One night, as I was watching TV with my mother and Aunt May, my father came storming in through the back door. He was limping. He was holding what looked like a tattered rag, shaking it in the air like a DA with an indictment. Particles and clods of dry earth were shaken from it and pattered onto the floor.

‘Did you do this?’ he said fiercely. He was looking at me, rattling that thing. ‘Was this your bright idea?’

Until then, I had been reclining apathetically on the sofa, resting my elbow on the armrest, resting my cheek on my hand, staring at the set. Aunt May was next to me, smelling too good and chattering too much through the program, and my mother was in the cushioned chair with her crossword, too far away. It was beginning to occur to me that my trip to camp was not as far off as it used to be, hardly more than a week or so away. The dread of it was weighing heavy on me and I wanted to be near my mother, and alone with her for comfort, without the visitor’s interference.

Then my father thundered in.

‘Damn it!’

Whoa! I thought, quailing: My father had cursed.

He hobbled to the breakfast table, leaned on the back of a chair for support. My mother was already up and waddling toward him. I stood up too, and May cast her beauty in his direction.

My father pushed the indictment at me with his free hand. ‘I could’ve broken my leg!’

‘What is it, Dad?’ I said, stalling for time. I knew what it was all right. Even from where I stood, I could now read the faded scrap of headline through the encrusted dirt: LBJ … VIETNAM … GREAT SOCIETY.

Dad turned to Mom. ‘It’s a piece of the newspaper. Your … son laid it over a hole and covered it up with dirt. Someone could’ve come by and broken his leg and sued us for a fortune.’

‘I was just playing around with Freddy!’ I cried out. ‘We were making a trap!’ I had forgotten all about it. It was weeks ago.

‘Well, it was a damned stupid thing to do!’ my father said.

My mother was working him into the chair, calming him, saying, ‘All right, all right, let me see your foot. Can you move it?’ She took the paper from him and put it on the table. I thought I detected the tremor of a smile at the corner of her lips. I felt awful, scared and awful, but it looked like it was going to be all right. I was almost beginning to breathe again.

And then, from the sofa next to me, May had this to say: ‘Michael, what is it you do on all these secret night-time rambles you’re always on anyway? It’s no wonder you fall into things, creeping around the backyard in the pitch dark like that.’

It was an instinct I think she had – I’ve known people since who’ve had it too, people whose early lives proved unreliable somehow and collapsed around them. They develop this sort of compulsion to test the structure of things by jarring the stones that support it. May, I guess, was like that; she must’ve felt most at home with the catastrophes that followed, whatever the cost to herself. Her timing, anyway, was just impeccable. My father looked raw murder at her – raw murder, like nothing I’d ever seen in him before.

‘Go to your room, Harry,’ he said in a soft, strangled voice. He never took his eyes off May.

‘Go on,’ my mother said to me, but no one had to tell me twice.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ I said miserably. And, hangdog, I got the hell out of there.

There had never been anything in my house like the screaming there was then. My parents didn’t scream as a rule – it was, in fact, exactly what they didn’t do – and so I knew nothing about that kind of unbridled, free-galloping rage. It must’ve been building up in all of them for some time. But me, I’d had no idea. And to hear it now coming up through the floor of my room, well, it seemed as if hell had yawned belowstairs without warning. I seriously wondered if there would be anything left of home and family and everyday life when it was over. I lay on my bed, wobble-lipped, wet-eyed. My Yankee pennant was blurry through my tears. The models on my bookshelves – Frankenstein’s monster, a knight in armor, Kennedy’s war craft PT 109, even Agnes’s grinning Play-Doh skull – seemed to hover over me in helpless pity like cherubim viewing the Crucifixion. I prayed for courage to my framed photograph of Mickey Mantle.

‘But you don’t know what it’s like to be alone!’ These words, Aunt May’s unholy wail, reached me clearly. And my father’s carnivorous rumble after that. And then the low warble of my mother – who never cried – pleading with her sister in tears.

Then May again: ‘Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do? You have everything, Claire! I don’t have anything!’ The words seemed to be ripped brutally out of Aunt May’s throat. ‘Keep your money! I don’t want your dirty money!’ And her sobs – it sounded to me as if they would tear her apart. ‘Oh God! Oh God!’

I tensed on the bed almost to the point of trembling and stifled a sob or two myself as I heard her footsteps rushing to the stairs, rushing up the stairs, closer and closer to me. I half expected her to burst in through the door next, shrieking, ‘See what you’ve done, with your stupid trick!’ I didn’t mean it, I thought, clenching my fists, bracing myself.

