The Most Dangerous Thing

Chapter Fifteen

Autumn 1979

Tally Robison has made a private game of cooking dinner out of whatever is at hand. She doesn’t plan the week’s meals in advance. That would be cheating. She flies down the aisles of the Giant every Saturday morning, picking up things on a whim, never using a list. The rest of the week, she stays at her easel as late as possible, channeling a character in a fairy tale, an enchanted princess who shifts shape every evening. Sunset is coming! The dark forces are gathering. Once the light is gone, she will be transformed into an everyday wife and mother, making dinner and small talk.

This strict separation between her daytime and evening lives is entirely her choice. Neither Clem nor Gwen challenges the hours she devotes to painting, much less suggests she is neglectful of them in any way. Tally is the one who has decided that her artistic self must be banished with the dying of the light. Clem and Gwen wouldn’t mind if Tally threw buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table, or fell back on Chinese takeout. They wouldn’t notice if she remained in her painting clothes or allowed a few romantic spatters to linger on her hands. But she minds. She notices. There has to be a clean break between her two lives, no overlap. That way, she is wild to get back to her work in the morning.

Even so, it’s hard to let go of her daytime life, now that the days are short. The inevitable consequence is that she tests time, working feverishly to the last possible moment, showers as quickly as possible, then descends to the kitchen to face the challenge of assembling that night’s meal.

Today, it is barely five-thirty when she enters the kitchen and sets to work on a quiche recipe out of the Moosewood Cookbook . Tally’s vegetarian aspirations are another secret, a new regime launched with no fanfare just after Labor Day and the big storm, when the lights went out for several hours and she decided she didn’t trust any of the meat in the house. September is a better time for new beginnings than January 1, when she is usually so depressed she can barely haul herself out of bed. No fanfare, no resolutions, no grand pronouncements, yet September’s changes stick. Now, two months later, neither Clem nor Gwen has picked up on the fact that Tally prepares red meat only once or twice a month and that the evening meal is altogether meatless every other night. Do they notice anything she does? But who would register the lack of steak and pot roast when there is quiche with homemade crust, pizza from scratch, red beans and rice, Moroccan stew with couscous? Besides, food isn’t important to them. Clem is one of those odd people who eats mainly for fuel, although he has a yen for greasy fast foods. Gwen, untrusting of her newfound slenderness, evaluates every mouthful based only on what it might do to her figure.

Where is Gwen? Tally stands still, listens to the house, catches the buzz of a radio or television coming from Gwen’s room. She is supposed to check in with Tally upon arrival home, but that is Clem’s rule, and Tally doesn’t bother to enforce it now that Gwen is alone behind her closed door. Tally doesn’t want to be disturbed while in her studio, and Gwen understands that. She’s a considerate girl. She is Tally’s favorite child, a sentiment she would freely profess if it didn’t horrify others. She believes all mothers have favorites. Hers did, and it wasn’t Tally. Miller is a stolid, dutiful lump, Clem without a sense of humor. And Fee, lacking any talent for introspection, is an utter bore. How did Tally have such dull children?

Two months ago, Where is Gwen? was a much more freighted question because Gwen would have been with Sean, and the two of them were clearly working their way toward serious mischief. Clem professed to be unconcerned, called it puppy love, said Gwen was too young to get into trouble. Tally considered that an interesting bit of denial for a man whose own bride had been a mere eighteen to his thirty-two on their wedding day. But Clem’s naïveté turned out to be justified. The romance with Sean was fleeting. Now Gwen is seeing other boys, determined not to be tied down. She’s all about quantity now, flitting from one to another. Tally approves, for the most part. Her only worry is that Gwen will meet a boy who ignores her and mistake his lack of interest for love.

Tally zips through the crust, thanks to the Cuisinart she received last Mother’s Day, at her request, grates the cheese, slices the mushrooms, marveling-no false modesty for her, thank you-at her dexterity and speed. A tidy person, she cleans up as she goes, which is all to Gwen’s benefit, as it’s Gwen’s job to clear the table and load the dishwasher at dinner’s end, not that Gwen notices, much less thanks her. I am a good mother. I am a good wife. I take good care of my family. It is the very same theme embodied by a new perfume commercial, the one that uses the old blues song, although the woman in the ad also makes money for her household. Tally might not bring home the bacon, but she is creating beautiful, beautiful things in her makeshift studio. And the new project-

Her litany of self-congratulation stalls when she opens the refrigerator and discovers that she has only one egg. Good at improvisation Tally may be, but not even she can make a quiche with one egg. She has forgotten that Gwen is going through a phase where she exists on hard-boiled eggs, eating them for breakfast and lunch. Stupid fad diet. Tally will have to drive to the little grocery store at the top of the hill, an errand that quashes her spirits. She has lost at her own game. Plus, she hates the gloomy makeshift grocery at the top of the hill, which seems to exist only to remind her how far she is from everything, how her husband has chosen a place that is the worst of all worlds-in the city, yet as remote as any suburb, with nothing within walking distance, and no sidewalks on which to walk, anyway. She wants to move to Paris.

She wants to move to Paris . It’s a stupid thought, petulant and impossible. Such a notion should flit across her mind and disappear in the minute it takes to grab her purse and car keys, yet it lingers, stubborn and defiant. Get out, she tells the thought, as if it were a neighbor’s dog that has wandered into her house. I have a wonderful life. I love my husband, and he adores me. I have terrific kids and I was young when I had them. I won’t even be fifty when Gwen goes off to college. I’m already doing what I want to do, what I was meant to do. Nothing is holding me back.

I want to move to Paris.

She turns on the car radio, hoping to drown out her own thoughts. “Those Were the Days.” An oldie, at least a decade past its prime. Clem clearly drove her car at some point in the past few days.

What Tally actually wants is a do-over, to move to Paris at age eighteen, to return to a time when she had such choices. The problem is, she is forever destined to make the same choice, because the facts never change: she was eighteen, accepted at Wellesley, having a wonderfully secret affair with a thirty-two-year-old man, her father’s colleague and her uncle’s best friend.

And she believed she was pregnant, although she never told Clem that. If she had to get married-and she thought she did-at least the groom could believe it was pure love. Besides, she wasn’t an artist then, she wouldn’t have dreamed of Paris, or even New York. She thought her choices were Clem or Wellesley. If she had found a way to get rid of the baby, it just would have been Wellesley and then another, possibly lesser, version of Clem four years later. Girls of her time and class were not programmed to bring home the bacon. Her dilemma-the eternal human dilemma-is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future. But there’s a reason that there’s no game show where they throw a car, a washer-dryer, and a goat onstage and ask you to select forthrightly among them. Where’s the drama in that? Where’s the suspense? The only possible surprise would be the one-in-a-million person who picks the goat, on the grounds that he doesn’t drive and already has a serviceable washer-dryer.

If Tally ever had three wishes, she expended them long ago, on the most mundane things. Everyone has wishes-and everyone squanders them. The fairy tales got that right. Magic exists only to screw with you. Eggs, for example. She wished for eggs not five minutes ago, and while most people think a wish should produce the desired thing at that instant, in a puff of smoke, who’s to say that her wish isn’t being granted as she drives to the store, money in her purse? Somewhere on the planet, in this very city perhaps, a person is wishing for eggs right now and can’t have them. So Tally wishes for Paris and somewhere else right now-in Logan Airport, the airport of her youth-a beautiful young woman is waiting to board an Air France flight, a rucksack at her feet, her future wider and broader than the ocean she’s about to cross. Whatever you want at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for. In the time it takes her to work this out, Tally has driven the mile to the store, parked, gone in, and grabbed a carton of eggs, checking the expiration date. She can’t begin to list all the stale, expired, past-their-sell-date items she has brought home from this store.

And now she is waiting in an interminable line because the store is, of course, perpetually understaffed. She tries to hold on to the serene, wise persona she discovered in the car, focusing on the back of the head in front of her. Be in the moment. Breathe. Live. That’s the secret to happiness. Notice the pink-and-blue flowery scarf, over pink curlers, which are twisted around pinky-red hair, the material of the scarf thin enough so one can see how sparse and dull the hair is. Sad. Ugliness is sad.

The woman turns, as if she knows she’s being judged.

“Oh.” Tally tries to cover the rudeness of her shock, tries to make the exhalation sound more what-a-pleasant-surprise than fuck-you-look-awful . “Hi, Doris.”

“Hello, Tally.” Doris Halloran holds up her box of Hamburger Helper, as if Tally is a higher authority to whom she must report her nutritional decisions. “It’s what they want.”

“Gwen loves it, too. I guess I’m meaner than you because I never let her have it.”

“That girl gets prettier every day.”

Tally wants to say thank you, except she doesn’t feel as if her daughter has been complimented. Doris’s tone is almost accusing, as if Gwen has achieved her prettiness by guile. Custom dictates that Tally should respond with a kind comment about Doris’s children, but she is stumped. She never sees the boys anymore, come to think of it. When did they stop coming around? Mickey, too, no longer visits. The candy drawer hasn’t needed to be replenished in some time. Let’s see-Tim, the lummox as Clem calls him, is probably the same stupid frat-boy-in-training he always was. Go-Go can’t be any worse than he’s been, although there are rumors linking him to the cats that have been found suffocated in the neighborhood’s old insulated milk boxes. Sean, the best of the lot, is a natural-born politician. Tally doesn’t consider that a compliment, but Doris might.

“That Sean,” she says. “He’s a charmer. All your boys have”-grasp, grasp, grasp-“such distinctive personalities.”

Tally wonders if Doris is as curious as Tally is about who broke up with whom, if Doris doubts Sean’s version of events the way Tally doubts Gwen’s. Something happened. Her hunch is that Gwen traded up, realized there was greater cachet in a Gilman boy or a football hero.

Tally wonders if she doubts her daughter because she is aware of her own proclivity for lying. Fudging, as she prefers to think of it. Or maybe nudging- easing a complicated truth toward something simpler, more comprehensible. Tally never lies for advantage or gain. Her lies are no different from, say, a fresh coat of paint or wallpaper in an old house. Something pretty over something unsightly. There’s never been a home that didn’t eventually require updating or renovation. A life is the same way. You live inside it for a long, long time if you’re lucky. Things fray, break, go out of fashion. There’s no shame in bringing a life up-to-date.

She buys her eggs, wishing the store stocked fresh herbs, but one would be hard-pressed to find so much as a jar of dried oregano here. She should have her own herb garden, but the property is too shady to grow anything but ferns and a few complacent flowers. Why hadn’t Clem seen that flaw in his dream lot? It’s formidably dark, with trees to the east, west, and south. The northern light is good for a painter-or would have been, if Clem had been thoughtful enough to include a studio for Tally. She paints in a prefab toolshed bought at Sears, which means choosing between freezing or running a space heater in the winter, a dangerous option around her oil paints and turpentine. I didn’t think you were that serious about painting, Clem said when she asked for her little cabin last year. He was sad; Clem hates to disappoint Tally. Clem, to his credit, did not bring up all the other things tried and abandoned. Throwing her own pots. The novel, which never got far enough along to have a title, other than The Novel . Macramé. Candle making. Jewelry making. Okay, so he was entitled to be dubious, especially given her decision to keep her latest project under wraps, refusing to let anyone see it until she’s finished. But she is finding-what does a painter find? Writers discover their voices. Tally guesses she’s on the verge of achieving her vision of things.

In the parking lot, she notices that Doris Halloran is still sitting in her car, hands gripping the wheel, yet she hasn’t turned on the engine. Poor thing. Although she looks at least ten years older than Tally, she is actually younger, younger even than Tally’s real age, about which she is always a little vague.

“S o you started your family young, too,” Doris Halloran said to Tally in this very market, when the Robisons were finally settled in Dickeyville. Settled, but not exactly accepted. Hard feelings lingered about Clement Robison’s dream house, the way he got around the village’s strict rules on historic preservation. He argued that his house, the farthest house down Wetheredsville Road, lying beyond the mill, technically wasn’t part of Dickeyville after all.

“Too?”

“I was married at twenty, but there were two miscarriages before Tim. He’s fourteen now.”

That made Doris, what? Thirty-five, thirty-six? Tally wondered if it was the gray light in the little market that made Doris look so gray. If Tally had been forced to guess-thank God she hadn’t guessed-she would have put the other woman’s age at forty-five, a very hard and unforgiving forty-five.

“Oh, I’m older than I look,” Tally said. Adding swiftly, lest she seem vain, which she was, but why advertise it: “It’s the way I wear my hair that makes me look younger.”

Doris nodded. “We’ve noticed.”

T o this day, Tally wonders about that “we.” Doris and her husband? The royal we? All the women of Dickeyville, sitting in silent judgment on the newcomer, with her long corn-silk hair and pretty, impractical clothes, living in the modern monstrosity that no one wanted? The mid-1970s was the era of The Stepford Wives, and if the women of Dickeyville were not the empty-eyed automatons of the book and film, they were not as individualistic as they wanted to believe. They were merely a hipper variation of Stepford wives. Eating granola and living in a historic district didn’t make you a freethinker.

Of course, Doris Halloran was and is a different kettle of fish from the other Dickeyville wives. She still wears housedresses and panty hose. Her pale red hair, on those rare occasions when it is released from its curlers, is worn in tight, unflattering waves. Yet she is younger than Tally. How can that be? Doris Halloran looks as if she has been old all her life. Had the miscarriages done that? Tally yearns to feel superior to her. Why shouldn’t she? She is pretty, vibrant, smart. She paints, and not in a dilettante way. Who is Doris Halloran to be talking about Tally’s hairstyle, to be judging Gwen for breaking up with Sean? Tally may claim to be older than she is, but she could shave five, ten years off her real age and be believed.

Tally has been lying about her age since she and Clem left Boston two years into their marriage. She lies about Clem’s age, too. Not outright lies, but evasive bits of gentle misdirection, fudging and nudging, nudging and fudging. She nudges her husband’s age down, ever so slightly, her own up, thereby narrowing the gap between them, which she finds embarrassing, although not as embarrassing as the fact that she married at eighteen and had her first child at nineteen. It isn’t the math that tortures her, but the other facts that can be inferred from these bits of arithmetic. Tally Duchamp Robison did not graduate from college, maybe didn’t even attend. Among her people-and Tally comes from people who are the sort of people who think of themselves as having people-this was unfathomable, shaming. Her great-great-grandmother had gone to college, her grandmother was a lawyer, her mother is an ob-gyn. OK, maybe she was brought up to bring home the bacon after all, but Betty Friedan be damned, the only rebellion available to Tally was an early, conventional marriage to an older man. It felt exciting and daring at the time. Now, in 1979, no one gets that. To the world at large, she is no different from the Doris Hallorans, marrying at twenty because there were no other options. Tally had all the options in the world when she was eighteen.

And she threw them all away because she was headstrong and shortsighted-and didn’t know where to go for a pregnancy test without being found out, and didn’t want to wait too long, lest others figure out her predicament.

I want to go to Paris, she thinks, waiting to turn left at the always busy intersection near the store, still overwhelmed by traffic from the Social Security Administration at this time of day. It’s taking the line of cars two, three cycles to get through the light. I want to be the person I’ve been pretending to be all these years.

Tally was never foolish enough to claim to have a degree, but she drops her selected facts like bread crumbs and lets people follow them where they seem to lead. She was accepted at Wellesley. True. She married young. Again, true. Her husband was a college professor-oh no, not at her college-her uncle’s best friend, from the medical school. A bit of a scandale, if one must know. Still true, and is it her fault if people think she was seduced while a college freshman? People eye Clement differently after they hear these bits. With more respect, because a thirty-two-year-old man who had an affair with an eighteen-year-old was not necessarily out of line, especially if he married her in the end. Tally still remembers the gleam of who’d a thunk it in the eyes of their new acquaintances. Clem benefits as much as she does from this misunderstanding. Dear as he is, he is a bit of a fuddy-duddy. At a recent faculty party, someone produced a joint and Clem not only declined to try it, he also insisted they leave immediately. Geriatric specialist? Clem is a geriatric specialty.

But such instances of disharmony are rare. Tally is an old soul, in her opinion, older than Clem in many ways. When Gwen, their surprise baby, was born, Clem was already forty, Tally not even twenty-eight, yet it was Clem who got down on the rug with her and played without inhibition. Tally didn’t have it in her. She felt ancient. She adores Gwen, who has turned out to be a most satisfactory child. But having Gwen-finally, an accident, not that she regrets it-meant postponing her next stage. What if she had started painting in her twenties? Where would she be now?

