The Sixties were so performative! This contribution from her daughter who lives nearby.

Well, she can no longer march. In Central Park she walks the short distance set by her failing heart, delights in a warm day, an amber wash of Indian Summer.

She would like to know who proposed the motto In God We Trust, and when unseasonable days were first called Indian Summer, as though knowing might steady her flip-flop pulse. These are almanac questions with almanac answers available on an Internet service. Suppose, just suppose, this time round the easy answers will not heal by way of distraction. I am outraged. She repeats this phrase in the lilting, stage center voice that entertained students in the classroom and readings of her work in years past. I am outraged. What crimes are they committing at their Black Sites? Delivered to her husband, her brother, to Cleo and Glo—whoever will listen, and they are outraged, too, repeating the day’s dreadful news. We have not been given the full count of the injured. She is caught up in gestures of dollars and cents where In God We Trust came into her story—on green-backs, coinage in the pocket of her old black coat, though it’s her credit card that registers the small donations of her protest. So it goes.

She is still in her bathrobe at noon, her flighty gray hair unwashed, strange crust on her cheek, a new hillock of puffed flesh on the wrinkled map of age. She turns from the mirror. Not much for mirrors anymore. Let the body play out the days with a handful of pills adjusting the heartbeat, thinning the blood. Till well after noon she stays in her back room writing the last of her seasons, Fall with its showy splendor. She predicts year’s end may be her end, but that’s one of her stories. Her body will float on a bier of books and first drafts down the Lethe, or bob in Olmsted’s Lake, which appears at a distance, an elegiac vision she may have to revise, a cold wind ruffling the glass surface. Seldom given to self-pity. Consolation is across the street in Central Park with its Bridle Path, Pinetum, Reservoir Track, all that prospect of a healthy, if halting, afternoon walk, thus the five dollar bill in her pocket for the needy or a threatening encounter. She loses her glasses, forgets her cell phone and what’s for dinner, repeats her riff on outrage, remembers in some detail disturbing events of the past filed away under Wars I have known, one scene oddly persistent in recent days.

For years the woman who lives across from the Park recalled the shame of her relief when the foreign student left her college room, shame at her inability to feel nothing more than embarrassment, to wonder at—the harsh soap of suet and lye embedded under the princely ring as though the honored guest in the magenta beanie joined in a humble washday task. Had the woman found other children in the dead of night to listen to the calm recitation of her story? Today the warm dormitory room appears again with the two friends who went their separate ways by the end of that year, the poster on the wall—Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose—Sargent’s little girls in white summer dresses, their Japanese lanterns illuminating a garden beyond lovely. And there on the floor, the discarded textbook in which the Greek chorus mourned what had come to pass as in the chant—We are outraged—or warns what will come to pass, but tragedy had gone out of business. Her own initials were incised on her tea mug, MK—a gift from her father—a gruff, sentimental man, who never wanted her to grow up, leave home with new clothes—a lumpy rag rug, gauzy curtains fluttering near the hot coil of the burner.

I’m comfortable with first person, don’t mind drawing back the velvet curtain, coming onstage. I was born in the city of P. T. Barnum, the impresario who never feared facing his audience even when the music was too highbrow or the freak show failed to amaze. On Good Morning America, a marine amputee is learning to walk on metal stilts to carry on in our three-ring circus.

I have my troupe, my regulars, bring them center stage as they are needed, one by two by three, duets and line dancing, solo turns throughout the seasons, not lives of the saints, yet not lives of the sinners. The improbable mathematician, his lapsed artist wife, the foreign student with the heavy rope of hair who appeared one night vowing never to return to Innsbruck where she grew up in extraordinary comfort. Call them my cast: in shameless imitation of Papa Haydn and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I give you Sissy, a waif with golden hair and a bad habit; the Jesuit cousin—godless man of god; Audubon, who killed, stuffed and gave life through his art to our American birds; my parents in their molto adagio, who have long been defenseless. And you, brilliant in your supporting role, flipping the calendar back to take as good as you get, as though we are still in our prime. I look forward to your corrections, to my reply as I turn to the next blank page.

You advise me against bringing the Cheerleader into play, writing of here and now, allowing editorials to seep into my stories, spoiled fish wrapped in yesterday’s Times.

You say: Outrage is a bumper sticker, one of many sentiments parked side-by-side in Kmart Plaza. Proud parent of an honor student at Monument Valley High. Honk if you love Borges.

Indian Summer: a few days of blessed warmth after the cold weather has set in; or the time when the Indians harvested their crops; or a time before frost when they attacked European settlements storing their food for winter. The settlers retaliated with cumbersome muskets. So it goes.

I live in the city. I share the garden across the street. If you would like to know with maximum honesty about my loves or further shame, my faltering heart, it’s none of your business. My brother is switching channels, expecting the bombed mosque in Mosul will be shown in more detail. Was it them? Or us? No matter, he is outraged. We all are. My husband, who works with numbers—market up, market down—figures to the nth dollar the military contracts dealt out to the Cheerleader’s friends doctoring the books, the outrageous rip-offs. There will be a candlelight vigil. We will stand with our homemade placards: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Song, piety, mulled cider in the Park. It will only be effective if we wait till the sun has set, well after dark.

I throw down the book I was reading, nothing to do with an October night in Bridgeport at the start of the Great Depression. The false memory of my begetting was a digression, an off-bounds stop on the way to a disturbing story. This very day I had searched the pages of a novel I’d written as though checking an old bankbook to reckon where I spent foolishly, what interest accrued that I might go on with and ended up broke, wishing dramatically to have never been born. I was attempting to make some connection, this daybook with my rants against the war to the book thrown aside. To my discredit, that love story was of the Second World War, yet all I called up, attempting to balance the account, was to switch the scene to my parents’ bedroom, muslin curtains flapping in a welcome breeze while I read War and Peace in a creaking wicker chair. Why was I allowed to invade their space through the long Summer days while I read Tolstoy’s great work? I was fourteen years old.

Today I can no longer look at my war story, the novel with the gold medallion on the cover declaring my prize. I put on an old black coat with the buttons dangling, as though covering tattered jeans might conceal the shame of conjuring my parents’ embrace on the four-poster. Is the coat needed on this warm day?

Your topcoat, Mimi. Better safe than sorry.

I put words in my mother’s mouth while Bill strikes a match, cups his hand around yet another Lucky. In this way we keep track of each other, though they’re long gone.

Just brought the fellow across the state line into the jurisdiction, don’t get a hold on your lefty complaint. This rendition? I set myself up for their corrections, begging their care, their tolerance, my indulgence of the past, I suppose. The picture of him in the Bridgeport Post, Bill, plump, choirboy handsome, the jaunty brim of his felt hat casting a shadow on his smile. Handcuffed to a mobster of note: Simple police work, extradition.

You said: There’s no one among us to challenge her. The small triumph of the survivor.

I walked into the Park slowly, as advised, and headed straight for the slope running up to the Reservoir newly enclosed with a black iron fence, replica of the Calvert Vaux original. There was not a ripple on the water. The ever present gulls squatting on the pipe that spans the Reservoir appeared two dimensional, so many ducks in a shooting gallery. For a long moment no one in sight, all the better to cherish my melancholy brought on by eavesdropping on my parents’ bedroom with its crisp dresser scarf and the wicker chair in which I spent most of a summer reading War and Peace for the love story, skimming the pages of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, understanding less of that carnage than I did of the Bridgeport Post mapping the D-Day Invasion, or the White Russian Division advancing on the Germans. That war progressed on the nightly news my father listened to, head tilted toward the speaker of our bulbous mahogany console, while I set the table in the kitchen. When I finished my chore, I’d come into the living room to hear the roundup; then my father took his place at the head of the table and softened the bloody events of this day for my mother, who absorbed the news in silence, then took off her apron to serve our supper. One night, with adolescent bravado, I declared that the defeat of the Soviets at Minsk was much like the fall of Napoleon’s Grand Army in the very same city, history repeating itself as our table talk mixed tidbits of neighborhood gossip, my brother’s mastery of Latin declensions and my father’s unpatriotic grumble at his paltry serving of meat.

Now, Bill. How often she’d sneak her chop or chicken thigh onto his plate.

Taking up my route round the Reservoir, I determined to leave behind these girlish memories of war, more honest than my invention of Nazi espionage in the novel I’d thrown aside. Looking to the first lap of my forbidden journey, I saw the runners coming upon me, a full cadre of men and women in red jerseys training for some competition. Their leader swiveled his gleaming shaved head to check on the pack falling farther and farther behind. It is only in recalling the moment of the runners straining to catch up with this lean man wound tight, clearing me out of his way, that I clung to the fence, saw in the tranquil Reservoir a mirror image of the bright sky that banished all thought of my troubling intrusion on the lives of Loretta and Bill, subject to my telling their tales. In a Chaplinesque strut, sure to leave my fraudulent war novel behind, a love affair trumped by betrayal, I began my route around the Reservoir Track. The body took hold with its thoughtless demands. The level course is rimmed with limp mullein in this season and untidy wild asters. I’m not part of the jogging scene. The heart that’s failed me improvises its bebop arrhythmia. I take caution as ordered, slow to a stroll, but never give in to a bench, not even as I approach the bridge joining track to parkland, where a gathering of athletes, maybe just neighborhood friends, pay court to the old runner, Alberto Arroyo. He’s at his post every fine day, some not so fine, the gold medal dangling from the patriotic ribbon round his neck. In running gear, silk shorts this crisp day. I catch sight of the swollen blue veins in his legs, fanning out on the weathered cheeks the handlebar mustache white as his gleaming halo of hair. His gestures exuberant as always, though by his side the steel cane, rubber grips on its claws. It’s said he ran the first New York Marathon, indeed was a founder. Who knows if that story is true or with time became legend? The time before the old legs gave out, before he sported the Mylar toga each cold day, conserving body heat at the end of no particular race, before he became a figure of reverence at the South Pumping Station, fashioning himself as local patron saint, grandee of the Running Track.

A mere walker in down-at-heel tennis shoes, I thought how neat to be of that company, to know I might scramble up to the Reservoir, pay homage to the old runner, listen to his words of wisdom or enjoy the gossip of the day to set me free of the reading chair which this day brought me back to the place of origin, my voyeuristic tale with its many variations—how on an Autumn night when the barberry hedge was not yet planted in the patch of front yard to absorb the noise of traffic, with the green linen shade drawn against the streetlight, my parents felt their way to each other in the dark. Felt their way with what purpose? I heard the footfall behind me, the huffing breath of the next trotter. All passed me by. As though I was stuck on a treadmill, the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park with its swirl of Guggenheim Museum seemed no closer. Soldiering on in my invalid pace, this day’s outing was a strategic maneuver against the assault of memory.

This stretch of track is more carefully tended, though the ornamental cherry trees have dropped their end of season pips and, sloping down to the police barracks, ferns flopped, yellow and limp. Tourists had found their way into the Park with museum shopping bags and guidebooks in hand—Germans with camera gear; Japanese lovers delicately holding hands; a party of Brits, the Union Jack on their sweatshirts. Clouds swept in, a sudden surface rippling, and a mallard, floating free of the rushes, ruffling her wings, was joined by a male with brighter plumage by far.

Name of the laike? Sharp Cockney diphthong.

Walking on I called out: Reservoir.

Can’t they see it’s man-made? The wonky circumference distorted by a hydraulic bulge on the south side. The slight undulations of this carefully plotted shoreline bear no resemblance to nature’s random design. Turning, not to be rude to visitors, I called out again, Reservoir. The Japanese man put an arm round his girl as though to protect her from my shrill cry. The Germans had set up a tripod for a picture of our Fall blazing an Oktoberfest across the shimmering expanse of water. That shot can be bought from a vendor outside the Guggenheim, but it would be their own view, recall a hike in New York. Yes, they carried burled walking sticks as though to conquer an alpine height, but our Track is level, the water piped in, no racing streams, no cascade. My breath came short, unsteady as I turned round again to call out another correction.

Reservoir, I meant to repeat, but the Brits had gone their way. She would have recalled the old Croton Reservoir piping water down to the city after the raging fires that consumed Lower Broadway long before the Civil War. Keen on preservation, she might have winced then, aware of history’s erasures, accepted the memorial renaming with grace. On a slick little map, I’d seen the blot of blue water Lake Jackie, too familiar by far, yet she’d know her name would convey to the Germans, the Brits, even to the private school kids who replaced my Japanese lovers, kids awkwardly entwined on a bench, a lacrosse stick balanced between them.

Drawing back from the heavy breath of his ardor, the girl shrugged him off. I was their embarrassment, old lady in tennis shoes, buttons dangling.

Old party pretending to look away, not to admire the girl’s mane of long honey hair, the neat muscular knots in her legs. She’s baiting this guy. The awkward gesture of his hand hovering in limbo above her bare knee; his face, broad and earnest, Slavic perhaps. The affront of his rejection sends me back to the creak of the wicker chair in my parents’ bedroom as I settled each Summer day into the romance. How inevitable of Natasha, that enchanting child, to love the careless Prince, not the worthy suitor, Pierre. But worse, morally worse in my view: when Tolstoy finally marries her to the good man, she plays their last scenes as a frump, a plump housewife and mother.

Yes; they fed horse flesh to the Turks, did you know? Proclaimed at the dinner table to alarm. They, the French or the Russians? I was uncertain, but the shocking tidbit was mine. Which we may be eating now.

Rumor that Kunkel, the butcher on Capital Avenue, minced horsemeat in with the beef. Now that recall does stop me; the supper table lesson on the bloody retreat of Napoleon’s Grand Army. The lacrosse player, lolling on the bench not two feet from the Track, was the girl. The bright blue jacket of her team thrown open, breasts on display. Let me make that clear: nipples, erect in chill Autumn air, poked a T-shirt which read, EVERYONE LOVES A CATHOLIC GIRL.

So untrue. I could tell her stories along that line. We were not embarrassed by each other.

Me—reading her chest.

She—slouching in a phony embrace, humiliating that boy. Then, ditching the flirtation, she ran off, lacrosse stick cradling air, boy trailing after. Dismissed from their after school tryst, I felt a sharp pang of shame, the lot of a voyeur. Had I invented my parents’ embrace in the four-poster, then hovered over these hapless kids to dismiss my guilt? I had manipulated history to write a love story. Printed and praised, there could be no erasure. Playing a shell game—that war, this war, did I hope for a reprieve with the feeble cry of my outrage at the Cheerleader, at the coaches directing his boyish strut as he comes to the podium on the White House lawn? We are audience to his grotesque performance at halftime, his bounce, joy in atrocities. Whatever happened to Civil Disobedience? The essay not assigned in college. Fellow grew beans, lived by a pond, nothing as fine as Central Park, what we’ve got here.

When I turned back to see the distance I’d come, the Germans were still in the photography business. Finding the pin oaks dull at end of day, they’d set up a white screen to reflect what was left of sunlight on tarnished bronze leaves. Give it a week. Our grand finale will knock your Birkenstocks off. My heart beat a fierce catch-up thump. I was breathless as I came to the open view at last, the point of full exposure. Clear across the Reservoir loomed the house I fled a half hour ago. From this vantage point, the trees, still leafed out, erased all other buildings on Central Park West. Our turrets caught the last glitter of this day in false gold.

Yes, the El Dorado. The presumptuous name of the house where we live with ancient plumbing and electric circuits updated with vigilance, with those casement windows sanded and painted against rust and the mural in the lobby of a phantasmagoric pilgrimage to a futuristic city of heavily varnished gold. And in a back room where the sun never shines, my failed book thrown aside.

My secondhand Raleigh, tires gone flat while I turned the pages of Tolstoy’s very long story renewed and renewed. I feel the hard surface of its indestructible library cover (dark green), title stamped in the spine. And see, as of this day, the slick dust jacket of the war story that garnered my prize.

Today, reading in my airless back room, the landing gear grunting onto the shore of Omaha Beach, my soldier boy—jaw shattered, chill waves pulling him under—ticked off the memory of my father turning up the volume of the Philco on the evening when all America, so the story goes, listened to Roosevelt call a benediction upon our troops, the pride of our nation. My mother coming from the kitchen to hear we shall return again and again, while I stood by the console. The clatter of knives and forks when I dropped them during the President’s prayer.

Mimi! My father scolding.

History demoted to domestic anecdote, the uncontrollable urge to bear witness, write myself into the scene.

Where was I when the first mushroom cloud rose in its ghostly threat on the black-and-white screen?

When Kennedy slumped into his wife’s lap?

Bobby bloodied on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel?

Let me unscramble time. In the personal almanac: my solemn attention to the landing of Allied Forces in Normandy, June 6, 1944, was broken by the kettle shrieking on the stove. I let go forks, knives and dessert spoons to savor rice pudding still warm from the oven. The following week, the school year ended, I turned to the opening pages of War and Peace. Mastering the difficult Russian names, I pursued the romance, admiring the wealthy landowners, suspecting the impoverished royals might be up to no good. In my parents’ bedroom I settled into the creaking wicker chair by a side window. On the few dark days, I read under the soft light of a silk-shaded lamp. Scraps of my mother’s old skirts and my father’s worn trousers had been braided into a lumpy rug at the Women’s Art League, wool gathering history. On their Victorian dresser, her soft chamois nail buffer in its ivory case lay beside the empty leather holster for the County Detective’s gun. I am no longer sure why I plotted, or why they tolerated, this incursion into their room.

The next year, watching the first A-bomb do its unspeakable thing, I was reading nothing at all. That summer was one long orgy of desire at Fairfield Beach. I blistered my fair skin parading in front of a wheezing asthmatic boy mustered out of the army. He never took notice of me—Everyone loves a Catholic girl—his name irretrievable, while I bear the near-invisible scars where the basal cells were removed from my chin. Looking across the Reservoir to the El Dorado, I stopped on the track remembering the good doctor who zapped the offending growths with such skill, Bernie Simon, who lived in the north tower of our building. He had worked with the team of plastic surgeons when the Hiroshima Maidens were brought back to New York, twenty-five Keloid Girls mostly kept out of sight by their families. Nine years after the bomb, they arrived at La Guardia, June 1955. Their disfigured faces and limbs were to be reconstructed. Many of the maidens were billeted with Quakers, peace-loving people. By October some had discarded kimonos. Others posed for the camera in saddle oxfords, twinsets, cultured pearls, the costume of American college girls; others wore prim secretarial suits cut close to the body. In the photographs, taken at a distance, you can’t really see the thick, dead flesh on their hands and faces.