But she veered off, of course. The guest room door slammed shut. I heard her sobbing and coughing in there, calling on God. I thought that it was just chaos, chaos everywhere, chaos and the end of the world.

Then, the next morning, everything was fine. Dad and Aunt May were at the breakfast table with me. Mom was in and out of the kitchen, bringing us cereal and bowls. Dad’s foot was fine, much better, he told me when I worked up the courage to ask. He sat abstracted over his Times while Mom, a little stone-jowled maybe, still came and went, keeping her thoughts to herself. May? She couldn’t have been sprightlier, all clear weather after the storm. Trailing scent with balletic sweeps of her downy arm. Catching the morning sun from the big window behind me. Her voice, as always, trilled its jolly little tune.

‘I thought I’d drive down to Washington to do some sightseeing,’ she called over her shoulder into the kitchen. ‘I might even go to Florida by way of Atlanta – I hear it’s beautiful down there.’

‘Just be careful in the South these days,’ my mother said darkly, re-entering. She dealt the bowls out to us. ‘Put an American flag on your aerial or something. You don’t know what those people are up to.’

‘So you’ll finally be rid of your old Aunt May,’ Aunt May said to me now. ‘Will you miss me, Harry? Just a little bit?’ I made a face and hunched my shoulders. She laughed delightedly, and reached across the table to tousle my hair. ‘Just grateful to have your bathroom back, I’ll bet. Oh, Claire, you don’t know how I envy you – really.’ She smiled at my Dad; he had looked up at the sound of that laughter of hers, half bray as ever, half heavenly psalm. ‘To think,’ she said, ‘your husband might have been mine if I’d only been smart enough to jump at a good thing. You have to admit you were at least a little in love with me before Claire stole you away, Michael.’

‘Do you want Rice Krispies or Raisin Bran?’ my mother asked me.

‘Uh … Rice Krispies,’ I said.

‘Everyone was in love with you, May,’ said Dad. He opened the paper wide so that he was hidden behind it. ‘You were a great beauty,’ came his voice. ‘You still are.’

‘Oh, the gallant gentleman,’ said May. ‘Harry, you wouldn’t believe it, but your father used to be so romantic. He drove me home once from the beach in Atlantic City. Oh! He was Prince Charming.’

I poured milk on my Rice Krispies and tilted my ear to the bowl to hear the snap, crackle and pop.

‘All right, May,’ said Mom. She lowered herself formidably into her seat at the end of the table.

‘Well, he was!’ squealed May, notwithstanding. ‘All the way home, he talked about the stars, that’s it. He could absolutely turn a girl’s heart to sauce, Harry. I remember it as if it just happened. Do you remember, Michael? That drive we took? You have to remember. What all did you say?’

‘Uy,’ my father groaned. He turned the page and shut the paper, folding it over expertly.

I was spooning sugar into my cereal now, one teaspoon after another, the spoon clinking against the sugar bowl. I liked to pile the sugar up, then watch it sink slowly into the milk of its own weight. When the cereal was finished, I liked to eat the milky spoonfuls of sugar on the bottom.

‘Well, he was the total, total cavalier, Harry,’ May said, and I think she glanced my way as I studied how the sugar darkened just before it was submerged, as I thought to myself, We’re taking on water, Captain! The ship is going down! ‘Talking all about the sky and the stars, that’s it,’ May went on. ‘Oh, and how the sky was like love because you couldn’t make it go away even if you knew it was an illusion. God, we were young. And that the – what do you call them – the constellations were that way too, only sometimes, if you concentrated, you could make them go away and you would just see the beautiful, beautiful stars themselves. You see, I do remember, Michael, even though I didn’t understand it all. You see how you stole my heart? And you told me all those stories about the constellations too. I remember. About the two brothers – right? – and how sad it was because one of them died, poor thing, and they had to live together in one body after that. And what else?’

My sugar sank – and, before I even realized why or what had been said or how it poisoned everything, my little Harry heart slowly started going down with it, glub, glub, glub, Captain …

‘Oh well,’ said Aunt May, sighing like an ingenue, ‘I guess you can never bring back the past.’

My first reaction to an emotional blow was always indifference. Kind of a mental anesthetic, like when a dying man has visions of a passage into divine radiance rather than, say, a clown face shrieking, ‘So long! You’re ceasing to exist!’ Whenever cause for anguish struck me, I’d be as if immersed into a solution of indifference and then drawn out only slowly, maybe over days, into what you might call a general atmosphere of pain. By the time the last of the indifference evaporated, I would usually have lost the connection between my misery and the original source of it: I would just feel bad somehow – bad for no reason or for some other reason, the wrong reason. Camp, it was this time. From that breakfast onward, I began to grow depressed because I didn’t want to go away to camp.

