Union Atlantic

Chapter 1

A plot of land. That’s what Doug told his lawyer. Buy me a plot of land, hire a contractor, and build me a casino of a house. If the neighbors have five bedrooms, give me six. A four-car garage, the kitchen of a prize-winning chef, high ceilings, marble bathrooms, everything wired to the teeth. Whatever the architecture magazines say. Make the envying types envious.

“What do you want with a mansion?” Mikey asked. “You barely sleep in your own apartment. You’d get nothing but lost.”

Finden, Doug told him. Build it in Finden.

And so on a Sunday morning in January 2001, Mikey had picked Doug up at his place in Back Bay and they had driven west out of Boston in a light snow, the gray concrete of the overpasses along the Mass Pike blending with the gray sky above as they traveled the highway that Doug had traveled so often as a kid. It had been six years now since he’d moved back up to Massachusetts from New York. What had brought him was a job at Union Atlantic, a commercial bank whose chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Holland, had entrusted Doug with the company’s expansion. In the years since, his salary and bonuses had accumulated in the various accounts and investments his financial adviser had established, but he’d spent practically nothing.

“You’re pathetic,” Mikey had said to him once, when he’d come back to Doug’s apartment for a beer and seen the college furniture and books still in their boxes. “You need a life.”

A solo practitioner, Mikey had gone to Suffolk Law at night, while he worked at a bail-bond office. He lived with his girlfriend in one of the new condos in South Boston, six stories up and two blocks east of the house he’d grown up in, his mother still cooking him dinner on Sunday nights. He liked to call himself a well-rounded lawyer, which in practice meant he did everything but drive his clients to work.

A few miles short of the Alden town line, they turned off at the Finden exit onto a wooded road that opened out into the snow-covered meadows of a golf course, used at this time of year for cross-country skiing. They passed under an old, arched brick railway bridge and soon after reached the first stretch of houses.

The town was much as Doug remembered it from the days when he’d driven his mother to work here: mostly woods, the homes widely spaced, with big yards and long driveways, the larger homes hidden from view by hedges and gates. When they reached the village center, he saw that the old stores had been replaced by newer clothing boutiques and specialty food shops, though their signage, by town ordinance, remained conservative and subdued. The benches on the sidewalks were neatly painted, as were the fire hydrants and the elaborate lampposts and the well-tended wooden planters.

On the far side of this little town center, the houses became sparse again, one large colonial after the next, most of them white clapboard with black trim. They passed a white steepled church with a snow-covered graveyard and a mile or so farther along turned onto a dirt track that led down a gentle incline. A few hundred yards into the woods, Mikey brought the car to a halt and cut the engine.

“This is it,” he said. “Five acres. Up ahead you got a river. The other side’s all Audubon so they can’t touch you there. One other house up the hill to the right, and a couple more on the far side of that. Any other place, they’d put eight houses on a piece this size, but the locals ganged up and zoned it huge.”

Stepping out of the car, they walked over the frozen ground farther down the track until they reached the bank of the river. Only four or five yards across and no more than a few feet deep, it flowed over a bed of leaves and mossy rock.

“Amazing,” Doug said, “how quiet it is.”

“The town’s asking for two point eight,” Mikey said. “My guy thinks we can get it for two and a half. That is if you’re still crazy enough to want it.”

“This is good,” Doug said, peering across the water into the bare black winter trees. “This is just fine.”

THE HOUSE TOOK a year to complete: three months to clear the land, bury the pipes, and dig a foundation, another seven for construction, and two more for interior work and landscaping. For the right sum, Mikey oversaw all of it.

By the time it was done, the real estate market had progressed as Doug had foreseen. After the tech bust in 2000, the Federal Reserve had cut interest rates, making mortgages cheap, and thus opening the door for all that frightened capital to run for safety into houses. The attacks on 9/11 had only sped the trend. These new mortgages were being fed into the banks like cars into a chop shop, stripped for parts by Union Atlantic and the other big players, and then securitized and sold on to the pension funds and the foreign central banks. Thus were the monthly payments of the young couples in California and Arizona and Florida transformed by the alchemy of finance into a haven for domestic liquidity and the Chinese surplus, a surplus earned by stocking the box stores at which those same couples shopped. With all that money floating around, the price of real estate could only rise. Before Doug ever opened the front door, the value of his new property had risen thirty percent.

The first night he slept in Finden he remembered his dreams as he hadn’t in years. In one, his mother wandered back and forth along the far end of a high-school gymnasium, clad in a beige raincoat, her hands in her pockets, her head tilted toward the floor. They were late again for Mass. Doug called to her from beneath the scrub oak in their tiny backyard. Its bark peeled away, he saw veins pumping blood into branches suddenly animate and forlorn. A priest waited in an idling sedan. In the distance, he heard the sound of a ship’s cannon firing. Oblivious to all of this, focused only on the floorboards in front of her, his mother kept pacing. As the deck beneath him began to list, Doug rolled to his knees to break his fall.

He woke on his stomach, sweating. The wall was an uncanny distance from the bed, the pale-yellow paint someone had chosen for it beginning to glow dimly in the early-morning light. He rolled onto his back and stared at the stilled ceiling fan, its rounded chrome fixture as spotless as the deck of the Vincennes on inspection day.

Here he was, thirty-seven, lying in his mansion.

Reaching for the remote at his side, he switched on the TV.

… Israel denies Arafat request to leave West Bank compound, the CNN ticker began … Pakistan in discussions with U.S. to hand over chief suspect in murder of Wall Street Journal reporter … CT residents to pay $50 more per year for garbage collection after State Trash Authority loss of $200 million on deal with Enron …

His BlackBerry began vibrating on the floor beside his keys; it was his trader in Hong Kong, Paul McTeague, calling.

At Doug’s level of bank management, most people relied on underlings to handle recruiting, but that had never been his practice. He insisted on choosing his own people, right down to the traders. McTeague had been one of his. They’d met a few years ago on a flight to London. A Holy Cross grad, McTeague had grown up in Worcester and learned the business with a specialist on the floor of the NYSE. A rabid Bruins fan, his conversation didn’t extend much beyond hockey and derivatives. Twenty-eight and itching to make a killing. The human equivalent of a single-purpose vehicle. In short, perfect for the job. Usually Doug would have waited awhile before clueing in a new guy as to how he, in particular, ran the flow of information, i.e. avoiding intermediate supervisors. But he could tell right away that McTeague was his kind, and so he’d told him straight out: If you’ve got a problem and you’re getting hassled, just call.

Two months ago, when the head of the back office at the Hong Kong desk had left, Doug had installed McTeague as the temporary replacement, thus putting him in charge of all paperwork and accounting, and expanding the dominion of an employee with direct loyalty to him. The more raw information Doug could get stovepiped up from the front lines without interference from all the middling professionals, the more direct power over outcomes he wielded.

“You’re a genius,” McTeague said when Doug answered his phone. “The Nikkei’s up another two percent. Our economy’s still in the tank but Japanese stocks keep rising. It’s a thing of beauty.”

A month and a half ago, in early February, he and McTeague had been at a conference in Osaka. After one of the sessions, they had gone to Murphy’s, the bar where the Australians pretended to be Irish. They were about to call it a night when Doug saw a senior deputy in the Japanese Ministry of Finance stumble in with a Korean woman half his age. The man shook his head in resignation as his young companion made her way straight for the bar and ordered a bottle of scotch. Interested to see how things would play out, Doug ordered another round and he and McTeague settled in to watch. The argument in the corner grew steadily more heated. The woman was demanding something the man didn’t want to give, the Tokyo deputy apparently at wits’ end with his mistress. Eventually, after being harangued for half an hour, he stood up, threw cash on the table, and walked out of the bar.

That’s when the idea had occurred to Doug: the young woman might know something.

“Do me a favor,” he’d said to McTeague. “Comfort the girl.”

And a good job of it McTeague had done. At some point after they’d had sex, the deputy’s mistress told him that the Ministry of Finance had a plan. They were about to launch another price-stability operation. The Japanese government would buy up a boatload of domestic stocks, sending the Nikkei index higher and thus shoring up the balance sheets of their country’s troubled banks. It was a classic command-economy move, using public money to interfere with the market’s valuations. In the process, the Japanese government would hand a major loss to the foreign, largely U.S. speculators who had been shorting the value of their stock market for months.

The operation, of course, was secret.

And thus it was that in mid-February, Atlantic Securities, the investment banking firm that Union Atlantic had purchased and renamed two years earlier as part of its expansion, had become the one American firm to go from bearish to bullish on the prospects for the Japanese economy. Under Doug’s supervision, McTeague had placed large bets on the Nikkei going higher, using Atlantic Securities’ own money. The resulting trading profits had been substantial and were still flowing in. It would be awhile yet before the Ministry of Finance’s plan would become public and there was a lot of money to be made in the meantime.

“So,” McTeague asked, eager as ever, “how much cash do I get to play with tomorrow?”

“We’ll see,” Doug replied. “Call me after New York opens.”

THE CHILLED MARBLE of the bathroom floor felt particularly solid against the balls of his feet. Two huge sinks in the shape of serving bowls, one for the master and one for his wife, were set beneath mirrored cabinets along the far wall. Beyond were two shower stalls with shiny steel heads that jetted water from the walls and ceiling. Opposite these stood a patio-size cross between a Jacuzzi pool and a bathtub, the whole thing decked in slate.

Walking to the window, Doug looked out across the front of the house. Mikey had done a good job: a stately, circular driveway, an enormous freestanding garage mocked up like a barn, and, surrounding it all, pleasing expanses of lawn. Through a row of bare maples that had been left up the hill to mark the property line, he could see a dilapidated barn and beside it an ancient house with weathered shingles, a listing brick chimney, and a slight dip in the long rear slant of its roof. It was one of those old New England saltboxes that historical preservation societies kept tabs on, although not too closely by the looks of it. Whoever owned it didn’t seem to be occupying the place. Weeds had risen in the rutted gravel drive. On the one hand, it was the farthest thing from a Mickey D’s and a strip mall you could get, just the sort of nostalgia for which people loved towns like this, casting the dead starlight of American landed gentry, dotted with graveyards full of weathered headstones and the occasional field of decorative sheep. Allowed to decay too far, however, it could cause a decline in the value of Doug’s property. If some absentee WASP who’d retreated to his compound in Maine thought he could just let a house rot like this, it would have to be sorted out. He’d put Mikey on it, he thought, as he slipped out of his boxers and stepped into the shower.

Downstairs, he passed through the mansion’s empty rooms and, finding the touch-screen keypad by the front door inscrutable, pushed an Off button and saw the screen announce: Fanning Disarmed.

Mikey was good. He was very good.

As he came down the front steps, the late-winter sun was just beginning to strike the side of his garage. Glancing over the roof of his car, he saw a woman in a blue ski jacket coming out the back door of the old house up the hill, which was apparently inhabited after all. Tall and rather thin, she had longish gray hair and a stiff, upright posture. With her were two large dogs, a Doberman and some sort of mastiff. It looked as if the animals were too strong for her, that she might be pulled down by them, but a yank of her arm brought them under control and they led her in orderly fashion along the stone path to the overgrown driveway. At first Doug thought she hadn’t noticed him at such a distance. But then, as he was about to get in his car, she glanced in his direction, and Doug waved.

She made no response, as if surveying an empty landscape.

Rude or half blind, he couldn’t tell. Driving slowly, he turned onto Winthrop Street and, lowering the passenger-side window, rolled up beside her.

“Good morning. My name’s Doug Fanning. The new place here — it’s mine.”

For a moment, it seemed she hadn’t heard a word he said and was perhaps deaf to boot. But then, abruptly, as if the car had only now appeared, she came to a halt. Bringing the dogs to heel, she leaned down to look into the car. The deeply lined skin of her face had the same weathered gray hue as the side of her house. Without a word, as if he weren’t even there, she sniffed at the air of the car’s interior; the Lexus he’d leased for the new commute was still pine fresh.

“Trees,” she said. “Before you came. All of it. Trees.”

And with that she stood upright again and kept walking.

Chapter 2

For months now Charlotte Graves had tried to avoid looking at the new place. And yet how could anyone’s eyes not snare on the enormity of it? It had been designed to draw attention.

As she and the dogs came down the drive the following morning, it came into view once again: a hulking, white mass of a building, three full stories in the middle, with wings on either side and someone’s idea of an orangery or sunroom protruding from the far end. A cupola the size of a small bandstand stood atop the pile, betwixt two fat, brick chimneys. A columned portico framed the enormous front door. Either side of this, along the front of the house, were yew shrubs set in beds of newly delivered wood chips. It looked, more than anything else, like a recently opened country club, and indeed the landscaping of the yard, with its empty flower beds cut from the imported turf like oval incisions on a piece of bright-green construction paper and its perfectly crosscut lawn running to the river’s edge without so much as a transitional weed, reminded one of the manicure of a golf course. In line at the drugstore, Charlotte had overheard a real estate agent describing it as a Greek Revival château.

This was what had replaced the woods that Charlotte’s grandfather had given to the town for preservation. This steroidal offense.

Over the last year, as it was being built, she had often reminded herself that the house was merely the furthest and most galling advance of the much larger intrusion, the one that had begun decades ago, first at a distance, a sighting here or there, a fancy stroller in the library stacks, a concern for caloric totals voiced over the meat counter. More recently had come the giant cars, the ones that looked as if they should have gun turrets mounted on their roofs, manned by the children glaring from the backseat. For years the news had made so much of bombings in the Middle East, and of course in dear old New York now as well, and of the birds of prey we released in retaliation but they never mentioned the eyes of the wealthy young and the violence simmering numbly there. She had seen it at school, the way her students had grown pointed, turned into swords wielded by their masters. As soon as she began speaking of such things openly the principal had gone to the retirement board and they had got rid of her. Nearly forty years of teaching history to the children of this town and they had hustled her out for speaking the truth.

With the Bennetts on one side of her and the woods on the other, Charlotte had always thought she would be safe from the worst of the intrusion. Her house, the old family place, was a redoubt of sorts. After all this time living in it, its memories were for her neither a comfort nor a haunting. They were simply the traces of beings with whom she shared the place. Time by herself had done that to Charlotte, slowly worn away the hard barrier of the self that had clenched against loneliness for so many years at the beginning but in the end lacked a source of power. Unfed by the barriers of others, social fear tended to wither. The membrane between herself and the world had begun to breathe. And while this gentle dissipation had put to rest the anxiety she’d endured in the earlier years, when still wed to the story of marriage, it had increasingly opened her to a more profound, if not exactly personal, terror. Say, for instance, not the thought but the unsought intuition of every soul at stake on the planet hour to hour. A thing not to be borne for more than a minute without destroying the integrity of her individual mind. So you let in just a few fates at a time, hoping the blinders would hold. With the dogs, she could just about manage. How comforting it turned out even their ornery presence could be when the dumb quantity of humanity pressed its case.

Before the mansion had been erected, there had been the chain-saws and backhoes, trees dragged like corpses to the road. Then the engines of the diggers, the cement mixers, the nail guns. She had stayed indoors, unable to watch. They removed so much earth, the angle of the land itself had changed. The maples they left along the top of the hill, from where she could now see all the way down to the river, did a poor job of hiding the new site even with the leaves out, and as fall had come round again the naked wood frame of the unfinished house had shown clearly through the bare branches.

As a teacher all these years, seeing for herself the small-mindedness of those who ran the town of Finden, Charlotte should have known it would come, that the town would betray the trust her grandfather had placed in it. Her father might have done something about it. A man with a bedrock faith in the law, he had prosecuted malfeasance to the last. Episcopalian by birth, Presbyterian by temperament, Quaker in abstention, secular to the bone. He would have found a way to stop these cretins. But not her younger brother, Henry. No. After a few brief discussions with the lawyer, Cott Jr., Henry had suggested that if Charlotte found it too much to bear, perhaps the time had come to sell the house and move somewhere, as he put it, more practical.

Thus it had been left to her to wage the battle. Naïvely, she had begun with an attempt to persuade, writing letters to the selectmen and the newspaper. When that produced nothing but a few polite replies, she’d begun gathering signatures outside the supermarket, informing people of the town’s plans. Just a few years earlier, most people would have at least stopped and said hello. She had been their teacher, after all, or their children’s teacher, or both. But now they looked upon her with pity.

Budgets were budgets, the town said. They regretted deeply the necessity of putting a parcel of land up for auction. But the referendum for school funding had failed at the polls and they had to look to their assets. Never mind the breach of faith. Never mind the lobotomized, negligent short-termism of it all, as if a one-time windfall could ever fund an annual expenditure. What had government become these days but the poorly advertised fire sale of the public interest?

But, oh, how they would rue the day now! Because at last Charlotte had done what she should have years ago: she had fired Cott Jr., the incompetent, collaborationist son of the old family lawyer who’d done little more than play at resisting the town’s grab, and she’d gone herself into the records down at the town hall. And there she’d discovered the mendacity of these idiots. Cott Jr. had said she had no legal recourse. But he was wrong. She’d filed her own suit now. She didn’t need an attorney to stand up before a judge. She would crush these scoundrels all on her own. And though it was late in the day, the trees already felled, that monstrosity already erected, still how sweet the victory would be when eventually she evicted that little charmer and razed his house to the ground.

Just thinking of it slackened the muscles of her shoulders and chest, as if for these many months she’d been wearing a shirt of chain mail, the bands of which were only now beginning to warm and expand, allowing her to breathe.

Heading up the road past the Bennetts’, she came to the low wooden fence that ran along the edge of the golf course. Wilkie and Sam nosed toward the gap that led onto the fairway. Seeing no one on the tee and the green clear, she followed them through onto the rough grass. The sky had brightened to a pale blue.

How insane it had all been. How perverted. This business with the house all of a piece with what had gone on at the school, where they had run her out for describing the world as it was and most everyone had simply gone along with it, so enamored of authority they couldn’t imagine disagreeing. For years she’d assigned a photo-essay on lynchings in her unit on the Jazz Age. Then one day the department head told her she would have to stop because the objections from parents had grown vociferous. She had continued nonetheless, distributing the materials at her own expense with a new cover page explaining the topic’s contemporary relevance, including quotes from the novels of Tim LaHaye, along with a line from one of the parents’ letters, complaining that the assigned reading was too negative.

“Yes. So was Dachau,” she’d said to the woman on parents’ night.

These people who behaved nowadays as if the world were a menace sent to sicken or debilitate their children. What meagerness of spirit. To treat your own offspring as so inherently weak. They pumped their addled sons full of Ritalin and Adderall and their sullen daughters with whatever the psychopharmacologist recommended, but the unimpeachable facts of history were considered bacteria. She had done nothing more than describe such people to themselves. For that, she had been deemed unfit. Her only contact with students now was the occasional child one of her former colleagues sent to her for tutoring.

Held back by the dogs sniffing at something on the fairway, Charlotte paused, looking down the slope of the first hole to the stream and the footbridge that led across it.

Her father had played this course in the summers. Each Memorial Day weekend he would drive them up here, along the post road through Connecticut and Rhode Island and across to Massachusetts. Her mother in the front seat, her eyes covered in dark sunglasses, her lacquered Nantucket creel on the floor by her feet, hands folded on her lap as she gazed out the window in controlled displeasure at one aspect or another of the arrangements — luggage or dinner plans or how soon on Tuesday their father would have to get a ride to Boston to catch the train back. Until August he would come only on weekends, spending the weeks alone at the house in Rye and commuting into the city. Most of the other families they knew went to Long Island or the Cape, but despite their mother’s annual disgruntlement they came here, to this town where their father’s family had always lived, to the house he’d grown up in and inherited.

What could Charlotte have known then of how she’d return here by herself? Nothing. At the time, the adventure seemed ever new. Rushing with Henry into the house ahead of their parents to claim their rooms, rolling on the cotton-tufted bedspreads, the air tinged with naphthalene and the richer scent of pitch from all the wood: the dark ceiling beams, the slanted floors, the narrow steep steps back and front. After a day or two, when her mother had aired the place out, the smell of mothballs faded, but the tar-like taste remained all summer, as fixed in the house as the old latch doors and twelve-pane windows. The red Jeep in the barn had a sticker for the lake, and they’d drive there with an ice chest full of lunch, stacks of towels, and an umbrella her mother read under while they swam. Later, running to the back of the field at dusk to pick asparagus among the tall grass; or across the road to Aunt Eleanor’s house for sugar or cooking oil, the screen door on the back steps slapping behind her; watching the slow, dying flail of the greeny-black claws of lobsters held between her father’s thumb and forefinger just before he dropped them into the boiler; the ridged metal shell-snappers set out with little forks to get at the thin meat in the legs; mosquitoes bouncing against the porch bulb after dinner when her father smoked a cigarette and looked back into the house at them like a man in a darkened theater watching the scene of a play. He’d wink at her and Henry on his way out the door with their mother to some party nearby, as if to say, lucky you, staying here, free to play at what you like, you always have more fun than me — and Charlotte could never tell if he meant it. Waking to the sound of the river, starlings in the crab apple tree by her window, eating cereal with Henry in his pajamas, the weightless late-morning hours before they went to the lake, idling in the backyard, on the mown grass, mountains of white cloud floating in the vast blueness of the summer sky.

A shield. That’s what the memories were, the ones that had risen in her with such force of late. A barricade thrown up against the depredations of the present.