Today, the mighty block of Mount Sinai hovers over the eastern skyline of the Park, but it was in the old hospital at 100th Street and Fifth Avenue where the A-girls were slowly, painfully transformed into something like normal—that can’t be the word—poster girls for an act of reparation, cruel footnote to history. Dr. Simon lost a spirited maiden on the operating table, though he massaged her bare heart with his hands. Tomoka had wanted to wear summer blouses with short sleeves, not much to ask. The year before his death, Bernie worked out in a loping run, an easy stretch on the Bridle Path, the flesh of his legs and arms burnished with a healthy tan. As though to figure in my story by a masterful computation or throw of the dice, an honored mathematician, Peter Lax, lives other side of our building. When called to Los Alamos, the Project he worked on seemed to the young lieutenant “like science fiction. There were all these legends everywhere.”

Here’s a true story you might recall if you’re getting on in years: This Is Your Life, a popular show, bottom of the TV barrel, in which the unsuspecting party is brought onstage and confronted with someone long lost who “made all the difference.” A programmed occasion for faked embarrassment, tears of joy, shrieks of disbelief: Oh, my God! Which is exactly what the pilot and bombardier of Enola Gay, the plane of infamy that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, cried out, Oh, my God! upon viewing the shadowy forms of two Keloid Girls hidden behind translucent screens, lest the audience of 40 million be disturbed by their Bar numesque disfigurement. The pilot died this past year, ever sure of his mission. Well, that’s the story folks, entertainment trumping science fiction.

I managed to make my way huffing, puffing to midpoint in the eastern stretch of the Track. Windows high above Fifth Avenue flashed the bronze setting of the sun. I will never understand how that brilliant display, mostly blocked by the apartment houses on Central Park West, leaps the Reservoir’s expanse. And do not care to understand, demanding magic from this forbidden journey, though the simple refraction of light at end of day may be grammar-school science. Breath coming short, halfway home, no use turning back. Feeling my considerable age, I settled into a simple touch of the blues. Not a jogger in sight, as though an official blew the whistle—ending play. Loping on, heart racing ahead, I was alone on the loop that leads to the North Gate House, thinking the tennis courts would soon come into view, might still be open at dusk with the plunk-plunk of balls and the mercy of a public drinking fountain. But there, under the flickering cover of trees, were two figures, still as statues until they heard the slow shuffle of my feet, then the woman put out her hand. With a swift gesture demanded I stop.

Perched above—an owl. In the lens of his unblinking golden eyes, the bird possessed us.

The quiet, spooky at first, was then pleasantly prolonged, the owl joining our conspiracy of silence. The woman’s attention consumed her. The man lowered his binoculars to feast on his wife’s pure pleasure as she wrote in a little book. I presume wife. Now I place gold rings on the birdwatchers’ fingers. Matched beyond their Nike jackets and billed caps, they became one in their attention to the bird. It’s only now I frame them as young lovers in a chill season, intent on their pursuit of nature; not shepherd and milkmaid tumbling in the hay, stockings in telltale disarray. I presume they are blessed with each other beyond this bucolic scene. Or not blessed, for he withdrew a few steps, looked somewhat paternal, admiring the quick strokes of her drawing, the ardor of her attention. For a moment he took me in—disheveled old lady with no claim to bird lore—then flashed me a smile as if to say, We’re not among the converted.

His wife would know, without benefit of my Audubon Guide, the long-eared owl to be ubiquitous in the Northeast. She drew us to our observation again. A sudden movement in the undergrowth broke the spell. We waited, we three, for something tremendous, the owl’s dive for its victim, a chipmunk or Reservoir rat. The bird would not perform. Then, in that still, suspended time, thump-de-thump declared itself, the heavy off beat of my heart. Random, the turbulence does not follow fast moves or exertion, drops in like a petulant neighbor with its complaint. I waited for the fibrillation to tap its way back to something like normal. When I skipped off from our hushed encounter as best I could, then turned back, the birdwatchers had also left the scene. The flat Track seemed uphill all the way, the North Gate House much farther than recalled. As it finally came into view, I heard a creature’s high screech of death, and the owl’s cruel laughter—hoo-hoo-hooting, having deprived us the thrill of the kill.

Clouds moved in with surprising swiftness, dusk turning twilight. I approached the dreary granite of the North Gate House, or houses—two on the Reservoir shore—straight and tall like giant rooks abandoned in a game of chess. Their black iron doors bolted, double padlocked. I take the notice personally: KEEP OUT. As though I would trash, pollute the works, while in the backwater sloshing between the towers my fellow citizens have deposited plastic bottles, deflated soccer balls, dead sneakers. Skeletal ribs of an umbrella float in thick green scum. This debris seemed placed here to call the city to mind—its waste, fumes, and general congestion of the grid in which Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux staged their pastoral drama, drew up plans for a park with hills and vales, rusticated nooks, and the folly of a castle to be viewed from the grandeur of Bethesda Terrace. The people of New York, high and low, would take pleasure in this otherworld that would never admit crumbled cigarette packs, milky condoms, a dismembered iPod jauntily floating in a tangle of weeds. Just beyond this detritus, the water was clear across to the South Pumping Station. The gulls, drained of color in the approaching night, held their post all along the pipe that dissects the Reservoir. I’d always thought a pipe’s a pipe. Not at all, when the water’s low you see their perch to be handsomely paved with stone. Above, the moon was translucent, a nibbled host in a starless sky. The programmed lights shone brightly on the tennis courts for players who would not give up on the day.

Repossessed by their warning, I found myself, dark end of day, round the block on French Street—its empty lot with shanties, idle men out of work. Our mother never called them tramps.

As I crossed the Bridle Path, the last child in the playground struggled against his mother’s embrace. The fiberglass hippos and jungle gym clung to their stations while the kid was dragged off protesting. He did not want to go home, nor did I. How I hate that antique locution—prissy, at arm’s length from my fear the escape route ended where I began, the backward glance at my storybook with its claims to a sorrow never felt for the reality of a war and its aftermath I did not—may never—fully understand. With the doctor’s warning and the day’s meds, I had accomplished the loop, 1.58 miles, still subject to parental correction. Why the twinge of disgrace, sharp as a stitch in my side? Why my childish name? What’s more, they were right, I do not know how to take care of myself, simply enjoy the day’s adventure, cut free of the past. I’d been seduced by the contrived beauty and small adventures of Central Park, hoodwinked by an owl, affronted by black iron doors. My playground was closed for the night. I was home, Chez El Dorado, elevator at the ready.

You were there, waiting. I passed you by in the hall—rudely, I guess—ran to my workroom, made a note—Everyone loves—lest I forget the self-serving legend of the Catholic Girl, forgetting I’d had a Bic and small pad in the pocket of the old black coat, two of its three buttons now missing.

I called to you, Put on the pasta pot.

By my reading chair, the book I threw aside. On a knockout cover, a single Rhinemaiden swims for the gold. By the sparkling stream, the author’s name is printed in Third Reich Gothic. I had aimed at important: that took the prize. Liebestraum, now reissued with a student guide, should have a query on the writer’s plagiarized emotions: Does the note of doomed love underwrite the inexhaustible horror of that war? My journey down the well-trodden path into the dark woods of National Socialism was pure Grimm. I cast myself as the clever troll to lead the way.

But if, you suggested in a reality check way back when, when I was in the heady spin of my misdirection, if, before the war, that lieutenant you’re writing about studied physics with Heisenberg, he should have been stirring the hot pot at Alamogordo with our neighbor Peter Lax, not slogging through enemy fire on D-Day.

Captain. I promoted him toward the end of the war. Yes, or he might have been translating at Nuremberg and not so easily betrayed by a Rhinemaiden bitch; but D-Day it was for the sake of my PLOT, the nefarious name, in any flash upon the fancy, so advises Henry James. As though calling upon the Master would make amends for my patter of quick steps, the forward march of my story. Did I then presume the glib balance of an aphorism, sum up the argument: Memory prods History. History corrects Memory. As in—

Where were we when Al Gore won the election?

In Seville, the Grand Hotel. We went to bed happy.

The children, you told me, by which we mean grandchildren, have moved on to pumpkins and plastic masks of action figures unfamiliar to oldies, but the options are still open about what they will actually be for Halloween. Transformed, as we were, to tramps or ghosts in homemade costumes?

I noticed the scar on your nose which I lose track of over the years, a perfectly round patch of slick keloid, large as a dime. One day you had a chat with Bernie Simon in the lobby. I’ll take care of that, he said, saving your life. In those days we were cavalier about the ravages of time. Heart-burn, toothache, a touch of vertigo—our vision of the future blurred by cheap drugstore glasses.

As though just another jaunt, breath of fresh air, not a reprieve from the heavy sentence of the book I’d thrown aside. What might I have said that was truthful? That I too often looked back, not to presume upon the day’s blessing, isn’t that how my mother might put it? Channeling that cultured voice—Best get on with your business, Mimi. Remember Lot’s wife.

Well, I do, I remember that wife is given no name, no space in the story, and no say. She disobeys, turns to look at the sinful city in sulfurous flames. Swift chapters in the good book don’t miss a beat turning her into a pillar of salt. Whatever the indulgences of body and soul in Sodom, she was leaving home with nothing like the comfort of Central Park to run to.

You took Liebestraum, the offending book, from my hand. Leave it.

You knew perfectly well what I’d been up to, picking at the gold medallion on its cover like a kid with a scab on my knee.

I said, Let’s give some thought to supper.

The new flat-screen TV in the kitchen brought cut-rate news. Corporate Greed, Celebrity Breakup, DNA Frees Convicted Rapist, Dollar Drops Against Euro. As president flops off mountain bike, I shed onion tears. High school bands march down Fifth Avenue: NYPD, Mayor Bloomberg, Senators, Sons of Italy, Knights of Columbus. Car Bomb in Haifa, Helicopter Malfunction in Mosul. Five marines, their deaths verified. Sipping my wine—tears, the real thing.

Their photos: two in camouflage, three in dress uniform. Tonight the oldest is twenty-three. I could see you didn’t buy my tears for the cruel fate of those boys shipped home, RIP. Onion knife in hand, I left you to go back down the hall to my workroom. Behind the confusion of old postcards and printouts, there’s the photo of my grandfather sitting on the steps of the Knights of Columbus, an ample brick-and-shingle house spiffed up to rival the Masonic Lodge. Bridgeport, 1918. He is broad-shouldered; craggy forehead shelters his eyes from the sun, mouth rather too generous with a twist of a smile. George Burns is remarkably handsome, big hands clasped on his knees to ground him while this picture is taken with the fraternal brothers, important men who run Main Street, the harbor, City Hall. He is the only Knight in a soft shirt and tweed cap that a worker might wear on a Sunday. The rest of the Templars sport confident fedoras, stiff collars, four-in-hand ties. All of them Irish, and it’s a wonder to me still how these Paddys-come-lately tied up with Columbus when they had little to do with Italians other than renting them tinderboxes in the Hollow or granting the occasional loan. Burns built houses for the men who worked on his crew, all Italians, paving roads in the city outgrowing its limits. At sixteen, when the landscape firm that bore Olmsted’s name extended the breakwater in Seaside Park, he’d carted stones, scythed the bulrushes of Long Island Sound and lost half a finger.

Back in the kitchen, I hand over the photo dulled to amber photogravure. You’ve seen it often, yet I launch the whole roundabout story while the water in the pasta pot boils away, tell how I circumnavigated the Reservoir, hooting at tourists when I came to that bend in the road, and end with the devalued holiday, the grandfather I hardly knew, an old man bankrupt, shrunken, silenced by age, dealing his grandchildren pennies from a jam jar.

I’m small, with few words. He reaches out, strokes my cheek with the stump, the slick flesh of that terrible finger. I’m ashamed of my tears. Pennies clink as my mother drops them one by one back into the jar.

We’ve lived too long together. I feed you your lines.

Yes, plotted, and on I went turning back to serving my life sentence for the story I committed, that Nazi soprano who betrays a smitten officer, his love doomed from the first page, American innocence exposed as plain foolish but always forgivable. Liebestraum (Love Story in plain English); a touch of irony to leaven my story.

Come off it. Your tone not amused, not indulgent.

I wound back to the comfort zone, the course of my flight through the lobby of the El Dorado with its homey grandeur—sofa, club chairs, flowers stiffly arranged—past the kindest of men at the imperial front desk and the doorman who would never comment on my coat with its last buttons dangling, bleach spots of a misbegotten wash day splattering my jeans, then my crossing to the park with the comfort of its stories. Waiting for linguine to test al dente, I confessed I had not cried for today’s boys blown up by the side of a dusty road.

I could barely distinguish between my mother’s correction and your tolerant smile at pennies in a jar. I moved on to the owl, claiming the bird as my discovery of the day, how he tricked me into submission. You said, Watching the pot?

As we talk, I pick at the medallion still stuck on my book. When I have it off, Alberich comes into view, the gnarled dwarf who grabbed the gold ring. The Rhinemaidens, all three laughing at his plug-ugly body; at his rejection of love which set Wagner’s whole Ring Cycle rolling on and on, fable begetting fable. By family telepathy my brother gets the message. I’m in the dumps. I protect myself with a pawn, tremor of uncertainty in my voice: My Summer of War and Peace? That creaking wicker chair? How come I hung out in their bedroom?

But yes, that Summer I set one more place at the kitchen table. And the war news? Before supper we gathered by the Philco.

Trust he’s right about the Magnavox, but I know for certain that on D-Day FDR’s message of sorrow and hope was cut off by the clatter of forks, knives and spoons.

Mystery solved: I dropped the good silver ’cause Grandma came to stay!

My brother’s voice is strong today, sharp, lighthearted: What are you on about? He gets it. D-Day? Your prize story—rubbing salt in the wound of success? All that old stuff.

Calendar stuff. Like Grandpa in a dinner jacket at the Grand Knights of Columbus. They served oysters Rockefeller, don’t you know. Santa María, remember?

That was my brother’s ship in a bottle. I recall his concentration with glue, pincers, scraps of a linen napkin dipped in tea for the sails, button-thread rigging. He remembered pebbles brought home from the schoolyard, painted gold. The treasure chest stuck to the balsa wood deck of the Admiral’s flagship, Santa María.

I heard the Times flop down on the table that lives by his side with amber bottles of pills for the daily doses aiding and abetting stealth moves on his body. We compare systolic over diastolic achievements, scoring low for the gold star.

He knew, this brother who was there from the beginning, that I was out of sorts, weighted with more than my displacement to a wicker chair, what big eyes you have Gramma, sleeping in my bed—all that old stuff. He groaned slightly as he rose. I heard the slow squeak of his walker as he made his way across to the bookshelf in his tidy study. Now he would pick The Anatomy of Melancholy off the shelf, the book so heavy as he flipped through its pages to find clever bits to amuse me. We had been into Burton’s big book of a lifeline before:

Till he induces laughter. So, you think while they listened to war news after the dishes were dried, I read Tolstoy by lamplight? Flies batting the screen.

Stay on message, he says. Honor the holiday, one of your brief lives, Columbus.

I’d launched a piece on Columbus but it sniffed of embalming fluid, seemed a replica of his statue commanding the Piazza Acquaverde, the bus station in Genoa. We did tour the house where Christoforo was probably not born, and in a nautical museum viewed waxy simulacra of the Admiral with a first mate, and selection of sailors costumed for the journey. His instruments of navigation, the quadrant and the astrolabe, while never useful, were beautiful, and in yet another funky museum, a plaster cast of his hand. Why his hand? It’s so undiscovered, Genoa. The well-worn joke . . . À tre scopertede . . .

Prego, not to tell it again. Do Columbus.

Like the old days, I obey his command.

Adam with an agenda: he named each island in this earthly paradise—Trinidad, Fernando, Isabella, Santa María de la Concepción and so forth—bringing it all back home. Best that he did not invoke the Lord in naming Puerto Grande, a sculpted harbor of Cuba we know as our naval base, Guantánamo Bay with its history of detention and “outrages upon personal dignity” (Geneva Convention). On first sight, the vegetation of the islands recalled the beauty of Andalusia, but deeper into the rain forest’s dense thickets of vines and lush trees the humidity was overwhelming. The natives, friendly and instructive, alas had no vein of gold. They offered stone glittering with something like mica, and the story of a great king who lived by an inland lake. Or perhaps the golden man was lord of a distant island? Could he be farther up the dangerous waters of the Orinoco, this godlike figure in some versions named El Dorado, with coffers of the precious stuff in his city of Manoa, enough to fill the royal treasury impoverished by holy wars to convert infidels to the one true faith. Now Colón’s calling was to be as much missionary as miner, persisting in his duties until on the island of Hispaniola he might find the river of gold in the waters of the Ciabo, might find enough glitter to show in Madrid along with curiosities and his captives. He settled the crew he left behind to set up shop. The book of Colombo’s discoveries was a best seller; his tales wonderful and so wonderfully told they might be the adventures of Marco Polo, which he read and reread in Italian, his mother tongue, preparing for his discoveries and for the writing of his own extravagant tale. After the success of the first voyage, Columbus drew up a contract, The Book of Privileges, in which Don Colombo demanded and received a title, a coat of arms, and a share in perpetuity of the profits of all the lands of his discovery. On the second voyage, he brought chickens to this handsome race quick to learn words of a strange language and the value of a farmyard egg. Prospects did not turn out for the best.