Aunt May left us, but the house did not seem our own again, not to me. To me, it just seemed empty and odd, with the floral smell of her lingering, like the music of her voice, like the soggy nylons on my bathroom towel rack that no one removed for days. For days, I wandered through the rooms, all fraught with woe, shuffling after my mother, repeating, ‘I don’t wanna go to camp,’ over and over again. My mornings in front of the TV grew longer. I could zombie-glide right through the game shows sometimes, The Price Is Right and Concentration, both of which I hated. ‘Harry, would you turn off that TV and go outside,’ my mother would say. And I would roll onto my back and stare up at her with hollow eyes. And whine at her: ‘I don’t wanna go to camp.’ Before she could bully me into my clothes it was nearly lunchtime, and when she hurled me outdoors, I would linger in the backyard like my own ghost, haunting her with an I-don’t-wanna-go-to-camp stare through the kitchen casements. Harry’s Raiders were soon disbanded on account of this depression. How long could they sit in the womblike dark of the lumber pile with their fearless leader sunk in dejected reverie?

And as for Agnes – I did not see her. In all that time, that whole last week. I didn’t understand that she was at the heart of this, I just didn’t feel like going over there anymore, that’s all. Sometimes, some afternoons, I would wander aimlessly up toward Piccadilly Road, but I was never abuzz with the old expectations. I was steeped instead in fantasy: King Harry at the Judgement Day, his dread sceptre tilting left or right, the naked women wailing in their terror, and flailed across the tush, many of them, to insure obedience or simply for good measure not to mention that it was such breathless fun. And then, somewhere along the road, at the top of Wooley’s Lane usually, before the curve, before the ghost house, I would stop. I would look around me and find myself cotton-headed with dreams and out-of-sorts. I did not want to see her; even the thought of it depressed me even more. I wanted to go home, to spend these precious moments of the fleeting July with that dear, dear mother from whom I would too soon be cruelly sundered.

So, shrugging, sighing, miserable – God, miserable – I would turn again and head back down the hill, angrily kicking stones, angrily dreaming, wasting what could have been our last days together, Agnes’s and mine, and laying – or so I tell myself on those nights I want to rip my own head off in paroxysms of regret – the groundwork of our lifelong ruination.

Signs of the Dreaded Day accumulated: Mom sewing name tags into shorts and T-shirts, clothing strewn on bedspreads, suitcases brought up from the basement and a camp trunk, with stout metal hinges and latches everywhere, brought home from the city by my Dad. My parents were taking advantage of my absence to spend a week in Europe so the packing was general and, to my tragical mind, it looked as if my entire existence were being struck like a set.

Finally, as it must to all men, Sunday came, the eve of my departure. The various packing paraphernalia had converged in the guest room. Thoughtful, nimble, my tubby Mom stepped among the neat piles of clothing on the carpet there, returning inevitably to the suitcases set open upon the bed and the trunk on the floor, all of which became, inevitably, nearer and nearer to being full. The condemned man sat in the midst of this. On the edge of the bed with head hung down, with hands clasped between his knees and shoulders bowed under at least a ton of fear, homesickness, helplessness, dread. And something else, some nameless suspense. Outside, through the glass door that led onto the garage roof, the sun could be seen setting, a dragon-toothed splotch of light poised on the peak of the Rothmans’ roof next door.

‘Why do you have to go to Europe?’ I groaned.

‘We’ll be back before you get home,’ said my mother wearily. She pressed a finger to her lip as she swiveled indecisively between a poncho and a pile of underpants.

‘I don’t wanna go to camp,’ I said.

The underpants, Mom decided, and leaned down to lift the stack between her two hands.

‘I don’t wanna …’

‘Oh, Harry, it’s only two weeks. You’ll have a wonderful time. Just be careful, that’s all. Don’t go crazy.’ She divided the stack in two and bent to set it neatly into the trunk’s corners. ‘Don’t start any trouble. Don’t let them make you do anything dangerous.’

