an equally lengthy reply—in French. Since Marilyn knows I don’t speak French, she had to have sent it knowing I’d need a translation; who knew what kind of mortification she intended to subject me to. I hesitated before calling Nat over.

” ‘Following the death of King Louis XIV, the court returned to Paris from Versailles. Residences were constructed on the Faubourg, displacing the horticultural marshes… .’ ” He scanned down. “There’s something in here about a restaurant… . You know what this is, it’s the history of her hotel. It sounds like she cut-and-pasted it off the website.” He looked at me. “Does that have any meaning to it that I’m missing?”

“It just means fuck off.”

THE SNOWSTORM DELAYED SAMANTHA’S RETURN, and when I talked to her, she urged me to continue without her. I decided to use the time to follow up on the information I’d gotten at the stationery store. For weeks I’d been calling local game rooms and chess and checkers clubs, thinking that Victor might have gone in search of a challenge. The places nearest the Courts were actually in Brooklyn, and without exception they turned out to be full of two-bit academics; anxious teenagers with bad haircuts; dead-eyed prodigies salivating over their victories, or else sitting in chairs too high for them, swinging their feet and clutching electronic clocks as they waited for a worthy opponent. I would tiptoe around, trying to ask if anyone knew a Victor Cracke, small man with a moustache, looked a little like—

“Shhhhhh.”

The second-to-last place on my list was the High Street Chess and Checkers Club, located on Jamaica Avenue. Thursday, the answering machine said, was checkers night, round-robin at seven thirty, five-dollar entry fee, winner take all, soda and chips provided.

Calling the place “High Street” could not mask the fact that it was a shithole: a grimy room four floors above a bail bondsman, up a vertiginous stairwell, to which you gained admittance by hammering on a metal door until someone came to fetch you. I arrived fifteen minutes early. A painfully thin man in a flannel shirt and hideous corduroys came down and demanded to know if I had a reservation.

“I didn’t know I needed one.”

“Aahhh, I’m just messing, har har har. I’m Joe. Come the fuck on up.”

As we mounted the stairs, he apologized for the lack of access.

“Our intercom’s broken,” he said, wheezing. He had a slight limp that caused his hips to swing aggressively behind him, like he was trying to shake free of himself. “The rest of’m work, just ours is screwed. Landlord’s not interested. We have to keep it locked cause there’s been some breakins. Somebody got aholda the fire extinguisher and sprayed down the carpet. I don’t know what the problem that is, piecea wet carpet never hurt a man, har har har.” He took out a hankie and blew his nose.

I said, “I was actually hoping to ask you about one of your players.”

He halted, one foot on the top stair. His whole demeanor shifted; I saw him withdraw. “Oh yeah? Who’d that be?”

“Victor Cracke.”

Joe scrunched up his face, scratched his neck. “Don’t know him.”

“Do you think someone else might?”

He shrugged.

“Is it all right if I come up and ask around?”

“We’re about to play,” he said.

“I can hang around until after you’re done.”

“It’s not a spectator sport.”

“Then I can come back,” I said. “What time do you finish?”

“Depends.” He drummed his fingers on the banister. “Could be an hour, could be four.”

“Then I’ll play,” I said.

“You know how?”

Who doesn’t know how to play checkers? “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Reasonably.”

He shrugged again. “Okeydoke.”

Taken as a whole, the checkers constituency of the High Street Chess and Checkers Club made the Brooklynites look positively trendy. Queens, I gathered, drew a more diverse crowd: a jittery man with an immense Afro and Coke-bottle glasses; an obese man wearing Velcro sneakers and purple sweatpants; twins who stood against the far wall, steadily consuming Coca-Cola and mumbling to each other in Spanglish.

Joe was clearly in charge. He made announcements, reminded them about the Staten Island tournament, and then went around the room pairing people up. I was shown to a rickety card table where my opponent sat in a fully buttoned parka, moonface luminous from within his hood. “This is Sal. Sal, meet new guy.”

Sal nodded once.

“You might as well play,” Joe said to me. “Without you there’s an odd number. Five dollars.”

We took out our wallets.

“Thaaaankyou,” he said, plucking the bills from our hands and moving on.

Despite the room’s mounting heat, Sal continued to wear his parka. He also wore mittens, making it hard for him to pick up my pieces when he captured them, which he did with dismaying frequency. As a courtesy I began handing them over.

I said, “What happens—” “Shhhh.”

“What happens when you have an odd number?” I whispered.

“Joe plays two at once. King me.”

The game took about nine minutes. It was the checkers equivalent of an ethnic cleansing. When we were done, Sal sat back, grinning. He tried to put his hands behind his head in a pose of casual triumph, but, as he was unable to lace his fingers together, he had to content himself with cupping his chin and staring at the board, now free of any pesky black pieces. The rest of the room played on in silence, save the click of a plastic disk or the occasional King me.

I whispered, “Did you ever meet someone na—” “Shhhh.”

I took out a pen and a business card and wrote my question on the back. I handed it to Sal, who shook his head. Then he motioned for the pen, and with his paw loopily wrote out a response.

No but I only started

He motioned for another card. I handed it to him. He waved impatiently and I gave him three more. As he wrote he numbered each card in the corner.

(Ă) coming here a few months ago so I don’t know

2) everyone’s name, Joe knows everyone though did you

3) know he used to be a national champion

I took out another business card. I was down to three.

Is that a fact I wrote.

)4) Yes he was the nat champ in 93, he is also a master

(5) in chess and backgammon

On my final card I wrote Impressive.

Then we endured an awkward silence, both of us nodding at each other, having established just enough of a connection to make our lack of ability to communicate excruciating.

“Next match,” Joe called.

I played and lost eight more games. The closest I came to victory was making it past the fifteen-minute mark, a feat I achieved largely because my opponent, a veteran with hearing aids in both ears, fell asleep midway through. By the end of the night only Joe had gone undefeated. When it came time to play him, players groaned as though they’d been kicked in the crotch. My own game against Joe was my eighth and final. I pushed a piece into the center of the board.

“Twelve to sixteen,” he said. “My favorite opening.”

He then proceeded to wipe me out in calm, steady strokes. It was as if we were playing different games. In a sense, we were. I was playing a game from childhood, when the goal is to entertain oneself, and my decisions must have seemed to him random or nonsensical, achieving no more than short-term gain, if that. He, on the other hand, was engaged in self-analysis, which is what any activity becomes at the highest level.

Watching him, I felt a kind of thrill similar to what I felt the first time I saw Victor’s drawings. That might sound strange, so let me explain. Genius takes many forms, and in our century we have (slowly) come to appreciate that the transcendence given by a Picasso is potentially found in other, less obvious places. It was that old reliable provocateur, Marcel Duchamp, who showed this when he abandoned object-making, moved to Buenos Aires, and took up chess full-time. The game, he remarked, “has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer.” At first glance Duchamp seems to be lamenting the corrupting power of money. Really, though, he’s being much more subversive than that. He is in fact destroying the conventional boundaries of art, arguing that all forms of expression—all of them—are potentially equal. Painting is the same as chess, which is the same as rollerskating, which is the same as standing at your kitchen stove, making soup. In fact, any one of those plain old everyday activities is better than conventional art, better than painting, because it is done without the sanctimony of anointing oneself “an artist.” There is no surer route to mediocrity; as Borges wrote, the desire to be a genius is the “basest of art’s temptations.” According to this understanding, then, true genius has no self-awareness. A genius must by definition be someone who does not stop to consider what he is doing, how it will be received, or how it will affect him and his future; he simply acts. He pursues his activity with a single-mindedness that is inherently unhealthy and frequently self-destructive. A person much like, say, Joe; or a person like Victor Cracke.

I will be the first to admit that I swoon in the presence of genius, the burning pyre onto which it throws itself in sacrifice. I hoped that, standing beside the fire, I would feel it reflected in me. And as I watched Joe capture my last piece and set it down among the pile of victims, the little plastic corpses that used to be my men, I remembered why I needed Victor Cracke and why, now that I’d lost my ability to create him, I had to keep looking for him: because he was still my best chance, perhaps my only chance, to feel that distant heat, to smell the smoke and bask in the glow.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRIZES—by which I mean the lump sum of $50, awarded to Joe by Joe—took place with little fanfare. One of the players, long knocked out of contention, left after losing his sixth game in a row, a streak that made me feel a tad less alone in my wretchedness, although as he stormed out I felt a twinge of concern at not being able to question him.

It turned out not to matter, though: everyone else knew Victor. They told me he had been a regular at the club up until a year ago. If I really wanted to know about him, they said, I should ask Joe, who was around more than anyone else. I found this puzzling, to say the least, as he had already disavowed knowledge. When I turned around to ask him what was going on, I discovered that he had disappeared.

The man with the Afro counseled me to wait around. “He’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“He has to lock up.”

I waited. One by one the rest of the players drifted out. From the window I watched them humping up the sidewalk through the snow or scrambling after the Q36. Two stuck around, playing additional games until eleven thirty, at which point I was left alone among the tables and chairs, listening to the fluorescent lights buzz and staring at a torn, crumby package of Lorna Doone shortbreads.

It was after midnight before Joe returned. He had to come back. I knew this not only because the man with the Afro had told me but because no true genius would ever leave the object of his obsession in disarray. I heard the key rattle in the gate below, heard him huffing and puffing to the top of the stairs. He walked into the room as though I wasn’t there and began stacking chairs. I got up to help him. We worked in silence. He handed me a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle and we wiped down the tabletops.

“I saw you in the paper,” he said finally. “You’re the one put up the show.” He tied off a trash bag with an elaborate knot. “Am I right?”

“That’s partly why I want to talk to Victor. I have money that belongs to him.”

“Partly why else.”

“What?”

“What’s the other reason you want to talk to him.”

“I want to make sure he’s okay.”

“That’s very nice of you,” he said.

I said nothing.

“How much money?” he asked.

“A fair amount.”

“How much is a fair amount?”

“Enough.”

“Any reason you’re not answering me?”

“At least I’m not lying to you.”

He smiled. He transferred the garbage bag from his right to his left hand; his body likewise slumped. He had terrible posture, and a tendency to lapse into a grimace when not speaking, the look of someone whose basal state is discomfort.

Outside, snow had again begun to fall. Joe tossed the bag into the alley and walked toward the bus stop. His limp seemed worse, his gait almost spastic. He also looked larger than before, as if he’d grown a layer of blubber. A breeze opened his coat, revealing a second coat, and protruding from its collar, the collar of a third.

“Do you want a ride?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“I’m going to call myself a car,” I said. “I can have it drop you wherever you need to go.”

In the distance the bus turned the corner. He looked back at it, then at me, and he said, “What I really am is hungry. You hungry?”

WE WENT TO AN ALL-NIGHT DINER. All I wanted was a cup of decaf, but when I said I was paying, he ordered fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a milkshake. Listening to him gave me heartburn. The waitress started to walk away, and he called her back to add onion rings and a green salad.

“Gotta get all the food groups,” he said.

He ate slowly, giving everything about fifty chews, until I couldn’t imagine he was tasting much more than mush and his own saliva. Long gulps of milkshake followed, his face stuck so far forward into the glass that his nose reemerged tipped with froth. He would then wipe his face on a napkin, crumple it, and drop it on the floor. All the while his eyes kept up a nervous hopscotch, to the door, to the counter, to me, the table, the waitress, the jukebox; his fingertips red and feathery with hangnails.

He asked when I had last played checkers.

“Probably twenty-five years ago.”

“I could tell.”

“I never claimed to be any good.”

“Victor’s a good checkers player. He’d be better if he slowed down a bit.”

This tidbit intrigued me, as for some reason I’d always pictured Victor as contemplative, at least when not drawing. I mentioned to Joe that the art had a strong gridlike feel to it, especially when assembled as a whole. He shrugged, either in disagreement or out of apathy, and went back to eating.

“You live around here?” I asked.

“Sure. Sometimes.”

I didn’t understand, and then I did, and when he saw that I’d caught on, he started to laugh.

“I could have you over sometime. We’ll have a sleepover. You like the great outdoors? Har har har.”

I smiled politely, which made him laugh even harder.

“You know what you look like,” he said, “you look like I just took a dump on your living-room rug and you’re trying to ignore it. Hell, I’m just messing. I don’t really live outside… . Feel better now?”

“No.”

“Why not? Don’t believe me?”

“I—”

“Yes I do, then. I sleep in the park. Har har har. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiled, kicked back the last of his milkshake, and waved the empty glass at the waitress. “Chocolate, please.”