She is-what is her real age?-forty-two years old, pretending to be forty-six-ish. Clem is fifty-six, although she says early fifties when pressed. Gwen will leave for college in four years. Now throw in another four years. College-age children expect their homes to stand as shrines, as Tally learned from Miller and Fee. She will be forty-six, and Clem will be sixty, married almost thirty years. He probably won’t want to take early retirement, but he’ll be ready to leave teaching at sixty-five, once Gwen is out of college, she’s sure of it. Then they can go to Paris. Somehow, some way. She will go to Paris before she’s fifty-two.

You’ll be dead at fifty-two.

The thought runs an icy finger down her spine. This is not at all like her. She is not morbid. She is not given to dark premonitions. She blames the shiver on the black cat in the window of the dry cleaners, the one holding up its paw in salute to the glories of Black Cat rubber heels. Mired here in the line of traffic waiting to turn left, she has been absentmindedly staring at the cat, whose face has a decidedly sinister cast. “Shoo,” she says as she accelerates, her turn for the green light finally arriving. Shoo . Doris Halloran is still sitting in her car, back at the market. Tally assumes Doris is too exhausted to go home, that the interior of her car is the only place she can be alone. It’s different for Tally. She has her studio, she has a vocation, she has-well, it’s different for her, it just is.

Chapter Sixteen

Winter 1980

D oris gave Go-Go the spare room when he started wetting the bed last fall. Tim Junior raised a stink, of course, and Sean took his side, but she stood up to them, said it made sense because Go-Go has the earlier bedtime. It was odd because bed-wetting was never Go-Go’s problem as a toddler, if only because she was too tired to care much by the time he was born and her very nonchalance succeeded where all her effort never had. Wear diapers the rest of your life if that’s what you want, she told him once, but when you learn how to tie your shoes, you can change your own pants . At his own initiative, Go-Go was completely potty-trained at age two, a feat neither older brother could claim.

It may be his only accomplishment, Doris thinks as she gathers up the sheets one weekday morning. No one else in the household knows about Go-Go’s problem. She doesn’t want his brothers to have any more ammunition for teasing. As for his father-she can’t bear to think what he will do to the boy if he finds out. So no one knows except Doris. At this point, Doris isn’t sure if even Go-Go realizes he’s wetting the bed up to four times a week. Why would he? She does everything possible to minimize, conceal, the problem. There is a plastic mattress pad, at no risk of being discovered, since no one else in this household would ever strip his own bed, much less wash another person’s sheets. She checks Go-Go’s bed every morning as soon as the house is empty, washing the sheets if necessary, often doing all the household linens for cover.

Thank goodness they have a washer-dryer in this house. For the first six years of her marriage, they lived in a brick town house without any laundry facilities and only one bathroom. It was hard, especially after Sean was born. What if she had actually given birth to all the children that she and Tim Senior had conceived? She would have eight children now. They never could have afforded that. Did God know? Was that why God took her children? And of all the children God took, why had he given her Go-Go? Didn’t she deserve a sweet baby, a well-behaved little girl, someone who might take her side from time to time? She had prayed to St. Gerard for such a baby. Instead, she got Go-Go, and no one, not even his mother, could consider Go-Go an answer to a prayer. Still, for all his exhausting craziness, he was sort of sweet, too, the only one of her boys who liked to be cuddled and held. That is, he liked to be cuddled and held until his brothers teased him out of it.

Now Go-Go is all sour, no sweet. Crazy, sullen, sarcastic, more destructive than ever, at least at home. Strangely, his behavior at school seems to be getting marginally better, if not his grades. There is a new priest, Father Andrew from Boston, and he seems to think Go-Go is a good kid at heart. “High-spirited, but wasn’t I the same as a boy?” he asks in his Boston accent. Doris thinks Father Andrew is very good-looking. And smart. She almost wishes he were more worried about Go-Go, which would entail meetings at the school, with Father talking to her in that wonderful voice. He is so masculine . He risks the little kindnesses and sentiments that Tim Senior never attempts. Once, when Doris was arriving at St. Lawrence for altar duty, she saw Go-Go’s class in the yard, playing kickball. Go-Go kicked a magnificent home run, soaring, soaring, soaring over his classmates’ heads and when he trotted to home plate, Father Andrew rubbed his hand across Go-Go’s head, congratulating him. Later, at bedtime, Doris did the same thing. She had forgotten how soft her son’s hair was, how appealing, even when in need of a wash.

“Stop it,” Go-Go said. The next morning, his sheets were yellow again and she wanted to scream. She can’t. She mustn’t. She is all Go-Go has. Tim and Sean will be fine, especially Sean. But Go-Go needs her.

Sheets in the washing machine, she shuffles into the kitchen, but she doesn’t have the energy to face the breakfast mess. Tim Senior insists on eggs and bacon every morning, and how can she deny the boys a full breakfast when their father is having one? He has been out of work since the end of the holiday season, and there was a three-month layoff before that job. He should be able to find something, though, with his experience. Maybe not at one of the big department stores-he’s pretty much burned his bridges there-but at Robert Hall, Tuerkes, Hamburger’s. He says he’s looking, but Doris doesn’t know where he goes during the days, taking their only car. “I’ve got a lead,” he will say, and she doesn’t have the nerve to ask what sort of job interview leaves a man’s breath sour from cigarettes and beer. She has heard he’s hanging out in Monaghan’s over in Woodlawn. It’s a decent place as taverns go. He isn’t running around with women. She is pretty sure he isn’t running around with women. Sex isn’t that important to Tim. After Go-Go, there had been one more miscarriage, and Doris told Tim that she didn’t think she could take it anymore, that they had to be more careful, find a way to make things work while being true to the church. The miscarriages were harder than the pregnancies. He was very sweet about it, said it was OK, his needs weren’t that great.

Abandoning the kitchen, she takes a cup of lukewarm tea into the living room and turns on the television, catching the last bit of People Are Talking . Exactly, Doris thinks. People are always talking. That’s why she has to be vigilant, keep the family’s secrets. Go-Go doesn’t wet the bed, Tim Senior isn’t out of a job, they didn’t start raiding the boys’ college funds last summer to stay afloat. She misses the program Dialing for Dollars, which is off the air, killed by the state lottery. At least that’s Tim’s take on it. Hard to get excited about winning forty dollars, he says, when you could win thousands and you don’t have to sit around waiting for a phone call. Still, she misses it. Dialing for Dollars was her respite when Go-Go was little. True to his name, he was always in motion, and when his brothers were at school during the day, Doris never knew any rest. However, he would settle in with a bottle of juice to watch Dialing for Dollars with her. Go-Go was frustrated that the host, Stu Kerr, never called them once, but Doris held no grudge. It’s a big city, and Doris never wins anything, small or large. She remembers when Sean put together the fact that Kerr, beneath a wig and funny nose, was also Professor Kool on Professor Kool’s Fun Skool . Sean was outraged. That is, he pretended to be outraged about the principle of the thing, as he saw it, but he was really embarrassed to have been fooled. Sean doesn’t like to be wrong, ever. It’s almost a little unnatural, the one characteristic that makes her nervous for her otherwise most golden child. Only Jesus gets to be perfect.

The phone rings. For a second, she thinks it’s Stu Kerr, and she panics because she doesn’t know the count and the amount, but then she remembers the show is on only in her thoughts. She rushes to the kitchen, taking inventory yet again of the sink of dishes, the cast-iron frying pan filled with bacon grease.

“Mrs. Halloran?” It is Father Andrew’s lovely voice, but she doesn’t want him to know she recognizes it instantly.

“This is she.” She stands up a little straighter, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Where’s the curler that held the hair? She spots it on the drainboard.

“Father Andrew up at St. Lawrence. We have a little situation with Gordon.”

Doris appreciates the euphemism but knows it has to be bad for the school to call.

“He’s OK,” the priest says, rushing to assure her. He is so nice. “But you see, another boy brought a baseball mitt to school today, a birthday gift he wanted to show off. It went missing and we found it in Go-Go’s desk.”

“He isn’t a thief,” she says quickly. “He just likes… nice things.”

“He was also very forthright. Didn’t lie or pretend it was put there by mistake. Just said he admired it and couldn’t help wanting to touch it. Still-I thought it might be effective if we spoke to him together.”

Together .

“I would be right there, but we only have the one car and Mr. Halloran has it and-” She breaks down, begins to cry, which is as shaming as Go-Go’s thievery. It’s too much. Her son, stealing from a classmate. Her husband unavailable to her, and even if she could reach him, she would never dare ask for his help in such a situation. Tim Senior would probably take a belt to Go-Go for this offense, and Lord knows, a part of her has yearned to beat him, to scream at him, to shake him. Father Andrew being so nice-that makes it worse. The thing is, she would like nothing better than to drive to the school-after taking out her curlers, maybe a quick bath-and talk to Father Andrew. Men who give up women, as priests do, are so much easier to talk to. She can take him some cookies, store bought, and maybe he will make her tea on the little hot plate he keeps in his office. She is surprised to realize how much she has noticed in her visits there-the hot plate, the mug from Northeastern University, the photos of children, presumably his nieces and nephews, a large photo of what was clearly a family reunion in some place very green. It could be anywhere, but she wants to believe it was Ireland. They would speak to Go-Go constructively, then send him back to class, and then talk privately about what a challenge he is. Like Father Andrew, she will find positive, optimistic words. Challenge, situation, incident. She might even tell him about the chronic bed-wetting, ask if he has any insight into why an almost ten-year-old boy would regress this way. Father Andrew probably has all sorts of reassuring insights.

But she is stuck here because they have only one car. No other family in the neighborhood has only one car, except for that chaotic single woman across the street, the one who doesn’t mow her lawn until the neighborhood association insists, tells her it’s a breeding ground for rats. What are they going to do when Tim Junior gets his license? How are they going to afford the extra insurance for having teen drivers on their policy? She cries harder.

“There, there,” Father Andrew says. “I can handle it alone.”

“Does everyone know?” she chokes out.

“I’m afraid it was a little public for my tastes. But he was caught, he confessed, he was punished. I’ll make sure that the children understand there is no point revisiting such things.”

He will, somehow. Father Andrew has that kind of power. The children love him as much as their mothers do. Only the fathers don’t seem to get Father Andrew’s charm. The thick, dark hair, the high color in his face, the bright blue eyes, the broad shoulders. It would be unbearable if he were a regular man, because then he would have a girlfriend or a wife. But as a priest, Father Andrew is available to her.

“Maybe we should still have a meeting one day?” she asks. “About Go-Go’s… situation.”

“Sometimes, the less said, the better. Let it go. He’s learned a valuable lesson.”

She is torn, wanting to tell him about the sheets, the other problems, if only to prolong the conversation, yet feeling it would be a betrayal.

“About Go-Go,” she starts.

“Yes?”

She can’t do it. “What do you think of him? Truly.”

“I think he’s a boy, ma’am, with all the inherent contradictions and conflicting impulses. He wants to be good. He really does. But it’s hard to be good.”

This is such a generous assessment of her son that she yearns to believe it. Yet a part of her mind steps back and hisses like a goose: You’re a fool, Father. He’s a bad, bad boy. He’s an awful boy. And maybe he has every reason in the world to be that way, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep all his secrets.

Chapter Seventeen

T im Halloran starts each weekday by circling job prospects in the morning paper, the Beacon, every red loop an exercise in positive thinking. He has never used the want ads before to find a job, managing to rely on word-of-mouth leads from friends and colleagues. But since he left the seasonal job at Goldenberg’s, there is nothing. Or so people say. Sorry, I don’t know about anything. Sorry, things are god-awful tight . Tim knows what’s going on. His boss at Hutzler’s was a vindictive little prick, and he’s spread the word all over town that Tim has a bad temper. Bad? He simply has a temper, unlike that faggot, who liked to hold forth about film-as opposed to movies, some airy-fairy distinction that the guy insisted on-when he didn’t know shit. Guy went on and on about how John Wayne had died on-screen only once, such complete and utter bullshit that Tim, who loves John Wayne, all but recited most of the titles in one breath. (SANDS-OF-IWO-JIMA-MAN-WHO-SHOT-LIBERTY-VALANCE-THE-COWBOYS-THE-SHOOTIST . And that was off the top of his head, not even complete.) OK, Tim’s fuse is a little short, but it’s never affected his work. Tim’s only failure is not kissing ass. He is good at what he does, probably could have been a true mathematician instead of a bookkeeper if he had the freedom to fart around with that academic bullshit. But he was a husband at twenty-one and a father at twenty-three, which means parking the ego and providing for your dependents.

Only he isn’t exactly providing now. They are running through their savings at an alarming clip. Running through? They have run through the savings and kept on going, like a car with no brakes. After the first of the year, he started dipping into the boys’ college funds to keep them afloat. Luckily, the boys don’t even know they have college funds, although Tim Junior seemed kind of surprised when Tim Senior told him last fall, anticipating the worst, that anything beyond community college was going to be a DIY project. For once, Tim took something seriously. His grades are decent and he even won a prize for something called moot court. He says he wants to be a lawyer. Just what the world needs, another lawyer.

Sean will be OK, that’s a given. He’s got a shot at the National Merit Scholarship, which would be sweet. And maybe the little one will straighten out. He’s a mess, but Tim sees something of himself in Go-Go’s chaos, a too-big-for-itself energy that needs only to be organized and focused. Tim was the same way before the Marines put him together. He volunteered when he was eighteen, knowing he wasn’t going to get a deferment or exemption. But by volunteering, he had been free to choose the branch he wanted. The Marines suited a scrappy little bantam like Tim, who had learned to fight growing up in the Pigtown neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore. He also happened to catch a break, for once in his fucking life, got in after Korea and out before Vietnam started to escalate, then went to UB on the GI Bill. There’s another option for his boys. Volunteer, then let Uncle Sam pay for tuition. What’s the risk? There are no wars. Let those towelheads scream and gibber. They couldn’t organize a panty raid in an underwear factory.

He glances at his wristwatch, at Doris’s back at the sink, where she is moving a dishrag around with few noticeable results. A day is a hard thing to fill, especially in these gray winter months when he can’t throw golf clubs in the trunk, spend the afternoon at the public Forest Park course. Doris has to know he isn’t looking for work the whole day long, but she doesn’t dare question him. She doesn’t dare oppose him in any way. And it’s not like he’s ever raised a hand to her. With Doris, all it takes is getting loud, really loud, and she caves. She can’t stand the sound of a raised voice. She’s weak. The weakness in the boys-and there is weakness, a softness, in all of them, even Sean-that’s pure Doris, her blood and her ways. He should have taken a closer look at that family of hers, picked up on the fact that her prettiness wasn’t so much prettiness as frailty. Doris at eighteen was so thin and so pale she glowed, like one of those catfish in the Ozarks. He mistook that for class, breeding, when it was probably anemia and malnutrition. She can barely stand up straight these days. And that glorious, glorious red hair, which once promised to fulfill Tim’s every The Quiet Man /John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara dream of Ireland-it has faded to a pinky color, and you can see her scalp in spots. When he met Doris, her mother was dead and there weren’t a lot of womenfolk in the family, so he didn’t have anyone to study. He should have looked at the men, the most rabbity, watery, bucktoothed, swaybacked bunch of Irishmen he had ever seen in his life. But, like the song said, he only had eyes for Doris. Doris made him feel tender and protective, where other women just made him want to fuck, fast and dirty. Those aren’t the kind of girls you pick to bear your children.

Then again, a milky white, pink-haired rabbit of a girl whose uterus killed as many babies as it made wasn’t the best choice for motherhood, either.

He stubs out his cigarette and stalks out to the car, not bothering to say good-bye. He tells himself that he’s going to Security Square Mall or maybe Westview, drop off a few applications, see that guy he knows at Gordon’s Booksellers. But no one’s in, not at the first couple of places, and he’s at Monaghan’s when it opens its doors at eleven. Not that Tim is a drunk. He can’t afford to be. He nurses one beer, then two, all the way to happy hour, then asks for one more, knowing that the bartender won’t charge him for the third one. The bartender, Jim, is a good guy. He understands that Tim is looking for a job, and he mentions leads here and there. He even suggested that Tim could work at Monaghan’s. But he can’t do it, can’t squander all he has fought for-a job where you wear a shirt and tie, a desk, regular hours, benefits.