My whole slumped body rose and fell with a moaning breath. I lifted my head slowly against the weight of apathy and doom. Now the sun was sinking past the Rothmans’ roof and turning yellow and throwing shadows of the burly trees across the pitched slate. Time, that’s what the suspense was, the running out of time. And nothing I could do. I was pilloried with despair. I looked around the room. The mounds of clothing were fewer and fewer. The suitcases were nearly full. The ordinary contours of the room were returning. I wished it was more familiar, a room we used more, a room I knew, I wanted to embed myself in those known things. But the guest room always seemed strange. Not colonial like the rest of the house, more modern, like my room, with white walls, and orange carpeting and indigo bedspreads. There was a dresser in the far corner from me, a piece I almost never noticed. Not the sort of exact thing my mother usually liked, but just functional, knobby, stained tan. I saw now that there was even a picture on it that I had never seen before. Something May had left behind maybe. A black-and-white photograph veiled with yellow age. A young man in funny old clothes, wearing a high collar, stiffly holding a derby under his chest with one bent arm. He was standing off to one side, proudly displaying the legal offices behind him. I wanted to ask who he was, but was too lethargic to say the words.

I glanced out the glass door again. The sun went down behind the roof. ‘Why did Aunt May leave?’ I asked suddenly, without thinking.

Mom, already holding a pair of pants, averted her face as if searching for something else. ‘Well,’ she said with some gravity, smoothing the pants absently over her arm, ‘she had to go back to her own life.’

‘Why is she so strange though?’ Blurted again, almost with anguish, with some new emotion anyway glimmering under the big dark dolmen of all the others.

Of course, Mom was interested in this, whatever truths about her sister a child might stumble onto. She set a smile on her lumpy, sagging features, and asked me, ‘Why strange?’

‘I dunno. She just … she always has to be in everybody’s business and part of everything. I dunno.’

My mother snorted softly. Finished folding the pants and avoided my eyes as she set them in a suitcase. ‘Oh, these things,’ she said. ‘They’re just sillinesses. People carry them around with them. They ought to just get rid of them. But they don’t –’ She gave the packed pants a definitive pat. ‘– and that’s why there’s so much silliness in the world.’

Thus my mother’s wisdom; make of it what you can. I only half heard it myself anyway. My attention was on the window and the first hulking violet of this final night. I did not want to pull myself away from my mother’s side, not even to think of it. There was so much still to say to her: I don’t wanna go to camp, for instance. But there was this other urgency percolating now. I stood up. With a beleaguered, nasal drawl, I said: ‘I’m gonna go out for a while.’

And my mother, surprised: ‘It’s almost seven o’clock, where are you going?’

‘Out. I’ll be back.’

Behind me, as I went out the door, she called: ‘Not for too long, Harry. I want you in bed by eight, we have to get up very early tomorrow.’

I took my bike. These Shakespearean tragedy links – I have nightmares about them. I’d never taken my bike before because there was nowhere to hide it and Agnes and I had this vow of secrecy between us. But tonight I took it, afraid, after all this time, that she wouldn’t wait for me by the stream. I stood on the pedals up Wooley’s Lane, anxious to be on, eager to get back. I didn’t even park it by the ghost house at the top but raced it dramatically, with flurrying feet, down the steep of Piccadilly almost to her front walk. Recklessly, I set the kickstand on the sidewalk just a little before her driveway. And even so, I didn’t realize what a dither I was in for a rendezvous until I looked up to see the peaked white aluminum cubes of the Sole place sinking into insubstantial shadow against the still summer background of trees and sky. The house was dark. Although an air conditioner was muttering in an upstairs window, the lights were all out – it seemed no one was home – and I could’ve torn my hair in aggravation. This made things more dramatic still. I ran without caution past her windows, across her back lawn to the stand of trees. Panting heroically, I worked my way among the thick leaves of oak and hickory, the spindles of pine, over the acorns bulging up beneath my Keds, through the spider webs clinging to my lashes and lips. I crashed through to the top of the slope above the stream. It was already thick dusk there, the leafy tree crowns on the far side huddling against the sunset. And, posed rather handsomely in the last movement of my dynamic breakthrough, I peered along the banks through the uncertain light.

And there was Agnes, kneeling quietly at the edge of the water.

I hated her. I only realized it when I set eyes on her. I was furious at her, so mad it was as if the whole reason I had had to come – the matrix of the suspense and the urgency that had got me there – was that I needed to tell her what a stinko she was. I was metamorphosed on the spot. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing how I’d hurried to find her. I stopped panting. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. I skittered casually down to the bank, and strolled along it toward her as if I’d just happened by.

A twig snapped under me and Agnes looked up. Looked up, and lit up when she saw it was me.

‘Hi, Harry!’ She got to her feet, smiling, dusting off her shorts and her scabby knees. ‘I thought you went to camp or something.’