There were still a couple of onion rings left, as well as the entire untouched salad. With his new drink he resumed the process—chew chew chew chew swallow gulp gulp wipe—and I got the impression that he was obeying some weird ritual, that he needed to finish his food and drink at the same time. I had a vision of us sitting there until sunrise, ordering and reordering until a happy coincidence gave him permission to stop.

Either that or he was just really, really hungry.

He said, “You see that?”

His chocolate-tipped nose pointed across the street to an unlit church.

“They got a shelter,” he said. “Doors close at nine, though, so on game nights we finish too late.”

I didn’t need to ask why he chose checkers over a bed. It would have been insulting for me to ask. Instead I said, “Where did you learn to play?”

He wiped his face with a revoltingly soiled napkin. I handed him another and he wiped, crumpled, dropped. “The nuthouse.”

Again, I smiled politely, or tried to.

“Har har har, dump on the rug, har har har.” He forked his salad and held the dripping leaves up to the light before popping them in his mouth. “I love me some greens,” he said, chewing.

“When were you there?”

“Seventy-two to seventy-six. You can learn to do anything in there. Lots of time, you know? It’s like the best college in the world. I got my four-year degree, har har har. If you weren’t nuts before they put you in there, you’d go nuts from boredom.” He laughed and drank and coughed out some milkshake and wiped his chin.

“Sal told me you used to be world champion.”

“Coulda beena contendah. Har har har. Yeah, I won some fucking money. Not much money in checkers. They got a computer now that can’t be beat. The human being is obsolete.” He sat back, patted his stomach. It was hard to tell where all the food had gone. All that remained on the table was three fingers of milkshake, which he eyed spitefully. “You want to know something about Victor, buy me dessert.”

I flagged the waitress. Joe asked for coconut cream pie.

“We don’t have it.”

He looked at me. “I want some coconut cream pie.”

“What about strawberry,” I offered.

“Does that sound like an adequate substitute?” he asked.

“Well—”

“How bout some hair pie,” he asked the waitress. She looked at him, looked at me, shook her head, and walked away.

“Whatever happened to service,” Joe shouted at her. He looked at me. “I’ll have a brownie sundae.”

I got up and went after the waitress.

Joe stared sullenly at the tabletop until his dessert came. When it did, he didn’t touch it. He said, “Victor was in the nuthouse, too.”

“With you?”

“No.” He snickered. “You never met him, huh?”

“No.”

“He’s a lot older than me. We didn’t meet until he started coming to the club.”

“And when was that.”

“Right after I started advertising the tourney. So, 83. I used to make fliers and stick em up on telephone poles. He shows up, one of the fliers in his hand, like it was his ticket. I remember that night, there were only three of us, me, Victor, and Raul, who kicked it in a couple of years back. He and I played all the time cause nobody else showed on a regular basis. I knew Victor was decent cause he clobbered Raul.”

“Did he beat you?” I asked.

He began shoveling in the ice cream. “I said he was good.”

I apologized.

“I don’t care. But if you’re trying to get the facts, then that’s the fucking facts.”

“Did he ever mention where he was institutionalized?”

“Someplace upstate.”

“Did he mention the name?”

“That’s privileged information,” he said.

He didn’t say anything more until he’d finished his sundae, scraping his spoon along the inside of the bowl to gather the last threads of chocolate sauce. Then he grunted and took a deep breath and said, “The New York School for Training and Rehabilitation. That’s what it’s called.”

I wrote it down.

“It’s near Albany,” he added.

“Thank you.”

He nodded, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on the floor as the waitress passed. She hissed at him and he blew her a kiss. Then he sighed and said, “Pardon me while I drain the main vein.”

I paid the check and sat waiting for him to return. He never did. He went out the back door, and by the time I figured it out, his footprints were already filling up.

Bertha lies on the top floor of a private hospital on the east side of Manhattan. Well-wishers have filled her room with bouquets, but as she prefers the dark, the nurses have left the shades drawn and the flowers have all begun to die, producing a cloying stench that gets into one’s clothes. Nevertheless she will not consent to have the vases removed. She is impervious; she has tubes up her nose; and the comfort that the flowers provide means more to her than the momentary comfort of her visitors. Visitors come and go, but she is stuck; and if the room smells like a compost pile, that’s nobody business but hers. Who are these visitors, that they should have an opinion? Not her friends. Not the committees and boards of directors who have sent the flowers. Those people are not allowed in. She does not want to be seen in a state of decay. Only with the greatest of reluctance did she agree to come to the hospital in the first place. She wanted to stay at the house on Fifth. David prevailed upon her: she could not remain at home; she would die if she did not get proper care, in a proper setting. And what, exactly, was wrong with that? Louis had died at home. But David argued that if she went to the hospital she might live longer, and wasn’t that the idea? To stay alive—to clutch at life—to dig fingernails into its greasy surface?

Lying here, she isn’t so sure.

Hospital or no hospital, she’s dying all the same. Her body is a city and the tumors that riddle it little insulting middle-class suburban outposts of disease, springing up overnight in her liver, her lungs, her stomach, her spleen, her spine. They have tried one treatment; they have tried another. Nothing helps. Better to go in a favorite bed, with a favorite view, surrounded by people she has known and trusted. Not these men with clipboards. Not these women with needles and white hats. Not lost in an artificial jungle of sympathy. Where is her son? He brought her here. Where is he, that son of hers? She calls his name.

“Yes, Mother.”

“I want to go home.”

She cannot see his reaction—he sits slightly behind her, where he knows she cannot turn to see him—but she knows what he’s doing: tugging on his earlobes. His father did the same thing.

“You can’t go home, Mother.”

“I can and I will.”

He says nothing.

“David.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“If the child is a girl I don’t want you to name her for me. That’s morbid.”

“It’s a boy, Mother. We’re going to name him Lawrence. You already know that.”

“I know nothing of the sort. What kind of a name is Lawrence?”

He sighs. “We’ve talked about this already.”

“When.”

“Several times.”

“When.”

“Weeks ago. Several times. In fact, you asked me the day before yesterday.”

“I asked no such thing.”

He says nothing.

“When are the children coming to visit.”

“They were here, Mother.”

“When.”

He says nothing.

“When were they here,” she says, afraid to hear the answer.

“Yesterday,” he says.

“That’s a lie.” She grips the bedsheets, terrified. Why is it that she can remember events and faces and stories and whole conversations from thirty years ago—and yet she cannot remember her grandchildren, yesterday? That shouldn’t be possible. Her memory is impressionistic; the closer she gets, the less she can resolve. Her nose to the canvas and all she gets are dots and smudges. And her mind has worse tricks than that up its sleeve, much worse. Old memories keep springing up where they do not belong; at times she calls David by his father’s name. She overhears David and the doctor discussing the president, and she expresses her opinion about Roosevelt and the two men look at her and David says, “It’s Kennedy, Mother.” The doctor is a young Jew named Waldenberg or Waldenstein or Steinbergwald or Bergswaldstein. He is bald and joyless and she doesn’t trust him. She asks David for Dr. Fetchett and is informed that he has been dead since 1957. That is nonsense; Fetchett has been in the room. He comes in daily to take her temperature. He stands at the foot of her bed, commiserating. Dear Bertha, you look so pale. Would you like a glass of whiskey? A kind of second sight has taken hold of her; before her illness, she never would have been able to see him so clearly. The forehead filigreed with blue veins and the enormous pores and moist nostrils, like a cow’s. Not a handsome man, Dr. Fetchett … And yet she sees the wilting flowers and cannot remember who sent them; demands over and over to know why she cannot go home.

Worse than the loosening of her mind still is her awareness of that loosening. She had expected that one of senility’s few comforts would be its self-negation; she might be confused, but she wouldn’t know she was confused. But she sees how people talk to her. They use soothing tones meant for animals and children. They push food upon her. They ask her to sign documents relinquishing her authority. They coax and wheedle and she sends them away. They don’t have her best interests in mind. She won’t deal with them, not as long as they continue to patronize her. Still they come, these lawyers with their pens and notaries and contracts and wills and lawsuits and mortgages. She refers them to David and still they come.

They are crafty. They wait for him to leave and then they sneak in. It’s enough to drive a lesser woman up the wall.

Bertha has never been one to succumb to anger; hers has been a life of self-control. She did not become a Muller—remain a Muller—save the Muller name from extinction—by losing her head. She may be sick, but she’s not dead yet, and as long as she can draw breath, she will believe that all problems have solutions; that no turn of events, no matter how bleak, cannot be turned further, bent into an advantage, the barrel twisted back toward the shooter. Her memory has decided to run riot. Fine. Let it. She might not be able to remember the day of the week, but she can bring back her childhood with a thrilling vividness. She will enjoy herself. She opens the album and remembers.

She remembers: walks in the forest and wonderfully sour Kirschkuchen and the yeastiness of her father and the soapiness of her mother. Baths in a small wooden tub, the stump of a barrel. A wooden soldier that clapped its hands when you pulled a string in its back, a painted top that cut bright orange circles in the air. The housekeeper taught her to sew until she was reprimanded for doing so and thus Bertha never learned more than a simple running stitch. The day her parents told her they were moving to America she ran crying to her best friend Elisabeth’s house, but nobody answered and in her time of greatest misery she felt lonelier than ever. At home she cried in her mother’s arms and her mother promised We will always be together, I will always take care of you. The journey will be long but you will see so many things girls your age never get to see. Bertha was unconsoled.

The port at Hamburg, the ship’s huge fluted mouth belching loud enough to shake her in her shoes. The waiters in long black coats who called her Mademoiselle. In the big dining room she ate snails; they tasted like rubber and butter. She did not get seasick; her mother did. They sunbathed on their private veranda. Her mother read to her from a book of fairy tales, using different voices for each character. The princes were noble and the princesses gentle and the witches sounded like grinding chains, everyone exactly as they should be. As they sailed into the sunset she thought of her home and she wrote lots of letters to Elisabeth that she intended to deposit in the mailbox as soon as they landed but forgot about when she saw the green lady in the sea.

She remembers her first sight of Central Park, from their hotel window. She was disappointed. She’d hoped it would be bigger. It didn’t compare to the parks and woodlands she knew. It was full of wheelbarrows, trenches, overturned earth. It wasn’t a park; it was a pit. She cried, and to quiet her down, her father gave her a package of peppermints that she ate, one by one, until she was sick.

She remembers school. She remembers being teased. She remembers the tutor. She sells seashells. Who sold those seashells? She never found out.

At Bloomingdale’s, tailors stuck her with pins. She didn’t enjoy the process but then the dress came. Everyone fussed over her, but she didn’t need their confirmation, she could see for herself: she had talent. In yards of green silk, she outshone Lady Liberty herself. Standing before her mother’s three-sided mirror, she decided that it would be terribly ungrateful if she did not use her gifts to become someone important.

She remembers her debut. The eyes all on her, not just the men but the women, too, whether jealous or shamed or in unabashed worship. She remembers descending the stairs on a cloud, her tiara held in place with so many hairpins that she thought her head would break off and roll away. Dancing and champagne and young men’s sweaty hands slipped into hers over and over. Her mother pointing out a certain young man in a narrowly cut jacket. That is Louis Muller, of the Mullers.

And her wedding.

She remembers early summers in Bar Harbor, the gleaming sailboats white, so white, her smocks flawless and dry even in the woolly heat. She changed her outfit four times a day: after breakfast, after lunch, in the afternoon before tea, and then for dinner. So many meals, piled high with those coarse American dishes she would never quite get used to, the Southern-style cornbread that her father-in-law liked but that tasted to Bertha like a block of animal feed. She ate sparingly. While other women talked about the need to reduce, she wore a bathing costume that emphasized her bust. She was the most divine creature on the Eastern Seaboard. So said her father-in-law. Dear Walter. He called her his little Bavarian rose; never mind that her family came from Heidelberg. He was always a little in love with her, openly scornful of his son’s indifference. What a catch Louis had landed, what radiance, what wit, what charm, what skill. She could play the piano. How many girls had a figure like hers? She could count them on one hand. And could any of those girls play the piano? She could count them on one hand, too … if you cut off all her fingers … but then she wouldn’t be able to play the piano. Ha ha ha ha. Walter always implied that, had the vagaries of time not torn them asunder … But she ended up with Louis. Oh Louis. Dear Louis. She wants to be charitable to him. She will choose to think of him fondly.