Down on the second tee, a golfer arranged himself. Wilkie and Sam took no notice, their snouts still pressed to the ground. Of Charlotte’s drifts into reminiscence, the two of them did not approve. She found this hard, given all the love she had shown them over the years. She understood they missed the woods and the chance to run untethered by the river as they used to; they resented being leashed on every walk now.

When she’d first moved to Finden, it had been to rest, the summer after Eric died, for what she thought would be only a few months before returning to New York. There had been no living thing in the house with her, no pets or plants, the garden untended. It had stayed that way all through August because why settle in where you weren’t going to stay? Then her landlord in New York, not wanting any trouble after what had happened, had asked that she not renew the lease. Part of her wasn’t sure she could face going back in any case. That fall, she took a temporary job teaching history at Finden High while she figured out what to do. At some point, a colleague had come by with a cutting of a jade plant and they had gone together to a nursery to buy geraniums and bulbs.

For most of her time here, there had been only the plants and the garden, which she’d tended with great care. It was just in the last six or seven years that she’d taken in the dogs. Samuel had come from a litter of purebred mastiffs owned by George Jakes, the son of Mr. Jakes, who’d always been their plumber and who looked after the property during the year, when the family was back in Rye. George had brought the puppy over one day when he’d come to fix the tub and asked if Charlotte would mind the company because while his children wanted to keep all seven of them, it wasn’t practical.

A small fawn-colored creature with floppy ears, Samuel lay happily in her lap that first day. She hadn’t considered how large he would become and might have hesitated if she had, if only because of the strength it required to hold him back once he gained his full stature. All through her adolescence and young adulthood Charlotte had prided herself on her lack of sentimentality, a badge of honor in a household dominated by her father’s pragmatism. She considered pets a maudlin affair, lacking the fundamental seriousness that characterized worthwhile emotional life. Despite all this, Sam’s dopey comfort with himself peeled at least one layer of reserve from Charlotte, and even as he grew into a larger animal, she continued to let him lie with her on the couch, his head in her lap as she read the paper.

Wilkie, the Doberman, had come from the pound a year or so later. A story in the local newspaper said an unusual number of homeless dogs were being put down so she’d driven over and visited with the keeper, who told her she could have any one she liked. A roar of barking had filled the aisle of wire cages. Amidst all the noise, Wilkie stood silent and intent at the far end, the sinews of his legs and neck visible beneath a gleaming coat.

He slept the first week in the yard and then a month or more in the vestibule before claiming a large wicker basket inside the back door. Once Sam had fought him out of the dining room and Wilkie had claimed the hall, they got along grudgingly and lay beside each other on the warm stones in front of the fireplace. Slowly, her days had formed themselves around their habits: rising before dawn, a long walk before breakfast, a nap in the late afternoon, dinner earlier than she ever used to eat, and another walk before bed.

Naturally, conversation ran in everyone’s head, snippets of talk, a moment’s complaint dismissed, plans for the week or the hour or the minute debated back and forth. If you lived on your own, of course, the volume tended to rise, filling the silence. Fair enough. She’d had decades of this as a single woman. If you added the everyday fact of people speaking to their pets, and more, of their sensing, sometimes keenly, the wishes, wants, or moods of the animals they lived with, then none of what had begun happening a few months ago should have been thought abnormal. She resented the judgment she knew others would make: dogs don’t talk. There’s help you could get.

As a young woman living in New York, she had visited certain apartments with Eric, apartments of those who considered themselves radicals, the rent on walk-ups paid by suburban parents while the children decried the system, the main attribute of which was an authority so pervasive the masses couldn’t see it. Dime-store Marxism peddled to the disaffected. And then there was the other strand, the young men and women who ate their peyote and read their Huxley and spoke of the subtler tyranny of the ordered senses. Damp is how she remembered them, pale, long hair pasted down the sides of their faces, sweating in overheated apartments eating cake and oranges. Visiting in those rooms, observing, Charlotte found herself standing behind a cordon sanitaire, a line drawn in the invisible but deeply staining ink of class. It’s not that her parents would have reproved her for doing such things or taken drastic steps. They would merely have been disappointed, their distaste, like hers, more aesthetic than political.

For years afterward, a criticism had lodged itself in her: that she’d been afraid of experience, a coward, a debutante stuck in the mind of the ball. But what sloppiness and vagary those believers had been delivered into. What bathos of posture and commercialism. All their therapy and their divorces and now their wretched houses built up to her door. And what of their radical perception now? Would they even think to credit Charlotte’s mind for a minute?

So a few months ago the conversations in her head had grown a bit in volume, and pushing outward the bicker and debate had circled into her companions, Wilkie and Sam, with whom she’d always communicated in one way or another. So what? They’d taken to conversation in the way she would have predicted from their personalities: Sam the more arrogant of the two, convinced of himself, Wilkie making up for self-doubt with an added righteousness. Were the flower children-cum-yuppies going to cart her off for an imagination gone too florid?

If she were honest with herself, however, Charlotte had to admit the animals themselves had begun to trouble her of late. At first they had merely taken up one side or another of exchanges long conducted internally, most of them quotidian: when to put in the storm windows, when to take them out; whether to read the paper or give oneself a rest from news of death. Helpmates, they were. Companions who cared enough to take a view of the daily dilemmas. But recently their talk had begun to veer from what occupied Charlotte’s conscious mind. More and more the topics were their own.

An odd couple they made, she considered, walking behind them now as they moved along the bank of the stream. Sam with his blond coat and oafish head, that openmouthed lumber of a walk, his tongue hanging from his mouth; Wilkie, so dark and slender, so precise in his movements, lithe and graceful and possessed of a mystery absent in Sam’s bluster. She hadn’t asked the keeper at the pound who his previous owner was or how he had ended up there because she thought it unfair to Wilkie to judge him on his upbringing. His good demeanor had spoken for him that day.

The two of them led her over the footbridge, past the green, and back onto the road again. The turning of the earth had brought the light of the sun into the tops of the trees now, and it cast long shadows across the pavement and the fronts of the houses whose east-facing windows shone with the white-and-orange flood. Another few minutes and they were back by the stone wall that ran between the road and Charlotte’s front yard.

As they turned into the drive, Fanning’s great, gaudy pretense came into view again.

Planks of the tree fort she and Henry used to play in had still been rotting up in the old sycamore by the river when they cut it down, a tree from whose branches her father had hung a swing that swung you out over the footpath high enough at times it seemed you could fly right into the water.

When she’d seen that intruder coming down the steps yesterday morning, the first thing she’d noticed was his suit, too slick by half. It fit him more like a diving outfit than a proper set of clothes. But then why should one expect anything discreet from such a person? That was not the logic of his kind. Theirs was the reign of endless display.

“The new place is mine,” he’d said, shoving his car up beside her.

They would see about that.

In the breezeway, the dogs sat on their haunches, waiting. As she reached for the latch, Charlotte glanced down into Sam’s face: the loose, moist folds of his jowls, the curtains of his ears, his eyes a dark vacuum.

Your town walls are fallen down, he said. But such is the descent of the devil at this day upon ourselves, that I may truly tell you, the walls of the whole world are broken down, such a gap made in them, that the very devils are broke in upon us. And what use ought we to make of so tremendous a dispensation? What use?

Chapter 3

Stuck behind a Volvo moving in slow motion through the center of Finden, Doug examined the suburban scorecard stacked up its rear window. According to the stickers, the driver or various members of her family had attended Andover, Stanford, Cornell, and Yale Medical School. When the woman came to a complete halt in front of the coffee shop and began chatting with a friend on the sidewalk, Doug leaned on his horn, wishing sorely it were the trigger of a cannon. The two women glared back at him in disdain.

For you I served, he thought. For you we killed. For this.

As he often did to calm his nerves at such moments, he dialed Mikey.

“So what’s with the neighbor?” he asked him.

“I love you, Doug, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The place next door. Up on the hill. Turns out some old hag lives in there. She didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat.”

“You mean Miss Charlotte Graves? Yeah. I’ve been meaning to call you about her. She’s a problem.”

“The way she’s keeping that place, she must be violating some kind of ordinance, right? Some Keep Finden Beautiful shit? You should be able to find something to get her on.”

“Trouble is—”

“She’s just the type, isn’t she? Trees, she said. And then walked off. Like I’m the first person ever to cut down woods to build a house in this town? Like her fucking ancestors didn’t clear cut it three hundred years ago. I’ll tell you something, Mikey, some days I wish I was a Russian gangster with twenty cousins and a stretch Hummer. Just to piss people like her off.”

“I think you got that covered, my friend. But listen. When I say she’s a problem I’m not kidding. She’s filed a lawsuit against the town — saying she owns your land.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“My guy on the board of selectmen told me. She wrote the complaint herself. He says it reads like something out of the Old Testament. But she’s pro se, so some judge’ll have to give her a hearing and try to piece her shit together on the taxpayer’s dime. And I’ll have to show up to make sure he tosses it out. It’s a nuisance suit — she’s crazy.”

“Get rid of it, Mikey. You hear me? I don’t need that shit. Not now.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”

Up ahead, a third woman, in a Burberry jacket and duck boots, this one steering a stroller, joined the nattering pair obstructing the roadway.

“I got a situation here,” Doug said, tossing his phone aside and stepping from the car.

“Where do you think you are?” the pearled young matron demanded, as he approached the Volvo. “Los Angeles? Are you planning to fly into some kind of rage?” She turned back to the driver. “All right, then, Ginny. We’ll see you Tuesday.”

“Okay! Bye!” the woman behind the wheel called out in her bright, chipper voice. And with that, she stepped on her accelerator, leaving Doug standing by himself in the middle of the street as the cars behind him began to honk.

THAT MORNING he’d slept through his alarm, which he never did, caught up in dreams again, the remnants of which stuck with him as he cleared the town traffic and made it onto the Pike, still moving at a frustrating pace along the crowded inbound lanes. He’d dreamt of his cousin Michael and it had reminded him of when Michael had told him the story of Doug’s father. His mother had met him when she had gone to help serve his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. This would have been 1964 and she would have been seventeen. When the dinner was through and the dishes washed, the son had driven her home, all the way from the North Shore, an hour at least. This part Michael could say for sure because he’d heard it from his own father’s mouth. That, and the fact they’d been on dates. Two or three and it had ended by Christmas; or maybe it was five or six and had run on into January; he was in college in Western Mass or he’d just graduated or was working for his father before going. His father was rich, that much was clear, because Doug’s uncle John had got a break as a young electrician with a contract to service all the companies the man owned. It was Uncle John who’d recommended his little sister for that day, thinking she might get a regular job out of it. Michael had been told never to speak of it, especially not to Doug. But they were sixteen and they were drunk in Uncle John’s basement while everyone else finished up the Labor Day barbecue in the yard and Michael had told him.

So that was his father. The nameless son of a nameless family who at one time had lived about an hour’s drive away.

What Doug had already known — what everyone knew — was that by February 1965, his mother was pregnant and without a boyfriend, let alone a husband. She stayed with her parents that year and for a year or two after, while Doug was a toddler. Her parents were religious people who never renounced their obligation to love their daughter or their obligation to be ashamed. They continued to share a pew with her at St. Mary’s, though now the family sat at the back of the church. She had many different jobs but by the time they moved into the apartment on the top floor of the blue triple-decker on Eames Street, she mostly cleaned houses and cooked. They had a small backyard that ran down to a creek, and through the trees on the far side of it you could hear the cars moving along the state route. Back then there had been nothing along that highway but a few warehouses and a depot for the Alden town trucks. But when Doug had turned six an auto-parts store had gone in. Soon after that came a mattress discounter, then a gas station, and six months later a Burger King. They cleared land for the first mall, an oval of white concrete with an open-air courtyard and fountain, surrounded by the largest parking lot anyone had ever seen, which backed right up to their creek. Once the cineplex went in with its own vast parking lot, lit by even brighter lights, Doug’s bedroom never got fully dark anymore, the glare of the strip strong enough to color his shade a pale yellow into the small hours of the morning.

On Saturday evenings Doug and his mother went to Mass and again on Wednesdays, and though he hated it from an early age, mostly for the pity shown him by the adults and the pity shown his mother, before he even knew why, he followed obediently along until thirteen or so when he told his mother he didn’t believe in God or the Church and didn’t care what she thought about it. She’d lost most of her bargaining power to the drink by then and didn’t much resist. Daytime was a raw period for her, a time to be endured, after which the relief of the first glass of wine came, a routine that left little margin for argument or delay. He was taller than her well before he reached high school and there weren’t many places in the apartment for her to hide her bottles. Early on he’d learned he could cut her off more or less at will, and after that he never needed to; the threat alone sufficed to win whatever concession he needed from her.

Never a talkative woman, she said even less when she’d drunk three or four glasses.

After the first bottle, her silence deepened into something more profound, her daily withholding of words buoyed up into a principle of sorts, an almost enjoyable one it seemed, a queenly disregard for the commonplace of chatter or conversation, as if he were a man in whose presence she was determined to remain permanently coy. Conspicuous in her withdrawal. She had her television and her magazines, and as long as he was there to watch her getting along without him then indeed she could. And when she fell asleep on the couch at the end of the night Doug would carry her to her bed and turn out the light.

Once he’d gotten his license he had taken control of the car and begun to drive her to work. Heading down the state route you always knew exactly where Alden stopped and Finden began because the strip ended. After the muffler shop and the liquor store strategically placed on the town line to serve the residents of the dry community next door, you came to a traffic light. Beyond that it was as if time had stood still. Just the fluted gray railing running up the side of the highway and behind it, on either side, woods. It continued like that all the way east, seven miles or more toward Boston, until you reached the next town, where another liquor store stood just over the line and the malls and burger chains and car dealerships started up again.

All his mother’s work was in Finden. Over the years, she cleaned for different families in the mornings but as long as he could remember, she’d always worked afternoons at the Gammonds’, where he would come to pick her up in the afternoons. They lived at the end of a white gravel drive in a large brick house with green shutters and flowers in the window boxes.

In spring and fall, Mrs. Gammond would often be working in the garden. She had white hair and fine mottled skin and Doug had always remembered her necklace of jade with its large stones of sea green and imperial purple, separated by rings of silver, resting across her chest like the jewels of some northern queen.

She would ask him how school was going and which subjects interested him and comment on the weather as they waited for his mother to emerge from the house.

“Such a handsome son you have,” he could remember her saying.

People had always liked him for his looks. As a child, he’d got lost in the supermarket and all the other mothers had crowded around, saying how adorable he was. As a teenager, he’d begun jacking off naked in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door, goading himself on, his looks beginning to handle like his first real weapon, his first experience of control.

“She says I’m the best cleaning lady she’s ever employed,” his mother said once on the ride back to Alden, a wry smile on her face, as she smoked her first cigarette in hours, asking Doug to conspire with her for just a little while, to take her slender joke, to be with her for a few moments, on her side. “Maybe one day she’ll give me a medal. A shiny medal.”

The only man who ever visited their apartment was Father Griffin, in his horn-rimmed glasses and black raincoat. His narrow bird face was gaunt with sympathy. Knowing how to time his calls, he would arrive just before supper, when Doug’s mother had drunk only a glass or two and was still sociable. He’d share parish news — of the sick and the dead and the newly born — and stand up to leave as soon as Doug took supper out of the microwave.

What the navy recruiter had to offer was a way out of that apartment and the sight of his mother drowning. Doug had signed the papers the day after his eighteenth birthday. For a week he tried coming up with the words to tell his mother he was leaving but they never came and so he decided he’d call her instead, once he reached the base. He took a bus to the Naval Station Great Lakes, and after three days there ended up phoning his cousin Michael instead to let the family know where he’d gone.

Most of the other recruits struck him as innocents without a plan: patriotic boys itching to stick it to the Evil Empire, kids with eyes set wide apart who looked as if they’d arrived through some damp, half-witted dream into a bunk and a bench in the galley, washed off the prairie like shallow soil. Right away he knew he’d do the minimum and get out. He kept figuring he would write his mother a letter or a postcard, but then again she knew where he was and she hadn’t written or called.

He met sailors who no longer knew where their folks lived and didn’t seem much to care. At first, he thought he’d begin to forget like that, that his memory would wipe itself clean. But it didn’t. It wasn’t at the low times that he thought of his mother but when things were going well, when accomplishment and momentum felt real, at the end of a well-executed maneuver or when he got his first promotion. Then, just as he grabbed on to a bit of excitement, to the sense that things might work out, he’d picture her spending the night on the couch, waking with a headache at dawn, shuffling to her bed for a few more hours of sleep, and like a kill switch, the image would cut dead the power surging within him. Noticing how the memory of her held him back, he decided he would no longer permit himself guilt. It was a priestly game, after all, a game of sin and forgiveness, one that could eat a life whole.

AS HE ROUNDED the exit for South Station, Doug could see the eastern face of the Union Atlantic tower shimmering in the morning sun. It was taller than 60 State Street and framed in crisp white lines, its glass much brighter than the dark reflective obelisk of the John Hancock. Jeffrey Holland had built it against all kinds of opposition, striking the deal when prices were low because no one wanted to put up with the Big Dig on their front doorstep, despite the fact that it would eventually be a park leading to the water. The tallest building in the city, it now dominated the financial district and had become the centerpiece of skyline night shots during Red Sox broadcasts and the network legal procedurals set in town, the Union Atlantic logo — the outline of a cresting wave — lit in bright blue along the south-facing superstructure, the whole gleaming edifice a bold announcement of intent, its scale impressing clients and competitors alike. Holland understood well the logic of images creating impressions which became facts. Insider chatter about overreaching had been no match for the persuasion of size and ambition. The foreigners in particular loved it, the Koreans and the Chinese, whose business they were getting hand over fist now. At Doug’s encouragement they’d entered into talks with the Four Seasons about a hotel next door. Union Atlantic alone could fill two-thirds of it with clients.

“Good morning, Mr. Fanning,” the new receptionist on the senior management floor said as Doug stepped off the elevator. He was a twenty-something metrosexual in Banana Republic gear whose smiling deference was so total it almost begged a crude response. “I’ve sent a few packages down to Sabrina for you.”

Doug had gone through three secretaries before he found Sabrina Svetz. She was an aspiring writer looking for a day job. A brunette with the angular features of her Slavic ancestors, her looks were peaking now in her late twenties, the severity of the bone structure no longer hidden by youthful chubbiness, but still on the glamorous side of gaunt. He liked that she fundamentally resented her job and had other ambitions. It clarified their relations. She was a shameless flirt and ill-suited to working in a bank, always nosing around for odd bits of detail about people’s personal lives. He’d waited three weeks before taking her out for a drink and sleeping with her, a perfunctory exercise they’d engaged in two or three times since and which gave Doug what he needed from her: an understanding between the two of them as individual actors, bound by the bargain they had struck, not some bullshit out of a company handbook about what got reported and to whom. He’d made it perfectly clear before they took their clothes off what the sex would and wouldn’t mean. Being a somewhat hardened woman, for reasons he didn’t care to know, she understood right away and consented. She’d often eat her lunch in Doug’s office with the door closed, telling him about her dating life and discussing who was hot and who wasn’t among the staff.

She was writing a novel set during the Spanish Civil War and had a thing for Iberian men, particularly those whose grandparents were old Fascists willing to talk.

“Our Leader awaits you,” she said, not bothering to look up from her screen as he approached her desk. The downside of such close relations was that she felt comfortable indulging a degree of sullenness that would otherwise have been considered unprofessional. The gain, however, was worth it. She did exactly as instructed even if it meant telling the chief of administration to screw off. She had no loyalty to the organization but plenty to Doug.

This was important. When Holland had hired Doug, Union Atlantic had been a regional, commercial bank. It took in deposits, offered checking accounts to the public, and made loans to businesses and real estate developers. It had the conservative balance sheet of the highly regulated institution that it was. But Holland’s plan for the company was much larger. Through acquisition, he wanted it to grow into a financial-services conglomerate with an investment banking arm, an insurance division, and a private wealth management business.

Holland had given Doug two jobs, one as head of foreign operations and the other as the man in charge of the newly created Department of Special Plans. The purpose of the latter was to formulate long-term strategy for how Union Atlantic should navigate the new, deregulated environment, in which Congress was slowly repealing all the old, New Deal reforms that had prevented banks from owning the insurers and investment houses Holland wanted to buy. Doug had done a ferociously good job. On his advice, the bank had brazenly commenced acquisitions that were strictly speaking still illegal but that Doug foresaw would be approved by the time the deals were finalized, in part because of Union Atlantic’s own lobbying but also because their competitors, as soon as they caught on, would follow suit adding their own legislative pressure to scrap the old protections. Leading the pack, Holland, Doug, and the management team had been able to cherry-pick the most profitable companies to acquire. In less than six years, while several of the older behemoths had stumbled, Union Atlantic had grown from a stand-alone commercial bank into Union Atlantic Group, a global player and one of the four largest financial companies in the country. Holland had capped it off with the new tower. Soon thereafter he’d appeared on the cover of Fortune and BusinessWeek. The leading industry analyst, a prick named Koppler, pronounced Union Atlantic Group the herald of a new paradigm for multi-platform financial services and its stock rose six percent in a day.