Not that he actually likes bookkeeping. But you aren’t supposed to like your job. It makes him a little crazy, listening to Tim Junior and Sean talking about what they want to do. Not when they were little, still in the astronaut-firemen phase. Heck, he wished they’d go back to the firemen phase. With overtime, those guys make out like bandits. No, it was all this current talk of fulfillment, of what would be meaningful to them, that makes him crazy. Sean wants to be a doctor, and while Tim knows he would burst with pride if that happened, he resents it, too. Same with Tim Junior, with his half-assed dream of being a lawyer. As for Go-Go-the last vocational desire he expressed was being a garbageman. Sincere as anything. He thought it would be fun, he said, picking up other people’s trash. Two kids aiming too high, one aiming too low.

He blames their mother’s blood. He wonders about the children lost, what they might have been. All daughters, Doris claims, but she has no way of knowing. Tim believes a son, his real son, the boy most like him, was one of the lost children.

The bar grows dimmer as the day grows brighter. About 4 P.M., as he’s getting ready to ask for his last beer, he sees a vaguely familiar woman enter the place, a real slinky piece even in her nylon waitress uniform. She feeds the cigarette machine, yanks the knob hard, curses, and slaps the side. She’s overdoing it, making a spectacle of herself. She likes having everyone’s eyes on her.

“Can you make good on the money I lost?” she asks Jim.

“Didn’t you read the sign?”

“What sign?”

“The one plastered on the front of it that says ‘Out of Order, do not use, no refunds.’ ” Jim’s smiling, though. She’s too cute to ignore.

She glances back over her shoulder. “Oh, that sign.” It’s droll, the way she says it. “I was in such a goddamn hurry to get to work I didn’t even look. Can’t you cut me a break?”

“Best I can do is take your name and the amount lost and the boss will fish it out for you when the repairman comes by.”

“Aw, c’mon.” She doesn’t put much oomph into it. She might have gotten what she wanted if she had. She is a good-looking woman. Maybe that’s her problem. Too proud to use charm, thinks her looks alone should carry her. Where has Tim seen her before, or is that wishful thinking? Then he remembers.

“You’re-that girl’s mother. Mickey. We’ve met.”

“Have we?” She extends a hand so limp that the fingers curl like cocktail shrimp.

“Halloran. Father of Tim, Sean, and Gordon.”

“Rita.” She studies him. “Oh yeah, the night of the storm. Mickey went out looking for your boy-”

Is that how she remembers it? Is that all she knows? The men told the children never to speak of Go-Go’s secret, not even to their mothers. Tim didn’t want everyone knowing his son had been touched by that queer. A story like that could ruin a boy’s life. He had to tell Doris, but he didn’t tell her much. He’s pretty sure that faggoty Dr. Robison has kept his mouth shut. Rita’s boyfriend, Rick, shouldn’t have had any problem not telling Rita. It’s Mickey and Gwen that Tim wonders about, though. Do girls tell their mothers stuff? How many people know?

He says: “Funny how the kids used to be together all the time and now they’re not. I guess Tim and Sean are too old to be playing with girls.”

“You don’t think boys and girls can play together?” Her mouth curves, not quite a smile. Something else. Something better.

“Not into high school. It’s not natural. They were right to segregate kid by sexes in school. They learn more when they’re apart. At least the Catholic high schools are still all-boy.”

“You know what? I kinda agree.” She sticks out her lower lip and blows upward, ruffling her bangs. She wears her hair in an upsweep. Not quite a beehive, but something with some height to it. It’s not fashionable, but he likes it. Better than those crazy hippie curls women are wearing now. He also likes her liquid eyeliner, laid on thick.

“Where’d you go to school?”

“I’m not from here, not originally. We moved here my last year of high school and I didn’t bother going anywhere.” Her tone borders on rude.

“Well, I still might be interested in the answer, did you ever think of that?”

“No. People here, they only ask that so they can play ‘Do you know.’ I’ve never lived in a place where people were less interested in people not from here.”

“I’m sure lots of people are interested in you,” he says, trying to stick up for his hometown and flatter her at the same time.

“If by people you mean men and if by interested you mean want to fuck me, yeah, then some are.”

He hates women who use that kind of language. He also has a hard-on. Which she notices, and tries not to.

“Doesn’t it seem like spring’s never going to come?” she asks the room in general. “I grew up in Florida. I cannot deal with these winters much longer.” Softer, to him. “I got a guy. He’s a good guy. You know that.”

She’s being kind, the most insulting thing she could ever be. And just because she has a good guy-what did she mean, “You know that”-doesn’t mean she’s happy with him. She would definitely fuck someone else. Just not him. Not that he asked, by the way. She shouldn’t be so full of herself. Popping a boner was a reflex, nothing more. His stomach had been known to growl when he couldn’t be less interested in food. Fuck her. No- don’t fuck her . He won’t even whack off to her, although he was thinking about doing that a little later.

She glances at her watch. “I’m going to be late. And now I gotta make it through a six-hour shift with no cigarettes.”

He takes out his pack and offers it to her.

“Marlboros?”

“You were expecting maybe Virginia Slims?”

She laughs, selects two, as if picking chocolates from a box, as if one might be better than another. “You’re a nice guy, Hank.”

“Tim.”

“Right.”

He is a nice guy. Having a temper doesn’t mean you are a bad guy, just that you were born with a shorter fuse, less tolerance for bullshit. No one blames short-legged people for not being able to walk with longer strides. How can people hold him accountable for his temper? Plus, he gets mad only when people fuck up. He always has a reason for what he does. He’s not a bully. True, sometimes he yells at his kids or Doris, but he has his reasons. He’s trying to explain things to them. What the light bill is every month. Why they can’t have a dog or a cat. He’s trying to get everyone else to join him here on Planet Earth.

“You know, maybe the adults should get together, have dinner sometime.”

“The four of us, or do we have to invite the good doctor and the grand lady?”

He misunderstands this for a second, thinks she said grandbaby. “Oh, the Robisons.”

She makes a face. “I don’t really know him. Her-”

This is the kind of woman talk he usually disdains, pure gossip, petty hurts over who said what or wore what, the kind of bullshit that Doris brings home from the altar guild, the unending chatter about so-and-so trying to get in good with Father Whosis. But there is something intriguing about Rita’s dislike of Tally Robison. Something earned.

“Just the four of us,” he says, knowing he can’t afford a night out until he finds work again, knowing Doris has no desire to go out, knowing he would be ashamed to be seen with her, the way she looks now. She would seem even more washed out and dried up alongside juicy, vivid Rita.

“Maybe,” she says. “If that no-good daughter of mine could be trusted to watch her younger brother for even an evening.”

He watches her go. She has a sweet ass, an upside-down heart in that tight skirt. He hasn’t been rejected, exactly. You can’t be rejected if you never enter the race. He’s a married guy, their kids are friends, or were. Of course they’ll never go out as couples. Too dangerous.

O ver the next few weeks, it seems the most natural thing to take the back way home, along Purnell Drive, and stare up the hill at the town houses, not that he knows which one is hers. He imagines coming upon her after dark, her car broken down, needing help. Somehow they end up at the Millrace Tavern, or back at Monaghan’s, and then they end up in the backseat of his Buick. His kids make fun of his love for Buicks, but they all have nice big backseats, as his sons will discover one day.

He allows himself these stories, then he goes home, where his house is a mess and his wife slumps on the sofa and there’s a faint smell, something dirty. Have the boys adopted a dog or a cat against his wishes? One day he’ll tear the house apart, find out what they’re hiding from him. They can’t be laying out for pet food, not now. He’s a good guy. He deserves a break. He has given his children everything- everything- and they don’t seem to know or care. He watches this new late show every night, the one about the hostages, counting off the days. He would have thought the whole thing would be over in a week, maybe two, but now the days are in the triple digits. Where’s John Wayne when you need him? Dead of cancer, going on a year now.

John Wayne, the good old Duke, is what got Tim canned at Hutzler’s last year. Tim’s stupid faggot of a boss, embarrassed by being one-upped on his knowledge of movies, joked they were going to rename the Orange County airport John Wayne Terminal . Tim honestly doesn’t remember what happened next, but his coworkers say he literally went over the desk, almost cleared it in one leap. They had to slap him in the face until he let go of that pencil dick’s pencil neck.

Chapter Eighteen

Spring 1980

R ita sizes up the customers left in her section. Two young lovers. A middle-aged man, alone, stretching his coffee and cigarette. Wherever he lives, he doesn’t want to go there. Three kids in surgical scrubs, too tired to eat. The man will tip well. The lovers-that can go a lot of ways. They could be a new item, and he’ll want to impress her. Or they could be a new item and she’ll be insecure, wonder aloud if he’s leaving a big tip because he thinks the waitress is cute. Most women who have put in their time waiting tables, they don’t let their boyfriends or husbands get away with undertipping, while women who have never carried a tray get all huffy if they think the tip is too big. As for the young almost doctors-they’ll do their best, and their best will probably be about 10 percent. They will rationalize that their tab is mostly beer, as if that made it any easier to transport to the table, that their food was only so-so, even if it did get there hot and fast, which is all Rita should be judged for. Besides, everyone knows the food at Connolly’s is mediocre. It’s almost a point of pride. The food sucks, yet everyone still eats here. Even the mayor comes here regular. He was in earlier this evening, with his mother. Now he’s a good tipper, but Rita didn’t have him tonight. The manager spreads him around.

Rita has been at Connolly’s only five years, but she feels as if she’s part of the fixtures, a piece of the original building, in place when it opened, whenever that was. Back in the 1930s? 1920s? A long time ago. Like a lot of things in Rita’s life, its heyday was over long before she grabbed a piece of it. Oh, it’s still crowded, still beloved, but with the development of the Inner Harbor now the big thing, the owners have been put on a month-to-month lease. A smart cookie would get out before she’s forced out.

Rita is a smart cookie, but she’s also a very tired cookie these days. She has enough on her plate, what with needing to find a new place to live, pronto. She can’t make the rent on the town house if Rick is moving out. He’s going to pay child support-Mr. Good Guy, bully for you, you’re so swell-but, man, that’s not the same as splitting all the living expenses. Based on what she’s seen so far, she’s going to be forced to take a two-bedroom, make Mickey double up with her, at least until Joey gets a little older. There’s also no way she’s going to be able to stay in the city school district.

Mickey seems okay about changing schools, almost eager for it. Rita had steeled herself for a big showdown, only it never happened. Mickey’s an okay kid most of the time, doesn’t ask for much. But when she does want something, she is ferocious in her desire for it. She argues, she screams, and, on occasion, even lashes out, trying to hit and scratch Rita. She’s a hellcat. Well, she comes by that naturally, through her mother and her father, may he rest in peace. Rest in pieces. What a loser he was. Killed in jail, in the overnight lockup on something small, but he had to go pick a fight with a little guy who beat him to death before the guards could get to them. When Mickey was young, it was too complicated to say her father was dead and not say how, so Rita said he was in the wind. She planned to kill him later, in some more civilized way. “Oh, honey, I just heard-your dad died in a car accident in Whereverthehellishe.” Or cancer. Something nice. But as Mickey gets older, it only grows harder for Rita to speak to her of her father’s death. She’s such a funny kid, always focused on who has what, very into fairness. It bugs her that Joey has a father and she doesn’t.

Man, how bugged she would be if she ever finds out that Joey has two fathers, in a sense. But even Rick hasn’t figured that out. At least she doesn’t think he knows that part.

Rita’s tables are all in lulls; she ducks outside for a cigarette. The air is nice tonight, balmy and bursting with scents, spring coming on all of a sudden, like it overslept and needs to make up time. But maybe what she’s smelling is only what’s left in the breeze from McCormick spices on the other side of the harbor. People are excited about the changes coming to the harbor, and Rita knows there will be opportunities-new restaurants, which will draw crowds if only because they’re new. But she’s skeptical. Tear down the old things, build new things, it’s still Baltimore. She should have gotten out while the getting was good, headed to San Francisco or Los Angeles, maybe Dallas. Some big city, although not New York. New York never appealed to her. It’s almost as bad as Baltimore. Crime, drugs. Dirty. She wants to go someplace clean, fresh, and warm, a place where the air never turns red with powder from the steel mill. Atlanta? Florida, although not Jacksonville, where she grew up. Real Florida, Miami or Fort Lauderdale.

But her last chance of a fresh start was sixteen years and two kids ago. She met Mickey’s father, Paul, and got knocked up. Talk about wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. She couldn’t afford an abortion, and even if she could, she didn’t trust the guy that Paul said he knew. Then Paul had to go and get himself killed before his daughter was even born. At least she could claim they were married, pretend to respectability, not that her own father bought it. He only let her stay at home because her mother was wild for the baby. They moved out as soon as Mickey was in school and Rita got the lunch shift at Hot Shoppe Juniors. She moved on to Connolly’s when Mickey turned nine. Then she met Rick. Then she met Joey’s dad-to-be, not even a month later. That was a complicated time. But fun . She smiles, remembering, two new romances at the same time, both fulfilling in their own way. There was Rick, handsome and steady, ready to take care of her, so sweet with Mickey. Rita loved her daughter a little more, seeing her with Rick. Not that she didn’t love her like crazy, but part of being a single mom was never getting to step back and take in the view. Rick made that possible.

Then there was Joey’s dad, Larry. He was bad, in the best sense of the word. Drove a hot car, usually had a little toot on him, liked to have sex anywhere but a bed. He had come into the restaurant one night, sat at the bar, watching her, making sure she saw him watching her. He was waiting outside when she got off at ten, leaning against his Monte Carlo. “Need a lift home?” “I need to make a phone call first.” He gave her the dime for the pay phone. She liked that. She went back inside, called Mickey. “Mommy’s got to stay late,” she said. “We’re doing inventory.” The girl was nine, there was no harm in leaving her alone. Within an hour, Larry had her bent over a picnic table in a kids’ park and she was all but baying at the moon. Maybe it was the cocaine, maybe it was cheating on Rick, maybe Larry really did know some things that other men didn’t. All she knew was that the sex was better than it was with Rick, and it shouldn’t be. Larry wasn’t even as good-looking as Rick. Bad skin, too thin. She assumed part of the reason he liked sex in odd places was because he never had to get all the way naked, he could conceal his caved-in, almost hairless chest, his pin-thin arms and legs. Didn’t matter. He was thick where it counted.

Then Rita got pregnant. She couldn’t be sure who the dad was, so she figured she’d tell them both, see what each one offered, kind of like making two employers compete for her. Rick said they should get engaged, move in together. Larry said he would help her out however he could-and promptly disappeared. So that sealed it. She had the right guy, and who cared who the actual sperm donor was. Rick was solid, reliable. She could have given up working, but she was reluctant for reasons even she didn’t understand. She told Rick she would keep working so they could put more aside to buy a house, yet she never put anything aside, except for the tip money she hid in a little metal box in the kitchen. Rick worked days and she stayed home with the kids, keeping her evening shifts. By afternoon, she looked forward to getting out of the house, although she knew enough to complain now and then about her job. Sometimes, heading out the door, she all but did a little jig.

Then last December, Larry came into Connolly’s. Sat at the bar, eyed her the whole time. Sure enough, he was waiting for her, leaning against a new car. Still thin, still pockmarked. Still sexy.

“Hey, babe,” he said. “Been too long.”

She had worked out what she would say if she ever saw him again. It was good, too. She was going to flash her engagement ring, say that some men knew how to treat a woman. Those plans evaporated. She still wanted him. It was even more exciting than the last time around. Now she was really cheating. But she was cheating with the father of her child. And there was no doubt in her mind that he was the father. Joey was almost five now, and people kept commenting on how he didn’t resemble anyone in the family, except maybe Mickey a little. Only Rita knows that he looks just like his father.

She was up in the air, incapable of making a decision, wanting Larry, scared to leave Rick. It turned out not to be her decision after all. Rick caught wind of what she was doing. How, she’s still not sure, but it didn’t matter. They were over.

She tosses her cigarette in the water, goes back inside. She has gauged her tables well: the young lovers tip fairly, the man tips generously, the doctors-to-be can’t even make 10 percent among the three of them. She tries not to watch the clock, but she’s aware of it over her head, its hand creeping toward nine, sending her home.

He walks in at eight forty-five, making the bartender sigh. Rita sighs, too, only happily. She hasn’t told Larry yet that Rick moved out and she has to start over. Rick is her ace in the hole. She’ll be smart this time, play it right. The magazines she reads at the beauty parlor, the women she knows-you can’t call them friends, but they gab sometimes-all these so-called authorities would argue that it’s not smart to want this man, that he’s already proven he can’t be trusted. But a person can change in a few years. He came back for her. When he sees Joey, everything will fall into place.

