"The Corrections" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

ONE LAST CHRISTMAS

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker’s Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights. He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he’d formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.

A shadowy light of late afternoon was captive in the window wells. The furnace was cycling on often, the house leaking heat. Alfred’s red sweater hung on him in skewed folds and bulges, as if he were a log or a chair. His gray wool slacks were afflicted with stains that he had no choice but to tolerate, because the only other option was to take leave of his senses, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that.

Uppermost in the Maker’s Mark carton was a very long string of white Christmas lights coiled bulkily around a wand of cardboard. The string stank of mildew from the storeroom beneath the porch, and when he put the plug into an outlet he could see right away that all was not well. Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs—a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle. He unwound the spool with veering hands, paying the string out on the Ping-Pong table. At the very end of it was an unsightly stretch of dead bulbs.

He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string. But the discount stores were mobbed at this time of year; he’d be in line for twenty minutes. He didn’t mind waiting, but Enid wouldn’t let him drive the car now, and Enid did mind waiting. She was upstairs flogging herself through the home stretch of Christmas prep.

Much better, Alfred thought, to stay out of sight in the basement, to work with what he had. It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn’t trash.

Modernity expected this designation and Alfred resisted it.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to fix the lights. He didn’t understand how a stretch of fifteen bulbs could go dead. He examined the transition from light to darkness and saw no change in the wiring pattern between the last burning bulb and the first dead one. He couldn’t follow the three constituent wires through all their twists and braidings. The circuit was semiparallel in some complex way he didn’t see the point of.

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season’s rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn’t work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn’t affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement…

Alfred’s hands were rotating on his wrists like the twin heads of an eggbeater. As well as he could, he advanced his fingers along the string, squeezing and twisting the wires as he went—and the dark stretch reignited! The string was complete!

What had he done?

He smoothed out the string on the Ping-Pong table. Almost immediately, the faulty segment went dark again. He tried to revive it by squeezing it and patting it, but this time he had no luck.

(You fitted the barrel of the shotgun into your mouth and you reached for the switch.)

He reexamined the braid of olive-drab wires. Even now, even at this extremity of his affliction, he believed he could sit down with pencil and paper and reinvent the principles of basic circuitry. He was certain, for the moment, of his ability to do this; but the task of puzzling out a parallel circuit was far more daunting than the task, say, of driving to a discount store and waiting in line. The mental task required an inductive rediscovery of basic precepts; it required a rewiring of his own cerebral circuitry. It was truly marvelous that such a thing was even thinkable—that a forgetful old man alone in his basement with his shotgun and his sugar cookie and his big blue chair could spontaneously regenerate organic circuitry complex enough to understand electricity—but the energy that this reversal of entropy would cost him vastly exceeded the energy available to him in the form of his sugar cookie. Maybe if he ate a whole box of sugar cookies all at once, he could relearn parallel circuitry and make sense of the peculiar three-wire braiding of these infernal lights. But oh, my God, a person got so tired.

He shook the string and the dead lights came on again. He shook it and shook it and they didn’t go out. By the time he’d coiled the string back onto the makeshift spool, however, the deep interior was dark again. Two hundred bulbs were burning bright, and modernity insisted that he junk the whole thing.

He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn’t understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it.

And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.

You were outfitted as a boy with a will to fix things by yourself and with a respect for individual physical objects, but eventually some of your internal hardware (including such mental hardware as this will and this respect) became obsolete, and so, even though many other parts of you still functioned well, an argument could be made for junking the whole human machine.

Which was another way of saying he was tired.

He fitted the cookie into his mouth. Chewed carefully and swallowed. It was hell to get old.

Fortunately, there were thousands of other lights in the Maker’s Mark box. Alfred methodically plugged in each bunch. He found three shorter strings in good working order, but all the rest were either inexplicably dead or were so old that the light was faint and yellow; and three shorter strings wouldn’t cover the whole tree.

At the bottom of the box he found packages of replacement bulbs, carefully labeled. He found strings that he’d spliced back together after excising faulty segments. He found old serial strings whose broken sockets he’d hot-wired with drops of solder. He was amazed, in retrospect, that he’d had time to do all this repair work amid so many other responsibilities.

Oh, the myths, the childish optimism, of the fix! The hope that an object might never have to wear out. The dumb faith that there would always be a future in which he, Alfred, would not only be alive but have enough energy to make repairs. The quiet conviction that all his thrift and all his conservator’s passion would have a point, later on: that someday he would wake up transformed into a wholly different person with infinite energy and infinite time to attend to all the objects that he’d saved, to keep it all working, to keep it all together.

“I ought to pitch the whole damn lot of it,” he said aloud.

His hands wagged. They always wagged.

He took the shotgun into his workshop and leaned it against the laboratory bench.

The problem was insoluble. There he’d been, in extremely cold salty water, his lungs half-full and his heavy legs cramping and his shoulder useless in its socket, and all he would have had to do was nothing. Let go and drown. But he kicked, it was a reflex. He didn’t like the depths and so he kicked, and then down from above had rained orange flotation devices. He’d stuck his working arm through a hole in one of them just as a really serious combination of wave and undertow—the Gunnar Myrdal’s wake—sent him into a gargantuan wash-and-spin. All he would have had to do then was let go. And yet it was clear, even as he was nearly drowning there in the North Atlantic, that in the other place there would be no objects whatsoever: that this miserable orange flotation device through which he’d stuck his arm, this fundamentally inscrutable and ungiving fabric-clad hunk of foam, would be a GOD in the objectless world of death toward which he was headed, would be the SUPREME I-AM-WHAT-I-AM in that universe of unbeing. For a few minutes, the orange flotation device was the only object he had. It was his last object and so, instinctively, he loved it and pulled it close.

Then they hauled him out of the water and dried him off and wrapped him up. They treated him like a child, and he reconsidered the wisdom of surviving. There was nothing wrong with him except his one-eyed blindness and his non-working shoulder and a few other small things, but they spoke to him as if he were an idiot, a lad, a demented person. In their phony solicitude, their thinly veiled contempt, he saw the future that he’d chosen in the water. It was a nursing-home future and it made him weep. He should have just drowned.

He shut and locked the door of the laboratory, because it all came down to privacy, didn’t it? Without privacy there was no point in being an individual. And they would give him no privacy in a nursing home. They would be like the people on the helicopter and not leave him be.

He undid his pants, took out the rag that he kept folded in his underwear, and peed into a Yuban can.

He’d bought the gun a year before his retirement. He’d imagined that retirement would bring that radical transformation. He’d imagined himself hunting and fishing, imagined himself back in Kansas and Nebraska on a little boat at dawn, imagined a ridiculous and improbable life of recreation for himself.

The gun had a velvety, inviting action, but soon after he bought it, a starling had broken its neck on the kitchen window while he was eating lunch. He hadn’t been able to finish eating, and he’d never fired the gun.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter—to inflict that version of himself on other people—was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.

He was also afraid that it might hurt.

And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.

And the question was:

The question was:

Enid hadn’t felt ashamed at all, not the tiniest bit, when the warning horns were sounding and the Gunnar Myrdal was shuddering with the reversal of its thrusters and Sylvia Roth was pulling her through the crowded Pippi Longstocking Ballroom, crying, “Here’s his wife, let us through!” It hadn’t embarrassed Enid to see Dr. Hibbard again as he knelt on the shuffleboard deck and cut the wet clothes off her husband with dainty surgical clippers. Not even when the assistant cruise director who was helping her pack Alfred’s bags found a yellowed diaper in an ice bucket, not even when Alfred cursed the nurses and orderlies on the mainland, not even when the face of Khellye Withers on the TV in Alfred’s hospital room reminded her that she hadn’t said a comforting word to Sylvia on the eve of Withers’s execution, did she feel shame.

She returned to St. Jude in such good spirits that she was able to call Gary and confess that, rather than sending Alfred’s notarized patent-licensing agreement to the Axon Corporation, she’d hidden it in the laundry room. After Gary had given her the disappointing news that five thousand dollars was probably a reasonable licensing fee after all, she went to the basement to retrieve the notarized agreement and couldn’t find it in its hiding place. Strangely unembarrassed, she called Schwenksville and asked Axon to send her a duplicate set of contracts. Alfred was puzzled when she presented him with these duplicates, but she waved her hands and said, well, things get lost in the mail. Dave Schumpert again served as notary, and she was feeling quite all right until she ran out of Aslan and nearly died of shame.

Her shame was crippling and atrocious. It mattered to her now, as it hadn’t a week earlier, that a thousand happy travelers on the Gunnar Myrdal had witnessed how peculiar she and Alfred were. Everyone on the ship had understood that the landing at historic Gaspé was being delayed and the side trip to scenic Bonaventure Island was being canceled because the palsied man in the awful raincoat had gone where nobody was supposed to go, because his wife had selfishly enjoyed herself at an investment lecture, because she’d taken a drug so bad that no doctor in America could legally prescribe it, because she didn’t believe in God and she didn’t respect the law, because she was horribly, unspeakably different from other people.

Night after night she lay awake, suffered shame, and pictured the golden caplets. She was ashamed of lusting for these caplets, but she was also convinced that only they could bring relief.

In early November she took Alfred to the Corporate Woods Medical Complex for his bimonthly neurological checkup. Denise, who’d signed Alfred up for Axon’s Phase II testing of Corecktall, had been asking Enid if he seemed “demented.” Enid referred the question to Dr. Hedgpeth during his private interview with her, and Hedgpeth replied that Alfred’s periodic confusion did suggest early Alzheimer’s or Lewybody dementia—at which point Enid interrupted to ask whether possibly Alfred’s dopamine-boosters were causing his “hallucinations.” Hedgpeth couldn’t deny that this was possible. He said the only sure way to rule out dementia would be to put Alfred in the hospital for a ten-day “drug holiday.”

Enid, in her shame, didn’t mention to Hedgpeth that she was leery of hospitals now. She didn’t mention that there had been some raging and some thrashing and some cursing in the Canadian hospital, some overturning of Styrofoam water pitchers and of wheeled IV-drip stands, until Alfred was sedated. She didn’t mention that Alfred had requested that she shoot him before she put him in a place like that again.

Nor, when Hedgpeth asked how she was holding up, did she mention her little Aslan problem. Fearing that Hedgpeth would recognize her as a weak-willed, wild-eyed substance-craver, she didn’t even ask him for an alternative “sleep aid.” However, she did mention that she wasn’t sleeping well. She stressed this, in fact: not sleeping well at all. But Hedgpeth merely suggested that she try a different bed. He suggested Tylenol PM.

It seemed unfair to Enid, as she lay in the dark beside her snoring husband, that a drug legally purchasable in so many other countries should be unavailable to her in America. It seemed unfair that many of her friends had “sleep aids” of the sort that Hedgpeth had failed to offer her. How cruelly scrupulous Hedgpeth was! She could have gone to a different doctor, of course, and asked for a “sleep aid,” but this other doctor would surely wonder why her own doctors weren’t giving her the drugs.

Such was her situation when Bea and Chuck Meisner departed for six weeks of winter family fun in Austria. The day before the Meisners left, Enid had lunch with Bea at Deepmire and asked her to do her a favor in Vienna. She pressed into Bea’s hands a slip of paper on which she’d copied information from an empty SampLpak—ASLAN ‘Cruiser’ (rhadamanthine citrate 88%, 3-methyl-rhadamanthine chloride 12%)—with the annotation Temporarily unavailable in U. S., I need 6 months supply.

“Now, don’t bother if it’s any trouble,” she told Bea, “but if Klaus could write you a prescription, it would be so much easier than my doctor trying to get something from overseas, so, anyway, I hope you have a wonderful time in my favorite country!”

Enid couldn’t have asked such a shameful favor of anyone but Bea. Even Bea she dared to ask only because (a) Bea was a tiny bit dumb, and (b) Bea’s husband had once upon a time made his own shameful insider purchase of Erie Belt stock, and (c) Enid felt that Chuck had never properly thanked or compensated Alfred for that inside information.

No sooner had the Meisners flown away, however, than Enid’s shame mysteriously abated. As if an evil spell had worn off, she began to sleep better and think less about the drug. She brought her powers of selective forgetfulness to bear on the favor she’d asked of Bea. She began to feel like herself again, which was to say: optimistic.

She bought two tickets for a flight to Philadelphia on January 15. She told her friends that the Axon Corporation was testing an exciting new brain therapy called Corecktall and that Alfred, because he’d sold his patent to Axon, was eligible for the tests. She said that Denise was being a doll and offering to let her and Alfred stay in Philadelphia for as long as the testing lasted. She said that, no, Corecktall was not a laxative, it was a revolutionary new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. She said that, yes, the name was confusing, but it was not a laxative.

“Tell the people at Axon,” she told Denise, “that Dad has some mild symptoms of hallucination which his doctor says are probably drug-related. Then, see, if Corecktall helps him, we can take him off the medication, and the hallucinations will probably stop.”

She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days. She had tickets for the Christmasland light show and The Nutcracker; tree-trimming, sledding, caroling, and a Christmas Eve church service were also on the bill. She dug out cookie recipes that she hadn’t used in twenty years. She laid in eggnog.

On the Sunday before Christmas she awoke at 3:05 a.m. and thought: Thirty-six hours. Four hours later she got up thinking: Thirty-two hours. Late in the day she took Alfred to the street-association Christmas party at Dale and Honey Driblett’s, sat him down safely with Kirby Root, and proceeded to remind all her neighbors that her favorite grandson, who’d been looking forward all year to a Christmas in St. Jude, was arriving tomorrow afternoon. She located Alfred in the Dribletts’ downstairs bathroom and argued with him unexpectedly about his supposed constipation. She took him home and put him to bed, erased the argument from her memory, and sat down in the dining room to knock off another dozen Christmas cards.

Already the wicker basket for incoming greetings contained a four-inch stack of cards from old friends like Norma Greene and new friends like Sylvia Roth. More and more senders Xeroxed or word-processed their Christmas notes, but Enid was having none of this. Even if it meant being late with them, she’d undertaken to handwrite a hundred notes and hand-address nearly two hundred envelopes. Besides her standard Two-Paragraph Note and her four-paragraph Full Note, she had a boilerplate Short Note:

It was ten o’clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.

“Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!” Enid sang into the telephone.

“Some bad news here,” Gary said. “Jonah’s been throwing up and has a fever. I don’t think I can take him on the plane.”

This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.

“See how he feels in the morning,” she said. “Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he’ll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!”

“Mother.”

“If he’s really sick, Gary, I understand, he can’t come. But if he gets over his fever—”

“Believe me, we’re all disappointed. Especially Jonah.”

“No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day.”

“I’m warning you it will probably just be me.”

“Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don’t you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything’s going to work out fine!”

It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.

Early the next morning she was awakened—rewarded—by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip’s voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.

For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket—a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier—and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.

“It’s wonderful news about Chip, don’t you think?” she asked Alfred at breakfast.

Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

“Chip will be here tomorrow,” Enid repeated. “Isn’t that wonderful news? Aren’t you happy?”

Alfred consulted with the soggy mass of All-Bran on his wandering spoon. “Well,” he said. “If he comes.”

“He said he’d be here tomorrow afternoon,” Enid said. “Maybe, if he’s not too tired, he can go to The Nutcracker with us. I still have six tickets.”

“I am dubious,” Alfred said.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.

Enid had pinned her hopes, like a baby in a walnut shell, on Corecktall. If Alfred proved to be too confused to participate in the testing, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Her life therefore bore a strange resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were “addicted” to monitoring their investments. According to Bea, Chuck’s anxiety drove him to check quotes on his computer two or three times an hour, and the last time Enid and Alfred had gone out with the Persons, Joe had made Enid frantic by cell-phoning three different brokers from the restaurant. But she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful upswing, forever fearful of a crash.

Her freest hour of the day came after breakfast. Every morning, as soon as Alfred had downed his cup of hot milky water, he went to the basement and focused on evacuation. Enid wasn’t welcome to speak to him during this peak hour of his anxiety, but she could leave him to his own devices. His colonic preoccupations were a madness but not the kind of madness that would disqualify him for Corecktall.

Outside the kitchen window, snow flakes from an eerily blueclouded sky drifted through the twigs of an unthriving dogwood that had been planted (this really dated it) by Chuck Meisner. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon Jell-O. These foods, along with twice-baked potatoes, were official St. Jude favorites of Jonah’s and were on the menu for tonight.

For months she’d imagined Jonah pinning the Christ child to the Advent calendar on the morning of the twenty-fourth.

Elated by her second cup of coffee, she went upstairs and knelt by the old cherrywood dresser of Gary’s where she kept gifts and party favors. She’d finished her Christmas shopping weeks ago, but all she’d bought for Chip was a sale-priced brown-and-red Pendleton wool bathrobe. Chip had forfeited her goodwill several Christmases ago by sending her a used-looking cookbook, Foods of Morocco, wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with stick-on pictures of coat hangers with red slashes through them. Now that he was coming home from Lithuania, however, she wanted to reward him to the full extent of her gift budget. Which was:

    Alfred: no set amount

      Chip, Denise: $100 each, plus grapefruit

      Gary, Caroline: $60 each, maximum, plus grapefruit

      Aaron, Caleb: $30 each, maximum

      Jonah (this year only): no set amount

Having paid $55 for the bathrobe, she needed $45 worth of additional gifts for Chip. She rummaged in the dresser drawers. She rejected the vases in shopworn boxes from Hong Kong, the many matching bridge decks and score pads, the many thematic cocktail napkins, the really neat and really useless pen-and-pencil sets, the many travel alarm clocks that folded up or beeped in unusual ways, the shoehorn with a telescoping handle, the inexplicably dull Korean steak knives, the cork-bottomed bronze coasters with locomotives engraved on their faces, the ceramic 5×7 picture frame with the word “Memories” in glazed lavender script, the onyx turtle figurines from Mexico, and the cleverly boxed kit of ribbon and wrapping paper called The Gift of Giving. She weighed the suitability of the pewter candle snuffer and the Lucite saltshaker cum pepper grinder. Recalling the paucity of Chip’s home furnishings, she decided that the snuffer and the shaker/grinder would do just fine.

In the season of joy and miracles, while she wrapped, she forgot about the urine-smelling laboratory and its noxious crickets. She was able not to care that Alfred had put up the Christmas tree at a twenty-degree tilt. She could believe that Jonah was feeling just as healthy this morning as she was.

By the time she’d finished her wrapping, the light in the gull-plumage winter sky had a midday angle and intensity. She went down to the basement, where she found the Ping-Pong table buried under green strings of lights, like a chassis engulfed by kudzu, and Alfred seated on the floor with electrician’s tape, pliers, and extension cords.

“Damn these lights!” he said.

“Al, what are you doing on the floor?”

“These goddamned cheap new lights!”

“Don’t worry about them. Just leave them. Let Gary and Jonah do that. Come upstairs and have lunch.”

The flight from Philadelphia was due in at one-thirty. Gary was going to rent a car and be at the house by three, and Enid intended to let Alfred sleep in the meantime, because tonight she would have reinforcements. Tonight, if he got up and wandered, she wouldn’t be the only one on duty.

The quiet in the house after lunch was of such density that it nearly stopped the clocks. These final hours of waiting ought to have been the perfect time to write some Christmas cards, a win-win occasion in which either the minutes would fly by or she would get a lot of work done; but time could not be cheated in this way. Beginning a Short Note, she felt as if she were pushing her pen through molasses. She lost track of her words, wrote took an unexpected “swim” in an unexpected “swim,” and had to throw the card away. She stood up to check the kitchen clock and found that five minutes had passed since she’d last checked. She arranged an assortment of cookies on a lacquered wooden holiday plate. She set a knife and a huge pear on a cutting board. She shook a carton of eggnog. She loaded the coffeemaker in case Gary wanted coffee. She sat down to write a Short Note and saw in the blank whiteness of the card a reflection of her mind. She went to the window and peered out at the bleached zoysia lawn. The mailman, struggling with holiday volumes, was coming up the walk with a mighty bundle that he pushed through the slot in three batches. She pounced on the mail and sorted wheat from chaff, but she was too distracted to open the cards. She went down to the blue chair in the basement.