I shrugged. Grunted a hello. Gave her the side of me, and swung my foot, kicking a clod of dirt into the water. It hadn’t rained in weeks and the stream was low, an avid trickle humping it over the bottom rocks. ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said. And then: ‘I guess you were busy and had to get ready and everything.’ She jutted eagerly at my grumpy profile. ‘I almost didn’t come out tonight. Only there’s a full moon and it’s supposed to come up just at dark.’ I sniffed at that; I gave her nothing. She tried again: ‘See, the moon comes up at different times, a little later, every day, every different size of moon comes up at its own …’

‘I know how you know all this stuff, Agnes. My father tells you.’

The heave of rage, the way my mouth twisted, the way I spat out the words: I’d been so busy putting on the show of anger, I was surprised at how real it turned out to be. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what this was, this acid in me. What did I care about what my stupid Aunt May said?

But Agnes, Agnes the Witch, she got it right away. She was meek. She was conciliatory. She made an offering. ‘Some of it my mother tells me.’

‘Oh yeah, right! Because my father tells her.’

‘Well …’ She licked her lips. ‘Maybe he’ll tell you too soon. He probably tells you lots of other things.’

I glanced at her to see if she was making fun, but she was all face, desperate for forgiveness. ‘Sure he does,’ I said nastily. ‘He tells me lots of things. He tells me things all the time.’ I kicked out again – a white stone plinked into the trickle. ‘Anyway, I just didn’t want to come here cause I don’t want to play on your stupid rock anymore, that’s all. It’s all stupid.’

With which, unnoticed, gray, grainy twilight with no friendly intent closed in around us poor two. Agnes frowned as if she would cry. Maybe she did cry, but by then, she was kneeling again so I couldn’t see, standing some twigs in the soft earth where the stream had receded, laying others in the small current as part of her secret ritual – it’s what she had been up to when I broke in.

‘My Daddy never says anything,’ she said. The priestess now, incanting it to the elements, but small too, a little voice, pitiable. ‘He never says anything. He can’t. He can’t talk.’

‘Oh, he can talk,’ I said. ‘I heard him.’

‘No, I know, but he can’t tell me about anything. I couldn’t ask. My mother says so. It would make him too sad. He’s not like your father.’ And, lifting to me all at once her graven suffering, she broke forth right earnestly: ‘I’m sorry, Harry!’

Well, the Har was moved. A guy’s not stone, after all, even in his rages. Even hurt – and hurting stupid too, because I didn’t know, not even now quite, what the hell this was all about – I began, in increments for pride’s sake, to relent.

‘Well, what’s he so sad about? Your father.’

Back at her twigs, swallowing hard, she laid it out for me. ‘He was there – in that place I told you about? – where they killed all the children. He had to watch them being killed. They killed his wife – his wife before my mother. And my half-sister, Lena. That was his daughter. They killed her too.’

Around us, unnoticed, the volume of the place was slowly rising, the night syncopations of frogs and cicadas coming up from the grass, hatches of gnats and mosquitoes buzzing under the trees, birdsong floating from the topmost branches, from the high leaves. I shifted my shoulders suspiciously. ‘What did they kill them for? Where was this?’

‘In Poland, where he’s from. They wanted to kill all the Jewish people.’

‘What, you mean, like, the Nazis?’ I’d heard about that, of course. Nazis killing Jews. A very bad thing. Fortunately, my father had gone over there personally to help put an end to it. ‘The Nazis killed them?’

Agnes nodded, kneeling there. And – though it was getting harder and harder to make her out, to distinguish her outline from the thickening obscurity – I could tell that her hands were unsure in their movements now, going from twig to twig, place to place, hovering frantically, never quite coming to rest.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They had a place they had to go to. My mother told me.’

‘Was she there too?’

‘No. But she knows about it. She told me some of it. She said everybody had to go to this place, all the Jews did, to see Hitler – he was the King Nazi. And everybody had to go up to him. First they had to give everything they had to the other Nazis, all their money and everything, even their clothes. So they were all naked so they couldn’t do anything, and they had to stand in line and walk up to where Hitler was, and he would point with his, what do you call it, that stick king’s have …’

I stared down at her through the darkness. ‘A scepter,’ I said softly.

‘Yes. He would point with it, with his scepter, like, to the left or to the right. And the people he pointed to the right had to go in a big room to be killed. And the people he pointed to the left had to be his slaves and do, like … I don’t know, like, hard work, in the snow and everything, like breaking rocks with a hammer or something. I just know it was very hard.’ She shook her head, her braids stirring. ‘I don’t want my Daddy to have to talk about it. I don’t want him to have to be sad about it anymore.’