They make love parked outside her town house. This has been their pattern since Rick moved out two weeks ago, Larry digging what he thinks is the big risk, getting caught. Larry follows her home, she runs inside, tells Mickey she’s going out for a pack of cigarettes or a carton of milk, please keep the door locked and listen for Joey. Then she gets in Larry’s car, which has these divine seats that go all the way flat. Tonight, the two of them are extra quick, but not in that efficient I-know-you-let’s-get-it-done way. They’re quick because they can’t hold back. After, she smokes a cigarette, helps herself to the bottle under his front seat, laughing about nothing. God, did she and Rick ever laugh about anything? If so, she can’t remember. He was always so superdutiful, and then he started getting superparanoid about her and the kids, accounting for everyone’s whereabouts. Glancing back at the house, she thinks she sees the curtain twitch in the window. But Mickey knows better. Rita will snatch that girl bald-headed if she’s spying on her. She pulls Larry’s head to her breasts, thinks about the dinner she’ll cook in her new apartment the first time she has him over. Something good, but not too fancy. Candles on the table? No candles, she decides. Very casual, maybe even take-out pizza. She has the man she wants, not the one she’s supposed to want. It was trying to be good that made her bad, leading with her brain instead of her heart. If she lets herself have what she really wants, it will be easier to be good this time.

Chapter Nineteen

T he last student on Clem’s schedule this morning is very young, very pretty-and destined for failure. These things are not related, not directly. But her youth and her beauty have protected her for much of her life, and this girl-Clem sneaks a look at his appointment calendar, Amanda something, he can’t read his own handwriting, he’s the ultimate doctor cliché-cannot quite believe that these attributes will not get her through medical school as well. She got in, didn’t she? Besides, based on what Clem has gleaned, she was a legitimate admission, not an affirmative action reach or a legacy. She had good grades and MCATs. She is earnest and hardworking.

But she’s not meant to be a doctor, not unless she chooses a field like pathology, where her ineptness with people won’t matter. Oh, doctors can be cold, brusque, high-handed. Many are. But they at least need to understand people on some level, which this girl does not. Inevitably, she wants to be a pediatrician. She thinks children like her. No one likes her. Clem tries to imagine a child wretched enough to deserve her “care,” and his mind slides across an image of little Go-Go Halloran, which shocks him. He doesn’t harbor any ill feelings toward the boy. He pities him.

“Dr. Robison?”

“Yes, Amanda?”

“What do you think I should do?”

Quit . But his instincts about people, which are excellent, tell him not to be direct with this young woman. There is something a little dangerous about Amanda. He’s not going to flatter himself into thinking she would sleep with him to improve her situation, yet she clearly wants something from him. She almost vibrates with neediness. She is used to people volunteering to help her, figuring out what she requires even when she doesn’t have a clue herself.

“We would have more options if you had come to me before you received a failing grade,” he says.

“But I wasn’t failing until I took the final.”

“You were marginal throughout the year. You had to know you were skating by, that you were rolling the dice.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. Her mannerisms are so childish. Perhaps she has confused her own immaturity with an affinity for the young.

“You could take a semester off,” he says. “Come back at midyear, retake the class. Plead special circumstances.”

“Such as?”

You’re not very intelligent . “That’s not for me to say. Amanda”-she brightens at the very sound of her name, like a dog or a small child-“tell me-why do you want to be a doctor?”

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.” She is slipping into a speech, a performance. She has recited this story before, probably to much nodding approval. “When I was four, I opened a hospital for my toys. And I really fixed them-put dolls’ arms back in their sockets, sewed on a teddy bear’s eye.”

Ah, but the toys couldn’t complain.

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. I can’t imagine anything more rewarding than taking care of children. Especially babies, who can’t tell you where they hurt or what’s wrong.”

“I’m not sure being a doctor is supposed to be rewarding,” he says.

Amanda’s eyes bug at this bit of sacrilege. She is not, upon second look, as attractive as she clearly thinks she is. Her features are not proportionate. The big eyes are a little goo-goo-googly, the mouth broad, and the heart-shaped face can’t quite contain it all. She looks like a cartoon deer.

Goo-goo-googly makes Clem think of Go-Go again. Again, there is a flash of-it can only be called revulsion. But he’s a little boy. Nothing was his fault. The adults have to take responsibility for what happened.

“I mean-it is, at times, very rewarding. But that’s not the point, the main thing of it. We don’t become doctors because of how it makes us feel. We become doctors because we want to care for others. What we feel and experience is secondary. We are here to serve patients.”

“Your specialty is geriatrics.”

“Yes?”

She is groping toward a point, although lord knows what it is. That he doesn’t understand her desire to care for children? That his patients are closer to natural death and therefore less important, or simply crankier and more demanding? Why does he even bother? She probably will muddle through, end up in a pediatric practice. Chances are, she will be no worse than clumsy, the kind of doctor that children hate and everyone thinks it’s just their child. There will be mistakes, but they won’t be fatal. Serious, perhaps. Vulnerable to lawsuits. But she won’t manage to kill anyone, and her colleagues will cover for her because that’s what doctors do. Clem believes every profession covers for its incompetents. So do families. Any group, no matter how loosely affiliated, will always close ranks against the world at large.

He gives Amanda a generic pep talk, sends her on her way. He needs to review three other student files before he meets with them this afternoon, but he feels logy. If he sits here, he’ll fall asleep. He will go for a walk, maybe buy a hot dog from one of the carts.

The University of Maryland sits in a forlorn, somewhat forgotten corner of southwest downtown, although the neighborhood is beginning to catch a second wind. When the highway project was halted by community opposition-and Clem was one of those who fought it, because of what it would have done to Leakin Park, its flora and fauna-the city was left with blocks of houses it had planned to demolish. These “dollar” houses in nearby Otterbein ultimately were awarded in a lottery to those who promised to renovate them and live in them for at least five years. Some of those houses will come on the market soon, although the neighborhood is far from gentrified, despite talk about Federal Hill becoming the next Georgetown. Baltimore is one of those cities that defines itself by such comparisons. The next this, the next that. Except maybe Johns Hopkins, which considers itself far above the city, apart from it. But Clem has no regrets about choosing the University of Maryland. It’s a good school, too, and it doesn’t have to shoulder the weight of a worldwide reputation. Renown is overrated. Plus, one becomes responsible for all of one’s colleagues at such places. In the public’s mind, Hopkins is Hopkins is Hopkins. He can’t imagine that everyone at Hopkins is pleased with John Money right now, given his recent pro-incest comments in Time magazine. If Clem worked at Hopkins, he’d probably be asked about that constantly, would not be able to persuade people that a geriatric specialist has no overlap with the sex clinic.

It’s a finer day than the morning had promised, and Clem decides to walk north, up Eutaw, to the pleasant chaos of Lexington Market. He won’t go so far as to say that he prefers Baltimore to his hometown of Boston, but he considers it a fair trade, especially since they moved into the house on Wetheredsville Road. Boston was fine. He understood it, and it understood him. But Tally wanted to leave, so they left-and allowed her to make him the scapegoat, telling her family it was Clem who desired a change. He shields Tally often from such unpleasant situations, but it’s a small price to pay for being married to her. He’s a lucky man. Other men, seeing Tally next to him, have told him that over and over. Twenty-five years after the fact, he still flushes at the memory of those early days with Tally. At least she wasn’t his student, although that’s what everyone seems to infer.

Still, it was illicit by his standards, even a little sordid. That was part of its charm. And she had taken the lead. No one would ever believe that, and he would never say as much out loud. It’s not gallant, for one thing. Perhaps the truth is seldom gallant. Eighteen-year-old Tally Duchamp seduced thirty-two-year-old Clement Robison. He had no idea why she wanted to be with him, and he is even more baffled by why she stays with him. She is a headstrong woman, capable of marrying someone merely to antagonize her parents, then staying in that marriage to prove them wrong. Tally has enormous staying power for grudges.

But she is fickle in almost all other aspects of her life. Clem has watched her flail and fail her way through a remarkable number of projects, attacking each enterprise with great energy, then dropping the new activity when the early passion dissipates. He should find it reassuring that painting seems to have taken hold, that she finally is finding a place to channel her formidable energy, especially now that Gwen is only a few years away from leaving the nest. But Tally’s current obsession unnerves him. She seems to be using it to wall herself off, to escape from the family. Did he feel that way before the night of the hurricane? Or is he projecting on her the burden of his secret? If she knew what he knows, she would be within her rights to distance herself.

He wonders if Tim and Rick have broken their pledge. There is a prevailing theory that there are no secrets in marriages, not good ones. If they have confided in their mates-well, he envies them. He would love the release of telling someone, to hear someone say: What could you have done? Or: I don’t see that you had any choice. The problem is, he doesn’t trust Tally to say those things. Her best quality is also her worst. She’s relentlessly, reluctantly honest when asked her opinion. Oh, she won’t volunteer it, won’t go out of her way to make someone feel bad. She tries to be tactful. But if you insist on knowing what she really thinks, you’d better be prepared to take it. Sometimes Clem isn’t.

He enters the market. Noisy and chaotic on this Thursday before Memorial Day, it comes at him in a wave of aromas. Fried food, deli meats, fish, flowers. The sweet, buttery smells of Konstant Candies’ peanut brittle trumps everything else. He will buy some for Gwen only-she doesn’t eat candy anymore. His mood flags, thinking of his daughter, the obsession with her weight. Worse, her intense interest in boys. She used to have a lively, curious mind and now all she cares about are clothes and how many boys call her each week. It wasn’t that long ago that she walked with him through the woods on weekend days, raptly absorbing his knowledge of plants and wildlife. Only two years ago, they read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn together, which provided a lot of opportunities for valuable discussion. Poverty, the lives of immigrants, even sex crimes. When he speaks to her now, she is very patient and kind, as if he were mildly retarded.

He decides to have a crab cake at Faidley’s. And a beer. It’s practically the holiday weekend.

Someone has left a copy of yesterday’s Star, the afternoon paper, on the counter. Clem flips through it reflexively, pushing it away when he chances on an item from Chicago, something about a possible appeal in John Wayne Gacy’s case. Every year, there seems to be a new unthinkable horror. Jim Jones in 1978, John Wayne Gacy last year. What will 1980 bring before it’s over? And will his first name begin with a J ?

His food arrives and he focuses on enjoying the platter, a cholesterol horror show-French fries and macaroni and cheese, the fried crab cake. He would chide a patient for eating such a lunch. But his own cholesterol is excellent, as is his blood pressure. He knows his good health is a lottery ticket, but he’s proud to show patients what is possible as one ages. Yet no matter what he does, statistics show his wife is destined to be a widow at a relatively young age. That’s a bum thing to do to the person you love most in the world.

Tally was adamant that she understood the actuarial odds. That she would rather have a foreshortened time with him than a longer marriage to anyone else. Still, he wonders if she will decide that it was a poor bargain, giving away her youth, only to find herself alone with much of her own life ahead of her. Say she’s sixty-three when he dies, which would make him seventy-seven. That’s too late for a true second chance. She’ll almost definitely be a grandmother. She might be on her way to being a great-grandmother, if either Miller or Fee decides to start a family early. His money’s on Miller, a bit of a throwback, short-haired and stalwart and dutiful. Miller, born in 1956, almost seemed disappointed that he had to sign up for the draft but not actually serve. Miller lives to serve. He always wants to do the right thing. In other words, he’s just like his father. He has made a good marriage to a terrific girl. And that girl, like her mother-in-law before her, has persuaded Miller to abandon his hometown, only in her case she wants to be close to her family. He calls every Sunday, recounting his week. In some ways, Clem feels he knows more about Miller’s life than he does about Gwen’s.

Now Fee is quiet, withdrawn. She has a secret, even if she doesn’t know it. Tally believes it’s her sexuality, which makes Clem sad, only because he believes Fee’s life will be harder for it, that she will not be comfortable in her own skin. She’s in San Francisco, but she might as well be in… Dubuque, based on what Clem has gleaned of her life. She goes to school-she’s working toward a master’s in psychology-and spends her weekends biking obsessively, almost as if she’s trying to get away from herself. Clem hopes she eventually finds a way to be still.

As for Gwen-sweet, pretty, eager-to-please Gwen. Whatever she does, she’ll do well. So much younger than her siblings, Gwen had the best of both worlds: she was essentially raised as an only child, but by parents with plenty of field experience. Some might call her spoiled, but Clem thinks she’s the opposite. Gwen is a delight. Or was.

“What if it were your child? What if it was Gwen or Mickey?” Tim Halloran asked Clem and Rick that night. To this day, Clem has to fight down the impulse to blurt out: It wouldn’t be. Gwen isn’t stupid that way . He isn’t blaming the victim, Go-Go. He’s castigating the Hallorans for not preparing their son for the world at large. Was it because he was a boy that his safety in the world was presumed, or because he had two older brothers who were supposed to show him the ropes? Yet Clem and Tally hadn’t abdicated their responsibility to Gwen because of Miller and Fee.

“Hey, he tried to hit Mickey,” Rick said. “He could have killed her. The kids say he kept an old shotgun in that cabin. What if he had grabbed that instead of his guitar?”

“It’s not the same,” Halloran shrilled, his voice high-pitched as a woman’s. “It’s not the same.”

Halloran was right, but not in the way he believed. Clem could not bear to tell Tim that a violent physical assault on a girl would, according to the law, be judged much more harshly than the touches that the old man had bestowed on Go-Go. What would the courts have done to him? He would have gotten a year or two at the most. And what if he had denied it? How could it be proved? According to Sean, Mickey couldn’t describe what she had seen in the darkness of the cabin, only that the old man had become violent when she found him alone with Go-Go. Yes, the man was old and black and indigent. The justice system would not be predisposed in his favor. But whatever sentence was meted out would never have satisfied Tim. Hell, a smart defense attorney might summon Dr. Money as an expert witness, ask him to tell the court what he had told Time magazine: “A childhood experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” But what was a child? What was a relative? Clem remembers, as he often does, the image of eighteen-year-old Tally, passing canapés in her parents’ house, offering her tray to her bachelor uncle’s best friend, pregnant by him not even a year later. Utterly different, of course-and yet some people wouldn’t consider it so. Both situations would be covered by Dr. Money’s rubric.

The discussion was moot. The man was dead at their feet. Events and possibilities swirled around them, fast as the water rushing around the man, unstoppable, implacable. Any number of things could have killed him. The fall, the blow to his head, a heart attack, drowning. What good would it do to tell anyone about the children, how the man had chased them through the woods, much less why. They agreed that Clem would place an anonymous call to 911 from a pay phone downtown, reporting a body in the woods, then check the morgue to find out when a John Doe was brought in. An autopsy would determine if it had been a heart attack, or even a stroke, brought on by exertion. No one was to blame for what happened.

But when Clem finally called the morgue on an elaborate pretext, claiming he needed to collect data on all over-fifty deaths in September for a research project, there wasn’t a single John Doe who matched the description of the man in the woods. Had his body not been found? Could he have been wrong about the man’s death? If so-

He pushes his plate away, incapable of finishing. He should buy something for the girls, as he thinks of Tally and Gwen. But what can he take them? Tally is proprietary about her menus and resents any unsolicited contributions. Gwen no longer eats sweets. The market’s flowers are not the best, a little bedraggled and mealy-looking. He has nothing to bring them but himself, old and tired at the end of another day.

Chapter Twenty

“I found my thrill,” Larry sings, “up on Strawberry Hill.”

“Strawberry Hill Apartments… for-e-ver,” Rita sings back, unwrapping glasses. Lord, Mickey did a shit job packing them, and a few are chipped. Inevitably, it’s her nice ones, the matched set of heavy Mexican amber from Pier One. Why couldn’t the freebies from the filling station giveaways end up cracked?

But even the broken glasses can’t dim Rita’s mood, although she makes a mental note to find Mickey later and give her what-for.

Moving, which is supposed to be one of the most stressful events in a person’s life, has brought Rita nothing but a constant, giggling joy since she signed the lease on the Strawberry Hill apartment last month. She floats through her days, her temper soft, and she rockets through her nights, shooting up, up, up on waves of sex, then falling into the best sleep she has ever known. She can’t believe Larry volunteered to move in with her, without even being asked. Being legit-sharing a bed and an apartment with Larry, if not the actual lease-is the best high she has ever known. Everything is better. Each cigarette, each drink, punching out at work. Even Joey, something of a wild child, is suddenly an angel. It’s almost as if he knows who his real father is, although Rick-of course!-continues to be the superdutiful dad, coming by every other weekend and Wednesday nights. God, Rita would love to tell him the truth, just to wipe that superior look off his face, but she doesn’t want to say good-bye to his checks.

