Take a cab. A chorus of them ordering her about, even Kate, who, on the day she turned ten, auditioned for her nursey role with comforting hugs, and on Thanksgiving pulled out a chair to settle the old lady at the festive table. Grandma imagined the Norman Rockwell poster with herself painted out, an enormous roast turkey levitating above the fix-in’s on the Freedom from Want table. The family assembled with her best middle-classy china, the Limoges gravy boat and the bold B embroidered on the Irish linen napkins.

It was ten days before Christmas when she discovered the ad. She had not mentioned Macy’s, just shopping.

What I need, he said, is nothing you can buy.

Sounds sweet, but controlling. She countered their hovering with therapy-speak. They were all on her case. She gave them an unlovely snort she traced back to the McCarthy trials, which only one of their three grown kids recalled from a PBS special. Why her imitation of the Senator from Wisconsin sucking air, heavy-breathing his discourteous answers? Why remember now? Her first political protest was ladylike, the flutter of a red scarf when Joe McCarthy spoke on campus. Different from family politics, surely. Her husband had been enabling when she read him entries in her daybook, cheering her outrage at the wars in progress. He joined in her despair that harsh judgment would never be leveled at the thugs in power. Now her anger was spent, a bad investment with little hope for a future rally. These past weeks had been passive, an entertainment of watching hopeful and hopeless presidential candidates, rating and berating their performance as they balked, strained for position at the starting gate. She had called him supportive of her effort to rewrite a book for her own satisfaction, the war story that won a prize, to find some honesty in her own history and lives imagined in the fiction. Still, it had been a good time, Thanksgiving packed away, Christmas looming. These brisk days, he no longer encouraged her to take a short turn in the Park. They set up a festival of silents. Yet another look back, movies seen when they were children, often seen again in art houses when out of college.

He said: First seen at the Trans-Lux, Madison and 85th.

Propped in bed, they laughed once again at Charlie and Buster, delighting in the voiceless overacting, the honky-tonk sound track, fancy footwork of the great comics—the triumph of grace over klutz. The gags, famous routines—Chaplin eating his boot in The Gold Rush, twirling the shoelaces like spaghetti.

He said: It was licorice, don’t you know.

For once she didn’t, but knew Keaton did his own stunts. Watching The Great Dictator, they were again enchanted by Charlie’s dance with the balloon globe, continents skimming the oceans, a fragile world awaiting Herr Hynkel’s flip of destruction. Alas, he crossed over to talkies. The ghetto was a pleasant stage set, and when the Jews avoiding the camps fled the city, they settled in a land of milk and honey, pet goats and darling children, costumes country cute.

In disbelief, she said: Nineteen forty! He’s gotta be kidding.

Just making his movie. They watched till the bitter end. Chaplin’s urgent message was delivered by the waif Paulette Goddard playing to the lens, the aura of hope in soft focus of trees and bright sky behind her: The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls—has barricaded the world with hate—has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

Stunned by the blind hope of patriotic spiel, they sat through the credits, through the warning: This Movie Not for Commercial Distribution. . . . She would have been eleven by the time The Great Dictator came to the Rialto. Had she accepted the clean cots and cozy blankets dealt out to prisoners when the timid Jewish barber was sent to a camp? Or, moved by the bleating finale, teared up at the warning of what might come? If I had known then; not the excuse of a grown girl, but of the director, Chaplin making amends for this ambidextrous movie. Not one of his silents—quite noisy, in fact—the story of our Charlie enacting pathos while Herr Hynkel was dealt the best routines? Chaplin, played against himself, failing as both the little guy and Hitler. It was a miscalculation. Blather and bladder of a deflated balloon.

But walking up Madison Avenue . . . He remembered leaving the theater overcome with purpose, I was awed or just in love with Paulette in her peasant blouse. I stopped at a bar that served me since I was fifteen, though I couldn’t buy my way into the army.