“Al,” she shouted, “I think you should get up.”

He sat up haystack-haired and empty-eyed. “Are they here?”

“Any minute. Maybe you want to freshen up.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Gary and Jonah, unless Jonah’s too sick.”

“Gary,” Alfred said. “And Jonah.”

“Why don’t you take a shower?”

He shook his head. “No showers.”

“If you want to be stuck in that tub when they get here—”

“I think I’m entitled to a bath, after the work I’ve done.”

There was a nice shower stall in the downstairs bathroom, but Alfred had never liked to stand while bathing. Since Enid now refused to help him get out of the upstairs tub, he sometimes sat there for an hour, the water cold and soap-gray at his haunches, before he contrived to extricate himself, because he was so stubborn.

He had bathwater running in the upstairs bathroom when the long-awaited knock finally came.

Enid rushed to the front door and opened it to the vision of her handsome elder son alone on the front stoop. He was wearing his calfskin jacket and holding a carry-on suitcase and a paper shopping bag. Sunlight, low and polarized, had found a way around the clouds, as it often did near the end of a winter day. Flooding the street was the preposterous golden indoor light with which a minor painter might illuminate the parting of the Red Sea. The bricks of the Persons’ house, the blue and purple winter clouds, and the dark green resinous shrubs were all so falsely vivid as to be not even pretty but alien, foreboding.

“Where’s Jonah?” Enid cried.

Gary came inside and set his bags down. “He still has a fever.”

Enid accepted a kiss. Needing a moment to collect herself, she told Gary to bring his other suitcase in while he was at it.

“This is my only suitcase,” he informed her in a courtroom kind of voice.

She stared at the tiny bag. “That’s all you brought?”

“Look, I know you’re disappointed about Jonah—”

“How high was his fever?”

“A hundred this morning.”

“A hundred is not a high fever!”

Gary sighed and looked away, tilting his head to align it with the axis of the listing Christmas tree. “Look,” he said. “Jonah’s disappointed. I’m disappointed. You’re disappointed. Can we leave it at that? We’re all disappointed.”

“It’s just that I’m all ready for him,” Enid said. “I made his favorite dinner—”

“I specifically warned you—”

“I got tickets for Waindell Park tonight!”

Gary shook his head and walked toward the kitchen. “So we’ll go to the park,” he said. “And then tomorrow Denise is here.”

“Chip too!”

Gary laughed. “What, from Lithuania?”

“He called this morning.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Gary said.

The world in the windows looked less real than Enid would have liked. The spotlight of sunshine coming in under the ceiling of cloud was the dream light of no familiar hour of the day. She had an intimation that the family she’d tried to bring together was no longer the family she remembered—that this Christmas would be nothing at all like the Christmases of old. But she was doing her best to adjust to the new reality. She was suddenly very excited that Chip was coming. And since Jonah’s wrapped gifts would now be going to Philadelphia with Gary, she needed to wrap some travel alarm clocks and pen-and-pencil sets for Caleb and Aaron to reduce the contrast in her giving. She could do this while she waited for Denise and Chip.

“I have so many cookies,” she told Gary, who was washing his hands fastidiously at the kitchen sink. “I have a pear that I can slice, and some of that dark coffee that you kids like.”

Gary sniffed her dish towel before he dried his hands with it.

Alfred began to bellow her name from upstairs.

“Uch, Gary,” she said, “he’s stuck in the tub again. You go help him. I won’t do it anymore.”

Gary dried his hands extremely thoroughly. “Why isn’t he using the shower like we talked about?”

“He says he likes to sit down.”

“Well, tough luck,” Gary said. “This is a man whose gospel is taking responsibility for yourself.”

Alfred bellowed her name again.

“Go, Gary, help him,” she said.

Gary, with ominous calm, smoothed and straightened the folded dish towel on its rack. “Here are the ground rules, Mother,” he said in the courtroom voice. “Are you listening? These are the ground rules. For the next three days, I will do anything you want me to do, except deal with Dad in situations he shouldn’t be in. If he wants to climb a ladder and fall off, I’m going to let him lie on the ground. If he bleeds to death, he bleeds to death. If he can’t get out of the bathtub without my help, he’ll be spending Christmas in the bathtub. Have I made myself clear? Apart from that, I will do anything you want me to do. And then, on Christmas morning, you and he and I are going to sit down and have a talk—”

“ENID.” Alfred’s voice was amazingly loud. “SOMEBODY’S AT THE DOOR!”

Enid sighed heavily and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Al, it’s Gary.”

“Can you help me?” came the cry.

“Gary, go see what he wants.”

Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. “Did I not make my ground rules clear?”

Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn’t around. She climbed the stairs slowly, trying to work a knot of pain out of her hip.

“Al,” she said, entering the bathroom, “I can’t help you out of the tub, you have to figure that out yourself.”

He was sitting in two inches of water with his arm extended and his fingers fluttering. “Get that,” he said.

“Get what?”

“That bottle.”

His bottle of Snowy Mane hair-whitening shampoo had fallen to the floor behind him. Enid knelt carefully on the bath mat, favoring her hip, and put the bottle in his hands. He massaged it vaguely, as though seeking purchase or struggling to remember how to open it. His legs were hairless, his hands spotted, but his shoulders were still strong.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, grinning at the bottle.

Whatever heat the water had begun with had dissipated in the December-cool room. There was a smell of Dial soap and, more faintly, old age. Enid had knelt in this exact spot thousands of times to wash her children’s hair and rinse their heads with hot water from a 11/2-quart saucepan that she brought up from the kitchen for that purpose. She watched her husband turn the shampoo bottle over in his hands.

“Oh, Al,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“Help me with this.”

“All right. I’ll help you”

The doorbell rang.

“There it is again.”

“Gary,” Enid called, “see who that is.” She squeezed shampoo into her palm. “You’ve got to start taking showers instead.”

“Not steady enough on my feet”

“Here, wet your hair.” She paddled a hand in the tepid water, to give Alfred the idea. He splashed some on his head. She could hear Gary talking to one of her friends, somebody female and chipper and St. Judean, Esther Root maybe.

“We can get a stool for the shower,” she said, lathering Alfred’s hair. “We can put a strong bar in there to hold on to, like Dr. Hedgpeth said we should. Maybe Gary can do that tomorrow.”

Alfred’s voice vibrated in his skull and on up through her fingers: “Gary and Jonah got in all right?”

“No, just Gary,” Enid said. “Jonah has a high, high fever and terrible vomiting. Poor kid, he’s much too sick to fly.”

Alfred winced in sympathy.

“Lean over now and I’ll rinse.”

If Alfred was trying to lean forward, it was evident only from a trembling in his legs, not from any change in his position.

“You need to do much more stretching,” Enid said. “Did you ever look at that sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth?”

Alfred shook his head. “Didn’t help.”

“Maybe Denise can teach you how to do those exercises. You might like that.”

She reached behind her for the water glass from the sink. She filled it and refilled it at the bathtub’s tap, pouring the hot water over her husband’s head. With his eyes squeezed shut he could have been a child.

“You’ll have to get yourself out now,” she said. “I won’t help you.”

“I have my own method,” he said.

Down in the living room Gary was kneeling to straighten the crooked tree.

“Who was at the door?” Enid said.

“Bea Meisner,” he said, not looking up. “There’s a gift on the mantel.”

“Bea Meisner?” A late flame of shame flickered in Enid. “I thought they were staying in Austria for the holiday.”

“No, they’re here for one day and then going to La Jolla.”

“That’s where Katie and Stew live. Did she bring anything?”

“On the mantel,” Gary said.

The gift from Bea was a festively wrapped bottle of something presumably Austrian.

“Anything else?” Enid said.

Gary, clapping fir needles from his hands, gave her a funny look. “Were you expecting something else?”

“No, no,” she said. “There was a silly little thing I asked her to get in Vienna, but I’m sure she forgot.”

Gary’s eyes narrowed. “What silly little thing?”

“Oh, nothing, just, nothing.” Enid examined the bottle to see if anything was attached to it. She’d survived her infatuation with Aslan, she’d done the work necessary to forget him, and she was by no means sure she wanted to see the Lion again. But the Lion still had power over her. She had a sensation from long ago, a pleasurable apprehension of a lover’s return. It made her miss how she used to miss Alfred.

She chided: “Why didn’t you invite her in?”

“Chuck was waiting in their Jaguar,” Gary said. “I gather they’re making the rounds.”

“Well.” Enid unwrapped the bottle—it was a Halb-Trocken Austrian champagne—to be sure there was no hidden package.

“That is an extremely sugary-looking wine,” Gary said.

She asked him to build a fire. She stood and marveled as her competent gray-haired son walked steadily to the woodpile, returned with a load of logs on one arm, deftly arranged them in the fireplace, and lit a match on the first try. The whole job took five minutes. Gary was doing nothing more than function the way a man was supposed to function, and yet, in contrast to the man Enid lived with, his capabilities seemed godlike. His least gesture was glorious to watch.

Along with her relief at having him in the house, though, came the awareness of how soon he would leave again.

Alfred, wearing a sport coat, stopped in the living room and visited with Gary for a minute before repairing to the den for a high-decibel dose of local news. His age and his stoop had taken two or three inches off his height, which not long ago had been the same as Gary’s.

While Gary, with exquisite motor control, hung the lights on the tree, Enid sat by the fire and unpacked the liquor cartons in which she kept her ornaments. Everywhere she’d traveled she’d spent the bulk of her pocket money on ornaments. In her mind, while Gary hung them, she traveled back to a Sweden populated by straw reindeers and little red horses, to a Norway whose citizens wore authentic Lapp reindeer-skin boots, to a Venice where all the animals were made of glass, to a dollhouse Germany of enameled wood Santas and angels, to an Austria of wooden soldiers and tiny Alpine churches. In Belgium the doves of peace were made of chocolate and wrapped decoratively in foil, and in France the gendarme dolls and artiste dolls were impeccably dressed, and in Switzerland the bronze bells tinkled above overtly religious mini-crèches. Andalusia was atwitter with gaudy birds; Mexico jangled with its painted tin cutouts. On the high plateaux of China, the noiseless gallop of a herd of silk horses. In Japan, the Zen silence of its lacquered abstractions.

Gary hung each ornament as Enid directed. He was seeming different to her—calmer, more matoor, more deliberate—until she asked him to do a little job for her tomorrow.

“Installing a bar in the shower is not a ‘little job,’” he replied. “It would have made sense a year ago, but it doesn’t now. Dad can use the bathtub for another few days until we deal with this house.”

“It’s still four weeks before we fly to Philadelphia,” Enid said. “I want him to get in the habit of using the shower. I want you to buy a stool and put a bar in there tomorrow, so it’s done.”

Gary sighed. “Are you thinking you and Dad can actually stay in this house?”

“If Corecktall helps him—”

“Mother, he’s being evaluated for dementia. Do you honestly believe—”

“For non-drug-related dementia.”

“Look, I don’t want to puncture your bubble—”

“Denise has it all set up. We have to try it.”

 “So, and then what?” Gary said. “He’s miraculously cured, and the two of you live here happily ever after?”

The light in the windows had died entirely. Enid didn’t understand why her sweet, responsible oldest child, with whom she’d felt such a bond from his infancy onward, became so angry, now, when she came to him in need. She unwrapped a Styrofoam ball that he’d decorated with fabric and sequins when he was nine or ten. “Do you remember this?”

Gary took the ball. “We made these in Mrs. Ostriker’s class.”

“You gave it to me.”

“Did I?”

“You said you’d do anything I asked tomorrow,” Enid said. “This is what I’m asking.”

“All right! All right!” Gary threw his hands in the air. “I’ll buy the stool! I’ll install the bar!”

After dinner he took the Olds from the garage, and the three of them went to Christmasland.

From the back seat Enid could see the undersides of clouds catching urban light; the patches of clear sky were darker and riddled with stars. Gary piloted the car down narrow suburban roads to the limestone gates of Waindell Park, where a long queue of cars, trucks, and minivans was waiting to enter.

“Look at all the cars,” Alfred said with no trace of his old impatience.

By charging admission to Christmasland, the county helped defray the cost of mounting this annual extravaganza. A county park ranger took the Lamberts’ ticket and told Gary to extinguish all but his parking lights. The Olds crept forward in a line of darkened vehicles that had never looked more like animals than they did now, collectively, in their humble procession through the park.

For most of the year, Waindell was a tired place of burnt grass, brown ponds, and unambitious limestone pavilions. In December, by day, it looked its very worst. Garish cables and utilitarian power lines crisscrossed the lawns. Armatures and scaffolds were exposed in their flimsiness, their provisionality, their metallic knobbiness of joint. Hundreds of trees and shrubs were draped in light strings, limbs sagging as if hammered by a freezing rain of glass and plastic.

By night the park was Christmasland. Enid drew breath sharply as the Olds crept up a hill of light and across a landscape made luminous. Just as the beasts were said to speak on Christmas Eve, so the natural order of the suburbs seemed overturned here, the ordinarily dark land alive with light, the ordinarily lively road dark with crawling traffic.

 The mild gradients of Waindell’s slopes and the intimacy of its ridgelines’ relations with the sky were midwestern. So, it seemed to Enid, were the hush and patience of the drivers; so were the isolated close-knit frontier communities of oaks and maples. She’d spent the last eight Christmases exiled in the alien East, and now, at last, she felt at home. She imagined being buried in this landscape. She was happy to think of her bones resting on a hillside such as this.

There came scintillant pavilions, luminous reindeer, pendants and necklaces of gathered photons, electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces, a glade of towering glowing candy canes.

“Lot of work involved here,” Alfred commented.

“Well, I’m sorry Jonah couldn’t come after all,” Gary said, as if, until now, he had not been sorry.

The spectacle was nothing more than lights in darkness, but Enid was speechless. So often credulity was asked of you, so seldom could you summon it absolutely, but here at Waindell Park she could. Somebody had set out to delight all comers, and Enid was delighted. And tomorrow Denise and Chip came, tomorrow was The Nutcracker, and on Wednesday they would take the Christ baby from its pocket and pin the walnut cradle to the tree: she had so much to look forward to.

In the morning, Gary drove over to Hospital City, the close-in suburb where St. Jude’s big medical centers were concentrated, and held his breath among the eighty-pound men in wheelchairs and the five-hundred-pound women in tentlike dresses who clogged the aisles of Central Discount Medical Supply. Gary hated his mother for sending him here, but he recognized how lucky he was in comparison to her, how free and advantaged, and so he set his jaw and kept maximum distance from the bodies of these locals who were loading up on syringes and rubber gloves, on butterscotch bedside candies, on absorptive pads in every imaginable size and shape, on jumbo 144-packs of get-well cards and CDs of flute music and videos of visualization exercises and disposable plastic hoses and bags that connected to harder plastic interfaces sewn into living flesh.

Gary’s problem with illness in aggregate, aside from the fact that it involved large quantities of human bodies and that he didn’t like human bodies in large quantities, was that it seemed to him low-class. Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical. They were a dumber, sadder, fatter, more resignedly suffering breed. A Diseased underclass that he really, really liked to keep away from.

However, he’d arrived in St. Jude feeling guilty about several circumstances that he’d concealed from Enid, and he’d vowed to be a good son for three days, and so in spite of his embarrassment he pushed through the crowds of the lame and halt, entered Central Discount Medical’s vast furniture showroom, and looked for a stool for his father to sit on while he showered.

A full-symphonic version of the most tedious Christmas song ever written, “Little Drummer Boy,” dripped from hidden speakers in the showroom. The morning outside the showroom’s plate-glass windows was brilliant, windy, cold. A sheet of newsprint wrapped itself around a parking meter with erotic-looking desperation. Awnings creaked and automotive mud flaps shivered.

The wide array of medical stools and the variety of afflictions to which they attested might have upset Gary had he not been able to make aesthetic judgments.

He wondered, for example, why beige. Medical plastic was usually beige; at best, a sickly gray. Why not red? Why not black? Why not teal?

Maybe the beige plastic was intended to ensure that the furniture be used for medical purposes only. Maybe the manufacturer was afraid that, if the chairs were too handsome, people would be tempted to buy them for nonmedical purposes.

There was a problem to avoid, all right: too many people wanting to buy your product!

Gary shook his head. The idiocy of these manufacturers.

He picked out a sturdy, low aluminum stool with a wide beige seat. He selected a heavy-duty (beige!) gripping bar for the shower. Marveling at the gouge-level pricing, he took these items to the checkout counter, where a friendly midwestern girl, possibly evangelical (she had a brocade sweater and feather-cut bangs), showed the bar codes to a laser beam and remarked to Gary, in a downstate drawl, that these aluminum chairs were really a super product. “So lahtweight, practically indestructible,” she said. “Is it for your mom or your dad?”

Gary resented invasions of his privacy and refused the girl the satisfaction of an answer. He did, however, nod.

“Our older folks get shaky in the shower at a certain point. Guess it happens to us all, eventually.” The young philosopher swiped Gary’s AmEx through a groove. “You home for the holidays, helpin’ out a little bit?”

“You know what these stools would really be good for,” Gary said, “would be to hang yourself. Don’t you think?”

Life drained from the girl’s smile. “I don’t know about that.”

“Nice and light—easy to kick away.”

“Sign this, please, sir.”

He had to fight the wind to push the Exit door open. The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.

Driving north toward the airport, with the low sun mercifully behind him, Gary wondered if he’d been cruel to the girl. Possibly he had. But he was under stress, and a person under stress, it seemed to him, had a right to be strict in the boundaries he established for himself—strict in his moral accounting, strict about what he would and wouldn’t do, strict about who he was and who he wasn’t and whom he would and wouldn’t talk to. If a perky, homely evangelical girl insisted on talking, he had a right to choose the topic.

He was aware, nevertheless, that if the girl had been more attractive, he might have been less cruel.

Everything in St. Jude strove to put him in the wrong. But in the months since he’d surrendered to Caroline (and his hand had healed nicely, thank you, with hardly a scar), he’d reconciled himself to being the villain in St. Jude. When you knew in advance that your mother would consider you the villain no matter what you did, you lost your incentive to play by her rules. You asserted your own rules. You did whatever it took to preserve yourself. You pretended, if need be, that a healthy child of yours was sick.

The truth about Jonah was that he’d freely chosen not to come to St. Jude. This was in accordance with the terms of Gary’s surrender to Caroline in October. Holding five nonrefundable plane tickets to St. Jude, Gary had told his family that he wanted everyone to come along with him for Christmas, but that nobody would be forced to go. Caroline and Caleb and Aaron had all instantly and loudly said no thank you; Jonah, still under the spell of his grandmother’s enthusiasm, declared that he would “very much like” to go. Gary never actually promised Enid that Jonah was coming, but he also never warned her that he might not.

In November Caroline bought four tickets to see the magician Alain Gregarius on December 22 and another four tickets for The Lion King in New York City on December 23. “Jonah can come along if he’s here,” she explained, “otherwise Aaron or Caleb can bring a friend.” Gary wanted to ask why she hadn’t bought tickets for the week after Christmas, which would have spared Jonah a difficult choice. Ever since the October surrender, however, he and Caroline had been enjoying a second honeymoon, and although it was understood that Gary, as a dutiful son, would be going to St. Jude for three days, a shadow fell on his domestic bliss whenever he made reference to the trip. The more days that elapsed without mention of Enid or Christmas, the more Caroline seemed to want him, the more she included him in her private jokes with Aaron and Caleb, and the less depressed he felt. Indeed, the topic of his depression hadn’t come up once since the morning of Alfred’s fall. Silence on the topic of Christmas seemed a small price to pay for such domestic harmony.