Night fell then, mercifully dropping its velvet veil over my slack-jawed stupidity, my willed density, the stone synaptic wall I’d thrown up between connection and connection. Even hidden though, even with all that self-deception – woof! The guilt, the ignorant guilt. The poignant whining within to be justified to her. ‘I’m only going to sleepaway for two weeks,’ I said for no reason I could think of. ‘I’ll be back for the whole rest of August. Okay? We can go back to the rock or whatever then. I didn’t really mean it was stupid or anything, okay, Agnes?’

As if mollified on the instant, Agnes hopped up. ‘Then you’ll be back in time for the Perseid showers,’ she said. She stood so close to me that her features loomed – loomed pleadingly. ‘They’re late at night, but maybe we could get to stay up for them. Or maybe – maybe I could watch from my window and you could watch from yours and we’d be seeing them at the same time.’

‘Uh – okay. Sure.’ I sounded a lot more eager than I felt, a lot less nauseous than I felt too. And I forced myself to ask – I didn’t want to, knowing the source, but I made the effort: ‘So, like, what are they? The – what showers?’

‘Perseid. ’Cause they’re in the constellation Perseus. They’re meteor showers. Showers, like, of falling stars. You want to go up on the rock? I could show you where they’ll be. We could watch the moon come up, okay?’

For the first time, finally, I remembered that I had to be home – and now that I did remember, I couldn’t tell her. How could I? And leave it like this between us, everything messed up, alchemy reversed, her mystic enthusiasm forced, or sounding forced to me at least, and the night leaden – black and loud and summery, but leaden, dead; etched in close by the usual forest lineaments, the alleyway of fresh stars between the high leaves above us, but flat-seeming and leaden; the invisible water’s gurgling, the oompah frogs, the rest of the chattering insect masses – all supposed to be charged and twinkly with our conspiratorial demonry and just small, I don’t know, messy, plopped too close to the road and the lights of houses, and with me plopped in it, leaden too in the belly, wanting to be home, sick and heavy and sour at the prospect of hearing this shower stuff, my own father’s meteor stuff, from her – what could I do? I was desperate to restore our ruined thing.

‘Okay!’ I forced myself to say. ‘Great!’

And we leapt the stream energetically and clawed up the far bank side by side, making our expressions seem bright and excited.

In the big sky above the lot, the stars were out, the first layer of bright constellations, Cygnus, the dipper, Cassiopea.

‘Perseus will come up later, there,’ she said when we had climbed the rock. She pointed hard above the treetops just behind us. We didn’t sit, we were standing together on the boulder, our shoulders touching, our faces lifted, hungering, toward the sky. She strained for that tone of mystery, and began to tell me the Perseus story and it was a good story too but Jesus, it was agony, agony to listen to it. Everything she said now seemed underlaid, thick with hauntings, palimpsests and pentimenti. Her forced whispers, her outsized gestures were warped by all the storytelling I’d been gypped of, the forfeited ranges of paternal chumhood. I mean, I might have known this stuff and told her! She’d stolen it from me, maybe innocently, but still. I tried hard to do the rapt audience bit. I nutcracked the logic of the arcane Greek offenses and the unnecessary hero trials, and I conjured a seaweedy ocean god like the ghost of a sunken man, and I even chimed in with a gout of blood for the beheading scene, always a major plus. But my mind drifted too, and at the same time that Perseus was doing that neat trick of reflecting Medusa on his shield so he could decapitate her without being turned to stone, I was half-imagining homey scenes that might have been, in my home, in her home, in some television home – who knows? – with a sort of red mist of unacknowledged rage hissing up over everything. What a shame, what a shame. Because there it all was too, or would be, she said, come the middle of August, right up in the sky by way of the constellations. There was Cepheus the King and Queen Cassiopea – all right, she looked like a lawn chair but there she was; and Perseus was rising; and just now, the brighter stars in Andromeda and in Pegasus, the winged stallion – a real stallion with wings just like the Amoco gasoline sign! – were burning their way through the purple dark. And at midnight, when deep August came, so she told me (so my father must have told her), the kraken would breach the eastern horizon to devour the chained princess and Perseus would hie it to the rescue brandishing the basilisk ugliness of Medusa’s head (still gouting) to turn the monster to stone. And stars would fall, dozens of shooting stars like fireworks to celebrate the event – I mean, what would it take to get us in the mood?