The High Admiral of the Ocean Seas proved to be a slack administrator of the greatest real-estate deal of all time. He was unfortunate in choosing his lieutenants. Christoforo’s gift was for mapping the sea, not transatlantic politics, not sorting out quarrels between gold diggers and the indigenous people. Among the curiosities brought back from his first travels—lemon seeds, a necklace of fish bones, tobacco, cinnamon bark, corn—were strange birds and slaves. He had assumed his captives would submit to this arrangement, though the Queen found their possession a bad show when they were put on public display—perhaps the beginning of his fall from grace. And where in advertised abundance was the gold? At the outset of his third voyage, he was becalmed in the Doldrums under the sign of Leo, which, given his belief in astrology, foretold the severity of his fate. When at last the Admiral landed at Santo Domingo, the ungrateful settlers he had left behind revolted. His powers dissolved, Columbus was shipped home in chains.

In a homey museum just above Genoa, we discovered him in two roles. A white marble statue portrays a pretty boy with abundant curls, dreaming the glorious future, longing for adventures at sea. This charming Christoforo sits on a shelf with the crusty oil painting of a broken man, scant white hair, swollen feet, tattered robes. Shackled below deck, you said, head bowed to darkness. Upon his return to Hispaniola, the settlers had not thanked him for their hunger, war with the natives, death and disease. And yet again he returned. Now here’s the pity: the Don came back that fourth voyage, sailing with his young son and brother, to find the route to China described by Marco Polo, confusing fiction with geography, presuming that the estuaries of Panama might be the rivers of Cathay.

Cristóbal Colón, Colom. Or Colombo—an Italian-Jewish name. A wool carder, weaver, boy sailor. Instructed by his brother Bartholomew in cartography, he mapped the known world. In Portugal and Spain, cartography was a Jewish profession. According to Christoforo’s calculations, the world might be shaped like a pear, and so he sailed round this fruity globe to bring back spices and trinkets of the Caribbean. His true quest had been for the wonders of China or Japan. He figured the world too small, America lay in the way. It is said the Admiral, bitter and nearly blind, passed his last years consumed with the defense of his Privileges and his title. It is said the Genoese bankers drew on his pesos d’oro in Hispaniola, which supported him grandly. If true, he died rich. A devout Christian, he was deeply religious yet a confessed mystic who communed with the stars, though he never mastered celestial navigation. Five hundred years after weeds and a pelican foretold the most promising landfall known to man, a colossal statue of Christopher Columbus was refused by five cities in the States and Puerto Rico. A Taino woman, descendant of the people who first greeted Columbus, debunked the memorial enterprise: To allow the ultimate symbol of mass murder, genocide, oppression, colonialism . . . Enough! There is never enough outrage to fully tarnish a symbol. We are left with the navigator, son of the wool merchant, possibly illegitimate, the bright ambitious boy who went to sea.

The public television documentary turns folio pages from his log book, voice-over reading the translated text on-screen; model of the Santa María; an animated map of each voyage, with his fleets bobbing over the sea: the professors disagree about the date and place of his birth, perhaps a hill town above Nervi. A facsimile of the chart used on the triumphant voyage of discovery is pegged as it was every four hours, pin-pricking the distance achieved each day. The flow of sand in an egg timer tracked navigational hours. A quadrant and an astrolabe are displayed: the nifty new tools he carried on board. But the Admiral could not fix his latitude; in bad weather could not site the North Star. In a letter to the King of Spain, Columbus claimed he had determined his latitude off Cuba by use of a quadrant. In truth, his readings were off. He did not have the math, laid the instrument aside, sailed the parallel by dead reckoning, pinprick by pinprick, a ship’s boy, perhaps his son, turning the egg timer until the last willful voyage was done. The astrolabe behind glass case is not of his period, so the tag says in all honesty. When we left that museum set in a park just down from the villa in Bogliasco, we took a wrong turn into a boccie-ball game, old men, old as we are, passing the time. They were welcoming to i stranieri with museum pamphlets in hand. One with a grizzled beard could not resist the old Genovese query, À tre scopertede Genoa sono? I answered: pesto, banking, and America. We laughed in bilingual accord.

Columbus Circle, newly refurbished with trees that brave the exhaust fumes, stands at the southwest corner of Central Park. The Admiral wears the familiar cloak of his best days, fur trim and rich wool stiffly flowing. The puffy beret we remember from a school play. Perched on a mighty pillar, he stands sentinel to the traffic that circles round him, his back to the Park and to the outsize pylon that bears the competing statue of Columbia Triumphant as she heads toward Broadway in a golden shell. Layer upon layer of gold leaf covers her body and windblown gown. She commemorates our Victory in the Spanish-American War, 1898. Columbia and Columbus join in our urban allegory of Empire as empire sails on.

October 13, 1492. The fish so unlike ours that it is wonderful. Some are the shape of dories and of the finest colors, so bright that there is not a man who would not be astounded, and would not take great delight in seeing them. There are also whales. I saw no beasts on land save parrots and lizards.

Among trees. On the Mall in Central Park, he stands under American elms with the poets. Blinded by disgrace, the Admiral could not see Literary Walk flashing green to gold on the day marking the discovery, nor hear the distant blare of a high-school band, so I backdate him to full possession of his Privileges, walk him along Columbus Avenue a block west of Central Park. In the neighborhood of the El Dorado, two restaurants are Italian with inferior trenette al pesto, pandolce of sorts. The Mass at St. Gregory’s on 90th Street is said in Spanish and French, Salve, a poor parish of immigrants—Hispaniola, San Salvador, Port-au-Prince—its school basement once the last refuge of unruly priests who protested the Vietnam War. That war, this war. Many of the indigenous on the avenue are dusky as those once noted in his log. On this unnaturally warm day, a few men and women display markings of mysterious designs on their naked arms and legs. We might stop at the narrow shop with birds in the window—zebra finches, parrots, canaries, the exotic creatures he captured for the delight and edification of Her Majesty. Past the flower shop with Peruvian lilies, maranta, Queen’s tears, a bouquet gathered from his Discoveries. We will stop at 86th Street. Two banks on the corner. That should amaze the Genoese sailor. His swollen fingers fumble with the knot on his purse. The high ceiling and terrazzo, all so familiar, but the deposit slot rejects his pesos d’oro. . . . And that henceforth I should be called Don, and should be Chief Admiral of the Ocean Seas, and that my eldest son should succeed and so from generation to generation forever. . . .

The woolen cloak heavy on his stooped shoulders, strands of white hair poke out of the jaunty tam. Through infirmity of eyes, he sees at last this Manoa, the strange land of his discovery. We head east on 86th, back to the Park. Thanks be to God the air is very soft like April at Seville; and it is a pleasure to be here, so balmy are the breezes.

On the Promenade, a Hispanic peddler of gelato. Limón, por favor. Pinprick by pinprick, back in time when the world was fresh. Near blind. A small whale near shore? A stalk laden with rose berries, in plain light of day birds flying from winter. Heaven on earth awaiting his discovery of a flickering mirage.

You said: Take it down a peg. You’re edgy.

You flapped the Wall Street Journal against your thigh; a respectful review of a movie we might want to see.

Your instructive tone is troubling. It’s the Park I have going for me, new material—tourism, birding, our looming towers preserved in bourgeois splendor. I spoke then of my Scheherazade mode, of watching the clock run down, of my balancing act that’s solo, though often I depend on a fellow traveler. Like Chaucer, don’t you know?

It’s Fall in Central Park.

I am writing in the small green notebook in which you record our sightings of northeastern birds. It has been years since I scribbled more than a quick note with pen on paper. Attorney Thaddeus Sylvan informed me that Security might not look kindly on my laptop, though my life and times are easily accessed, from the incompleteness of my Yale degree to my credit rating to the theorem I am attempting to work to its probable conclusion. Your notebook slipped easily into the pocket of a gray flannel suit worn to Wall Street by my grandfather. I rescued it along with his pocketwatch, so that I might wear it when called to testify on behalf of Bertram Boyce, who’s between a rock and a hard place. Silenced, I resort to the shorthand of clichés; sequestered in a small room with unforgiving metal chairs and a behemoth of a scarred wood table. It seems, as I look over the page, that I write in a retro voice much like my grandfather’s. Cyril O’Connor was a gent who was formal at breakfast, who muted his affection at bedtime and contained his exuberance when our Yankees won the game. A shame you never knew him.

Bear with me, Lou. I will ease up. I’m attempting to describe the occasion when I reattached to Bertie, who I must claim as my good friend. You were along for the ride. It is best to turn back to that day on which Bert and Artie found each other again, embraced in a Judas moment, though who betrays, who saves the day is yet to be determined. Should anyone audit this memory bank or question its inventions, they must know you cannot testify against me, insofar as you are my loving wife.

A volley of shots in the distance. A thrasher fluttered into the bulrushes. I faked a pistol with my hand. Backfire.

A great egret flew to the island in Turtle Pond. Displaying his annoyance, he chose not to perform his strut. In something of a huff, you lowered your binoculars. We’d come for songbirds stopping off on their migration to pleasant winter climes. The day was unseasonably warm, as though the years flipped fast forward and phoebes had long abandoned the sheltering grasses round the pond.

Lou, there was nothing to fear on a Monday afternoon in Central Park. Above—swift sailing puff clouds; below—still water glazed in sunlight.

A second volley.

I know it’s backfire, you said, convincing yourself no sharpshooter crawled the swampy undergrowth. Took me a week to get you to come birding, never my great thrill, yours. I wanted to see your pleasure at the green gold of the warblers, observe your full attention sketching their pinstripe tails. I wanted you to breathe easy, Lou, for a few hours of the day. Our Sylvie, more than friend, who often looks after the children, had gone off, a visit to her stepdaughter in sunny CA. You checked your watch, opened this small spiral notebook to record our sighting of the egret and the single thrasher in the reeds repeating his mockingbird cry. This outing was going as well as could be expected, given we had abandoned our children to a student of mine with no experience in kid care other than a brood of brothers back home.

Turtle Pond lies directly below Belvedere Castle, once a stone shell, a hollow stage set built to enchant the eye. All such notes, Lou, come by way of my grandfather, a would be historian if life had not ordained his career on Wall Street, allowing only an occasional Sunday walk in the Park to instruct a boy. So, if I include the Delacorte Theater with its seats facing an empty pit, we might have been a couple of lost ground lings from a pageant of heroic legends. Tourists and a busload of schoolchildren were on the viewing terrace above, looking down from the battlements on the little body of water and the island both, as their guide blasted through a megaphone, ENTIRELY MAN MADE. A disappointment to his audience surely, but there we were by way of entertainment, Louise Moffett and Arthur Freeman, playing our observation of the birds for all to see. With the next volley of earsplitting pops, you mimed fright. If these outlanders had simply turned from us, looked down other side of the Castle, they might have seen men in their Conservatory jackets attempting to deal with a disabled tractor backfiring at the utility shed. I enclosed you in the rough body hold of a protective embrace. How long had such childish fun been in short supply? Shrugging free of me, your cap tumbled down the embankment. Artie to the rescue. In a princely gesture, I set it atilt on your head. Worry lines not permanently etched in your brow were hidden in the shadow of the bill, but your cheeks were ghostly pale in the bright light of day. You tucked in the ponytail. That day plays a PowerPoint show in my head: Here’s the moody egret, here a lone phoebe seeking shelter in the reeds from the guide blasting Vista Rock with misinformation, here’s my wife, gorgeous and plain. Mind if I put that down? You insist you are a throwback to Household Mom in black-and-white reruns. I might say a fading American rose. I still call you Miss Wisconsin. Cheese, say cheese.

Pen poised above this very notebook, the stern set of your mouth would not give way to a smile as you estimated the great egret’s height. I brushed the wet grit of the embankment off my khakis. Then, as though to amuse in a game of I Spy, I trained my binoculars on the foot soldiers above. The schoolchildren, you may recall, waved little flags—red, white and green—but the tourists seemed puzzled or plain embarrassed by their bird’s-eye view of us horsing around. What had they seen? A private moment, always lovers in the Park, though not often caught in an act of observation. Adjusting my lens, I dictated notes to you on the enemy’s shaggy plumage, their slack mandibles and splintered beaks.

They could not hear me describe them as goosey gander, common tern, but no doubt heard you cry, “Oh, Artie.” The high chirp of your laughter reached up to include them as they watched our tussle, your love punch to my ribs and my gentlemanly gesture, taking your arm as we climbed toward the Great Lawn, where soccer practice was in progress, boys in the blue jerseys of Trinity School. Next the Pinetum, where you hoped for a red crested kinglet, then the Reservoir, expecting the arrival of grebes basking in the sun. Again you checked the time. Our Maisy had the first cold of that peculiar season, which did not deliver crisp Fall days. I’m uncertain how much to recall of our encounter with Bertram Boyce, not yet charged with backdating options of Skylark shares, but I am certain I lured you away from the apartment with Maisy’s congestion, with Cyril’s trembling tower of Lincoln Logs. I offered you the consuming delight of birds in their citified migration.

You hurried ahead, past dog walkers, babies in slings, past the elderly taking the air, skateboarders—illegal on the walkway. The pretzel salesman had resumed his Summer post. A fat boy in a red shako, much gold braid on his breast and belly, began a melancholy taps on his bugle—Day is done, gone the sun—broke to drain spittle from his mouthpiece.

You were not amused by this touch of Fellini. Checking your watch: Four-fifteen.

Columbus Day, I said. Parade long over.

The holiday stuck on to the weekend. Cyril had wanted to go to school that morning, always wants to go to school, where he outwits his class-mates less endowed. His cleverness is a cross he will have to bear. Only now that I recall Bert Boyce and Artie Freeman breaking through the Fifth Avenue crowd when Columbus Day was kept in its place, the disruptive twelfth. Snotty nerds lusting for the drum majorettes and their flock of twirlers from the outer boroughs, those high-stepping girls far beyond our reach.

In the Pinetum we did a swift look-see searching for the red crest of the kinglet. There was only the resident clown in a battered derby prompting his flea-bitten parrot—H’lo there! ’Lo there! Impatient, you took the Reservoir Track the long way round. Not a merganser in sight as we headed to the crosstown bus to get home to the children. Our pretense of pleasure seemed a failed duty until you caught the noiseless swivel of an owl’s head, flick of tufted ears.

The long-eared, napping till end of day, did not deign to acknowledge our ogle eyes trained on him. Drowsy creature, yet I believe he heard every step of our approach, listened to each shallow breath of our silence, a comfort compared to the panting of joggers. We had discovered him fully disclosed on his perch. If he’d been in a story, he’d be wiser or at least crafty, the role he’s often assigned. You wrote in this very notebook, the turn of the page noiseless. Flipping back, I see with what care you drew the eye stripe cutting a perfect V to the owl’s beak. In any case, I had my prize for the day in your extended moment of delight, which swept aside Maisy’s catarrh, the terrifying pops of an old combustion engine, and the anxiety, never mentioned, that my work was not going well. I might not find my way through the knots of higher mathematics to the solution of one small problem. In clear sight of the owl, the troubling world dropped away. Louise, confess your thing about owls, starting with barn owls on the farm in Wisconsin. The first prize you ever won, sketch of an owl perched on a downspout, every night watching that bird from your bedroom window until the dive for its prey, the death shriek of its victim.

Our binoculars captured the Halloween mask of the owl’s flat face. I must not deprive the bird of his owlness, see him pompous and befuddled, like Owl in the book our son loves. An uncertain shuffle brought the prolonged silence to a halt. Do you remember the old woman huffing and puffing her way round the track? You signaled her to stop? With a flip of your hand ordered: Look, look up. A party of three sharing the vigil. In a contest of wills, this urban owl might outlast us. Finally, the shabby old girl broke the spell, shuffled toward the tennis courts, her breathing audible—uneven. The sky had darkened, leaves rustled underfoot. The long-eared was surely gloating as we headed toward Fifth Avenue, his unblinking eyes on us. I preened at coaxing a laugh at Turtle Pond, and for some time, long minutes of owl time, you’d been lost to the world.

Released into the city at high noon, I could head up, or downtown. History lies in both directions. Downtown is Wall Street, where my grandfather went to the office every working day. He invested, bought and sold, made money. We are living off him now, Louise, though he’s gone these six years if I reckon correctly, which I should be able to do, since he has willed me the luxury of going back to school to pick up my love affair with mathematics. So I had the choice of walking down the blocks to look at the Stock Exchange that rang the market to my grandfather’s attention each day, though not going as far as the Trade Center wound or taking the route up to SoHo, where we lived our first years together in your loft, the materials of your trade all around us—paints, charcoal smudges in progress, canvases stacked against the wall. I was in that empty waiting room at my request, the privilege granted by the machinations of Bertie’s lawyer, who believed I must fiddle on with statistics and correlations for my class in applied mathematics. Furthermore, I did not want to spend time under the surveillance of Attorney Sylvan, famous for finding loopholes in the law. I had been coached by him, his every slick word put in my mouth, thinking when the time comes I’ll say what I have to say truly—my schoolboy adventures with Bertie, my larky jobs at Skylark, more play than employment.

My choice was not to travel downtown for recess, Lou, not to recall the dutiful life of Cyril O’Connor, not indulge in Lower Broadway, where we were so gone on each other our nights of love consumed us. I’ve loosened up, though consumed is too heady a word, or too visceral. My tongue freed by a hot dog with the works as I perused the discount junk on Canal Street, odd lots of T-shirts with Goth symbols of the Reich, dog beds, doll heads, faucets, copper wire, cruets labeled Oil and Vinygar, framed posters of Che and the Eiffel Tower. Products in their mass graves guarded by their keepers, who seemed to be doing swift business of sorts, perhaps as subject to investigation as Bertram Boyce’s deals at Skylark. Troubling.

You were well acquainted with troubles that day in the park, your fears crossing the line from daily concern to manic organic. Alar in the apple juice, bacteria flourishing in plastic bottles, E. coli, tuna with its dose of mercury—all loomed large as the national debt. A whiff of the super’s stogie in the hallway, Asian flu, Teflon and faulty seat belts—right up there with toxic waste. Nothing to fear but fear itself, attempting the noble line, I fail to amuse. Along with your catalog of horrors, there is Maisy’s persistent congestion, and the uncertain course of my career. Love, in one of its many distortions, allows you never to speak of my possible failure, though I work hard, harder than I ever have in my life. Lou, there is the one unspeakable word—talent, if in fact the gift of numbers was ever mine to squander. No longer nimble, one step behind the beat? Better to record the owl’s composure on a warm October day.