And for a while the treats and attention that Enid had promised Jonah in St. Jude seemed to outweigh the attractions of Alain Gregarius and The Lion King. Jonah mused aloud at the dinner table about Christmasland and the Advent calendar that Grandma talked so much about; he ignored, or didn’t see, the winks and smiles that Caleb and Aaron were exchanging. But Caroline more and more openly encouraged the older boys to laugh at their grandparents and to tell stories about Alfred’s cluelessness (“He called it Intendo!”) and Enid’s puritanism (“She asked what the show was rated!”) and Enid’s parsimony (“There were two green beans and she wrapped them up in foil!”), and Gary, since his surrender, had begun to join in the laughter himself (“Grandma is funny, isn’t she?”), and finally Jonah became self-conscious about his plans. At the age of eight, he fell under the tyranny of Cool. First he ceased to bring up Christmas at the dinner table, and then when Caleb with his trademark semi-irony asked if he was looking forward to Christmasland, Jonah replied, in an effortfully wicked voice, “It’s probably really stupid.”

“Lots of fat people in big cars driving around in the dark,” Aaron said.

“Telling each other how wunnerful it is,” Caroline said.

“Wunnerful, wunnerful,” Caleb said.

“You shouldn’t make fun of your grandmother,” Gary said.

“They’re not making fun of her,” Caroline said.

“Right, we’re not,” Caleb said. “It’s just that people are funny in St. Jude. Aren’t they, Jonah?”

“People certainly are very large there,” Jonah said.

On Saturday night, three days ago, Jonah had thrown up after dinner and gone to bed with a mild fever. By Sunday evening, his color and appetite were back to normal, and Caroline played her final trump. For Aaron’s birthday, earlier in the month, she’d bought an expensive computer game, God Project II, in which players designed and operated organisms to compete in a working ecosystem. She hadn’t allowed Aaron and Caleb to start the game until classes ended, and now, when they finally did start, she insisted that they let Jonah be Microbes, because Microbes, in any ecosystem, had the most fun and never lost.

By bedtime on Sunday, Jonah was entranced with his team of killer bacteria and looked forward to sending them into battle the next day. When Gary woke him on Monday morning and asked if he was coming to St. Jude, Jonah said he’d rather stay home.

“It’s your choice,” Gary said. “But it would mean a lot to your grandma if you came.”

“What if it’s not fun, though?”

“There’s never a guarantee that something’s going to be fun,” Gary said. “But you’ll make Grandma happy. That’s one thing I can guarantee.”

Jonah’s face clouded. “Can I think about it for an hour?”

“OK, one hour. But then we have to pack and go.”

The end of the hour found Jonah deeply immersed in God Project II. One strain of his bacteria had blinded eighty percent of Aaron’s small hoofed mammals.

“It’s OK not to go,” Caroline assured Jonah. “Your personal choice is what matters here. This is your vacation.”

Nobody will be forced to go .

“I’ll say it one more time,” Gary said. “Your grandma is really looking forward to seeing you.”

To Caroline’s face there came a desolation, a deep tearful stare, reminiscent of the troubles in September. She rose without a word and left the entertainment room.

Jonah’s answer came in a voice not much louder than a whisper: “I think I’m going to stay here.”

If it had still been September, Gary might have seen in Jonah’s decision a parable of the crisis of moral duty in a culture of consumer choice. He might have become depressed. But he’d been down that road now and he knew there was nothing for him at the end of it.

He packed his bag and kissed Caroline. “I’ll be happy when you’re back,” she said.

In a strict moral sense Gary knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d never promised Enid that Jonah was coming. It was simply to spare himself an argument that he’d lied about Jonah’s fever.

Similarly, to spare Enid’s feelings, he hadn’t mentioned that in the six business days since the IPO, his five thousand shares of Axon Corporation stock, for which he’d paid $60,000, had risen in value to $118,000. Here again, he’d done nothing wrong, but given the pitiful size of Alfred’s patent-licensing fee from Axon, concealment seemed the wisest policy.

The same also went for the little package Gary had zipped into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Jets were dropping from the bright sky, happy in their metal skins, while he jockeyed through the crush of senior traffic converging at the airport. The days before Christmas were the St. Jude airport’s finest hour—its raison d’être, almost. Every garage was full and every walkway thronged.

Denise was right on time, however. Even the airlines conspired to protect her from the embarrassment of a late arrival or an inconvenienced brother. She was standing, per family custom, at a little-used gate on the departure level. Her overcoat was a crazy garnet woolen thing with pink velvet trim, and something about her head seemed different to Gary—more makeup than usual, maybe. More lipstick. Each time he’d seen Denise in the last year (most recently at Thanksgiving), she’d looked more emphatically unlike the person he’d always imagined that she would grow up to be.

When he kissed her, he smelled cigarettes.

“You’ve become a smoker,” he said, making room in the trunk for her suitcase and shopping bag.

Denise smiled. “Unlock the door, I’m freezing.”

Gary flipped open his sunglasses. Driving south into glare, he was nearly sideswiped while merging. Road aggression was encroaching in St. Jude; traffic no longer moved so sluggishly that an eastern driver could pleasurably slalom through it.

“I bet Mom’s happy Jonah’s here,” Denise said.

“As a matter of fact, Jonah is not here.”

Her head turned sharply. “You didn’t bring him?”

“He got sick.”

“I can’t believe it. You didn’t bring him!”

She seemed not to have considered, even for a moment, that he might be telling the truth.

“There are five people in my house,” Gary said. “As far as I know, there’s only one in yours. Things are more complicated when you have multiple responsibilities.”

“I’m just sorry you had to get Mom’s hopes up.”

“It’s not my fault if she chooses to live in the future.”

“You’re right,” Denise said. “It’s not your fault. I just wish it hadn’t happened.”

“Speaking of Mom,” Gary said, “I want to tell you a very weird thing. But you have to promise not to tell her.”

“What weird thing?”

“Promise you won’t tell her.”

Denise so promised, and Gary unzipped the inner pocket of his jacket and showed her the package that Bea Meisner had given him the day before. The moment had been fully bizarre: Chuck Meisner’s Jaguar in the street, idling amid cetacean puffs of winter exhaust, Bea Meisner standing on the Welcome mat in her embroidered green loden coat while she dug from her purse a seedy and much-handled little packet, Gary setting down the wrapped bottle of champagne and taking delivery of the contraband. “This is for your mother,” Bea had said. “But you must tell her that Klaus says to be very careful with this. He didn’t want to give it to me at all. He says it can be very, very addictive, which is why I only got a little bit. She wanted six months, but Klaus would only give me one. So you tell her to be sure and talk to her doctor. Maybe, Gary, you should even hold on to it until she does that. Anyway, have a wonderful Christmas”—here the Jaguar’s horn beeped—“and give our best love to everyone.”

Gary recounted this to Denise while she opened the packet. Bea had folded up a page torn from a German magazine and taped it shut. On one side of the page was a bespectacled German cow promoting ultrapasteurized milk. Inside were thirty golden pills.

“My God.” Denise laughed. “Mexican A.”

“Never heard of it,” Gary said.

“Club drug. Very young-person.”

“And Bea Meisner is delivering it to Mom at our front door.”

“Does Mom know you took it?”

“Not yet. I don’t even know what this stuff does.”

Denise reached over with her smoky fingers and put a pill near his mouth. “Try one.”

Gary jerked his head away. His sister seemed to be on some drug herself, something stronger than nicotine. She was greatly happy or greatly unhappy or a dangerous combination of the two. She was wearing silver rings on three fingers and a thumb.

“Is this a drug you’ve tried?” he said.

“No, I stick with alcohol.”

She folded up the packet and Gary took control of it again. “I want to make sure you’re with me on this,” he said. “Do you agree that Mom should not be receiving illegal addictive substances from Bea Meisner?”

“No,” Denise said. “I don’t agree. She’s an adult and she can do what she wants. And I don’t think it’s fair to take her pills without telling her. If you don’t tell her, I will.”

“Excuse me, I believe you promised not to,” Gary said.

Denise considered this. Salt-splashed embankments were flying past.

“OK, maybe I promised,” she said. “But why are you trying to run her life?”

“I think you’ll see,” he said, “that the situation is out of hand. I think you’ll see that it’s about time somebody stepped in and ran her life.”

Denise didn’t argue with him. She put on shades and looked at the towers of Hospital City on the brutal south horizon. Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one “alternative” sibling and he didn’t need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it undercut the pleasure he took in his home and job and family; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life. He was especially galled that the latest defector to the “alternative” was not some flaky Other from a family of Others or a class of Others but his own stylish and talented sister, who as recently as September had excelled in conventional ways that his friends could read about in the New York Times. Now she’d quit her job and was wearing four rings and a flaming coat and reeking of tobacco…

Carrying the aluminum stool, he followed her into the house. He compared her reception by Enid to the reception he’d received the day before. He took note of the duration of the hug, the lack of instant criticism, the smiles all around.

Enid cried: “I thought maybe you’d run into Chip at the airport and all three of you would be coming home!”

“That scenario is implausible in eight different ways,” Gary said.

“He told you he’d be here today?” Denise said.

“This afternoon,” Enid said. “Tomorrow at the latest.”

“Today, tomorrow, next April,” Gary said. “Whatever.”

“He said there was some trouble in Lithuania,” Enid said.

While Denise went to find Alfred, Gary fetched the morning Chronicle from the den. In a box of international news sandwiched between lengthy features (“New ‘Peticures’ Make Dogs ‘Red in Claw’ ” and “Are Ophthalmologists Overpaid?—Docs Say No, Optometrists Say Yes”) he located a paragraph about Lithuania: civil unrest following disputed parliamentary elections and attempted assassination of President Vitkunas… three-fourths of the country without electricity… rival paramilitary groups clashing on the streets of Vilnius… and the airport—

“The airport is closed,” Gary read aloud with satisfaction. “Mother? Did you hear me?”

“He was already at the airport yesterday,” Enid said. “I’m sure he got out.”

“Then why hasn’t he called?”

“He was probably running to catch a flight.”

At a certain point Enid’s capacity for fantasy became physically painful to Gary. He opened his wallet and presented her with the receipt for the shower stool and safety bar.

“I’ll write you a check later,” she said.

“How about now, before you forget.”

Muttering and soughing, Enid complied with his wishes.

Gary examined the check. “Why is this dated December twenty-six?”

“Because that’s the soonest you could possibly deposit it in Philadelphia.”

Their skirmishing continued through lunch. Gary slowly drank a beer and slowly drank a second, relishing the distress that he was causing Enid as she told him for a third time and a fourth time that he’d better get started on that shower project. When he finally stood up from the table, it occurred to him that his impulse to run Enid’s life was the logical response to her own insistence on running his.

The safety shower bar was a fifteen-inch length of beige enamel pipe with flanged elbows at each end. The stubby screws included in the package might have sufficed to attach the bar to plywood but were useless with ceramic tile. To secure the bar, he would have to run six-inch bolts through the wall into the little closet behind the shower.

Down in Alfred’s workshop, he was able to find masonry bits for the electric drill, but the cigar boxes that he remembered as cornucopias of useful hardware seemed mainly to contain corroded, orphaned screws and strike plates and toilet-tank fittings. Certainly no six-inch bolts.

Departing for the hardware store, wearing his I’m-a-jerk smile, he noticed Enid at the dining-room windows, peering out through a sheer curtain.

“Mother,” he said. “I think it’s important not to get your hopes up about Chip.”

“I just thought I heard a car door in the street.”

Fine, go ahead , Gary thought as he left the house, fixate on whoever isn’t here and oppress whoever is.

On the front walk he passed Denise, who was returning from the supermarket with groceries. “I hope you’re letting Mom pay for those,” he said.

His sister laughed in his face. “What difference does it make to you?”

“She’s always trying to get away with things. It burns me up.”

“So redouble your vigilance,” Denise said, proceeding toward the house.

Why, exactly, had he been feeling guilty? He’d never promised to bring Jonah on the trip, and although he was currently ahead by $58,000 on his Axon investment he’d worked hard for those shares and he’d taken all the risk, and Bea Meisner herself had urged him not to give Enid the addictive drug; so why had he felt guilty?

As he drove, he imagined the needle on his cranial-pressure gauge creeping clockwise. He was sorry he’d offered his services to Enid. Given the brevity of his visit, it was stupid to spend the afternoon on a job she should have paid a handyman to do.

At the hardware store, he stood in the checkout line behind the fattest and slowest people in the central tier of states. They’d come to buy marshmallow Santas, packages of tinsel, venetian blinds, eight-dollar blow-dryers, and holiday-theme pot-holders. With their bratwurst fingers they dug for exact change in tiny purses. White cartoon puffs of steam shot out of Gary’s ears. All the fun things he could be doing instead of waiting half an hour to buy six six-inch bolts assumed ravishing form in his imagination. He could be visiting the Collector’s Room at the Museum of Transport gift shop, or sorting out the old bridge and track drawings from his father’s early career at the Midland Pacific, or searching the under-porch storeroom for his long-missing O-gauge model railroad equipment. With the lifting of his “depression,” he’d developed a new interest, hobbylike in its intensity, in framable and collectible railroad memorabilia, and he could happily have spent the whole day—the whole week!—pursuing it…

Back at the house, as he was heading up the walk, he saw the sheer curtains part, his mother peering out again. Inside, the air was steamy and dense with the smell of foods that Denise was baking, simmering, and browning. Gary gave Enid the receipt for the bolts, which she regarded as the token of hostility that it was.

“You can’t afford four dollars and ninety-six cents?”

“Mother,” he said. “I’m doing the work like I promised. But this is not my bathroom. This is not my safety bar.”

“I’ll get the money for you later.”

“You might forget.”

“Gary, I will get the money for you later.”

Denise, in an apron, followed this exchange from the kitchen doorway with laughing eyes.

When Gary made his second trip to the basement, Alfred was snoring in the big blue chair. Gary proceeded into the workshop, and here he was stopped in his tracks by a new discovery. A shotgun in a canvas case was leaning against the lab bench. He didn’t remember having seen it here earlier. Could he have somehow failed to notice it? Ordinarily the gun was kept in the under-porch storeroom. He was sorry indeed to see that it had moved.

Do I let him shoot himself?

The question was so clear in his mind that he almost spoke it out loud. And he considered. It was one thing to intervene on behalf of Enid’s safety and confiscate her drugs; there was life and hope and pleasure worth saving in Enid. The old man, however, was kaput.

At the same time, Gary had no wish to hear a gunshot and come down and wade into the gore. He didn’t want his mother to go through this, either.

And yet, horrible though the mess would be, it would be followed by a huge quantum uptick in the quality of his mother’s life.

Gary opened the box of shells on the bench and saw that none were missing. He wished that someone else, not he, had noticed that Alfred had moved the gun. But his decision, when it came, was so clear in his mind that he did speak it out loud. Into the dusty, uric, nonreverberative silence of the laboratory he said: “If that’s what you want, be my guest. I ain’t gonna stop you.”

Before he could drill holes in the shower, he had to clear the shelves of the little bathroom closet. This in itself was a substantial job. Enid had saved, in a shoe box, every cotton ball she’d ever taken from a bottle of aspirin or prescription medication. There were five hundred or a thousand cotton balls. There were petrified half-squeezed tubes of ointment. There were plastic pitchers and utensils (in colors even worse, if possible, than beige) from Enid’s admissions to the hospital for foot surgery, knee surgery, and phlebitis. There were dear little bottles of Mercurochrome and Anbesol that had dried up sometime in the 1960s. There was a paper bag that Gary quickly, for the sake of his composure, threw to the back of a high shelf because it appeared to contain ancient menstrual belts and pads.

The daylight was fading by the time he had the closet empty and was ready to drill six holes. It was then that he discovered that the old masonry bits were as dull as rivets. He leaned into the drill with all his weight, the tip of the bit turned bluish-black and lost its temper, and the old drill began to smoke. Sweat came pouring down his face and chest.

Alfred chose this moment to step into the bathroom. “Well, look at this,” he said.

“You got some pretty dull masonry bits here,” Gary said, breathing heavily. “I should have bought some new ones while I was at the store.”

“Let me see,” Alfred said.

It hadn’t been Gary’s intention to attract the old man and the agitated twin fingered animals that were his advance guard. He shied from the incapacity and greedy openness of these hands, but Alfred’s eyes were fixed on the drill now, his face bright with the possibility of solving a problem. Gary relinquished the drill. He wondered how his father could even see what he was holding, the drill shook so violently. The old man’s fingers crawled around its tarnished surface, groping like eyeless worms.

“You got it on Reverse,” he said.

With the ridged yellow nail of his thumb, Alfred pushed the polarity switch to Forward and handed the drill back to Gary, and for the first time since his arrival, their eyes met. The chill that ran through Gary was only partly from his cooling sweat. The old man, he thought, still had a few lights on upstairs. Alfred, indeed, looked downright happy: happy to have fixed a thing and even happier, Gary suspected, to have proved that he was smarter, in this tiny instance, than his son.

“We can see why I’m not an engineer,” Gary said.

“What’s the project?”

“I’m putting in this bar to hold on to. Are you going to use the shower if we put a stool and a bar in here?”

“I don’t know what they have planned for me,” Alfred said as he was leaving.

That was your Christmas present, Gary told him silently. Flipping that switch was your present from me.

An hour later he had the bathroom back together and was in a fully nasty mood again. Enid had second-guessed his siting of the bar, and Alfred, when Gary invited him to try the new stool, had announced that he preferred a bath.

“I’ve done my part and now I’m done,” Gary said in the kitchen, pouring liquor. “Tomorrow I have a few things that I want to do.”

“It’s a wonderful improvement in the bathroom,” Enid said.

Gary poured heavily. Poured and poured.

“Oh, Gary,” she said, “I thought we might open that champagne Bea brought us.”

“Oh, let’s not,” said Denise, who had baked a stollen, a coffee cake, and two loaves of cheese bread and was preparing, if Gary was not mistaken, a dinner of polenta and braised rabbit. Safe to say it was the first time this kitchen had ever seen a rabbit.

Enid returned to hovering by the dining-room windows. “I’m worried that he isn’t calling,” she said.

Gary joined her by the window, his glial cells purring with the first sweet lubrication of his drink. He asked if she was familiar with Occam’s razor.

“Occam’s razor,” he said with cocktail sententiousness, “invites us to choose the simpler of two explanations for a phenomenon.”

“Well, what’s your point,” Enid said.

“My point,” he said, “is that it’s possible that Chip hasn’t called you because of something complicated that we know nothing about. Or it could be because of something very simple and well known to us, namely, his incredible irresponsibility.”

“He said he was coming and he said he would call,” Enid answered flatly. “He said, I’m coming home.”

“All right. Fine. Stand at the window. It’s your choice.”

Because he was expected to drive to The Nutcracker, Gary couldn’t do as much drinking as he might have wished before dinner. He therefore did quite a bit more as soon as the family came home from the ballet and Alfred headed upstairs, practically at a run, and Enid bedded down in the den with the intention of letting her children handle any problems in the night. Gary drank scotch and checked in with Caroline. He drank scotch and searched the house for Denise and found no sign of her. From his own room he fetched his Christmas packages and arranged them under the tree. He was giving everybody the same gift: a leather-bound copy of the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album. He’d pushed hard to get all the printing done in time for the holiday, and now that the album was complete, he planned to dismantle the darkroom, spend some of his Axon profits, and build a model-railroad setup on the second floor of the garage. It was a hobby that he’d chosen for himself, rather than having it chosen for him, and as he laid his scotchy head on the cold pillow and turned out the light in his old St. Judean bedroom, he was gripped by an ancient excitement at the prospect of running trains through mountains of papier-mâché, across high Popsicle-stick trestles…

He dreamed ten Christmases in the house. He dreamed of rooms and people, rooms and people. He dreamed that Denise was not his sister and was going to murder him. His only hope was the shotgun in the basement. He was examining this shotgun, making sure that it was loaded, when he felt an evil presence behind him in the workshop. He turned around and didn’t recognize Denise. The woman he saw was some other woman whom he had to kill or be killed by. And there was no resistance in the shotgun’s trigger; it dangled, limp and futile. The gun was on Reverse, and by the time he got it on Forward, she was coming to kill him—

He woke up needing to pee.