Besides, Rick’s visits seem to be the only thing that rouses Mickey out of her permanent sulk. Suddenly, nothing makes that girl happy. Take the school thing. She hates her current school, Rock Glen. She was excited about the transfer to a new district when Rita first told her. Then Rita told Rock Glen that Mickey has a medical condition and wouldn’t be able to attend the last three weeks. She now lives too far away to walk to the bus stop, and who’s going to drive her there at 7:30 A.M. every day? Not Rita. Besides, no one learns anything the last three weeks of school. You think a girl would be happy, getting a head start on summer vacation. Plus, Rita’s paying Mickey to babysit during the mornings, when it would be entirely reasonable to expect her to do that for free. A dollar twenty-five an hour, five hours a day, five days a week. Heck, that’s better than Rita does some nights. The girl should be delirious.

But Mickey hates the new apartment. She has to share a bedroom with Joey, at least until Rita can justify buying a sofa bed, but it’s not like either kid can be in Rita’s room, now that Larry is sleeping over. The new place may be smaller, but it’s nicer. Clean, freshly painted. Besides, her car insurance dropped almost by half just for moving out of the city, and they are a mile closer to the shopping centers up on Route 40 and out Security Boulevard. Mickey could take the bus to any of those places, go shopping, go to the movies. But when Rita points this out, Mickey sighs and says: “I miss my woods.” Her woods? Foolish girl.

Rita can’t waste time worrying about Mickey. Her immediate goal is to make Larry a man, a real man. Someone who provides. Someone who doesn’t deal drugs, maybe uses them from time to time, but doesn’t sell.

“What is this?” Larry asks, pulling a long, lidded metal pan from a box. She needs a beat to identify it.

“A fish poacher.”

“Have you ever used it?”

“No. I brought it home from work one night because I heard that was a good way to make fish, but my kids hate fish.” Actually, it was Rick who hated fish, but she tries to mention him as little as possible. She wants to erase Rick from the record, pretend he never happened.

“ ‘Brought it home’-you mean you nicked it.” Larry smiles. He likes her wicked side.

“Maybe.” She gives him a sideways bump with her hip as she passes him in the small galley kitchen, then turns and bumps her rear against his crotch, moving lazily back and forth until she sees Mickey standing in the living room, watching them through the pass-through. No expression on her face, no comment, just watching. The girl sees too much. Rita wonders if Mickey has noticed her brother’s marked resemblance to Larry. Thank God both Rick and Larry had dark hair and eyes. There’s nothing obvious to link Larry to Joey unless one looks for the resemblance, as Rita does, repeatedly. There’s a thinness at the bridge of the nose, camouflaged by Joey’s chubbiness, a sameness to the ears. Yes, the ears. She knows Larry that well, inside and out.

Which means she understands it won’t be easy, domesticating a man who loves her wild side. Rick was the big attraction, the thing that brought Larry back to her. Now that they aren’t cheating, his interest could fall off. If she leans on him to give up dabbling in drugs, move in officially-no, he has to make those decisions on his own. Or think he’s making them. So be it. She knows how to keep him happy and interested. Last week, they went to the drive-in up on Route 40 and Rita was dead tired, but she made sure to go down on him. Twice. Her hair was coated with grease and salt from his popcorn when she finally pulled her head from his lap. The people in the next car gave her a dirty look. They had a bunch of pajamaed kids with them. So what? It was an R-rated movie about two teenagers trying to lose their virginity. Those righteous parents were the creeps, bringing their kids to something like that.

She wonders if Mickey has gone all the way yet. She thinks not. She doesn’t want her to, of course, although Rita was only sixteen when she did it the first time, and girls grow up faster now. Still, Mickey needs a boyfriend, someone to distract her so she wouldn’t be in the apartment all the time, sneaking up on Rita and Larry. Maybe Rita should take Mickey to her doctor, get her on the pill? Or an IUD, like she uses, because she smokes. Does Mickey smoke? Does she use drugs? Rita won’t let her get away with that, even if it does make her a hypocrite. Does Mickey know she uses on occasion? Used. Probably, the kid doesn’t miss a trick. Look at her, standing there, staring. Who is she to judge Rita? It might look bad, leaving Rick, taking up with Larry so fast, but if only Mickey knew the whole story. Rita isn’t taking a family apart, she’s putting one together. The girl should be kissing her feet with gratitude.

“I’m going to go outside,” Mickey says. “Look around.”

“You get all your stuff unpacked?”

A pause. She’s actually thinking about whether to lie to her. The thing that kills Rita is that Mickey wants Rita to see her thinking about lying. “I’ve done enough,” she says. “For now.”

“You did a shit job packing my glasses,” Rita says.

“Maybe you should have packed them. I guess you were too busy.”

She puts a lot of spin on busy . There’s no doubt what she means.

“Yeah, I was busy. Busy working every night, so you can have food and clothes and a roof over your head.”

“Yes,” Mickey says, looking upward. “And what a roof it is.”

Rita raises a hand, her temper roaring back, even as Larry says, “Ladies, ladies.” Larry doesn’t like conflict. She better keep it in check if she wants to keep him, not let Mickey get a rise out of her. She wonders if Mickey understands this, if she’s baiting her mother to make her look bad in front of Larry.

Joey bellows from the bedroom, waking up from his nap. Rita’s policy is that if he takes a nap at nursery school, he sure as hell is going to take one at home. But he never goes down without a fight.

“Go get your brother,” she tells Mickey.

“I was going to-”

“Get your brother. Your stepfather and I have to-wash the sheets.”

“He’s not my stepfather,” Mickey says, and Rita can’t be sure, but she thinks Larry nods.

“Get your brother,” she says.

“Half brother,” Mickey says. She always has to have the last word.

As soon as Mickey leaves the room, Rita grabs the laundry basket and a random selection of clothes, doesn’t even bother with detergent.

“Why do I-” Larry starts, and she gives his crotch a quick squeeze. “You’ll like it,” she whispers. “Doing laundry is good clean fun.”

They can’t lock the door as it turns out, but they close it and start out standing. No one’s coming through that door unless they’re determined to push 250 pounds of human aside. But Rita doesn’t want to finish that way. It’s too tempting for her to press herself against the rattling washer, full of someone else’s clothes, Larry behind her, vibrating all over. She has to stuff her fist in her mouth to keep her pleasure to herself, and even Larry, expert at stifling his own cries, has to bite her shoulder to muffle his groans. He breaks the skin, although he doesn’t draw blood. She thinks she hears someone start to open the door, only to retreat.

This is how I will keep you . She almost says it out loud. She has to be fun, spontaneous, dirty .

Back in the apartment, little Joey is running around naked, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Mickey’s just watching him, no expression on her face.

“Nake! Nake!” he screams. “I’m nake.” It’s the word he used as a toddler. He knows it’s funny.

“What the hell, Mickey?”

“He took his clothes off,” she says with a shrug. “I can’t help it if he’s retarded.”

“Don’t call your brother retarded.”

“Look at that little thing,” Larry says. “No resemblance there.”

Rita shoots him a look. Shut the fuck up . Luckily, Mickey is oblivious, for once. She’s watching her brother run in circles as if she can’t remember what it’s like to be that young and silly. “Nake! Nake!” he cries. Rita reminds herself to be kind to Mickey, the less advantaged child, the one without a father, whereas Joey has two in a sense. Rita can tell it baffles Mickey that Rick Senior doesn’t have any obligations toward her since moving out. He’s kind enough to include her on some outings, but everything’s tailored to Joey-tot lot, cartoons-which makes it boring as hell for Mickey. Yet Rita can’t blame Rick, either. It’s biology. He’s taking care of what he believes to be his child. Eventually, Joey is what will bind Larry to her, far more important than hot sex in the laundry room and blow jobs at the drive-in. He just needs some time.

“Nake! Nake! I’m nake!” Joey screams.

“Retard,” Mickey says under her breath, but she’s smiling. They’re all smiling. Rita wonders if it would be wrong to start calling Joey by his middle name, which happens to be Lawrence.

Chapter Twenty-one

Summer 1980

T im stands outside his house, watching the participants gather for the Fourth of July parade. He tries not to take it personally, that his one-block street, Sekots Lane, is used as a staging area for the annual parade, but he can’t help feeling slighted. Sekots has always felt like an annex to the real neighborhood, some orphan street that got tacked on by mistake. Sekots dead-ends into a hill where children sledded once, but the Dickeyville Garden Club planted it aggressively, hoping to block out the view of the Wakefield Apartments above them. Seemed ridiculous at the time, all those little saplings, but trees grow, and the club’s objective has been achieved. Tim remembers when those trees were smaller than his boys.

It’s been years since his family was home for this parade. Even through last year, with his work life on and off, they were able to take their usual week in Ocean City. They always go to an old-fashioned rooming house that Tim’s family stayed in when he was a boy. It’s not fancy. In fact, it’s downright crummy, but what’s the point of spending dough on a place where you only come to shake sand out of your suit and hang wet towels over the railings. The location is prime, two blocks from the beach, within walking distance of the attractions along the boardwalk, where they spent almost every evening. Last summer, it broke Go-Go’s heart when he just missed the height cutoff for the bumper cars. Tim pleaded, even tried to slip the attendant a fiver. Go-Go threw a tantrum, not entirely out of character for him, although it struck Tim as particularly violent and out of control. Last summer-no, Tim tells himself. It hadn’t happened yet. It was only the one time. Go-Go said it was the only time he was ever in that old bastard’s cabin.

No shore this summer, even though Tim is back to work. He has a gig at Tuerkes, which sells luggage and leather goods. Not doing the books, but working the floor as a sales associate. He likes it, sort of. He actually has to dress better than he did when he was working in accounting, and he enjoys the store’s deep leathery smell, the company of the other guys. They’re young, blow-dried. They go to discos and come in after the weekends, talking about the pussy they get, claiming a girl’s drink preference tells you everything about her, whether it’s a Wallbanger or a Sex on the Beach. They swear that the best girls, the classy girls, drink white wine spritzers or Bristol Cream. The women they talk about-they seem like an entirely new species to Tim. They could be imported from the moon.

The Tuerkes job felt like a demotion at first, but now Tim thinks it might be a turning point. Learn the ropes at Tuerkes, rise up, maybe start his own business. The economy is god-awful, but it won’t always be. People will have money to spend again one day. The trick is figuring out what they’ll want, or how to make them think they want what you’re selling. He’s seen customers in Tuerkes who have no more need of a $200 briefcase than a pig needs a sports car, but the briefcase represents something to them, a dream, an ambition. What will people want when the money flows again? High-end appliances? Jewelry? With men wearing it now, the market has doubled. Gadgets? Look at Hechinger, beginning to spread all over the goddamn place. Who knew that a fucking hardware store could get so big? A hammer is a hammer is a hammer.

In the meantime, Tim has no seniority and no paid vacation. Which is a better excuse for not going to the shore than ’fessing up to his kids that they pretty much have no money. Interest rates hovering at 17 percent this year, and he had to pay a penalty to cash in a CD. That hurt. He told the older boys that they had to get part-time jobs this summer, making it seem like a character-building exercise. But he can’t force Go-Go to get a job and the kid’s a nonstop fount of needs. Lately, he’s obsessed with this video game where some yellow dot eats other yellow dots until some ghosts eat the big yellow dot. Thank god there’s not an arcade within walking distance or Go-Go would spend all his days there, buying time at what Tim has figured to be about three minutes per quarter, give or take.

A month ago, Go-Go started pestering him for money for a Fourth of July costume. The kid’s all excited about marching in the parade, although he’s keeping his outfit a secret, says he doesn’t want anyone to steal his idea. There are prizes for the best ones, penny-ante shit, but Go-Go’s acting like the crown jewels are at stake. Tim said he couldn’t give him money if he didn’t know what it was for, and Go-Go stopped asking. Very un-Go-Go like. Also unlike him to keep a secret, but he has managed to hide his costume from everyone, even his brothers. Even now, he is still in the house, in his room, determined not to put in an appearance until the parade actually starts.

The Dickeyville Fourth of July parade is one of those things that people love about the neighborhood, but the preciousness of it is a little much for Tim. Jesus, it looks like everyone is going to march in the damn thing, who’s going to be left to watch? The theme is vaguely patriotic, yet also kind of feel-good: We are all Americans . No shit, Sherlock. Who else celebrates the Fourth of July? Maybe the Brits are lifting a pint, glad to be rid of us, but their economy is in the crapper, too. Adherence to the theme doesn’t seem to be that hard-and-fast, anyway. Tim sees a platoon of tiny little girls in old-fashioned dresses, with buggies and baby dolls. Behind them, a Cub Scout troop. Tim didn’t realize there were so many little kids in the neighborhood. Judging by their ages, the Bicentennial was a big year for making babies.

As Tim looks around, he can’t believe this mix of hippies and preppies are his neighbors. He doesn’t fit in with either crowd. How did this happen? Was it always this way? He can’t remember now why he bought the house on Sekots Lane, other than that the price was right and he wanted a place whose walls didn’t connect to someone else’s walls. That seemed like a big step up. He’d like to blame Doris, but she fought him about the house-after the fact, which is the only way she fights. She said the neighborhood was too isolated and that she’d rather wait until they could afford something bigger. She also asked what was the point of moving to a place full of old-fashioned stone and brick houses surrounded by wooded hillsides, only to buy a new house that backed up to an apartment complex. “Things don’t break as much in a new house,” he argued. That’s a laugh. Things are constantly breaking in the house on Sekots Lane. There’s probably not an original appliance left in the place, and he’s pretty sure the hot-water heater is going down for the count.

Five minutes until the parade. It’s going to be a bitch of a day, hot and steamy. It makes Tim sweat just to look at the guy dressed up as George Washington. Even the sucker doing Jimmy Carter in shirtsleeves looks hot, and the poor Reagan impersonator is wearing a suit. Tim might vote for Reagan, although he’s keeping that to himself. If Teddy Kennedy can wrest the nomination away from Carter next month, then it will be different. Tim could never vote against a Kennedy. Sure, he knows about the dead girl, the secretary, and believes Kennedy was probably banging her, or planning to. So what? Those were his prerogatives. Tim doesn’t begrudge him a thing. He should be president, although Tim can’t imagine how many Secret Service agents it would take to keep him safe. Some nut will take a shot at him. There’s always a nut somewhere, willing to take a shot.

The parade is finally under way, transforming itself from a milling, formless mass into something with shape and purpose. The fife-and-drum trio has started playing, everyone is lining up. Where’s Go-Go? Tim begins to wonder if the boy understands how parades work, or if he even bothered to register, surely a prerequisite for marching and being considered for a prize. Go-Go has trouble understanding things like that, rules and regulations. His old man can sympathize.

The parade stretches out, heading down Pickwick toward the more picturesque heart of the village, wending its way toward the banks of the Gwynns Falls. Tim wonders if it’s too early to have a beer. It’s a holiday, isn’t it? The usual rules don’t apply. He goes back into the house and grabs a Schaefer. It is, as the song says, the one beer to have when you’re having more than one and Tim definitely plans to have more than one today.

A young mother, one of the ones who’s shadowing the buggy brigade, shoots him a dirty look. Hey, he put it in a Styrofoam koozie. No one can see the can. It’s a holiday, dammit.

Then he sees Go-Go, coming out the front door. Shit . He’s dressed as one of the U.S. Olympic hockey players. Not a bad idea, actually, for a display of patriotism. He’s more on the money than those little girls with their baby carriages. But the kid has to be dying inside all that gear. Because he’s not just any hockey player, he’s the goalie, Jim Craig, complete with pads and face mask. Although the pants are nothing but red sweatpants with duct tape and white paper stars along the sides, the rest of the costume looks authentic. Tim wonders where Doris got the scratch for it, if she’s one of those women who squirrels away money behind his back. She better not be. Shit, did Go-Go steal the stuff?

All those concerns are overshadowed by the fact that the kid is wearing actual skates. Sure, he’s got rubber covers on the blades, but he’s walking in skates . Short and rinky-dink as the Dickeyville parade is, there’s no way Go-Go is going to make it to the end in that outfit, brandishing a hockey stick.

Tim goes up to him. “Great costume, buddy.”

Go-Go nods his thanks, his entire being focused on what he has to do-the sweater, those skates. He’s almost vibrating inside all that gear. At least he has the good sense to wear the mask up on his head.

“But, buddy, you’ll never be able to walk in that getup. Even if you took off the skates-”

“I won’t, ” Go-Go says. “The skates are the best part. I’m Jim Craig.”