All that was before the fall of 2001. The 9/11 attacks had cut nearly seven hundred points off the Dow. Then, less than two months later, Enron had collapsed. Like many banks, Union Atlantic had provided the Houston energy trader and its off-balance-sheet partnerships with considerable amounts of financing. Meanwhile, Atlantic Securities, the investment banking arm, had sold Enron’s bonds to investors and had purchased many of them with its own money. Still, that wasn’t the worst of it. In December, Argentina had defaulted on its sovereign debt.

For years, Argentina had been a poster child for the International Monetary Fund, obediently implementing the Washington Consensus on structural adjustment, privatizing state-owned industries and public-sector utilities, mostly by selling them to foreign investors, and it had brought inflation under control by pegging the peso to the dollar. In the process, the bonds that the Argentinean government sold to finance its spending had become hugely popular with Western banks. They paid a higher rate of interest than the bonds of first-world countries, and given the IMF’s ongoing support of the Argentinean economy, they seemed a safe bet, even after a deep recession in the late nineties.

Countries as economically mature and as connected to the global system as Argentina didn’t walk away from their sovereign debt; it simply wasn’t done. Or at least never had been until December 2001, when the new government, ushered in after riots in Buenos Aires, defaulted on $81 billion owed to creditors around the world.

Up to this point, the American financial press had been happy to more or less ignore the cash that Union Atlantic itself had burned through in its recent spree of acquisitions. Now, however, given their exposure to the Argentinean crisis, the breathless coverage gave way to jitters, and with those came a sharply falling stock price.

And so once again Holland, seeing his grand plan imperiled and impatient with his doubters, had turned to Doug and the Department of Special Plans and said: Fix it.

To do this the company had to beat the market’s expectations for its earnings for at least two quarters in a row. The quickest way to accomplish that was to pump up the revenues at Atlantic Securities, especially in its futures and derivatives business. Attracting more clients, and thus earning more commissions from handling their trades, wouldn’t be enough; they would have to trade with the firm’s own money — proprietary trading as it was called — in order to enjoy the larger profit margins that came with such direct risk.

But there was a major obstacle to this strategy. In order to place such large, proprietary trades in the futures markets, Atlantic Securities had to post margins with the various exchanges it traded on. Enough cash, in fact, to cover any potential losses. This put a strain on Atlantic Securities’ cash flow. Too much of its capital was being tied up in margin accounts.

The obvious solution was for Union Atlantic, the regular commercial bank with a strong capital base of customer deposits, to lend Atlantic Securities the money it needed. The two entities were, after all, owned by the same holding company. But federal regulations limited this “lending across the house.” And the company’s own internal policies set strict limits on the practice. Divisions within the group were supposed to negotiate with one another at arm’s length. This was all well and fine when you had time on your hands. All very punctilious. One of those procedural safeguards in-house counsel derived such satisfaction from enforcing, never having generated a dime of profit in their lives. But a few more quarters of bad earnings reports, and a strategic plan years in the making could begin to crumble.

And so Doug had done what he’d been hired to do: he’d exercised his impatience. To get around the regulation, he had created a new corporation he dubbed Finden Holdings. Its sole purpose was to borrow cash from Union Atlantic and lend it to Atlantic Securities. This wasn’t illegal, strictly speaking, but the lawyers and auditors knew enough to keep the details in the footnotes. With this invention, the big money had begun to flow into the accounts of Doug’s foreign traders. Soon enough, profits were up.

In the first quarter of 2002, Union Atlantic Group exceeded Wall Street’s earnings forecast by more than any other company in the sector. Once again, they had proven themselves agile and determined. And this satisfied Doug. It satisfied him a great deal. Not because of the likely size of his bonus or the further expansion of his informal dominion. The execution was what gratified him. The focus and precision and directedness of his will. At such times, his churning mind turned lucid and through it power flowed as frictionless as money down a fiber-optic line, the resistance of the physical world reduced to the vanishing point. He felt then like the living wonder of the most advanced machine, as if he’d been freed of all organic hindrance to glide on the plain of pure efficiency. A place of relief, even peace.

Having Sabrina around to fend off the nitpickers and cover for him when he let his lesser, administrative tasks slide had been a great help.

“We have an office in Madrid, right?” she asked now, sidling into Doug’s office to hand him a manila folder.

He nodded.

“I need you to take me there on a business trip. For a week or so.”

Now and again Sabrina employed this sort of presumption, a compensatory fantasy, he imagined, for the inherent powerlessness of a person with an advanced degree in short fiction. It was as though she’d bargained on receiving a certain cultural cachet that had yet to materialize and in the meantime needed a bridge loan of prestige paid out in the quasi-glamour of international travel. Her parents were doctors who’d covered everything through graduate school but had drawn the line at outright patronage.

The paper she had just handed him was McTeague’s latest request for cash to post as margin on the futures exchange in Singapore. The amount was enormous. In addition to money to cover Atlantic Securities’ own trades, he was asking for large sums to cover the trading of his growing list of clients out in Hong Kong, mostly hedge funds who’d been attracted to McTeague’s high profits and wanted in on the action.

“We’re the victims of our success,” he said to Doug, once Sabrina had got him on the line. “Half of Greenwich wants to give me their money. If we don’t lend them the margin, someone else will.”

He sounded jacked up, teetering on nervous, which was just where Doug wanted him, on that vigilant edge, pumped about what he had in hand but wanting more. When news of what the Japanese Ministry of Finance was doing to prop up the Nikkei became public, he could turn McTeague off. But at present he was working perfectly.

“Three hundred and twenty million. That’s a lot of money,” Doug said. “Keep me close, you understand? I want to see the daily numbers.”

“Of course,” McTeague replied.

“You know Holland’s waiting for you, right?” Sabrina said, ignoring the fact that he was on the phone as she sat sprawled on the couch, leafing through a magazine. “He called down here himself.”

THE ARCHITECTS of the Union Atlantic tower had understood well who their client was. Not a corporation, not a board of directors, and certainly not a twelve-member building committee, but one man, the head of all three: Jeffrey Holland. The new headquarters had been his project from the outset and no major decision regarding it had been made without his approval. In the chairman’s suite, a brocade upholstered sofa fit for an English country manor sat beneath a painting of a river valley and snowcapped mountains, the canvas framed in faded gold leaf. The sofa afforded a view, through floor-to-ceiling windows, onto a flagstone terrace beyond the railing of which was visible only sky. This office — really its own structure sitting atop the tower — had everything an acquisitive soul might want of architecture without the distraction of postmodernism or the discomfiture of real innovation. The gesture toward minimalism in its frame and fenestration was sufficient to give it the patina of restraint, while in every significant detail, from the fluted columns of the dark-wood bookcases to the enormous Oriental carpets, it retained all the pleasures of empire. It was a big, bright compliment of a room.

Which, of course, fit well its function. When you wanted a French media-and-defense conglomerate to do its banking with you rather than with Chase, this was a fine place to chat with their chairman about his country house, his daughter’s art-school plans, and the benefits of proximity to Harvard before the lesser suits took him downstairs to explain the offer. You didn’t do PowerPoint in a room like this; you put people at ease.

“He’s on the phone,” Holland’s secretary, Martha, said, as Doug approached. “Not that that will stop you.”

He continued up the hall to the open door of the sun-flooded office. The man himself stood by the far window with his back to Doug looking north over the Fleet Center to the webbed white cables of the new Zakim bridge that spanned the mouth of the Charles. He spoke to the view, his hands in his pockets, the silver dagger of an earpiece extending an inch down his cheek.

“…. which is why those aren’t the only provisions we want in the bill. Everyone has an interest in transparency: us, the consumer, the courts. Who doesn’t want bankruptcies sped up? Who doesn’t want them rationalized? And I don’t think anyone’s been better at communicating that than you, Senator.”

He shook his head back and forth in disagreement with whatever he was hearing on the other end. When he turned and spotted Doug, he gestured with a nod for him to sit.

“Of course, Senator, I understand that, and believe me the last thing I want is my own lobbyist getting in the way of … I understand that.”

Holland was a tall man, six-three at least, broad shouldered and bulky in the chest without quite being overweight. He’d never been an athlete in college, yet he had an athlete’s bodily ease, his big shoulders rolled back, his girth part of the motion of his walk as he approached you, more an element of persuasion than anything to be embarrassed by. That same animal confidence was part of the motion of his face with its wide, agile mouth, full cheeks and thick nose, and the soft blue eyes, such an intimate part of the larger seduction. Photographs captured only the bluntness and gave little hint of the effect his physical presence had on others. Doug had seen it a hundred times, the way he rolled in on a mark — client or politician or friend — leveling their defenses at the outset with the big handshake, the big knowing smile, the slightly colder stare pushing the last barrier aside, so that by the time he opened his mouth his target was already nodding in agreement.

“Well,” Holland said with a chuckle, “if Bob Rubin can call himself a Democrat, I guess I can too. And believe me, we’re talking to your colleagues. No reason this should be a party-line matter. The public needs to hear about the safeguards, see how it would make credit cheaper for everyone in the end. We’re ready to roll all that out. It’s just a matter of timing, which is why I wanted to get your sense of where things stand … Of course, of course, we’ll be in touch.”

He removed his earpiece, took a seat, and swung his feet up onto the desk.

“Grassley’s an asshole.”

“He’s still with us, right?”

“Sure he is. The bankruptcy bill’s been his for years. Trouble is, if it ever gets passed he’ll need a whole new fund-raising strategy.” He joined his hands behind his head and stretched out to full length. “But that’s not my main concern right now. Have you looked at your cash position lately? You’ve got us lending to your traders hand over fist. Don’t get me wrong — your profits are impressive. But you’re tying up a lot of capital.”

He stood, thrust his hands in his pockets, and began pacing behind his desk.

“We’re attracting clients,” Doug said. “And we’re lending them the money to play the market with. It’s not our risk, it’s theirs. That’s the bigger point. The business is growing.”

I understand the position you’re in. That’s what Doug had told Holland during his final interview for the job. The board wants results. They want them quickly. What didn’t need to be said, what Doug’s tone of absolute confidence had said for itself: There will be times when it would be better if you didn’t know everything. I understand that too.

Holland had no idea how he and McTeague had discovered the plans of the Japanese government nor had he briefed him on the finer details of the Finden Holdings arrangement.

Coming up in the industry, Doug had met a lot of guys like Holland, men in their fifties and sixties who had never been in the military. Like the rest of them, Holland loved that Doug had run air defense on the most advanced ship in the navy and that he’d seen action in the Persian Gulf. He derived pleasure from it, the same satisfaction, it struck Doug, as the pleasure he himself used to get inspecting missiles down in their bays, running his hand over the shiny white warhead of an SM-2, feeling through the tips of his fingers all that locked-down, riveted potential. That’s what he was for a man like Holland: an attractive weapon. Doug worked best with the men who understood implicitly the balance of excitement, ignorance, and reward he offered. And no one had understood it better than Holland. He knew his aggression had to be channeled through others. He needed tentacles up into the board, laterally into the senior management with eyes on his job, and down into the bowels of the operation, where the consequences of loyalty were more concrete. Like a ship’s captain, who in principle relied on the chain of command but in practice drew close those he trusted, Holland surrounded himself with people who owed their jobs to him, and it was through these officers, of whatever rank, that he worked his will. He loved that all the secretaries had crushes on Doug, and that the rest of the department heads loathed him. Deep into the bullshit of management science, Holland had consultants threaded everywhere, hard at work rubber-stamping his plans, providing cover for whenever an initiative failed. But at base such caution bored him, and if he were honest with himself he would have to admit that it embarrassed him too. To all such mealymouthed, process nonsense, Doug was the perfect antidote: a means to direct action. Yet, as with any secret weapon, the pleasure and protection lay in the having of it, not in the use.

“What about our own trades?” Holland asked. “Where do we stand?”

For all his bluster about cash flow, this was why he had asked Doug to his office: to hear news of profit.

“Hong Kong netted thirty-five million last week. Next week, it’ll be forty.”

Holland glanced up, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. Then he strolled to the opposite side of the office to gaze from the window. Beneath a cloudless sky, the water of the harbor shimmered, a white ferry churned slowly from the pier, planes in the distance glided onto the peninsula of runways at Logan, the whole brilliant vista softened by the tint of the glass.

“That guy from Time called again,” he said. “He’s coming next week. They’ve decided to go ahead with the profile after all.”

“Congratulations,” Doug said.

“Thanks. So what’s the news with you? Are we neighbors yet? Have you moved out to Finden?”

“Yeah. Which reminds me. You know a woman named Charlotte Graves?”

“Never heard of her. What the hell are you going to do with all that space, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Doug said. “Make a killing maybe?”

Holland laughed. “My wife loathes people like you,” he said. “Probably because she used to be one.”

Chapter 4

From inside the blooming lilac, Charlotte whispers, Come. You’re missing it. Come and see. The pleasure, somehow, always hers. Mother and father with their drinks on the veranda in wicker chairs watching; traffic whirring in the distance on the post road. You’re missing it, his sister whispers. The air is soft in the first spring heat. Henry tries to walk toward his sister but his legs are fixed to the ground. Her whispers fill his ears from behind those coned purple flowers, the sunlight on the arced branches a brilliant diffusion. Here, what you’ve been looking for, here it is, she says, as the siren begins to sound.

Swallowing dryly, turning his head on the pillow, Henry half opened his eyes. The room was pitch-dark, only one edge of it discernible from a strip of light under the door. A hotel, certainly: the familiar hush of conditioned air falling into the padded gloom of rug and curtains and armchair, the tiny red signals of the television and the motion detector. But where? What city? For a moment, the yearning for a world saturated with meaning pulled him back toward sleep, but he caught himself and reached for the bleating phone, the grid of the present regaining administration of his mind, leveling in an instant the fading kingdom of dreams.

He was in a suite on the Atlantic coast of Florida and it was one fifteen in the morning.

“Mr. Graves? Is this Mr. Henry Graves?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Sir, my name is Vincent Cannistro. I’m vice president of market operations at Taconic Bank.”

“Hold on a moment.”

He reached up to switch on the light.

“This better be serious,” he said. “In which case, why am I talking to you?”

“That’s a perfectly fair question, sir. Fred Premley, our CEO, is currently in Idaho and we have been trying to reach him by cell phone for a number of hours now. I have a car headed to his location at this time and we expect to be in contact with him shortly.”

“And your chairman?”

“Our chairman, sir, he’s in that same location.”

Henry sat upright and reached for his glasses, bringing the room into focus. Briefing books for the conference were piled on the desk opposite.

“So you’re in a bind and your management’s gone fishing. Have I got it right so far?”

“Sir, I would have to say that is more or less correct, yes.”

“All right, then, Mr. Cannistro. What’s your situation?”

There was a pause on the line. Even in his groggy state, Henry could sense the fellow’s unease. He’d heard men’s voices like this before, taut as a drum, overly formal, restraining with effort the profanity they’d been hurling at their subordinates for hours or even days. This man was making a call well above his pay grade. If things didn’t turn out right, he could lose his job.

“We’ve got a liquidity problem,” he said.

“Well, you don’t call at this hour if you’re unhappy with the examiners. What’s your position?”

“We’re on the short end of an interest-rate swap. We owe a hundred and seventy million. Payment was due nine hours ago.”

“A hundred and seventy? Whose rates were you betting?”

“Venezuelan to rise.”

“Jesus. That was stupid. I assume you hedged it. You covered it with something, right?”

“Sir, that’s the problem. The model had us covering the position with oil futures. They were supposed to drop if Chávez trimmed his rates. They didn’t drop.”

Henry rested his head back against the wall. For a moment he’d thought maybe his caller had jumped the gun and done nothing more than further damage his bank’s reputation with the Federal Reserve, in which case he could go back to sleep. Pulling the covers aside, he rose, took a pad of paper and pen from the coffee table, and settled himself into an armchair.

“Mr. Graves, are you there?”

“I’m here. That’s the most inane hedge I’ve ever heard of. And you’re telling me you can’t raise the money for the payment?”

“As of this hour, no.”

“I see,” Henry said, nodding to himself. Under normal circumstances even a small retail operation like Taconic would have credit enough with the market to cover such incompetent trading. But they had been carrying a lot of bad tech loans for a year or more now and their retail base was being squeezed on one end by Chase and on the other by the national discounters. In the last few weeks they’d begun borrowing heavily to cover their own trading positions.

As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves had oversight responsibility for all the banks in his district, including Taconic. He also regulated the large bank holding companies that had come to dominate the industry. But the New York Fed, unlike the other regional Federal Reserve banks, was more than simply a supervisory institution. It was the operational hub of the whole Fed System. It acted as the Treasury’s agent in the market, buying and selling T-bills. Nearly every country in the world held some portion of their sovereign assets in accounts at the New York Fed. The wire service the bank ran cleared a trillion dollars in transactions each day. Simply put, Henry Graves was in charge of the biggest pumping station in the plumbing of global finance. His most vital function was to keep money moving. To do it quickly. And, above all, to do it quietly.

Which meant making sure a situation didn’t become a crisis. Taconic’s problems, small as they were in the scheme of things, couldn’t be allowed to spread. The bank’s ultimate failure, if that’s what it came to, would pose little systemic risk. In receivership, it would be broken up and sold. But in the short run, a nonpayment of this size could cause trouble for Taconic’s creditors. A resolution, however temporary, was needed before the morning bell.

“Who do you owe the money to? Who’s your counterparty?”

“Union Atlantic.”

Henry’s thought was one of relief. At least they were dealing with a known quantity, and a bank under his supervision. Union Atlantic meant Jeffrey Holland. A bit glib, a bit of a showman. In it for the sport of the deal. Not Henry’s favorite banker, but he could be reasoned with. He and his wife, Glenda, had showed up at the same hotel in Bermuda where Henry had taken Betsy just after she’d gotten sick. The four of them had eaten dinner together out on the terrace one evening. They’d sent a huge arrangement of flowers to the funeral.

The other line started to ring and he told Cannistro to hold.

“Did that jackass get a hold of you yet? What an idiot, huh? An upstate strip-mall bank betting on Chávez! Did you get a load of that? What a goddamn mess.”

Sid Brenner, head of payment systems. The master plumber, as they called him, the man with his fingers on the dials. You could count on two hands the number of people capable of programming the network that wired that trillion a day through the market. Most of them worked at IBM. Sid had been with the Fed thirty-five years, starting just a few months before Henry. Born in Crown Heights, he lived there still — three kids, one an officer in the Israeli army, the other two professors. Any day of the week he could have walked down the Street and made five times what the Fed paid him, but he never had.

“We’ve got time,” Henry said, a half-truth they would let pass between them. “I’ll get on the phone. We’ll work it through.”

“None of my business, but if you give these jerks a free ride, I’ll wring your neck. They should be lucky to get a loan at eight percent.”

“I’ll talk to Holland. Did everything else settle?”

“Yeah, just a gaping hole in Taconic’s reserve account.”

“What’s your sense of who else knows at this point?”

“About the swap in particular? Not so many. That they’ve been scrambling for money for eight hours? Not exactly a secret.”

Henry woke his secretary, Helen, at home and asked her to set up the calls with Holland and Taconic’s management, as soon as the car reached them.

As they were about to hang up, she asked, “Are you all right?”

He crossed the room and pulled the curtains aside. Through the glass he could see down to the beach, where the lights from the hotel reached the tranquil water’s edge. He slid the door open and stepped onto the balcony, the night air heavy with moisture.

Like Sid, Helen had been at the Fed for decades, starting out as Henry’s assistant in the counsel’s office and moving with him to the presidency. When they were together, priorities sorted themselves in the space between them with little more than a glance or nod. She could interpret the nuance of a bank officer’s evasions as readily as the nervous chatter of some freshman analyst. He disliked involving her in personal matters but ever since Betsy had died four years ago, he’d found it impossible to meet his own standard of segregating entirely work and private life.

“Did my sister call?”

“No. There’s been no word.”

He rested his forearms on the railing, feeling in the thickness of his head the pitched forward slowness of jet lag. The flight from Frankfurt had been ten hours, the drive up from Miami all stop-and-go traffic owing to a jackknifed truck that had torn the roof off one of those Volkswagen bugs, the whole scene bright as day under halogen floods.

A few weeks ago, after listening to one of Charlotte’s tirades about the house next door, he’d raised the question of whether it might be time for her to move. She’d practically hung up on him and had replied to none of his phone calls since.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with this,” he said to Helen. “It’s unprofessional of me.”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied. “Do you need anything else? It could take awhile to get Holland at this hour.”

“No. Just the account positions. And I suppose you better call down to D.C. and find out where the chairman is, just in case. I don’t think we’ll need him.”

“By the way,” she said. “Did you speak to the plumber about the leak at the house?” He had happened upon it the other evening in the back hall, a rust-colored sagging in the wallpaper over the side table. “It’s not the kind of thing you can just forget about. You could get a burst pipe.”

In which case, what? he thought. Water in the living room? A lake beneath the piano? He barely used the downstairs anymore, getting home after ten most nights and heading straight to bed. Even upstairs he’d withdrawn into one of the guest rooms, where he found it easier to sleep surrounded by fewer of Betsy’s things. His wife’s death had hit him with startling force for a month or two, during which his body ached from the moment he woke to the moment he went to sleep. But his job’s demands didn’t cease. And soon there were days when he thought of her less often; half a year later there were days he didn’t think of her at all. This seemed wrong, inhuman even, that forty years of marriage could fade so easily through a slip in time. Did it mean he was a callous person? Unfeeling? Who was to judge? As for his private life now, the person he thought of, whom in a sense he’d always thought of, was his older sister, Charlotte. A woman Betsy had done little more than tolerate.