The darkness in his room was relieved only by the glow of the digital clock radio, whose face he didn’t check because he didn’t want to know how early it still was. He could dimly see the loaf of Chip’s old bed by the opposite wall. The silence of the house felt momentary and unpeaceful. Recently fallen.

Honoring this silence, Gary eased himself out of bed and crept toward the door; and here the terror struck him.

He was afraid to open the door.

He strained to hear what was happening outside it. He thought he could hear vague shiftings and creepings, faraway voices.

He was afraid to go to the bathroom because he didn’t know what he would find there. He was afraid that if he left his room he would find the wrong person, his mother maybe, or his sister or his father, in his bed when he came back..

He was convinced that people were moving in the hallway. In his clouded, imperfect wakefulness, he connected the Denise who’d disappeared before he went to bed to the Denise-like phantom who was trying to kill him in his dream.

The possibility that this phantom killer was even now lurking in the hall seemed only ninety percent fantastical.

It was safer all around, he thought, to stay in his room and pee into one of the decorative Austrian beer steins on his dresser.

But what if his tinkling attracted the attention of whoever was creeping around outside his door?

Moving on tiptoe, he took a beer stein into the closet that he’d shared with Chip ever since Denise was given the smaller bedroom and the boys were put together. He pulled the closet door shut after him, crowded up against the dry-cleaned garments and the bursting Nordstrom bags of miscellany that Enid had taken to storing here, and relieved himself into the beer stein. He lipped a fingertip over the rim so that he could feel if he was going to over flow it. Just when the warmth of rising urine had reached this fingertip, his bladder finally emptied. He lowered the stein to the closet floor, took an envelope from a Nordstrom bag, and covered the mouth of the receptacle.

Quietly, quietly, then, he left the closet and returned to his bed. As he was swinging his legs off the floor, he heard Denise’s voice. It was so distinct and conversational that she might have been in the room with him. She said, “Gary?”

He tried not to move, but the bedsprings creaked.

“Gary? Sorry to bother you. Are you awake?”

He had little choice now but to get up and open the door. Denise was right outside it, wearing white flannel pajamas and standing in a shaft of light from her own bedroom. “Sorry,” she said. “Dad’s been calling for you.”

“Gary!” came Alfred’s voice from the bathroom by her room.

Gary, heart thudding, asked what time it was.

“I have no idea,” she said. “He woke me up calling Chip’s name. Then he started calling yours. But not mine. I think he’s more comfortable with you.”

Cigarettes on her breath again.

“Gary? Gary!” came the call from the bathroom.

“Fuck this,” Gary said.

“It could be his medication.”

“Bullshit.”

From the bathroom: “Gary!”

“Yeah, Dad, OK, I’m coming.”

Enid’s bodiless voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs. “Gary, help your father.”

“Yeah, Mom. I’m all over it. You just go back to sleep.”

“What does he want?” Enid said.

“Just go back to bed.”

Out in the hall he could smell the Christmas tree and the fireplace. He tapped on the bathroom door and opened it. His father was standing in the bathtub, naked from the waist down, with nothing but psychosis in his face. Until now, Gary had seen faces like this mainly at the bus stops and the Burger King bathrooms of central Philadelphia.

“Gary,” Alfred said, “they’re all over the place.” The old man pointed at the floor with a trembling finger. “Do you see him?”

“Dad, you’re hallucinating.”

“Get him! Get him!”

“You’re hallucinating and it’s time to get out of the tub and go back to bed.”

“Do you see them?”

“You’re hallucinating. Go back to bed.”

This went on for a while, ten or fifteen minutes, before Gary was able to lead Alfred out of the bathroom. A light was burning in the master bedroom, and several unused diapers were spread out on the floor. It seemed to Gary that his father was having a dream while he was awake, a dream as vivid as Gary’s own dream about Denise, and that the awakening that he, Gary, had accomplished in half a second was taking his father half an hour.

“What is ‘hallucinate’?” Alfred said finally.

“It’s like you’re dreaming when you’re awake.”

Alfred winced. “I’m concerned about this.”

“Well. Rightly so.”

“Help me with the diaper.”

“Yes, all right,” Gary said.

“I’m concerned that something is wrong with my thoughts.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“My head doesn’t seem to work right.”

“I know. I know.”

But Gary himself was infected, there in the middle of the night, by his father’s disease. As the two of them collaborated on the problem of the diaper, which his father seemed to regard more as a lunatic conversation piece than as an undergarment to be donned, Gary, too, had a sensation of things dissolving around him, of a night that consisted of creepings and shiftings and metamorphoses. He had the sense that there were many more than two people in the house beyond the bedroom door; he sensed a large population of phantoms that he could glimpse only dimly.

Alfred’s polar hair was hanging in his face when he lay down. Gary pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. It was hard to believe that he’d been fighting with this man, taking him seriously as an adversary, three months ago.

His clock radio showed 2:55 when he returned to his room. The house was quiet again, Denise’s door closed, the only sound an eighteen-wheeler on the expressway half a mile away. Gary wondered why his room smelled—faintly—like somebody’s cigarette breath.

But maybe it wasn’t cigarette breath. Maybe it was that Austrian beer stein full of piss that he’d left on the closet floor!

Tomorrow, he thought, is for me. Tomorrow is Gary’s Recreation Day. And then on Thursday morning we’re going to blow this house wide open. We’re going to put an end to this charade.

After Brian Callahan had fired Denise, she’d carved herself up and put the pieces on the table. She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn’t run away. She told herself a story about a daughter who, in her desperation to escape, had taken refuge in whatever temporary shelters she could find—a career in cooking, a marriage to Emile Berger, an old-person’s life in Philadelphia, an affair with Robin Passafaro. But naturally these refuges, chosen in haste, proved unworkable in the long run. By trying to protect herself from her family’s hunger, the daughter accomplished just the opposite. She ensured that when her family’s hunger reached its peak her life would fall apart and leave her without a spouse, without kids, without a job, without responsibilities, without a defense of any kind. It was as if, all along, she’d been conspiring to make herself available to nurse her parents.

Meanwhile her brothers had conspired to make themselves unavailable. Chip had fled to Eastern Europe and Gary had placed himself under Caroline’s thumb. Gary, it was true, did “take responsibility” for his parents, but his idea of responsibility was to bully and give orders. The burden of listening to Enid and Alfred and being patient and understanding fell squarely on the daughter’s shoulders. Already Denise could see that she would be the only child in St. Jude for Christmas dinner and the only child on duty in the weeks and months and years after that. Her parents had better manners than to ask her to come and live with them, but she knew that this was what they wanted. As soon as she’d enrolled her father in Phase II testing of Corecktall and offered to house him, Enid had unilaterally ceased hostilities with her. Enid had never again mentioned her adulterous friend Norma Greene. She’d never asked Denise why she’d “quit” her job at the Generator. Enid was in trouble, her daughter was offering to help, and so she could no longer afford the luxury of finding fault. And now the time had come, according to the story that Denise told herself about herself, for the chef to carve herself up and feed the pieces to her hungry parents.

Lacking a better story, she almost bought this one. The only trouble was she didn’t recognize herself in it.

When she put on a white blouse, an antique gray suit, red lipstick, and a black pillbox hat with a little black veil, then she recognized herself. When she put on a sleeveless white T-shirt and boy’s jeans and tied her hair back so tightly that her head ached, she recognized herself. When she put on silver jewelry, turquoise eye shadow, corpse-lip nail polish, a searing pink jumper, and orange sneakers, she recognized herself as a living person and was breathless with the happiness of living.

She went to New York to appear on the Food Channel and visit one of those clubs for people like herself who were starting to Figure It Out and needed practice. She stayed with Julia Vrais in Julia’s outstanding apartment on Hudson Street. Julia reported that in the discovery phase of her divorce proceedings she’d learned that Gitanas Misevičius had paid for this apartment with funds embezzled from the Lithuanian government.

“Gitanas’s lawyer claims it was an ‘oversight,’” Julia told Denise, “but I find that hard to believe.”

“Does this mean you’re going to lose the apartment?”

“Well, no,” Julia said, “in fact this makes it more likely that I’ll get to keep it without paying anything. But still, I feel so awful! My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania!”

The temperature in Julia’s extra bedroom was about ninety. She gave Denise a foot-thick down comforter and asked if she wanted a blanket, too.

“Thanks, this looks like plenty,” Denise said.

Julia gave her flannel sheets and four pillows with flannel cases. She asked how Chip was doing in Vilnius.

“It sounds like he and Gitanas are the best of friends.”

“I hate to think what the two of them are saying about me,” Julia mused happily.

Denise said that it wouldn’t surprise her if Chip and Gitanas avoided the topic altogether.

Julia frowned. “Why wouldn’t they talk about me?”

“Well, you did painfully dump both of them.”

“But they could talk about how much they hate me!”

“I don’t think anybody could hate you.”

“Actually,” Julia said, “I was afraid you’d hate me for breaking up with Chip.”

“No, I never had anything at stake there.”

Clearly relieved to hear this, Julia confided to Denise that she was now being dated by a lawyer, nice but bald, with whom Eden Procuro had set her up. “I feel safe with him,” she said. “He’s so confident in restaurants. And he’s got tons of work, so he’s not always after me for, you know, favors.”

“Really,” Denise said, “the less you tell me about things with you and Chip, the happier I’ll be.”

When Julia then asked if Denise was seeing anybody, it shouldn’t have been so hard to tell her about Robin Passafaro, but it was very hard. Denise didn’t want to make her friend uncomfortable, didn’t want to hear her voice go small and soft with sympathy. She wanted to soak up Julia’s company in its familiar innocence, and so she said, “I’m seeing nobody.”

Nobody except, the next night, at a sapphic pasha’s den two hundred steps from Julia’s apartment, a seventeen-year-old just off the bus from Plattsburgh, New York, with a drastic hairstyle and twin 800s on her recent SATs (she carried the official ETS printout like a certificate of sanity or possibly of madness) and then, the night after that, a religious-studies major at Columbia whose father (she said) operated the largest sperm bank in Southern California.

This accomplished, Denise went to a midtown studio and taped her guest appearance on Pop Food for Now People, making lambsmeat ravioli and other Mare Scuro standards. She met with some of the New Yorkers who’d tried to hire her away from Brian—a couple of Central Park West trillionaires seeking a feudal relationship with her, a Munich banker who believed she was the Weißwurst Messiah who could restore German cooking to its former glory in Manhattan, and a young restaurateur, Nick Razza, who impressed her by itemizing and breaking down each of the meals he’d eaten at Mare Scuro and the Generator. Razza came from a family of purveyors in New Jersey and already owned a popular mid-range seafood grill on the Upper East Side. Now he wanted to jump into the Smith Street culinary scene in Brooklyn with a restaurant that starred, if possible, Denise. She asked him for a week to think it over.

On a sunny fall Sunday afternoon she took the subway out to Brooklyn. The borough seemed to her a Philadelphia rescued by adjacency to Manhattan. In half an hour she saw more beautiful, interesting-looking women than she saw in half a year in South Philly. She saw their brownstones and their nifty boots.

Returning home by Amtrak, she regretted having hidden for so long in Philadelphia. The little subway station under City Hall was as empty and echoing as a battleship in mothballs; every floor and wall and beam and railing was painted gray. Heartbreaking the little train that finally pulled up, after fifteen minutes, with a population of riders who in their patience and isolation were less like commuters than like emergency-room supplicants. Denise surfaced from the Federal Street station among sycamore leaves and burger wrappers racing in waves down the Broad Street sidewalk, swirling up against the pissy façades and barred windows and scattering among the Bondo-fendered cars that were parked at the curb. The urban vacancy of Philadelphia, the hegemony of wind and sky here, struck her as enchanted. As Narnian. She loved Philadelphia the way she loved Robin Passafaro. Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

She unlocked the door of her brick penitentiary and collected her mail from the floor. Among the twenty people who’d left messages on her machine were Robin Passafaro, breaking her silence to ask if Denise might like to have a “little chat,” and Emile Berger, politely informing her that he’d accepted Brian Callahan’s offer of the job of executive chef at the Generator and was moving back to Philadelphia.

At this news from Emile, Denise kicked the tiled south wall of her kitchen until she was afraid she’d broken her toe. She said, “I’ve got to get out of here!”

But getting out was not so easy. Robin had had a month to cool off and conclude that if sleeping with Brian was a sin then she was guilty of it also. Brian had rented a loft for himself in Olde City, and Robin, as Denise had suspected, was dead set on keeping custody of Sinéad and Erin. To strengthen her case, she stayed put in the big house on Panama Street and rededicated herself to motherhood. But she was free during school hours and all day on Saturday when Brian took the girls out, and on mature reflection she decided that these free hours might best be spent in Denise’s bed.

Denise still couldn’t say no to the drug of Robin. She still wanted Robin’s hands on her and at her and around her and inside her, that prepositional smorgasbord. But there was something in Robin, probably her propensity to blame herself for harms that other people inflicted on her, that invited betrayal and abuse. Denise went out of her way to smoke in bed now, because cigarette smoke irritated Robin’s eyes. She dressed to the hilt when she met Robin for lunch, she did her best to highlight Robin’s dowdiness, and she held the gaze of anyone, female or male, who turned to look at her. She visibly winced at the volume of Robin’s voice. She behaved like an adolescent with a parent except that an adolescent couldn’t help rolling her eyes whereas Denise’s contempt was a deliberate, calculated form of cruelty. She shushed Robin angrily when they were in bed and Robin began to hoot self-consciously. She said, “Keep your voice down. Please. Please.” Exhilarated by her own cruelty, she stared at Robin’s Gore-Tex raingear until Robin was provoked to ask why. Denise said, “I’m just wondering if you’re ever tempted to be slightly less uncool.” Robin replied that she was never going to be cool and so she might as well be comfortable. Denise allowed her lip to curl.

Robin was eager to bring her lover back into contact with Sinéad and Erin, but Denise, for reasons that she herself could only halfway fathom, refused to see the girls. She couldn’t imagine looking them in the eye; the very thought of four-girl domesticity sickened her.

“They adore you,” Robin said.

“I can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t feel like it. That’s why.”

“All right. Whatever.”

“How long is ‘whatever’ going to be your word? Are you ever going to retire it? Or is it your word for life?”

“Denise, they adore you,” Robin squeaked. “They miss you. And you used to love to see them.”

“Well, I’m not in a kid kind of mood. I don’t know if I’ll ever be, frankly. So please stop asking me.”

By now most people would have got the message; most people would have cleared out and never come back. But Robin, it transpired, had a taste for cruel treatment. Robin said, and Denise believed her, that she would never have left Brian if Brian hadn’t left her. Robin liked to be licked and stroked within a micron of coming and then abandoned and made to beg. And Denise liked to do this to her. Denise liked to get out of bed and get dressed and go downstairs while Robin waited for sexual release, because she wouldn’t cheat and touch herself. Denise sat in the kitchen and read a book and smoked until Robin, humiliated, trembling, came down and begged. Denise’s contempt then was so pure and so strong, it was almost better than sex.

And so it went. The more Robin agreed to be abused, the more Denise enjoyed abusing her. She ignored Nick Razza’s phone messages. She stayed in bed until two in the afternoon. Her social cigarette habit bloomed into craving. She indulged fifteen years’ accumulated laziness; she lived on her savings account. Every day, she considered all the work she had to do to prepare the house for her parents’ arrival—putting a handle in the shower, carpeting the staircases, buying furniture for the living room, finding a better kitchen table, moving her bed down from the third floor and setting it up in the guest room—and concluded that she lacked the energy. Her life consisted of waiting for the ax to fall. If her parents were coming for six months, there was no point in starting something else. She had to get all her slacking-off done now.

What exactly her father thought about Corecktall was difficult to know. The one time she asked him directly, on the phone, he didn’t answer.

“AL?” Enid prompted. “Denise wants to know HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT CORECKTALL.”

Alfred’s voice was sour. “You’d think they could have found a better name than that.”

“It’s a completely different spelling,” Enid said. “Denise wants to know if you’re EXCITED ABOUT THE TREATMENT.”

Silence.

“Al, tell her how excited you are.”

“I find that my affliction gets a little worse every week. I can’t see that another drug is going to make much difference.”

“Al, it’s not a drug, it’s a radical new therapy that uses your patent!”

“I’ve learned to put up with a certain amount of optimism. So, we will stick to the plan.”

“Denise,” Enid said, “I can do lots to help out. I can make all the meals and do all the laundry. I think it will be a great adventure! It’s so wonderful that you’re offering.”

Denise couldn’t imagine six months with her parents in a house and a city she was done with, six months of invisibility as the accommodating and responsible daughter that she could barely pretend to be. She’d made a promise, however; and so she took her rage out on Robin.

On the Saturday night before Christmas she sat in her kitchen and blew smoke at Robin while Robin maddened her by trying to cheer her up.

“You’re giving them a great gift,” Robin said, “by inviting them to stay with you.”

“It would be a gift if I weren’t a mess,” Denise said. “But you should only offer what you can actually deliver.”

“You can deliver it,” Robin said. “I’ll help you. I can spend mornings with your dad, and give your mom a break, and you can go off by yourself, and do whatever you want. I’ll come three or four mornings a week.”

To Denise Robin’s offer only made the prospect of those mornings bleaker and more suffocating.

“Do you not understand?” she said. “I hate this house. I hate this city. I hate my life here. I hate family. I hate home. I’m ready to leave. I’m not a good person. And it only makes it worse to pretend I am.”

“I think you’re a good person,” Robin said.

“I treat you like garbage! Have you not noticed?”

“It’s because you’re so unhappy.”

Robin came around the table and tried to lay a hand on her; Denise elbowed it aside. Robin tried again, and this time Denise caught her squarely in the cheek with the knuckles of her open hand.

Robin backed away, her face crimson, as if she were bleeding on the inside. “You hit me,” she said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“You hit me rather hard. Why did you do that?”

“Because I don’t want you here. I don’t want to be part of your life. I don’t want to be part of anybody’s life. I’m sick of watching myself be cruel to you.”

Interconnecting flywheels of pride and love were spinning behind Robin’s eyes. It was a while before she spoke. “OK, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

Denise did nothing to stop her from leaving, but when she heard the front door close she understood that she’d lost the only person who could have helped her when her parents came to town. She’d lost Robin’s company, her comforts. Everything she’d spurned a minute earlier she wanted back.

She flew to St. Jude.

On her first day there, as on the first day of every visit, she warmed to her parents’ warmth and did whatever her mother asked her to. She waved off the cash Enid tried to give her for the groceries. She refrained from commenting on the four-ounce bottle of rancid yellow glue that was the only olive oil in the kitchen. She wore the lavender synthetic turtleneck and the matronly gold-plate necklace that were recent gifts from her mother. She effused, spontaneously, about the adolescent ballerinas in The Nutcracker, she held her father’s gloved hand as they crossed the regional theater’s parking lot, she loved her parents more than she’d ever loved anything; and the minute they were both in bed she changed her clothes and fled the house.

She paused in the street, a cigarette on her lip, a matchbook (Dean amp; Trish • June 13, 1987) trembling in her fingers. She hiked to the field behind the grade school where she and Don Armour had once sat and smelled cattails and verbena; she stamped her feet, rubbed her hands, watched the clouds occult the constellations, and took deep fortifying breaths of selfhood.

Later in the night, she undertook a clandestine operation on her mother’s behalf, entering Gary’s bedroom while he was occupied with Alfred, unzipping the inside pocket of his leather jacket, replacing the Mexican A with a handful of Advils, and spiriting Enid’s drug away to a safer place before she finally, good daughter, fell asleep.