Think of the delight he took in buying her things, how he loved to adorn her. In the cushions of her house, she has lost diamonds worth a king’s ransom. Think of how he took her everywhere. After David was born she felt sad. It came from nowhere and gummed up her mind. Nights she could not sleep; dragging herself from bed in the morning became torture. To cheer her, Louis bought a villa in Portofino. Every summer after that they would spend a month, the baby tucked away with a nurse and Louis promising not to work at all. They would eat rich meals and drink luscious wines and travel the coast, down to Rome or round the bend to Monaco, where the Prince himself would escort them through the casino. They played with chips made of real gold. Servants brought deep saucers sloshing with champagne and wet towels to cool their necks. And then during the War, when travel became impossible, Louis bought another house for her, a thirty-five-thousand-acre ranch in the middle of Montana. She tired of it quickly. He sold it at a loss. He bought her a home in Deal. He did whatever she wanted. He was a good husband. She cannot think of him now without tearing up; oh, how maudlin. He was a decent man, after all. She was glad that he went without suffering. His heart stopped a few months before the birth of David’s first child. What is the girl’s name. Amelia. For a moment she almost forgot, but she triumphed through sheer willpower. Amelia, yes. And her baby brother, Edgar. The year after Edgar

was born, her old friend Elisabeth died. Elisabeth’s husband had been an officer in the SS and after the War they got to him; the stress killed him and then her. What luck. What timing. Every time David has a baby someone dies. A lesser woman might have ordered him to stop having children. He had a son and a daughter; enough already, stop killing off the rest of us. If anyone is to go next it will be her. But she was glad when Yvette got pregnant, regardless of the outcome. Bertha will sacrifice herself for the cause, because Yvette will be a good mother, far better than David’s first wife, who Bertha never liked and never approved of, even though she and Louis played along for appearance’s sake. They even footed more than their share of the bill at the wedding. David argued that they should foot the entire bill; it wasn’t as though they had a shortage of funds. Everyone argued. David was twenty-five then and his bachelorhood had begun to worry her; he might turn out to have his father’s tendencies. Where she had never doubted her own ability to manage Louis, how could she ensure that a prospective daughter-in-law would have the same strength and conviction? Women could not be relied on. Nobody could be relied on. You had to do everything yourself these days. Thankfully, David did get married. A relief to her, on the one hand; and on the other hand, she did not trust the girl he chose, the daughter of a man who owned clothing stores in the Middle West. She called New York ugly. Who was she to be so stuck-up, she came from Cleveland. Whatever Bertha’s opinions of the changes that have taken place in the city since her arrival so many years ago, she firmly believes that nobody has the right to make comments when they’ve been in residence for less than a month. That wicked girl. Bertha can remember her name all right but chooses not to. Picking fights with David over everything, making scenes everywhere, icy dinners where nobody spoke: Bertha thinks about them and suddenly two sets of memories collide: silence and silver on china and crystal on linen … and silences, and— and—and notes delivered by hand, notes from Dr. Fetchett. No, that is not right. That did not happen then. She is mixing up the chronology and she does not want to think about certain things. With tremendous strain she turns the page and finds another one, a page full of good memories, another

night, a happy occasion … back to her wedding. Think about her wedding. Think about the liveried footmen and the mighty brass instruments and the dancing legions spinning in her honor; think about her wedding cake, that magnificent tower of buttercream in the shape of a pyramid, the biggest cake anyone had ever seen; they printed a picture of it in the newspaper, and her picture, too. The wedding of Mr. L. I. Muller and Miss Bertha Steinholtz proved undoubtedly the most spectacular event of the season. The bride wore a taffeta gown of surpassing elegance, and the groom his traditional black. The ceremony was performed at the Trinity Church by the Most Reverend J. A. Moffett, and festivities continued… . They called it a fairy tale, and for once they got it right. Her life has been magical.

And now she is old and in a bed and it is 1962. There are things that remain hidden. They should not bother her now, not after so much time. Water under the bridge. But memory, nasty beast, returns again and again.

Not the girl. She can think about the girl without flinching. She has never doubted her decisions and she does not doubt them now. There was too much at stake. Louis could never see that. He told her once that she had no heart but that just showed how deeply he misunderstood the world, how deeply he misunderstood her. She did what she did not because she lacked a heart but because she knew, all too well, how merciless people could be. She remembered being mocked, nightly sobbing, pillows soaked, years of struggle before she came into her own and they could not deny her any longer. Because she was beautiful, and beauty cannot be denied.

But for the girl? An eternity of faux pas. She stood to suffer. What Louis failed to grasp was that Bertha had been acting with mercy.

For David’s tenth birthday she threw a luncheon, hired entertainment, and opened the ballroom. After dessert David played his violin for the guests, most of whom were adults, friends of hers; in those days, he did not have many friends. All told a pleasant afternoon, at least until Louis bolted from the room. She found him on the edge of his bed, face in his handkerchief. It disgusted her: this soft cruelty he had the gall to call mercy. He did not know what true mercy meant. He had never suffered. He had been coddled, fawned over, given a pass on the most vile transgressions. So naturally he assumed that the world would do the same for the girl. Bertha knew better. She knew disgrace. All she wanted was to spare the girl the same.

She wanted to think fondly of him but bitterness seeps through. The girl’s fate began as an argument but grew, over the years, into a towering obstruction between them, a wall of thorns, curling in on itself until they lost sight of each other completely.

It would be easy for a novelist to write And though they continued to live in the same house, they never spoke again. It would be easy but untrue. For the truth is, she still felt kindly toward Louis at moments, and she sensed that he, too, had a kind of lukewarm desire to be in her good graces. In forty years of marriage they laughed many times, shared much mutual pleasure—though not often sexual—and raised a son.

When Louis died, everything came out. By that time the boy was eleven. Eleven years old! Living like a hermit. One old woman to care for him; God knows what sort of perversions took place between them. He barely spoke. The woman, whose name was Greene, said he’d never been one to babble. Bertha told her to be quiet until spoken to.

She wanted to ship the boy as far off as possible, to Europe or Australia, but Dr. Fetchett advised against it, and in a rare moment of equivocation, she had consented to send him to the farthest point in New York state. The problem went away again. This time permanently.

But as she lies high above the earth, full of drugs, wired to electronics, she worries that her efforts have been in vain. The bills come directly to her; she pays them from a personal account. What will happen when she stops? They will come looking for her; they will contact David. With horror, she realizes that they might have done so already.

“David.”

“Mother?”

“How long have I been here.”

“In the hospital, you mean? Six weeks.”

Six weeks sounds like ample time for a bill to come past due. The crisis is upon her, then. David will find out. The story will emerge and everyone will know. She needs to make him understand the need for secrecy. But he comes from a different generation; smugly they call themselves enlightened, without the faintest notion of how quick life is to knock out your teeth. Louis’s softness has found its way into him. She must find a solution. She thinks. Her mind stumbles back and forth between the present and the past. She talks to her husband and her maid. She talks to the television. The room David got her looks less like a hospital and more like a hotel. The walls are wood-paneled; a leaded window in the shape of a star glows gently. She squeezes down on her mind and the answer comes: she will pay the fees now, in advance. She will establish an endowment. She has done that before. At Harvard and Columbia and Barnard people work and learn because of her generosity. She has given money to charities of all stripes, been feted by politicians from every side of the aisle … she squeezes down. A problem at hand, she will solve it. She will call the man at the school in Albany and give him an enormous sum of money. Where is her checkbook. Where is the telephone.

“Mother.”

They hold her arms.

“Mother.”

“Call the doctor.”

No, don’t call the doctor. The doctor is dead. He died in 1857. He died in 1935. He died in 1391, he is nothing but bones. Memories are his flesh and she can burn him up with the blink of her eye. Memories are fickle. Memories taste smoky. They taste like Kirschkuchen. Everything withers and turns to bones. Walter is bones. Louis is bones. Soon she too will be bones. Give enough money and problems turn to bones. She will grind them up and cast them upon the water; she will be remembered forever in the minds of people who have never met her; she will live in their minds the way memories live in hers, the way she so starkly recalls the flood that destroyed their basement; lightning seen from the bow of a ship; the pain of childbirth; the pain of childbirth; the dullness of intercourse; the men who attempted to woo her when Louis died, imagine that, she a wrinkled old woman and men thirty years younger offering her roses; she remembers and remembers and remembers and it is not a flashing of her life so much as a cascade, events superimposed and time seesawing, people who never met shaking hands, conversations a moment ago crystalline now fizzy and roaring like the surf, the frame of her mind creaking and buckling inward, a mineshaft, rivers of dirt snaking down the incline toward blackness.

“Mrs. Muller.”

“Mother.”

Mrs. Muller.

Mother.

Yes, she is Mrs. Muller. She had a husband. Yes, she is a mother. She has a son.

20

t took an afternoon of phone calls, but I managed to track down the New York School for Training and Rehabilitation, right where Joe said it would be: ten miles outside Albany, operating under the name Green Gardens Rehabilitation Center. An assistant director named Driscoll told me that in its previous incarnation, the place had been an honest-to- goodness asylum, of the padded walls and shock treatment ilk. Like many such institutions, it had fallen victim to the civil rights movement, its programs disbanded and its charter revised to reflect a kinder, gentler approach: Green Gardens specialized in spinal injuries. Driscoll took evident relish in recounting all this to me; he seemed to consider himself the unofficial historian.

I asked about the old patient records, and he said, “A couple years ago we had a problem with the boiler, so I go down to the basement with a flashlight. I’m crawling around, sneezing my head off, and I stumble right through a big pile of letters, medical records, all the physicians’ notes. Nobody had touched any of it for twenty years. The paper was disintegrating.”

“So you still have them,” I said.

“No. When I told Dr. Ulrich she had them shredded.”

My heart sank. “There’s nothing left?”

“There’s probably one or two down there that we missed, but even so, I couldn’t give you access to them. They’re confidential.”

“That’s really a shame.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

I thanked him and started to get off the phone when he said,

“You know what, though.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’ll have to look into this. But we have some photos.”

“What kind of photos.”

“Well—and this gives you an idea of what ideas about privacy laws used to be like—they’re up on the walls in one of the old wings. They’re black-and-whites, sort of like class photos. Groups of patients in ties and jackets. I even think there’s one where they’re wearing baseball uniforms. Some of them have names and some don’t. I don’t know if the person you want is there, but I might be able to show them to you. I don’t see what kind of rules we’d be breaking, considering that they’re already on display.”

“That would be fantastic. Thank you.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. Ulrich and let you know.”

I called Samantha, finally back from South Carolina.

“Strong work,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I mean, really, you’re turning into Columbo.”

“Thank you.”

“Like, a metrosexual Columbo.”

“Tell me you have good news, too.”

“I do,” she said.

“And?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Oh come on.”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

We agreed to meet up the following week. In the interim I went back to the doctor for a checkup. He looked into all the orifices in my head, pronounced me well, and offered to give me more painkillers. I filled the prescription and set it aside to give to Marilyn when she got back from France.

That Sunday, the second in January, I received a second e-mail from her. This one was in German. I turned to an Internet translator for assistance.

On 24 October 1907 the Vossi newspaper reported: “During the daily of yesterday emperors had, Empress, princesses and prince the magnificent Building of hotels visits and Mr. Adlon their acknowledgment here in glorious capital the work in most honoring way expressed. “

Taking this to mean she had gone to Berlin, I swallowed my pride and responded with a second long, pleading e-mail. As soon as I pressed SEND, I regretted it. I had already put myself out there in my first letter, already degraded myself. Now I didn’t know what I was trying to achieve. Reconciliation? I wasn’t sure I wanted it. For the past two weeks I had been entirely Marilyn-free, and while on some level I missed her, I also felt for the first time in years like I could fully relax. That’s the way you’re supposed to feel about your parents, not your lover. Not that I was an authority on either.

Mostly I wanted her to forgive me so I could feel less guilty breaking things off, assuming it came to that—which I assumed it would. Or else I wanted her to be so livid, so beyond reason, that I could walk away without any fanfare. I wanted a starting point: she was either totally okay or not okay at all. I could work with either. What I couldn’t deal with was limbo, and so that’s where she kept me. She knew me well enough to have predicted the effects of her silence. She was drawing out my discomfort on purpose. It made me mad, although looking back, I suppose I deserved it.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON I got a call from Detective Trueg of the major case squad, who asked if I had time to come over to the station. Eager to be out of the gallery, I hopped in a taxi, and upon arrival was escorted to a cubicle, where he sat ensconced in a ring of discarded Burger King wrappers. Andrade, too, had his lunch out: a half-finished Tupperware container of tofu and brown rice.

“You want a Coke?” Trueg asked me.

“No, thanks.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Cause we don’t got none.”

The investigation, the detectives informed me, had taken an odd turn around the time they decided to question Kristjana Hallbjornsdottir.

Trueg said, “We go over to her studio, we’re talking to her. She’s not saying anything too suspicious or not suspicious, one way or the other. I excuse myself and ask if I can use the restroom. Down the hall I go and what do you know, up on the wall are some drawings that look a hell of a lot like yours.”