“I got that, buddy.”

“I turned away thirty-six of the Soviets’ thirty-nine attempts on goal.”

“Yeah, in February, at Lake Placid. But it’s July in Baltimore. You’ll die. I mean, literally, Go-Go. You could die from the heat.”

Doris comes up, wringing her hands. “You can’t walk in that outfit, Go-Go. You’ll get sick.”

Funny, but Doris taking his side makes Tim want to find another one. He isn’t going to be like her, the enemy of fun, the worrywart.

“Look,” he says, “how about if I walk with you? Maybe bring some water. That way, if you get thirsty or something-”

Go-Go has been mincing forward all this time, slowly but surely, the gap between him and the parade growing larger and larger.

“You mean, like a bodyguard?”

“Sure,” his father says. “Like a bodyguard. I bet Jim Craig had a bodyguard when he went home to”-where was Jim Craig from?-“Philadelphia and all his friends came out to see him.”

“Jim Craig,” Go-Go says, every word, every step, a concentrated effort, “is from Massachusetts. Like Father Andrew.”

“Massachusetts, Pennsylvania. I always get them confused.”

Tim has Doris fill an old thermos with ice water, reluctantly trades it for his beer, then falls in behind Go-Go. Still, they’re losing ground with every labored step. Pretty soon, they can barely see the little girls with their baby carriages.

“You know, Jim Craig was a big hero in that game.”

“I know, ” Go-Go says.

“And sometimes, when someone is a big hero, people carry him on their shoulders.”

Go-Go doesn’t break stride. If you could call those tiny, painful steps strides. “Did they do that with Jim Craig, though?”

“They did, I think, when he went home. To Massachusetts. I’m pretty sure when he went back to his hometown, that’s exactly what they did.”

He hoists his son to his shoulders. He’s ten and wearing all that gear. It’s no small thing. And it’s so damn hot. Still, Tim makes better time than Go-Go ever could have. With each lumbering step, the skates bang his chest and Go-Go ends up hitting him on the head with the stick every time he tries to adjust himself. But they are narrowing the gap now. As they catch up to the parade and the spectators, Go-Go hands his hockey stick to his father. He then lifts his arms, hands clenched, clearly imitating some victory grip he’s seen in a movie or TV show.

His brothers, who had been following the parade on their bikes, circle back, riding in slow, lazy circles around them.

“Let’s take turns,” Sean says. “We can go faster than you.”

“He’s too big for you to carry.”

“Not for me and Tim together.”

They leave their bikes by the side of the road-no need to fear them being taken here in Dickeyville, where everyone knows everyone, although some colored kids might come along. The brothers make a seat of their hands and carry Go-Go the next block. Tim then takes him back on his shoulder for a segment. And so they go, now part of the parade. But for the final stage, for the approach to the finish alongside the stream, Go-Go wants to get back on his father’s shoulders and do his hand thing again. This time, Sean carries the hockey stick.

They’re all dripping with sweat, smelly and disgusting. But the woman who frowned at Tim’s can of Schaefer smiles at him now. He smiles for himself. Go-Go wins second prize-really, it should have been first, just for the sheer stamina involved-but he’s pleased as hell with the ten-dollar gift certificate to G. C. Murphy’s and the look on his face is more than enough reward for Tim. Even with Tim back at work, things are still lean for the family.

Go-Go must understand this because later that night, after running through a list of all the things a boy can do with ten dollars at G. C. Murphy’s, he offers to put it toward school supplies.

“That’s okay, buddy,” his father says, tucking him in, something he seldom does in the summer, when the boys are allowed to stay up as late as they wish. Something he seldom does, period. “It was your costume, you get the prize, spend it on whatever you want. Where’d you get the idea?”

“I found a hockey mask.”

“Where did you find a hockey mask?”

“In the woods.”

“In the woods. I thought we agreed you weren’t going to go into the woods alone.”

“At the end, in the vacant lot on Tucker Lane. Not in the woods -woods.”

“OK. So you found a hockey mask, just lying there?”

“Yeah. At first I was going to be the killer in Friday the 13th . I didn’t get to see it, but Sean and Tim told me about it.”

“That wouldn’t have been a very nice thing to be on the Fourth of July, buddy. It’s your country’s birthday.”

“I know. Besides, that would mean I was a girl because in the movie, it’s a lady who wears the hockey mask so people don’t recognize her when she’s killing them. I don’t want to be a lady.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re a boy. You’re all boy. And what you did, that was better. Jim Craig-that’s in the right spirit.” A pause. “Where’d you get all the other gear, buddy? The stick and the pads?”

“Oh, some boys lent it to me.”

“Really? What boys?”

“I have to give it back. Not the skates. I wore my own skates. Do you remember when you taught me how to skate?”

Go-Go’s memory is generous. Tim didn’t exactly teach him how to skate. He left that to the older boys. He does remember the rink at Memorial Stadium, a bone-cold frustrating day of Go-Go walking on his ankles. Tim hated every second of it and kept retreating to the car to “get warm” and listen to the Colts playing out of town. Turns out that all that walking on his ankles had prepared Go-Go well for today. “Yeah, I remember.”

“That was a good day.”

“If that was a good day, then I guess today is a fantastic day.”

“Yeah.” Go-Go frowns. “It is, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. Things aren’t as good as when I was little.”

That fuckin’ freak in the woods . For all Tim knows, that monster gave Go-Go the hockey mask last summer, that’s how he lured him into his house. That man took his boy’s childhood and there’s not a damn thing Tim can do about it. Talking makes the least sense, he doesn’t care what anyone says. Nothing can undo what happened. He and Doris are united on this front at least. No psychiatrists, no talking about it. She prays and he does his best to set a good example of what a man is. OK, he wasn’t doing a very good job there for a while. But he’s back at work, he’s earning again, providing . He will take care of his family. He just lost his way there for a little while. Go-Go showed him he needed to get it together.

“Things are as good as they were when you were little,” Tim says. “It’s only that all memories get better the further you get away from them.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he says. “Good memories get better and bad memories just disappear.”

“Really?” Go-Go’s voice scales up, awed, as if this has never occurred to him.

“Really.” One day you won’t think about it. I promise, I promise, I promise.

“I wish we could go to the ocean this summer.”

“Me, too. Maybe we will for a day.”

“Can we have saltwater taffy?”

“Sure.”

“And Grotto Pizza?”

“Definitely.”

“Thrasher’s fries?”

“And funnel cake. I bet you’re tall enough to go on the bumper cars this year.”

He is. It’s mid-August before they make it to Ocean City for a day trip and the drive is miserable, even though it’s a weekday. But the traffic and the sticky hot car are worth the headache to see Go-Go in a bumper car. His smile is tight but real, jamming his car into his brothers’ less-fleet vehicles. He’s nimble behind the wheel, eluding them when they try to exact their revenge. He does get in a little trouble for going against the flow and creating a few head-on collisions, but hell, that’s Go-Go.

That night, driving home, boys and mother dozing as Tim listens to the final inning of the Orioles game, Go-Go suddenly says from the backseat, almost as if talking to himself: “Today is a good memory already.”

It takes all Tim’s strength to keep his car heading straight in the westward-bound lane on the Bay Bridge. Oh, if only he could, he would make the old Buick rise in the sky, truly Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, farting black smoke all the way home. Anything-anything-to make Go-Go laugh again.

Chapter Twenty-two

Autumn 1980

T ally is surprised how hard the news hits her, although she supposes one is never prepared for this. Her mother, after all, had to cope with the same situation when she was much younger. Implacable time, the one thing that never stops, that’s the real certainty behind death, if not taxes. Time is relentless in its forward drive. She grips the phone, the cherry red wall unit in the kitchen, one of the few notes of color allowed in her all-white oasis, seeing details she stopped noticing long ago-the paper disk in the center of the dial, the tendons in her hand, the large squash blossom ring she wears on her right hand, scuff marks on the wall. Most rings like this are turquoise, but Tally’s stone is coral. It clashes terribly with the red of the phone-

“April,” Miller says. “I hope you don’t mind that we waited.”

“Of course not,” she says. She thinks of an old phrase- butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. To her, it has never connoted anything but coldness, and she has never understood why others think it indicates charm and good manners. But she gets it now. Her mouth is like a covered butter dish, cool and contained and proper, presenting what is expected of her. She calls over her shoulder. “Clem? Clem?” The acoustics in the house are so odd. He could be steps away and oblivious. He could be upstairs and hear every word.

“What?” he calls back. It sounds as if he’s on the second floor.

“Pick up the extension. Miller has news.”

She stays on the line while Miller repeats his big announcement, makes the proper happy noises, then excuses herself, insisting that father and son should have a father-to- father talk. In hanging up the phone, she misses the hook and the receiver clatters to the floor on its long curlicue of a cord. She stoops to pick it up and slides it onto the cherry red base. She’s going to be a grandmother. This is what happens to women who have children at nineteen. They become grandmothers at forty-three.

Nothing has changed. She looks as young as she did two minutes ago, when Miller called, taking advantage of the Sunday rates, as he always does, thrifty boy. It is only 3 P.M. out in Denver. Here, it is the end of a perfect autumn weekend, which Gwen has wasted by spending it indoors at a roller-skating rink. Tally is skeptical of Gwen’s enthusiasm for such a wholesome activity. She worries it might be used as a cover for something else, something done out in the parking lot, assuming they really go to the rink at all. But what’s the worst thing that could happen? Gwen will get pregnant. So what? Tally’s already going to be a grandmother.

She knows her reaction makes no sense. If she had anticipated this development, prepared herself, she would be elated or at least somewhat enthusiastic. But it feels messy, being a grandmother when one child is still in high school. It makes her feel old and young at the same time-a grandmother at forty-three, but still a mother to a high school freshman. Clem, she knows, will have no ambivalence, and she steels herself for his arrival in the kitchen, his eagerness to celebrate.

Sure enough, he comes in and kisses her with an excitement he has not shown in-well, let’s not add up all those weeks, months, she thinks. A year, at least.

“What are you looking for?” she asks, for Clem has released her and is rummaging through the small collection of wine they keep in a stackable Formica holder on the counter.

“Something worthy of the news.”

“What news?” Gwen says, clattering up from the basement. Her cheeks are ruddy, her hair mussed. A completely normal by-product of roller skating, but also of other activities. And why did she enter through the basement?

“Your brother’s going to have a baby.”

“How advanced of him,” Gwen says, going to the refrigerator and staring into it, a habit that makes Tally wild because she never takes anything, only studies the food with an almost voyeuristic delight . “I would have thought that Sylvia would have the baby, but I guess Miller is superevolved. Kramer vs. Kramer must have hit him pretty hard.”

Tally knows that Clem hates this new tone of Gwen’s, a flip sarcasm honed over the summer, but he ignores it today, determined to have his moment of joy. “If you like, you can have a glass with us to celebrate.”

“A glass of what?” She’s interested, Tally can tell. Gwen likes being treated like a grown-up. Tally was the same way at this age. Still, it makes her nervous, the way Gwen brightens at the thought of drinking something with alcohol. Don’t move so fast, she wants to tell her daughter. Or next thing you know, you’ll be on the verge of being a grandmother.

“This white Burgundy, I think. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

“It won’t be cold in time,” Tally says. “Dinner’s at seven.”

“I’ll put it in an ice bucket. That will be good enough. Does it go with what you’re fixing?”

It will, actually. She’s making poached salmon, a light green salad for dinner. A summer dish, but it is technically summer for one more day, although the seasons also seem to be rushing, impatient as Gwen. The light is pulling away. The days are darker at both ends. Tally hates to feel the ebbing of the light, even though she made very little progress over the summer when there were daylight hours galore. The new painting, which began with so much promise, is torturing her, has been torturing her for almost a year. But for once she’s not going to give up.

While Tally wishes she could stop time, she understands Gwen is eager for the calendar to move forward. She is wearing fall colors today-a plaid skirt with burgundy knee socks, a navy sweater. This is Gwen’s “new look,” straight from The Official Preppy Handbook, and Tally objects to it on every front. It is expensive, first and foremost, and materialistic. She hates Gwen’s sudden attachment to labels, the insistence on branding herself with tiny alligators, polo players, a socialite’s signature.

But Tally also finds it confounding that her daughter wants to dress in this conservative, rigid style. If Tally had been a high school girl today, she would be listening to punk bands, embracing the most outrageous clothes possible. Why does Gwen want to look like a Junior Leaguer? Clem loves the new Gwen, but Tally suspects that the clothes are a cover, that the boys in plaid pants and crewnecks are much wilder than the scruffy hippies that Gwen brought home last year. She is dating a Gilman boy now and seems to attach a lot of importance to that. Her goal, Tally understands, is to get a bid to as many private school proms as possible. She has turned into a horrible flirt.

“You are turning into a horrible flirt,” Tally told her just that morning, after listening to Gwen’s end of a phone call. She wasn’t eavesdropping. Tally was in the kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast, and Gwen chose to take the call here rather than run up to her bedroom. She wrapped the extension cord around herself, then uncoiled, all the while talking about her various conquests.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Gwen said.

“I’m not a flirt.”

“You don’t flirt often,” Gwen conceded. “Maybe that’s why you make such an ass out of yourself when you do.”

“Gwendolyn Eleanor Robison.” She is named for the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. And a maiden aunt of Clem’s, but Tally prefers to credit only the poet.

“Remember that time with Mickey’s stepdad?”

She doesn’t. She can’t even remember his name. Then she does.

“I wasn’t flirting with him.”

“That’s not how Mickey’s mother saw it.”

“That’s not what happened-”

“Oh, don’t spazz out about it,” Gwen said with a flippant wave. “It’s not important.”

Then why bring it up? Probably because she knows Tally will brood on it for the rest of the day.

T ally must have seen Rick here or there-at the Exxon, sitting in Rita’s car when they dropped Mickey off-but she first spoke to him at the end of Mickey’s eleventh birthday, a Friday-into-Saturday sleepover. Gwen was not a whiny or demanding child, but she had lobbied relentlessly to attend this party for her new friend. Clem didn’t want her to go. He was dubious about Mickey’s home situation. But Clem didn’t have the heart to tell Gwen his true objections, and she easily batted down the straw men he tried to put up- you won’t get enough sleep, you’ll eat junk, what about homework? All Tally could think was that Rita was a stronger woman than she was, having a sleepover for eleven-year-old girls.

Tally wanted to think she was better than her neighbors-and Clem-when it came to such snobbery. Mickey’s house called her bluff. From the moment she crossed the threshold that Saturday afternoon, she was in distress. The smells-onion, bacon, a never-quite-clean diaper pail somewhere. The noise-there was clearly no quiet corner in the house. And the house, although newish, was showing its seams. Then again, so was Clement’s dream house. Whatever the modern world had wrought, it did not include better-built structures. Old houses got scuffed and dirtied, true, but new houses gapped and sagged and peeled. Gwen seemed oblivious to it all. But Tally noticed, and Mickey’s mother, Rita, noticed her noticing.

“We were living up in Wakefield, but there were only two bedrooms,” she said. “After I got pregnant with Joey, we needed three bedrooms, but I didn’t want Mickey to leave the school district. We didn’t have a lot of options.”

“Oh, that’s good. That you were able to maintain that stability for Mickey. She’s a very special little girl.”

Rita squinted at Tally, as if suspecting she was being ridiculed. “We like her. Although I wish she would help more with the baby.”

“I just turned eleven,” Mickey said. “And he weighs, like, ninety pounds.”

“Try twenty,” put in Rick, the baby’s father, although this dark, good-looking man didn’t resemble his son, a white, doughy blob. Most babies were white doughy blobs, in Tally’s opinion. Why did people pretend to find them fascinating? Tally hadn’t even found her own children mesmerizing. She loved them, of course. But it had been hard, being a twenty-one-year-old girl with two children under the age of three. Hard and, well, boring.

“He’s adorable,” she said, flicking a finger under his chin. Chins. His mother shifted him on her hip. Rita was a pretty woman, despite being a little hard and faded. If Rick left her, she could still find another man. But after that? She wasn’t going to have much of a shelf life.

Tally automatically made this calculation upon meeting another attractive woman: How many more men were in her future? It was like assessing another person’s bank account. What are you worth? Do you have more than me or less than me? Most women had decidedly less. Rita was harder to judge. She was earthy, practically reeking of sex. Clem was a bigger prize than Rick, but Rick was a catch . He can probably fix things, Tally thought. He didn’t bother with this place because it was a rental. But if he owned his own home, everything would work, always. His dream house would function, no corners would be cut, no mistakes would be made.