That night when Cyril and Maisy were safely stashed in their bunk bed, I discovered you were keeping an account of the current war’s fatalities, though only our boys were admitted to your file. You had copied each soldier’s name, age, rank and hometown into a baby book, a present from your mother intended for Maisy’s vital statistics—first tooth, first fever, first word. On the cover a stork carts a swaddled newborn in its beak. I suggested the death toll of Operation Iraqi Freedom is online, www.Iraqbodycount.org. Oh, that’s only information, you said, transferring Private First Class, 20, Linden, NJ, and Staff Sergeant, 34, Shreveport, LA, from the Times to your register, inscribing each name, your pen dipped in India ink. Kind of crazy, the record made personal, and then Louise Moffett, once an artist on the cutting edge, now invested in the role you embrace as housewife and mother, costumed in apron and sensible shoes, closes the baby book, takes up a mystery, British. Potboilers, you call these murders set in the manse or vicarage. The gardener did it or the village doctor you thought so kind. The night of our birding, you challenged the sly smile of my bewilderment.

You know the satisfaction, Artie. Puzzles, solutions.

Our pleasant ongoing argument in which I point out that a problem chalked on the blackboard is without motive—no adultery, sibling rivalry, not even greed to provoke a crime.

And fell asleep with the murder unsolved. I scanned my preparation for class—harmless proofs completed, then lay your book aside, turning down the page not to lose the place in that story. Even in sleep you looked troubled, gone from me, but earlier that day I had you back. As we headed along the sidewalk to 86th Street, I was hopeful till worry surfaced in tightness around your mouth, an audible sigh as you looked across Fifth Avenue at the apartment house where I lived with my grandparents when I was a boy, an orphan. You won’t go there, a slippery expression, though you take care to avoid the wounds of my childhood, which I believe long healed. I have hoped that Bertie, with his troubles, all too real, might release you from conjuring the demons of my past, and from free-floating angst that pursues you. OK pursues us all, but we get Cheerios in the bowl before reading the morning paper.

I imagine how gently your might cut me off. Backdating to that day of owl and egret, your ponytail slapping air, for no reason at all, gave me hope. That night, the night of our birding in the Park, while you slept I turned on the tube, muted it to indulge in our nightcap addiction to the comic turns on the dysfunctional state of our nation. The pantomime without clever words and background laughter seemed as inadequate, to wing a metaphor, as a Band-Aid on a suppurating sore. Or merely electronic—a fleeting message held in our hand: pick up juice, organic snacks at the market. We’d lost track of the sand castle blown away in Desert Storm. So it’s ever been while Rome burned, though have you noticed there’s no tune for this war? Where have all the flowers gone? My mother strumming, Long time passing. Long time ago.

I am writing in a new notebook with unlined pages, bought at Pearl Paint, where you ordered supplies when you were still invested in your art. Your little green notebook is, after all, for the birds. When I returned to the courthouse, Tim McBride presented me with a sealed envelope. Lawyer for the defense—that is, Thad Sylvan—asked me to consider in my testimony the charities of Bertram Boyce Jr. and the corporate goodwill of Skylark. And what did I recall of the Boyce family holidays, and the religion of their choice? I remember that the mother (divorced) went to Aspen for Christmas, Bermuda at Easter. She took Bert along until he was old enough to be abandoned to the Park Avenue apartment or sent to visit his father, a mysterious tinkerer in Bethesda, Maryland, who held patents on medical apparatus that paid the bills, saved lives. I did not share these memories. Sylvan should do his homework. Why not ask poor Heather Boyce who, in Newsweek, walked up the courthouse steps arm in arm with Bertie, a couple properly suited for good works. Their names are printed in programs of the symphony, the opera—Bertram and Heather Boyce, right up there with the heavy donors. Black tie at the Modern and the Met, drives you crazy, Lou, their attention to couture. And Project Hope, the llamas with big, soulful eyes, Heather supplying indigenous folk with herds of the beasts for costly sweaters. Shearing, carding, spinning for a week’s handout of rice and beans.

There’s this. I had a few beers during recess. Observe, dearly beloved, that I was ever so slightly greased. Up for the self-portrait, not the idealized Artie Freeman you once sketched, boyish with a thatch of hair gone early gray. You demoted my smile to an air of bemusement. Forever looking on, not part of the show, the squint of my eyes at every sleight of hand, moral or monetary. Jimmy Stewart, you suggested, one of those innocent heartthrobs.

Back to Bertie, back to business. I have written more of me and more of you than the subject of my deposition. Testimony: corrected by Tim McBride when I attempt the legal lingo. I put the two of us on the stand while the accused awaited his day in court. Birding in the Park, the day we met Bertie, I now understand as a confession. The only one I ever knew who confessed was my grandmother, Mae O’Connor, the least sinful of women. She was shriven, strange word, at Ignatius Loyola a few blocks from the apartment. I waited on the church steps facing Park Avenue expecting a hum of holy about her when she emerged from the blessed darkness, but it was only Mae fumbling in her purse for the list of groceries we must pick up at Gristede’s. A shame you never knew her. I see this memory business, this getting it down, might be a simple image that I use for my class. You can’t, Louise, fill up a circle with circles that do not overlap, but if you allow the overlap, then there can be many if not infinite circles which will allow Mae O’Connor to take her place in my story.

Circles within circles as on that day heading out of the park. Past five. Five, you repeated, in case I missed the urgency in your voice. Across Fifth Avenue, the apartment house where I lived as a boy was encased in scaffolding to update its limestone façade. The window where my mother stood with her love child (my grandmother’s version of the tale) was draped in netting, misty as the occasion of my birth. As a boy I wanted to be born on Krypton where, by improbable chance, my father lived, but where was the dynamic logo, my soaring flight over Metropolis? Two lapdogs nipping and nosing each other blocked our path. I stopped you crossing as a siren cleared the way for an ambulance racing down from Mount Sinai. A cab jumped the curb, an ordinary mishap in the city. The electronic pedestrian, trapped in the stoplight, raised his arm in a friendly salute. Safe, safely across. Chill coming on, cloudy sky if memory serves. You checked your watch again, five-fifteen.

Day is done, gone the sun. Now, why? Why did I sing that funereal tune? From the hills, from the lake . . .

To get the laugh, Oh, Artie.

Speaking of the old woman in the floppy black coat, jeans shredded at the cuffs, I said, Wasn’t she a funny duck?

We recalled her look of offense when you ordered her to silence the heavy pit-pat of her tread. You suggested the heavy gasp of her breathing put the owl off its kill.

I question the two of us. In the past, our eyes and ears were in accord when birding, specially in the city, my admiration for you on display, the milkmaid walking with a proprietary air through the whole spread of Central Park as though tracking the back acres in Wisconsin. That day we were not in sync. Our argument, could it be called that, had little to do with sighting.

Kind of a washout, you said, birdwise.

That must have been it, Sylvie, a legacy of my grandfather’s, her love for the old man embracing us beyond blood relation. Our kids’ Frau von Trapp. No need to recall the untidy woman squinting up at the owl, coat stretched across her bum. Same age as Sylvie, give or take a few years, yet in no way like our friend, who is slim and stylish, the cap of white hair carefully sculpted to her head, Like an angel, you said, ageless, one of Fra Angelico’s darlings. And if Our Sylvie had been home to take care of the children, you would have been free to enjoy a few hours of the Fall migration in the Park. I hustled you by the apartment where I lived with my grandparents, a motherless, fatherless boy. Why fear him?

McBride believed the case—mine and Bertie’s—might be deferred. Have I made it clear that Tim came round now and again for a chat with the professor doing his math? I hadn’t the heart to correct him. He admitted me to the empty room, then went off on his assignments, slapping at his hip, searching for lost authority in the black holster of Security. I’m not dangerous, so left on my own. Or dangerous only to myself, writing not one word in defense of my old friend, but these many words of self-incrimination, backdating my limited options to the incident of birding, recording only personal discoveries of that Columbus Day, avoiding our chance meeting with the accused.

At the bus stop: teenagers comparing test scores in shrill, competitive voices. I can’t forget one sad striver with a mini-tattoo on her wrist, silver stud in her nose, concave chest weighted with schoolbooks. You stepped off the curb to see if the bus was coming while I took measure of the distance I ran from my grandparents’ apartment to the museum. “Take measure” is a Cyril O’Connor phrase, prudent, unlike these pages written for you. I stood at the corner judging the distance I crossed to the Temple of Dendur, ran up the steps of the museum, through the massive door, cut right to the Egyptians. So familiar to the guards they never stopped me for my pass, sharp kid eager to show them my ill-drawn barges to the underworld circa 2 B.C. Not so strange after all, my obsession with the Pharaohs and their vast company of underlings to serve them in their tombs. Even Bertie, conspiring with me in all plots against the popular faction at school, was not privy to my devotion to Isis. My fix on the goddess was a reasonable accommodation to my mother’s death, a way to believe in the afterlife, not as my grandmother believed in the apparatus of heaven with angels surfing the clouds, saints in cumbersome robes. Reviewing my route to the tombs fitted out for the long run of afterlife with the comforts of home, I maintain it was not the worst idea, writing to my mother in hen-scratch hieroglyphics. So why does it trouble you when my clever tactics for survival are long packed away? True, I wasted time searching for the phantom father, now only the loose end of a story. Never fear, Lou-Lou Belle, the grief of my childhood is not a genetic disease.

The crosstown came toward us. I stepped free of the students, drawn into a circle of noisy flirtation. You called to me, frantic. Waving your cap, hair flying, you stood by the open door of a limousine, its extravagant length blocking the bus stop. Passengers decamped in the middle of the street. Slowly, yet grandly, an emaciated version of Bertram Boyce stepped out of the long black car that established his importance. In the courthouse, I should have been figuring the next problem built on the last, but this business of writing without chalk or computer is rewind—back, I go back in time while Tim McBride stops by, hand automatically patting his missing piece. I replay the scene, Bertie helping a woman with babe in arms to collapse a stroller. He steers her up into the bus. The private school kids observe Mr. Wonderful with teen irony; then the boss, once my boss, takes me in hand, settles me in the beige leather of his limo. The old authority in his order to the driver: Downtown.

You said, A ride across the Park will do us. Something like that, cryptic.

Bert did not introduce us to the girl with a cell plugged in her ear, a spill of mahogany hair veiling her face. We spoke softly, not to interfere with her compelling business.

Bertram Boyce, dry as a pod with a terminal tan. He seemed an endangered species in a fringed . . . serape? Poncho? We watched Bert stroke the girl’s leg up to the black leather skirt that ended far above her knee.

He said, Long time no see. Better part of a year?

Christmas. Ah, the holiday visit. Bert’s family in suburban splendor. You will not forget the extravagant gifts. Bert, dispensing goodwill of the season, offered a priceless claret, Lafite-Rothschild: Some prefer ’85. He found ’86 more than OK. A fete out of the nostalgia manual—Dickensian goose, Bud with the girth of St. Nick. Better part of a year for that rotundity to scale down to skin and bones.

You surely remember Heather Boyce flashing Santa’s watch ringed with diamonds. Boyce children, bored with our kids, dismissed to their Game Boys.

Heather, So what can you do? The holidays. Something like that, putting words into her mouth as I’ve put them into yours. Isn’t that the idea of writing it down? Call back the day, things said in passing or by intent, translation from the foreign film of memory into the subtitles of here and now.

Hear her? See her? Heather, who has never shed the yearbook smile of savvy innocence, the pleasant efficiency with which she packed away your offerings to Fern and Bertram III? Sketch pads, Chinese brushes, from ye olde curiosity shoppe with a bell over the door. The Christmas invite, an awkward duty for both parties.

Cubby brought a scolding. I did not value the privilege, Attorney Sylvan having procured this cell to prepare my schoolroom assignments. Had Thad slipped McBride a gratuity?

Tim ran his hands over the digs and stains of the table. This room, interrogation room, used to be.

Did money change hands so that I might sit among the ghosts of the guilty? Released for the day, I drew circles within a circle on the Broadway Line. Students will guess a scribbled infinity at one glance, though this simple visual has nothing to do with their progress in Math for Business Dummies, everything to do with my notebooks, with this spill of words written in ballpoint on paper, circles within circles. I could not run word count on the inked page, that’s only information, closed up shop on the Broadway Line listening to the muffled beat of my neighbor’s music, having written not one word in defense of my friend.

I am reminded of Einstein’s letter to someone famous in which he confessed that images ran in his head long before the difficult search for language. The notebooks stored in my backpack with their weight of words seemed . . . well, wordplay skirting some image central to the story that is mine as much as Bertie’s, as though we are still competing as we did first day in the schoolyard. Let the image be the soccer ball with its patchwork of pentagons he shot my way, and my penalty kick these many years later, roughing him up in my version of our story. We were tough on each other, always outside the varsity game in progress.

Backdating, Bert filled her in on the apartment where I lived with my grandparents. Where we picked them up, a block from the old homestead. Grandpa was Wall Street, last of the ticker-tape honchos.

Gina stayed in the present. You’re the guy working on knots.

Your Ghostly Honor, I may have actually joined the prosecution in my estimate of that leathery woman, she of the great legs who tossed off what might, or might not, be the subject of my dissertation when she apparently hadn’t a clue that we, the Freemans, had for some years moved uptown? Why get into it, Lou? She seemed well aware that I was a Boy Scout tangled in a stubborn knot of string theory. This Gina sneaking up on the site in which my theorem depended upon the work of others. She would know that the problem was not mine alone, and further know we broadcast our progress with a sense of camaraderie, as though still low on the ladder, we might settle into a Viennese café, spell our answers out on paper tablecloths, though the acrobatic dream of my climbing a rung up while scribbling through cigarette haze may not work out, not at all. You see how precarious it was, yet how available my various routes to solvation.

Perhaps that Gina was even aware that Ernst Gottschalk, our leader in the quaint Hall of Mathematics, is the man I dodge even when he’s gone a-conferencing, not settled in his endowed Chair, elegantly tailored beyond the three dimensions of the world we inhabit in out-at-elbow Gap, worn student jeans. The door to his office flung open, no appointment needed, as though we play in time gone by—kindly teacher welcoming a confab with befuddled adjunct in need, though mostly unavailable as he publishes the next and the next paper, the only one that counted back in ’78, the dark age of a quantum past. Gott, who still holds with No. 2 pencils, red erasers, an ancient’s belief in the contemplated mark on the page, the rubber crumbs of correction. I slouch by his door each day. Idle fear, Louise, as though he might catch me out in a miscalculation. Tut-tut shake of the ponderous head with its unruly ruff of white hair. For now I will call it a touch of paranoia connecting that Gina, Bert’s Munster mom, to Gott, a legendary figure of fun and fear you have never, may never, meet. Our leader does not frolic at math parties, partake of our pizza sweating in the cardboard delivery box, sip our tepid beer.

Gina, this is the professor. Her bangled arm raised in greeting. Gina multitasks, nanos, surveillance.

In the past, Bert claimed the title Entrepreneur—telecommunications in Africa, oil in Belarus, gold in Peru—seemed multi enough. At his emporium a job arranged for Artie when in need, so I’d run the books on the screen, always this side of the law, or play pixart, imaging whatever the boss imagined in his climb to the heights. I trust you recall Skylark’s shot at a weather channel, Bertram Boyce controlling the elements. Make it rain, Freeman. Give us a blustery day. More often than not, reality echoed my cloud cover or the mist of a Spring morning. Snow fell softly on the tristate area, credit of Arthur Freeman. We marketed the sun, the rain. The atmosphere in the limo that day was heavy with a climate of restraint, a forecast of possible grief.

The 86th Street transverse allotted little time for my sorry tale. I was not and, as you feared, may never gain the dimension of professor. The Park glowered above its stone walls, trees and sky dimmed, blur of a dirty white cloud. Bert scrolled a window down to admit a wave of fossil fumes, then, skeletal hand on your thigh, made his move, the old one-on-one maneuver.

You sweetened your answer with a smile. I’m not in business. Let it play out, the uncomfortable silence enclosing us at the stoplight.

Then Gina on the wireless canceling out the old friends of Bud Boyce. I’m on the board, to whom it may concern, so I’ll go in that direction.

Feathering her nest?

You remarked upon the jangle of her bracelets, her assessment of your canvas jacket with Maisy’s spit-up on the shoulder. In the gathering gloom of the limo, you rapped your binoculars for attention: We don’t have much time away from the children. Protecting me, not yet a postdoc, from this woman’s superior smile and, as you noted, excessive eyeliner and smart mouth, this Gina with tasks insufficient to keep her from surveillance of Artie, the boyhood chum. So you rattled on, abundance of species. A long-eared today. Owl, that is. You attempted the great egret’s mournful cry, though he had been out of sorts, silently strutting on pipe-stem legs.

Bud offered door-to-door service. You said, Just drop us, we like the walk. That’s how I remember it, a conjecture which need not be proven, strange when you’d been counting the minutes to get home to the kids. Something desperate about Bert’s air kiss aimed at you, corner of CPW, Gina’s ringtone ordering him back to business in the limo. Tapping me with a skeletal hand, Chairman of Skylark said: Don’t be a stranger. Not an offhand remark, a plea. We faked one of those embarrassing male embraces. Bert, transformed to dry skin and bones. What was left of my friend’s solid state? There’s your problem for topology. And why that woman?

Many questions, though on our way home in a taxi, I simply asked, Can you believe it?

I believe it. Poor Heather.

You wondered about that—poncho? About the design woven into the gray wool, a pattern circling in on itself, the fringe of dangling strings with the weaver’s knots you thought might be read, knots forming words, and the alarming sight of Bert’s manicured toes peeking out of rough sandals. You never liked Boyce. Till that day I did not know he once suggested the two of you get it on, the boss and my wife riding downtown in the old Boycemobile, fitted out with a screen tracking the commodities market. And yes, I was pissed or at least affronted, but you awarded the incident a girlish disbelief you can still call upon in honesty. The current floating palace less office, more lounge of a first-class hotel. Smoked glass of the windows mutes the city. Did Gina get it on with Bert? He seemed too frail, flesh fallen away under the floppy gray garment.