On her second day in St. Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it. At breakfast she was tortured by every word her mother said. Browning the ribs and soaking the sauerkraut according to ancestral custom, rather than in the modern style she’d developed at the Generator, made her angry. (So much grease, such sacrifice of texture.) The bradykinetic languor of Enid’s electric stove, which hadn’t bothered her the day before, made her angry. The hundred-and-one refrigerator magnets, puppy-dog sentimental in their iconography and so feeble in their pull that you could scarcely open the door without sending a snapshot of Jonah or a postcard of Vienna swooping to the floor, filled her with rage. She went to the basement to get the ancestral ten-quart Dutch oven, and the clutter in the laundry-room cabinets made her furious. She dragged a trash can in from the garage and began to fill it with her mother’s crap. This was arguably helpful to her mother, and so she went at it with abandon. She threw away the Korean barfleberries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. She threw away the wreath of spray-painted pinecones that somebody had ripped apart. She threw away the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. She threw away the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted, the Nixon-era bottle of Mai Tai mix with an oozing crust around its neck, the collection of Paul Masson Chablis carafes with spider parts and moth wings at the bottom, the profoundly corroded bracket for some long-lost wind chimes. She threw away the quart glass bottle of Vess Diet Cola that had turned the color of plasma, the ornamental jar of brandied kumquats that was now a fantasia of rock candy and amorphous brown gunk, the smelly thermos whose broken inner glass tinkled when she shook it, the mildewed half-peck produce basket full of smelly yogurt cartons, the hurricane lanterns sticky with oxidation and brimming with severed moth wings, the lost empires of florist’s clay and florist’s tape that hung together even as they crumbled and rusted…

At the very back of the closet, in the cobwebs behind the bottom shelf, she found a thick envelope, not old-looking, with no postage on it. The envelope was addressed to the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA. The return addressee was Alfred Lambert. The words SEND CERTIFIED were also on the face.

Water was running in the little half-bathroom by her father’s laboratory, the toilet tank refilling, faint sulfurous odors in the air. The door to the lab was ajar and Denise knocked on it.

“Yes,” Alfred said.

He was standing by the shelves of exotic metals, the gallium and bismuth, and buckling his belt. She showed him the envelope and told him where she’d found it.

Alfred turned it over in his shaking hands, as if an explanation might magically occur to him. “It’s a mystery,” he said.

“Can I open it?”

“You may do as you wish.”

The envelope contained three copies of a licensing agreement dated September 13, signed by Alfred, and notarized by David Schumpert.

“What is this doing on the floor of the laundry-room closet?” Denise said.

Alfred shook his head. “You’d have to ask your mother.”

She went out to the bottom of the stairs and raised her voice. “Mom? Can you come down here for a second?”

Enid appeared at the top of the stairs, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What is it? Can’t you find the pot?"

“I found the pot, but can you come down here?”

Alfred, in the lab, was holding the Axon documents loosely, not reading them. Enid appeared in the doorway with guilt on her face. “What?”

“Dad wants to know why this envelope was in the laundry-room closet.”

“Give me that,” Enid said. She snatched the documents from Alfred and crumpled them in her fist. “This has all been taken care of. Dad signed another set of agreements and they sent us a check right away. This is nothing to worry about.”

Denise narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said you’d sent these in. When we were in New York, at the beginning of October. You said you’d sent these in.”

“I thought I had. But they were lost in the mail.”

“In the mail?”

Enid waved her hands vaguely. “Well, that’s where I thought they were. But I guess they were in the closet. I must have set a stack of mail down there, when I was going to the post office, and then this fell down behind. You know, I can’t keep track of every last thing. Sometimes things get lost, Denise. I have a big house to take care of, and sometimes things get lost.”

Denise took the envelope from Alfred’s workbench. “It says ‘Send Certified.’ If you were at the post office, how did you not notice that something you needed to send Certified was missing? How did you not notice that you weren’t filling out a Certified Mail slip?”

“Denise.” Alfred’s voice had an angry edge. “That’s enough now.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Enid said. “It was a busy time for me. It’s a complete mystery to me, and let’s just leave it that way. Because it doesn’t matter. Dad got his five thousand dollars just fine. It doesn’t matter.”

She further crumpled the licensing agreements and left the laboratory.

I’m developing Garyitis, Denise thought.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother,” Alfred said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

But Enid was exclaiming in the laundry room, exclaiming in the Ping-Pong–table room, returning to the workshop. “Denise,” she cried, “you’ve got the whole closet completely torn up! What on earth are you doing in there?”

“I’m throwing food away. Food and other rotten junk.”

“All right, but why now? We have the whole weekend if you want to help me clean some closets out. It’s wonderful if you want to help me. But not today. Let’s not get into it today.”

“It’s bad food, Mom. If you leave it long enough, it turns to poison. Anaerobic bacteria will kill you.”

“Well, get it cleaned up now, and let’s do the rest on the weekend. We don’t have time for that today. I want you to work on dinner so it’s all ready and you don’t have to think about it, and then I really want you to help Dad with his exercises, like you said you would!”

“I will do that.”

“Al,” Enid shouted, leaning past her, “Denise wants to help you with your exercises after lunch!”

He shook his head as if with disgust. “As you wish.”

Stacked up on one of the old family bedspreads that had long served as a dropcloth were wicker chairs and tables in early stages of scraping and painting. Lidded coffee cans were clustered on an open section of newspaper; a gun in a canvas case was by the workbench.

“What are you doing with the gun, Dad?” Denise said.

“Oh, he’s been meaning to sell that for years,” Enid said. “AL, ARE YOU EVER GOING TO SELL THAT GUN?”

Alfred seemed to run this sentence through his brain several times in order to extract its meaning. Very slowly, he nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “I will sell the gun.”

“I hate having it in the house,” Enid said as she turned to leave. “You know, he never used it. Not once. I don’t think it’s ever been red.”

Alfred came smiling at Denise, making her retreat toward the door. “I will finish up in here,” he said.

Upstairs it was Christmas Eve. Packages were accumulating beneath the tree. In the front yard the nearly bare branches of the swamp white oak swung in a breeze that had shifted to more snow-threatening directions; the dead grass snagged dead leaves.

Enid was peering out through the sheer curtains again. “Should I be worried about Chip?”

“I would worry that he’s not coming,” Denise said, “but not that he’s in trouble.”

“The paper says rival factions are fighting for control of central Vilnius."

“Chip can take care of himself.”

“Oh, here,” Enid said, leading Denise to the front door, “I want you to hang the last ornament on the Advent calendar.”

“Mother, why don’t you do that.”

“No, I want to see you do it.”

The last ornament was the Christ baby in a walnut shell. Pinning it to the tree was a task for a child, for someone credulous and hopeful, and Denise could now see very clearly that she’d made a program of steeling herself against the emotions of this house, against the saturation of childhood memory and significance. She could not be the child to perform this task.

“It’s your calendar,” she said. “You should do it.”

The disappointment on Enid’s face was disproportionately large. It was an ancient disappointment with the refusal of the world in general and her children in particular to participate in her preferred enchantments. “I guess I’ll ask Gary if he’ll do it,” she said with a scowl.

“I’m sorry,” Denise said.

“I remember you used to love pinning on the ornaments, when you were a little girl. You used to love it. But if you don’t want to do it, you don’t want to do it.”

“Mom.” Denise’s voice was unsteady. “Please don’t make me.”

“If I’d known it would seem like such a chore,” Enid said, “I never would have asked you.”

“Let me watch you do it!” Denise pleaded.

Enid shook her head and walked away. “I’ll ask Gary when he gets back from shopping.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She went outside and sat on the front steps smoking. The air had a disturbed southern snowy flavor. Down the street Kirby Root was winding pine rope around the post of his gas lamp. He waved and she waved back.

“When did you start smoking?” Enid asked her when she came inside.

“About fifteen years ago.”

“I don’t mean to criticize,” Enid said, “but it’s a terrible habit for your health. It’s bad for your skin, and frankly, it’s not a pleasant smell for others.”

Denise, with a sigh, washed her hands and began to brown the flour for the sauerkraut gravy. “If you’re going to come and live with me,” she said, “we need to get some things clear.”

“I said I wasn’t criticizing.”

“One thing we need to be clear about is that I’m having a hard time. For example, I didn’t quit the Generator. I was fired.”

“Fired?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. Do you want to know why?”

“No!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

Denise, smiling, stirred more bacon grease into the bottom of the Dutch oven.

“Denise, I promise you,” her mother said, “we will not be in your way. You just show me where the supermarket is, and how to use your washer, and then you can come and go as you please. I know you have your own life. I don’t want to disrupt anything. If I could see any other way to get Dad into that program, believe me, I would do it. But Gary never invited us, and I don’t think Caroline would want us anyway.”

The bacon fat and the browned ribs and the boiling kraut smelled good. The dish, as prepared in this kitchen, bore little relation to the high-art version that she’d plated for a thousand strangers. The Generator’s ribs and the Generator’s monkfish had more in common than the Generator’s ribs and these homemade ribs had. You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

She said to her mother: “Why aren’t you telling me the story of Norma Greene?”

“Well, you got so angry with me last time,” Enid said.

“I was mainly mad at Gary.”

“My only concern is that you not be hurt like Norma was. I want to see you happy and settled.”

Mom, I’m never going to get married again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, in fact, I do know that.”

“Life is full of surprises. You’re still very young and very darling.”

Denise put more bacon fat into the pot; there was no reason to hold back now. She said, “Are you listening to me? I’m quite certain that I will never get married again.”

But a car door had slammed in the street and Enid was running into the dining room to part the sheer curtains.

“Oh, it’s Gary,” she said, disappointed. “Just Gary.”

Gary breezed into the kitchen with the railroad memorabilia that he’d bought at the Museum of Transport. Obviously refreshed by a morning to himself, he was happy to indulge Enid by pinning the Christ baby to the Advent calendar; and, as quickly as that, Enid’s sympathies shifted away from her daughter and back to her son. She crowed about the beautiful job that Gary done in the downstairs shower and what a huge improvement the stool there represented. Denise miserably finished the dinner preparations, assembled a light lunch, and washed a mountain of dishes while the sky in the windows turned fully gray.

After lunch she went to her room, which Enid had finally redecorated into near-perfect anonymity, and wrapped presents. (She’d bought clothes for everyone; she knew what people liked to wear.) She uncrumpled the Kleenex that contained thirty sunny caplets of Mexican A and considered wrapping them up as a gift for Enid, but she had to respect the limits of her promise to Gary. She balled the caplets back into the Kleenex, slipped out of her room and down the stairs, and stuffed the drug into the freshly vacated twenty-fourth pocket of the Advent calendar. Everybody else was in the basement. She was able to glide back upstairs and shut herself in her room as if she’d never left.

When she was young, when Enid’s mother had browned the ribs in the kitchen and Gary and Chip had brought home their unbelievably beautiful girlfriends and everybody’s idea of a good time was to buy Denise a lot of presents, this had been the longest afternoon of the year. An obscure natural law had forbidden whole-family gatherings before nightfall; people had scattered to wait in separate rooms. Sometimes, as a teenager, Chip had taken mercy on the last child in the house and played chess or Monopoly with her. When she got a little older, he’d brought her along to the mall with his girlfriend of the moment. There was no greater bliss for her at ten and twelve than to be so included: to take instruction from Chip in the evils of late capitalism, to gather couturial data on the girlfriend, to study the length of the girlfriend’s bangs and the height of her heels, to be left alone for an hour at the bookstore, and then to look back, from the top of the hill above the mall, on the silent slow choreography of traffic in the faltering light.

Even now it was the longest afternoon. Snowflakes a shade darker than the snow-colored sky had begun to fall in quantity. Their chill found its way past the storm windows, it skirted the flows and masses of furnace-heated air from the registers, it came right at your neck. Denise, afraid of getting sick, lay down and pulled a blanket over herself.

She slept hard, with no dreams, and awoke—where? what time? what day?—to angry voices. Snow had webbed the corners of the windows and frosted the swamp white oak. There was light in the sky but not for long.

Al, Gary went to ALL that trouble —

I never asked him to!

Well, can’t you try it at least once? After all the work he did yesterday?

I am entitled to a bath if I want to take a bath .

Dad, it’s only a matter of time before you fall on the stairs and break your neck!

I am not asking anyone for help .

You’re damn right you’re not! Because I have forbidden Mom — forbidden her — to go anywhere near that bathtub —

Al, please, just try the shower —

Mom, forget it, let him break his neck, we’d all be better off —

Gary —

The voices were coming closer as the contretemps moved up the stairs. Denise heard her father’s heavy tread pass her door. She put her glasses on and opened the door just as Enid, slow on her bad hip, reached the top of the stairs. “Denise, what are you doing?”

“I took a nap.”

“Go talk to your father. Tell him it’s important that he try the shower that Gary did so much work on. He’ll listen to you.”

The depth of her sleep and the manner of her awakening had put Denise out of phase with external reality; the scene in the hall and the scene in the hall windows had faint antimatter shadows; sounds were at once too loud and barely audible. “Why—” she said. “Why are we making an issue of this today?”

“Because Gary’s leaving tomorrow and I want him to see if the shower’s going to work for Dad.”

“And tell me again what’s wrong with the bath?”

“He gets stuck. And he’s so bad on the stairs.”

Denise closed her eyes, but this substantially worsened the phase-sync problem. She opened them.

“Oh, plus, and Denise,” Enid said, “you haven’t worked with him on his exercises yet like you promised!”

“Right. I’ll do that.”

“Do it now, before he gets cleaned up. Here, I’ll get you the sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth.”

Enid limped back down the stairs, and Denise raised her voice. “Dad?”

No answer.

Enid came halfway up the stairs and pushed through the rails of the banister a violet sheet of paper (“MOBILITY IS GOLDEN”) on which stick figures illustrated seven stretching exercises. “Really teach him,” she said. “He gets impatient with me, but he’ll listen to you. Dr. Hedgpeth keeps asking if Dad’s doing his exercises. It’s very important that he really learn these. I had no idea you were sleeping all this time.”

Denise took the instruction sheet into the master bedroom and found Alfred in the doorway of his closet, naked from the waist down.

“Whoa, Dad, sorry,” she said, retreating.

“What is it?”

“We need to work on your exercises.”

“I’m already undressed.”

“Just put some pajamas on. Loose clothing is better anyway.”

It took her five minutes to calm him down and stretch him out on his back on the bed in his wool shirt and his pajama bottoms; and here at last the truth came pouring out.

The first exercise required that Alfred take his right knee in his hands and draw it toward his chest, and then do the same with his left knee. Denise guided his wayward hands to his right knee, and although she was dismayed by how rigid he was getting, he was able, with her help, to stretch his hip past ninety degrees.

“Now do your left knee,” she said.

Alfred put his hands on his right knee again and pulled it toward his chest.

“That’s great,” she said. “But now try it with your left.”

He lay breathing hard and did nothing. He wore the expression of a man suddenly remembering disastrous circumstances.

“Dad? Try it with your left knee.”

She touched his left knee, to no avail. In his eyes she saw a desperate wish for clarification and instruction. She moved his hands to his left knee, and the hands immediately fell off. Possibly his rigidity was worse on the left side? She put his hands back on his knee and helped him raise it.

If anything, he was more flexible on the left.

“Now you try it,” she said.

He grinned at her, breathing like someone very scared. “Try what.”

“Put your hands on your left knee and lift it.”

“Denise, I’ve had enough of this.”

“You’ll feel a lot better if you can do a little stretching,” she said. “Just do what you just did. Put your hands on your left knee and raise it.”

The smile she gave him came reflected back as confusion. His eyes met hers in silence.

“Which is my left?” he said.

She touched his left knee. “This one.”

“And what do I do?”

“Put your hands on it and pull it toward your chest.”

His eyes wandered anxiously, reading bad messages on the ceiling.

“Dad, just concentrate.”

“There’s not much point.”

“OK.” She took a deep breath. “OK, let’s leave that one and try the second exercise. All right?”

He looked at her as if she, his only hope, were sprouting fangs and antlers.

“So in this one,” she said, trying to ignore his expression, “you cross your right leg over your left leg, and then let both legs fall to the right as far as they can go. I like this exercise,” she said. “It stretches your hip flexor. It feels really good.”

She explained it to him two more times and then asked him to raise his right leg.

He lifted both legs a few inches off the mattress.

“Just your right leg,” she said gently. “And keep your knees bent.”

“Denise!” His voice was high with strain. “There’s no point!”

“Here,” she said. “Here.” She pushed on his feet to bend his knees. She lifted his right leg, supporting it by the calf and thigh, and crossed it over his left knee. At first there was no resistance, and then, all at once, he seemed to cramp up violently.

“Denise.”

“Dad, just relax.”

She already knew that he was never coming to Philadelphia. But now a tropical humidity was rising off him, a tangy almost-smell of letting go. The pajama fabric on his thigh was hot and wet in her hand, and his entire body was trembling.

“Oh, shoot,” she said, releasing his leg.

Snow was swirling in the windows, lights appearing in the neighbors’ houses. Denise wiped her hand on her jeans and lowered her eyes to her lap and listened, her heart beating hard, to the labored breathing of her father and the rhythmic rustling of his limbs on the bedspread. There was an arc of soak on the bedspread near his crotch and a longer capillary-action reach of wetness down one leg of his pajamas. The initial almost-smell of fresh piss had resolved, as it cooled in the underheated room, into an aroma quite definite and pleasant.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. “Let me get you a towel.”

Alfred smiled up at the ceiling and spoke in a less agitated voice. “I lie here and I can see it,” he said. “Do you see it?”

“See what?”

He pointed vaguely skyward with one finger. “Bottom on the bottom. Bottom on the bottom of the bench,” he said. “Written there. Do you see it?”

Now she was confused and he wasn’t. He cocked an eyebrow and gave her a canny look. “You know who wrote that, don’t you? The fuh. The fuh. Fellow with the you know.”

Holding her gaze, he nodded significantly.

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Denise said.

“Your friend,” he said. “Fellow with the blue cheeks.”

The first one percent of comprehension was born at the back of her neck and began to grow to the north and to the south.

“Let me get a towel,” she said, going nowhere.

Her father’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling again. “He wrote that on the bottom of the bench. Bommunnuthuh. Bottomofthebench. And I lie there and I can see it.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Your friend in Signals. Fellow with the blue cheeks.”

“You’re confused, Dad. You’re having a dream. I’m going to get a towel.”

“See, there was never any point in saying anything.”

“I’m getting a towel,” she said.

She crossed the bedroom to the bathroom. Her head was still in the nap that she’d been taking, and the problem was getting worse. She was falling further out of sync with the waveforms of reality that constituted towel-softness, sky-darkness, floor-hardness, air-clearness. Why this talk of Don Armour? Why now?

Her father had swung his legs out of bed and peeled off his pajama bottoms. He extended his hand for the towel when she returned. “I’ll clean this mess up,” he said. “You go help your mother.”

“No, I’ll do it,” she said. “You take a bath.”

“Just give me the rag. It’s not your job.”

“Dad, take a bath.”

“It was not my intention to involve you in this.”

His hand, still extended, flopped in the air. Denise averted her eyes from his offending, wetting penis. “Stand up,” she said. “I’m going to take the bedspread off.”

Alfred covered his penis with the towel. “Leave that to your mother,” he said. “I told her Philadelphia’s a lot of nonsense. I never intended to involve you in any of this. You have your own life. Just have fun and be careful.”

He remained seated on the edge of the bed, his head bowed, his hands like large empty fleshy spoons on his lap.

“Do you want me to start the bathwater?” Denise said.

“I nuh-nunnunnunn-unh,” he said. “Told the fellow he was talking a lot of nonsense, but what can you do?” Alfred made a gesture of self-evidence or inevitability. “Thought he was going to Little Rock. You guh. I said! Gotta have seniority. Well, that’s a lot of nonsense. I told him to get the hell out.” He gave Denise an apologetic look and shrugged. “What else could I do?”

Denise had felt invisible before, but never like this. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” she said.

“Well.” Alfred made a vague gesture of explanation. “He told me to look under the bench. Simple as that. Look under the bench if I didn’t believe him.”

“What bench?”

“It was a lot of nonsense,” he said. “Simpler for everybody if I just quit. You see, he never thought of that.”

“Are we talking about the railroad?”

Alfred shook his head. “Not your concern. It was never my intention to involve you in any of this. I want you to go and have fun. And be careful. Tell your mother to come up here with a rag.”