“Would you like a beer?” Rick asked. She said she would. Gwen shot her a look. The look said many things. Such as: You never drink beer! If there’s no rush to get home, why are you here already? What are you doing? But Tally was just being polite.

Later, on the short trip home, Gwen said: “You acted sappy.”

“Sappy? What do you mean?”

“Weird. Drinking beer. Staying late, when you always say that good manners mean not hanging on and on.”

“I thought you wanted to spend more time with Mickey. She is your best friend.”

“Mickey said-” Gwen paused. “Mickey said you were flirting with her dad. She said women do that all the time, right in front of her mother.”

“I thought he was her stepdad and not even that, not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not married, right?”

Gwen’s face clouded with hard thought. Oh dear, what was so obvious to an adult could fly over a child’s head. Gwen honestly didn’t know that people could live together and have babies without being married. Tally remembered her playing Barbies with a friend back in the old neighborhood, Gwen informing the friend solemnly: “They can’t have babies if they’re not married. It’s a law.” Her daughter was naive in a way Tally had never been.

“I didn’t mean they’re not married, darling. Just that they didn’t have a big wedding. But that’s typical of second marriages. Forget I said anything.”

Talk about naive: children never forget what they are asked to forget. Within a week, Gwen had hurled this accusation at Mickey, after some silly argument, and Mickey reported the insult to her mother, who had, lord help them, driven to the Robisons’ house to confront Tally. Tally claimed a migraine and asked Clem to take charge of the mess, but he insisted that she at least be present while he defended her.

Rita was headed to work, her hair in a messy upsweep, sort of a deflated beehive. Her fury was so palpable that one could almost imagine real bees buzzing furiously around her head.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Clem said. “Tally never meant to say anything to Gwen.”

“Misunderstanding? More like wishful thinking, if you ask me. I’m used to women throwing themselves at Rick. I’m not used to them using little girls to carry their ugly gossip. Maybe Mickey shouldn’t be coming over here, if you have problems with my lifestyle.”

“Mickey and Gwen love each other,” Clem said. “They shouldn’t be punished because an adult made a mistake.”

“What do you mean, love ? My girl’s not queer.”

“Not that kind of love.” Tally could tell that Clem was working hard to keep his emotions in check, that he was repulsed by Rita’s quickness in projecting romantic love on the friendship of two innocent little girls, and her knee-jerk disgust at homosexuality. Perhaps Clem suspected, even then, that Fee was gay. At any rate, he talked Rita down, apologizing for Tally’s misstatement. (Which it really was; she had done everything to mitigate her slip.) He charmed her. Clem could charm. He had charmed Tally into giving her life away.

Now, almost four years later, watching her slim-hipped daughter switch about the kitchen in a way that seems designed to make the pleats on her skirt swing just so, Tally wonders if Mickey had loved Gwen in that way, if Rita’s instincts had been better than theirs. It would explain so much-Mickey’s abrupt disappearance from Gwen’s life as she plunged into the world of boys, boys, boys, Gwen’s fierce determination never to speak of her. What had they done, up in those hills, all those afternoons? A few Sapphic kisses, perhaps some show-and-tell? Then the Halloran boys had become part of their dyad, and Gwen had switched her affections to Sean. That ended, too. Everything ends.

“How do you feel about being an aunt?” she asks Gwen, hopeful that she will turn the question back to Tally, show a smidgen of empathy for her mother, or at least acknowledge that Tally is human, that she did not come into existence solely to produce Gwen, feed her, and clothe her.

“We never see them,” Gwen says. “So it’s hard to see how it will change much of anything around here. Why is that? Why don’t they visit? Even when they were dating, he never came home.”

“Well, he lives so far away-”

Her daughter can call bullshit with a glance.

“It’s how things are, Gwen. Sons tend to be absorbed by their wives’ families.”

“They only got married three months ago.” Tally remembers it well. Outdoors, in the Boulder backyard of the in-laws, Miller’s studious little wife wearing a wreath of flowers in her hair, Gwen staring raptly at the young couple exchanging their vows. Too raptly, for Tally’s taste. Gwen was seeing only the dress, the crown of flowers, the attention riveted on the bride.

“You’ll see. Miller’s just doing what most boys do, disappearing into his wife’s family. But daughters are for life.”

“What about Fee?”

“She’s still in college. I don’t expect Fee to partner off for a long time. Miller’s the odd duck, marrying young, having a baby right away.” But Tally wonders if Gwen is challenging her to gossip about Fee, to include her in the confidential discussions she and Clem have had about their oldest daughter.

“Huh.”

“But when you marry-”

“I’m never going to marry.” The viciousness of Gwen’s tone almost literally knocks Tally off balance. This is sincere revulsion, not the cool mockery she has been practicing. Tally finds herself placing her right palm on the edge of the stainless steel sink, steadying herself. She hates this sink, cold and industrial. Sinks should be porcelain, like the one in her parents’ home. Her parents’ home, with its pantry and maid’s room off the kitchen, a life she wanted no part of. Why? Why had she traded it for something even lesser? What was she thinking?

Perhaps Gwen realizes she has crossed a line because she softens her tone slightly. “I mean, I’m not going to marry young, or at least not have children young, not until I’m at least thirty. I want to have a career first.”

Her attempt at tact is only more hurtful. Gwen’s words hang in the kitchen, an utterly polite fuck-you to her mother. Why not just say: Upon pain of death , I am not going to be you. Tally wouldn’t mind. Tally doesn’t want to be Tally most days.

But if Tally hadn’t been Tally, then there would be no Miller, no Fee, no Gwen, no in utero grandchild. You can’t hate me for the crime of having you, Tally yearns to tell her daughter. Only it’s not hate, it’s disdain and pity, so much harder to stomach. Gwen, her plaid skirt twitching on her hips, is like some beautiful alien in a science fiction film, briefly looking back in disgust at the primordial ooze from which she has emerged. She wants to believe that she is the author of her own life, that she can take whatever form she chooses and it will have nothing to do with Tally. She needs to believe this, at least for a while. Tally understands, absolutely. She felt exactly the same way at Gwen’s age. I’ll be anyone but you .

Why does understanding only make it feel worse? Forgetting Clem’s plans, she takes the Burgundy from the ice bucket, opens it, and pours herself a healthy slug of wine. Let the celebration begin.

Chapter Twenty-three

F ather Andrew is coming to tea. The invitation occurs to Doris just like that, when she stops by his office after altar guild to ask how Go-Go-Gordon, Father Andrew does not approve of nicknames-has been doing since school started.

“We should talk,” he says. “Not now I’m afraid-I’m due at a meeting-but we should make time to speak privately.”

She knows her heart should sink at those words. No mother-no good mother-wants to hear those words: We should talk . And, somewhere inside her, there is a horrible, pricking worry, something plummeting with the sound of a long, sad cartoon slide whistle. I knew it. Things aren’t getting better. But that pathetic naysayer can barely be heard over the Love, American Style fireworks shooting into the air. They have to talk! Privately!

“The thing is, you are so in demand when you’re here,” she says. “People always seem to be tugging at you. And my husband and I still have only the one car, and he uses it most days. Perhaps you could come to the house. For tea?” Yes, for tea, on an afternoon when Sean has band practice and Tim Junior. is at the library and Go-Go is outside, doing whatever Go-Go does. Doris has never served an actual tea, but how hard can it be? That is, she has drunk tea, but never set the table for tea. She has a proper teapot somewhere and a cozy and a trivet. She can bake cookies if she puts her mind to it, or at least buy fancier ones, Pepperidge Farm, although she bets Father Andrew likes something with more heft-banana nut bread, pound cake?

Father Andrew considers her proposal, probably sifting through his schedule in his head, nothing more, yet Doris can’t help wishing more complicated calculations are going through his head. “That would be nice,” he says at last. “Today?”

“Tomorrow,” she parries, nervous that she will be punished for not accepting immediately what he offered, that it’s wrong to ask Father Andrew to work around her schedule. But she can’t ready the house by this afternoon.

“Tomorrow,” he agrees.

The next morning, she can’t wait for Tim Senior to leave for work. But once the house is empty, she is overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. When did the house get this dirty? How? Why can’t Tim Senior ever put his own coffee cup in the dishwasher?

She decides to start on the first floor and work up, as if it were a mountain to climb, pushing the mess in front of her, like a child rolling the base of a snowman. If she doesn’t finish the second floor, it’s not dire. She scrubs out pots that have been soaking for days, separates the boys’ laundry and folds it, putting it on their respective bureaus instead of leaving it in a heap on the hallway bench. She vacuums, she mops, she cleans the venetian blinds, wondering as she does so why they are called venetian . That could be a nice conversational gambit with Father Andrew. He seems to know such things.

She gets out a cookbook and realizes she has the ingredients to make a pound cake, although it will wipe out the butter and there will be hell to pay when Tim Senior has breakfast tomorrow. She can run up to the corner grocery later. Oh, she should have read ahead: the eggs have to be separated and beaten with a hand mixer. Where is her hand mixer? She finds it in Go-Go’s room, under his bed. She is forever finding things under Go-Go’s bed. She has to wash it, of course, grimed with dust as it is, and she screws up separating the first egg, which means she has none to spare, but she is perfect on the others. The house, neat for the first time in months, soon fills with the smells of vanilla and butter and sugar.

Can Doris work the same transformative magic on Doris? She goes into the master bathroom. Fluorescent light is unkind to everyone, but this is downright cruel. When did her face become gray and sunken, her hair thin and pink? She was one of the prettiest girls in her parish, second only to Sally McCafferty. Doris was like a rose, everybody said so, although her Aunt Ginny always added: “A plucked rose fades fast.” People laughed when Aunt Ginny said that, and Doris, innocent as she was, assumed it had something to do with virginity. Or perhaps it was pregnancy? Or merely marriage? At any rate, she is good and truly plucked, but there must be something she can do. She gives her face a once-over with cold cream, then applies a thin coat to wear the rest of the afternoon. She takes her curlers out and runs a wet comb through her hair. Tally Robison wears her hair loose and smooth. Why shouldn’t Doris? Hmmm, it doesn’t look quite right. Maybe she can tweak the ends into a pageboy. Her nails are a mess, especially after today’s work, but she cleans them, then files and buffs until they are presentable if not notable.

She goes to her closet. What to wear? Father Andrew has seen her mainly in skirts and blouses. Wouldn’t it seem odd if she dresses up for his visit? But there is a wraparound skirt, green with white piping, which pairs nicely with a green-and-white-checked shirt. That works, although it’s a little summery for November.

The timer pings. She brings the loaves out to cool, making a mental note to hide them later. Tim and the boys would go through these like locusts. She feels a twinge of guilt: What kind of woman bakes a delicious dessert and then hides it from her loved ones? But in her mind’s eye, there must be two perfect, uncut loaves on the serving plate. She wants her table to look like a picture out of Better Homes and Gardens . She needs a tablecloth and fresh napkins. She rummages through the dining room’s built-in breakfront and finds a white tablecloth. Stained, of course. She tosses it into the wash with some bleach, hoping for the best.

When she was a newlywed, she didn’t even have a washer-dryer. Also no dishwasher, no venetian blinds, only hand-me-down lace curtains at the windows. All their things were hand-me-downs, with the exception of their bedroom suite, which was a wedding gift from her father. They lived in a simple brick rowhouse off Ingleside, and she kept it spotless. Tim returned from work to home-cooked meals. She washed the dishes by hand while he sat on the back steps, listening to the Orioles game. She was happy. The women’s libbers said she shouldn’t have been, but she was. What happened?

Children . No one wants to say that out loud, but between the children she gave birth to and the ones she didn’t, Doris was done in. They moved up to a bigger house, not that this place was that big, but it’s that much more to clean. If she had to wash her dishes by hand now, it would take all nine innings to get through them, and that’s despite trying to simplify meals, serving things like Hamburger Helper and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, which the boys prefer to homemade anyway. Look at how many bowls and utensils went into creating a pound cake. Come to think of it, she better wash and dry those now, hide the evidence. She laughs at herself, thinking of a pound cake as a crime. But she is contemplating a crime, isn’t she? Well, not a crime, but a sin, one of the biggest. To be sure, she’s only thinking about it, but even the fantasy is wrong.

Four years ago, everyone laughed when the current president confessed to committing adultery in his heart. Tim Senior certainly had. For some reason, people thought that the president’s admission made him even more of a-what did the boys call it-a wimp . But Doris dug out Tim Senior’s Playboy- she had known the location of his secret cache for years-determined to read the article for herself. She flipped to the interview, trying not to see the naked women along the way-not because she was a prude, but because they made her feel so bumpy . It was natural for them to be young, with big bosoms and tiny waists, but the honeyed, creamy look of their skin taunted Doris. She never looked like that, even when she was the second prettiest girl in the parish. She found her way to the interview, and as she had suspected, there was more to it than people were saying. The president not only said that God forgave his lust, but he said that he, the president, also could not judge men who gave in to it, that he should not think he was better than a man who left his wife.

Well, Protestants, Doris had thought at the time. What do you expect? Yet those words lodged into her, granting her permission to have her own fantasies. She would never do anything, of course. But if she does-she might be forgiven. Only how would God feel about her taking a priest with her? Doesn’t that make it a much, much bigger sin? Also, she knows she will be disappointed in Father Andrew if he proves capable of being seduced. Not that she’s going to seduce him . She wonders how good the sex could even be if he has never had it before. All she has is her experience with Tim. Still, that pent-up energy should count for something, although it hadn’t worked that way for her and Tim in the early years. Yes, she sometimes felt things. Okay, orgasms. She had them, thank you very much. Eventually. But they fell short of what the world had led her to expect. Not Love , American Style fireworks, obviously, she’s not that silly, but something-transforming. Something worth all the fuss, not to mention the pregnancies, full-term and lost, those mounds of underwear on the hallway bench, the kitchen that’s never clean. Her husband’s anger, although she supposes that isn’t a direct consequence of sex, or even the lack of sex. She wonders if Tim has ever cheated on her. She wonders if she cares. Caring requires a lot of energy, and she’s pretty tired. Caring takes so much-she takes a breath and allows herself the curse word, if only in her head-so much goddamn effort.

By 5 P.M., the house looks almost as she had imagined it, although she doesn’t dare set the dining room table. That would provoke curiosity. They eat dinner in the kitchen, and Tim doesn’t even ask why. Tim never asks her anything. It is six-thirty by the time he stomps through the front door, knowing full well that they eat at six, but he says it’s important for him to go out for drinks with his coworkers. He doesn’t like the job at Tuerkes as much as he did at first, and Doris worries he won’t last long there. He trudges through the clean house, noticing nothing, although he had no problem seeing the mess when it was there and criticizing it for advantage. Tim sees only what is wrong and blames her for everything, even the things that are clearly his fault, like his dinner being cold tonight. Some things just don’t reheat well.

“Some things just don’t reheat well,” she tells him.

“I’m the head of this household,” he says. “Dinner should be ready when I’m ready.”

“The Pollacks have a microwave,” Sean says.

“They give you radiation poisoning,” Doris says, although she yearns for one. But it’s better to have a reason for not wanting the thing you want than to admit to yourself that you want something you can never have.

Over the next two hours, Tim and the boys undo much of what she has accomplished today, and Doris is reminded why she stopped trying to stay on top of the housework. Quietly, trying not to draw too much attention to her actions, she goes behind them and puts the house back to rights. She is dying to set the dining room table, to see if it will measure up to the picture in her mind. Her anticipation over the scene is almost as great as the event. Should she find flowers? It’s late in the season, there are only mums and asters, and they have never been to her liking.

“Do you smell that?” Tim asks, coming into the kitchen from the living room, where he has been watching Quincy, M.E . For a moment, she worries he has picked up the scent of vanilla and butter. She blushes like a thief, trying not to let her eyes drift to the cabinet where the wrapped pound cakes are hidden.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something bad.”

She is almost startled into saying, My pound cakes do not smell bad , but then she notices what has caught Tim’s attention. She has been too wreathed in Comet and Pine-Sol to pick up the scent, but there is a bad smell like-

“I swear, if that pipe has backed up again, I will”-Tim throws open the door to the basement and clatters down the stairs. “What the fuck are you doing?”

The next thing Doris hears is Go-Go crying-horrible, unnatural cries-as his father yells and, judging from the scuffling sounds, tries to land blows on him.

“Tim!”

He has Go-Go by the wrist, his belt half out of the loops.