Such a find, you said, in the chili-bean market, unwearable when you get it home.

Bud had looked a sad clown. You carried on about that Gina, then disapproved of yourself as a prude. That woman intimate with the small problem I worked on, suggesting I’d never find my place in a crowded field. You haven’t much of a clue about topology, only that my superiors are attempting to map the world, beginning to end, without landmass or bodies of water. You remain a tourist in this geography of abstraction.

Remember the logo? I called to mind the wingspread on the web site. Skylark, on the annual report and the simplified wings of my design woven into the corporate carpet. Bird that never was.

Bird thou never wert, correcting your husband, Humanities dropout, comic relief man chirping wert, wert.

Oh, Artie, checking your watch again. How long had we waited for the crosstown, then malingered in the stretch while Cyril and Maisy were abandoned to my student, a strange girl they’d never met?

Gone the sun from the river, from Riverside Park. Darkness falling as I sorted through bills to pay the cabby.

Now, why? Why that melancholy tune? To beg a smile.

It’s only six twenty-seven. Cyril, flashing his digital watch, grown-up gift from Our Sylvie. The student was gone with high fives for the children. A last gift of the day.

That night I couldn’t get near the extra dimensions that may, in a very long run, anoint me a professor. Don’t be a stranger. Bert’s look searching me out was desperate, but we were exactly that: strangers. He knew it, yet sent that woman, whatever part she played in his life, to ferret out my small problem. That Gina who seemed to know I was sulking in a corner of string theory appropriately called flop-transition,as though the tilted rubber ball of space named the failure of Artie Freeman.

It occurred to me that night of our birding, not for the first time, our family life in these rooms was inauthentic, no need for our children to be stacked in a bunk bed, Maisy below nestled in her plush menagerie, Cyril above clutching his tyrannosaurus rex. No need for us to fear toppling his tower of Lincoln Logs. Just behind me the hamster tumbled incessantly in its cage. A cluster of shrinking balloons hovered on the ceiling. No need for this pretense of student life. We should look to our own migration, a refuge sustainable for more than a season of uncertainty. I’d sold Cyril O’Connor’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, glad of the take. You said we must move from the loft downtown, the contaminated air of our injured city the first of all your fears. So here we still are in cramped quarters, a little late for growing pains self-inflicted. Is that what Bud, costumed as a starving peon, was up to? He had stroked the leg of the all-knowing Gina as though under a spell.

I opened the baby book with the stork on the cover, flipped back to the day of our birding, first day you had not noted each verified death in the war. The blank page was marked with a postcard from Sylvie Neisswonger who is more than our friend. The Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla sat firmly on its hill. Waters rising! Love to all, natürlich. Sylvie’s hand schoolgirl perfect, natürlich. What’s more, you did not read a mystery that night, no body in the library, no clueless inspector from Scotland Yard. Then, as I finally attempted to set the course for the next encounter with my students, more pedagogical tricks than math, you stood beside me, Maisy in your arms. You had affixed a disfiguring nebulizer over our daughter’s face. Mucus sucked in little blips from her nose and mouth.

I said: Now, this is the scariest thing.

You shifted Maisy, left shoulder to right: Not really.

Her temperature would be brought down by pink sugary drops, nothing magic. I understood the pleasure of your control, your soft lullaby voice. Do you remember the only thing that mattered was to wait in silence for the even draw of her breath, for the moment when Maisy pushed the plastic tube away? Then we waited for the sleepy smile on her flushed, rosebud face. Together we put her down with the bear and the lion, the tortoise and speckled snake. I said, All that’s missing is an owl, an attempt to keep our vigil light.

When Maisy breathed easy, I noted that you wore the nightgown, the one I like, though it buttons to your neck with difficult pearl buttons, the blue nightgown now dimmed in the wash. And I saw, not the first time, streaks in your pale hair, dark as dull bronze.

A full week of delays. Like that Gina, I opted for the present, waiting for a judgment to be handed down; that’s the feel of those courthouse days. Skylark in ruins, unlike the midscale Buick that shares its name, more the frail body of my equations towed to the scrap heap of rusted ambition. When it finally came, the reprieve, McBride was proven right, proud of himself predicting Bertie would not be charged with cooking the books. The case was too flimsy, but the plaintiff is not off the hook. Boyce must be a good lad, suffer a slap on the wrist, a year’s public service. Skylark may never soar again, spread its wings over the dusty pits of Peruvian gold or peck at the infinitesimal grains of nano technology. In the first flush of their victory, Bertie and Heather, losing their cool, embraced me, but I had not testified that my friend discovered Freeman, the new boy at school, inscribing hieroglyphics in his algebra text, that he had a slim chance of besting me at chess, that the neighborhood was ours, every alley, shop, embassy and elegant doorway between Fifth and the Boyce apartment on Park, where we played games of my invention on a primitive DOS system free of interference from Bert’s socialite mom. Play—we had played hard and long—which kept me from diving for salvage in my mother’s watery grave. Back, back then Bert finally psyched out my trips to the Egyptian collection, but the Opening of the Mouth was never revealed. Only now comes to mind, Louise, the ritual I enacted in the back bedroom of the apartment you dread, King Tut mumbo jumbo that might bring the goddess to life so she might breathe, speak to her boy, play a song on the lute. That was private, middle-of-the-night stuff. Still, never-call-me-Bert was my buddy, and the alliance began in which I was to play office boy as he rose to corporate power.

Can’t bring to mind how I begged off. Rain check? Or work, I suppose, heavy duties of my professorial life.

Justice was deferred, which brings to mind my grandmother, who said something like that about our sins, most particularly sins of omission, that we would face them come Judgment Day. McBride in his various roles—prosecutor, defendant, jury, judge—went on to his next case. I was free of the interrogation room.

Tonight as I stood at the window looking through the leafless trees to the Hudson, I saw a familiar boat not yet stowed away for the season. It will sail downstream to safe harbor, the 79th Street boat basin, I guess. A ship with a single mast, and it was only then that I remembered skylarking. When we were in high school, we came across the term in a computer game we played too often, signing off on an early version of Myst. No knights defending a phony castle, only the crew of a pirate ship. Apparently Bert did not forget the perilous game played by these black-hearted sailors. Climb the mainmast, latch onto the rigging, swing out far over the sea. City boys making our mark in the classroom, we never had the occasion to skylark beyond the virtual, but we climbed too high, Bertram Boyce and Arthur Freeman.

Fellow at MIT, Gott said, an elegant paper.

Squared it away, so to speak, the very problem I had been working on. Fellow at MIT beat me to it. We had stalked each other. Had I not been at the courthouse, I would have known of his triumph without our leader’s old news. So it’s a slice of humble pie, happens all the time, Lou, fellow edged me out in the crowded field. It was then suggested—Gottschalk’s no-nonsense words—that I am “a live wire” in the classroom, perhaps not a perfect fit with the theoretical, as though I wear a pinched shoe. Then again, sequencing has taken an energetic turn in the human-genome race, not to mention the tech market, nano coming into play. At the end of the day, end of the story, I have been advised to limp on to new fields.

Like Cyril, that’s our bright boy. Now, why did I say that?

Not to get the laugh, though it was all quite pleasant after the tight shoe dropped, Gottschalk suggesting how I might recoup. Move on? Ein stein tells us that to move on, to take the next step beyond the signs and images of numbers, conventional words must be sought for. It is no consolation to know that he never solved everything, though he sure tried. Every last thing—how the universe got it together in this, our long allotted space-time. Well, I’m no Albie, apparently not much of a mathematician at all. But there is an endgame to the mystery that may give you some pleasure. Why had I not known that the problem was solved? Up there in Cambridge, fellow at MIT looking beyond his successful calculations to a bright Autumn day on the Charles. Because I had not accessed the information that a boy’s quest for an answer had been, in fact, answered. In those courthouse days, I became devoted to words written down, addicted to news of the past, which suddenly seemed more pressing than the tabloid headline: FREEMAN FLOPS TRANSITION. Early on, I had failed with hieroglyphics, with demotic script invoking my mother. And in our time, Louise, lost the scavenger hunt for my phantom father. Perhaps, after all, Bertie’s troubles were a dodge and this is just a family story. I see that these pages did not come easy at first, then too easy—spilling off the backlog of our birding, the meager discoveries of a day in Central Park. How I mocked your catalog of fears, my possible failure right up there with e-waste, habitat loss.

Conventional words, Lou: I am sorry.

I said: A turn on the kids’ refrigerator art, Lou. Cyril’s precise launch pads and rockets, Maisy’s scribbles freehand. I believe, post-courthouse, care must be taken honoring your vision, so let me correct and revise.

Moffett’s paper memorial to our soldiers dead in this war decorates the glass shelf over the stove in our kitchen. The names of the dead are not memorialized in black marble, just written in ink on fragile paper scraps stapled one to two, two to three, three to four and so on. They were first recorded in a book meant to track the weight, height, amusing words, and fevers of our sickly child, but that record is long gone. Moffett’s memorial is now inscribed on strips of brown butcher paper that winds between the measuring cups and the copper stock pot that was my grandmother’s prize, then circles back on itself and sweeps round the broken coffee grinder. Where have all the young men gone?

In our cottage industries of art and science, we do move on, discovering the last stale breath in the shrunken bladders of this year’s birthday balloons, the hamster replacement spinning in his cage, Bert’s sentence called off pending our further interrogation. Again, I place my updated notebook by your chair. You will remember the owl, the cold eye of that Gina, our Maisy’s congestion, your impatience one day in the Park, the ten dollar bill pressed on my pretty student who couldn’t possibly, Professor, a girl with no fear of the city dark, though big readable numbers on Cyril’s watch told us 6:27, gone the sun, from the hills, from the lake, safely rest. . . . That is the trouble with memory: it sorts through the chaos, brings images to mind—watchtower of a phony castle, Bert sniffing his claret, the rough stuff of his poncho, rigging and mainmast, a gold dou bloon for the scoundrel who takes a death-defying chance.

“Our Sylvie,” she says, no need to say more. The children are safe at home with Sylvie Neisswonger. Louise has seldom been to Freeman’s office, a bleak room atop the curious little temple, Mathematics Hall, a cast-off aerie he shares with his aspiring pals—an acknowledged genius, boasting baby fat, who brings cookies to the children when invited to supper, devours them before the kids get a chance; an Indian woman who affects biker gear to counter her astonishing beauty, her great reserve. Artie is alone as Louise knew he would be, his schedule posted on their home page, Works and Days.

“Your version of our birding? What you wrote, down there in the courthouse?”

She begins her case against him, then turns to the blackboard, of course. Of course there must be a blackboard screwed to the wall. An elaborate problem covers most of its surface. Underneath in the old wooden frame, some joker, or serious student, has carved PYTHAGORAS SUCKS.

“You left these for me to read as though we can no longer talk.”

“Lou-Lou.”

“Don’t Lou-Lou me.”

“Easy way out, writing it down.”

Artie comes round the desk, turns his wife to the window. A spectacular Autumn day, the sky wiped new blue. Students denying the chill in flip-flops and shorts litter the steps leading down to the broad campus from Low. The view from this height trumps that from Gottschalk’s office. Homer, Plato, Virgil, the usual suspects inscribed in the limestone cornice of Butler Library catch the late sun.

“Computation?” she says. “He’s got to be kidding.”

“Gott doesn’t kid. Demographics, genomes. Think small.”

“Not what you wanted, not ever.”

“Just different. I will not contribute. Love that terminal squeak? The Big Bang, first or last, will blast off without me. Fellow’s paper beating me out by a mile may be published too early, pie in the sky, amount to nothing at all.”

“Then why is it elegant?”

“You hear me talk solutions—beautiful, stunning. Some friend of Ein stein’s said elegance ought to be left to the tailor, the cobbler. Take Gott, for instance. The proof of his pudding may amount to nothing more than his elegant labels—Gucci, Armani, or so we students suppose.”

But she wasn’t listening—as she had so often—to the tolerable lectures attempting to make his work real to her. When they lived downtown in the loft, she had followed his every word, or tried to. At the turn of the millennium, Louise understood perfectly why the world would not end in a slippage of time, Y2K snuff the soul out of our computers. With reparation we would move on. Artie had called his return to mathematics the makeup class in whatever the world might be made of, that his scribbled lineup of symbols and numbers were the merest foot soldiers to a general theory of everything, don’t you know? At times he would attempt to draw strings coupling, or make visible the loop-de-loop of quantum frenzy. She never quite got it but took the pencil from his hand, shaded in, crosshatched to get the depth of possible dimensions. Her own work had given way to house and children as though, much like old Gottschalk, she wiped away the rubber crumbs of her art, leaving the smudge of line and perspective unsolved.

On the South Lawn below, a card table flaps its antiwar poster. No patrons to read the leaflets, sign the petition. Too brisk, too bright a day, the message worn, ineffectual. Long time ago, 1968, that war, the students had stormed the president’s office, but that siege doesn’t come to mind; she just wishes he had not used that gentle folk song in his account of her work. She must tear down her kitchen art. The private notice of her mourning seems foolish today, Art Speak to no listener other than Artie. Once she had drawn the arrow of time for Freeman, a birthday card, and once exhibited a cloudy solution in a bottle of water, half empty, half full, a show playing with uncertainty, the assault of time on the body, that’s all. Time passing as we know it, day by day. Not mere numbers, he had said of the evaporating water in a hand-blown bottle—his judgment kindly, self-effacing. Now as she listened to his babble of knots and loops, she did not try to understand, not this time. Perhaps she was never meant to. From the rising pitch of his voice, she guessed he was going on about proof. What matter whether the conjecture was true or false? Something absurd, how he fell into the swamp of the excluded middle, laughing, still foolin’ around.

He said: “Oh, Artie,” imitating the caress of her incalculable scolds.

“Don’t,” she said, “don’t go there.” She held the notebooks to her breast, his new one from Pearl Paint and the old greenie with her bird notations, heard the shuffling of papers into his backpack and the familiar snap of his laptop as he prepared to walk Cyril to school each morning. Closing up shop, but she did not think so, not now, perhaps never. He couldn’t give up playing the numbers. On the way home, they would speak, a few words with a bitter edge to be glossed over. Then they would talk for how many years? They would move, though never far from a classroom, and she would again have a studio. Change of direction might not suit them, not again. They would honor the yearly trip to the farm in Wisconsin. What mattered was here and now, the probable life just outside the city, a garden perhaps, doghouse, sandbox, but never a plastic feeder to fake out the hummingbirds with sugar in a bowl. She would plant red flowers to lure them, though she could not yet name them—cardinal flowers. Our Sylvie would discover her young friends still within range of their starting line, Lower Broadway. He would make light of Lou’s fears. She would endure his mixed metaphors, his puns, the dated phrases of his grandfather, Cyril O’Connor. The difficult pearl buttons at the top of every nightgown would be snipped off for the hope of easy access on nights reclaiming their eager bodies in the loft, skin to skin. Nightclothes came with the children. She wished he had not used that song. It belonged to his mother, to her mother, too. Or perhaps he did not remember the appropriate line: Where have all the young girls gone? Taken husbands every one. Though that was not true, not true of his mother, who left him by accident to an orphan boy life. He switched off the buzzing fluorescent light, the room behind her in semidarkness now. She thought, how unfair: Artie lost, Bertie won. Would they still go to Connecticut for the Christmas goose, the tasteful Boyce glitter, snubs from their spoiled children? She would not speak; the anger was still there, a clutch in her throat that he’d never told her, that he’d written his failure out as though it’s no more than a story. Put words in her mouth. On the way home, she would relent, hand over the notebooks, say good job to his account of their day in the Park, entirely man-made, their birding, her fears. But that would never do, for that’s what she said to the kids—good job—when they showed her their brave efforts with Play-Doh, Legos, with Magic Markers of their refrigerator art.

The sun at the window was still bright, almost blinding. Squinting, Louise could see a Frisbee fly over the patch of lawn on the campus designated for play, and a tour guide leading prospective students and their parents up the steps into Low, where they would be awed by the dome of the rotunda, for sure a temple of learning. She could hear Artie scrape back the chair from his old desk, funky like Gottschalk’s. As though there for a show at the end of this day, birds flitted from tree to tree on Campus Walk. She would not call them city pigeons. Pale mourning doves, she named them in a coo. Colum-um-bidae. When she turned, her husband was erasing the intricate problem on the blackboard. Chalk dust fell in a haze. Not to steal his words, she waited for him to say it.

“Clean slate.”

In Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, read just weeks ago, a posturing public servant reviews his life to discover that his ambition has been a burden to his family. As it was to Tolstoy’s, so we are told by Nabokov, spreading the guilt around. Prompted by this confession, I swing toward you on my ergonomic chair. You are at the door of my workroom. I speak of the years you’ve put up with my scribbling.

Apology dismissed, you suggest we close the little house in the Berks this year, As a precaution.

Caution on your mind these days. While I have a formal gratitude for your care, what might happen if I throw it to the wind? I mourn the loss of our wrangling, the way you screen my fancy through reality check. We will miss the view of the garden safe in its blanket of snow. Still, we are in perfect accord.

You closed the flue, discarded the ashes good for the garden.

Here in the El Dorado the fireplace in our apartment was sealed up before we settled in. A pretentious display of marble. The mantel’s crenellations and brass rosettes refer to some striver’s hope in the wake of the Great Depression. Elegance—now you see it: now you don’t.

In any case, the little house is closed as a precaution. I’m confined to the safety of our twin towers and the Park, all stories within reach, legends of the season. I mean to say: more than a magician’s trick, though plain as the nose on my face, the decorative dead wood in the fireplace is not seen anymore. The screen to protect us from hot embers, useless. Antique Roadshow stuff—an astrolabe, highboy, cradle, Death of the Virgin , Goya’s Disasters of War (second state).