With this, he launched himself across the carpeting and shut the bathroom door behind him. Denise, to be doing something, stripped the bed and balled everything up, including her father’s wet pajamas, and carried it downstairs.

“How’s it going up there!” Enid asked from her Christmas-card station in the dining room.

“He wet the bed,” Denise said.

“Oh my word.”

“He doesn’t know his left leg from his right.”

Enid’s face darkened. “I thought maybe he’d listen better to you.”

“Mother, he doesn’t know his left leg from his right.”

“Sometimes the medication—”

“Yeah! Yeah!” Denise’s voice was plangent. “The medication!”

Having silenced her mother, she proceeded to the laundry room to sort and soak the linens. Here Gary, all smiles, accosted her with an O-gauge model railroad engine in his hands.

“I found it,” he said.

“Found what.”

Gary seemed hurt that Denise hadn’t been paying close attention to his desires and activities. He explained that half of his childhood model-railroad set—“the important half, with the cars and the transformer”—had been missing for decades and presumed lost. “I just took the entire storeroom apart,” he said. “And where do you think I found it?”

“Where.”

“Guess,” he said.

“At the bottom of the rope box,” she said.

Gary’s eyes widened. “How did you know that? I’ve been looking for decades.”

“Well, you should have asked me. There’s a smaller box of railroad stuff inside the big rope box.”

“Well, anyway.” Gary shuddered to accomplish a shift of focus away from her and back to him. “I’m glad I had the satisfaction of finding it, although I wish you’d told me.”

“I wish you’d asked!”

“You know, I’m having a great time with this railroad stuff. There are some truly neat things that you can buy.”

“Good! I’m happy for you!”

Gary marveled at the engine he was holding. “I never thought I’d see this again.”

When he was gone and she was alone in the basement, she went to Alfred’s laboratory with a flashlight, knelt among the Yuban cans, and examined the underside of the bench. There, in shaggy pencil, was a heart the size of a human heart:

 She slumped onto her heels, her knees on the stone-cold floor. Little Rock. Seniority. Simpler if I just quit.

Absently, she raised the lid of a Yuban can. It was full to the brim with lurid orange fermented piss.

“Oh boy,” she said to the shotgun.

As she ran up to her bedroom and put on her coat and gloves, she felt sorriest about her mother, because no matter how often and how bitterly Enid had complained to her, she’d never got it through her head that life in St. Jude had turned into such a nightmare; and how could you permit yourself to breathe, let alone laugh or sleep or eat well, if you were unable to imagine how hard another person’s life was?

Enid was at the dining-room curtains again, looking out for Chip.

“Going for a walk!” Denise called as she closed the front door behind her.

Two inches of snow lay on the lawn. In the west the clouds were breaking up; violent eye-shadow shades of lavender and robin’s-egg blue marked the cutting edge of the latest cold front. Denise walked down the middle of tread-marked twilit streets and smoked until the nicotine had dulled her distress and she could think more clearly.

She gathered that Don Armour, after the Wroth brothers had bought the Midland Pacific and commenced their downsizing of it, had failed to make the cut for Little Rock and had gone to Alfred and complained. Maybe he’d threatened to brag about his conquest of Alfred’s daughter or maybe he’d asserted his rights as a quasi member of the Lambert family; either way, Alfred had told him to go to hell. Then Alfred had gone home and examined the underside of his workbench.

Denise believed that there had been a scene between Don Armour and her father, but she hated to imagine it. How Don Armour must have loathed himself for crawling to his boss’s boss’s boss and trying to beg or blackmail inclusion in the railroad’s move to Little Rock; how betrayed Alfred must have felt by this daughter who’d won such praise for her work habits; how dismally the entire intolerable scene must have turned on the insertion of Don Armour’s dick into this and that guilty, unexcited orifice of hers. She hated to think of her father kneeling beneath his workbench and locating that penciled heart, hated the idea of Don Armour’s drecky insinuations entering her father’s prudish ears, hated to imagine how keenly it offended a man of such discipline and privacy to learn that Don Armour had been roaming and poking through his house at will.

It was never my intention to involve you in this .

Well, and sure enough: her father had resigned from the railroad. He’d saved her privacy. He’d never breathed a word of any of this to Denise, never given any sign of thinking less of her. For fifteen years she’d tried to pass for a perfectly responsible and careful daughter, and he’d known all along that she was not.

She thought there might be comfort in this idea if she could manage to keep it in her head.

As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen. Denise unbuttoned her coat and turned back, taking a shortcut through the field behind her old grade school.

She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

Alfred, likewise, had shown his faith in her by taking her at face value: by declining to pry behind the front that she presented. She’d felt happiest with him when she was publicly vindicating his faith in her: when she got straight A’s; when her restaurants succeeded; when reviewers loved her.

She understood, better than she would have liked to, what a disaster it had been for him to wet the bed in front of her. Lying on a stain of fast-cooling urine was not the way he wished to be with her. They only had one good way of being together, and it wasn’t going to work much longer.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. She understood this better than Chip and Gary did, and so she felt a particular responsibility for him.

To Chip, unfortunately, it seemed that Alfred cared about his children only to the degree that they succeeded. Chip was so busy feeling misunderstood that he never noticed how badly he himself misunderstood his father. To Chip, Alfred’s inability to be tender was the proof that Alfred didn’t know, or care, who he was. Chip couldn’t see what everyone around him could: that if there was anybody in the world whom Alfred did love purely for his own sake, it was Chip. Denise was aware of not delighting Alfred like this; they had little in common beyond formalities and achievements. Chip was the one whom Alfred had called for in the middle of the night, even though he knew Chip wasn’t there.

I made it as clear to you as I could, she told her idiot brother in her head as she crossed the snowy field. I can’t make it any clearer.

The house to which she returned was full of light. Gary or Enid had swept the snow from the front walk. Denise was scuffing her feet on the hemp mat when the door flew open.

“Oh, it’s you,” Enid said. “I thought it might be Chip.”

“No. Just me.”

She went in and pried her boots off. Gary had built a fire and was sitting in the armchair closest to it, a stack of old photo albums at his feet.

“Take my advice,” he told Enid, “and forget about Chip.”

“He must be in some sort of trouble,” Enid said. “Otherwise he would have called.”

“Mother, he’s a sociopath. Get it through your head.”

“You don’t know a thing about Chip,” Denise said to Gary.

“I know when somebody refuses to pull his weight.”

“I just want us all to be together!” Enid said.

Gary let out a groan of tender sentiment. “Oh, Denise,” he said. “Oh, oh. Come and see this baby girl.”

“Maybe another time.”

But Gary crossed the living room with the photo album and foisted it on her, pointing at the photo image on a family Christmas card. The chubby, mop-headed, vaguely Semitic little girl in the picture was Denise at about eighteen months. There was not a particle of trouble in her smile or in the smiles of Chip and Gary. She sat between them on the living-room sofa in its pre-reupholstered instantiation; each had an arm around her; their clear-skinned boy faces nearly touched above her own.

 “Is that a cute little girl?” Gary said.

 “Oh, how darling,” Enid said, crowding in.

 From the center pages of the album fell an envelope with a Registered Mail sticker. Enid snatched it up and took it to the fireplace and fed it directly to the flames.

 “What was that?” Gary said.

 “Just that Axon business, which is taken care of now.”

 “Did Dad ever send half the money to Orfic Midland?”

 “He asked me to do it but I haven’t yet. I’m so swamped with insurance forms.”

Gary laughed as he went upstairs. “Don’t let that twenty-five hundred burn any holes in your pocket.”

Denise blew her nose and went to peel potatoes in the kitchen.

“Just in case,” Enid said, joining her, “be sure there’s enough for Chip. He said this afternoon at the latest.”

“I think it’s officially evening now,” Denise said.

“Well, I want a lot of potatoes.”

All of her mother’s kitchen knives were butter-knife dull. Denise resorted to a carrot scraper. “Did Dad ever tell you why he didn’t go to Little Rock with Orfic Midland?”

“No,” Enid said emphatically. “Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“He told them yes, he was going. And, Denise, it would have made all the difference for us financially. It would have nearly doubled his pension, just those two years. We would have been in so much better shape now. He told me he was going to do it, he agreed it was the right thing, and then he came home three nights later and said he’d changed his mind and quit.”

Denise looked into the eyes semireflected in the window above the sink. “And he never told you why.”

“Well, he couldn’t stand those Wroths. I assumed it was a personality clash. But he never talked about it with me. You know—he never tells me anything. He just decides. Even if it’s a financial disaster, it’s his decision and it’s final."

Here came the waterworks. Denise let potato and scraper fall into the sink. She thought of the drugs she’d hidden in the Advent calendar, she thought they might stop her tears long enough to let her get out of town, but she was too far from where they were stashed. She’d been caught defenseless in the kitchen.

“Sweetie, what is it?” Enid said.

For a while there was no Denise in the kitchen, just mush and wetness and remorse. She found herself kneeling on the rag rug by the sink. Little balls of soaked Kleenex surrounded her. She was reluctant to raise her eyes to her mother, who was sitting beside her on a chair and feeding her dry tissues.

“So many things you think are going to matter,” Enid said with a new sobriety, “turn out not to matter.”

“Some things still matter,” Denise said.

Enid gazed bleakly at the unpeeled potatoes by the sink. “He’s not going to get better, is he.”

Denise was happy to let her mother think that she’d been crying about Alfred’s health. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“It’s probably not the medication, is it.”

“It probably isn’t.”

“And there’s probably no point in going to Philadelphia,” Enid said, “if he can’t follow instructions.”

“You’re right. There probably isn’t.”

“Denise, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I knew something was wrong this morning,” Enid said. “If you’d found that envelope three months ago, he would have exploded at me. But you saw today. He didn’t do a thing.”

“I’m sorry I put you on the spot there.”

“It didn’t even matter. He didn’t even know.”

“I’m sorry anyway.”

The lid on a pot of white beans boiling on the stove began to rattle. Enid stood up to reduce the heat. Denise, still kneeling, said, “I think there’s something in the Advent calendar for you.”

“No, Gary pinned the last ornament.”

“In the ‘twenty-four’ pocket. There might be something for you.”

“Well, what?”

“I don’t know. You might go check, though.”

She heard her mother make her way to the front door and then return. Although the pattern of the rag rug was complex, she thought she would soon have it memorized from staring.

“Where did these come from?” Enid said.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you put them there?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“You must have put them there.”

“No.”

Enid set the pills on the counter, took two steps away from them, and frowned at them severely. “I’m sure whoever put these there meant well,” she said. “But I don’t want them in my house.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“I want the real thing or I don’t want anything.”

With her right hand Enid herded the pills into her left hand. She dumped them into the garbage grinder, turned on water, and ground them up.

“What’s the real thing?” Denise said when the noise subsided.

“I want us all together for one last Christmas.”

Gary, showered and shaved and dressed in his aristocratic style, entered the kitchen in time to catch this declaration.

“You’d better be willing to settle for four out of five,” he said, opening the liquor cabinet. “What’s wrong with Denise?”

“She’s upset about Dad.”

“Well, it’s about time,” Gary said. “There’s plenty to be upset about.”

Denise gathered up the Kleenex balls. “Pour me a lot of whatever you’re having,” she said.

“I thought we could have Bea’s champagne tonight!” Enid said.

“No,” Denise said.

“No,” Gary said.

“We’ll save it and see if Chip comes,” Enid said. “Now, what’s taking Dad so long upstairs?”

“He’s not upstairs,” Gary said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Al?” Enid shouted. “AL?”

Gases snapped in the neglected fire in the living room. White beans simmered on moderate heat; the registers breathed warm air. Out in the street somebody’s tires were spinning on snow.

“Denise,” Enid said. “Go see if he’s in the basement.”

Denise didn’t ask “Why me?” although she wanted to. She went to the top of the basement stairs and called her father. The basement lights were on, and she could hear a cryptic faint rustling from the workshop.

She called again: “Dad?”

There was no answer.

Her fear, as she descended the stairs, was like a fear from the unhappy year of her childhood when she’d begged for a pet and received a cage containing two hamsters. A dog or a cat might have harmed Enid’s fabrics, but these young hamsters, a pair of siblings from a litter at the Driblett residence, were permitted in the house. Every morning, when Denise went to the basement to give them pellets and change their water, she dreaded to discover what new deviltry they’d hatched in the night for her private spectation—maybe a nest of blind, wriggling, incest-crimson offspring, maybe a desperate pointless wholesale rearrangement of cedar shavings into a single great drift beside which the two parents were trembling on the bare metal of the cage’s floor, looking bloated and evasive after eating all their children, which couldn’t have left an agreeable aftertaste, even in a hamster’s mouth.

The door to Alfred’s workshop was shut. She tapped on it. “Dad?”

Alfred’s reply came immediately in a strained, strangled bark: “Don’t come in!”

Behind the door something hard scraped on concrete.

“Dad? What are you doing?”

“I said don’t come in!”

Well, she’d seen the gun and she was thinking: Of course it’s me down here. She was thinking: And I have no idea what to do.

“Dad, I have to come in.”

“Denise—”

“I’m coming in,” she said.

She opened the door to brilliant lighting. In a single glance she took in the old paint-spattered bedspread on the floor, the old man on his back with his hips off the ground and his knees trembling, his wide eyes fixed on the underside of the workbench while he struggled with the big plastic enema apparatus that he’d stuck into his rectum.

“Whoops, sorry!” she said, turning away, her hands raised.

Alfred breathed stertorously and said nothing more.

She pulled the door partway shut and filled her lungs with air. Upstairs the doorbell was ringing. Through the walls and the ceiling she could hear footsteps approaching the house.

“That’s him, that’s him!” Enid cried.

A burst of song—“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”—punctured her illusion.

Denise joined her mother and brother at the front door. Familiar faces were clustered around the snowy stoop, Dale Driblett, Honey Driblett, Steve and Ashley Driblett, Kirby Root with several daughters and buzz-cut sons-in-law, and the entire Person clan. Enid corralled Denise and Gary and hugged them closer, bouncing on her toes with the spirit of the moment. “Run and get Dad,” she said. “He loves the carolers.”

“Dad’s busy,” Denise said.

For the man who’d taken care to protect her privacy and who had only ever asked that his privacy be respected, too, wasn’t the kindest course to let him suffer by himself and not compound his suffering with the shame of being witnessed? Hadn’t he, with every question that he’d ever failed to ask her, earned the right to relief from any uncomfortable question she might want to ask him now? Like: What’s with the enema, Dad?

The carolers seemed to be singing straight at her. Enid was swaying to the tune, Gary had easy tears in his eyes, but Denise felt like the intended audience. She would have liked to stay there with the happier side of her family. She didn’t know what it was about difficulty that made such a powerful claim on her allegiance. But as Kirby Root, who directed the choir at Chiltsville Methodist, led a segue into “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” she began to wonder if respecting Alfred’s privacy wasn’t a little bit too easy. He wanted to be left alone? Well, how nice for her! She could go back to Philadelphia, live her own life, and be doing exactly what he wanted. He was embarrassed to be seen with a plastic squirter up his ass? Well, how convenient! She was pretty goddamned embarrassed herself!

She extricated herself from her mother, waved to the neighbors, and returned to the basement.

The workshop door was ajar, as she’d left it. “Dad?”

“Don’t come in!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have to come in.”

“I never intended to involve you in this. Not your worry.”

“I know. But I have to come in anyway.”

She found him in much the same position, with an old beach towel wadded up between his legs. Kneeling among the shit smells and piss smells, she rested a hand on his quaking shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

His face was covered with sweat. His eyes glittered with madness. “Find a telephone,” he said, “and call the district manager.”

Chip’s great revelation had come at about six o’clock on Tuesday morning, as he was walking in near-perfect darkness down a road surfaced with Lithuanian gravel, between the tiny hamlets of Neravai and Miškiniai, a few kilometers from the Polish border.

Fifteen hours earlier, he’d reeled out of the airport and had nearly been run over by Jonas, Aidaris, and Gitanas as they veered to the curb in their Ford Stomper. The three men had been on their way out of Vilnius when they’d heard the news of the airport’s closing. Pulling a U- turn on the road to Ignalina, they’d returned to rescue the pathetic American. The Stomper’s rear cargo area was fully constipated with luggage and computers and telephone equipment, but by bungee-cording two suitcases to the roof they made room for Chip and his bag.

“We’ll get you to a small checkpoint,” Gitanas said. “They’re putting roadblocks on all the big roads. They salivate when they see Stompers.”

Jonas had then driven at unsafe speeds on suitably awful roads west of Vilnius, skirting the towns of Jieznas and Alytus. The hours had passed in darkness and jostling. At no point did they see a working streetlight or a law-enforcement vehicle. Jonas and Aidaris listened to Metallica in the front seat while Gitanas pressed buttons on his cell phone in the forlorn hope that Transbaltic Wireless, of which he was still nominally the controlling shareholder, had managed to restore power to its transceiver station in the midst of a national blackout and the mobilization of Lithuania’s armed forces.

“This is a calamity for Vitkunas,” Gitanas said. “Mobilizing just makes him look more Soviet. Troops in the street and no electricity: this will not endear your government to the Lithuanian people.”

“Is anybody actually shooting at people?” Chip asked.

“No, it’s mostly posturing. A tragedy rewritten as a farce.”

Toward midnight the Stomper rounded a sharp curve near Lazdijai, the last sizable town before the Polish frontier, and passed a three-Jeep convoy heading in the opposite direction. Jonas accelerated on the corduroy road and conferred with Gitanas in Lithuanian. The glacial moraine in this region was rolling but unforested. It was possible to look back and see that two of the Jeeps had turned around and commenced pursuit of the Stomper. It was likewise possible, if you were in the Jeeps, to see Jonas making a sharp left onto a gravel road and speeding alongside the whiteness of a frozen lake.

“We’ll outrun ’em,” Gitanas assured Chip approximately two seconds before Jonas, encountering an elbow curve, rolled the Stomper off the road.

We’re having an accident, Chip thought while the vehicle was airborne. He experienced huge retroactive affection for good traction, low centers of gravity, and non-angular varieties of momentum. There was time for quiet reflection and gritting of teeth and then no time at all, just blow after blow, noise upon noise. The Stomper tried out several versions of the vertical—ninety, two-seventy, three-sixty, one-eighty—and finally came to rest on its left side with its engine dead and its lights still burning.

Chip’s hips and chest felt seriously bruised by his lap and shoulder belts. Otherwise he seemed to be in one piece, as did Jonas and Aidaris.

Gitanas had been thrown around and bludgeoned by loose luggage. He was bleeding from wounds on his chin and forehead. He spoke to Jonas urgently, apparently telling him to cut the lights, but it was too late. There was a sound of great downshifting on the road behind them. The pursuing Jeeps pulled up at the elbow curve, and uniformed men in ski masks piled out.

“Police in ski masks,” Chip said. “I’m struggling to put a positive construction on this.”

The Stomper had crashed in a frozen-over marsh. In the intersecting high beams of two Jeeps, eight or ten masked “officers” surrounded it and ordered everybody out. Chip, pushing open the door above him, felt like a Jack emerging from its box.

Jonas and Aidaris were relieved of their weapons. The contents of the vehicle were methodically dumped on the crusty snow and broken reeds that covered the ground. A “policeman” pressed the muzzle of a rifle into Chip’s cheek, and Chip received a one-word order that Gitanas translated: “He’s inviting you to take your clothes off.”

Death, that overseas relation, that foul-breathed remittance man, had suddenly appeared in the immediate neighborhood. Chip was quite afraid of the gun. His hands shook and lost feeling; it took the entire sum of his will to apply them to the task of unzipping and unbuttoning himself. Apparently he’d been singled out for this humiliation because of the quality of the leather goods he was wearing. Nobody seemed to care about Gitanas’s red motocross jacket or Jonas’s denim. But ski-masked “policemen” gathered round and fingered the fine grain of Chip’s pants and coat. Puffing frost through O-shaped mouth holes with their weirdly decontexualized lips, they tested the flexure of his left boot’s sole.