All Gaul is divided into three parts! The Gauls didn’t succumb to ruination by way of Rome, the decadent culture. We must take note. Her schoolroom remark hovered in the air, then: And take care with our children: They’re all we’ve got. We’re finished. That erasure of the Murrays’ ongoing lives, Joe’s pacemaker, Sue’s hip replacement, called for a change of subject.

He said: The boy who painted our fence in the country sent us an e-mail. He’s in Afghanistan now crawling the mountains, not the Berkshire hills. I miss his simple messages ordering brushes and tarps.

One night at the Kleins’, she dozed off while Naomi enacted scenes of a Broadway musical she suffered when her sister came up from Florida.

She woke in alarm to dead silence, a hush of pity.

In the cab going home: It can’t have been more than a moment.

It was nothing, he said. Naomi trashing the teen musical was tedious for us all.

He began, a stealth move, entering the back room where she worked. The lockup, as she called it, was off limits. Still, he made bold to shove books stacked on the floor to the side so she’d not trip. Colette, Marguerite Duras.

Scrap them, she said: I’ll never read those French women again. Licking their wounds.

All of Gertrude Stein? Once adored.

Poor Gertie. The roundabout of her stories is too grand altogether. Her Irish put-down pasted on Stein discards. A surfeit of biographies to go, four of Lincoln, three of President Wilson. Benjamin Franklin and V. Woolf saved; all murder mysteries of the genteel British variety out, every professorial turn and turn again that smacked of a time when she was into cultural geography, simulacra. All that old stuff, untranscendable horizons.

Head bent to the side, he read off the titles of a potpourri concocted for a seminar. Her final time out, she’d faced off with homegrown reality—Parents and Children, Sentimental to Scathing—the daily bread of family life had been her concern: Dickens, Kafka, Welty, Flannery O’Connor. She had called the course an indulgence, published an offbeat piece on Rudy, the dead child of Molly and Leopold Bloom, “The Phantom of the Liffey.” Her close reading imagined the boy as a shade, most probably a suicide. Joyce wrote him into the dumb show of memory. And what did the scholars say? Go back to your tales, don’t tread on our dreams. He puts the “Phantom” offprints aside, but not on his life would he touch his wife’s clippings or postcards; or her old toys, still treasured. She had dusted them off for Christmas—a celluloid Santa, tin clown on a tightrope, windup Loop the Loop plane, a mini semaphore that properly belonged with the old train set, her brother’s. The little kids would find them under the tree, where they’d have a brief moment of attention before LEGO City was torn from its wrapping. Just that once, he made brave to tidy the discards and duplicates, then retreated to the evening news when she called him invasive. All in good humor of course, of course.

So Bloomingdale’s, she said to Pedro. Pedro had been with the building since he was a boy. Well, a young man just out of high school. Peter, he had been called then. At times she reverted to the old name, as she did now. Peter, remember the origami?

Beautiful, he said. Sure, I remember.

They watched an agile young man in a Santa hat climb a metal ladder. He clipped the top of the tree. Still the star did not fit. He clipped again and there it was, the Star of the East, shimmering plastic. On the front desk, four bulbs were lit in a tasteful menorah.

She had thought the origami was the work of a single mom who lived with her pierced daughter, north side of the building. But no, their only role was to place the creatures great and small on the branches. It was an artist, Pedro said.

She remembered the many cranes mixed in with tigers, birds, unicorns. She sat on the bench meant for visitors or for residents of the building expecting children home from school, or waiting comfortably inside while Mike hailed a cab. Well, she was just getting her breath before the journey. Tonight she would remind her husband of their origami encounter, not of the cold-comfort tree in the lobby. They had gone one evening to the Ducal Palace in Genoa. A tribute to a local painter, the mayor was to speak. They arrived early with a group from the Villa dei Pini, a haven for visiting writers and artists, and for the historian combing through the Ligurian resistance (1943-44) to the British bombardment of Genoa’s port. He had found an old fisherman with war stories more compelling than the dry record in i documenti diplomatica. Properly invited in both English and Italian, the group from the villa wandered through the local master’s retrospective—vintage oils of the old city, what was left of it, genre views of the Mediterranean surround. The artists from New York had been restrained in their judgment.