“If you give me the plumber’s number,” Helen said, “I’ll call him myself.”

“No,” Henry replied. “It’s all right. I’ll see to it when I get back.”

DOWNSTAIRS, THE COCKTAIL lounge was deserted save for an elderly Latino man in a vest and bow tie reading a newspaper behind the bar. Basketball from the West Coast played in silence on the television mounted above his head. Henry ordered a ginger ale and walked out onto the terrace, taking a seat at a table by the steps to the lawn. Between the hotel and the ocean stood a row of shaded palms lit from beneath, their fronds perfectly still. Waves barely lapped at the shore. The big investment houses had made a killing on resorts like this, consolidating the industry, securitizing the mortgages, first in line to get paid when a chain went bankrupt, first in line to finance the entity when it reemerged.

The ginger ale had too much sweetener and not enough fizz. Another penny for Archer Daniels Midland and the corn-syrup giants.

Stop, he thought to himself. Enough.

He could never tell if exhaustion bred the automatic thought of production and consequence or whether the habit itself did the tiring. Either way, it had become incessant. As an undergraduate, studying philosophy, his first challenge had been skepticism, how the mind could know with certainty that objects existed. By the time he went to law school, he’d settled happily on a social, pragmatic answer: that to believe otherwise led to absurd results. These days much of the world seemed drained of presence to him, not by his doubt of anything’s existence but because objects, even people sometimes, seemed to dissipate into their causes, their own being crowded out by what had made them so.

Over the gentle surf, he heard the hum from the air-conditioning vents high on the roof of the hotel, and his brain, once more, ran the stimulus to ground: the steel smelted from ore mined on some island of the Indonesian archipelago; forged into sheets on the hydraulic presses of a foundry outside Seoul; shipped across the Pacific to sit in a warehouse in Long Beach where it showed up in the Commerce Department’s numbers on inventory; ordered, packaged, trucked over the plains to an Atlanta wholesaler; bought by a contractor in Miami, who stood with a foreman directing workers riveting the vents together, operating the crane that raised into place the engine, itself assembled with parts from ten countries or more at a Maytag plant out in Iowa or perhaps Mexico, calibrated to the precise wattage required to pump cooled air into the hundreds of sleeping chambers, where its faintly medicinal scent blanketed the slumbering travelers. And allowing each step from the miner’s lowly wage to the construction buy: loans, lines of credit, borrowed money — the vast creationary incentive of compound interest, blind artificer of the modern world.

He wondered how it would be if the humming were just that to him: a sound.

Leaving his glass on the table, he wandered out onto the lawn. He wouldn’t be able to sleep before he’d resolved Taconic’s troubles but until their CEO and Holland were on the phone there was nothing more he could do.

On the far side of the pool area a footbridge led over the sand and the shallow water to a jetty that formed the outer edge of the marina. He crossed it and walked alongside the yachts and cigarette boats attached to their moorings with chains that glittered dimly beneath the dock lights.

In the summers, he and Betsy had always gone up to Maine, to Port Clyde. A night in the mainland cottage, a day getting the boat out of storage, two weeks on the island. The same every year. Just as he rode the same train to work that his father had ridden. His father who’d worked for Roosevelt’s SEC, back in its early days, who had been a scourge to penny-stock fraudsters and pyramid schemers, arriving home each night with a briefcase full of pleadings and depositions, rarely back in time for dinner. He’d believed with fervor in the rules he’d enforced, in the idea of the government as the good leveler of the field. In 1944, he’d driven a Sherman tank through the streets of Paris to cheers. Back in the States, he’d spent his whole career going after securities fraud as if it were an insult to the country. How dare anyone think they were above the democratic rule of law that he had fought to defend. Fair procedure meant everything to him. He’d been delighted when Henry chose to go to law school, though he would never have argued for or against it. Of the Federal Reserve, however, he’d always been a bit suspicious, given how badly it had failed in the Depression. And then it wasn’t exactly democratic either, with men from the private sector controlling the regional banks, appointing officers like Henry. An essential public function — the conduct of all monetary policy — handled beyond the public eye, by unelected officials. Of that his father had been wary.

“You have to remember,” Henry could recall his mother saying, sipping her gin and tonic at the dinner table across from their father’s empty chair, “your father is a man of principle.”

Henry had followed his father’s lead in never interfering with his sister’s life, even after the disaster of her affair with Eric. The old man had always hewed to his line about being proud of his daughter’s independence. The principled position. But then he wasn’t around anymore.

Tires were lashed to the thick wooden posts at the end of the dock, where the dark water sloshed up against them. How was it that after all these decades his sister could still draw him back in? He’d thought once that having his own family would be a barrier of sorts, and for a while it had been, when his daughter, Linda, was a child. But it hadn’t lasted long. In her way, Betsy had always resented his sister, and he couldn’t entirely blame her. It wasn’t that they saw so much of her in any given year. It was something else. Something about the nature of her claim on Henry.

“Your marriage should be donated to the Smithsonian,” Charlotte had said to him once.

He should have been insulted, but he’d always enjoyed her wit.

As he turned back up the jetty toward his room, his cell phone began to vibrate.

WHATEVER SUSPICIONS he’d harbored about Taconic’s management were quickly confirmed by his conversation with Fred Premley. It turned out the bank had been hemorrhaging cash on the swap for nearly a month. Clearly news had leaked into the overnight market. Which meant the problem was already worse than its notional value. If he’d been doing his job, Premley would have approached Henry’s staff two weeks ago and borrowed from the Discount Window. But he was trying to attract a buyer for his company, so he’d avoided that public sign of distress. Instead, he’d just held on, hoping circumstance would save him. They had never met, but from the orotund tone of his voice, Henry could just picture the double chin. This was the kind of Business Roundtable chump who spent his lunchtime decrying government intrusion and now found himself on a cell phone in the middle of the night pleading with the government to save him. In the morning, there would be teams of examiners at the doors of his office, but right now they had to patch something together. After listening to his prevarications for a few minutes, Henry made it clear a specific request would be required.

“Well, then,” Premley said, “I guess I’m asking if the Discount Window would loan us the one seventy.”

Henry glanced at the fax Helen had sent through. Taconic had forty million in its reserve account.

“You might have got that, Mr. Premley, if you’d approached us in a timely fashion. But you’ve left it a bit late, wouldn’t you say?”

There was a pause on the line.

“You’ll get thirty,” Henry said, “and that’s generous.”

“You’re serious.”

He said nothing.

“What about the rest?” Premley asked.

Henry had reached the limit of his official, public authority. From here on, they entered the informal realm. “The rest will need to be restructured,” he said. “Tonight.”

“I don’t disagree, but my VP he tells me Union Atlantic’s been holding out for hours. They don’t want to refinance.”

“That’s hardly surprising under the circumstances.”

He let the silence that followed hang there on the line between them. He needed to soften Premley up with fear so that he would accept the harsh terms Union Atlantic would offer once Henry placed his call to Holland. He said nothing for another moment or two, time enough, he figured, for the man to begin wondering about his own liability once the shareholder litigation began.

“Tell Cannistro to set up the transfer for the thirty million and keep this line open, all right, Mr. Premley? We’ll see what we can do.”

Turning on the television back in his room Henry saw that Frankfurt and Paris were down in early-hours trading. He pressed the Mute button and closed his eyes for a minute. The back offices in London were starting their day now and would begin to notice that Union Atlantic’s payments were being held up. A call or two out to the trading desks where the young jocks sipped their coffee, stroking the fantasy of the one-day killing, and the lines would start to hum, bank stocks getting ready to head lower at the bell. He could see the sheen on the hard black plastic of the phones that would start to ring, the five-screen stations at Roth Brothers feeding Reuters and Bloomberg, the digital glide of ticker tape high along the wall, servers linked, nested, and cooled on the floor below, batching for export the first of the day’s reports to the redundant facilities in Norfolk or Hampshire, windowless steel barns surrounded by fence and barbed wire.

“Remarkable how total the distraction can become, no?” Charlotte had said a few months ago in one of their loopy conversations. “Just don’t forget yourself in the midst of it all.”

Lifting his eyelids, he gazed at the figures running along the bottom of the silent screen. On his BlackBerry, he found the number for Mark Darby, his counterpart at the Bank of England, and left him a voice mail telling him there had been a glitch, that Union Atlantic’s accounts would settle before the start of business in New York. Darby would get the word out and if all went well, in the next hour London might still open smoothly.

“Isn’t there some regulation against men our age being up at this hour?” Jeffrey Holland asked in that warm, charming voice of his, after Helen finally patched him through. He knew perfectly well that Henry had at least ten years on him, and thus, true to form, the question doubled as a compliment. Henry figured it was the poor compensation that had kept Holland out of politics.

“Not to my knowledge, but I’m sure Senator Grassley would introduce a bill if you put a word in his ear.”

Holland chuckled. He’d helped nix a reporting provision the Fed had wanted in the latest markup of the finance bill.

“I should mention it to him. No phone calls after nine o’clock.”

“So did you have any warning on this Taconic business?” Henry said.

“None at all. I heard about it today. They must have moved around between lenders. They certainly didn’t come to us.”

Henry found this difficult to believe but chose to let it pass.

“Do you know this fellow Premley?”

“I’ve dealt with him once or twice. They brought him in to fix the place up and sell it. Not such a good bet, apparently.”

“Between us, the Discount Window just extended them thirty of what they owe you.”

“And you think we should roll over the rest?”

“Well, you’ve got an uncovered position yourself. It’s two thirty in the morning.”

He could hear what sounded like ice being put in a glass. Holland swallowed and cleared his throat. He wouldn’t resist now. In the worst case, Union Atlantic would end up writing off the loss for whatever they couldn’t recoup. Alerted to its weakness, Holland might even try to buy Taconic, once its stock price fell into the basement. A flap with the shareholders three months hence measured little against his bank being technically illiquid when the markets opened. They both knew this. Besides, Henry regulated Union Atlantic Group. Holland would offer terms now. The call itself was all that had been necessary.

“It must be an odd job,” Holland said. “To have to keep imagining the real disaster. The whole leveraged shooting match falling to pieces.”

Henry had wandered again onto the balcony, where the breeze had picked up off the water, the waves a bit larger now, boats bobbing against their posts, the fronds of the shaded palms swaying. How could anyone not imagine it these days? After the currency scares, 9/11, the Argentinean default, each of them managed one way or another. The system, in the public eye, still strong, people’s faith in the value of the money in their pocket such a basic fact of life they couldn’t imagine it otherwise. And yet if you’d been on the calls with the Ministers of Finance or with Treasury on the twelfth and the thirteenth — Henry from Basel, his senior staff some of the only people left in lower Manhattan other than the fire and rescue crews — you knew it could have gone differently. One more piece of bad news and the invisible architecture of confidence might have buckled.

About this Holland was right. Henry was paid to worry so the average citizen didn’t have to.

“We do our best,” he said.

“I’ll have my people talk to Premley.”

“I appreciate that,” Henry said. “And of course, the less press about this the better. For everyone’s sake.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, I’ll let you get back to sleep, then.”

“Look after yourself, Henry. The country needs you.” And with that he clicked off the line.

Henry gazed down into the pool lit by wasted power, its surface ruffled by the new motion in the air, which had begun to raise the surf along the beach. Once more he heard the humming of the machine on the roof, the engine of the air conditioner whirring away. He thought of the speech he had to give in a few hours downstairs in the ballroom; the plane ride to LaGuardia; the car ride back up to Rye. And soon enough, the trip he’d have to make to Massachusetts, to sort out this business with his sister, to find somewhere for her to go.

His given family, once and again.

Chapter 5

Finden High, a brick pile with arched windows and a squat clock tower, had been erected in 1937 as part of a public works project. Like many such buildings, its bluntness was only partially offset by its few art-deco flourishes, such as the stainless steel that framed the front doors and the zigzag lines carved beneath the modernist clockface. To the grim utility of a factory, its designers had added just a whiff of style. It stood across Wentworth Street from an expanse of playing fields that extended all the way to the river. Not far from the varsity soccer pitch was the spot, commemorated with a plaque and a bench, where the Town Historical Society had decided that the first white families had alighted from their riverboats after traveling the short distance from Boston late in the 1630s. According to records, these settlers had wanted to name the then sparsely populated Algonquin hunting ground “Contentment,” but taking a more practical view the Massachusetts General Court had overridden their decision, imposing upon them instead the solid English name of Finden, considered a better fit with the recently established towns of Roxbury, Gloucester, and the like.

As the students were told each fall in the assembly on local history, which served as a pep talk-cum-guilt trip, one of the settlers’ first acts was the founding of a public school, which the community had maintained throughout its uneventful history of development from a trading post to a farming town to a twentieth-century suburb. Lately, the assembly had featured more on the Native American contributions to local custom but it still concluded with the principal sounding a note of pride about the percentage of seniors going on to four-year colleges, a fact the students were somehow meant to connect through the mists of time to that centuries-old journey down the river by the pious and the brave.

That spring of 2002, however, one particular student, Nate Fuller, was in danger of depressing this statistic. He had failed to fill out his applications to colleges back in the fall and failed again in the spring to apply to those with rolling admissions. His guidance counselor had called him in several times, requesting updates on his progress but he had none to report. Nor did he have a plan of how he might spend a year off to better his chances of getting in the following autumn. His teachers described him as adrift.

Most days this milky-skinned seventeen-year-old could be seen walking the halls dressed in frayed chinos and a blue hoodie, his brown hair grown over his ears and his eyes puffy with sleep. His father had died back in September, and he had been out of school for three weeks. He’d never caught up on the work he’d missed, let alone visited college campuses or written essays on his motivation to learn. Nonetheless, despite his general air of fatigue, he still possessed the changeable quality of the young, his affect shifting quickly from moroseness to affability and back. And though he cared little for his classes, he’d recently promised his mother to meet with the tutor that his American history teacher said he needed if he hoped to pass the AP exam.

On a cloudy day in the middle of April, after his latest dud of an appointment with the guidance counselor, he headed out the back of the school building and through the courtyard onto Pratt Road, where the yards were still wet with the morning’s rain. Friday afternoons were usually the sweetest time of the week, replete with the promise of escape, but today he had the chore of meeting the tutor. He could blow the appointment off if he wanted and simply tell his mother he’d gone. But such deception would require its own energy and the visit would only take an hour.

Between his mother’s new job at the library and his effort to be out of the house in the evenings, he and his mother didn’t see much of each other these days. During the meals they did share, Nate didn’t begrudge his mother her remoteness: how she didn’t seem to hear what he said, how she responded in non sequiturs — bits of news about old friends or relatives, or recollections of trips they had once taken. Time together was tolerable that way. The two of them absent like that.

The difficulty arose when, on occasion, she would come to him with some fact in hand — a grade or health form — something she felt the sudden, fitful need to measure up to as a parent. Then they couldn’t avoid each other, and all her straining in the last year to keep their lives together, to keep them in the house and to pay the bills, would pour into her panicked voice and no matter how small the subject she’d raised it would seem suddenly to be a matter of life and death. That was when he couldn’t bear it and would agree to whatever she asked so they could both turn away again.

A year ago his father had been flying high, pulling Nate out of school in the middle of the day to eat lunch at the Four Seasons or driving him in an old Rolls-Royce out to the tip of Cape Cod late on a weekday night to watch the reflection of the moon on the dark waters of the Atlantic. Knowing that his mother was sitting at home stricken with worry about where they might be made it hard for Nate to simply enjoy such moments, however much his father did. He had lost his last consulting job a year and a half earlier and Nate knew they were running out of money. The rush of ideas about the next business he planned to start came at Nate so hard the words took on physical force, like a wind blowing fine shards of glass. The descriptions of projects and investors, elaborated down to the last digit and address, were painful in their detail.

This relentless drive of his had lasted six months. Then, in the middle of June, his father had come home and gone to bed, where he had stayed for most of the summer, making only occasional forays into the garage or basement to escape the heat. He ate little and barely spoke, while Nate’s mother did her best to make it appear as if all were as usual.

Eventually, regaining energy, he’d begun to leave the house again, taking long walks on the trails over by the Audubon. He would depart before dawn and return around lunchtime. When he didn’t come back one afternoon, Nate’s mother called him at the supermarket where he worked after school and asked if he would go looking for him.

A quarter of a mile into the woods, Nate had come to the aqueduct that spanned the marsh, its concrete surface spotted with graffiti left by the kids who drank there on weekends. He and his father had crossed this bridge together countless times before, just meandering on a weekend afternoon, scouting out parts of the river they might row down if they had a boat. Until recently, Nate had thought nothing of their idyll of a companionship; it had simply always been there.

He crossed the bridge and continued along the path that followed the ridgeline into the forest. The Audubon preserve was a mile or so farther along, accessed from a road on the far side. Not many people walked up through this area so he wasn’t surprised not to meet anyone on the trail. But he only went so far. He didn’t walk all the way to the far end of the path that led down to the water’s edge; and he didn’t explore under the arches of the bridge on his way back or search up along the riverbank as he could have, as he might have. Rather, he stood at the aqueduct’s black, wrought-iron railing looking out over the turning leaves, wishing his father wouldn’t keep making his mother worry so.

The next morning, the police sergeant said only, “Up by the aqueduct,” when Nate’s mother asked where his father had hanged himself. The officer didn’t mention when his father had done it. And so Nate had no idea if he’d still been alive as he’d searched for him, too self-conscious to even call to him aloud.

About the months that had followed, Nate didn’t remember much. Luckily, his closest friends treated him with kid gloves for only a week or two before starting to give him the same shit they always did, returning his life to at least a semblance of what it had been.

He thought of them now, Emily and Jason and Hal, tempted once more to ditch this tutoring nonsense and call them to see if they’d started hanging out yet.

As he walked farther toward Winthrop Street, the houses grew sparser, this being the oldest, wealthiest part of town, made up mostly of estates.

Charlotte Graves, 34 Winthrop, along with a phone number. That’s all Ms. Cartwright had written on the note card. When he had called the woman to set up the appointment, she had been curt to the point of rudeness and offered no directions.

The mailbox bearing that number stood between two driveways, leaving it unclear which house it belonged to. The driveway to the left led down to a white-columned mansion stretched out along the river-bank, recent by the looks of it but built in a neoclassical style that invited you to forget the fact. Its thick cornices and stately windows and the perfect lawns that surrounded it were somehow resplendent even in the light of an overcast day. The other drive was a weedy track heading up to a barn and a shingled little box of a house, which looked as if it had been built centuries ago and not much cared for since.

A tutor of history, Nate thought. What were the odds?

He knew which his father would have picked. Which house he would have talked his way into, putting everyone at ease, charming them with his glittering words. For all Nate knew, his father already had. For all he knew, the mansion’s owners were among those in Finden whom his father had convinced to lend him boats or vintage cars, a habit he’d got into during that last spring of adventure.

Slowly, he headed down the hill to the mansion, where he climbed the steps to press the brass bell. The first ring produced no response. Glancing through a window, he didn’t see much of anything inside. He leaned over and, pressing his hand to the glass to block the reflection, saw that the entire front room was empty, not a stick of furniture in it. No rugs on the floor, nothing on the walls. On the other side of the door it was the same — a vast high-ceilinged room, a fireplace at one end, and nothing else but bare boards and plaster. One of the big new houses built on spec, he figured, waiting for an owner. He rang a second time, just in case.

Curious, he stepped along the front of the house and peered through another window into another bare room. The emptiness of the place intrigued him. All that finished space marked by nothing. Without content or association. A perfect blank.

But not quite, it seemed. Through the next window, he saw a flat-screen TV set up on a crate facing an old cloth couch. There were no chairs or tables here, no lights or fixtures, just the television and the couch and an empty beer bottle beside it. The real estate agent? he wondered; but then how could he or she show the place? It was an odd, slightly forlorn sight.

Giving up, he headed back across the circular drive, past a fountain with a cherub in the middle, and headed up the hillside to the neighboring house. This one looked as if it were sinking slowly into the earth. Hydrangeas had grown up to the lower panes of the downstairs windows and the peeling gutters overflowed with leaves. At one end, a drainpipe had broken off and leaned now against the side of the house. Up on the roof, the faded aluminum rods of an old television antenna had come loose from the chimney and tilted precariously toward the street.

There weren’t many places like this left in Finden. Ever since Nate had been a kid, they’d been building new houses everywhere they could, dividing up lots, turning fields and woods into new developments, the traffic worse every year.

He wondered if Ms. Cartwright had given him the wrong address, if perhaps this place was uninhabited. In fact, he hoped that it would be. But as soon as he tapped on the back door, he heard barking and the scuffle of paws on linoleum. From somewhere in the house a voice called out words he couldn’t discern. And then he heard footsteps approaching. A harsh whisper followed.

“Don’t be silly,” the voice said. “Since when does the devil knock?”

Then, more loudly, “Who is it?”

“It’s Nate Fuller. Are you Charlotte Graves?”

The door came open just a crack, and the snouts of two dogs pressed into the gap, followed a moment later by the deeply lined face of a gray-haired woman.