I sat up straight.

Trueg nodded. “Yup. Right out there for everyone in the world to see. Naturally, this is very interesting to us, but we don’t say anything about it. We finish asking her about her relationship with you, we say thank you very much, and then we go and get a warrant.” He smiled crookedly. “That lady is one live wire when she’s mad.”

“You have no idea.”

“We had to have someone take her outside to calm her down.”

“You’re not the first.”

“What did you do to her, anyway? I never was clear on that.”

“I canceled a show of hers,” I said, trying to contain my impatience. “She has the drawings?”

Andrade reached into his desk and took out a handful of pages sealed in evidence bags: a dozen Crackes, easily identifiable by their wild sense of scale, their surreal imagery, the oddball names and recurrent faces. The backs were numbered in the mid-thirty-nine thousands. As Andrade spread them out in front of me, I felt a rush of relief that Kristjana had not destroyed the pieces out of spite. But then it occurred to me that these might be all that remained from the several thousand she had stolen.

“The box I had was full,” I said. “It had probably two thousand drawings.”

“Well, that’s all she wrote,” said Trueg.

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

Andrade shook his head.

“Oh, no.” I put my head in my hands. “Oh, shit.”

“Before you get too upset—” said Trueg.

“Did you search her apartment? Shit. I don’t believe this. Shit.” “Hang on,” said Trueg, “that isn’t the half of it. I’m just gettin warmed up here.”

“Shit.”

“I think you want to listen to this,” said Andrade. “Shit …”

Trueg said, “So we take her in and question her, and as soon as we bring up the drawings she gets this very offended look on her face and says—” He looked at his partner. “Go on, you do it. You do it good.”

Andrade said, in a stilted Scandinavian accent, “‘But I made them myselv.’”

Absorbed by the thought of my destroyed art, I barely heard him. When what he said finally did register, I said, “Excuse me?” “Go on,” said Trueg. “Do it again.”

“She claims she made the drawings herself,” said Andrade.

“Aw, come on, Benny, one more time.”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait a second. She made what herself.”

“The drawings,” said Andrade.

“Which drawings.”

“These,” said Trueg, indicating the Crackes. I stared at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, that’s what she said.” He seemed disconcertingly calm, as did Andrade.

“Well,” I said. “But that’s ridiculous. Why would she do that?” “She says someone hired her to make copies,” said Trueg. “You know, in the style of.” “What?”

“I’m just tellin you what she said.”

“Who hired her?”

“She wouldn’t say,” said Andrade.

“Nope,” said Trueg. “On that she got real stubborn.”

I sat back and crossed my arms. “Well. That’s—I mean—that’s ludicrous.”

“We thought so, too,” said Andrade. “So we asked her to produce one for us. I sat in the room and watched while she did it. See for yourself.”

He opened his desk again and pulled out a second batch of evidence bags containing drawings virtually indistinguishable from the first. I take that back. They were indistinguishable. I kept blinking and staring and blinking, certain that I was hallucinating. Most disorienting of all was that the drawings connected, seamlessly, just as the Crackes did—and not only that, but they connected to the first set of drawings, the ones confiscated from the studio, as though Kristjana had taken a smoking break and then carried on working. I asked if she had been looking at the first drawings at the time and Andrade shook his head and said no, she’d done them from memory. Suddenly I began to sweat, and what I’d once said to Marilyn popped into my head: “She used to be a good painter.” Kristjana was classically trained, after all, and it would be just like her to get a kick out of copying the work of the very artist who had displaced her. It probably tickled her sense of martyrdom, that preachiness that made her worst work intolerable. It fit, all right; but at the same time I could not accept that the work was so easily parodied. I was the expert on Victor Cracke’s iconography; I knew what was and what wasn’t; I had the goddamned droit moral goddammit, and the work I was looking at was as authentic as anything I’d dragged out of that shitty stuffy little apartment. Had to be. Look at it, for crissake. Both sets of drawings on the desk had to have been done by the same person; even the tone of the inks—which in the Cracke drawings varied from one section to another, depending on age—were a perfect match. And then the room began to spin: what if the drawings I had in storage didn’t belong to Victor Cracke. What if the whole thing was part of an elaborate prank orchestrated by Kristjana herself? Victor Cracke was Kristjana. In my agitation, this idea seemed absurd enough to be plausible. She loved that sort of self-referential swill, and I could imagine the masochistic frisson she would get from getting me to cancel a show of her work in order to put up another show of her work. Who was Victor Cracke, anyhow? Nobody. Nobody that I knew, or that anybody else knew. It was all Kristjana. Everything was by Kristjana. The Mona Lisa? That was her. The Venus de Milo? Also her. Everything that Kevin Hollister wanted to hang in his office, from Allegory of Spring to Olympia—all her! I began to wonder how she had gotten Tony Wexler in on the joke, not to mention Superintendent Shaughnessy, the neighbors, the fruit vendor, Joe the checkers champion … double agents, all. But—but—but I had talked to people who’d seen Victor Cracke, passed him in the hallway … and but none of them could give me a complete physical description … but wasn’t that more realistic, wouldn’t people retain differing impressions? … but wouldn’t Kristjana know that, and account for it, couldn’t she script something just so … ?

My headache returned, with gravy.

Mixed in with my confusion was a strong sense of annoyance that she’d been wasting her time planning destructive installations involving one-ton sea mammals when she could so easily produce shit that people would buy.

I don’t know whether Andrade and Trueg thought I was having a breakdown or what, but when I said, “It sure looks like the real McCoy,” they nodded sympathetically, the kind of nod you give a crazy person to keep him calm while the men in white coats get their nets out of the van.

Trueg said, “Hang on, show’s not over yet. We also found this in her apartment.”

Andrade opened his desk again—what was he going to pull out now? A picture of Kristjana and Victor having tea?—and handed me another bagged piece of evidence, this one containing a half-completed letter, written in the same tiny, threatening hand as the two letters I had supposedly gotten from Victor himself. It said, many times, LIAR.

“Why does she think you’re a liar?” Andrade asked.

“How the hell do I know?” I said. “She’s insane.”

LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR

“If you ask me,” said Andrade, “this would seem to lend some credence to her claim about having done the drawings.”

LIAR

“You said those first two letters came from the artist, right?” Trueg asked.

“I thought so.”

“Well, this looks like the same person to me,” he said. He looked at Andrade. “Benny? What do you think?”

“I think so.”

Trueg smiled at me. “That’s our professional opinion. Same person. So she fooled you once, I don’t see why she couldn’t do it again.”

“But.” I picked up the letter. LIAR LIAR LIAR. “Don’t you think—I mean, she’s threatening me, why don’t you arrest her for assaulting me?”

“Well,” said Trueg, “that’s not so straightforward, either. She admits to sending you the first two letters—”

“All right,” I said. “There you go.”

“—and she says she was going to send another. But then she tells us that the first two were intended as some kind of practical joke.”

“You have got to be—”

“And when you got jumped, she started to worry about implicating herself, so she stopped sending them. She’d written half of the next one but she didn’t finish it, and that’s the one we found. This one.”

“And you believe her?”

Trueg and Andrade looked at each other. Then they look at me.

“Yeah,” said Trueg. “I do, actually.”

Andrade said, “That was my instinct, as well.”

“She offered to take a polygraph.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “This. This is … So what are you saying—that she’s the one or not.”

“We don’t know,” said Trueg. “She might have arranged for you to get beat up, but it wasn’t her who did it. At eleven forty-five she was at a party across town. All the other guests we talked to swear she was there from ten until at least one in the morning.”

“She could get them to say that,” I said. Even to my ears I sounded paranoid.

“That’s true,” Andrade said kindly.

“She could get someone to do it for her,” I said.

“That’s true, too.”

I said, “I don’t know what else to think.”

“Right now we don’t have anything we can charge her with that’s going to stick. Maybe, like, harassment for those first couple of letters. But I gotta be honest with you, I don’t think they’re going to bother. She says it was just a joke.”

“Do you find this funny?” I demanded, holding up the letter.

Trueg and Andrade exchanged another look.

“Well,” said Andrade, “not a hundred percent funny.”

“But like sixty percent,” said Trueg.

I stared at them. Why did everyone kept finding my distress so amusing?

“Maybe more like thirty,” Trueg said.

Andrade said, “Essentially, we’re where we were before. We’ll keep looking for the art to pop up. In the meantime you can relax about those letters. I don’t think you’ll get any more of them.”

I nodded dumbly.

Said Trueg, “Wheels within wheels.”

I LEFT THE STATION IN A FOG and stayed that way until my meeting with Samantha. She saw me and immediately asked if I was feeling all right. I explained to her what the detectives had told me and she said, “Wow.”

“Indeed.”

“That’s messed up.”

“Indeed.”

She grinned. “Well, allow me to add a little clarity to your life.”

She told me that she had found James Jarvis, the man who, thirty years prior, had survived an assault reminiscent of the Queens murders. He now lived in Boston, where he taught marketing at a community college. Samantha had spoken with him, and although he claimed not to remember much, her gut told her that he was holding back. Having dealt with many victims of sexual assault, she believed we would get more from him face-to-face; the telephone made it easier for people to detach themselves and to repress

frightening memories. And when, the next day, the assistant director at Green Gardens called to let me know that while he couldn’t send out copies of the photographs, we could come have a look for ourselves, Samantha and I decided to make a trip of it.

Wednesday morning two weeks later, we boarded a puddle-jumper from LaGuardia to Albany International Airport. The previous evening’s weather report warned of an incoming nor’easter, and I expected a long delay, if not a cancellation. But that day dawned bright and clear; the terminal’s picture windows threw long rectangles of sunlight, a big blank filmstrip through which Samantha moved, illuminated, toward me. She wore lavender corduroys and a black sweater and no makeup; she swung a battered duffel bag, and when she stood at the ticket kiosk, she hooked her thumbs into her back pockets. I stood off a ways, looking at her, reluctant to break the spell she had cast around herself, and when I finally did come over to say hello and she smiled at me, it was hard not to tell her how lovely she looked.

We got our tickets and boarded a bus that took us across the tarmac to a rickety-looking prop plane, its wings glistening with deicer. There were only thirty seats, and as we took our places across the aisle from each other, Samantha turned her attention out the window, to the maintenance worker spraying down the blades.

“I hate flying,” she said.

I took her at face value. Who doesn’t hate flying? Especially these days.

But I underestimated her. At every bump—and in a tiny plane, you feel them—she clutched at the armrests, sweat beading at her hairline.

“Are you okay?”

She was pale. “I just really hate this.”

“Do you want some water?”

“No, thank you.” The plane dipped and her whole body tensed. “I’m not like this,” she said. “It started after Ian died.”

I nodded. I did a quick risk assessment and, hoping I was making the right decision, reached across the aisle and took her hand. She held on to me for the remainder of the flight, letting go only to allow the beverage cart past.

I DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT ALBANY except that Ed Koch had once referred to it as a town without a decent Chinese restaurant, and as we pulled out of the airport I saw the wisdom of his words. A limp sense of obligation compelled us to take a spin past the Capitol, which proved an ostentatious red-and-white mess, an attempt at dignity in a place obviously discredited by time. In hindsight, it might’ve been prudent of the first New Yorkers to reserve judgment a bit before choosing their capital. What seemed important three hundred years ago—an abundance of locally procurable beaver pelt— might eventually matter less than, say, being the worldwide center of culture and finance. But we’ll not Monday-morning quarterback.

Green Gardens was over the Hudson, off Route 151. We drove through low neighborhoods still festooned with tinsel; we came to a highway junction where, in a wet asphalt lot adjacent to a gas station, two men stood watching a third as he walked backward atop a truck tire. Before letting Samantha get behind the wheel, I’d made her promise she was calm enough, and by now she had returned to her dry, rational self, spending the bulk of the drive flatly relaying holiday horror stories.

“My mom called Jerry my dad’s name.”

“You’re joking.”

“Wish I was.”

“Was she drunk?”

“No. But he was. That’s why she did it, I think. I think she was having one of those flashbacks to when she used to yell at my dad. Jerry was being an ass about something she cooked and she goes, ‘Goddammit Lee!’ Right away she put her hands over her mouth, like in a cartoon.”

“Did he notice?”

“Yup.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yup.”

“That’s appalling.”

“It is what it is.” She looked at me. “Did you call your father?”

I hesitated. “No.”

She nodded, said nothing.

Feeling defensive, I said, “I was going to. I actually did pick up the phone.”

“But?”

“I had no idea what to say.”

“You could have asked why he wanted to buy your drawings.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s up to you.” She signaled left. “We’re here.”