Of Hiroshima.

A different exhibit altogether. Dazed by scene upon scene of destruction, they shuffled slowly by the dead—dead in the rubble, dead on the road, the scorched eyes of a mother standing above the body of her child, a pack of felled dogs and the hollowed-out wall of what may have been a temple. No building, house or field spared. They had seen such pictures soon after that war, though not so well framed. Hung row upon row on partitions cleverly forming a gallery within the restored walls of the Palace, they were—stunning. The photographer, Magnum she supposed, though no name, no titles, no commentary given. Not needed. When they emerged in silence to the bright courtyard of the Palace, they came upon origami papers being set out on a table. A student, appropriately solemn, handed them notice of One Thousand Cranes. Years ago she read the story to her daughter—not read to the grandchildren, not yet, perhaps never—about a girl with leukemia, one of many in the aftermath of that infamous day. Sadako had folded a thousand cranes in hope against hope of good fortune, folding until she died. Her story became a book, a documentary, a Peace Project, and here they were, i stranieri in their finery attempting to add to the millions upon millions of cranes. The artists from the villa folded swiftly, flapped the paper wings as though their birds might fly. Her husband had attempted folding flap over flap, then stuffed lire in a lacquered box for the cause.

She was just fine. A small audience of residents and staff going about their day had now assembled, waiting for the tree to be lit. Tutti Genoa had waited in the piazza outside the Ducal Palace. Waiting was part of the show, a time to be seen, to see those invited. Then the black cars arrived with many officials. She caught at words in the mayor’s praise—molta brava, sempre con cuore. Receiving the honors of the city as his due, the artist had a touch of old-time Bohemia about him—trim white beard, silk ascot, above-the-fray importance. He set a floppy straw hat aside, the familiar headgear of Matisse, who painted just across the border in France, which brought to her mind the exuberance of the master’s bright rooms with harem women, bold patterns of rugs and shawls, windows open to sunlit views. That night after dinner, they had left her fellow artists and scholars, walked under the tall pines. The garden sloping down to the sea was the pride of the villa, though seldom used. Planted years ago—no one quite remembered when—its famed succulents were now monstrous, swollen.

Unearthly, he called them.

They sat in a grotto. Broken pillars and shattered urns mimicked a ruin, once a romantic setting of decay, now merely spooky. A heavy breeze swept up from the shore. He took off his blazer, placed it over her shoulders. Tomorrow he would fly back to New York, back to business.

She said: I’ll be fine. Get you out of my way. She was writing, attempting to write about a local boy, Columbus. Though how was she fine when touring in recent days she could not climb the streets of Genoa with ease? Here in the garden, her breath gave out on the trail leading up from the shore, so they sat in the damp of the grotto.

He asked: What did the mayor say?

Extravagant things. The artist captured the soul of the city, l’anima della città. I doubt the painter knew he shared the palace with a thousand cranes.

From their perch in the grotto, they could see the last ferry of the day coming into the Stazione Marittima. They had wanted to cross to Tunisia while he was with her at the villa, but there was more to the hillside towns along the coast than they had imagined, more Roman ruins, more breathtaking views. And she was here to work, after all. The lights in the sala da pranzo had gone off in the villa. The fellows had finished their coffee and little glasses of Amaretto. The garden, abandoned to moonlight filtering through the old pines, was illuminated once again by light from the library above. Now the historian would be telling the novelist and her partner, newly arrived from Glasgow, the old fisherman’s story, how he’d row out with his father as if for the catch, how they had signaled to the gunners on shore.

Can you figure, she asked her husband, which side the fisherman was on?