A cry went up when a wad of U. S. currency fell from the boot. Again the gun muzzle was in Chip’s cheek. Chilly fingers discovered the big envelope of cash under his T-shirt. The “police” examined his wallet as well but didn’t steal his litai or his credit cards. Dollars were all they wanted.

Gitanas, with blood congealing on several quadrants of his head, lodged a protest with the captain of the “police.” The ensuing argument, in which Gitanas and the captain repeatedly gestured at Chip and used the words “dollars” and “American,” ended when the captain pointed a pistol at Gitanas’s bloody forehead and Gitanas raised his hands to concede that the captain had a point.

Chip’s sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender. It seemed very important to contain himself, however, and so he stood in his socks and underwear and pressed his butt cheeks together as well as he could with his shaking hands. Pressed and pressed and fought the spasms manually. He didn’t care how ridiculous this looked.

The “police” were finding much to steal from the luggage. Chip’s bag was emptied on the snowy ground and his belongings picked through. He and Gitanas looked on while the “police” shredded the Stomper’s upholstery, tore up its floor, and located Gitanas’s reserves of cash and cigarettes.

“What exactly is the pretext here?” Chip said, still shivering violently but winning the really important battle.

“We’re accused of smuggling currency and tobacco,” Gitanas said.

“And who’s accusing us?”

“I’m afraid they’re what they seem to be,” Gitanas said. “In other words, national police in ski masks. There’s kind of a Mardi Gras atmosphere in the country tonight. Kind of an anything-goes type of spirit.”

It was 1 a.m. when the “police” finally roared away in their Jeeps. Chip and Gitanas and Jonas and Aidaris were left with frozen feet, a smashed-up Stomper, wet clothes, and demolished luggage.

On the plus side, Chip thought, I didn’t shit myself.

He still had his passport and the $2,000 that the “police” had failed to locate in his T-shirt pocket. He also had gym shoes, some loose-fitting jeans, his good tweed sport coat, and his favorite sweater, all of which he hurried to put on.

“This pretty much ends my career as a criminal warlord,” Gitanas commented. “I have no further ambitions in that direction.”

Using cigarette lighters, Jonas and Aidaris were inspecting the Stomper’s undercarriage. Aidaris delivered the verdict in English for Chip’s benefit: “Truck fucked up.”

Gitanas offered to walk with Chip to the border crossing on the road to Sejny, fifteen kilometers to the west, but Chip was painfully aware that if his friends hadn’t circled back to the airport they would probably be safe now with their relatives in Ignalina, their vehicle and their cash reserves intact.

“Eh,” Gitanas said with a shrug. “We might have got shot on the road to Ignalina. Maybe you saved our life.”

“Truck fucked up,” Aidaris repeated with spite and delight.

“So I’ll see you in New York,” Chip said.

Gitanas sat down on a seventeen-inch computer monitor with a stove-in screen. He carefully felt his bloody forehead. “Yeah, right. New York.”

“You can stay in my apartment.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Let’s just do it,” Chip said somewhat desperately.

“I’m a Lithuanian,” Gitanas said.

Chip felt more hurt, more disappointed and abandoned, than the situation called for. However, he contained himself. He accepted a road map, a cigarette lighter, an apple, and the Lithuanians’ sincere good wishes and set off in the darkness.

Once he was alone, he felt better. The longer he walked, the more he appreciated the comfort of his jeans and gym shoes as hiking gear, relative to his boots and leather pants. His tread was lighter, his stride freer; he was tempted to start skipping down the road. How pleasant to be out walking in these gym shoes!

But this was not his great revelation. His great revelation came when he was a few kilometers from the Polish border. He was straining to hear whether any of the homicidal farm dogs in the surrounding darkness might be unleashed, he had his arms outstretched, he was feeling more than a little ridiculous, when he remembered Gitanas’s remark: tragedy rewritten as a farce. All of a sudden he understood why nobody, including himself, had ever liked his screenplay: he’d written a thriller where he should have written farce.

Faint morning twilight was overtaking him. In New York he’d honed and polished the first thirty pages of “The Academy Purple” until his memory of them was nearly eidetic, and now, as the Baltic sky brightened, he bore down with a mental red pencil on his mental reconstruction of these pages, made a little trim here, added emphasis or hyperbole there, and in his mind the scenes became what they’d wanted to be all along: ridiculous. The tragic BILL QUAINTENCE became a comic fool.

Chip picked up his pace as if hurrying toward a desk at which he could begin to revise the script immediately. He came over a rise and saw the blacked-out Lithuanian town of Eisiskès and, farther in the distance, beyond the frontier, some outdoor lights in Poland. Two dray horses, straining their heads over a barbed-wire fence, nickered at him optimistically.

He spoke out loud: “Make it ridiculous. Make it ridiculous.”

Two Lithuanian customs officials and two “policemen” manned the tiny border checkpoint. They handed Chip’s passport back to him without the bulky stack of litai that he’d filled it with. For no discernible reason except petty cruelty, they made him sit in an overheated room for several hours while cement mixers and chicken trucks and bicyclists came and went. It was late morning before they let him walk over into Poland.

A few kilometers down the road, in Sejny, he bought zlotys and, using the zlotys, lunch. The shops were well stocked, it was Christmastime. The men of the town were old and looked a lot like the Pope.

Rides in three trucks and a city taxi got him to the Warsaw airport by noon on Wednesday. The improbably apple-cheeked personnel at the LOT Polish Airlines ticket counter were delighted to see him. LOT had added extra holiday flights to its schedule to accommodate the tens of thousands of Polish guest workers returning to their families from the West, and many of the westbound flights were underbooked. All the red-cheeked counter girls wore little hats like drum majorettes. They took cash from Chip, gave him a ticket, and told him Run.

He ran to the gate and boarded a 767 that then sat on the runway for four hours while a possibly faulty instrument in the cockpit was examined and finally, reluctantly, replaced.

The flight plan was a great-circle route to the great Polish city of Chicago, nonstop. Chip kept sleeping in order to forget that he owed Denise $20,500, was maxed out on his credit cards, and now had neither a job nor any prospect of finding one.

The good news in Chicago, after he’d cleared Customs, was that two rental-car companies were still doing business. The bad news, which he learned after standing in line for half an hour, was that people with maxed-out credit cards could not rent cars.

He went down the list of airlines in the phone book until he found one—Prairie Hopper, never heard of it—that had a seat on a St. Jude flight at seven the next morning.

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay down on it to sleep. He didn’t understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He’d lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he’d lost track of himself.

How strange, then, that the old man who opened the front door at nine-thirty in St. Jude the next morning seemed to know exactly who he was.

A holly wreath was on the door. The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn’t see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn’t simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages. The old street with its oak smoke and snowy flat-topped hedges and icicled eaves seemed precarious. It seemed mirage-like. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something beloved and dead.

“Well!” Alfred said, his face blazing with joy, as he took Chip’s hand in both of his. “Look who’s here!”

Enid tried to elbow her way into the picture, speaking Chip’s name, but Alfred wouldn’t let go of his hand. He said it twice more: “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!”

“Al, let him come in and close the door,” Enid said.

Chip was balking at the doorway. The world outside was black and white and gray and swept by fresh, clear air; the enchanted interior was dense with objects and smells and colors, humidity, large personalities. He was afraid to enter.

“Come in, come in,” Enid squeaked, “and shut the door.”

To protect himself from spells, he privately spoke an incantation: I’m staying for three days and then I’m going back to New York, I’m finding a job, I’m putting aside five hundred dollars a month, minimum, until I’m out of debt, and I’m working every night on the script.

Invoking this charm, which was all he had now, the paltry sum of his identity, he stepped through the doorway.

“My word, you’re scratchy and smelly,” Enid said, kissing him. “Now, where’s your suitcase?”

“It’s by the side of a gravel road in western Lithuania.”

“I’m just happy you’re home safely.”

Nowhere in the nation of Lithuania was there a room like the Lambert living room. Only in this hemisphere could carpeting so sumptuously woolen and furniture so big and so well made and so opulently upholstered be found in a room of such plain design and ordinary situation. The light in the wood-framed windows, though gray, had a prairie optimism; there wasn’t a sea within six hundred miles to trouble the atmosphere. And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

Chip apprehended it all in a heartbeat. The continent, his homeland. Scattered around the living room were nests of opened presents and little leavings of spent ribbon, wrapping-paper fragments, labels. At the foot of the fireside chair that Alfred always claimed for himself, Denise was kneeling by the largest nest of presents.

“Denise, look who’s here,” Enid said.

As if out of obligation, with downcast eyes, Denise rose and crossed the room. But when she’d put her arms around Chip and he’d squeezed her in return (her height, as always, surprised him), she wouldn’t let go. She clung to him—kissed his neck, fastened her eyes on him, and thanked him.

Gary came over and embraced Chip awkwardly, his face averted. “Didn’t think you were going to make it,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Chip said.

“Well!” Alfred said again, gazing at him in wonder.

“Gary has to leave at eleven,” Enid said, “but we can all have breakfast together. You get cleaned up, and Denise and I will start breakfast. Oh, this is just what I wanted,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had!”

Gary turned to Chip with his I’m-a-jerk face. “There you go,” he said. “Best Christmas present she’s ever had.”

“I think she means having all five of us together,” Denise said.

“Well, she’d better enjoy it in a hurry,” Gary said, “because she owes me a discussion and I’m expecting payment.”

Chip, detached from his own body, trailed after it and wondered what it was going to do. He removed an aluminum stool from the downstairs bathroom shower. The blast of water was strong and hot. His impressions were fresh in a way that he would either remember all his life or instantly forget. A brain could absorb only so many impressions before it lost the ability to decode them, to put them in coherent shape and order. His nearly sleepless night on a patch of airport carpeting, for example, was still very much with him and begging to be processed. And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. The tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by Enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building.

Denise’s shampoo had the pleasing, subtle scents of late-model Western capitalism. In the seconds it took Chip to lather his hair, he forgot where he was. Forgot the continent, forgot the year, forgot the time of day, forgot the circumstances. His brain in the shower was piscine or amphibian, registering impressions, reacting to the moment. He wasn’t far from terror. At the same time, he felt OK. He was hungry for breakfast and thirsty, in particular, for coffee.

With a towel around his waist he stopped in the living room, where Alfred leaped to his feet. The sight of Alfred’s suddenly aged face, its disintegration-in-progress, its rednesses and asymmetries, cut Chip like a bullwhip.

“Well!” Alfred said. “That was quick.”

“Can I borrow some clothes of yours?”

“I will leave that to your judgment.”

Upstairs in his father’s closet the ancient shaving kits, shoehorns, electric razors, shoe trees, and tie rack were all in their accustomed places. They’d been on duty here each hour of the fifteen hundred days since Chip had last been in this house. For a moment he was angry (how could he not be?) that his parents had never moved anywhere. Had simply stayed here waiting.

He took underwear, socks, wool slacks, a white shirt, and a gray cardigan to the room that he’d shared with Gary in the years between Denise’s arrival in the family and Gary’s departure for college. Gary had an overnight bag open on “his” twin bed and was packing it.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” he said, “but Dad’s in bad shape.”

“No, I noticed.”

Gary put a small box on Chip’s dresser. It was a box of ammunition—twenty-gauge shotgun shells.

“He had these out with the gun in the workshop,” Gary said. “I went down there this morning and I thought, better safe than sorry.”

Chip looked at the box and spoke instinctively. “Isn’t that kind of Dad’s own decision?”

“That’s what I was thinking yesterday,” Gary said. “But if he wants to do it, he’s got other options. It’s supposed to be down near zero tonight. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey. I don’t want Mom to find him with his head blown off.”

Chip didn’t know what to say. He silently dressed in the old man’s clothes. The shirt and pants were marvelously clean and fit him better than he would have guessed. He was surprised, when he put the cardigan on, that his hands did not begin to shake, surprised to see such a young face in the mirror.

“So what have you been doing with yourself?” Gary said.

“I’ve been helping a Lithuanian friend of mine defraud Western investors.”

“Jesus, Chip. You don’t want to be doing that.”

Everything else in the world might be strange, but Gary’s condescension galled Chip exactly as it always had.

“From a strictly moral viewpoint,” Chip said, “I have more sympathy for Lithuania than I do for American investors.”

“You want to be a Bolshevik?” Gary said, zipping up his bag. “Fine, be a Bolshevik. Just don’t call me when you get arrested.”

“It would never occur to me to call you,” Chip said.

“Are you fellas about ready for breakfast?” Enid sang from halfway up the stairs.

A holiday linen tablecloth was on the dining table. In the center was an arrangement of pinecones, white holly and green holly, red candles, and silver bells. Denise was bringing food out—Texan grapefruit, scrambled eggs, bacon, and a stollen and breads that she’d baked.

Snow cover boosted the strong prairie light.

Per custom, Gary sat alone on one side of the table. On the other side, Denise sat by Enid and Chip by Alfred.

“Merry, merry, merry Christmas!” Enid said, looking each of her children in the eye in turn.

Alfred, head down, was already eating.

Gary also began to eat, rapidly, with a glance at his watch.

Chip didn’t remember the coffee being so drinkable in these parts.

Denise asked him how he’d gotten home. He told her the story, omitting only the armed robbery.

Enid, with a scowl of judgment, was following every move of Gary’s. “Slow down,” she said. “You don’t have to leave until eleven.”

“Actually,” Gary said, “I said quarter to eleven. It’s past ten-thirty, and we have some things to discuss.”

“We’re finally all together,” Enid said. “Let’s just relax and enjoy it.”

Gary set his fork down. “I’ve been here since Monday, Mother, waiting for us all to be together. Denise has been here since Tuesday morning. It’s not my fault if Chip was too busy defrauding American investors to get here on time.”

“I just explained why I was late,” Chip said. “If you were listening.”

“Well, maybe you should have left a little earlier.”

“What does he mean, defrauding?” Enid said. “I thought you were doing computer work.”

“I’ll explain it to you later, Mom.”

“No,” Gary said. “Explain it to her now.”

“Gary,” Denise said.

“No, sorry,” Gary said, throwing down his napkin like a gauntlet. “I’ve had it with this family! I’m done waiting! I want some answers now.”

“I was doing computer work,” Chip said. “But Gary’s right, strictly speaking, the intent was to defraud American investors.”

“I don’t approve of that at all,” Enid said.

“I know you don’t,” Chip said. “Although it’s a little more complicated than you might—”

“What is so complicated about obeying the law?”

“Gary, for God’s sake,” Denise said with a sigh. “It’s Christmas?”

“And you’re a thief,” Gary said, wheeling on her.

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You sneaked into somebody’s room and you took a thing that didn’t belong—”

“Excuse me,” Denise said hotly, “I restored a thing that was stolen from its rightful—”

“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!”

“Oh, I’m not sitting here for this,” Enid wailed. “Not on Christmas morning!”

“No, Mother, sorry, you’re not going anywhere,” Gary said. “We’re going to sit here and have our little talk right now.”

Alfred gave Chip a complicit smile and gestured at the others. “You see what I have to put up with?”

Chip arranged his face in a facsimile of comprehension and agreement.

“Chip, how long are you here for?” Gary said.

“Three days.”

“And, Denise, you’re leaving on—”

“Sunday, Gary. I’m leaving on Sunday.”

“So what’s going to happen on Monday, Mom? How are you going to make this house work on Monday?”

“I’ll think about that when Monday comes.”

Alfred, still smiling, asked Chip what Gary was talking about.

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“You really think you’re going to go to Philadelphia?” Gary said. “You think Corecktall’s going to fix all this?”

“No, Gary, I don’t,” Enid said.

Gary didn’t seem to hear her answer. “Dad, here, do me a favor,” he said. “Put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

“Gary, stop it,” Denise said.

Alfred leaned close to Chip and spoke confidentially. “What’s he asking?”

“He wants you to put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

“That’s a lot of nonsense.”

“Dad?” Gary said. “Come on, right hand, left shoulder.”

“Stop it,” Denise said.

“Let’s go, Dad. Right hand, left shoulder. Can you do that? You want to show us how you follow simple instructions? Come on! Right hand. Left shoulder.”

Alfred shook his head. “One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need.”

“Al, I don’t want one bedroom and a kitchen,” Enid said.

The old man pushed his chair away from the table and turned once more to Chip. He said, “You can see it’s not without its difficulties.”

As he stood up, his leg buckled and he pitched to the floor, dragging his plate and place mat and coffee cup and saucer along with him. The crash might have been the last bar of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse.

Chip knelt down and helped him into a sitting position while Denise hurried to the kitchen.

“It’s quarter to eleven,” Gary said as if nothing unusual had happened. “Before I leave, here’s a summary. Dad is demented and incontinent. Mom can’t have him in this house without a lot of help, which she says she doesn’t want even if she could afford it. Corecktall is obviously not an option, and so what I want to know is what you’re going to do. Now, Mother. I want to know now.”

Alfred rested his shaking hands on Chip’s shoulders and gazed in wonder at the room’s furnishings. Despite his agitation, he was smiling.

“My question,” he said. “Is who owns this house? Who takes care of all of this?”

“You own it, Dad.”

Alfred shook his head as if this didn’t square with the facts as he understood them.

Gary was demanding an answer.

“I guess we’ll have to try the drug holiday,” Enid said.

“Fine, try that,” Gary said. “Put him in the hospital, see if they ever let him out. And while you’re at it, you might take a drug holiday yourself.”

“Gary, she got rid of it,” Denise said from the floor, where she’d knelt with a sponge. “She put it in the Disposall. So just lay off.”

“Well, I hope you learned your lesson there, Mother.”

Chip, in the old man’s clothes, wasn’t able to follow this conversation. His father’s hands were heavy on his shoulders. For the second time in an hour, somebody was clinging to him, as if he were a person of substance, as if there were something to him. In fact, there was so little to him that he couldn’t even say whether his sister and his father were mistaken about him. He felt as if his consciousness had been shorn of all identifying marks and transplanted, metempsychotically, into the body of a steady son, a trustworthy brother…

Gary had dropped into a crouch beside Alfred. “Dad,” he said, “I’m sorry it had to end this way. I love you and I’ll see you again soon.”

“Well. Yurrr vollb. Yeaugh,” Alfred replied. He lowered his head and looked around with rank paranoia.

“And you, my feckless sibling.” Gary spread his fingers, clawlike, on top of Chip’s head in what he apparently meant as a gesture of affection. “I’m counting on you to help out here.”

“I’ll do my best,” Chip said with less irony than he’d aimed for.

Gary stood up. “I’m sorry I ruined your breakfast, Mom. But I, for one, feel better for having got this off my chest.”

“Why you couldn’t have waited till after the holiday,” Enid muttered.

Gary kissed her cheek. “Call Hedgpeth tomorrow morning. Then call me and tell me what the plan is. I’m going to monitor this closely.”

It seemed unbelievable to Chip that Gary could simply walk out of the house with Alfred on the floor and Enid’s Christmas breakfast in ruins, but Gary was in his most rational mode, his words had a formal hollowness, his eyes were evasive as he put on his coat and gathered up his bag and Enid’s bag of gifts for Philadelphia, because he was afraid. Chip could see it clearly now, behind the cold front of Gary’s wordless departure: his brother was afraid.

As soon as the front door had closed, Alfred made his way to the bathroom.

“Let’s all be happy,” Denise said, “that Gary got that off his chest and feels so much better now.”

“No, he’s right,” Enid said, her eyes resting bleakly on the holly centerpiece. “Something has to change.”

After breakfast the hours passed in the sickishness, the invalid waiting, of a major holiday. Chip in his exhaustion had trouble staying warm, but his face was flushed with the heat from the kitchen and the smell of baking turkey that blanketed the house. Whenever he entered his father’s field of vision, a smile of recognition and pleasure spread over Alfred’s face. This recognition might have had the character of mistaken identity if it hadn’t been accompanied by Alfred’s exclamation of Chip’s name. Chip seemed beloved to the old man. He’d been arguing with Alfred and deploring Alfred and feeling the sting of Alfred’s disapproval for most of his life, and his personal failures and his political views were, if anything, more extreme than ever now, and yet it was Gary who was fighting with the old man, it was Chip who brightened the old man’s face.