The stone columns flanking the entrance to Green Gardens had once supported a gate; similar columns ran all along the frontage, stained with rust runoff near the empty bracket holes in their tops and sides. Thickets of pine and alder blocked the view from the road; as we cleared them, I felt a rising sense of anticipation. A towering white house came into view, gabled and turreted and encircled by a porch. We parked and mounted the steps and were greeted by a man with a little red goatee.

“Dennis Driscoll,” he said.

“Ethan Muller. This is ADA Samantha McGrath.”

“Howdy.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “We don’t get a lot of visitors.”

The interior of the house was creaky and musty and berugged, its original Victorian trimmings intact: god-awful wallpaper, push-button light-switches, an off-kilter chandelier. Steam pipes hissed. In the foyer hung a severe oil portrait of a jowly, baldpated man: THOMAS WESTFIELD WORTHE, according to the nameplate.

“He was in charge until the mid-sixties,” Driscoll said. “In its time, it was considered a fairly progressive place.” He led us upstairs, pausing on the landing to point out the window. Across a wide, snowy meadow stood a second building, this one squarely modern. “That’s where the dormitory used to be. They knocked it down in the 70s to make room for the main rehab facility. The house is from 1897.” He started up toward the third floor. “I was surprised to hear from you so soon. Frankly, I don’t think Dr. Ulrich expected you to show up, which is probably why she agreed.”

“Here we are.”

“Yessirree.” We walked along a cramped, dark hallway, went up another flight of stairs. “This part of the house isn’t used very much, because the heat doesn’t work that well. And in the summer it’s like a kiln. Mostly we use these rooms for storage. Long-term patients can leave their bags. We get a lot of out-of-staters, a few Canadians tired of being on a waiting list. In theory family members could sleep here, but I always recommend they use the Days Inn. Voila.” We turned the corner.

He said, “You can see why I didn’t want to go through them all myself.”

All along the hallway hung hundreds of photographs, their frames cracking from decades of seasonal fluctuation in humidity. Virtually every inch of wallpaper was covered, evoking one of those claustrophobic seventeenth-century “paintings of paintings,” some Flemish archduke’s personal gallery smothered floor to ceiling in art. A few of the photos were of individuals, but most were as Driscoll had described, in the style of a class portrait, the subjects arranged in rows, tallest in the back, shortest sitting cross-legged, all of them dead-eyed, their hair slicked down and their collars buttoned up; all of them rigid and sullen, as befits the subjects of an old photo. But I detected, too, an extra dose of insolence; sneers lingering and chins jutting out farther than strictly necessary. Was I overreading? I did know, after all, that they’d been sent here for bad behavior. Either way, I felt a profound sympathy for them, these castoffs. Had I been born in a less indulgent era, to a less indulgent family, I might have ended up among them.

Knowing that somewhere in this array of faces we might find Victor Cracke gave rise to the temptation to rush, but we proceeded methodically, squinting to read the legends. Some were unlabeled. I lifted one frame off the wall and found nothing on the reverse but June 2, 1954. All these faces and names; all these forgotten souls. Where were their families? What kinds of lives did they lead before coming here? Did they ever leave? Ghosts tugged at my sleeves: spirits looking for a living body to carry them away.

I think I expected fireworks when we found him. All that happened, though, was Samantha saying,

“Ethan.”

Seven men in a single row. She put her finger near the bottom of the frame.

STANLEY YOUNG FREDERICK GUDRAIS VICTOR CRACKE MELVIN LATHAM

Shorter than the men to either side of him by at least four inches, wearing an uneven moustache, his eyes wide and terrified as he waits for the flash. A high forehead and a rounded chin give his face the shape of an inverted tombstone, its width out of proportion with his torso, which is sunken and slight. He might be hunchbacked. Based on the other men in the photo, seemingly from the same cohort, I put him at about twenty-five, although he looked prematurely wizened.

Driscoll said, “I’ll be darned.”

My hands shook as I took the picture from Samantha. I felt a lot of things—sadness, relief, excitement—but most of all I felt betrayed. Once, he had not existed. Once, I had been the one to create him; I had been the prime mover. Then, as we hunted him down, I had been forced to forfeit those beliefs, piecemeal and painfully. I talked to people who knew him. I ate his apples. I walked in his footsteps. He became realer and realer, and afraid of losing him entirely, I had grabbed at him. Instead of minimizing him, I inflated him. I had expected that when I finally did lay eyes on him, he would be more: more than a typed name; more than a bunch of muddled grays and chalky whites, a piece of institutional arcana; more than a sad-looking golemlike little man. I wanted someone monumental; I wanted a totem, a superman; I wanted a sign that he was of the Elect; I wanted a halo hovering above him, or devil’s horns sprouting from his forehead, or anything, anything at all to justify the sweeping changes he had wrought in my life. He was my god, and his plainness shamed me.

Interlude: ó/44.

In the little house he has everything he needs. Mrs. Greene cooks for him and does his laundry. She teaches him how to read and how to do simple math. She teaches him the names of birds and animals, she gives him a big book, she puts him on her lap and reads to him from the Bible. The story he likes best is Moses in the bulrushes. He imagines the basket on the Nile, surrounded by crocodiles and storks. Mrs. Greene uses her hands to make their snapping jaws, scaring him with loud claps. Chomp! But Victor knows that the story has a happy ending. Moses’s sister watches from the banks. She will not let anything happen to him.

Most of all he likes to draw, and when Mrs. Greene goes to town she brings back boxes of colored pencils and paper so thin he has to be careful not to tear through. She does not go often enough to satisfy his hunger for blank space and so he draws on the walls. When she sees she is angry. You must not do that, Victor. There is never enough room to draw, so he learns to hoard paper of all kinds: envelopes he fishes out of the trash, the insides of books Mrs. Greene reads and puts away on the shelf. One time she pulls down a book and sees what he has done and then she is angry again. He doesn’t understand. She has already read them, what does it matter? But she says You must never and then she beats him.

But she does not beat him too often. Most of the time she is tender and he loves her like a mother although he does not have a mother and Mrs.

Greene will not let him call her that. He doesn’t understand where he came from, but he doesn’t worry, he has everything he needs, food and Mrs. Greene and paper.

They walk all around the property. Mrs. Greene teaches him the names of the flowers and he studies their petals up close. There are bees but he never gets stung. He stares at a flower until he sees it in his mind perfect, then he goes back to the cottage and draws. Mrs. Greene calls him an odd duck but she smiles when she says it. Victor, you’re an odd duck. Look at that daffodil. Look at that dandelion. Foxglove, chicory, and clover, they all have different shapes. You’re an odd duck, you are, but you are quick with a pencil.

He is six. He sees other children moving along the road on funny things and she says Those are bicycles. They move so fast! He wants one. Mrs. Greene says No, you cannot leave the property. He replies that he will not leave the property, but please oh please give me a bicycle.

No.

Victor hates her. To get back at her he waits until she has fallen asleep in the afternoon, which she often does, and then he pulls a stool over to the wall where the key hangs on a ribbon. He unlocks the front door and the front gate and walks all the way into town. He has been to town before but always hanging tightly to her hand. Before the town seemed exciting but now it is loud. A car honks at him. A dog barks at him. He feels dizzy and to escape he goes into a store. The storekeeper looks at him like he is a big bug. It starts to rain and he cannot leave. He stays in the store for hours. He gets hungry. He wants something to eat but he has no money so he takes the first thing he sees, some rock sugar. He puts it in his pocket and runs out. The storekeeper chases him. Victor runs as fast as he can. The storekeeper slips in a puddle and falls and when Victor looks back the man is blotched with mud brown-and-white like a cow. But he is no longer chasing. He yells still and still Victor runs. By the time he gets to the front gate his feet hurt and fire burns in his chest.

Mrs. Greene is not in her room. Victor climbs on the stool and puts the key back and goes to his room and lies on his bed, wheezing and touching the sugar rock in his pocket. He is not hungry anymore. He doesn’t like sweets, he should have taken something he liked more. He doesn’t like to eat very much at all, and so he is very skinny and not too tall, he knows this because when the man with the mirror and the tongue stick came to visit he told Mrs. Greene that the boy needed to eat more, his growth was already stunted. And she replied that didn’t he think she had tried. The man was a doctor. He left. Mrs. Greene said he would return.

Victor takes the sugar rock out of his pocket. He likes the way it feels, sharp and hard and delicate. He plays with it until it begins to melt in his hands. He puts it on the table and observes the way it bends the sunlight. He takes a piece of paper and traces the jagged shape. He starts to shade its different faces and then Mrs. Greene bursts in with her face red like a chicken’s. She says she knows what he has been up to, she has been half mad looking for him. Where did he think he was going, what did he think he was doing? Never again oh you wicked boy, you must learn, you are a fool. She smashes the sugar rock on the floor. Then she puts him over her knee and paddles him until he wails. You wicked boy. She takes his half-completed sketch and tears it to pieces.

But most of the time she is kind. She takes him to church. Victor likes the windows. They show the Annunciation and the Sermon and the Resurrection. They shine with blue and purple fire. Victor likes to imagine them when he lies in bed at night. He likes their colors but more so their shapes. Mrs. Greene teaches him to pray and he often lies awake at night and whispers the rosary.

Another man comes to visit. He comes in a long black car. He wears a big felt hat like Victor has never seen. Hello, Victor. The man knows his name. He has a moustache. Victor wants a moustache. He thinks of what it would be like to have a friendly pet on his face all the time. He would never be alone the way he is. He is often alone but does not often feel lonely. Sometimes he feels very lonely, though. Why is that?

The man with the moustache comes often. Sometimes they are walking the property and when they come home the man is waiting for them, reading the newspaper. When Victor is lucky the man forgets to take the newspaper when he leaves. Victor tears it into strips and saves them for future use.

He likes the man’s visits. They are brief and they always end with a gift. The man brings Victor a model ship and a big glove and a ball and a spinning top. Victor puts on the glove and it is like his hand has gotten bigger. He doesn’t know what to do with it until Mrs. Greene tells him that you use it to catch the ball. But who will throw the ball to him? Mrs. Greene says she will but she never does. The glove goes unused. The ship he likes to draw. The top he can make spin for a long time.

When the man with the moustache comes he spends a great deal of time looking at different parts of the house, poking his head into rooms. He opens and closes doors. When they squeak he makes a sour face. He wipes his finger along the tops of the tables and rubs his fingertips together. Then he asks Victor questions. What is three multiplied by five? Write your name for me, Victor. If Victor gets an answer right the man gives him a nickel. If he gets it wrong, or if he does not know, the man frowns, the fuzzy creature on his upper lip standing up in disgust. Victor aims to get as many right as possible, but as he gets older the questions become more complicated. He begins to dread the man’s visits. He feels ashamed. He turns seven and the man says We must get him some lessons.

A few days later another man comes to the house. His name is Mr. Thornton and he is the tutor. He carries a stack of books, which to Victor’s amazement and joy he leaves behind. Victor has never seen so much paper in his life, and that night he sets to it like a fiend, scribbling in the margins, making patterns, stars, faces. When the tutor comes back the next morning and discovers that not only has Victor failed to do the assignment but that he has ruined three brand-new textbooks, he paddles Victor much harder than Mrs. Greene ever would. Victor cries out but Mrs. Greene is in town buying groceries. The man beats Victor’s bottom hard enough to make him bleed.

Lessons are not all bad. The man teaches him how to weigh things on a scale; how to look at plants under a microscope. The shapes are beautiful snowflakes. They are called cells. Victor hopes the man will leave the microscope for him to use, but alas he packs it back into its leather case and takes it away when he leaves. Victor draws the cells from memory. He does not dare show the results to the tutor, who has already shown his distaste for Victor’s drawings.

One time while Mrs. Greene is in town the tutor tells Victor to stand up and take off his trousers. Victor screams because he does not want to be paddled again. He has done nothing wrong! He screams and the tutor grabs him and puts his hand across Victor’s mouth until Victor cannot breathe. Victor tries to bite the tutor’s fingers but the tutor slaps him flat. The tutor unbuckles Victor’s belt and pulls his trousers down. Victor prepares himself for pain but the tutor touches his legs and Victor’s bottom and then he puts his hand on Victor’s privates. Then the tutor tells him to get dressed and they study some grammar. Sometimes this happens.

The next time the doctor comes he tells Victor to take off his trousers and Victor screams. He bites the doctor on the elbow and runs around the room until Mrs. Greene grabs his arms and the doctor grabs his legs and they tie him to the chair with a garden hose.

What in the world has gotten into him.

I don’t know.

Dear Lord look at him.

The doctor points a light in Victor’s eyes. Does he do this a great deal?

No.