As they made their way up to the villa, she put on his blazer. In the pockets she found the crumbled origami, his failed crane.

Going the wrong way, uptown. She ran across the street against the light, a cab swerving to get out of her way.

He whispered, not expecting an answer. What in God’s name were you up to?

The kindness of strangers, she said. Kunkel was the butcher in Bridgeport who was, of course, plump, while this Mr. Kunkel was lean.

She would never forget waiting with her mother while German sausage poured from the grinder. It glistened, all that fat. Such innocent times. I was handed over by Mr. Kunkel, escorted upstairs by Eduardo.

He begged her to cut the false brightness. It doesn’t cover your crime.

Daybook I wrote on the yellow pad but did not record the month, the year. I was missing my people, not family. You will think I’m heartless, or just headed in the wrong direction again; unbalanced as in a pratfall down icy stairs. I could not return to a spill of words that charted the passing of this year. I looked to the usual suspects posted on the wall of my workroom to find Borges—the blind poet; V. Woolf, eyes avoiding the camera, gone mad in time of war; Raleigh in fancy dress—always. Only Dickens held me to account. On the old Christmas card, he’s without desk, pen or paper; slumped in a chair, eyes closed though not dreaming. Figures, alive in his stories, are sketched all about him. What was next for the rumpled old man in house slippers? I lay aside my legal pad. Found a story I started years ago, ballad of a lonesome girl never finished. There was a scene in the Park, snow and a soldier, a love story perhaps, one I might honestly tell.

I’d lost my Park City of Bridgeport, was scaled back to Central Park, the limited view. I once had the whole spread, quo, quo, quoting myself—with revisions:

Her mother had an eye that strayed. Sissy could never tell when she was looking at her or at some place far away. Well, the fire was the end of Lyman; that was the father’s old Yankee name. They never found him those years ago, just that he ran off; that was the story. The fire was written up in the Eagle with the little one treated at the hospital for second-degree burns, but that item—so sad—got her mother work in the paper mill. They waited for Lyman to return. In time Rachelle, that was her mother’s name, settled in with a man who trucked in pulp to the mill. Then it seemed Sissy and her brother became left baggage. Did she remember that her mother was pretty, despite the wandering eye? Father Rooney said it was a gift from God, the eye finding its own way. Rachelle had been raised strict, a Catholic Canuck. The priest was especially nice to Sissy, though her mother wasn’t married and had a baby by Matt Baegler. That was the trucker’s name.

Many years later Sissy would ask her brother why, just like her father, she ran away. Was it taking care of that colicky baby while her mother and Matt tanked up at the tavern on Lake Pontoosuc? As though she could begin her story the day she got on the bus, not when her own father struck her or Matt felt up the bumps on her chest. She was visiting her brother before he went on trial for just a small stash and DD violation. He couldn’t say it was the continual screech of that kid or just she was flunking out of school. Stay out of trouble, he told her when he gave her money to get out of town. She had a plan, going to find her friend Debby who sent her a postcard from New York. Debby had a baby, one that slept, never cried, and why didn’t Sissy come on down? They could make it together. Now, she does remember that the fake ID said she was sixteen and her name was Margaret Phelan. She had been just the sister in her family. Sissy stuck. In the Port Authority, a woman at a newsstand asked, real sweet, like she was lonely and wanted to talk: Why aren’t you in school?

Well, I am, Sissy said. I’m doing a project. Should have said, None of your business. She picked up Newsweek, leafed through it to show she was smart. Asking her way, she had walked to the place Debby wrote out on the postcard. It was a store where the woman spoke Spanish. An old man slumped on a cot behind the counter. She showed the woman the postcard Debby sent up to Pittsfield.