“Of course I am,” she said. “Who else would I be? Are you some sort of Mormon? They usually come in twos.”

“No,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the barking. “I’m here for the tutoring. I called last week? We spoke on the phone?”

“Did we?”

She considered him for a moment and then reluctantly pushed the dogs’ heads back into the house.

“Yes, I suppose we did,” she said. “I guess you’ll have to come in.”

She pulled the door open and stood aside. As soon as Nate entered, the Doberman leapt up, planting his front paws on Nate’s chest and pinning him to the wall. He bared his teeth and began barking. A big, slobbering mastiff stood behind him growling.

“Stop being so paranoid, Wilkie!” the woman yelled. “He’s got nothing to do with Elijah Muhammad. Now just come away!” she scolded, swatting the dog’s head with a dish towel. The attacker pressed against Nate for a moment longer, the whites of his eyes bright in the dark pointed head. Reluctantly, he stepped off, joining the other one, the two of them standing either side of their owner like henchmen guarding passage to the rest of the house.

The kitchen looked like a set from The Grapes of Wrath, the wooden countertops warped and stained, the sink streaked with rust, the claw-foot stove losing its white enamel. The refrigerator appeared to be the only modern appliance, and even it was a pretty busted piece of merchandise. Yet this wasn’t poverty. That didn’t describe it. It was something else. Something Nate couldn’t place.

“Is this a bad time?” he asked, hopefully. “I could come back another day?”

“No,” she said. “It’s as good a time as any. I remember your call now. You’re the one trying to make up for lost time.”

“Yeah. AP history.”

Something seemed to catch her eye on the red-and-white speckle of the linoleum floor; her hands came to rest in the stretched pockets of her cardigan. For a moment there was complete silence.

“I don’t do this much anymore,” she said in a reflective tone, as if the commotion with the dogs had never happened and she were alone in the room, making an observation aloud to herself. “Tutoring, I mean.”

Nate didn’t know what to say. It seemed a private moment. Already, despite her surliness, he feared she’d be disappointed if he left.

“Ms. Cartwright — she mentioned you used to teach at the high school?”

The woman nodded, emerging from her inward turn.

As he picked up his backpack and moved toward the center of the room, the Doberman began growling again.

“Would you like some water?” she asked. “Or perhaps an Orangina?”

“Water’s fine.”

She moved to the sink, filled a pewter tankard, and handed it to him. It looked like something a knight might drink from.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose we ought to get started.”

HE’D IMAGINED a few preliminary questions. About what they had covered in class and what he had missed. But there was none of that. She had been reading about the law of property recently, she said, and this led her to the subject of taxation.

Perched on the edge of the couch, she folded her hands on her lap and stared fixedly into the ashes of the fireplace. After a moment of silence, she coughed slightly and said, “It’s customary for students to take notes.”

“Right,” he said, reaching into his bag for pen and paper, “sure.”

“The Sixteenth Amendment is generally neglected,” she began. “But not in this household.”

With this she commenced an uninterrupted half hour on the adoption of the federal income tax, and the long road to the passage of this general levy on corporations and the wealthy, an idea championed by the Populists and the Socialists and the Democrats under Bryan, shot down by the Supreme Court, agitated for in one campaign after the next, until finally the Republican progressives took it up as the answer to deficits and the tariff mess. Taft, a president who’d failed even to register on Nate’s syllabus, was savaged by Ms. Graves as a generally ponderous and ineffectual man.

“But it should not be forgot,” she said, “that it was he, who in 1909, stood before Congress and proposed an amendment to the Constitution allowing the government to collect the money.”

From an ancient wingback chair losing feathers through the frayed fabric of its cushion, Nate took in the remarkable state of the room. Every surface from the side tables to the mantelpiece and a good portion of the floor was covered in paper: journals, newspapers, magazines, manila folders overflowing with yellowed documents, the piles adorned with everything from coffee mugs to used plates to stray articles of clothing — red wool gloves, a knitted scarf. And everywhere he looked, books: hardbacks, paperbacks, reference volumes, ancient leather-bound spines with peeling gold lettering, atlases, books of art and photography, biographies, novels, histories, some splayed open, others shut over smaller volumes, the overstuffed bookcases themselves standing against the walls like sagging monuments to some bygone age of order, entirely insufficient now to contain this sea of printed matter.

“‘An excise tax on the privilege of doing business as an artificial entity.’ That’s what Taft called the corporation tax.” She quoted from a tome open on the coffee table in front of her. “It took another four years before enough states ratified the measure and a bill from Congress could be sent to Wilson. But there it was, the principle established: for the privilege of earning money in this, the people’s system, you, the wealthy, will pay.

“Now,” she said, warming to her point, “move forward half a century. It’s 1964. The Republicans are in disarray, a party in the wilderness, without the White House, Congress, or the Court. The Civil Rights Act has just been passed. And along comes a man named Barry Goldwater. And he’s got an idea: make government the enemy.”

Almost as remarkable as the sheer quantity of stuff was how completely oblivious to it Ms. Graves appeared to be. She’d made no comment about the condition of the place as she’d led Nate in, letting him clear his own space to sit. It seemed that as far as she was concerned nothing was amiss. And yet, for all the mess she lived in and all her rambling, she didn’t strike him as incoherent. In fact, Nate had never heard anyone speak with such conviction, except perhaps his father. Certainly none of his teachers. This was history, after all. And yet she spoke as if she were waging a rhetorical insurgency against the enemies of civilization.

“And look at us now,” she continued. “Look at how ingeniously they have coded our politics. Using the same line of attack on our own sovereign authority to suit all their other ends. Of course, over time one begins to imagine connections between the darker forces. But then you say to yourself, No, Charlotte. You’re dramatizing, you’re giving in to conspiracy. You’re satisfying some desire to moralize because, let’s be honest, you’re nothing but a stack of Eastern prejudices. But then you pick up this”—she scanned the books at her feet, spotted the one she wanted, and opened to an earmarked page—“and you think, well maybe so. But just listen to how they put it. Here’s Lee Atwater — you’ve probably never heard of him — explaining how it worked. ‘You start out,’ he says, ‘in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.’

“That’s what he says,” she insisted, clapping the book shut. “And so then you think, I’m not mad. Not at all. Taxes are about race. Like everything else. As if sometime in the sixties the public square in our mind changed colors. From imaginary white to imaginary black. And we’ve been running from it ever since. As if anything you couldn’t fence in or nail to your house were the equivalent of the public pool menaced by the dark and the poor. But the public pool’s not in your backyard, you say. It’s nowhere close. True. But it’s in my country. Am I not allowed a patriotism of ideals? Is that what we’ve come to?”

She paused to breathe.

“You see, then, what I mean?” she asked.

“I guess so.”

“Not that you would agree with any of this, would you?” she said, leaning down to address the mastiff. “He’s become such a reactionary lately. Haven’t you, Sam? All your religious blather. Do you have dogs?”

“No. We used to have a rabbit.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Sorry, I—”

“No, no, I wasn’t talking to you. Sam here’s just a bigot. Thinks you’re a Catholic. Rabbits you say. My grandfather was fond of shooting them. They’d pop up in the yard and he’d rest his gun on the sill right there and open fire. Drove my grandmother to distraction. You’d think they’d have come back in strength by now but I never see them. He, of course, was a mugwump. Have you covered the 1880s? Republican, of the very old stripe. Bolted the party in ’84. Small-town lawyer, edited the Finden Gazette. Didn’t like machine politics. Laissez-faire, of course, but it was another time. He railed against the trusts as much as the city bosses, and there he was prescient. You look at the World Trade Organization today and it’s all rather familiar. The way those conglomerates are making up the rules so they can run roughshod over the locals. Nothing the railroads didn’t do to the state legislatures,” she concluded, examining a patch of the mastiff’s back for ticks or lice.

“I’m afraid the bullies here need their walking,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve run on a bit. But there’s a lot to cover.” She looked up at him then, meeting his eyes directly for the first time. “You will come back, won’t you? Next week?”

These last many months the intuition of others’ needs had become Nate’s second nature, as if his father’s going had cut him a pair of new, lidless eyes that couldn’t help but see into a person such as this: marooned and specter-driven. What choice did he have?

___________

AS SOON AS he got out of the house, he phoned Emily.

“Give us your location,” she said. “We’re in transit.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jason’s Jetta pulled up behind the Congregational Church in the center of town and Emily rolled down the passenger-side window.

“All right, the medevac’s here.”

In the backseat, Hal lay slumped against the far door with his eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from between his lips. A lanky, effete, mildly gothic boy, he prided himself on his superior intellect and perpetual indolence. To the alarm of his parents, he’d clicked through on some Internet ad and got himself admitted to a university in Tunis. From there he planned to spend the fall traveling the Maghrib.

“The Valp’s holding,” Jason said, speeding onto a side street. “But if we don’t get there soon he’ll smoke it all himself.” They avoided the streets still heavy with commuter traffic until they had crossed all the way to the other side of Finden and pulled up in front of a white stucco house with three Japanese maples in the front yard surrounding a giant vertical boulder that looked as if it had been airlifted out of Stonehenge.

“What’s with the rock?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know. His mother’s got a witch thing going on,” Jason said, stepping out of the car. “She runs some kind of regional coven.”

“I hung out with this Valp guy once,” Emily said. “All he talked about was North Korea. Those rallies they have with the colored cards, you know? Like at the Olympics, where everyone in the crowd holds one up to make an image. Apparently they’re very good at it over there.”

She sounded bored, as usual, wearied by this petty world of high school. Emily had lived in London with her parents sophomore year and returned with a coolness unimpeachable by anyone except the three of them, who mocked her attempts to exempt herself from the indignities of Finden High.

Up on the lawn, from beside the obelisk, Jason was waving for them to come inside. “Christ, can’t he just score the shit and get out of there?” Emily grumbled, leading the other two up the driveway.

Arthur Valparaiso had a slightly intimidating presence at two hundred and twenty pounds with a shaved head and clad this evening in an orange judo outfit. They had apparently interrupted some kind of deep-focus session, in which Arthur assumed a single lunging pose for up to an hour, a feat his girth rendered implausible. But now that he’d been disturbed, he was inclined toward a bit of company before completing the sale. As Nate’s father had once said of God, the worst thing about drugs was the other people who believed in them.

The bong was produced, the music turned on, and the usual desultory conversation commenced. Knowing that the goal was an early exit, the four of them went light on the smoke, letting Arthur suck down most of the bowl, which had no discernible effect on him. Despite the smallness of his hit, Nate felt a tingling starting up at the back of his head, and slowly his thoughts began to wander as he stared at the walls of the basement rec room, which were covered with pictures of crowds: black-and-white aerial photographs of rallies in squares and piazzas, newspaper clippings of marches on the National Mall, stadiums full of rock fans shot from above.

“Have you read much Guy Debord?” Hal asked their host in a voice made all the more languid by the pot.

“Who the fuck is he?”

“French. He shared your interest in the masses. He writes about spectacle, how all this ginned-up collectivity contributes to our alienation.”

“Crowds are where it’s at, dude,” the Valp said. “They’re the future. Individualism is, like, a relic. Burning Man — that’s the future.”

Nate had discovered a vinyl beanbag in the corner. From there he watched Jason attempt to effect a game of pool, but it came to nothing. Eventually, a plea was made to Arthur and the transaction completed. Back in the car, a joint was rolled in the front seat and passed around as they sped down the state route toward the Alden strip, managing eventually to land themselves in the front row of a movie theater, at the foot of a huge screen that dashed their brains with the blood and pillage of some beast war of Middle Earth created, it seemed clear, by other, older drug-takers. They emerged into the parking lot more than two hours later, weakened and lethargic, having no sense of what to do or where to go.

For a while they drove, entranced by the clutter of lights and the bass tones of the car speakers, managing at one point to navigate a drive-through at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and coming down as they munched their crullers and cinnamon buns in silence, gliding back into Finden.

A faint numbness behind the eyes was all that remained of Nate’s high by the time they dropped him home.

He stood awhile in the front yard once they’d gone, staring at the darkened façade, only the porch light and the light up in his mother’s bedroom on. It wasn’t as decrepit a house as Ms. Graves’s nor was it new or by any means empty. He needed to cut the grass soon. The shutters needed paint. Inside, nothing had changed for a long time.

They had arrived for the first time at this house in a rainstorm, he and his brother and sister standing in the front hall listening to their mother shout at their father about how dark it was, how cramped the kitchen and ugly the cabinets and ugly the wallpaper, how the boxes hadn’t arrived and there were no blankets upstairs, and what would they do? How would they manage? As if he had led them all into disaster.

That was ten years ago and the wallpaper was still there, and the cabinets, and the mirror at the top of the stairs which his mother had never liked.

Climbing onto the porch, he closed the front door quietly behind him and switched off the porch light.

Once, when their mother had taken their father off to New York to see a specialist, his sister had thrown a party at the house and a girl had been sick on the front staircase, and though she’d tried her best to clean it, the detergent his sister had used had left a paling stain, which Nate passed over now as he headed up the stairs.

Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over. But in this house, since his father had died, it seemed sediment was all that was left: the banister, the hall mirror, the bathroom’s black-and-white tile, the ticking on the runner carpet that led to the foot of his mother’s door — all of it heavy with his absence.

This was the trouble with staying away with friends and getting high. He felt wrong for forgetting his family even for a few hours, as if to keep faith with his father required an unceasing grief.

Knocking gently on his mother’s door, he turned the handle open. She was reading in bed, the covers pulled up to her waist. She glanced up over her reading glasses, her oval face gaunt, as it had been for months. She’d lost considerable weight in the last year and still ate very little.

“Was that Emily dropping you off?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We saw a movie.” He paused for a moment, feeling the obligation to offer her something more.

“I went to that lady for tutoring.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten. How was it?”

“She’s a little strange. But it was okay.”

It never stopped being terrible, how alone his mother looked. He couldn’t make it go away, even by being here, even if he were never to leave.

“Sleep well,” she said, looking at him with a tender, somewhat distant expression, as if she hadn’t seen him in a very long time.

Chapter 6

By Nate’s third visit, Ms. Graves had stopped discussing American history altogether and thus any topic that might appear on his exam. Jumping off from Wilson at Versailles, she had waded into the diplomatic correspondence that detailed Britain’s haphazard Middle East strategy following the Armistice.

“It came down to a lack of troops. Their army was fading away, you see. Someone had to maintain law and order. And so the British did what empires always do — they installed puppets. The Hashemites! Losers to the Sauds in the battle for the Arabian Peninsula! Why not give them Jordan! Of course it was only supposed to be a temporary fix, six months of police work until the mandate could be rearranged, a gentlemen’s agreement, but look what we got! What should obviously have been the Palestinian state run for eighty years by an imported monarchy. Cancer number one. But why stop there? Ms. Gertrude Bell is a very fine and knowledgeable woman but not quite fit to rule Mesopotamia and given that the French had chucked brother Faisal out of Syria, he was in need of a job, so why not give him Baghdad — another Hashemite installed to rule an incoherent people in an incoherent country! Truck in the Sunni elites! Throw in the Kurds! Can’t you just picture it?” she asked, tossing her arms in the air. “Little Mr. Whatsit in his Whitehall office carefully drawing his map. If it weren’t so lethal it could be read as farce.”

When Nate ventured that the units he’d missed in class were on the Revolutionary War, Ms. Graves closed her eyes, held her palm out like a guard at a crosswalk instructing him to halt, and said, “I can’t do George Washington. I simply can’t. Triumphalist or otherwise. You’ll have to go elsewhere for that.”

Slouched again in the wingback chair, Nate let go of whatever responsibility he’d felt to prepare for the test. What did an AP credit matter when he hadn’t even applied to college? It didn’t compel. Not like the woman in front of him, who was so clearly driven by her own imaginings. It reminded him of the time his father had borrowed someone’s yacht and sailed Nate out to Block Island to visit a businessman he had met on an airplane, a man who owned a paper company and might want to make a deal, only the businessman wasn’t home when they arrived at his waterfront house; the maid said he’d gone to Brazil. And so they sat together on the empty beach sipping the gin his father had brought in a thermos, the liquid warm now and rather bitter.

Thus, while it surprised Nate when Ms. Graves asked at the end of the session if he would like to continue their work over dinner, it seemed to make an odd kind of sense, and he didn’t hesitate to say yes.

At five thirty on a Friday afternoon they were the only customers at Finden Szechwan. A sunken-eyed waiter greeted them and the two dogs with a resigned nod of the head, directing them toward a banquette in the corner.

“At least their prices don’t seem to have changed,” Ms. Graves said, studying the menu through her reading glasses. “But you shouldn’t worry about that. I’ll take care of this. I’m celebrating, you see. I got a letter today about this suit I’ve filed. There’s going to be a hearing soon and it turns out that the case has been assigned to the perfect judge. You noticed, I’m sure, that enormous house next to mine.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty impressive.”

Her head recoiled, as if he’d tossed a rat onto the table.

“Of course,” she said, slowly gaining hold of herself, “there’s no reason you should understand. I forget so easily — the ignorance of the young. How would you know these things? No one’s taught you.” She put down her menu and leant across the table toward him. “In which case, allow me. That house,” she said, her voice dropping, “that house is an abomination!”

“It was just an opinion,” he said.

“No!” she cried. “That’s precisely what it isn’t! That’s precisely what’s become so endemic. That cheap, mindless relativism. You’re all awash in it. Of course it’s a pluralist society. So we’re modest. In the big things: religion, metaphysics. We’re non-absolutists. That’s secularism. That’s maturity. That’s what the zealots can’t abide. But this business of opinions. As if the world had no discernible qualities. As if there were no history. It’s a disaster. It’s an abandonment of the Enlightenment. All in the name of individualism. And they expect people to just stand by and watch. I was run out of my job on this sort of hogwash. The whole four-hundred-year effort sacrificed on the altar of the inoffensive. It’s unspeakable.”

“Right,” Nate said, afraid of the woman for the first time.

“But that’s just it!” she exclaimed, thrusting her hands out to her side, knocking Sam in the face. “You’re agreeing with me because you think that’s what I want. That’s the problem. Do you think I was the one who brought The Autobiography of Malcolm X into the classroom? No. That’s what they forget. It was students, black students God forbid, bused out from the city, who told me they’d stop coming to class if I didn’t assign it as a counterpoint to King and the nonviolent wing of the movement. And more power to them. They were right. But by the time the authorities got rid of me those children were swallowing that book down like just one more palliative drop of minor guilt and minor catharsis, one more petty event in their two-bit little moral Olympiad, where everyone always wins gold. The young limbs of the body politic cleansing themselves for future efficiency. I played them the tapes of his speeches, and even met them halfway by showing the damn movie. But it was all just one big entertainment to them.”

The waiter had come over to take their order but in her enthusiasm Ms. Graves failed to notice him.

“However, I digress. The point is, that house, you mark my words, it’ll be gone. This town, those selectmen — they broke the law.”

Nate glanced at the idling waiter, trying to clue his tutor to his presence.

“Oh, hello there,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her cardigan, from where she produced a faded newspaper coupon advertising a two-for-one entrée special. “We were wondering,” she said, handing it to the waiter, “which of your dishes qualify?”

The man’s already sagging countenance drooped. He took the worn clipping from her and turned it back and forth a few times, as if delay might save him from this final indignity.

“This is no good,” he said. “It expired. Three years ago.”

“Well that’s rather silly. It certainly succeeded in luring us in here. Are you saying you have no special offers at all?”

“Oh, no. We got specials. We introduced pad thai. It’s right up there on the board. Special. Seven ninety-nine.”

“But this is a Chinese restaurant.”

“Not next week it won’t be,” he said. “We’re closing.”

The Doberman had spotted a cat on a windowsill across the room and begun to snarl.

“I agree, Wilkie,” Ms. Graves said, “this is ridiculous. We came in here with the perfectly reasonable expectation of a discount. But never mind. On we go.”

When the moo shu arrived, she barely touched it, pouring herself a cup of tea instead.

“So. Tell me. Why is the world a problem for you?”

“How do you mean?” Nate asked.

“Well, for some people the world is a more or less obvious place. It’s transparent to them. It isn’t, in itself, a conundrum to be overcome. Which means their interests are simply tastes or preferences. But if the world’s a problem to you, your interests are different. You’re conscripted by them. You know what conscription means, don’t you?”

“I think I’m registered for it.”

“You understand my question. What interests you involuntarily?”

Smearing plum sauce over his third pancake, Nate tried to surmise what exactly she was after.

“You mean, like, what makes me unhappy?”

Wincing slightly, Ms. Graves said, “I suppose that will do, but you understand I’m not asking about the trivial here. Failing to win some prize, or that sort of thing. I ask because you listen to me in a rather particular way — and believe me, I spent years being listened to by people your age — and it suggests to me the world’s not obvious to you. I simply want to know why.”

When he asked if it would be okay if he finished the lo mein, she fluttered her hand dismissively, never removing her eyes from his face.

Seeing no reason not to, Nate mentioned his father.

“Yes. I imagined it was something along those lines. Where did he do it? In your house?”

“No, in the woods.”

She considered this for a moment.

“Inverting for you, I would imagine, the standard inquiry, Why kill yourself? to the less often asked, Why not? A sophomoric question, but then there are times in life when that makes it no easier to avoid.”