“The little shit has shit himself. He was down here trying to rinse his underwear out in the laundry sink, but he left all his turds behind.” He grabs Go-Go by the shoulders, shaking him. “What’s wrong with you? What kind of ten-year-old boy craps himself? How were you going to get all that shit out of the sink?”

“I let him have a hamburger at the drugstore today,” Doris lies, pushing between them, letting Go-Go grab her hips, even though his hands have traces of his own feces. “That probably gave him diarrhea. And he was trying to do the right thing by cleaning up after himself. He just didn’t think about where… things would go if he used the laundry tub. It’s not like he ever rinsed out a diaper, or saw someone do it.”

“He’s stupid,” Tim rails. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“No, he’s not. Stop saying that.”

Another mess to clean up, then herself to clean up. It is late when she finishes, but she stops by Go-Go’s room. He is lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t sleep well, her baby boy. He never has, though.

“I did have diarrhea,” he says, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I mean, I didn’t have a drugstore hamburger, but I did have diarrhea.”

“Oh, Go-Go. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I thought it was going to be a fart. I didn’t know.”

“Has it happened before?”

His silence tells her everything.

“At school, Go-Go? Has it happened at school?”

He turns toward the wall.

Doris knows now why Father Andrew is coming to tea. Her son has crapped himself at school. And now at home, within feet of a toilet. She isn’t sure why this is so much more shameful than wetting the bed, yet it is. Something is terribly wrong with Go-Go. Is he crazy? Are all the little things that once made them laugh-the energy, the dancing-were those things they should have been worried about?

She sits on her son’s bed and places a hand on his back. He’s a strong boy, although short for his age, strength and energy almost pulsing through his body. He is, as always, warm to the touch, a furnace. She wants to remember the little boy that was put in her arms ten plus years ago, nine pounds, the biggest of her children, red-faced from his journey yet almost eerily calm. She wants to remember how sweet he was. She wants to believe he will be sweet again.

But all she can think is: Father Andrew is coming to tea tomorrow . And whatever else went wrong today, she has managed to save those perfect, perfect pound cakes for him.

Chapter Twenty-four

Winter 1980

T he university starts its holidays by mid-December, and Clem is home, left to his own devices during the day as Gwen still has a week of school and Tally has her painting. Creativity doesn’t take a Christmas break, she informed Clem loftily when he began enumerating the things they might do together. Loftily and a little desperately. “I have to make use of what godforsaken light there is this time of year,” she said Sunday evening. She says that there are studies showing that some people need light, that she wasn’t made to live in this climate. Clem pointed out-gently, he thinks, even comically-that her mother’s people were Scandinavian. “And our furniture is Danish modern, so you should feel right at home. Perhaps you just need herring.”

Tally doesn’t find this funny. Tally finds very little funny as of late. She tells Clem that she hates their furniture, which she chose because it was the only style that worked in his house. His house. Clem isn’t sure about the lack of light being the cause of Tally’s moods, but the moods are undeniably real. She used to be more on an even keel, but now the happy-manic?-days are rare. For all the time she spends in her studio, she isn’t getting much done, and he thinks this might be the real source of her depression. The big canvas that she started a year ago ground to a halt this summer. Clem knows because he sneaks into her studio. He shouldn’t, of course. He should respect Tally’s desire to show her work to him when she’s ready. But he can’t stop himself. He wants to see her work because he wants to know that this is really what she does, all day.

Until this latest project, most of Tally’s canvases were the sort of thing that makes people say, “My kid could paint better than that.” Tim Halloran said exactly that, adding: “And I mean Go-Go.” When Tim teased his kids, it never sounded quite right. Not to apportion blame, but-if that man in the woods had shown the boy any kindness, then Clem could understand how it happened. Go-Go yearned to be held by someone, anyone. Clem remembers how he used to climb Tally, seizing her hair, as if she were Rapunzel.

Despite what philistines such as Tim may think, Tally has a gift for abstract painting. She owes a lot to Rothko and Motherwell, but those are good debts. She uses cool colors in shades so close to one another that it is necessary to stand back and study her paintings to understand how much variation there is. Completely self-taught, she’s uncanny, and he’s proud of her, wishes she believed in herself enough to push for a show or even enter an amateur competition.

The painting that has bogged her down is figurative, however. No one’s child could paint this. It’s huge, an oil of two entwined children-well, teenagers, Clem has decided, because otherwise it would be almost pornographic. They belong to some other era, based on the clothing strewn through the foreground, an ancient time. The girl has a wreath of white flowers in her hair. A lion watches them from a glade. Pyramus and Thisbe? But the classic couple did not have a chance to make love before the lion entered their story. The painting is disturbing, in a good way, not at all trendy. But the faces are giving Tally fits. She clearly has tried again and again, but they are never quite right. The boy looks as if he’s in pain, not ecstasy, while the girl’s face has never advanced enough to have any expression at all. He yearns to ask Tally about what has inspired her, but then he would have to reveal that he has been sneaking into her studio.

It is an hour before dusk. Tally has retreated to the kitchen, where she will drink tea and mutter while preparing dinner. Clem loves the light at this time of year. True, he’s not a painter, but he can’t imagine anything better than walking through these hills of denuded trees. The soft gray light suits his mood. He’s not exactly upbeat himself these days. Ronald Reagan, president. A Republican-controlled Congress. It is scant comfort to live in one of the six states that Carter carried. If Tally’s depression were situational, he could better understand it, but she’s grown indifferent to politics. The only news that has affected her of late is John Lennon’s murder, which she insists on calling an assassination. Clem cannot bear to have such an important word used for the murder of a musician, and he told Tally as much. The argument spiraled out of control, perhaps because they seldom argued and had little practice. She wheeled their large dictionary over to him, showing him that it was accurate to use the word for the murder of any public person. “But for political reasons!” Clem countered. “Mark David Chapman was crazy, pure and simple. The desire for fame is not a political stance.” It was such a strange fight. Clearly, Lennon and Chapman were proxies for grudges they did not dare to address.

Now, striding across the hills in the fading light, it occurs to him that they were arguing over the fact that they were of different generations, that Tally had a stake in John Lennon’s murder, while Clem did not. But she doesn’t, not really. Although Tally is only four years older than Lennon, she is too old to be one of his true fans. By the time the Beatles came on the scene, she had opted out of her generation and joined Clem’s.

But perhaps that was the underlying cause of the fight, Tally’s lost youth-and the fact that she was the one who squandered it. He knows she doesn’t regret their marriage or the children. But she can’t stop wondering what might have been, a truly tragic affliction. Clem, born in 1923, had an old-fashioned education, the kind that involved lots of memorization and recitation. (How appalled he had been when Gwen had come home from her first day of high school and announced excitedly that her history teacher didn’t believe in dates. As if this were progress, as if dates had no relevance. What next, a chemistry teacher who threw out the periodic table?) Clem knows not only the famous Whittier line For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: “It might have been!” but he also knows the whole poem, “Maud Muller,” and finds the preceding lines far more chilling: God pity them both! and pity us all / Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.

What would his children regret? How could he keep them from having regrets? They are so different. Miller, always determined to do the right thing in the right way, marrying at twenty-four, now on his way to being a father. Fee, so shy and diffident, a mystery even to herself. Gwen, her mother all over again, which scares him more than anything. He wishes he could protect them from disappointment, but he lost that battle long ago. Once, when Miller was very young, Clem drove him to a railroad crossing in South Baltimore, near Stockholm Street. A freight train finally lumbered past, a long one with varied cars. Miller, not even four at the time, was thrilled. When the last car passed, the train’s whistle blowing, he turned to his father and said: “Again.” And when Clem could not make it happen, he cried bitterly, upset not only by the lack of another train but at his father’s impotence.

Clem himself has no regrets. Well-he had no personal regrets until a little over a year ago, and he still can’t see what he might have done differently, so is that truly regret? He crests another hill, sees the little house on the other side of the stream. Is there smoke coming from the chimney? Are there chickens in the yard? He speeds up, almost running, splashing through the creek without thinking about his shoes, much less the risk of tetanus. It was all a horrible dream, then. The night never happened, the man never died, that’s why his body didn’t show up at the morgue.

But when he reaches the house, there is no smoke, and the “chickens” are old newspapers, blowing lazily in the breeze. The house looks different, though. And Clem can be sure of this because his walks, over the past fourteen months, keep leading him back here, although he hasn’t entered the yard for a month or two. Someone has been here recently. Probably kids. Only it looks neater, which makes no sense. Kids, even good kids, don’t leave things neater.

How did the children ever find their way here? It’s a question he has asked himself over and over again. The adults knew about the old man, of course, if not his predilections. In winter, the cabin’s roof was visible from the road they all used as a shortcut. But to the grown-ups, the house was a blight, an embarrassment. Clem and Tally, in particular, felt odd, living down the street from a man whose life seemed little better than a sharecropper’s. Meanwhile the Hallorans were appalled because the man was black, not that they were polite enough to use that term, or even Negro. Doris Halloran pronounced people “colored,” as if it were the enlightened thing to say, and Tim Senior-well, he liked to mix up his epithets. He seemed to think his large stock of synonyms passed for wit. Jungle bunny, coon, tar baby, spear chucker. But never nigger, which only convinced Clem that Tim was dangerously racist beneath his I’m-just-having-fun-I-dare-you-to-say-otherwise gaze. Clem wonders if he still uses those words. He doesn’t know, because he can’t bear to be in the same room with the man, not that they had spent much time in each other’s company before the night of the hurricane. Maybe at a potluck, or the progressive dinner Tally put together one time, inspired by a book she was reading to Gwen, but he wasn’t sure.

He tries to tell himself that he objected to Sean as Gwen’s first boyfriend because of Sean’s father, his fear that any apple that dropped from the Halloran tree had to be poisoned. Oh, he liked Sean as much as any man could like a teen daughter’s first boyfriend, but he was glad to see him go. In the early stages of Tally’s stalled painting, he worried it was inspired by Sean and Gwen, that she knew something he didn’t. But, no, it just can’t be. He’s a doctor. He understands, theoretically, that Baltimore is full of teenage girls having sex. But not his daughter. Not with Sean.

And then he realizes that thought is as bigoted and snobbish as anything Tim Halloran ever dared to say out loud. Every time Clem wants to think he is different from Tim, something reminds him that he is not blameless. He will never be blameless.

He starts walking back, crossing the stream, a relative trickle today, then heading up the hill. This is the steepest part of the terrain. He imagines this spot as it was in the storm, what someone would have seen from where he’s standing now. Two men, hale and sure-footed, running down the slope, then kneeling in the rushing water, a slightly older one making his careful way toward them, flashlight strafing them with light. He sees the older man bending down-but he can’t stay outside the scene any longer. He is there again, realizing that the inert object at Tim’s and Rick’s feet is a man, dark as coal except for odd patches of unpigmented skin. And dead.

“H e was dead when we got here,” Rick said.

“But Tim was ahead of you, going down the hill, he had at least twenty-five yards on you-”

“ He was dead when we got here . Right, Tim?”

Tim Halloran nodded. He was shaking all over.

“The fall killed him,” Rick said. “See? That rock, that’s where he hit his head, and he’s been lying in this stream ever since, his lungs filling up with water. Between that and the head injury, he never could have survived. It doesn’t matter what the kids did. Leave him here.”

Clem bent down, tested at the neck for a pulse, knowing there would be none. He had no obligation to the dead, had taken no oath on their part. Still, it seemed wrong to leave the man here.

“He lived in these woods. He has no family, no one looking out for him,” Rick said. “It was an accident.”

“Was it?” Tim and Rick had crested the hill before him. Clem had heard shouting, though, seen an arc of light moving wildly through the night. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was flesh and blood clinging to Tim’s flashlight, even in this driving rain.

“An accident,” Rick repeated. “There’s nothing to be done. He slipped and fell. Talking about how he came to fall, or why we were here looking for him-there’s no point. We’ll have to talk about… everything. And that’s not going to be good for anyone.”

They left him there. Clem later made an anonymous call to the police from a pay phone downtown. A week later, when Clem hiked back into the woods, the man was gone. Clem wanted to believe that his anonymous call had yielded results, that EMTs had somehow found his body. But wanting to believe it didn’t make it true.

“Did you see his guitar?” Gwen asked one night, weeks later.

“Whose guitar?”

“The man in the woods. When you found him-did you see his guitar? It was steel, it was probably ruined in all that rain.”

“Honey, there was no guitar.”

To his amazement-and to his gratification, for Gwen had seemed cool and frivolous of late-she burst into tears. But it was the last time they ever spoke of the incident. Now, only a year later, she chatters away about dates and boys and, very occasionally, about school itself. The hurricane is forgotten. Her old friends appear to be forgotten. Mickey never comes to the house, although there’s still a drawer filled with the sugary junk she loved. The Halloran boys have abandoned the woods, although Clem sometimes sees little Go-Go walking along the top of the hill, where there’s a path.

It is the old who are supposed to have memory problems. Senility, Alzheimer’s, dementia. But in Clem’s experience, no one can forget the way a young person can. He specializes in the elderly, he is himself becoming elderly, but to be interested in old age also means thinking constantly about youth. That’s the paradox. His daughter is now almost the age her mother was when Clem first glimpsed her, a beautiful, high-spirited girl. No one thought it was that outré. Yet if a thirty-two-year-old man were to regard Gwen with anything approximating lust, he would want to kill him.

Only he wouldn’t. That’s the difference between him and the Tim Hallorans of the world.

Dead when they got there. Sure, why not? Could be. The man was dead when Clem had gotten there, and wasn’t that all that mattered? He hadn’t done anything except agree to a reality that meant a little less pain for everyone. Go-Go would never have to speak to strangers about what happened to him. Tim would not be called into account for his actions, whatever they were. Clem and Rick would not be labeled accessories. And the women and the children were allowed to sleep the blissful sleep of the ignorant, protected by their men, which is what men are supposed to do, first and foremost.

He turns back, looks at the funny little cabin, comically small and lopsided from this distance. Funny, how they never connected it. The grown-ups drove past this cabin, saw something shameful, a man living like a sharecropper only a few miles from downtown Baltimore. The grown-ups saw the past, complicated and cruel. Their children saw a playhouse. The man who lived here saw a potential victim in Go-Go.

What if it were your child? Tim had asked Clem that night. To this day, Clem thinks: It wouldn’t be. He knows that’s wrong. He understands intellectually that anything can happen to anyone at any moment. Even in his world of medicine and science, there are no absolutes. People smoke their entire lives at no seeming physical cost, while someone who has never so much as held a cigarette can get lung cancer. But he has to believe that his own daughter is immune to such danger, that she never would have allowed herself to let a stranger touch her as this man touched Go-Go.

He probably was dead when Tim got there. He slipped, he fell, and his lungs filled with water when the children ran to get help. Who can fault them for not staying with him on that dark rainy night? Who would ask them to administer first aid to that monster, lying in the creek? Yes, there was the strange arc of the flashlight going up and down, instead of side to side- Stop, he tells himself. Believe what’s easiest to believe. There’s no harm in it.

He is home now, or almost there, at the peak above his house. Your dream house, as Tally always says. It is. He built a house to his taste on a site that he loved, assuming his wife and children would love it, too, but only Gwen shared his affection for the place. Now even she wouldn’t object to moving, as long as she could continue to be the queen bee of her social set at Park School.

Someone-Clem has no idea who-called children and wives hostages to fortunes. He will never see it that way. His wife and his children are his real contributions to the world. He isn’t demeaning what he has accomplished professionally. He’s good at what he does and enjoys it, the best of all possible combinations. But there is always someone to take one’s place in any profession, no matter how singular or vital. There’s no shortage of men who want to be president or discover vaccines or explore the Amazon. Only Clem can be Tally’s husband, father to Miller, Fee, and Gwen. Only he can love them as he loves them.

As he descends the hill, he realizes that as much as he hates Tim Halloran, he envies him, too. Because Halloran proved he would do anything for his children, whereas Clem couldn’t even give up this jury-rigged, imperfect house. What Halloran did was savage. But it was also love, immutable, enormous love. He killed the man who touched his boy. If a police officer ever shows up on Clem’s doorstep, Clem will sell the others out in a heartbeat, cut a deal for himself. But their silence, their pact, was not simply about avoiding discovery. When they agreed that night to say nothing to anyone else about the man’s death, they condoned what Tim did. He avenged his son. He was a real man.

Something wraps around his ankle, and he starts. It felt like a bird. But it’s only a scrap of paper, a piece of trash blowing through his beloved woods, scampering down the hill toward his house.