Quite deaf, though not infirm, as the guards at the Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla might tell you, tell that every day of her visit, Mrs. Waite, as she is properly known, climbed uphill to have lunch with Martha. They were more than welcoming. “Gallant”: that’s the word she searches out, Perez and Bonfilio not checking the visitor ID that hung round her neck, quick to escort her up the steps, open the door as though the Institute were a first-class hotel, not a temple of science. Perez has three children. His wife’s name is Lola. Bonfilio is studying bookkeeping at night. Calling out loud and strong—Beautiful day, Mrs. Waite. How they did love to chat when she made it to the top of the hill, breathed easy. Waite, her legal name on two documents submitted at the airport in New York, is the name of her stepdaughter, Dr. Waite, Martha. Checking through Security brought back the memory of her first U.S. passport and the name she was born with: von Neisswonger. Yes, her mother, Inga von Neisswonger, had charmed the American consul in Toulouse. The papers he procured were not fraudulent; her passport with the photo of a wistful girl, stunned by the camera, hair braided tight, perfect little snowflakes knit into her Tyrolean sweater.

My brother Otto had a sweater with the very same snowflakes. Absurd, our father said,—snowflakes never match. Each one has its own crystal network. Pleased with herself for telling Martha that story with its bit of crystallography, for it’s hard to find common ground, always has been, to come upon a moment when she was not the woman with the trace of an accent, with words sought for in plain English. When she was not that intruder—Call me Sylvie—who came all of a sudden years and years ago to an old house in Connecticut to take the place of Martha’s dead mother.

Martha said: Most likely not woven, then held forth on the invention of knitting machines, correcting Sylvie not as sharply as Papa Neisswonger had corrected his son. Sylvie understood about the Jacquard loom, that it didn’t knit sweaters. She was ten years old at the time, some years older when her mother told the story, the way Inga told family stories to her new friends in New York, always leaving out the name of her son as though Otto might scratch, a painful burr in her throat. It is quite ridiculous, this loose strand of a childhood sweater that will lead Sylvie where she goes too often this past year, to the stucco villa in Innsbruck with its red-tiled roof, handblown glass in the windows transforming the garden to a shimmering mirage. Shuffling memories, laying out the cards.

Both von Neisswonger and his son were escorted out the double front door to the purring Mercedes by Nazi officers with thick Berlinerisch accents, Otto clutching his scuffed football like a ruined globe in his hands. Sylvie had once planned to go back to see the house, now a small hotel—how odd it would be to see her room rented for the night, her little bed with its white coverlet transformed to the vast comfort of king-size, the frieze of twined edelweiss painted out. She had once thought to return with Cyril, show her old lover the house on the river Inn, the imperial squares of the city, the Alpine mines her father worked, summer and winter. She will not go now, now that he’s gone, lies with May, his wife of many years, leaving Sylvie the comfort of his family. A wonder how they have sorted themselves out. As she packed for the yearly visit to Martha, My trip to California must do me, said to the neighbors who knew nothing of her abandoned journey to Innsbruck but would look after the house in Connecticut, take in the mail, overwater the plants. The house of Bob Waite, her late husband, she had explained to one of Martha’s pals at the Institute. Late. I have never understood that expression.

Better late than never, the fellow said, a rude remark now she thinks of it. They were a funny crowd, these men and women who keep track of the wind, who search for holes in the sea, who count time in the millions of years, a time when the waters rose, a time before the Great Flood became a Bible story. Now the deluge was all too real, happening fast in their calculations of melt. A stargazer, declared a crank by these scientists, believed he had found Noah’s Ark, what was left of it, poking up in a satellite picture of Mount Ararat. The waters were now rising, not receding, so what did he hope to salvage, they asked—a blockbuster script? The animals, two by two, cast from the San Diego Zoo? The Titanic in biblical dress? Sylvie had thought to stop their laughter—The ark was sturdy, sealed with pitch—then thought not, for she was their guest, the powdery old lady listening in at the end of the table. Martha took her side. Prehistoric sea creatures found at Yellowstone, so why not? Plucking a hair from Noah’s beard, DNA coaxing—could be Jurassic Park.

Sylvie believes that as soon as she left each day after lunch, the scholars went back to talking their winds and waves while she braved the freeway in her rented Toyota, found her way back to Martha’s cottage. Still, they seemed to her quite silly, these brilliant seashore observers laughing at last night’s TV, making jokes of the State of the Union. Well, the State of the Union was perilous, they well knew. She did not cut into their play, though it was all too easy to translate White House blather they laughed at to the German propaganda of the Reich. Heimat. Vaterland. Ehre. As for Noah, the one just man, she searched the shelves in the cottage wanting to read what God ordered by way of an ark. Martha did not own a Bible. Sylvie is certain about the pitch, the viscous caulk Bob Waite applied each Spring to his trawler. The smell was god-awful, impossible to wash the black stuff out of his clothes. Each year when he finished, that thrifty man threw his ruined jeans and work shirt away.

Far as Sylvie can see, these lunch breaks at the Institute and an occasional barbecue are Martha’s only life beyond the lab. There’s her bicycling team on Sundays and a correspondence with a professor at Woods Hole that seems to have gone beyond ice cores and ocean sediment. Martha, well into middle age, is flustered as she speaks of coming east to present a paper at a conference organized by her—pausing for the appropriate word—her mentor.

So mentor it is, though Sylvie hopes he is more. She will call Martha when she gets home to Connecticut. Still early in California, her big athletic girl with clipped gray hair will answer on the cell even if she is in the midst of climate calculations or e-mailing her prospective lover of an event some million years ago. What she remembers of Martha’s industry, what she told the scientists at lunch one day, was the story of when this Sylvie was brought to the house on a hill, Bob Waite’s unwelcome surprise. She took his children to the shore, the rim of sand on Long Island Sound, that small puddle, and the girl she did not yet know dug, dug until the water seeped up from China, saving the pebbles and a necklace of slimy seaweed to examine at home. Martha’s future, Sylvie told these men and women plotting the fate of the Pacific coast, was written in the sand.

And she sleeps as the red line makes its way across New Mexico up to Denver, till chicken or beef, hard to tell, though she recalls cupping her ear to hear the selection. She eats only the bland cookie, sleeps again, and when she wakes, the big screen at the front of the cabin displays a young man with a smirk on his face driving a mountain trail, a treacherous journey, though Sylvie’s seatmate is laughing—the hearty ho-ho of that Mitteleuropa actor in the old movies, jowls shaking in joy or despair. She imagines the thrill of the chase, the tough words of a cop who looks fierce . . . well, not really. Laughter across the aisle as the clown drives off the cliff, a well-known clown, and next thing he is jumping the cables on the set, flubbing his lines for the retake. Oh, they are only making a movie. Sylvie enjoys the pantomime, easily guesses the stuntman’s flirtation with the script girl, then nods off again, a dreamless sleep without fear, without longing—and when she wakes, the little plane on the small screen’s heading toward western Pennsylvania, and the long descent toward New York and home.

Her seatmate comes on friendly—I’m in sales—though she’s not asked, can’t hear the name of his product.

Resets the digital devices in her ears. Sales?

Heavy equipment. Farming, construction. Nurse the infrastructure of developing nations . . . Jed does not offer a last name. He’s Jed; she’s Sylvie. Developing nations—you’ve got your Asians, your South of the Border—will continue to need his backhoes, cranes. Jed flies business class. Coach this trip, personal time.

But suppose, Sylvie suggests, suppose the fields in Asia are underwater.

Wall-to-wall rice paddies? That’s a good one. On his laptop he brings up pictures of his daughter, a piglet with her father’s floppy ears, blessedly not his beak.

Lovely bright eyes. Sylvie says, Not rice paddies. Where there is now landmass, we may experience seeping salt water, estuaries. I have been visiting my stepdaughter. Sylvie attempts a quick course on the Gulf Stream, temperature twelve degrees above normal, while in the Pacific we may experience—finds herself tangled in alien language—short cycles of stability. From Jed’s indulgent nod, she suspects he’s heard it all, figured it into sales of his products—mapping the deluge, the snowless peaks of Kilimanjaro as seen on TV. She retreats to the airline magazine. Jed finds his place in Run for Cover. Sylvie flips the pages with many items the efficient traveler might need—inflatable hangers, golf bags, foldaway tents, bug zappers, ponchos for rainy adventures. Home is addressed in doormats, tea cozies, safety grips for the bathtub, electric heaters. Martha has said to come live with her for the warm weather, said it so cheerfully Sylvie barely detected the duty in her stepdaughter’s voice; and then she thinks of the chill Waite house in Connecticut, carpenter ants chewing hand-hewn beams to sawdust, mildew in the basement, but the pearwood mantel is sturdy and there’s the fanlight over the front door. Sunshine or shadow, each morning as she comes downstairs, the delicate tracery puts on its show, a subtle retort to squared-away Yankee design.

Still, the Federal house is not her home; and the broad stucco villa on Lundstrasse is not home, though she can tour every room with portraits of ancestors, all men with trim whiskers, several with military honors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Dürer woodcuts were hung between mirrors in the dining room. So predictable, Inga said to her new friends in New York, and so dreary—Death of the Virgin. Passion of Christ! Well, Inga would rather not partake of Melancholia with her schnitzel, Danke schön, and one day said as much to her husband, whose home the villa was in every detail. The famous etching of that brooding angel with her mystical apparatus and a sleeping dog at her feet remained in its place. Each room replays with its legend, how her father turned the incident of the Dürers to his benefit when an emissary of Cardinal Innitzer came to lunch. Otto was allowed to sit at the table while Sylvie had been instructed to kiss the Bishop’s hand, then sent belowstairs. Yes, Albrecht Dürer was son of a goldsmith, his iconography decidedly Protestant. Now his art graced the walls of a Catholic silver-mine family, a step down in the metallurgical table. An amusing story told by Neisswonger and retold by Inga with a mocking smile. Later, much later, Sylvie would understand the anecdote was not about the Master of Nuremberg or his works, gloomy though great, but about the slights a country girl of no account often suffered having married the honorific von with a sloping Hapsburg jaw, about how Inga dare not speak in the presence of the prelate come on behalf of Innitzer, who folded when the Germans appended Austria, about a move already in process had she looked up from her Apfelstrudel to advise the Jews to pack up, or simply noted the collapse of the Empire in a fistful of marks dealt out for a loaf of bread.

When they were first in New York, her mother told the Dürer story with a good deal of invention: Sylvie waited at the door with maids and the cook for the Bishop’s departure with a young priest who bestowed a final blessing on all. She was summoned to watch the emissary drive off in the big black car flying the Austrian flag—red, white, gold of the imperial eagle. Or that may have been her mother’s invention, but this memory was Sylvie’s, told at last to Louise: the day her father and brother were taken, she had watched her mother dissolve in tears. Mommi, Mommi, she cried, as her mother’s gray-green eyes blinded with sorrow. Her full lips, ripe for laughter, puckered to a sore. Sylvie would dream her mother’s face over the years, drowning in tears, gasping, Otto. Otto. The last time Inga would speak her son’s name, casting Sylvie off with a swift thrust of her arm to quickly compose herself, Frau von Neisswonger on the phone with arrangements, a forgiving smile for her girl who believes it was this day when her mother, no longer Mommi, became Inga, co-conspirator and pal. And they had lived on in the villa for some weeks, eating like mice in the kitchen, spare meals brought in by a loyal maid. Packing and unpacking their bags, would they need lavender soap, warm hose or sturdy sandals? Inga, silent and calm in preparation as though they were going to take the waters, splash about in the refreshing Seebensee.

Flying over the vast expanse of America, Sylvie indulges herself in this dream tour of a house, polished copper pots in the kitchen, full canisters—Zucker, Kaffee, Honig—while many were lucky for a potato, a crust of bread. No good can come from this scrapbook of plenty. She stands at the door of her father’s study where bound books lined the walls, each with its gold title, and the atlas lay open to the map of the Austrian Republic, 1918, the beautiful blue Danube fading on the lectern by the window with a view of the untidy garden rippling in sunlight. Now she enters the pretty bedroom of a small, scrappy girl, her Steiff animals outgrown, her dolls abandoned at a tea party, suitcase packed for the life of exile soon to come. Her father and brother taken. Neisswonger had spoken against the Chancellor, who stalled for time while Austria welcomed the invasion. Papa wrote letters against that very Cardinal who played word games with the Vatican, trifled with Mussolini, which gave a bitter twist to Inga’s amusing story: how easily her Ulrich was swept away like so much dross from his silver mines. And could he not see that Catholic Austria was running out of time like the hourglass in Dürer’s engraving? Melancholia, the hefty goddess with her scientific apparatus, unable to figure life-and-death equations? But why her son swept into the ashes of history? And what good to never say his name? Otto.

No good at all figuring, not even as an unburdening, though once the villa was revealed in detail to Louise Moffett, who’s as close as Sylvia Neisswonger Waite will ever come to having a daughter. No relation at all. Louise is the wife of the grandson of her lover, Cyril O’Connor, which is more distant than the second cousins twice removed recorded in the genealogy of the Neisswongers, all those lofty connections. Louise did not mourn the vanished Dürers, or a little girl’s room with a tea table and white coverlet on the bed, or the anxious weeks out of time lingering on in the villa, but cried for the spoiling, the word Sylvie chose to convey her memory of the soldier’s rough hands on her body, the harsh scrape of his brass buckle. He had not taken his tunic off, only pulled down his britches to accomplish the act. Beflecken, too often in recent days, the German word came to mind, would not allow the plain English. She, who once had the gift of tongues, a translator at the UN, German to English, English to French. In telling of the soldier’s weight upon her, she lapsed into the concealing hush of childhood, what must never be known. She believed he had bristle-blond hair, that his eyes were ice blue, though he covered her face with a pillow; then she heard his boots stomping downstairs, coarse laughter. Whispering to Louise as though Cyril stirring in the cradle might hear that her father’s books were thrown off the shelves, his wine cellar desecrated, the silver service carried off, and, most surely Melancholia and The Passion of Christ wrenched from the dining room walls. That night, when the soldier was through with her, she had wiped herself on a soft linen towel embroidered with the von N. Then, possessed of a miraculous will, she dressed in the inappropriate velvet frock her mother had set out for their voyage, woke Inga from a deep sleep, led her down the back stairs, out across the terrace and neglected parterre through a hole in the garden wall, thank God never mended. For years Sylvie would hate her small body, shun intimacy, though later she slept around, as they used to say, strictly unserious business, until she met Cyril O’Connor, but that was another story not told to Louise Moffett, only that she was loyal to her husband, Bob Waite, who took care with her, was attentive and kind.

The lost city is no longer real, Innsbruck only a setting for a fable told to her friend—the towering Alps at a distance, the villa garden in disarray. Unnatürlich, her father called the clipped box laid out in a stiff maze. The handless statue of a goddess blessed a plot of roses gone wild. Thorns and a dry fountain. She was allowed to play with a few friends in this confusion while Inga poured tea à l’anglais for their mothers.

Lou listening to a story more mysterious than a whodunit read before bedtime, a tale that would never provide the desired solution with each strand folded into an end. Otto would always be framed as a boy, lifeless as a studio photo; or the faint human skull, a prop in Dürer’s staging of a depressed angel with that skinny dog sniffing her feet. Two women together in a loft on Lower Broadway, tea bags soggy in their mugs, not art history with slides and a term-paper answer—Louise had cited Panofsky—to demonstrate that reason is defeated by imagination, or was it the other way round? In Melancholia, that is, not the insoluble history of this afternoon’s tale.

And how my father disliked the order of that garden, its geometric paths, labyrinth that tricked no one. He had been, in his youth, a mathematician. But Sylvie took that no further, returned to Inga working better millinery at Saks to pay for their rented room before she assumed her glamorous refugee disguise.

But I never found those secrets, only guessed them from movies, from novels. I know he was angry at the Cardinal, who ordered the Nazi flag to fly over the chapel, and that I wore a dirndl that day, costumed for a dark plot, not Sound of Music.

A story told when she traveled to the loft to help out with Cyril sleeping in that wooden cradle, the possession of all those Waites on their hill in Connecticut. It was the one thing she appropriated from their store of useful Yankee things. Now Cyril was in school, and when it came cradle time for Maisy . . . she recalls the apologetic sigh when Louise returned it, beautiful certainly, no longer useful. Maisy lay in a padded Moses basket woven of plastic straw, an ingenious contraption with many pockets, zippers, and handles to haul her about. Louise had carried the cradle down to Sylvie’s Jeep, parked illegally on Lower Broadway. A packing-up day, the time of the Freemans’ move uptown to be near the University so that Artie might go on with his studies, his note of purpose redressing his truant past. On the day Sylvie told of her childhood home in the Tyrol, she did not give the full tour of her father’s study. Louise was invited to view the map of the Hapsburg Empire well in decline, but her guide left out the mathematical journals neatly stacked by her father’s reading chair. To touch even their pale blue covers was strictly verboten by order of the silver-mine master who turned through their problems at night. The cradle was returned to its proper station by the fireplace in Connecticut, an artifact for a phantom child.

Louise laughed, An improvement over The Crucifixion? She was, let’s recall, an artist, or had been when she first met Sylvie. Something wistful about her quick judgment, the pleasure she took dwelling on Grosz’s dark romance, the arrogance of many self-portraits.