At dinner he took the trouble to describe in some detail his activities in Lithuania. He might as well have been reciting the tax code in a monotone. Denise, normally a paragon of listening, was absorbed in helping Alfred with his food, and Enid had eyes only for her husband’s deficiencies. She flinched or sighed or shook her head at every spilled bite, every non sequitur. Alfred was quite visibly making her life a hell now.

I’m the least unhappy person at this table, Chip thought.

He helped Denise wash the dishes while Enid spoke to her grandsons on the telephone and Alfred went to bed.

“How long has Dad been like this?” he asked Denise.

“Like this? Just since yesterday. But he wasn’t great before that.”

Chip put on a heavy coat of Alfred’s and took a cigarette outside. The cold was deeper than any he’d experienced in Vilnius. Wind rattled the thick brown leaves still clinging to the oaks, those most conservative of trees; snow squeaked beneath his feet. Near zero tonight, Gary had said. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey. Chip wanted to pursue the important question of suicide while he had a cigarette to enhance his mental performance, but his bronchi and nasal passages were so traumatized by cold that the trauma of smoke barely registered, and the ache in his fingers and ears—the damned rivets—was fast becoming unbearable. He gave up and hurried inside just as Denise was leaving.

“Where are you going?” Chip asked.

“I’ll be back.”

Enid, by the fire in the living room, was gnawing at her lip with naked desolation. “You haven’t opened your presents,” she said.

“Maybe in the morning,” Chip said.

“I’m sure I didn’t get you anything you’ll like.”

“It’s nice you got me anything.”

Enid shook her head. “This wasn’t the Christmas I’d hoped for. Suddenly Dad can’t do a thing. Not one single thing.”

“Let’s give him a drug holiday and see if that helps.”

Enid might have been reading bad prognoses in the fire. “Will you stay for a week and help me take him to the hospital?”

Chip’s hand went to the rivet in his earlobe as to a talisman. He felt like a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food; and now the witch was going to lock him in a cage, fatten him up, and eat him.

He repeated the charm he’d invoked at the front door. “I can only stay three days,” he said. “I’ve got to start working right away. I owe Denise some money that I need to pay her back.”

“Just a week,” the witch said. “Just a week, until we see how things go in the hospital.”

“I don’t think so, Mom. I’ve got to go back.”

Enid’s bleakness deepened, but she didn’t seem surprised by his refusal. “I guess this is my responsibility, then,” she said. “I guess I always knew it would be.”

She retired to the den, and Chip put more logs on the fire. Cold drafts were finding ways through the windows, faintly stirring the open curtains. The furnace was running almost constantly. The world was colder and emptier than Chip had realized, the adults had gone away.

Toward eleven, Denise came inside reeking of cigarettes and looking two-thirds frozen. She waved to Chip and tried to go straight upstairs, but he insisted that she sit by the fire. She knelt and bowed her head, sniffling steadily, and put her hands out toward the embers. She kept her eyes on the fire as if to ensure that she not look at him. She blew her nose on a wet shred of Kleenex.

“Where’d you go?” he said.

“Just on a walk.”

“Long walk.”

“Yuh.”

“You sent me some e-mails that I deleted before I really read them.”

“Oh.”

“So what’s going on?” he said.

She shook her head. “Just everything.”

“I had almost thirty thousand dollars in cash on Monday. I was going to give you twenty-four thousand of it. But then we got robbed by uniformed men in ski masks. Implausible as that may sound.”

“I want to forgive that debt,” Denise said.

Chip’s hand went to the rivet again. “I’m going to start paying you a minimum of four hundred a month until the principal and interest are paid off. It’s my top priority. Absolute highest priority.”

His sister turned and raised her face to him. Her eyes were bloodshot, her forehead as red as a newborn’s. “I said I forgive the debt. You owe me nothing.”

“Appreciate it,” he said quickly, looking away. “But I’m going to pay you anyway.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to take your money. I forgive the debt. Do you know what ‘forgive’ means?”

In her peculiar mood, with her unexpected words, she was making Chip anxious. He pulled on the rivet and said, “Denise, come on. Please. At least show me the respect of letting me pay you back. I realize I’ve been a shit. But I don’t want to be a shit all my life.”

“I want to forgive that debt,” she said.

“Really. Come on.” Chip smiled desperately. “You’ve got to let me pay you.”

“Can you stand to be forgiven?”

“No,” he said. “Basically, no. I can’t. It’s better all around if I pay you.”

Still kneeling, Denise bent over and tucked in her arms and made herself into an olive, an egg, an onion. From within this balled form came a low voice. “Do you understand what a huge favor you’d be doing me if you would let me forgive the debt? Do you understand that it’s hard for me to ask this favor? Do you understand that coming here for Christmas is the only other favor I’ve ever asked you? Do you understand that I’m not trying to insult you? Do you understand that I never doubted that you wanted to pay me back, and I know I’m asking you to do something very hard? Do you understand that I wouldn’t ask you to do something so hard if I didn’t really, really, really need it?”

Chip looked at the trembling balled human form at his feet. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’m having trouble on numerous fronts,” she said.

“This is a bad time to talk about the money, then. Let’s forget it for a while. I want to hear what’s bothering you.”

Still balled up, Denise shook her head emphatically, once. “I need you to say yes here, now. Say ‘Yes, thank you.’ ”

Chip made a gesture of utter bafflement. It was near midnight and his father had begun to thump around upstairs and his sister was curled up like an egg and begging him to accept relief from the principal torment of his life.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

“Would it help if I asked you for something else?”

“Tomorrow, OK?”

“Mom wants somebody here next week,” Denise said. “You could stay a week and help her. That would be a huge relief for me. I’m going to die if I stay past Sunday. I will literally cease to exist.”

Chip was breathing hard. The door of the cage was closing on him fast. The sensation he’d had in the men’s room at the Vilnius Airport, the feeling that his debt to Denise, far from being a burden, was his last defense, returned to him in the form of dread at the prospect of its being forgiven. He’d lived with the affliction of this debt until it had assumed the character of a neuroblastoma so intricately implicated in his cerebral architecture that he doubted he could survive its removal.

He wondered if the last flights east had left the airport or whether he might still escape tonight.

“How about we split the debt in half?” he said. “So I only owe you ten. How about we both stay here till Wednesday?”

“Nope.”

“If I said yes,” he said, “would you stop being so weird and lighten up a little?”

“First say yes.”

Alfred was calling Chip’s name from upstairs. He was saying, “Chip, can you help me?”

“He calls your name even when you’re not here,” Denise said.

The windows shook in the wind. When had it happened that his parents had become the children who went to bed early and called down for help from the top of the stairs? When had this happened?

“Chip,” Alfred called. “I don’t understand this blanket. CAN YOU HELP ME?”

The house shook and the storms rattled and the draft from the window nearest Chip intensified; and in a gust of memory he remembered the curtains. He remembered when he’d left St. Jude for college. He remembered packing the hand-carved Austrian chessmen that his parents had given him for his high-school graduation, and the six-volume Sandburg biography of Lincoln that they’d given him for his eighteenth birthday, and his new navy-blue blazer from Brooks Brothers (“It makes you look like a handsome young doctor!” Enid hinted), and great stacks of white T-shirts and white jockey underpants and white long johns, and a fifth-grade school picture of Denise in a Lucite frame, and the very same Hudson Bay blanket that Alfred had taken as a freshman to the University of Kansas four decades earlier, and a pair of leather-clad wool mittens that likewise dated from Alfred’s deep Kansan past, and a set of heavy-duty thermal curtains that Alfred had bought for him at Sears. Reading Chip’s college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he’d bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. “You’ll appreciate these on a cold night,” he told Chip. “You’ll be surprised how much they cut down drafts.” But Chip’s freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted—to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particular brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t belong in a dorm room. They’d betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out on the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he’d thought.

“I don’t understand these blankets,” Alfred said.

“All right,” Chip told Denise as he started up the stairs. “If it makes you feel better, I won’t pay you back.”

The question was: How to get out of this prison?

The big black lady, the mean one, the bastard, was the one he had to keep an eye on. She intended to make his life a hell. She stood at the far end of the prison yard throwing him significant glances to remind him that she hadn’t forgotten him, she was still in hot pursuit of her vendetta. She was a lazy black bastard and he said so at a shout. He cursed the bastards, black and white, all around him. Goddamned sneaky bastards with their pinheaded regulations. EPA bureaucrats, OSHA functionaries, insolent so-and-sos. They were keeping their distance now, sure, because they knew he was onto them, but just let him nod off for one minute, just let him let his guard down, and watch what they would do to him. They could hardly wait to tell him he was nothing. They could hardly wait to show their disrespect. That fat black bastard, that nasty black bitch over there, held his eye and nodded across the white heads of the other prisoners: I’m gonna get you. That’s what her nod said to him. And nobody else could see what she was doing to him. All the rest were timid useless strangers talking nonsense. He’d said hello to one of the fellows, asked him a simple question. The fellow didn’t even understand English. It ought to have been simple enough, ask a simple question, get a simple answer, but evidently not. He was on his own now, he was by himself in a corner; and the bastards were out to get him.

He didn’t understand where Chip was. Chip was an intellectual and had ways of talking sense to these people. Chip had done a good job yesterday, better than he could have done himself. Asked a simple question, got a simple answer, and then explained it in a way that a man could understand. But there was no sign of Chip now. Inmates semaphoring one another, waving their arms like traffic cops. Just try giving a simple order to these people, just try it. They pretended you didn’t exist. That fat bastard black woman had them all scared witless. If she figured out that the prisoners were on his side, if she found out they’d aided him in any way, she’d make them pay. Oh, she had that look. She had that I’m gonna make you hurt look. And he, at this point in his life, he’d had just about enough of this insolent black type of woman, but what could you do? It was a prison. It was a public institution. They’d throw anybody in here. White-haired women semaphoring. Hairless fairies touching toes. But why him, for God’s sake? Why him? It made him weep to be thrown into a place like this. It was hell to get old even without being persecuted by that waddling black so-and-so.

And here she came again.

“Alfred?” Sassy. Insolent. “You gonna let me stretch your legs now?”

“You’re a goddamned bastard!” he told her.

“I is what I is, Alfred. But I know who my parents are. Now why don’t you put your hands down, nice and easy, and let me stretch your legs and help you feel better.”

He lunged as she came at him, but his belt had got stuck in the chair, in the chair somehow, in the chair. Got stuck in the chair and he couldn’t move.

“You keep that up, Alfred,” the mean one said, “and we’re gonna have to take you back to your room.”

“Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!”

She pulled an insolent face and went away, but he knew that she’d be back. They always came back. His only hope was to get his belt free of the chair somehow. Get himself free, make a dash, put an end to it. Bad design to build a prison yard this many stories up. A man could see clear to Illinois. Big window right there. Bad design if they meant to house prisoners here. From the look of the glass it was thermal pane, two layers. If he hit it with his head and pitched forward he could make it. But first he had to get the goddamned belt free.

He struggled with its smooth nylon breadth in the same way over and over. There was a time when he’d encountered obstacles philosophically but that time was past. His fingers were as weak as grass when he tried to work them under the belt so he could pull on it. They bent like soft bananas. Trying to work them under the belt was so obviously and utterly hopeless—the belt had such overwhelming advantages of toughness and tightness—that his efforts soon became merely a pageant of spite and rage and incapacity. He caught his fingernails on the belt and then flung his arms apart, letting his hands bang into the arms of his captivating chair and painfully ricochet this way and that way, because he was so goddamned angry—

“Dad, Dad, Dad, whoa, calm down,” the voice said.

“Get that bastard! Get that bastard!”

“Dad, whoa, it’s me. It’s Chip.”

Indeed, the voice was familiar. He looked up at Chip carefully to make sure the speaker really was his middle child, because the bastards would try to take advantage of you any way they could. Indeed, if the speaker had been anybody in the world but Chip, it wouldn’t have paid to trust him. Too risky. But there was something in Chipper that the bastards couldn’t fake. You looked at Chipper and you knew he’d never lie to you. There was a sweetness to Chipper that nobody else could counterfeit.

As his identification of Chipper deepened toward certainty, his breathing leveled out and something like a smile pushed through the other, warring forces in his face.

“Well!” he said finally.

Chip pulled another chair over and gave him a cup of ice water for which, he realized, he was thirsty. He took a long pull on the straw and gave the water back to Chip.

“Where’s your mother?”

Chip set the cup on the floor. “She woke up with a cold. I told her to stay in bed.”

“Where’s she living now?”

“She’s at home. Exactly where she was two days ago.”

Chip had already explained to him why he had to be here, and the explanation had made sense as long as he could see Chip’s face and hear his voice, but as soon as Chip was gone the explanation fell apart.

The big black bastard was circling the two of them with her evil eye.

“This is a physical-therapy room,” Chip said. “We’re on the eighth floor of St. Luke’s. Mom had her foot operation here, if you remember that.”

“That woman is a bastard,” he said, pointing.

“No, she’s a physical therapist,” Chip said, “and she’s been trying to help you.”

“No, look at her. Do you see the way she’s? Do you see it?”

“She’s a physical therapist, Dad.”

“The what? She’s a?”

On the one hand, he trusted the intelligence and assurance of his intellectual son. On the other hand, the black bastard was giving him the Eye to warn him of the harm she intended to do him at her earliest opportunity; there was a grand malevolence to her manner, plain as day. He couldn’t begin to reconcile this contradiction: his belief that Chip was absolutely right and his conviction that that bastard absolutely wasn’t any physicist.

The contradiction opened into a bottomless chasm. He stared into its depths, his mouth hanging open. A warm thing was crawling down his chin.

And now some bastard’s hand was reaching for him. He tried to slug the bastard and realized, in the nick of time, that the hand belonged to Chip.

“Easy, Dad. I’m just wiping your chin.”

“Ah God.”

“Do you want to sit here a little, or do you want to go back to your room?”

“I leave it to your discretion.”

This handy phrase came to him all ready to be spoken, neat as you please.

“Let’s go back, then.” Chip reached behind the chair and made adjustments. Evidently the chair had casters and levers of enormous complexity.

“See if you can get my belt unhooked,” he said.

“We’ll go back to the room, and then you can walk around.”

Chip wheeled him out of the yard and up the cellblock to his cell. He couldn’t get over how luxurious the appointments were. Like a first-class hotel room except for the bars on the bed and the shackles and the radios, the prisoner-control equipment.

Chip parked him near the window, left the room with a Styrofoam pitcher, and returned a few minutes later in the company of a pretty little girl in a white jacket.

“Mr. Lambert?” she said. She was pretty like Denise, with curly black hair and wire glasses, but smaller. “I’m Dr. Schulman. You may remember we met yesterday.”

“Well!” he said, smiling wide. He remembered a world where there were girls like this, pretty little girls with bright eyes and smart brows, a world of hope.

She placed a hand on his head and bent down as if to kiss him. She scared the hell out of him. He almost hit her.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “I just want to look in your eye. Is that all right with you?”

He turned to Chip for reassurance, but Chip himself was staring at the girl.

“Chip!” he said.

Chip took his eyes off her. “Yeah, Dad?”

Well, now that he’d attracted Chip’s attention, he had to say something, and what he said was this: “Tell your mother not to worry about the mess down there. I’ll take care of all that.”

“OK. I’ll tell her.”

The girl’s clever fingers and soft face were all around his head. She asked him to make a fist, she pinched him and prodded him. She was talking like the television in somebody else’s room.

“Dad?” Chip said.

“I didn’t hear.”

“Dr. Schulman wants to know if you’d prefer ‘Alfred’ or ‘Mr. Lambert.’ What would you rather she called you?”

He grinned painfully. “I’m not following.”

“I think he prefers ‘Mr. Lambert,’ ” Chip said.

“Mr. Lambert,” said the little girl, “can you tell me where we are?”

He turned again to Chip, whose expression was expectant but unhelpful. He pointed toward the window. “That’s Illinois in that direction,” he said to his son and to the girl. Both were listening with great interest now, and he felt he should say more. “There’s a window,” he said, “which… if you get it open… would be what I want. I couldn’t get the belt undone. And then.”

He was failing and he knew it.

The little girl looked down on him kindly. “Can you tell me who our President is?”

He grinned, it was an easy one.

“Well,” he said. “She’s got so much stuff down there. I doubt she’d even notice. We ought to pitch the whole lot of it.”

The little girl nodded as if this were a reasonable answer. Then she held up both her hands. She was pretty like Enid, but Enid had a wedding ring, Enid didn’t wear glasses, Enid had lately gotten older, and he probably would have recognized Enid, although, being far more familiar to him than Chip, she was that much harder to see.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” the girl asked him.

He considered her fingers. As far as he could tell, the message they were sending was Relax. Unclench. Take it easy.

With a smile he let his bladder empty.

“Mr. Lambert? How many fingers am I holding up?” The fingers were there. It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven.

“Dad?”

“I should know that,” he said. “Can you believe I’d forget a thing like that?”

The little girl and Chip exchanged a look and then went out into the corridor.

He’d enjoyed unclenching, but after a minute or two he felt clammy. He needed to change his clothes now and he couldn’t. He sat in his mess as it chilled.

“Chip?” he said.

A stillness had fallen on the cellblock. He couldn’t rely on Chip, he was always disappearing. He couldn’t rely on anybody but himself. With no plan in his head and no power in his hands he attempted to loosen the belt so he could take his pants off and dry himself. But the belt was as maddening as ever. Twenty times he ran his hands along its length and twenty times he failed to find a buckle. He was like a person of two dimensions seeking freedom in a third. He could search for all eternity and never find the goddamned buckle.

“Chip!” he called, but not loudly, because the black bastard was lurking out there, and she would punish him severely. “Chip, come and help me.”

He would have liked to remove his legs entirely. They were weak and restless and wet and trapped. He kicked a little and rocked in his unrocking chair. His hands were in a tumult. The less he could do about his legs, the more he swung his arms. The bastards had him now, he’d been betrayed, and he began to cry. If only he’d known! If only he’d known, he could have taken steps, he’d had the gun, he’d had the bottomless cold ocean, if only he’d known.

He swatted a pitcher of water against the wall, and finally somebody came running.

“Dad, Dad, Dad. What’s wrong?”

Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was “I—”

I—

I have made mistakes—

I am alone—

I am wet—

I want to die—

I am sorry—

I did my best—

I love my children—

I need your help—

I want to die—

“I can’t be here,” he said.

Chip crouched on the floor by the chair. “Listen,” he said. “You have to stay here another week so they can monitor you. We need to find out what’s wrong.”

He shook his head. “No! You have to get me out of here!”

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Chip said, “but I can’t take you home. You have to stay here for another week at least.”

Oh, how his son tried his patience! By now Chip should have understood what he was asking for without being told again.

“I’m saying put an end to it!” He banged on the arms of his captivating chair. “You have to help me put an end to it!”

He looked at the window through which he was ready, at last, to throw himself. Or give him a gun, give him an ax, give him anything, but get him out of here. He had to make Chip understand this.

Chip covered his shaking hands with his own.

“I’ll stay with you, Dad,” he said. “But I can’t do that for you. I can’t put an end to it like that. I’m sorry.”

Like a wife who had died or a house that had burned, the clarity to think and the power to act were still vivid in his memory. Through a window that gave onto the next world, he could still see the clarity and see the power, just out of reach, beyond the window’s thermal panes. He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he’d lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

He wept at the injustice of his sentence. “For God’s sake, Chip,” he said loudly, because he sensed that this might be his last chance to liberate himself before he lost all contact with that clarity and power and it was therefore crucial that Chip understand exactly what he wanted. “I’m asking for your help! You’ve got to get me out of this! You have to put an end to it!”

Even red-eyed, even tear-streaked, Chip’s face was full of power and clarity. Here was a son whom he could trust to understand him as he understood himself; and so Chip’s answer, when it came, was absolute. Chip’s answer told him that this was where the story ended. It ended with Chip shaking his head, it ended with him saying: “I can’t, Dad. I can’t.”