Whatever it was, this wasn’t enough, not tonight. I tensed every time her shoulder brushed me. I felt morose. I wanted it to work too badly; too much damned presence of mind ruined the best effects. And then, anyway, the moon rose, the full moon she’d told me about. Back in the trees but bright enough to whitewash the dimmer stars away just as they struggled to show themselves. And it bared us to each other too, fruit-of-knowledge-like, more’s the pity, so that Agnes finally gave it up, falling silent during the embellishments, and we looked at each other hopelessly in the silver light. I almost said: I have to go home now; and I did have to – to get to bed, to get ready for camp. But I fought the impulse. How could I say it? How could I go? After our whole spring together, after all July? Was there nothing we could do?

‘Hey!’ I said too loudly. ‘You wanna pretend it? Like I’ll be the Perseus guy and – this could be the rock and you could be chained here? Okay?’

She hesitated – it was a little rowdy, a little boyish – but then she agreed, and we began to play it out in the empty lot.

Lord, Lord, Lord. I will not tell her this. My little visitor from the root cellar, from the sleet-streaked night. I will not tell her, I will not tell anyone. When I think what they would say – what Agnes’s biographers would say, and the art critics, and the feminist angerheads. When I imagine the dental vaginas, and the castrated witch-mothers they’d come up with. The post-Holocaust Jews relating to the western myth inheritance, they’d say, or an early experiment with the transubstantial artistry that turned monsters that night to statues, to stone. When I picture, I mean, the vomit of words they would drench those children with, those two poor defenceless waifs – the little girl dead now, the boy vaporized to an unsalvagable walking fart of corruption – oh man, I would rather drink blood than tell them, than breathe a word of this to anyone. Leave them alone, you bastards! I shake my fist at you! I goblin dance like Rumpelstiltskin till you run away. (Because you’re all cowards else you’d get out and work for a living, get some exercise.) I’ll die a wooden Indian, a blank tomb, an ur-stone. I’ll live a mirror: you can all trace your own fucking faces in me till you drop. I alone remember – I alone am survived to not tell thee – how the big purple-white sky was littered, behind our self-consciousness and the moonglow, with creatures, damsels and champions which we, small and far below in the broad, dusty lot, so desperately reflected and replayed. And how the stones crunched beneath my sneaker soles. And of Agnes’s hilarious ‘Help, Perseus, help!’ And the way I almost forgot myself a moment as I thought to intertwine my fingers in the snakes of the gorgon’s hair. Soul-heavy though I was, I remember, I forced out a TV-adventure riff – ‘Ba-dum ba-daaa!’ – as I galloped on my Amoco gasoline steed with the squiggling Medusa-head upraised. And I meteored down as best I could, so sick at heart, to petrify the breasting beast. And Agnes cowered very convincingly against her star rock and twisted in her chains and made a fuss, though I think she was praying all the while – I could just about hear her in my own mind – for the impossible resurrection of our late, lamented zing. And the air was warm and clear and smelled of dust. I was there, you assholes. It was my life, I was there.

And that, at any rate, was what we were up to when I heard my mother calling me from the road.

We stopped, breathless. My mother’s voice reached us again. ‘Harry?’

I lowered the hand with the gorgon’s head in it, my fist still clenched. ‘That’s my Mom,’ I said. ‘I gotta go.’

Agnes stepped away from the rock. Halfway across the lot, I could see her clearly in the moonlight. ‘Bye, Harry,’ she said. ‘Have a good time at camp.’

‘Okay. I’ll meet you by the stream when I get back.’

‘Bye,’ she said. She stretched her hand out to me, waving.

‘Harry!’ my mother called, sounding more worried than annoyed.

I waved to Agnes. ‘Bye, Agnes,’ I said. I felt her looking after me as I jogged past her and ducked into the trees.

My mother called one more time as I carefully made my way over the stream in the dark. ‘Harry!’ Then, as I was climbing the opposite slope, I heard her start to call again – and stop. When I broke out of the trees, I could see her at a distance. She was standing on the sidewalk beside my bike. She had spotted it, my bike, as she drove around in search of me.