Hmm. Hmm. Off goes the light. Well, it’s very strange.

They go into the next room. Victor can still hear them.

Does he have fits?

No.

Anything else?

He speaks to himself. He has imaginary friends.

That’s perfectly natural for children.

A boy his age? He speaks more to them than to me. Something is out of joint.

Hardly surprising.

He isn’t like his mother.

No. But feeblemindedness takes many forms.

It’s not natural to keep him here.

It isn’t our decision.

It can’t go on like this. How long?

I don’t know.

I won’t stay here forever.

Victor wriggles his hands against the hose.

Mercy says Mrs. Greene. Mercy.

I’ll talk to Mr. Muller.

Please do.

I’ll tell him that something needs to be done.

Where has he been? I’ve heard nothing in months.

He’s abroad. He went to London. They’re building a wharf.

Dear Lord. Is there nobody in the world besides you and I?

At the moment, no.

It isn’t right.

No. Oh.

Mrs. Greene. Oh. Oh.

I am at your disposal. Oh.

The hose starts to loosen. Victor pulls his arms free. Then he unties his feet. He creeps to the door and sees Mrs. Greene and the doctor standing close together. The doctor’s hands are inside her blouse. She stands away and together they go into another room. They are gone a long time. When Mrs. Greene comes back for Victor she does not seem surprised to find him at his desk, drawing. She gives him a mug of hot chocolate and kisses him on the head. She smells like bathwater.

Soon after that he sees Mrs. Greene’s body. He crouches at the keyhole while she takes a bath. The steam makes it hard to see but when she steps from the bathtub her bosoms shake, they are large and white. He makes a noise and she hears him and she puts on her towel. She opens the door as he is running away. You’re a dirty boy. He runs to his room and hides under the bed. She comes in wearing a dress that she put on inside out. Her hair drips, it sprays as she pulls him from under the bed. He scrapes at the floor but she is stronger. Dirty dirty boy. She does not paddle him, though. She sets him on the edge of the bed and scolds him in a loud voice. You must never. That is not what a good boy does. You must be a good boy not a bad boy.

He wants to be a good boy.

Time passes. The man with the moustache comes to visit. He looks unhappy.

It’s simply intolerable sir says Mrs. Greene.

The man paces the room, pulling on his ears. I understand.

Victor is amazed. He likes to pull on his ears, too. Mrs. Greene does not like him to do that, she slaps his hands and tells him to stop being such an odd duck. Yet here is the man with the moustache, so tall and majestic in his big hat, pulling on his ears just like Victor does. It makes Victor feel proud.

He needs to be in school sir.

I’m aware of that. I’ve asked Dr. Fetchett to find a more suitable place for him. It’s not as simple as sending him to Priestly. The man with the moustache stops to look at one of Victor’s drawings, which Mrs. Greene has stuck on the wall. This is quite good.

I can’t take credit for that sir.

You mean—really.

Yes sir.

All of them? My goodness. I had no idea. I always assumed they were yours.

No sir.

He’s quite talented. He should have paints.

Yes sir.

Let’s get him some, then.

Yes sir.

I’ll be back soon. I’ll talk to Fetchett, we’ll figure out a way.

Yes sir.

And the lessons? Any progress?

No sir. He still will not do his work. He tears it up.

The man sighs. You must discipline him.

Don’t you think I’ve tried.

Mind your tone.

I am sorry sir. I’m at the end of my tether.

I understand. Here is something for you.

Thank you sir.

And buy the boy some paints, please.

Yes sir.

Be a good boy, Victor.

He never sees the man again.

Time passes. He is eleven. Mrs. Greene makes a birthday cake for him and when she brings it to the table she starts to cry. I cannot. I simply cannot.

Victor wants to help her. He offers her some of his cake.

Thank you dear. That’s very kind of you.

A new car comes. Victor stands at the window and watches as it rolls up. It is gray. A man in a blue jacket jumps out and runs to the back door and opens it for a woman with a big swirl of hair and a hat high and brown like a toadstool. Mrs. Greene runs to answer the door and the woman in the hat walks past her. She stands in the middle of the room and looks down her nose at everything. Then she looks at Victor.

He is filthy.

He has been playing in the yard mam.

Don’t answer me back. The boy’s filthy and that is all there is to say. Well do you have anything to say for yourself ?

The woman is talking to him. He says nothing.

He isn’t the talkative sort mam.

You shut up. The woman in the hat moves around the room, picking up plates and tossing them down roughly. And this place is a pigsty, too.

I’m sorry mam. Usually I do the washing in the afternoon, after—

I don’t care. Clean him up. He’s leaving.

Mam?

You are not to be faulted for my husband’s poor decisions, but you must recognize that he is gone and the decisions are now mine and mine alone. Do you understand me?

Yes mam.

Now clean him up, I can’t bear to look at him.

Mrs. Greene draws him a bath. He does not want to take a bath; he already took a bath the day before. He struggles and she begs him. Please Victor. She sounds like she might cry and he allows her to take off his clothes and put him in the tub.

The woman in the hat says The car will be here in an hour.

Where are you sending him mam.

That’s no concern of yours.

With all due respect … I’m sorry mam.

You may stay here as long as you’d like.

I wouldn’t like to at all mam.

I don’t blame you. My husband was a damned fool. Well don’t you think that this is an idiotic plan?

I couldn’t say mam.

Yes you can, you have an opinion, don’t you.

No mam.

You’re very well trained. How much did he pay you.

Mam.

I’ll see to it you’re taken care of. You call this number. Do we have an understanding?

Yes mam.

Idiot. How long did he intend to keep this up?

I couldn’t say mam. He talked about finding the boy a school.

The woman in the hat looks at Victor and shudders. Well it’s done now.

They put him in a car and drive him through the snow. He has never been so far from home. Mrs. Greene sits with him, holding his hand. He does not know where he is going and many times he feels frightened. He screams and Mrs. Greene says to him Please Victor. Look at the trees. What do they look like? Here, take the paper. The bumping car makes drawing difficult. He tries to steady his hand but then when he starts to get something on paper he feels sick and has to close his eyes. He wants to go home. When will they turn back? He wants his bed and his cocoa, he wants his spinning top. He cries and Mrs. Greene says Look at the trees, Victor.

The trees are pointy and tall and white. They look like sugar rock.

At dusk they come to a house. It is bigger than any house he has ever seen, much bigger than his house. The house has a sooty face with yellow eyes. The car stops and Mrs. Greene gets out. Victor sits in the car.

Come on dear.

Victor gets out of the car. Mrs. Greene holds a small suitcase in her hand. She is standing very stiffly. Then she kneels down in the snow in her stockinged knees. Her eyes are small and red. You must be a good boy. Do you understand me?

He nods.

Good. Promise me you’ll be a good boy.

Ah here he is, our young gentleman. A man with stuck-down hair stands at the top of the stairs. He smiles. Hello there, young sir. My name is Dr. Worthe. You must be Victor. He holds out his hand. Victor puts his hands behind his back.

He’s very tired sir.

I can see that. The rest of the boys have just sat down to dinner. Would you like something to eat, Victor?

He’s quiet sir.

Dr. Worthe, who does not resemble the other doctor at all, crouches so that his face is near Victor’s. Are you hungry, young man? He smiles. Well, cat’s got his tongue. Victor doesn’t know anything about a cat.

They go inside. There is a big wooden staircase and a sparkly light. Mrs. Greene puts the suitcase down. We didn’t have time to pack all his things. I’ll send them along.

We’ll make sure he has everything he needs. Won’t we, Victor?

Then Mrs. Greene says I’m going to go now, Victor. You must listen to the man and do as he says. Be a good boy, be on your best behavior. I know you’ll do me proud.

She walks toward the front door. Victor follows.

No, you must stay.

Come, young man, let’s put something in your stomach, hey?

You must stay Victor.

Come on young man. Let’s be grown-up about this.

Victor. No. No Victor no. No.

They hold him.

Then he is alone.

Dr. Worthe puts his hand on Victor’s shoulder and leads him out a different door. They walk along a stone path to a brick building with a puffing chimney. Victor hears a car start and he wants to see if it is Mrs. Greene but Dr. Worthe squeezes his shoulder and says Now, now.

In the brick building they go first to the dining room. It is bigger than any room Victor has ever seen, running the length of the building and filled with tables and benches, boys and men of all ages wearing white shirts and brown sweaters and ties. Some of them look over when the door opens. They stare at Victor. Everyone is talking, the noise hurts Victor’s ears. He covers his ears but Dr. Worthe pries off his hands.

Let’s introduce you to some people who can be your friends.

Dr. Worthe shows him where to get food. There is a window and you go with a metal tray. The man in the apron gives you a plateful of stew. You take the tray and you sit at the third table.

Boys I’d like you to meet your new classmate. This is Victor. Say hello boys.

Hello.

Say hello Victor.

Victor says nothing.

Be friendly now. It is not clear who Dr. Worthe is speaking to.

Victor sits at the end of the bench. It is crowded and uncomfortable. He sees that there is another table with more room and he goes there.

No they say. You must go back. A man with a long neck takes him by the arm. Victor screams and bites him. The man lets out a shout and then everyone begins to shout. The noise makes Victor’s ears crackle. He has hot liquid on his arms, it burns him. The shouting grows louder and louder until Dr. Worthe stands on a chair. That’s enough. Victor is on the floor. Dr. Worthe comes near him and he screams. Dr. Worthe picks him up, another man also picks him up and they carry him away. He screams. They put him on a bed. You must stop screaming, nobody will hurt you. Dr. Worthe tells them to turn him and they turn Victor over and then he feels a jab and he falls asleep.

DURING THE DAY HE HAS LESSONS. Victor takes the pencil and paper they gave him and he draws the other boys. He draws the backs of heads, the sides of heads, the teacher’s face. Sometimes he imagines what it would look like to see the room from another place and he draws that. Outside the classroom window there is a big tree that reaches with its arms, he draws it. He draws pages of snowflakes. He puts the papers inside his desk.

He does not do his lessons well. Dr. Worthe says You must study.

The only lessons he likes are geography. He likes the shapes. Some of the maps have countries and some have continents. Africa and South America dragons’ heads nodding. He draws Italy a boot. He draws Spain a man with a big nose coughing out islands. He draws Finland. He draws Ceylon a teardrop. He draws Australia. The teacher says that there are kangaroos in Australia. He does not know what a kangaroo is. The teacher shows them a picture. A kangaroo is a big rat. He draws the teacher with whiskers and a tail. He draws the other boys in the class in the shapes of countries they resemble. George is Chile and Irving is Germany. Victor draws them and puts them in his desk. His desk is bottomless. He will never fill it up.

The older boys play football. Victor does not understand. Instead of watching the players he watches the patterns their boots make in the snow. At first the snow is smooth, then they begin and the dimples spread like bubbles in a pot. They are beautiful but then the snow gets too mushy.

Victor wishes they would stop in the middle so they don’t ruin the beautiful patterns. But the next day it snows again and the surface is clean.

The other boys do not talk to him. They call him Twitter. Victor thinks about Mrs. Greene. He asks for her often and the teacher does not understand. Dr. Worthe brings him into his office.

I understand you miss your old friend. Do you know how to write a letter?

He does not.

I’m going to show you what to do. Then you may write to her anytime you want. We encourage you to write, and to be friendly. How are you liking your friends? Do you know everyone’s name? Do you enjoy your classes?

Victor says nothing.

Naturally it has been difficult for you. You must try harder. It will get easier the more you practice. I see that you have not done your homework. That is not acceptable. You must do your homework. If you have trouble then ask for help. I will help you personally. That isn’t something I say to everyone. I say it to you because I think you’re a special child. I know that you’re capable of more than we’ve seen from you. I would like you to succeed. Would you like to succeed? Well would you?

He nods.

Good. Very good. Now let’s write that letter.

Dr. Worthe shows him the salutation. Now you write whatever you’d like.

Victor chews his pencil. He does not know what to do. He draws a picture of Belgium.

Dr. Worthe looks at the paper. This is what you want to write to her?

Victor nods.

I don’t think she’ll understand this. Wouldn’t you like to tell her how you are? Do you want to tell her about your friends? Let me have that for a moment if you please. Dr. Worthe erases Belgium, leaving a faint outline that he writes over. Dear Mrs. Greene. Hello. How are you? I am fine. I am trying very hard to do my best in school. I am enjoying my schoolwork. I have many friends. What else can we tell her? Yesterday we had potato soup. It was—Victor? Did you like the potato soup?

He did not eat the soup. He shakes his head.

Dr. Worthe says All right. Yesterday we had potato soup. It was not my favorite although still very tasty. My favorite foods to eat are—

Dr. Worthe is staring at him. Victor?