Sylvie’s account depends on doubtful stories told by Inga. As a student, late nights in the Public Library would never reveal that her father was called Herr Professor, a title he sharply rejected as he did the von. He came back to Innsbruck from his studies to run the family silver mines, and there Inga was, a village girl with aspirations. The mines’ picture-book village sat at the bottom of a valley below the Neisswongers’ hunting lodge, and at every turn there was Inga radiantly pious at Sunday Mass, flirtatious in the tavern where she washed up the steins, his with the family crest, eagle rampant. He came upon her each day on the path going down into the village, or at the bend in the one narrow street. She seemed always to be in his way that first season. He was reviewing the accounts, learning to manage the workers in the mine. This lovely girl’s smile distracted him from the reality that times were already bad, quite bad, that he may never go back to the University, listen to the arguments of his scientific betters. Inga had been once to Innsbruck with her confraternity for a procession—Immaculate Conception, Epiphany? The feast day was movable when Inga told of her meeting young Neisswonger on such an excursion. And wasn’t he surprised to see her in town looking smarter in her loden jacket than any village girl? Her “professor” became more than he ever could be, her Ulrich, who published one paper discrediting the uncertainty principle in a popular scientific journal. Why would Sylvie, a child transported to New York, not believe in this legend, yet still believe that her father followed the news of the brilliant men who practiced Jewish Science, as the Reich would name it. Sylvie telling Louise the story of her father’s great learning, his degrees, a man so certain—isn’t that odd?—that National Socialism with its diseased anti-Semitism, its anti-Christian program would never take hold in Catholic Austria. In going back over her father’s miscalculations about the fate of his country, his silence, then his defense of the Jews, she avoided his lonely pursuit of mathematics, knowing Louise fears that her husband might never run the course, that Artie’s makeup exam may prove to be a layman’s fiddling with numbers, much like her father’s.

And on another day Louise turned the page of a coffee-table book sent years back to Sylvie, gift from Inga to her daughter intended to enforce her tale of Bauhaus good taste. A glamour shot of a slim crystal carafe (Otto Wagner, date uncertain) faced off with a silver broach set with moonstones (Josef Hoffmann, 1919).

You understand I was shamed by my mother’s claim that such objects were part of our life. I was ten years old when we finally left the villa, escaped through the garden wall huddled in Inga’s fur coat, the two of us linked together like kids in a three-legged race. Kinderspiel. Martha latched to her brother. Gerald.

She had taken to the books. March 12, 1938, the date on which Austria was annexed by the Reich. The players who led to Austria’s downfall—Chancellors Dolfuss, Schuschnigg, the German ambassador, Papen—could not answer her question: when did Papa wake to the nightmare of Catholic compliance? Did he speak against the very prelate who laughed at his Dürer story? They ordered him to work his mines for their benefit two years before the Polizei led him out the front door with his son. The camp where she presumed her father and brother were taken was enlarged early, December of ’39. She worked on in the library at 42nd Street until the lights dimmed, then took the subway uptown to a rented room, the maid’s room in a big drafty apartment. The accounts of the war were not sorted into the arguments and fables of history. She discovered a portrait, Marie Elizabeth of Austria, radiant child who, disfigured by smallpox, became an abbess, d. Innsbruck, 1808; Emperor Ferdinand I required a yellow patch to be worn by all Jews, 1551. Protestants denied citizenship, their lives endangered with the punishment of heresy, 1527, according to Catholic state law.

She had turned back three volumes on the Treaty of Versailles and a rant claiming Hitler was indebted to Nietzsche, and to Descartes’s Meditations in which the philosopher questions if we can ever come up with the answers. Bright Sylvie said clearly—No thank you. She walked the long block to Broadway, took the bus uptown. A couple with theater programs, flirting madly, just out of a show, or perhaps, in the heat of desire, they’d left during intermission. Cut out to make out at home. Well, her home was that narrow maid’s room in the apartment of an old refugee couple. Each week, she paid twenty dollars in cash, passing an envelope to them before sunset on the Sabbath. They had little to say to their boarder with a cross on her neck in search of a family story, reading history to solve yesterday’s crimes when any day she might see that Solomon’s watchband did not fully conceal the numbers on his wrist. Inga had discovered their vacant maid’s room through a friend of a classy friend, then gone off to California, where yet another friend dealt her secretarial work for swank émigrés. Later Sylvie would understand that she took a page from her mother’s book, Inga writing her own script, a quick read that instructed: get on with your life.

The villa, you see, was as my father must have it, as it had always been in his time. Biedermeier curves of each sofa, his ashwood desk. My room of the spoiling was kitsch, Tyrolean cute. He had no anger against his privilege or trappings of his class, not a dollop of sour schlag. Not a worthless Austrian mark. Turning now to the page with: Silver clip in the form of a maple leaf for a fräulein’s hair, and: a slim Wiener Werkstätte mirror. Unburdened with a view of the past. Meine Mutter so clever—refurnishing memory. How we do live the life set forth by our tables and chairs.

We had only enough fuel to escort the bombers off on their mission. Escort them through dog fights. I lost half my squadron one night. Bob Waite gave no personal details, which she found troubling, the way the firebombing of a city could be no more than an order carried out. It’s all in the books, he said.

In time she came to believe in her husband’s reserve, though answers she sought were not in the books. She had married something of a hero, a widower with a ready-made family, enjoyed his gentleness in the old bed with creaking wooden slats. Passion would not come until she met Cyril O’Connor, shared a cab on a rainy day at the UN. Cyril had served in the Korean Conflict. Their emotional extravagance might have been shot as a war movie—lovers on Waterloo Bridge, tearful parting. They returned to their dutiful married lives until Sylvie, of all the unimaginable things, came back into his life. The sleeping prince—ailing eyesight, sparse white hair—was kissed back to life. Not her boldest move; that would always be the flight through the garden wall with Mommi. Still, finding their loved ones had passed, she took a chance that in matters of the heart there might be a second chance duty-free. Now their caresses were tender, the way kids courted a millennium ago. Sylvie runs the story off. Her visions—the love of her men in varying degrees. Of her father who she mourns in the full knowledge of his folly.

Soon after they met, Bob Waite took Sylvie to his house listed as a historic treasure. She raised his kids, lives on there in comfort though carpenter ants are back at their mischief. It is not truly her house: never can be. Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. Translate to the language you live in. Whoever has no house now, will never have one. How her beautiful mother of the grun-grau eyes came to quote Rilke with ease though she had no education to speak of. But that was in California, where Inga took tea with Thomas Mann, did more than frolic with Peter Lorre by the pool. Then Inga Meyer, moving on, was married to Billy Ray Boots by a Baptist minister in Houston and must be put to rest with many artifacts of genuine beauty, forgiven at last by her daughter. Wer jetzt allein ist . . . Translate: Whoever is alone will stay alone.

As they prepare for descent, Jed tells all, fesses up. He’s not on his way home to the baby girl on the laptop screen. Going to visit the teenage boy he left behind. Sylvie, pert with an encouraging smile, yes, the fairy god-mother with a halo of white hair, is comfortable hearing his familiar story of ambition gone wrong, midlife crisis, the office affair. She has listened carefully to the security guards at Martha’s Institute, how one Perez son is premed, the other hijacks cars. Lola visits him in prison. Bonfilio must keep at the course in bookkeeping to get on with his life. His heart is invested in tango. Weekends he competes. Mrs. Waite has seen the head shot, hair slicked, throat gleaming with sweat in the passion of the dance. Jed has no picture of his boy left behind—a moody dropout, will not welcome this visit from his father. Below the clouds now, ordered to turn off all electronic equipment. Jed back to business. His personal story now seems impersonal. Sylvie recalls the name of the actor he resembles, a sentimental fool in old movies, eyes tearing up, the flesh wobbling on his moon face. Jed cutting her off, scribbling numbers on a scratch pad, reminds her of Gerald Waite, never her son. She feels the flight has been a waste of her seatmate’s time, not finishing his thriller, chatting up an old lady, movie out of mind before the credits run. Perhaps it will never come right, these awkward visits with his son. Gerald Waite has written himself out of his stepmother’s life, that little prince of his private school who never took to Sylvie. Each year on the Christmas card, he covets the Rhode Island highboy, though inappropriate for his high-rise in Hong Kong. Gerald is corporate, self-posted to Asia.

Martha put it simply: Gerald needs money the way we need air. The whole nine yards. You know the expression?

I know it. Gerald needs more than his father’s considerable salary, more than his grandfather’s take from a distinguished legal practice in the city.

The little plane has nibbled to the very end of its trail on the screen. Pressure pops in her ears, and for a moment Sylvie’s hearing seems restored, that same baby crying above the pilot’s landing instructions—advice for descent, Bob called it.

Offering a stiff apology, Jed’s jowls quiver. Sorry for the personal stuff, laying it on.

Returned to the strained silence of her deafness, she thinks this is what we have, perhaps it is all—the telling, telling each other our stories. In the quarter hour that remains, she sets her watch to Eastern Daylight Time, flips pages in the airline magazine that offers, for a price, comforts never imagined: a robot vacuum, an electric corkscrew and a miniature trident, the three prongs of Neptune’s weapon to spear lint. Lint? Your clothes dryer may be clogged. Are you aware of this danger? Now the darkening sky wavers through Sylvie’s tears. It is too foolish, this fear of fluff, yet she finds it so sad, the claims of this product offering a life free of weightless debris. She remembers he was called Cuddles, the Hungarian actor who made you laugh when you should have cried. The plane is waiting for a runway, circling the city. She sites the Triborough, Ran dall’s Island, buildings along the East River—the towers of New York Hospital, the brick of old Bellevue and in between the UN, where she worked as a young woman, a translator double-speaking the principles and arguments of international agreement. In that upended matchbox of hope, she met both her husband and her lover. She can’t remember which committee Cyril, still in uniform, reported to, but she was translating areas of dispute between French and German fisheries. She must tell Martha: the commission was called Law of the Sea.

The neighbors have turned on the porch light, left the door off the latch. The mail of the last two weeks lies in the Chinese export platter on the hall table—catalogs pushing Christmas before the first frost, Doctors Without Borders, Coalition for the Homeless and Peace Folk, as Louise calls the many organizations begging money, as well they should, given the headlines Sylvie glanced wheeling her suitcase through the airport. FAMINE, GUANTÁNAMO TORTURE. DEATH TOLL RELEASED.

She is suddenly bone tired, speaks the phrase aloud to the heavy silence of the house. Now, what does that mean? It’s the spirit that’s tired; still, she must call the neighbors who doused the plants to death, thank them for their kindness. They have turned up the thermostat, set her tea mug next to the electric kettle, propped up a card of a smiley cat—Welcome! Sylvie sits by the fireplace where the Waite cradle resumed its proper place. A pale patch on the floor reveals where the Connecticut clock stood for nearly two hundred years, a grandfather clock that now ticks its inaccuracies in California. Alas, the finials have been taken off to accommodate the low ceiling in Martha’s cottage. Gerald Waite, the banker still building his firm’s business in Hong Kong, is the only one who gives a damn about the antiques, in particular their value. Last Christmas card went beyond the highboy to the Pilgrim hutch and Dun-can Phyfe chairs. In a frivolous moment Sylvie sent Gerald the Canton punch bowl, never heard if it arrived back home in one piece. She’d as soon ship him every spindle and scrap, the sampler ill stitched by some long-forgotten girl, the coverlet sturdy as the day it was woven pre- Jacquard loom. Her very life is overfurnished. Alone in the house, deafness her companion, she listens to herself through worn bone. Well, there is not much flesh on her though the limbs are sturdy; didn’t she make it uphill with a spring in her step, up from the parking lot to Perez and Bonfilio, to their courtesy each day? Now she must call Louise. She gets Artie. Maisy is ill again. Each night plagued with that cough. His voice—low-pitched, solemn.

Sylvie in a whisper: Tomorrow I will drive into the city. I should never have gone away.

She prepares a tray of white toast and tea. For the first time, the stairs are not easy. She sets the tray on the lowboy next to the pencil-post bed. Oh, it has a verified date, this uncomfortable bed where she slept beside her late husband and with her lover, Cyril O’Connor. The call to Martha’s A-drive is not forgotten.

I’m in the lab, Martha says, making up for lost time. She does not say time lost with Sylvie’s visit, their weekend jaunts up to the mission in Santa Barbara, down to the Baja Peninsula. Martha is working on a pet project, classifying sea cucumbers that thrive in a frigid canyon deep down in the sea.

Sylvie says, Well, it’s cold here, too. The leaves are turning.

Remember? Martha asks. Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

The last line of a ditty she chanted to the Waite children when they came from the beach in wet bathing suits, sand in their shoes. They were beyond such nursery jingles, but what did she know?

Yes, she remembers. Home again, home again, all in a day.

His exuberant words blow away. The boy looks puzzled. Dad walking on air? They are both on their way to school: that’s Cyril’s delight. His father will leave him off, go on to his classroom, where he writes numbers and squirrelly letters on the blackboard. His father has homework most nights. Sometimes Cyril pretends he has homework. Last night he wrote his name on his backpack, wrote it all out—Cyril Moffett Freeman, a name like no other kid at his school. Cyril is the name he comes by from the grandfather who is dead. His father had no father. He was not supposed to know that. When he asked, his mother said, You’re ours. Well, of course. What did that have to do with the man who disappeared off the face of the earth? Moffett was in there because his mother must not leave out her parents in Wisconsin. They lived on a farm he visited every year of his life. That grandfather had almost no hair and a loud voice like a man his parents watched every night on the news. Too loud when he came to New York, showed a movie at school telling about the rows and rows of cows hooked up to his milking machines. A calf sucked milk from its mother’s udder. Direct Delivery, his grandfather said, laughing in case you didn’t get it. Milk was pumped into a big steel tanker to travel to the next machine, boil it up and ship it to market. He knew more than anyone in his class about pasteurizing when Grandfather Moffett ladled milk from a can for every teacher and student. The farm was cleaner than anything in New York City, so Grandpa said. He taught dairy. That was just weeks ago when Professor Moffett passed out ice cream cups for the whole lower school. For some days Cyril was made much of, then taunted by older kids—Cyril 2%, Fat Free. Well, he was skinny, and besides, his teacher, after a conference with his mother, advanced him to reading and math with the second grade. It was still early in the school year, and one day he broke from his class line after recess, to watch a chess game, to advise a third-grader how a pawn could block a bishop. Before he fully understood the kid’s mockery, much mooing was what he put up with. Now the best part of the day was walking hand in hand with his father.

There’s a kid wearing a black mask on the steps leading up to school, sweater tied round his neck for a cape. Captain Marvel, looks like maybe he’s got a sore throat. Now that his father sees the black mask, he goes on about the calendar, how we should respect it, not let the merchants take over. By merchants he means all the shops on Broadway with plastic pumpkins and ghosts in the windows, and all the creepy ads on TV.

Five nights, Cyril corrects his father. It will be night when he goes out to spook the world. He is going to be a beetle, in fact. Today he has a ladybug in with his snack and a note to the teacher. The note says that they, the Moffett-Freemans, may be moving away within the school year, so save all records as to his progress to be transferred. Cyril had tipped a beetle into his bug box when they were in Connecticut looking at property. It was already dead on the doorsill of a dusty house where someone had died (not supposed to know that), just tipped it with a touch of his pinkie into the plastic box, which has a magnifying glass set into the lid so the bug looks larger than life, a monster black beetle with sharp horns. The hard wing case is unbroken. Too bad he never saw it fly and might not see a live one now that there’s frost, his mother says, but when they visited Sylvie in her old house, she showed him a chair which had been eaten by beetles, little holes in the wood.

Tells you how very old, she said. Please, not to sit in that chair.

Which made sense, because the beetles could still be in there chomp ing. He plans to be the black beetle in his box. His mother must make horns out of cardboard, but he has not figured the carapace, how it must cover his wings, how he can scare the kids at school and still carry a bug looking bucket, a nest or hive for the treats the merchants sell.

Today your teacher will turn back the clocks. Turn to his antic self, more likely, to Freeman who got kicked out of Yale for posting answers to the difficult calculus exam on primitive e-mail. Because it is the process, he wrote back then, not the answer. The rush is working it out. No longer a smart-ass, just wanting to say to these engineering, business majors, tech-masters-to-be, that they must take care with time. In a short time, the up-and-coming time of this November, Congress has decreed that they will walk to class in the dark. They will play, let’s say Frisbee, an educated guess, in daylight saved for that purpose. He hops to the blackboard, the old miscreant Artie, to begin his lecture that has nothing to do with the job market, the one which is suddenly less healthy, the market he’s in, though how could they guess from this acrobatic instruction that leaps from Daylight Saving Time back to long shadows cast at Stone henge to the Aztec calendar and the Julian, to leap year and the missing half minute of time, to Mark Twain who marked time in a paddleboat on the Mississippi? When he doles out Heisenberg, he gets a groan from the sharpest girl, the loveliest, who never lets him walk her home when she baby-sits the kids: We cannot know, as a matter of principle, the present in all its details. I’m down the rabbit hole late, late for a very important date, stop-watch and all. I come to rest, ladies and gentlemen, at the commercial countdown to Halloween, to the politics of time, the principle being that we have one more hour of sunlight to stop at the mall, so Congress has decreed. Meanwhile the alarm clock, do we use them anymore? But time being personal, I will hold you no longer. There’s a war on. It is evening in Baghdad. As a matter of principle, we wait in the dark for the morning news.

Late-night comic spinning off script, or a karaoke assault on the captive audience, he bops on to the abuse of constitutional powers, Bible study in the White House, or just another peace rally, war protest, one of how many? Their teacher ranting, bringing it down, the uncomfortable day-to-day problems they must either solve or leave unanswered in all their details. Artie, in self-destruct, is running late. They look at the time on their cells. What’s the next assignment? Patient, amused at his apology, which they accept as no apology at all. Class dismissed.

In the cavernous hall below, Artie is faced with Gottschalk having a good laugh, a hearty rumble off the old tile walls. He’d thought our leader never laughed, just meted out sourballs to children with the indulgent smile. Gott, waylaying him at the door of his office, I see that you were amusing in class today.

Artie reckons the half minute it takes to run down the spiral staircase. Telepathy?

Texting. It did give me a laugh, a student sending your tangent. You’ve been critical—pause for mock harrumph—of my insistence upon pencil and paper. It’s too easy to take answers off the screen, post them, send them about, as a miscreant just now broadcast your performance. We had to figure, in my day. In my day, the answer was inked on the palm of the culprit’s hand. In any case, an enjoyable excursion. Time, you old gypsy—

Artie dare not look at his watch. The hands of the old clock affixed to the wall are stopped in Western Union Time, five-fifteen of a day or night long gone.