Cariña, the woman said when she looked at Debby’s postcard, a tabby cat kissing a mouse, but knew nothing of that baby and mother. The old man sat up straight to say, Nevah, nevah, in English. And Sissy understood that he must say it often to people who came to the shop—Nevah, nod here. There were saints and candles, a smell—the weed Matt Baegler smoked, only heavier, sweeter. The statues were of Mary and her Baby, of St. Christopher carting the Holy Child across a stream. Tin hearts pierced by arrows hung on the wall. New York had seemed like she expected, walking uptown from the bus terminal, too many people. Louder than the city on TV, but she had not figured the distance. What had she expected of Debby who wrote down the name and number of this street? She stood in the heavy perfumed air of the shop thinking no place to go, nevah back home. It was as though she’d always known how to palm a Milky Way and mints. Later she would find out why the candy was stale; that bodega on Amsterdam didn’t sell sweets. It was when they saw her spit out the mint, she met Little Man and Tony. They saw the tag tied onto her gear up in Massachusetts to get her on the bus safe to New York. She would tell Father Rooney they were not bad guys, Little Man and Tony, only street people like her for a while. Not the full story. It was cold toward the end of the year. She had packed up on Christmas. Her mother sat watching the snow with one eye, massaging the baby’s belly so it wouldn’t cry. But it did, it did cry. They had not named it yet. It was a girl. Sissy had been given a red wool cap, that’s all, and she put it on for the holiday visit with her brother, who asked, many years later, how she stole out of there, out of the company house near the mill with her big canvas zip bag. Their mother wasn’t looking. You know how she was, off somewhere.

When she came back, Father Rooney pulled off a deal. He dealt with the mother. You get that baby baptized, I’ll take care of Sissy. He arranged for foster care, wouldn’t be the first time, till she was eighteen. He said: Till your ID isn’t fake anymore, Margaret Phelan. The priest was the only chance she had in this life, a plump dude in black pants and a Patriots jersey makes him one of the guys, a smooth dough face too often smiling. But as he drove her to Springfield, to a childless couple who needed the money for her care, he’s wondering, keeping their last hours together light with “Stardust,” “One for My Baby,” Matt and Mama’s music she hated, he’s wondering what would become of the girl. The girl who was half dreaming of her time in the big city, of Tony picked up by the cops in the Park on New Year’s Eve, how she dodged the crime scene with Little Man, who wasn’t the meanest. How she had kissed a soldier, just this guy, kissed deep in his liquor mouth. It was no joke—Happy New Year. He held her, and they fell in the snow. He pushed off her hat, kissed her hair. Wore that cap soldiers wear, and he wasn’t a soldier. For some days, she stalked him, knew where he lived. It was like love, she supposed, wanting Soldier to see her, to see Sissy, the girl picked him out of a snowdrift, kissed him, tongued him. She had Soldier’s cap with silver bars.

Captain, her brother said, where’d you get that? Has it still in her zip bag with clean jeans and sweaters for whatever, wherever Holy Rooney is taking her.

One more for the road, Sissy said.

Father Jack wondering what will become of the girl.

But, of course, use common sense, Miss Montour laughing at Mrs. Laughlin, who runs Mercy, Pat who’s too shy to find anything funny, too sorrowful about the whole world. So, it’s warm in the playroom when mothers park their children on a cold day in Fall and cool in the Summer with central air-conditioning, an extravagance in the Berkshires. Miss Montour billed for whatever the cost. Sissy in Target jeans, turtleneck, new wind-breaker, looking smart with her hair clipped close, bright golden hair always her problem, something of a come-on she never intends, a local girl, no Madonna. Chill day, Mrs. Laughlin, Pat, wears the navy blue suit makes her look like a nun, which she was before she fell for Mr. Laughlin. Now he’s gone of pneumonia last year, and she’s moved into the back parlor of Mercy, her saints on the bookshelf, her small-screen TV, the closet stuffed with not one pretty outfit.