Nate nodded slowly. It was weird to be talking about this to Ms. Graves but she wasn’t wrong and she wasn’t pretending. In fact, it was a relief to tell someone about it and not receive in return awkward condolence. To just say it and have it heard.

“Mostly it’s just lonely,” he said.

“You’ll get used to that. Maybe you’ll meet someone one day. Which may or may not ameliorate the feeling. When did you say this happened?”

“Last September.”

“Ah,” she said. “You’re in the early stages. When you get to my age, the borders open up a bit. The barriers between times aren’t so strictly enforced, which is a problem that you might say I’m conscripted by. This way in which we’re not just dying animals. Do we have souls strapped to our bodies? That division seems too neat to me, but that’s an intellectual matter. It lacks force in the end. But decay — rot — that’s more complicated. It has a purpose, after all. It leads to new things. To other life.”

A few minutes later the waiter approached to ask if they would like dessert. Ms. Graves shook her head and the waiter went to fetch the bill. The remains of their food had quickly congealed. She placed a few dishes on the floor for the dogs and for a while their lapping tongues were the only sound in the dining room.

___________

BY THE MIDDLE of May, the AP exam had come and gone. But still, each Friday afternoon, Nate went to the old woman’s house. He had stopped giving her checks but she didn’t appear to notice. Her lectures, if you could call them that, grew more disjointed as the weeks passed. Comments on Henry II’s abrogation of jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts of twelfth-century England led into a discussion of precursors to the English Revolution four hundred years later, which apparently had something to do with the poetry she read aloud describing Adam’s conversation with God: “‘In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?’ Can you hear that?” she asked. “He’s asking God how a person can be content alone.”

With her voice veering from angry to elegiac, she sounded as if she were narrating stories brought to mind by family photographs, the actors all intimates, their deeds still full of consequence and culpability. At the end of an hour or sometimes two, as Nate sat at her kitchen table drinking tea or stood in the doorway to go, rather than offering him some blandishment or goodbye, she would announce without transition what she saw in his expression.

Once, she said, “Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don’t be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There’s reason behind that idiom. It’ll kill you sure enough.”

Her peculiar affect freed him to ask things he otherwise wouldn’t.

“What if I don’t meet someone?”

“Then you won’t. And that will be the condition under which you’ll live. But remember: people won’t save you.”

Each time, on his way to and from her house, Nate would pause at the top of the hill to see if there were any signs of life down at the big house along the river, a car in the driveway or a light on inside. No for sale sign had appeared in the yard and yet there was still no evidence anyone lived there. Since that first day, he hadn’t been able to get the place out of his mind.

Finally, on the last Friday in May, after Ms. Graves had rattled on till nearly six and Nate had left more tired than usual by her river of words, he decided there would be nothing wrong with having another look. And so he headed down the slope in the rich light of the spring evening, the grass beneath him freshly cut. Mounted on the corner of the garage, he noticed a surveillance camera and wondered if it fed its images to a screen in the house or to some security firm’s office hundreds of miles away.

He passed out of its range, walking around the far end of the mansion which consisted of a glassed-in sunroom, unfurnished, with an open-air deck above. At the rear, a brick terrace extended onto the lawn, which ran forty yards or so down to the riverbank. Nate looked through one of the smaller rear windows into a pantry lined with bare white shelves. Next to that was a room whose perfectly polished wood floors glinted in the sun. He came to a set of French doors off the kitchen, which was a huge space with a slate counter island, two stoves, two sinks, and a double-wide fridge. In the corner stood a small wooden table with one chair, dwarfed by the room they had been placed in.

There were no cameras that he could see along this stretch of the house. He tried the door handle. To his surprise, it moved smoothly downward, the door coming open a few inches. He shut it again immediately, terrified of setting off an alarm.

A minute or two passed and he heard nothing.

What harm could it do, he thought. No one was here and he wasn’t going to steal anything. He cracked the door just wide enough to listen. No sound but the hum of the fridge.

As soon as he stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him, he could feel blood rushing to his head from the excitement. He walked to the counter and paused there to listen again. The room smelled of wood wax and cleaning fluid. Moving farther into the house, he crossed the marble floor of the front hall and proceeded into a room nearly as large as the downstairs of his entire house. The outsize fireplace had no grate in it and its mantel was bare. Beyond this was the room with the couch placed at an angle facing the giant TV in the corner. The beer bottle he’d seen on that first day that he’d peered through the windows was gone and there was a stack of files on the floor.

He had never trespassed before. He had no idea it could be so exhilarating, all his senses alive with anticipation. The fear of being caught was close to exquisite. And who was it that lived like this? What kind of life did it imply?

Entering the back wing of the house, he stood at the foot of a staircase, stopping once more, trying to detect the slightest sound.

Upstairs, he walked down a central hallway, passing more unfurnished rooms on either side. The scent of pine freshener and just a hint of paint hung in the motionless air. While the thrill of transgression still filled him, he was beginning to find the emptiness of the place almost soothing. A house so unmarked, so unstained by memory or disappointment. It didn’t even feel like Finden anymore.

At the fourth door along the hall, he glanced through what seemed to be the entryway to a suite of some kind. Entering it, he came up short at the sight of a king-size bed, recently slept in, the sheets ruffled, the pillow still bearing the wrinkled impression of a head. On the floor, a cordless phone rested facedown, and next to that stood a water glass. The only other objects in the room were a television and a standing lamp.

For several minutes he stood motionless, staring at the bed.

Along the opposite wall was a walk-in closet. Ten or twelve suits, blue, black, and dark gray, hung in a row on one side while dozens of freshly laundered shirts still in their plastic were lined up along the other. At the back stood a dresser, a pile of laundry heaped against its bottom drawer. Dress shoes arranged beneath the suits gave off the scent of newly polished leather. Cautiously, his hand beginning to tremble, Nate reached out to feel the arm of one of the suit jackets, marveling at how smoothly the fine wool moved between his fingers. That’s when he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut.

Chapter 7

Doug didn’t usually return to the house at such an early hour. But that afternoon he’d received a call out of the blue from Vrieger, his old commanding officer. It turned out he was living south of Boston and had heard through friends that Doug worked in the city. He’d phoned around noon from a restaurant not far from the office and asked if they could meet for lunch. Doug’s first inclination was to say of course he couldn’t, that he scheduled appointments weeks in advance, and that they would have to set a later date. But to tell Vrieger that seemed ridiculous and he found himself saying, yes, it was fine, that he would be there in an hour.

Walking beneath what remained of the Central Artery, he crossed into the narrow streets of the North End, glad to be out of the office for a little while at least.

The last week had been hectic. The Japanese Ministry of Finance’s intervention to prop up the country’s stock market had finally been made public, causing the Nikkei index to start dropping. Doug had phoned McTeague straightaway, instructing him to trim back Atlantic Securities’ positions, limiting their exposure. McTeague had seemed reluctant at first, arguing that it was only a blip, that they would be getting out of the market too soon if they sold now. Eventually, Doug had been forced to make it clear to him that the choice wasn’t his to make. The firm’s bets, built up over the course of months, were huge by now and would take time to unwind. Done right, however, they could get out with nearly all their profit intact and the whole Finden Holdings operation would still count as a major success. If McTeague’s clients wanted to keep going, pouring more money into the strategy, that was their business and their risk.

Making his way up Prince Street, Doug entered the restaurant and found Vrieger at the bar sipping a glass of bourbon, a nearly full ashtray at his side. In the decade and a half since Doug had last seen him, he had put on a bit of weight, but on the whole he looked remarkably unchanged with his ramrod posture and hair still clipped regulation short. He wore a version of his same square metal glasses, as unfashionable now as they had been back in the eighties.

“Christ,” he said, when he spotted Doug. “The least you could have done was get a bit uglier.”

“Lieutenant Commander, a pleasure to see you.”

“So you’re a corporate guy, huh? A suit. You always said that’s what you wanted to do.”

“Did I? To tell you the truth, I don’t remember talking about it.”

Doug ordered a beer and the bartender produced a few sandwich menus. Before the two of them had last parted in San Diego, Vrieger had told Doug that he planned to sign up for another tour. As he began describing it to Doug now, that third stint of his had taken him back to the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm. Later, in the mid-nineties, he’d run clandestine interdiction off the coast of North Korea as part of a loose nukes operation. The way he told it, he’d pissed off too many captains along the way to expect further promotion. “Truth is,” he said, “after Vincennes I didn’t really care. I just wanted to keep going.” When the navy assigned him desk duty back in Norfolk, Virginia, he’d decided to quit. “That was four years ago,” he said. “I thought I’d get a job out at Raytheon. Test battle systems. Something like that. I lasted through about two interviews.” Since then he’d been living with his father in Quincy, working at a liquor warehouse.

He reported all this in an affectless tone, his eyes fixed on the television over the bar, where cable news was spooling a loop of satellite images of building complexes in the Iraqi desert, as a commentator detailed the suspicious movement of trucks.

“So what about you? You seem to have done okay for yourself.”

Doug told him about getting his first job in New York, and how he’d spent his time learning the business, listening to the geeks and the quants, the pale men in ill-fitting suits who could tell you the yield curve on a Brazilian pipeline bond without looking up from their sandwich. And how when it came time to charm the Ivy League VPs, he’d just opened with a compliment and let them do the rest of the talking. And later, when he fired some of them, how disdainful the look in their eyes had been, as if all along they’d known he was a hustler and that they should never have let him into the club they were so fond of saying no longer existed, believing with fervor that all of finance was a meritocracy now.

“You’d recognize it,” Doug said. “Bullshit hierarchies and a bunch of rules you got to get around to get anything done.”

“You married?” Vrieger asked.

“No. You?”

“Are you kidding? Nine months is my record. And she was a drinker. But you? I mean, come on. You’re a pretty boy. You must have to fight ’em off.”

Doug couldn’t remember the last time he’d been asked such questions by anyone. He and Mikey never talked about personal stuff and no matter how often Sabrina Svetz tried, he’d never given her much detail either. The one woman he’d stayed with for more than a few weeks was Jessica Tenger and he hadn’t thought about her in ages.

They had met at a party in SoHo. Vrieger was right that Doug had grown used to girls requiring nothing more than a few minutes of easy flattery before they made it clear they were willing to be led. The thing about Jessica had been how directly she played the game. Her second question was where he lived, and her third when he planned on leaving the party. Back at his apartment they had ordered food and already finished having sex by the time it arrived. She hadn’t slept over that night or any other.

They hadn’t asked each other questions about work or discussed current events or how their days had been. In fact, they said very little to each other at all.

As he described her to Vrieger, her narrow hips and pageboy haircut, he remembered how he’d kept the lights on during sex and how she preferred keeping her eyes closed, allowing him to look at her without being watched. She could give herself over to whatever waking dream occupied her mind, the particulars of which he didn’t need to know. Raised over her in a push-up position, he would watch himself: the pleasing proportions of his biceps; his gleaming chest; the flat shield of muscle running across his abdomen into his groin; and the splendid view of himself disappearing inside her like the fluke of an anchor grabbing the seabed. The tightness and precision of his body felt alive then, and he would come to the sight of it in motion.

They might have continued on indefinitely. But one evening, after leaving work early, Doug had phoned her and she’d said to come by her apartment, which he’d never seen, over by the Hudson on Washington Street. The place was a semi-converted warehouse space with rough wood floors, iron columns, and windows high up the walls. It turned out she was some kind of sculptor. A series of worktables occupying one side of the apartment were covered in small bins of everything from copper wire to sand. On one of them, a few pale white heads, human size and made of wax by the look of them, lay on their sides. She poured wine, and as soon as they’d sat down on her couch Doug had realized that whatever they’d had was over. It had nothing to do with her being an artist or living in that apartment. She could have been a lawyer or an actress or a grad student. It was the specificity of the circumstance that broke the circuit. The particularity of her life, as he could see it now. Like all particularity, it had a terminal air about it. At work, which was to say in his life, his mind glided over the present, headed always into possibility. But that apartment — that announcement of all those specific, irrevocable choices — it demanded that he stop. That he remain still.

“I don’t have a lot of time these days,” he said to Vrieger. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think about relationships much.”

In the pause that followed, Doug began to wonder why he had agreed to come here. Was it out of obedience to his old commanding officer? This made no sense; he wouldn’t have so much as taken a call from the captain. Vrieger’s pull came from somewhere else. As Doug watched him order his third bourbon of the afternoon, it struck him that the thing about Vrieger, which he’d sensed ever since that summer in the Gulf, was how the events they had been through had acted on him like a trance, as if no matter where he might be, no matter what might be going on around him, he was still fixed back in that one place: the Combat Center of the Vincennes, July 3, ’88, his finger on the launch button. The years hadn’t changed that. Doug saw it in the constancy of his gaze at the television: that permanent alert habitual in the survivors of emergency.

“We’re going back in, you know,” Vrieger said. “You understand that, right? We’re going all the way to Baghdad. They’re polishing the missiles as we speak. Fifth Fleet’s already scheduled the hardware for the Gulf.”

Doug hailed the bartender and ordered another beer.

“Cat got your tongue?” Vrieger asked, a note of aggression creeping into his voice. “I don’t know about you,” he went on, “but the ones I remember are the women. The ones in those black sack dresses with their heads covered, just the slits for the eyes. The wailing that came out of them. You remember that? It’s strange, isn’t it? Down on the ground like that by the coffins, being held back by their families, like they can’t control it. You wonder: Why don’t we do that? Grieve like that, I mean. Give in to it. Grief’s like an illness here. A disease.”

The TV camera panned across a column of Israeli tanks filing through clouds of dust into the West Bank.

When his drink arrived, Doug asked the bartender if he minded changing the channel. The guy reached up and hit the Plus button once, leaving them with a close-up of a rotating diamond ring set in a velvet case above another ticker, this one running with product detail and a number to call.

“Is it that easy for you?” Vrieger said.

“What?”

“To turn it off. To forget.”

“Who said I was forgetting anything?”

Placing his empty tumbler upside down on the bar, Vrieger tilted his head to examine the cut of the glass. “Well, tell me then. I’m interested. How do you hold it? What we did.”

This was why Vrieger had called. And maybe why Doug had come.

That summer of ’88, a few days after they had shot down the airliner, a crew member from the USS Sides had told a reporter for some newspaper that he had seen bodies falling from the sky. On their return to San Diego, the entire crew of the Vincennes had been awarded combat action ribbons for their engagement of the Iranian gunboats. Vrieger had won the navy’s commendation medal for heroic achievement. He’d had to carry that around, too, all these years.

Doug took a cigarette from Vrieger’s box and lit it. “You know what the Iranians did?” he said. “After they signed the cease-fire with Iraq? They went into their gulags and rounded up all the political prisoners — leftists, mujahideen, whoever they thought might take advantage of the armistice. And they murdered them all. Either you repented and started praying or they murdered you. Tired old guy rotting in some cell for years? Pop. Sixteen-year-old kids? Pop. Girls? They raped them first and then popped them. Wives brought in to see their husbands hanged. That’s what they do to their own people. I’m not even talking our guys — Beirut, Khobar Towers — none of that.”

Vrieger’s next bourbon arrived. Without the cable news to soak up his watchfulness, he gazed into the amber liquid with a kind of dejected fervor, as if staring into the dark mouth of a tunnel, listening for the roar. “Interesting,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re still bound to the wheel of fire.”

“Here’s where I lose you.”

“Yeah,” Vrieger said, “that’s right.” With a slightly trembling hand, he raised his glass to his lips and drained it. “That’s King Lear being woken by his daughter at the end of the play. When his world has gone all the way to shit. You do me wrong to take me out of the grave, he tells her. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead.” He paused, his mouth in a slight wince, as if he were physically pained by the words. “You’re still in hell. That’s what I’m saying. You’re still in the hell of revenge.”

According to the clock above the cash register, Doug had been at the restaurant nearly an hour. In a little while, McTeague would be arriving at the office in Hong Kong, getting ready to withdraw a bit more of Atlantic Securities’ money from the market. Doug needed to get back, to look the numbers over once more, to make sure they were reducing their exposure at a quick enough pace.

“Do your folks still live around here?” Vrieger asked, breaking the silence between them.

“Who told you that?”

“You did. When I first met you.”

“Alden,” Doug said. “And it’s just my mother.”

“Wasn’t my business then and it isn’t now.”

He scooped up a handful of nuts and, removing the cigarette from between his lips, leaned his head back and poured them into his mouth. “I don’t mean to get at you. You got out, like you wanted to. You built a life. You’ve got something. I guess it’s just a question of what you bring out with you. Me? I didn’t bring much. Fact is, I’m going back.”

“Back where?”

“The Gulf.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I know a guy down in Virginia. He started one of these security outfits. Lots of ex-military. It’s still pretty small but he says if I get through the training, he’ll give me a job. I’m telling you, everybody’s ramping up. Logistics. Force protection. They don’t know where they’re going yet, where they’ll be needed. But it’s going to be a shit-storm.”

“You’re kidding me. Why the hell would you do that?”

“Why not?” Vrieger said. “I’ve got nothing here. Nothing to go the distance with. At least there I’ll be back inside. It’s got nothing to do with making up for what we did. Or winning or being forgiven or any of that. I guess you could say it’s sad or fucked up or I’m traumatized or whatever. But I don’t really care about any of that anymore. I’m not looking to be cured.”

WALKING BACK under the rusted struts of the Central Artery, the roar of jackhammers filling his ears, Doug felt light-headed. By the time he reached the cool of the tower’s lobby, the dizziness had given way to exhaustion. His legs would barely move one in front of the other. Unsure if he would make it to the elevator, he took a seat on one of the chrome benches running along the glass wall of the atrium. He watched employees come and go: the senior secretaries paddling by with their shoulder bags full of crosswords and knitting, junior analysts in serious suits, building security in purple sport coats returning with their takeout. A young woman coming off the elevator glanced in Doug’s direction and, recognizing him, appeared confused at the sight of him on his own with no papers or briefcase or BlackBerry in hand.

Finally, he managed to get his phone out and dial Sabrina.

“Call the garage for me, would you?” he said. “Have them bring up my car.”

By the time it appeared in front of the building, he felt lucid enough to take the wheel. He headed for Storrow Drive thinking maybe he would walk along the river to clear his head, but the mere thought of it tired him further and so he kept driving, exiting onto the Pike, where the lanes were clogged with traffic. It took him twenty minutes longer than usual to reach the house. Tossing his keys on the kitchen counter, he headed up the stairs to his room and flopped down on the bed, not even bothering to remove his shoes.

On the verge of sleep, he heard a sound behind him, coming from the bathroom.

He opened his eyes and remained perfectly still. Listening intently, he discerned two cautious footsteps. The house contained nothing worth stealing but the televisions; they were still here. Whoever it was had been waiting. Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand to the floor. Reaching under the bed, he fingered the steel crosshatching on the butt of his pistol and coaxed it into his grip. Between the next footstep and the one that followed, he counted five seconds. The sound was just a few yards from his shoulder now. When he heard it again, he grabbed the gun up off the floor, cocked it, and swiveled upright, shouting, “Back it up!” just in time to see the young man’s knees buckle as he fainted, falling into the room with a thud.

Coming up off the bed, Doug strode to the door, checked the hallway, and then crossed the room again to the window to see if there was anyone in the driveway or yard. Finding them clear, he turned back to the boy slumped in the bathroom doorway. He had disheveled brown hair and was dressed in frayed jeans and a sweatshirt. Doug nudged him with his foot but he was out cold.

Squatting down, he reached one arm under the kid’s knees and the other beneath the middle of his back. He was heavier than Doug had anticipated, his head lolling backward, his waist sagging between Doug’s arms. An odd sensation — that warm, unconscious body pressed up against his chest. Crossing the room, he set him down on the rumpled sheets. He looked peaceful lying there. Unsure what to do, Doug stood over him awhile, experiencing something peculiar, a feeling of sorts. A passing sorrow as he watched the boy breathe.

Chapter 8

Above Nate, a fan spun noiselessly. Pain stretched up his right side from his waist to his shoulder, and his head ached. Looking to his left, he saw a man with his back to him standing at the window dressed in suit pants and shirt. Instantly, his stomach clutched tight, the constriction spreading into his chest and throat, making his heart thud.

He tried sitting up, but dizzy, lay back onto the pillow again.

“So. You mind telling me what you’re doing in my house?” the man asked, without turning to face him. His hands jangled keys or change in the pockets of his trousers.

“I … I was just cutting across the yard—”

“And you wound up in my bedroom?”

“I shouldn’t have, it’s just—”

“Cutting across the lawn from where?”

“Next door.”

He turned back into the room now and looked directly at Nate.

“From that woman’s house? You were in there?”

He had shiny black hair cropped short, a wide jaw, and a dimpled chin. He was six-one at least. The muscles of his chest and shoulders, evident beneath the fitted shirt, torqued his upper body forward slightly, like a boxer leaning in to his opponent.

Online, there were plenty of men whose pictures made Nate go dreamy and hard, in a melancholy sort of way. But they were otherworldly.

“I asked you a question,” the man said.

“Ms. Graves. She’s my tutor.”

His eyes narrowed, his lashes bunched at the tips as if wetted, as if he’d just stepped from the shower.

“She sent you over here, didn’t she?”

“No. I swear. I was just curious. That’s all.”