In my day goes on with good humor; then Ernst Gottschalk strikes a serious note. In that moment Arthur Freeman understands that his leader, grudging as ever with his slant smile, will deal him another chance to pick himself up, brush himself off as in his grandmother’s hope invested in God and Fred Astaire. Gott—it’s only a spec—has a job up his sleeve. Artie must remember to tell Lou that this kindest of men was wearing a mixed message, bush jacket and cargo pants, perhaps working his sartorial way toward Halloween.

He’s late to pick up Cyril, the last child in the bright kindergarten room. The harvest is in place, cornstalks and pumpkins, humongous gourds. Cyril is counting, slow and steady, to a thousand.

Mrs. Goldberg tells Mr. Freeman once again, He does this to see how far he gets until you arrive. She does not say, Late as you often are.

Artie damns his performance, time lost in Mathematics Hall.

Seven hundred twenty-five, seven hundred twenty-six, twenty-seven . . .

No need to be sorry. Not closing the shop.

Course not. She tidies up after the children the many days he’s been late, never as late as seven hundred and twenty-eight. She gathers the scraps of construction paper, collects the blunt scissors, clamps the paste pot left open. She’s a pro—brisk, not motherly, a comfort to the children in her care. In the world of her room, each child’s name is spelled out in capital letters, numbers envisioned as red apples and golden pears. Amusements blend into Mrs. G’s lessons as she tracks the daily progress of every child, so particular in its triumphs and failures.

Spoken clearly, it comes as a shock to him. Not really. They have nearly settled on a house in Connecticut not far from where he lived as a small boy before his mother drowned in that boating accident, before he preserved her in legend, her mahogany hair without a streak of silver, her voice uncertain in song, folksy strumming.

Mrs. G going on about Cyril, her brightest student in years, how the Freemans must be careful with their gifted boy.

Pacing himself now—seven hundred and thirty-five.

Oh, come off it, his father says.

On the way home, it’s not OK. His father doesn’t reach for his hand at the crossing. Cyril digs in his backpack for the bug box. How much bigger does the magnifier make my beetle?

His father is somewhere else. Hard to tell.

Late to pick him up at school not surprising, but the brush-off Cyril will remember, the chill of his father’s silence as they headed round the corner to Riverside Drive. His fear that he must not say it: Seven hundred and thirty-six.

The charcoal pencil feels strange in Lou’s hand, but the tricks of dimension and line—the smudge and shading reliable. The sketch comes along. It’s a tree. Not a tree she might bring into focus when sighting a bird. Those trees she observes in detail, each node, crook of a limb to harbor a nest, bark broken where woodpeckers dig for their grub. This tree is puffy and perfectly round, a simplified picture-book tree. She believes she is drawing it for Sylvie, who must insist once again that Martha and Gerald are not her children. Louise has seen their photos displayed on a sideboard, sturdy girl in cap and gown, conventionally handsome boy, blazer and school tie. She writes Family Tree on top of the page, big page so a kid can draw freely. When the tree is finished, she inscribes a bold line under it, writes the names of Ulrich von Neisswonger and his wife, Inga, from which dangle Sylvia and Otto. Then Sylvie affixed to Bob Waite (deceased), from which, on a slant, Martha and Gerald, from Gerald a wife and two children unnamed, a second offshoot from Sylvia to Cyril O’Connor (deceased), from which Fiona with mate unknown, the begetter of Arthur Freeman, impossible to place as a piece of white cloud in a jigsaw puzzle, from which sprouts their boy connecting to Louise Moffett, from which Cyril and Maisy with side line to Pop Moffett and Shirley out there in Wisconsin, to her brothers so often deleted and a firm sidebar to Pop’s sister, Aunt Bea. Now the tree which spreads above must have leaves, and caught in the crotch of the branches, a corporate jet, powerful as Bob Waite might will it, then Fiona’s pleasure boat, the death vehicle, upended in turbulent waves. $$$ fluttering for both Gerald and Inga, and why not the stockbroker, Cyril? A moo cow for her father and an equation—here the artist is out on a limb—a problem, might have been solved by the von or by Artie, two guys who share the math gene. The cheap newsprint does not take to fine lines, but she must have the speckled ruff of a wise owl, as though she could go back to her bird, the one she drew as a girl, the owl that won her first prize. She has left out, quite by accident, Artie’s sainted grandmother, Mae.

Lou turns the page. With a stroke she gets Maisy wheezing in perfect peace, lips slightly parted, the gentle curve of her cheek, the scramble of pale curls. Gets the humpback of the old couch, the stick figure of Sylvie in her proper gray suit, mouth slack as in death, as though words might not come again. Lou, alone with these sleepers, feels she’s never been so alive, not even on the bus she flagged down to leave the farm, not even in her first studio apartment in this city. Back then she was fearless, her intentional distortions sharper than binocular blowups, than the camera’s eye. Alone with pencil on paper, she sweeps a line cross page, pure pleasure. She’s forgotten her work’s satisfactions. Call it art, the intentional smudge, lump of clay, streak of acrylic. Making something out of nothing.

Was I saying about the cave? Sylvie’s voice a soft whisper. I am not sure what Martha . . . now she speaks up . . . what they are looking for, Martha and her mentor, but in the story, a man is kept in a cave under the sea. Eine Fabel, a spell, you see. This drunkard, not worthy of the King’s daughter.

Maisy smiles at some turn of events in a dream.

Seems right. Lou closes the pad. We do tend to make nice. The family tree intended for Sylvie now seems sentimental. So she takes the hard path, says what she must finally say. On this day Louise announces they are leaving the city. I wish it could be different.

Sylvie touches a trembling hand to the useful aids in her ears, first one, then the other. I know about moving on.

Lou has never quite believed the legend of that woman’s beauty, sees only the silver delicacy of Sylvie’s old age. We will have a house, she says, with a shed. Cyril claims it. Enter at your peril.

For your work, then? About time. She has never let up urging Lou to go back to her art. And the boy? A slip of the tongue, but so Artie Freeman was tagged when his grandfather was alive. He has finished his studies?

As though just another cup of tea, a repeat of Sylvie’s travels—the best tacos and the old Mission in Santa Barbara, another day in which deflating birthday balloons (Maisy’s) begin one by one by one to fall to the carpet; in which the hamster rests beneath the wheel in his cage; in which Louise Moffett Freeman, just another night, turns to the end of her mystery to find out who fired the antique rifle point-blank at the Colonel, thereby missing the pages that told her why. Why kill off the old gentleman, so decent to his servants in Singapore?

Arthur Freeman discovers the family tree in the trash. Though it is signed Moffett, dated this day in November, it seems a relic of what his wife used to do, make sense of their world in scrapbook art—here’s where we came from, some of us intact, some children of disconnect and misfortune. The paper tears as he hides it in the drawer of his grandfather’s desk. He will find it again when they are about to move out of the city, when the children have their valuables packed, Maisy’s doll of mixed race with its infant paraphernalia, Cyril’s bugs labeled, his butterflies pinioned under glass. For weeks the children have been ready to go, waiting for their parents to get it together. In the future they will have their own rooms, a backyard, a dog—think of that. The backyard is a ruin, not cared for in years, but the property goes back, back to a small barn, nothing like the Moffett spread in Wisconsin.

Looking over the property, Cyril spotted a horned caterpillar, a sphinx eating the first fresh leaves of a birch, and a turquoise beetle not documented in Insects for Girls and Boys. It is his last night in the bunk bed, staring at the ceiling. He will never again hear his sister’s soft mewing in a dream, her phlegmy cough that begins the fevers once again, though who knows what lies ahead in the white house with a wreck of a shed, KEEP OUT OR ELS painted on its side by a child who died in that house. He is not supposed to know that. He will take possession of that shed—chess table, specimen cabinet, pincers and slides. He can see himself peering through a lens, the slight flutter of wings as he measures the thorax of a queen bee. He imagines a cot set up under the window facing the quiet street where he will be allowed to ride his bike, but never gets to the sad story of carpenter ants. If he could read the Latin words in his book, he might know why they have eaten his shed at the foundation. When you touch the doorframe, there at the bottom, what looked like wood crumbles to dust. He hears his mother in the kitchen packing dishes with gold rims, never used.

Artie Freeman has left the desk for last. The usual records, household insurance, bank statements, marriage certificate, last will and testament of one Cyril O’Connor, photo of his grandmother, Mae, in a white linen dress now yellowed with age, the tree he’d forgotten. It’s flimsy, like the list of the war dead Lou discontinued in the kitchen. He folds the sketch of the family tree in with past taxes, not his wife’s best work, still, not worthy of the trash.

Moving on became clear on the day when, making her bed, she discovered a little rip in the quilt at the center of the big star where all the scraps of the quilter’s remnants come together. She will patch it before she goes, leave everything in this house museum perfect. Sell up. Move back to the city, Upper West Side, where she first lived with Inga, studied English grammar at night, read books meant for kids half her age. It will be the third edit of the life she has made for Sylvia Neisswonger, a Catholic girl of good family. She showers, puts on fresh clothes, buttons up a warm sweater, recalling at this moment the snowflakes on her Alpine ski sweater as the mantle of a survivor. There had been that argument about the Jacquard loom, repetition of pattern, something to do with Otto. That memory had lost its power. This evening’s sweater—cold end of day—scratches at the neck and wrists, a cheap thing bought at the mall in Stamford where, during the winter Cyril was with her, they had gone on an errand that seemed urgent, but the lights of the pleasure palace were further blinding to him. Piped-in Muzak clotted her ears.

When the music stops, you must find a chair. She will sit on a bench in Central Park with a book she always meant to read. It concerns the triumphs and failures of the great scientists trained at Vienna and Göttin gen, but she will not find her father’s name among them, not even in the record of their exuberant youth in the cafés, arguing late into the night. So best close the book, for he may have been an everyday alchemist, extracting silver from veins of Alpine schist. And looking up at the tree above, she will be still when she sees the birds, for her friend has said you see more when you look from one point, one steady view, see the fluttering contraction of the tail as they alight—the warblers, the hawks, old owls with aging feathers—but she will not hear their song, natürlich. She will sign her name, Sylvia Neisswonger Waite, in the book at Goethe House upon the occasion of the anniversary of Bertolt Brecht’s death fifty years ago when she was translating documents at the UN. She takes her seat in the auditorium, is given the wireless device that will broadcast his Jungle of Cities into her ears. Auf deutsch, no need of the translation, yet she will hear, pretty much hear, a staged reading in English, Brecht’s dark laughter and brutal mockery of Hollywood despair, while dreaming back to the days when her mother was with Meyer, a cameraman who worked with Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Inga, having married into that aristocracy, bronzed and charming in yet another costume of a survivor—white linen slacks, the striped jersey of a sailor. Living at the crest of a hill on the Pacific Palisades, Inga had experienced vertigo looking down at the sea. Her grandest role, serving contraband Riesling to the likes of Thomas Mann. Mutter living it up with this distinguished crew, her day in the sun. Sylvie, her girl now on Fifth Avenue listening to Brecht’s jovial despair, one old lady among an audience of mostly students brought to this improving event. They laugh in the wrong places. But will you still be here when we come back? Would the play-wright have been amused? Could they imagine the audience eager for his work fifty years ago, for the political passion of his theater? Or might they learn it? Perhaps today they will be startled into listening, really listening, when the shot goes off in his cultural jungle, though it is only a play with gangland debauchery, a simple parable compared to the Götterdämmer ung of nightly TV. Frau Waite will straighten the electronic apparatus on her head; Sylvia, who remembers the plain girl, Inga’s daughter come on a visit from her studies in New York, remembers the scrunched little Brecht in his workman’s jacket, his sly squint of a smile, the ash trembling at the end of his cigar flipped onto the plate she was clearing. At home—that is, her sparsely fitted-out apartment on Columbus Avenue—she will now and again miss the empty house in Connecticut gone to the highest bidder, a quick sale much like her mother’s unloading the villa on the river Inn. The lesser pieces of Waite furniture stored for Gerald when and if he comes back to this country, the finer pieces auctioned at Sotheby’s. Sylvia, yearning for her language, will take Brecht’s early work off a shelf, find Jungle of Cities in the original. Sind Sie nock hier, wenn wir zuruckkomen? She will read, then begin to translate with ease, as in her working life long ago—the remnants of a family, a pretty moth eaten family, recalling Inga’s bold strokes of survival and at last, long last, Sylvia will admit undeniable love for her mother who she so readily mocked, made her endurance into a skit, a poor show. Translates: To be alone—that’s a good thing to be. The chaos has been used up. And it was the best time. Es war die beste Zeit.

Shuffling in the bits scattered among my own discarded pages, I do wonder if my mother ever read that rug woven with scraps of the past. Bill’s old tweed jacket worn only on weekends. When he presented state’s evidence in the courtroom, it was in three-piece suits, seat of the pants shiny with age. The cuffs could no longer be turned. My own Spring coat of robin’s-egg blue, a hand-me-down-from the neighbors, was cut into coarse ribbons. The checked riding skirt, rescued from better days when my grandfather’s workers boosted Loretta Burns up into the saddle to ride the trails of Beardsley Park. Yet somehow the strands in the rug came pleasantly together in my mother’s craft of making do; and there it lay on the bedroom floor for Mimi, alias Maureen, to trip over when she took up her post to skim Tolstoy’s novel, consigning the Napoleonic Wars to delay of the love story, passion to settle for domesticity, while ten thousand men had just died on the beaches of Normandy.

Still in search of that ultimate honesty, I look round my back room at the shelves and toppling stacks of books as though the landscape is new to me, yet I work day after day in this disorder, my fortress against reality. Often, as now, I get up in the middle of the night to mark down a word, a phrase that might be useful come morning. The streetlamp lights my way through the litter of journals and notebooks. Next to the phone a novel, my own, Liebestraum, love story with a slick jacket. Next to the chair that holds the imprint of my plump body: the reading lamp. Tonight: unfinished business. Long, too long delayed. I pick up the book, switch on the lamp, open to an earmarked page.

You gave me that scene, though your bar mitzvah was far from Levin’s. You did not read from Scripture. All those memorized Hebrew words and a new suit. You had signed on early as a dedicated nonbeliever. Your gold star lives with tarnished cuff links, pearl buttons, a Kennedy half-dollar, and the wedding ring of my first marriage in a Florentine box bought for just such tokens we can’t part with, can’t throw away.

Chill in her workroom. A shawl covers the back of the reading chair. I wrap myself in it. Old lady in a flannel nightgown, Mother Goose with her tales. Those geese, if that is what they are, skimming about on the water with their proprietary air. In all the years taking in the view of the city from the Reservoir, I’ve never seen one falter in flight, never seen a dead bird in the growth around the shore. But then, I had never seen a soldier dying except—a big exception it seems to me this night—in the movies back when I invented Levin’s story—the battlefield as on D-Day littered with bodies—oldies, Red Badge of Courage, Paths of Glory, Platoon. I was never sure how long it would take him to die of his wounds, only that I must get on with the Captain’s story, confident that in my scheme of things he had answers for the boy beyond those of his own father, the trusted pharmacist in the Berkshires. In the aftermath of that bloody invasion, Captain Warner would find the body of the kid, which was near impossible, and clip the chain from round Levin’s bloody neck, send the gold star back to a drugstore on a generic Main Street in Massachusetts. Old Mother Goose when she wanted to wander . . . My Captain suffered superficial wounds to take him out of action, transfer him to the army of occupation. The German of his student days was useful, assigned Warner to reading page upon page of documents supporting evidence that “Hitler’s Bomb” in the works, was two years behind the Project at Los Alamos. Writing on, I had known this much—how unlikely a leap from the slaughter of Omaha Beach to a desk job. The Captain requested the transfer for the sake of my story, for the curtain to go up on the opera singer in Bayreuth he’d fallen for, lost his head completely when a student in Leipzig, where the talk had been all uncertainty, not isolating heavy waters that might make the bomb. The novel optioned before the general acclaim, but Hollywood was in a brief period of denazifica tion, one might say, coasting with gangster epics homegrown, turned on by dazzling possibilities of special effects. The script, rewritten—less war, more sex, bodies wrestling in the sheets, a persistent achtung, in scenes never shot. The soprano with flaxen hair, what was she up to after the war? Taping whatever the Captain discovered about Nazi scientists while she mourned the defeat of her country. Sleeping with the enemy, the American officer who spoke with enthusiasm of Einstein’s Relativity. Everything she learned from Warner was passed to her German lover, a detainee with the true secrets tucked away, the sorry information they never achieved the critical mass. Procuring the components, could not assemble them, to become death, the destroyer of worlds. Deutsche Science had failed. But how do you cast a Wagnerian soprano, one that is slim with cupcake breasts, with a delectable ass pumping smoothly as she positions herself above her American lover? How confuse such sport with the soaring Wagnerian score? Reads like a treatment. There was, of course, the Captain’s all-innocence wife and two little boys in New Jersey, a treat for the reader, dark chocolate to flavor the tolerably happy end.

Adjusting my shawl, Mother Goose would fly through the air on a very finegander, crone with a silver voice spewing out words to readers who might as well be children. That’s my thought as I flip through the book in hand. The pages are marked with a system of elisions and stops, the better to read it time and again, clear and loud to an audience. Shamelessly. I filch a yellow legal pad that belongs to my husband, to write as I did before the secondhand Remington, a black office machine with the question mark and brackets missing. The rewrite comes quickly with scratch-outs of deletion. In reparation I will scribble my way to a redemptive conclusion. My handwriting, no longer schoolgirl, is illegible, damaged by years at the computer. This night and the next, I steal out of bed. Undoing is not daytime work—that’s the Park with its wide-awake stories of pantomime lovers, the mathematician and his artist wife, of an old lady born in Innsbruck, the Elysian Fields of Frederick Law Olmsted, the chill splash of Bethesda Fountain on a wind-whipped day. This is night work, a Penelope task, not dreamtime, far from it. No reward, no penance. Plain personal, though not confessional, my yellow pages must stand as my defense.

Here the revision reads like liner notes. . . . Much like the broken promise to Freia, goddess of youth, love is denied, the treasure lost, and so forth with dwarfs and the deadly curse that doesn’t play well in the game room.