Victor is frightened. He feels stupid. Oatmeal he says.

Oatmeal. Excellent. I enjoy eating oatmeal, which—Dr. Worthe smiles—is very fortunate because we receive it for breakfast almost every morning.

This is true. Victor has never eaten so much oatmeal in his entire life. He does not mind it, but he has a feeling that he will not like it soon.

I hope that you are very well and that you will come to visit. You may visit whenever you’d like. Perhaps when it is not so cold you will come to visit. Dr. Worthe stops writing. Is there anything else you’d like to tell her?

Victor shakes his head.

Now you need to sign the letter. How would you like to close? You may say sincerely or cordially or your friend. Here, take it. You choose.

Victor thinks. He writes Your friend.

Now sign your name.

He signs his name.

Good. Dr. Worthe turns the letter around. This is not correct. Let me— may I? He takes the pencil from Victor. Friend is spelled like this. Do you see?

Victor nods.

Very good. Now we need to address the envelope.

Then Dr. Worthe licks a stamp. He puts it on the envelope. You see, Victor? Now it goes in the mailbox. And now you’ve written a letter. Let’s see if she writes back to you.

She does. Many months later he receives a letter from Mrs. Greene. It is very short. Dr. Worthe gives it to him in his office.

Dear Victor Victor reads.

Read it aloud please. Speak up.

Dear Victor Victor says. I am so happy to hear about you. I think of you often. I have left the house, so I did not get your letter until they sent it along to me. I have a new home. The address is at the top of the page. I have a new job, too. I work for Dr. Fetchett. Do you remember him? He sends his regards. He thinks of you often, too. Love, Nancy. Inside curvy lines she has written Mrs. Greene.

Dr. Worthe looks pleased. That is a very nice letter. And now that we have her correct address we may write to her as much as we’d like. What shall we write?

This time he lets Victor lick the stamp. It tastes funny.

21 Í22

ur flight to Boston was delayed several hours; we didn’t make it to Cambridge until almost eleven EM. We took a cab to the hotel where Tony Wexler would stay whenever he came to Harvard to fix my mistakes, and I gave my credit card for both rooms. In my attache I had a plain-paper copy of Victor’s picture, as well as a CD-ROM with the scanned image. I hadn’t spoken much since that afternoon, and I must have looked morose, because when we got in the elevator, Samantha put her hand on my back.

“I think my blood sugar’s low,” I said.

“We can get dinner.”

I looked at her.

She shrugged. “I’ll make an exception.”

I smiled feebly. “I think I’m going to get room service.”

“Call me if you change your mind.”

In my room I stripped down to my underwear and ordered a tuna sandwich that I couldn’t bring myself to eat. I set the tray outside my door and lay down on the bed, staring at the darkened TV set, waiting for it to spring to life and fill up with Victor’s face. I’m no spiritualist, but I honestly expected at least an attempt at communication. If not through the TV then taps on the wall in Morse code or the lights flashing on and off. I waited and waited for him but he never came. My eyes started to close, and I was almost under when a soft knock woke me.

I put on my trousers and my shirt and opened the door a crack. It was Samantha. She apologized for disturbing me.

“It’s fine, I just passed out. Come in.” I stood back to let her in. She stayed outside, looking first at me, then at the uneaten sandwich on the floor. “I wasn’t hungry,” I said.

She nodded, staring at the ground. I realized that my shirt was unbuttoned and hanging open. I drew it closed. “Please. Come on.”

She balked, then crossed the room to the armchair, where she sat looking out on the green Eliot House cupola. I stood next to her, and for a few minutes we said nothing, watching the moon flirt with us from behind the shifting clouds.

I said, “Did you see the size of his hands?” She said nothing.

“They were like paws. Did you see them?”

CCT ť

I saw.

“I have a hard time picturing him strangling someone with those hands.” “They were children.” I said nothing.

“It must be jarring,” she said. I nodded.

We watched the sky. “Thank you,” she said. I looked at her.

“For what you did on the plane,” she said. “Of course.”

“You probably expected me to smack you.” “I can take it.” A silence.

She said, “I’m sorry I’ve been so cold to you.”

“You haven’t.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“A little, maybe.”

She smiled.

“It’s all right,” I said.

She said, “I can’t stand acting like this. I used to be such a stable person.” She paused. “I missed you when I was away.” “Me too.” A silence.

She said, “I want you to wait. Is that terrible for me to say?” “No.”

“Yes, it is, it’s terrible to put you on notice like that.” “It’s not terrible, Samantha.” “Please call me Sam.” “All right.”

“My dad used to call me Sammy.” “I can call you that, if you’d prefer.” She said, “Just Sam’s fine.”

SHE LEFT MY ROOM, and I got back into bed. I turned on the news. A clip of Bush, Cheney, and Rice in conference gave me an unpleasant flashback to the night of Marilyn’s party, and I switched to paid programming. My hotel phone rang. I muted the TV. “I thought you went to sleep.” “I didn’t wake you up, did I? I’ll feel awful if I woke you up.” “I was awake.” A silence.

She said, “Can I come back over?”

SHE WAS DIFFERENT NOW. She looked me in the eye, something I only then realized she had not done the first time. She moved more, too. It might have been the freedom afforded by a king-sized bed; or because we knew each other a little bit, had the advantage of a mental map; or maybe, probably, she was different this time because this time she wanted to feel not nothing but something.

BEFORE SHE DRIFTED OFF, she said, “I’m sorry I made you pay for two rooms.”

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING I awoke bullhorn-alert. Sam had one arm hanging off the edge of the bed and the blanket bunched between her thighs. I slipped from the bed and sat watching her change shape. Then I showered and dressed and went out for a walk along the Charles.

The river in winter becomes a patchwork of crackling ice and dark, poisonous water. Memorial Drive crackled beneath a speeding taxi. I stopped near the boathouse to zip up my jacket and to stare at the blinking Citgo sign. I’ve always had a soft spot for Boston. Its snootiness appeals to me, as does its anarchistic streak. It’s that odd combination of Puritanism and decadence that makes Harvard such a perfect breeding ground for the American elite.

I walked up Plympton, toward the trainlike hump of the Lampoon, turning west to head past the Fly. Inside, music was playing. I hadn’t kept in touch with anybody I knew back then, much less paid my alumni dues, but on a whim I went around to the front door and knocked. I was about to leave when the door swung open. A tall, handsome young man with shaggy blond hair stood there. He looked like a kid. He was a kid. He looked me up and down.

“Can I help you?”

“I used to be a member,” I said.

He seemed skeptical.

“Can I come in?”

“Uhm.” He looked at his watch.

From inside, a girl called Danny.

“One minute,” he yelled.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”

“Sorry, man.”

I turned and the door shut behind me. To my left was the backyard, fenced off, where in spring we held the Garden Party. I suppose they still do. Life keeps going.

I walked to the front gate of Lowell House, where I spent my latter two years. I wondered how short I was of a BA. I wondered if they would take me back. I pictured myself waiting in line for registration; carrying a futon up three flights of stairs; spooning myself green beans in the dining hall; whooping it up at the Game. The blond kid would be my friend. He would punch me for the Fly. We would hang out together and get stoned. I laughed and arched my thirty-two-year-old back.

Down the road was a Dumpster. I had a crazy urge to go rooting through it for my abandoned Cy Twombly. Maybe they hadn’t picked up the trash in twelve years.

I stood back and counted windows, picking out what I thought was my sophomore year room. The light was off. From its sill I had been able to see over the tops of the buildings, northward to the Yard and the Gothic spires of Muller Hall, a clear view of my past.

BY THE TIME I GOT BACK to the hotel, Sam was gone. She wasn’t in her room, either. I found her in the gym, pumping away at an elliptical machine. An MP3 player was strapped to her arm. One earplug in; its partner dangled at waist-level, freeing up the side of her head to pin a cell phone to her shoulder. A copy of Fitness lay upside down and unopened on the machine’s magazine thingie. With her right hand she swigged a bottle of water, and with her left she tattooed a Palm Pilot. Every part of her seemed to be moving in a different direction, like some marvelous sweaty cubist paroxysm.

“I appreciate it,” I heard her saying as I approached. “Thank you.”

“Good morning,” I said.

“Oh my gosh. You startled me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What happened to you. I thought you were gone.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I took a walk.”

“Leave a note next time, will you … I just got off the phone with James Jarvis.”

I looked at the gym clock. It was seven fifteen.

“He called me,” she said. Something new in her voice, a new timbre. Happiness. And it made her speak a little faster, despite her huffing and puffing. “He’s teaching today but he said we could come by after four. Do you know where Somerville is?”

“Five-minute drive.”

“Then we have a day to spend together.” She slowed down and stopped, her feet still on the pedals. “I’m gross right now, but I’m going to kiss you anyway, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

“That’s fine with me.” And it was.

SOMERVILLE, CAMBRIDGE’S POORER COUSIN, is home to many a grad student. I remembered it primarily as the location of the Basket, a lowbrow supermarket favored by Harvard students as a place to buy liquor in plastic bottles with handles. I think they do more sales in food stamps than in cash; the employees walk around with the pall of death on them; we used to call the place the Casket.

A stone’s throw away (assuming you had a very energetic throwing arm) is Knapp Street and its short run of town houses. Our buzz summoned a young man in surgical scrubs, who introduced himself as Elliot and who, upon showing us to the living room, immediately began berating us for upsetting James.

“He was crying,” said Elliot. “He didn’t even cry when our dog died and he was sobbing. I really hope you realize what you’re doing here. You just sent years of therapy down the drain. I begged him not to talk to you but he’s his own person. If it were up to me I wouldn’t have let you in the front door.”

Sam said, “He might be able to help us catch the person who did it.”

Elliot snorted. “Like that matters. Whatever. He should be home in a few minutes.” He left the room; a door slammed.

I looked at Sam. She seemed unruffled. Quietly she said, “It’s never what you expect. It’s always the father who’s freaking out, or the older brother. The women are calm when you talk to them. They can describe the most horrific stuff and it’s like they’re reading the phone book. In a way that’s worse, you know? Like I remember this girl, nine years old, raped by her grandfather. I was asking her these very specific questions and she doesn’t flinch. The only time she gets upset is at the end. All of a sudden she gets this look. She goes, ‘Don’t send him to jail, I’ll go instead.’ “

“That’s sick.”

“People are weird.” She picked up a copy of Architectural Digest and began to leaf through it. I was too tense to do anything but tap my fingers against my knees.

Jarvis had promised to be home by four thirty. At four forty-five Elliot reemerged, wearing running tights and a fleece, his bangs held back with a sweatband.

“He’s still not back?”

“No.”

He frowned and stooped to double-knot his shoes. It was obvious that he wanted to leave, wanted us to leave, as well; and everyone breathed a little easier when we heard a car pull up. Elliot ran out the front door and clomped down the steps. I heard the sound of an argument. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. In the street he was yelling at a thin, balding man in an overcoat and bright blue galoshes. This, I presumed, was James Jarvis. He was older than his partner by at least fifteen years, with a fatherly aura, the look of someone resigned to constant ingratitude. He said nothing as Elliot ranted and gesticulated and finally turned on his heel and sprinted off. I hurried back to the couch.

“Sorry I’m late.” Jarvis set his bag down. “There was an accident on the pike.”

“Thanks for taking the time,” Sam said.

“It’s—well, I was about to say it’s my pleasure, but I think that might be overstating it a bit. Can I get a cup of coffee before we begin?”

“Of course.”

In the kitchen he loaded up an espresso maker and set out three small porcelain cups. “I’m sorry if he was nasty.”

“There’s no need to apologize.”

“He’s very protective.” Jarvis set the machine running, then crossed his arms and leaned against the counter. “He has the zeal of youth.”

Sam smiled.

“I probably shouldn’t say that,” he said. “Look at both of you. You know what my first reaction was when you called? ‘I’m so old.’ That’s what really stung.” The machine clicked, and he fiddled with it. “Here I am living my Dorian Gray fantasy, and then you come along to remind me that in 1973 I was eleven. Elliot wasn’t even born then.” He made a face like The Scream. Then he laughed gloomily and turned to pour our drinks, which he set out for us at the breakfast nook. He also pried open a tin of biscotti. “Enjoy.”

Sam thanked him. “We don’t want to inconvenience you any more than we already have, so—”

“Oh, it’s no inconvenience to me. I might get the silent treatment for a couple of days but he’ll come around.”

“Well, all the same, thank you. If it’s okay with you we’ll just get started?”