She was standing in the light: the light of the full moon, which had risen here above the treetops, and the headlights of her Country Squire station wagon which she’d left running at the curb. And there was light too in the upstairs window of Agnes’s house – the window that had been dark before: it shone brightly now. I could see my mother with her face upraised, staring at it. My poor, dumpy, onion-shaped Mom. I could see her frozen there, trying to frame her reaction to what she’d just witnessed – bemusement, indifference, fury. I called out to her as I ran across the Soles’ lawn, but she didn’t turn. She kept staring up at that window. It was empty now – I checked it, vaguely curious, as I ran. The guilty parties had recovered, I guess, from their first panicky reflex when the sound of Mom’s voice reached them over the air conditioning. They had ducked down again although, of course, too late. But Mom kept staring, staring. Poor old Mom. Always working out the family secrets, always getting to the bottom of things. It was what she had instead of beauty. It must have taken all her motherly fortitude just to turn, when she finally did; just to smile at me ruefully, to shake her head mother-like, to croak in a distant, unsteady voice: ‘Oh, so there you are. I was worried about you. Well, put your bike in the back, and I’ll drive you home.’

Camp, it turned out, was fine. I had a good time for the most part. I got a certificate for winning a badminton tournament and my softball team lost only once the whole time I was there. I used to join in the general uproar of complaint about the freezing waters of Lake Placid, but I had a wry fondness for it secretly, especially in the morning, with the mist coming off the surface and the surface like steel and the sky an uncanny blue above the green-blue foothills of the Adirondacks which ringed it round. I was homesick only three times – badly, I mean: The first night, when I lay on my bottom bunk in tears, clutching a Civil War soldier I’d brought with me, and biting my lip so as not to call out for my mother. Then another night when some jerk told a story after lights out about how a guy had drowned in the lake a hundred years ago and how now, every so often, bubbles rose to the surface and popped with a soft cry of ‘Help! Help!’ Then, on a night toward the end of the second week, Uncle Chuck or Bobby or Neil – one of the college-age counselors – led us out to a campsite in an open field beyond the surrounding woods. We had a fire and sang songs and roasted marshmallows till nearly midnight. Then we lay on our backs in our sleeping bags and oohed and aahed into the deep black sky where meteors streaked back and forth across the Milky Way in unimaginable numbers, dying in July Fourth explosions in the bowl of the Dipper or the Great Square, leaving trails of white fire burning all the way back to Perseus, whence they had come.

As my mother predicted, it was all over before I knew it. And as I boarded the motor boat to go, I felt very brave and vowed to come back for the whole summer next year which, for one reason and another, I never did.

It was kind of depressing to be home, in fact. Only a few of my friends had returned so far. There wasn’t that much to do. I missed my camp buddies. School loomed.

My first day back, I scouted out Dave and we biked over to Allenwood Park and played catch. That was all right. But as the afternoon came on, I began to feel somewhat heavy-hearted. I knew I had to give Dave the slip and head over to Piccadilly. I’d said I would, after all, those many days ago. And, as I put it to myself, I did sort of want to go, but I sort of didn’t too.

Around four, with a suave excuse – ‘I gotta go, Dave, I got stuff to do,’ – I parted from him. He headed off to his Bunker Hill home, and I to Old Colony where I parked my bike in the garage and started out again on foot.

I was nervous as I crossed under the ghost house and into the trees. I was excited at the thought of seeing Agnes, but I wanted things to be different between us too. Camp, I felt, had changed and matured me. I wanted to act with more authority around her so she wouldn’t always ensorcel me so. I didn’t want everything to be just the same as it was.

I jumped the culvert and strolled the bank and reached our spot, but she wasn’t there yet. I waited for her, splashing stones, but the light ebbed and she didn’t come. Finally, as I sometimes did, I climbed up the bank and wove through the trees to the edge of her backyard. I came to the brink of the treeline and poked out into the Soles’ lawn. It looked different somehow. I couldn’t figure what it was – then I could. The patio furniture was gone. So was the sprinkler the Doctor generally left lying around. In the house, the lights were out, but it wasn’t night yet and the more I looked, the more I sensed a certain emptiness indoors as well in the dining area which I could just make out through the glass doors. Moving closer cautiously, it began to seem to me that the dining room table was gone, that all the furniture was gone. I edged closer. I leaned forward, peering through the glass. Yes, it was gone, all right. And, moving around to the side of the house and trying a window there, I could see the furniture in the living room was all stacked up. There were boxes in there and upside-down tables and rolled carpets. I kept moving slowly around to the front.

There was a For Sale sign planted in the grass. The garage was empty. The Soles’ name had been taken off the mail box – I could see the outline of the letter-stickers on the black metal.

I stood on the front lawn with my hands in my pockets – the first of the several times I would confront that empty place.

Hmph, I thought indifferently after a moment, I guess they moved away.

Then I shrugged and ambled back up Piccadilly, daydreaming.