“You do this often? You just wander into people’s houses?”

“No.”

“You could have been killed. You realize that?”

Nate nodded, holding his breath.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

He led Nate along the hallway and down the curved front stairs, which brought them into the hall Nate had passed through less than an hour before. This was it, he figured; he would be told to leave now. But rather than heading for the door, the man kept going into the giant kitchen. From the fridge, he took a bottle of vodka and poured himself a glass. Leaning against the counter, his legs slightly spread, he swirled the clear liquid with a tight little motion of his hand. To each of his gestures there was a precision, a kind of surface tension to the way his body moved. He had a cocksuredness about him that the jocks at school could only hope to emulate. A cool, level stare that announced straightaway he needed nothing.

“I guess I should call the police now,” he said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“You live in Finden?”

“Yeah.”

“You think this town’s just a playground for you? You can just do whatever you want because it’s all safe and cozy in the end? You were trespassing. You were breaking the law.” The cuff of his shirt sleeve slid back from his wrist as he raised his glass to his mouth.

“I didn’t take anything,” Nate pleaded.

For a minute or more the man made no reply, all the while staring directly at Nate. There was a perversity in his silence, a gaming of discomfort. Nate could sense it in the air between them. And yet there was something else too, something tantalizing: being looked at this hard, with that edge of threat. Part of Nate wanted to shut his eyes and let himself be watched, but he didn’t dare.

“That tutor of yours, she’s out of her mind. She thinks she owns this place.”

“Yeah. She mentioned that.”

“And you say you were just curious. About what?”

“That it was so grand, I guess. And empty. I didn’t think anyone lived here.”

The man glanced across the room, as if noticing its bareness for the first time. In profile, he was even more gorgeous, with his five-o’clock shadow and his perfectly shaped nose and his full, slightly parted lips. Entering the house had woken Nate’s senses but what he experienced now was of a different order, as if the whole physical world had been made exact, sharpened by the knife of desire.

“I suppose I could use some furniture,” he said, finishing his drink and setting it down on the counter.

“I think it’s kind of cool the way it is.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. It feels open, I guess. Like you could do anything you wanted to.”

“What’s your name?”

“Nate.”

“What are you, a high-school student?”

“I’m a senior. I graduate in a few weeks.”

“Well, Nate, I’ve got stuff to do, so I think it’s time for you to leave.”

Pointing the way out, he followed Nate from the kitchen.

“You’re not going to call the police?”

“Frankly, I don’t have the time.”

As the man held the front door open, Nate could see the electric orange of the streetlamps flickering on up along on the road. If he left now, like this, with nothing more said, how would he ever get back here?

He hesitated on the threshold a moment. Then he blurted out, “I could help you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you needed to know stuff. About Ms. Graves. About her lawsuit.”

The man’s lips parted, and he smiled for the first time, a look of conjecture playing across his face.

“Interesting,” he said. “And why would you do that?”

For all his effort, Nate couldn’t stop the blood from filling his cheeks now.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because.”

For another long moment, the man was silent.

“Sure,” he said, finally. “Why not? I’m usually home about ten thirty. Try knocking next time.”

NATE JOGGED the half mile to Jason’s house and arrived in a sweat.

“Where the hell have you been?” Emily shouted over the sound of the voice booming from the stereo in Jason’s room. She lay on the unmade bed, leafing through a copy of Harper’s.

“Sorry. I got held up.”

The evening here was still getting under way. Jason sat at his desk, parceling out whitish-brown stalks and heads into small glass bowls. In the corner, Hal, who’d apparently taken the liberty of showering, sat lounging in Jason’s blue terry-cloth bathrobe, an unlit cigarette in one hand, an empty pack of matches in the other.

“You know,” Hal said, “I was thinking—”

“Quiet!” Jason insisted. “It’s almost over.”

Obediently, they all listened to the voice on the speakers as it swerved back and forth between reasoned calm and a kind of prophetic verve. A professor, it sounded like, a researcher on some very extended leave.

“So you see,” the voice continued, “the entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the mother goddess, the planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high Paleolithic. In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is not your private unconscious or the architecture of your neural programming, but it is in fact a kind of intellecti, a king of being, a kind of Gaian mind. Once you sever from this matrix of meaning, what James Joyce called ‘the mama matrix most mysterious,’ once you sever yourself from this, all you have is rationalism, ego, male dominance to guide you, and that’s what’s led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilization, all the ills of modernity. We must import into straight society almost as a Trojan horse the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not aberrational, they are not pathological, they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos get involved with but rather the catalyst that called forth humanness from animal nature. That’s the call I’m making.”

The audience applauded as the volume of the recording faded out.

“Where the fuck do you get this stuff?” Emily asked.

“Interesting,” Hal allowed. “If nothing else, it’s a good highbrow excuse to get wasted.”

“That’s not the point. We’re not ‘getting wasted.’ This isn’t a party.”

“Sure,” Hal said. “We’re widening the lens.”

“Exactly,” Jason said, rising from the desk to pass them each their dish. “We’re taking what he calls the ‘heroic dose.’ The dose where you can’t be scared anymore because there’s no ego left to be frightened.”

The shrooms had a stringy, dirt-like texture that made Nate gag. The Brita was passed around and it took them a glass of water each to swallow down the bitter mush. Ingestion complete, Jason slipped on some panic-retarding French pop, all mild falsetto and ethereal synth. The night’s opening gesture made, they recommenced their lounging. Half an hour or so passed as the disco scrim luffed in the air about them.

“One day,” Hal said idly to Jason, “I think you’ll run a cult. Not in a bad way, at least not at first. We’ll read about you on an island with lots of women and children, all of you awaiting some astral bus. My career will be over by then, at twenty-eight or-nine, and I’ll wonder if I should join you.”

“Listen,” Jason said, “here’s a public service announcement, okay? The free-association thing — it can be a problem. I mean, ‘astral bus’? That’s the kind of thing someone could just catch on, and before you know it, we’re lost. Think of it like meditation. The thought comes and the thought goes. You’re not the thought.”

“I’m just saying I think you’ll run a cult.”

“Okay,” Jason replied, “okay.”

Heavy liquid began to pool at the back of Nate’s skull. He lay down beside Emily and closed his eyes, the afterimage of the ceiling lamp burning like an eclipsed sun on the backs of his lids.

“Shit,” Emily said to no one in particular.

The music came in waves now, cresting in the middle of the room, sloshing against the walls, and dripping onto the floor before rising once more above their heads.

“Dinner’s almost ready, guys.”

Seeing Mrs. Holland standing in the doorway, the four of them came to shocked attention. “Why don’t you clean this place up, Jason? Your friends don’t have to put up with your laundry, do they?”

She wore a white rayon dress belted with snakeskin and sipped a clear liquid from a tumbler held firmly in both hands.

From across the room, her son glared at her.

Smiling vaguely at the other three, she laughed, as if to say, Isn’t he a card? and then turned away, leaving the door open behind her.

“Now that,” Hal said, “is the mama matrix most mysterious.”

“Save it,” Jason snapped, rising to close the door. With his back to it, he made as if to address them, though as he parted his lips to speak, something on the carpet hauled his attention off, and like a general trying not to evidence distress before his troops he had to master himself anew before speaking “We’ve got a situation,” he announced. “There’s less time than I thought. We need to get down there and we need to consume some of that food in an orderly fashion. You understand? It’s early going. We can handle it. We just need to act quickly.”

Hal stood, tightened the belt of his bathrobe, and shouted, “I’m ready.”

“This is a very bad idea,” Emily said.

But Jason was already out the door and they were following him down the curving staircase.

THE HOLLANDS’ KITCHEN appeared roughly the size of a tennis court. Seeking a base of operations amidst this vastness, they made for a distressed farmhouse table on the far side of the room. When they got high in the car, Nate could let sensation spill over with no interference from the world. Not so now. Circumstance had forced him to his own personal battle stations, where he waged a desperate campaign against the inner flood.

“I’m on this wacky Listserv,” Mrs. Holland called out from the range, “with these old friends of mine, and who knows who else for that matter — anyone, I suppose, everyone — the terrorists!” She cackled. “Anyway, someone sent out this crazy thing professing to be a Sumerian cookbook. Can you imagine? Julia Child running around Mesopotamia four thousand years ago. Lunatic really. But I thought I’d give one of these cold dishes a try. Lucky for you Whole Foods didn’t have yak. I used venison. With this river grass they’re all enthused about. None of you are on a silly diet thing. Emily, you’re not doing one of those, are you?”

“No,” Emily said, her hands clutching the edge of the table. “I’m on a regular-food diet.”

“Well, consider it part of your multicultural education,” Mrs. Holland said, pouring herself another drink. “You know Jason’s father is all in favor of that sort of thing. Such a progressive man.”

“She’s headed for a meltdown,” Emily whispered to Nate. “I’ve seen it happen.”

Nate glanced at the other two, trying to gauge their coordination, affect, and overall cogency. He watched, stunned, as Jason, eyeing a fly that had settled on Hal’s face, said, “Hold on,” and then took a walnut from a bowl on the table and whipped it at Hal’s forehead, missing the insect by three or four inches.

“Oh fuck,” Hal said, unresponsive to the nut, but smiling broadly now. “We’re out of time.”

Slowly, Jason’s eyes fluttered shut. Their boat’s only rudder was coming loose.

Suddenly, Mrs. Holland placed a bowl of some dark, vaguely living substance on the table in front of Nate. He stared up into her blazing eyes and heard her say, “You guys look like you just ran a marathon. Should I turn up the air conditioning?”

Atop the mush in his bowl, Nate saw a mucus beginning to form, suggesting the larval stage of some dreaded prehistoric creature. What rough beast, he wondered, had come round at last, unborn since these ingredients had last mingled in some glade of the ancient world?

“Keep it together over there!” Jason whispered harshly, bringing Nate into sudden awareness that only an inch separated his face from the gestation unfolding before him. He sat quickly upright, trying not to cry with fear.

“You all go ahead and start,” Mrs. Holland said, miles away again. “I have to get this grain paste sorted out.”

Emily’s neck stiffened. “Something,” she said, “something has to be done.”

Nodding vigorously, Hal reached under his robe into his trouser pocket and somehow managed to make his cell phone ring, a call that he promptly answered.

“Oh my god,” he said, loud out of all proportion. “You’re kidding? Our family kitten? Out there on the highway? Right now? Oh, Mom. What can I do? You want me to come right now?”

He glanced at Jason, who turned quickly to his approaching mother and, looking somewhere over her shoulder, said, “Gee. I guess, well, so Hal — it looks like he’s got this … situation. I mean, this pet. This family pet cat. It looks as if it needs help.”

Forgetting the premise of the ruse, Hal placed his phone down on the table.

For a moment the only sound was the crackle of insects being burned to death by the caged blue light on the porch.

“And what about your dinner, mister?” Mrs. Holland said.

At that moment, Nate realized he had been drafted into a kind of psychic air traffic control, minus training or any chance of success. Mrs. Holland’s final, bitter word had dropped from beneath the clouds like an undetected passenger jet sailing straight for the terminal.

“Come on, Mom. This stuff looks like shit.”

Her groggy eyes narrowed.

“Is that so? I’m glad you’ve learned to be so honest, Jason. It’s a great quality in a man. I suppose you’ve told your friends that you’ve failed too many classes to graduate. Have you told them that?”

“Fuck you,” he said, rising from the table. “Come on, guys, we’re leaving.”

He crossed the room and walked out the back door, the screen slapping behind him. Sheepishly, Emily followed.

“You know, Mrs. Holland,” Hal began, spotting a box of matches by the salt and pepper and finally lighting the cigarette he’d been holding between his fingers all evening, “I appreciated the Sumerian angle. It’s always interesting to consider the origin of things. Particularly in these times. That sounds like a really wonderful Listserv you have there.” He inhaled, blew the smoke up toward the ceiling, and then, pushing his chair back, exited in the opposite direction from the others, back into the front hall.

Alone with her now, Nate watched as the viscosity in the air, which he had prayed was just a passing warp of his eye, began to leak openly into the world, the ceiling above Mrs. Holland becoming a slick, throbbing ooze, the lights in the room starting to pulse, bleeding along the edges of her rigid mother body, and then within her as well, her whole form glowing a dim orangey-red, the ember of some slowly dying need.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing up from the table. “I’m really sorry.”

HE HURRIED ACROSS the yard trying to catch up with the others, relieved by the lack of brightness on this darkened stage of willows weeping branches into pools of lamplight, the air about him soft and damp. He could hear Jason up ahead, and then he saw them as he rounded the turn and came up alongside them, no one taking any notice. They walked for what seemed a long while down Chandler Drive and onto the college campus. Making their way into the woods, they followed the path to the round stone terrace and stepping onto it saw the expanse of the lake stretched out before them, black and smooth under a dome of stars.

At the railing of the terrace the four of them stood, passengers on the prow of a stilled ship.

Jason slipped his sneakers and shirt off and walked down the steps, wading into the water up to his chest. He turned to the three of them, reached his arms into the air and lay back, falling into the bed of water, his head and body disappearing beneath the dark surface long enough for the vibe to reach uneasily toward after-school specials in which wasted kids drowned and the town held a candlelight vigil, their night on the verge of becoming one of those earnest, tragic affairs covered by local news, involving ribbons and flowers, yearbook snapshots, hope snuffed, etcetera, actual life and grief cheated and frozen by the arrogance of sentiment, and then his head and shoulders appeared again a few feet farther out and Emily laughed.

Stepping out of her sandals, she climbed down to join him.

“This,” Jason said, floating on his back, “this is the matrix most mysterious. And you know what? It doesn’t give a damn about us. It could care less if we even existed.”

He began a slow backstroke away from the shore.

Nate remained at the railing, the visible world trailing out behind itself and stretching forward, the glow at the tip of Hal’s cigarette and Emily’s bobbing head becoming the blurred average of the still-discernible past and the imminent future, the sky likewise a series of white lines sketching themselves back and forth across hundreds of bright centers. Making him wonder if a feeling could have such a pattern: want crossing over fear crossing back over longing crossing menace, the bright center of it all being the awful urge he’d felt standing before the man in the front hallway of the mansion just a few hours ago, wishing the man would just put him out of his misery and touch him.

How did people bear it? Needing to be saved so appallingly.

“The professor’s right,” Emily shouted. “Kill the ego! Let the world in!”

“Come on,” Jason called, “swim!”

Shedding his bathrobe and draping it on the rail, Hal leaned down to remove his shoes and trousers. His bare back was pale and narrow. A boy’s body, Nate thought, gangly, uncertain, a protector of nothing.

“You coming?” Hal said.

Nate stripped to his briefs and from the bottom step made a shallow dive, his thin form slipping into the water, the day, the drug, all of it, washed for an instant from his mind by the cold rush, gills opening in his chest as he let it all go. Rising again to the surface, his head was encompassed once more by the warm night air as he turned onto his back, a blazing zigzag of starlight pouring into his eyes.

They swam a few feet apart out toward the formal garden, Jason reaching the white balustrade first and lifting himself up to sit on its wide top. Behind him, on a steeply raked hillside, stood the fancifully clipped trees and hedges, topiary in the shapes of cones and boxes, a few cypress intermixed, all of it seen as much from memory as through the layers of shadow covering it now. He helped each of them up in turn and they crossed the path onto the lawn. On a terraced stretch of grass halfway up the rise, they sat, still dripping, beneath the large pyramid of an evergreen, looking back across the lake to the campus and beyond it to the lights of Finden.

“It keeps coming,” Emily said, resting her head on the ground.

“Let it come,” Jason replied. “Just let it come.”

___________

MANY HOURS LATER, after the drug had at last worn off and he’d snuck silently back into his house, Nate undressed in his room and put on an old pair of boxers before brushing his teeth. In the mirror over the sink, he looked scrawny, his arms thin like Hal’s, barely any muscle on his chest and hollows in his shoulders above the collarbone. Nothing, he thought, like the body of the man he’d met that day. None of his thick presence. Lying in bed with the lights off, Nate pictured the man upstairs in that huge house of his, taking off his tie, his pinstripe pants and pressed white shirt, a perfect strength exuded into the perfect dark behind Nate’s eyes, squeezed shut by this waking dream, as he moved his fist up and down on himself, trying hard to fill over the dry silence of the house with the flood of that other, imagined place, shorn of everything but a pleasure so keen it might just have the power to obliterate him. Then, for two or three ecstatic seconds, the obliteration came, its flood receding too quickly, leaving behind the wrecked old world of things as they actually were.

He lay still now. Along the bottom edge of the shade, he could see the faint, bluish tinge of the streetlight. A pile of clothing was dimly visible on the chair in the corner, the spine of a textbook sticking out over the edge of his desk. He closed his eyes again but the fantasy was gone and he was wide awake.

Chapter 9

A quarter past nine, the clock on the mantel read. Too early for bed, if Charlotte didn’t want to wake in the dead of night. She took a seat by the open window in the living room, where warm evening air floated across the sill onto her lap and onto the heads of the dogs lying at her feet. She’d run on too long this afternoon with young Nate, carried away on the Works Progress Administration, but she hadn’t been able to help herself.

He had caught her unawares that first day he’d appeared and it had been all she could do to muster an hour’s lesson. As he’d scribbled the occasional note, a familiar pall of uncomprehending boredom had settled over his face like custard. How many times had she seen the like while pacing her classroom, Lincoln’s doleful eyes gazing over the fruit of his more perfect union? Over the years, most students had been baffled by her importuning, her insistence that they see the conditions of their own lives in historical terms. Amidst the general, bovine indifference there had always been a few willing to entertain the notion that the world might consist of more than their uses for it. She hadn’t pegged Nate as one at first.

But now she saw things differently. He attended to her words as if it weren’t only the content that mattered. Toward the end of her years at the school, even her better students had become mere harvesters of fact, unwilling to be transformed by what they might learn. They were closed to that higher ambiguity that came only from observing at close range a person compelled by knowledge, someone who might show by example how one’s first self, illiberally imposed, could be given up in favor of the chosen course. But not this young man. It wasn’t that his few questions had been all that penetrating, and indeed his being impressed by the intruder’s mansion had struck her nearly dumb. But he considered her arguments; he followed the rhythm of her words.

A generosity of attention. That was the heart of it.

You expect us to believe that? Wilkie said, rising to press his nose to the screen, ears perked up like the wings of a bat. Come on now, be honest with yourself.

The boy’s skin, pale like butter; his large brown eyes; the way his hair fell in a wave over his forehead. She’d seen the resemblance early on, but pushed the thought aside. But sitting across from him at the Chinese the other week it made no sense to deny how like a younger Eric he looked.

Oh, here we go, Sam said.

How could she ever think, ever get things clear in her head with the two of them nattering like this?

That afternoon, tutoring Nate, just as an idea was about to take form and escape the eddies of modification and caveat, some tiny fact — ash on the carpet, a strand of ticking loose on the sofa’s arm — had pulsed up bright in front of her, arresting all her forward motion, and she’d floated there, lost, catching the dark sparkle of Sam’s or Wilkie’s eyes, who called out to her, There is no place other than this: welcome, leaving her terrified but determined to resist, to find the current again before it ceased, and so haul from her stalled mind a coherent thought.

But even now as she tried to concentrate, to keep her mind here in the present, memory, like a troubled friend whispering through the screen, brought the image of her old apartment on West Eleventh Street, those two little ground-floor rooms with the paved square of garden at the back, and the two of them bringing in the firewood Eric had found somewhere the day he moved in with her, his father’s old car parked in the rain, the two of them running logs down the steps and into the house, piling them on a blue tarpaulin spread on the living-room floor, the wood dust and strands of bark matted to their coats.

Most of Charlotte’s college friends had met their husbands before graduation or secured them soon after. Boys from Amherst and Williams arriving four or five to a car for the dances at Smith, long evenings of the smallest talk imaginable, the young gentlemen speaking like bad pantomimes of their fathers, all summer holidays and the names of banks, little lords of the financial manor. She’d watched women she’d heard speak eloquently in class of Shakespeare or Rome nod their heads and smile, listening patiently to one blandishment after the next, while the boys glanced about to see what else was available, and it made her feel ashamed for her classmates and for herself. It may have been that the boys didn’t approach her because she didn’t catch their eye, being a bit too tall, neither blond nor pretty in a conventional way, but the defiant expression she wore couldn’t have encouraged them either. If one did strike up conversation, she thought it best to compensate for her classmates’ hiding of their education; she usually started in on an analysis of whatever she was reading that week. A battlement her pride had been, high and safe.

As a single woman out in the world, it had only seemed the more necessary. At her seat at work behind the reference desk of the New York Public Library, middle-aged men would wink at her. On the subway they’d try worse.

“A bit lonesome, isn’t it?” she remembered her mother asking at the table at Thanksgiving the fall she started graduate school at Columbia. “All those hours cooped up studying?”

“As opposed to the ones you spend cooped up in this house?” she replied, which brought silence and a withering stare.

Her father understood; he’d encouraged her from the beginning.