He gestured Go ahead. I took the photocopy out of my attache and put it on the table. Jarvis stared for a long time, his expression inscrutable. I looked at Sam and she looked at me and nobody said anything and I started to believe that we’d gotten it all wrong and I felt something like elation and something else like exasperation and I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to pick Victor out; he shouldn’t rush to point a finger.

“That’s him.”

Sam said, “Are you sure?”

“I think so.” He scratched his cheek. “It’s hard to tell because it’s so grainy.”

I started to speak but Sam said, “We have a scan that’s higher-resolution. Do you have a computer we could use?”

We went to an office at the back of the house. Jarvis’s armpits were dark; his good-natured slouch gone. Violently he jerked the mouse to revive the screen. He put in the CD and clicked on the icon and the photo exploded onto the screen: much larger, shockingly crisp. Victor had a small mole on his neck that I hadn’t noticed.

“It’s him,” said Jarvis.

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

Was that it? Wasn’t there going to be something more catastrophic? Where was Victor’s spirit now? When did he come swirling out of the heating ducts, all undead vengeance? That could not be the end, not that whimper. Totem crumbling, I began to panic. I wanted to argue. Jarvis was mistaken. How much could he possibly remember? Not remember: know. We weren’t in a court of law. I had a higher standard than reasonable doubt. I wanted zero doubt. Now I saw Jarvis as the culprit, Jarvis as the antagonist, Jarvis as the liar. He had to prove to me that he wasn’t just a lonely boy vying for attention. He had to provide corroborating evidence. He had to describe the size and shape of Victor’s penis; he had to supply choice snippets of dialogue; he had to tell me the weather that day and what he’d had for lunch and what color socks he’d had on, something concrete and verifiable that would allow us to determine if his memory was as perfectly one hundred percent grade-A pristine as he claimed.

“When you’re ready,” said Sam, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”

He nodded distantly. He scrolled down to the bottom of the image, to the legend. Magnified, the type looked ragged. “Do you know where he is?”

“We’re looking.”

He nodded again. “It’s strange to have a name,” he said. “For years all I had was a face. It was like he wasn’t a real person.” He looked at Sam. Then he looked back at the screen and said, “Frederick Gudrais. He’s probably not even alive anymore. Is he?”

There was a silence. I looked at Sam, who said, “Pardon me?”

“He’d be—what—in his seventies by now. I guess he could be alive.”

Sam looked at me.

“That’s not his name,” I said. Those were the first words I’d spoken since introductions, and Jarvis gave me a strange look, one not without resentment. I reached for the mouse, scrolled up, tapped the screen. “That’s Victor Cracke.”

“So what.”

“So.” I looked at Sam. “So that’s him. Victor Cracke.”

“Fine,” said Jarvis, “but that isn’t the man who attacked me. This is.” He pointed to the man on Victor’s left.

At mealtimes he sits where he is supposed to. He never makes the same mistake as the first night. The other boys say Look, it’s Twitter. Victor hates them but he says nothing. Some of the boys try to take his dessert. He fights them and everyone ends up scolded. Instead of taking his dessert they stick their fingers in it or blow their noses in his milk. Victor fights them. Everyone gets scolded.

Dr. Worthe says I can’t understand why it’s always you sitting in this chair. You must stop fighting. I don’t want to punish you anymore. I’m tired of punishing you.

Simon is the worst. Simon pinches him under the table. He ties Victor’s shoelaces together so that Victor falls and cuts his lip. Everyone laughs. Victor fights him but Simon is much bigger and it is no use. Simon laughs, his breath smells like garbage. He says Twitter you’re a piece of shit. Victor knows that you don’t want to be a piece of shit. Twitter why don’t you stop staring at the ground? What’s the matter with you Twitter? There are other boys who do not talk and Simon beats them up, too. But he has a special liking for Victor. Twitter I am going to cut your balls off when you’re sleeping. Victor does not understand why anyone would do such a thing, but he is frightened. At night he sleeps with his hands over his balls. Sometimes Simon tries to punch Victor and Victor curls up on the floor and screams until a teacher comes. The teacher tries to lift Victor up but Victor snaps at him, he cannot help himself. They take him to Dr. Worthe’s office where he gets a scolding or else they put him to sleep.

Twitter who you talking to? There ain’t nobody there.

Victor ignores him. He is trying to do his assignment.

Gimme that. Simon tears up his assignment.

Victor leaps on him and they roll around. Everyone begins to cheer. Simon says into Victor’s ear I’m going to rip your balls off you piece of shit. Victor bites Simon on the chin and Simon howls. He turns Victor over and pins down his arms with his knees and begins hitting Victor in the chest and stomach. Victor throws up. Stop that says the teacher. Stop it right now.

They take him to the hospital. He likes the hospital. There is no oatmeal. All he does lie in bed and draw. He draws chairs and faces. He draws countries. Some are real and some are pretend. His plays with the bandage on his nose and the nurses say No.

When he comes back Simon is mad. Simon got punished and now he wants to kill Victor. You wait. One night you’re going to wake up and your balls will be gone.

Time passes. Victor is fourteen. He and Simon fight often, but they learn to fight in private so that nobody scolds them. Victor grows weary. He does not like to fight but he does not like the scolding even more. Dr. Worthe takes away his library privileges. The library is where he sits and copies pictures from books. There is an atlas that he reads many times. The library gives him all his happiness, and rather than lose that he fights quietly. Simon doesn’t care if he gets his privileges revoked, he only likes to beat up Victor.

They move to another table because now they are older. Some boys have left. Some boys stay behind at the old table. People come and go. In the spring a new boy comes to the school. His name is Frederick. He is tall, taller than Simon, although skinnier. He has black hair and a long pointy face and a very big mouth. At first he is quiet but sometimes he winks. He has no trouble finding a place at the table. He sits near Simon and Simon says Gimme your cake.

Frederick does not answer him. He eats his cake. Simon reaches for the cake and Frederick moves the plate out of his reach.

Gimme your cake.

Frederick stops eating. He looks at Simon. He says All right. He gives Simon his cake. Simon eats it with his fingers.

That night Victor is lying in bed when he hears someone moving across the room. He covers his balls and prepares for a fight, bunching up in the corner. He waits. It is Frederick. He is smiling. He whispers.

Victor.

Victor stares at him.

My name’s Freddy.

Victor says nothing.

I’ll tell you something, Victor. That son of a bitch is going to leave you alone.

Cautiously, Victor uncurls.

You know what I’m talking about?

Victor shakes his head.

Freddy smiles. You’ll find out.

At dinner Simon says to Freddy Gimme your pudding.

All right.

That night Simon is sick. They all hear him running to the bathroom. They hear wet noises. The teacher comes to investigate and Simon is spitting blood. That’s what the other boys say.

Freddy says to Victor Too bad about him huh.

Victor smiles.

Freddy and Victor become friends. Freddy gets in trouble a lot but he always seems to get away without punishment. He is much cleverer than Simon. Simon says he is going to kill Freddy but Victor can see how scared Simon really is. He stops beating people up as much and he leaves Victor alone.

Freddy says I told him he’d better lay off.

Victor is grateful. He draws Freddy a picture of a heliocanthus.

You did this for me huh Vic? Freddy calls him Vic. Nobody else calls him that; Victor likes it. Well bow-wow. It’s pretty good.

Victor shows him the rest of his drawings. By now there are too many to fit in the desk, so he hides them atop a shelf in the library. He stands on a chair to reach them. The box is very heavy. Inside are pictures of flowers and snowflakes, pictures of people and animals, maps with names he made by combining other names together.

Lookee that says Freddy. Not bad Vic.

It rains often and he and Freddy sneak to the attic. It is locked but Freddy has the key. They sit under the eaves and watch the swirling tree-tops. Victor takes note of the weather. He never wants to forget being with Freddy so he writes everything down in a little book he got for Christmas, Mrs. Greene sends him one every year. While they lie in the attic Freddy talks about himself. Victor likes the sound of Freddy’s voice.

I don’t know Vic. I might stay here awhile. They say I gotta leave when I’m seventeen but I don’t know about that. I might find my way back in. There’s fellas here older than that so I don’t see why I shouldn’t be. They think I’m stupid. They gave me some tests but I flunked them all, I knew that they had to send me here. I know what’s good for me. I like it better here than some of the other places I been. The food’s all right. You know? I don’t mind it. I’ll stretch it out as long as I can.

Nobody knows about their place in the attic. They go there alone. Freddy talks about everything and Victor listens. Time passes. Victor is fifteen. They go to the attic and Freddy says Look. He shows Victor his privates. They look different from Victor’s. Freddy’s privates have hair. He says Your turn. Victor opens his pants. Freddy laughs and Victor is embarrassed. He tries to put his pants back on but Freddy says Aw naw I wasn’t laughing at you. He moves Victor’s hands away from his groin. I think it’s just great. Bow-wow. You know how to make it grow? Freddy puts his mouth on Victor’s privates. They get swollen and then Freddy says You ain’t never seen it leak did you? Maybe you ain’t big enough yet. I can. Here. Victor puts his mouth on Freddy’s privates. Now move around. Victor moves around. Freddy touches the back of Victor’s neck. It tickles. Victor loves his friend. He loves Freddy. Freddy says Watch. Victor watches and Freddy’s privates cough up stuff. Milky drops roll down his wrist.

Some fly through the air and land on Victor’s foot. He touches them. They feel like oil.

Victor loves Freddy. He doesn’t mind going to the attic. He remembers the tutor but he doesn’t mind. They take off all their clothes and hold each other. When it is cold they hug together to stay warm. They get dirty on the floor.

One time Victor gets a nail stuck in his leg. Freddy says Shhh you want them to find out? Stop crying. Victor cannot stop crying. He loves Freddy and he wants to listen but it hurts. Stop it you damn crybaby. Stop it. Freddy slaps Victor. Victor stops crying. Freddy says Christ amighty. By the next morning it stops bleeding and Victor knows Freddy was right to slap him. He will not disappoint him again.

You ever been on a horse?

Victor shakes his head.

I was when I was a kid. My grandpop had a horse. I liked it good enough. One time it kicked my grandpop and broke his arm. Freddy smiles. You shoulda seen it. The bone was sticking out. You ever seen that Vic? It’s got stuff on the inside, bones. You ain’t never gonna believe it. They had to cut off his whole arm cause it didn’t heal right. He was a son of a bitch anyhow. I’m sorry the horse didn’t take off his whole head. But I like horses plenty. They got more nobility than us. You know what nobility is?

Victor shakes his head.

It’s what they got. Freddy scratches his bare bottom. He yawns. We ought to get downstairs fore the lesson’s over. Hey look at that. I’m a rude son of a bitch. I bet you know what to do with that don’t you Vic.

Victor knows what to do.

People come and go. Simon leaves. Other boys come. Victor takes no notice of them. He sees only Freddy, thinks only of him. He stops writing to Mrs. Greene. Still she sends him books and letters. One year for Christmas all the boys get chessboards. They come with checkers pieces too. Freddy doesn’t like chess. He likes checkers. He and Victor play checkers together in the attic. They kiss and hug and touch each other and play checkers. Victor draws pictures for Freddy. He is happy.

Victor is seventeen. Freddy says They’re kicking me out.

Victor begins to cry.

Don’t worry, I’ll be back.

But he does not come back. Victor thinks about him every day. He writes letters but Freddy does not write back. Before Freddy left he gave Victor the key to the attic but going there makes him too sad. So he prays. He bargains with God. He makes deals and waits for them to be paid off. He hurts himself and says Now he will come. They find him bleeding and send him to a quiet room. He hurts himself again and they give him pills that make him sick. They give him electric shocks that make him forget things. Before he felt lonely sometimes but this is new. He wants to die. He starts to draw a map, hoping to find Freddy in it. He will draw until he finds him.

Dr. Worthe takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes. We’ve known each other a long time haven’t we.

Victor says nothing.

I understand that you haven’t been eating. Is that true Victor? You look like you’ve lost weight. What do you have to say for yourself ?

Victor says nothing. He doesn’t care. He feels half-asleep. He hardly speaks to anyone, not even to say please and thank you, which he always tried to do because Mrs. Greene taught him it was good manners to look someone in the eye and say those words. He dreams of Freddy, wakes up with the taste of salt in his mouth. Underneath the blankets he pretends his hand is Freddy’s mouth. It isn’t the same.

HE RUNS AWAY. He goes at night when everyone else is sleeping. Now that he is older he sleeps in a room with four other boys, instead of the big room where all the younger boys sleep. He waits until everyone is asleep, then he puts on his shoes and goes quietly down the stairs. It is summertime. Outside insects cottonball around the orange lights. He walks across the rear lawn. In the House some lights are still on. He sees in the window the shape of a man lifting dumbbells. It’s the recreational teacher, Mr. Chamberlain.