“I’m just being practical,” her mother suggested, defending her worries for Charlotte’s future. Henry, five years younger, had already graduated from law school, started with a firm, and, to perfect the narrative, married Betsy, whom he’d met one summer on a trip to the Cape. The wedding had been given by Betsy’s parents in Hyannis, all white tents and high Episcopal good form, from the Bloody Marys to the starched collars to the understated, almost humble self-satisfaction of the father’s toast and the look in Charlotte’s mother’s eye as Henry took his bride by the arm and led her onto the parquet for the first dance. Or the last dance, as Charlotte thought of it. After all the cotillions and proms and coming-out balls, the dance that fixed you in place. For Henry, it was a dress-up lark dreamed by women into existence for which he was happy to play his role for the day, because what would it ever cost him, and it made his mother so happy (decades later, imitations of the clothes they’d worn on weekends like that would show up in all those catalogues, Ralph Lauren and the others, the smugness of that faded time resurrected as commercial fantasy). At the reception, Charlotte had been seated next to the bride’s brother, a Cadillac dealer who’d clearly never read Appointment in Samarra. Henry, to his credit, didn’t join in the cloying asides about her being next.

She’d spent three years studying: taking seminars, attending extra lectures, working in the library, and reading in the evenings. Her friends were other people in the history department along with the two or three women from college who hadn’t moved out of the city. In school, being single didn’t register the way it did at home with her parents. Time had purpose without a companion. Still, the solitude got to her now and again. Despite her best effort, she couldn’t rid herself of the tug of “Saturday Night” and the need to have something to do. On the weeks she failed to plan ahead and found herself alone, the doubt which concentration otherwise kept at bay entered her, and she heard her mother’s voice. The words in the books and journals spread on her kitchen table seemed lifeless then, dead as the time they described. But the feeling always passed; a paper would demand more reading, more research; the vistas would open up again inside her, lending the world that sense of integration, as she discerned more and more of the structure of the present in the society and politics of Europe three centuries before, as though she were glimpsing the hidden order of things. Try explaining that over gin and tonics at the beach club to one of the sons of her mother’s friends. Why no, Chuck, I don’t get to play much squash. You see, I’m a secular mystic, transported in private hours by the grandeur of human knowledge. You don’t say? Well, actually, I do.

Of the men she met in the city, most were married or seemed put off by her lack of deference.

It was at a winter party, given by one of her professors at Columbia, that she met Eric. She knew most of the people there, other graduate students, junior professors she’d taken classes with or heard speak. She noticed him first with his back to the room, examining the bookshelf, his head craned to read the spines. When he turned, he accidentally met Charlotte’s gaze and smiled, shyly, before looking into his drink. Something about the curly brown hair that hung over his brow and the creamy skin and the wide, slightly unshaven jaw had caused her to stare. That afternoon, sitting at her desk at the back of her apartment as the light faded in the courtyard, she’d finished writing what she considered her best work yet, a paper on Milton’s tenure in Cromwell’s government, the result of a year’s research. She remained full of the satisfaction of being done, a pleasure so long and scrupulously deferred. Eric looked a bit younger than she was, in his mid-twenties perhaps. Keeping an eye out, she spotted him a few minutes later on the far side of the room and went over to introduce herself. It was the kind of egalitarian gesture she believed in and for once she’d drunk enough to bring it off.

They spoke for two hours that evening, sitting on the bench in the bay window, the Hudson visible through the bare trees. After an awkward few moments, he had started in, dispensing with the pleasantries of asking who she was or where she fit in the party, right away wanting to know what she’d read recently, “the best things,” he said, “the stuff that could change you,” and he didn’t want to hear only about history but about novels, journalism, poetry. And then through and past that, to her thoughts, assuming without question that her ideas possessed the same integrity and significance of any of the books that helped shape them. His need to hear all this seemed almost animal-like, as though by elaborating her thoughts she were feeding him. At first, she spoke haltingly. She was used to the prescribed discussions of seminars; she’d never been asked to offer such comprehensive views. Answering his questions, she felt ideas, long inchoate, come into focus. The plainness of early Protestant worship explained something about why she’d been transfixed in Amsterdam the summer before by Vermeer’s painting of an everyday exterior — the brick fronts of the merchant’s house, the gray cloud, the women doing their daily work. And this connected in ways she could only guess at to idealism in politics, the insistence on equality, the plainness of it, and thus too, somehow, to the power of the spectacle of troops in Little Rock escorting a black girl to the ordinary activity of school. She understood then, and even more later, that others, the beautiful perhaps, would laugh if she were to confess it, but sitting fully clothed on that window seat, never having touched a hair on Eric’s body, she felt more sexually alive than ever in her life. She would have walked into a bedroom of that apartment, closed the door on the party, and made love to him at once if he’d asked.

As it happened, they made love on her couch the next night after dinner, the heat of his chest on hers and the smell of his flesh a blessing she’d thought she might never receive. Before they even climbed in the bath together, before he even raised himself from her and stood, naked and wet, looking down at her in surprise, she already feared the power of her wanting. She was twenty-nine and a fierce social independent, a position that had cost her a sense of future safety. They’d said nothing about anything between them, how could they? And yet even that first night, every time he touched her, there in the soapy water, lathering her hair, cupping her breast in his hand, it felt to her like a promise.

Had God foreseen the subtlety of your modern devils, Sam began, raising his blunt face from the carpet, he might have added a Commandment: Thou Shalt not Pity thy Self. In the case of Sorrow for a Dead Friend: Suppose, I were Dead; would I have my Friend mourn for me, with an Excessive, Oppressive, Destructive Sorrow? No, sure. Why then let my Sorrow for my Friend be moderated. You dwell in Memory like some Perversity of the Flesh. A sin against the gift of Creation it is to harp so on the dead while the living still suffer.

She wouldn’t be chastised like this. Not in her own house. Not by Sam. Lying there with his fine pale coat and superior manner. It was no great mystery who he had come to fancy himself as. All that pure breeding and King James diction. As though each day she walked Cotton Mather over the golf course on a leash. Did he really expect her to believe that was the case?

Across the room, the television stood mute, its glass a dull, greeny gray. The reception had grown steadily worse over the years, though she’d changed nothing, until finally the static had grown so thick it was hardly worth it, Jim Lehrer’s voice muffled beneath the hiss. She’d preferred MacNeil, in any case.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator shuddered off and the quiet of the house was once again absolute.

Eric’s place had been much like hers, a studio apartment over by the water on Bethune Street. A mess of books and papers, barely any shelves to put them on, a small wooden table, one chair. The previous fall, he’d enrolled to study philosophy at the New School and had been overwhelmed by the amount of work. He was late wherever they went, unkempt, often tired-looking. Charlotte loved him for it and even more for their hours of conversation and for his letting her kiss him whenever she felt the urge, Eric being happy to let her lead the way, telling him when they would study and when they would stop, when they would sleep and eat. Those first few months he’d get up early and go to his apartment a few hours each morning to get ready for his seminars, he said, and she’d usually find him back at her place napping when she returned in the late afternoon. She’d sometimes sit watching him as he slept, his legs curled up toward his chest, his mouth slightly open against the pillow. Her first guess at his age had been right. He was only twenty-four. The youngest of seven. His mother’s choice for the priesthood. Yet the only one of his siblings who hadn’t ended up living within a quick drive of the house back in the working-class section of Philadelphia where he’d grown up. Charlotte had been surrounded most of her life by people who’d sauntered to their place in the world, coming to it as if by right. This hadn’t been the case for her because she hadn’t chosen the course offered. Watching Eric sleep like that, an entire evening in the apartment together still ahead of them, she felt delivered not just from the usual loneliness — so well hidden by the manner she kept up with family and colleagues — but from the years of it she’d already been through, the tiring work of living on one’s own, of being such an odd bird, a single woman of her age back then, 1962, getting a PhD, no marriage in the offing. An awkward fit in the world. It was as if Eric gave her those years back by accompanying her now.

He made her young. He let her be silly. She’d never been able to afford silliness. Like fooling around in Henry’s apartment, where she’d taken Eric for dinner, fooling around in the bathroom after dessert, their drinks perched on the sink. Stuffy Henry and stuffy Betsy in their appropriate little apartment on the Upper East Side, the settee from the back hall in Rye primped up in the living room, carpets their mother had unearthed from the attic covering the floor, the wedding silver polished to the nines, and the two of them already on the lookout for a house, the closer to Mommy and Daddy the better. Charlotte could barely keep herself from laughing when they sat down again, so punch-drunk and pleased she was.

When Eric’s stipend ran down he asked if he could move in. She’d been taken aback at first, that it should happen so quickly, so informally, but then it seemed of a piece with how it had all begun. He’d practically been living with her in any case. They slept together most nights and his clothing had started to accumulate in her drawers. It might have bothered other women, women like Betsy who would have wanted to clarify the issue of his intentions. But Charlotte had given up so much of that racket — the hunt for the possession of the man— and instead marveled at how effortlessly Eric had slipped into her heart, as if he hadn’t even noticed the rigidity she feared had been the cost of exempting herself from all that.

She’d never been able to explain that to anyone afterward. How thankful she’d been to him for loving her just as he found her. There were too many steps to it, too much to account for. And by then they’d assembled their views, Henry and her mother: that she’d been taken in by a bad character. If there had been feeling there, well my goodness it had been misplaced. For heaven’s sake. Would you have us think otherwise? That you could still love and admire such a person? None of which, of course, ever had to be stated aloud, their taut lips and averted eyes all too eloquent.

“But I lived with him,” she wanted to say. “Shouldn’t you ask first what it was like? He loved me. I felt that to be so. He hated having to put me through it.”

In these basic facts, she had never lost her faith. Because while it was true, looking back, that he may have been under the influence around the time they met — those first few months when he’d go back to his apartment during the day — and so perhaps true also that his lack of money stemmed from that, once he moved in, he stopped. He had to have stopped, because it was summer, neither of them were in classes and they spent all their waking hours together. She would have known. And those were the best months they had together. The happiest of her life. Waking midmorning, the drowsy, shut-eyed kissing and fondling, his head in her hands between her legs. Morning after wonderful morning like that. Caught up in him. And then wandering out to a coffee shop where they’d eat and read and talk. And then films, what seemed like every night, though it couldn’t have been, and cooking soup or scrambled eggs and bacon on the electric stove and eating wherever they could clear a seat amidst the cram of his papers and hers.

He’d taken a seminar in the spring with a student of Karl Jaspers and that summer was working his way through Heidegger. “How’s your serious young man?” Henry would ask when they spoke, and of course there was some of that to Eric, the long discussions about authenticity and being, a cascade of words propelled by the need to believe there existed some world, however abstruse, other than mere things and our accommodation to them. But was that so laughable? Not to Charlotte. She and Henry had grown up in the most unexacting faith imaginable, a drawling, self-satisfied Episcopalianism marked by the minister’s wife in her mink coat and pleasant enough hymns at Christmas. They would no more have discussed their religion at the dinner table than fry filet mignon. Eric had been raised strict Catholic. When he left the Church, his mother called him apostate and refused to speak to him for a year. There may have been a pose now and again as he tried on the philosophy he was studying, a slight callowness to the high-handed way he dismissed books or people who hadn’t grasped the urgency of existential thought, but at the base of it lay an honest hunger. And a sadness.

Oh, come on sister, Wilkie said. Paint your picture if you want to, but a dope fiend is a dope fiend, and I should know. Your white boy might have been able to keep it under wraps longer than your uptown Negro because he didn’t have to score on the street. But the disease is the disease. There comes a day you’re going to get desperate, and it’s going to get ugly. A woman, if you’ve still got one by then, she’s just another route to a score.

It had taken awhile, but recently Charlotte had come to recognize Wilkie’s pretension as well. That oracular tone of his, the voice of Malcolm X streaming from his black head.

It hadn’t been as Henry and her mother imagined. Eric never stole anything. He never put her in harm’s way. They didn’t stop loving each other. The whole thing was so far outside her experience, at first she didn’t know what to do. She asked him if he would please stop, and he said that he’d try. Which he did for a time, though it might have only been weeks. She remembered coming back from the library one late afternoon and finding him asleep on the couch, his sleeve rolled up, a dot of red where he’d punctured the skin. With a cotton ball dipped in rubbing alcohol she daubed at the pinprick and covered it with a Band-Aid, then tidied the house and sat at her desk to type up her reading notes, because what else was she supposed to do, still wanting him as she did? When he woke, he rolled down his sleeve without saying anything, walked around behind her as she worked, and hugged her back to his chest. She heated up fish cakes and a can of baked beans, just as her mother used to on Fridays when the cook was off, and they sat at the little table by the back window and she cried a bit, but he told her it was only to help him get through the next while, the pressure of the work.

“You’re the only one I don’t feel lonely around,” he said, holding her hand.

“Can’t that be enough?”

“It will be.”

She knew nothing about the course of such things. Why should she? When he asked for money, she gave him what she could. He’s got the flu, she said to her mother in the kitchen at Christmas back in Rye, where at the dining-room table beside Henry and Betsy and her cousins it was suddenly obvious how sickly he appeared — her mother, who ever since Charlotte had met Eric had been torn between her desire for a wedding and her wish that Eric had come from a slightly better family, or at least a Protestant one. And of course the age difference ran in the wrong direction. She had married Charlotte’s father at twenty-one in the church on Copley Square and following her own mother’s example treated her husband as a kind of necessary appendage to the larger body of her household, the grand purpose of which was the flawless production of her children. A purpose Charlotte had years ago begun to thwart, failing to hide her disdain for that whole rigid, sequestered, matriarchal prerogative. If there were anyone in the family she could have confided in about Eric, it would have been her father, who’d admired the way she’d gone off on her own, but still it would have meant the end of things, his comforting her but still intervening to protect his daughter.

In January, Eric stopped going to his classes, stopped reading much at all, and only left the house toward dusk, coming back an hour or so later to spend a little while in the bathroom before napping. In bed, she’d hold him close, her hands reaching up to pat his damp hair. Usually by then, at midnight or one, he returned to a kind of equilibrium, and with the lights out and the building quiet, they talked as they had at the beginning, Charlotte recounting a novel she’d read or thinking aloud about the line of argument in whatever paper she was writing at the time, Eric asking her questions and listening, assuring her that, yes, he wanted to know. She remembered now the night she got up her courage to ask him what it was like to have that liquid in his veins. He said it felt like being able to live inside a memory of a childhood he was certain he’d never had, as if all the world around you had become the setting of a rich, nostalgic dream, some invincible summer. She could tell he was partly in love with the romance of it, the affective correlative it gave to the intellectual conviction about our lost experience of being, as if he were the living experiment for the things he studied and would one day turn it off and write it all down. Naïve, no doubt. But being with him made Charlotte realize how on her own she’d grown grimly practical, a student of what was required for praise and advancement. The pleasure he gave made her forget all that. Yes, he was deluding himself, mistaking a simple thing like taking drugs for the complexity of figuring out how to live, but the very youthfulness of the error opened something in her, a nostalgia of her own for romances she’d never had.

“He didn’t use me, Wilkie,” she said. “You’re wrong about that. I did what I thought was best.”

At the beginning of spring, Eric told her he’d been to a doctor and was tapering off. This was why he felt so sick, he said. Some days he barely left the bed. She ran baths and washed him just as he had washed her those first weeks after they made love. It was on a Friday afternoon that whatever supply he’d managed to build up ran out. To go off too quickly was dangerous, he said.

She hesitated at first. They could stay together there in the apartment and see it through, call the doctor if necessary. But he looked awful, his skin green, his eyes sunken. It was just a short walk through Washington Square Park to a building down on MacDougal Street. Four flights up past the old Italian ladies chatting on the landings. Seven or eight kids, in their twenties most of them, crowded into a little apartment, the shades pulled over open windows, everyone smoking, shouts from the street and the sound of motor engines bouncing off the building opposite into the dank, carpetless living room. The boys wore wing tips like her father’s. Wing tips and turtlenecks, the girls in corduroy pants and oversize sweaters. They stared at her as she imagined they would at their mothers. Someone was writing up a flyer. There were meetings she should attend. “In the kitchen,” someone told her, guessing her purpose for being there. A man with a lazy eye, who spoke with a slight Canadian accent, was the one she gave the money to and received in return a small envelope. Walking back up lower Fifth Avenue, Charlotte noticed the couples hand in hand, emerging from the brightly lit lobbies of the fancy buildings, headed out to dinner, the Henrys and Betsys, who when they glanced at her saw one of their own, her anxious mind calculating the efficacy of her disguise, wondering if they could ever guess her errand.

To her surprise, Eric had made the bed while she was gone, and tidied the kitchen as well. He’d cleared his books off the table and stacked them by the door.

“You’ll take less?” she asked, and he nodded.

Despite the sickness, he looked younger than when she’d met him, his features somehow more open, no longer organized by inquisitive zeal. Again, she offered to phone the doctor. He had never been to one, of course, so there wouldn’t have been a number to call. Instead, she put the envelope down on the counter and went into the front room. One thing she couldn’t do was watch him at it. Still in her coat, she sat by the window, looking through the bars of the windows at the passersby.

Once the summer came, she thought, they would go up to Massachusetts and use the Finden house for a few weeks when her parents weren’t there. They’d take the Jeep to the lake and on the way back buy corn and fruit at the farm stand. Come fall, Eric would get back to his classes, she would finish her thesis. They might get married in a year. She would meet his brothers and sisters. His parents would come around, eventually.

The Day was a public Thanksgiving for the Mercies of Heaven in the Year that is past, Sam intoned. I laid aside the subject I intended and in the Morning I composed a sermon on the line in 1 Samuel. She wept, and she did not eat. A sermon on the Thanks offering, prosecuting that Observation, that a sense of Affliction was oftentimes a Hindrance to the work of Thanksgiving, but that it ought not to be so. My son died about Noon. My sermon in the Afternoon proved very acceptable, and reasonable, and serviceable.

Why you? Charlotte thought. Of all I’ve read and forgotten, why a pompous old preacher? Why not Whitman’s singing or blind Milton to keep an aging isolate company?

He rubbed his ear to her foot to relieve an itch. Sensing something was being given out that he was not a part of, Wilkie’s head came down off the sill and he pressed his snout into Charlotte’s lap.

They followed her into the front bedroom, settling on their blankets as she took off her cardigan and began to undress. It had been so much harder living here, all those years ago, at the beginning. Such tense awareness of being alone in the house, the day’s routines acts that she observed herself completing: her dress returned to its hanger, her shoes put back in their sleeve pockets hanging inside the closet door, the watch on the bedside table, cold cream on her face, the bedroom door shut. To forget a bit, the past and herself, that’s all she’d wanted then. To move unsurveilled through time’s ceaseless unfolding. The critical eye closed, the narrative intelligence laid to rest. Repetition’s welcome victory over event. Up at the sound of the bedside alarm, the school day a prevention of other thoughts, along with the work she carried home. And when, inevitably, retrospect intervened nonetheless, she knew, then as now, that others would consider her precious or sad or both, prey to a romanticism gone morbid. So her mother had thought until she died. So Henry still imagined. And who was she to catalogue the varieties in which love and comfort came in order to tell them they were wrong? She could only know what she had felt, say, on the afternoon during that long summer of theirs when they’d stood together in the Metropolitan Museum looking at a small picture by Daubigny, a painting of a village along a river’s edge at dusk seen from across the water, light and peacefulness so miraculously captured it produced in her elation. Before she uttered a word of praise, Eric took her hand and said that from whatever he read or studied, all he wanted was the power to describe how a human being could arrive at the lucid sympathy this man must have felt for what he saw. A lucid sympathy. Those were his words. As if he’d reached into her, discerned an emotional thought still unformed, and allowed it definite shape. Difficult not to think you could live a lifetime with another person and never be as richly acknowledged. To then lie with this man in the grass of the park, make love to him before dinner, to keep discussing painting after the food was cold and the time to catch a film had passed. What did they know of that?

Best she move on after that sort of thing. That’s what the landlord had told Henry when Charlotte asked him to phone and find out why the man hadn’t sent her a renewal on her lease or returned her calls. There had been the ambulance, after all, and the neighbors standing in the hall watching.

Half an hour, it had been, that she’d remained sitting there by the front window. She heard the bathroom door close and after a few minutes open once more, then Eric’s steps to the couch. Such a small apartment it was, just the two rooms. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty feet between them. At first glance, he just looked paler than usual, his body in an odd position, back arched, one arm reaching out to the side, his chin turned down to his chest. At the feel of his hand, she shook him, lightly at first, insisting he open his eyes. Annihilating minutes spent waiting for the medics to arrive, clutching his head in her lap. She had never spoken to his parents. They had been living in sin, after all. His father sounded as if he were choking and had to suck hard for breath. From upstairs, Mrs. Ruskemeyer brought a plate of cucumber sandwiches, white bread with the crusts removed, in perfect English style. Charlotte offered one to the policeman, who smelled it before returning it to the plate.

“You the wife?” he asked.

“No.”

At the sink in her nightgown, Charlotte stood before her mirror now and applied the thick Nivea cream to the tissue-soft wrinkles beneath her eyes, struck with familiar wonder at how deeply grooved in a mind one cut of time could become. No school tomorrow to fill the day, as it had filled her life. And so the window opened, the bars came off, the passersby began to drift into the room where she still sat with Eric as he died, some of them quiet like generations past, others hot with the temper of dogs’ eyes. The membrane porous, the order shuffled. How arrogant, how wrong, for man to believe his animal senses caught the spectrum whole. An adventure time was, if you calmed yourself to its receipt.