Sissy is waiting on the porch of the old house where she works teaching women to learn English, read, cook good food for their children, to take care of their bodies, temples of the Lord. That’s what Father Rooney calls them, not women with breasts or heavy butts. She’s not laughing, not really, when he turns away from a mother breast-feeding her child. Pat says he’s a throwback to holy innocence, not even a priest of this time. Sissy calls it arrested development. Not a term allowed in the classroom. She is taking Human Growth and Development at the Community College, the emphasis on normal growth in the human life span, three credits. Holy Rooney is very old but like a child needs structure, the matins, what’s that? Evensong no longer remembered. Has needed the Church, a system outside the family, though he’s been her father, all she ever had. His life stage is nearing death. It is stupid to think of people that way, like a chapter in a book. Turn the page. What’s her life stage, trapped twenties, living with her wall-eyed mother who flashes the credit card at Sears, with the crybaby and biker brother in trouble again, and caring for kids at Mercy parked in the playroom while their mothers punch the keyboard—ay, linda, they call her—switching off with a volunteer, guiding achievers through Microsoft Excel. This morning Sissy should be reading the dynamics of conformity, stupid stuff—how we follow the leader like mice in the Pied Piper story. But then she may not be going to class tonight to discuss how we all kiss ass to whatever’s going down. It’s a special day, very, with Miss Montour coming and Father Rooney’s last visit to Mercy. He will be somewhere nearby where old priests live together doing their thing, praying and watching the Red Sox win the pennant in a replay from heaven. He’s skinny now, like the air’s been let out of his body. For a while he has not been all here, forgetting her name, his car keys, and why he has come to the front hall of the house where photos of Spanish families and black women in graduation gear hang on the wall. He is now driven by a parishioner to visit Mercy, where he taps the heads of the children and slowly flips through the easy books the women are reading, like they were written in a language he never learned.

At last a car turns in to the circular driveway, a silver SUV. Miss M calls out to Pat and to the women who have come onto the porch waiting with Sissy for their patron’s arrival, the staff eager to thank her, the students to show off their children, their skills. The man with her is reality handsome with a shadow beard like he’s on vacation, jeans poured tight on slim thighs. Laughing as he comes round to hand Miss Montour down from his car. So what’s funny? The flock of women with an old priest propped on his cane? Someone back at the rectory has got Father in full clerical dress-up. Miss Montour, call me Marie, goes first to Pat Laughlin with the peck on the cheek, then to Sissy, kissing, ruffling her bright hair. Miss M’s different from before, gray at the roots, her face stiff, unsmiling. The death of her husband chills the Autumn air. To the north, clouds threaten Mount Grey-lock. The widow turns to the leafless tree, her maple you would think here from the beginning, at least from when her family built the house. Not so; at great expense she had it planted full grown when she restored what was left of the grounds, turned the house into Mercy. Father Rooney has lost track of his mission. Just as well, the dear departed who married Marie Claude Montour worshipped at the altar of World Food and clean water, had no use for his prayer. Without Father’s blessing, the tour begins of the nursery, study rooms. Lights in the computer lab blink for attention.

So they say, her flip answer a conscious decision. Initial care to be taken: the dynamics of attraction must not be put into play. They have made it up three flights to the tower with overnight bags, just Sissy and the man who’s not Miss M’s son.

Heard about you, he says, expecting an answer.

With a slow burn of a smile, he takes in every inch of the girl, tousled bright hair to new sneakers scuffing nervously at the carpet. Longing to go back to her duties, to the safety of the lunchroom with the special treat of pizza or mac and cheese, both if you feel the need. And why would he care for Pat Laughlin’s report—four Colombian women have passed high-school equivalency, or flu shots once again free. The silent auction beyond expectation. There would be talk of an elevator to the tower. Sissy would like to be there, do her take on Pat puffing upstairs.

The house set on fire, he asks, where was it? He stands at the curved window of the tower looking down on the old public school with boarded windows.

Other way. So now they are facing the strip mall, only the bakery and thrift shop still open, nail salon come and gone. The house set on fire, will she ever hear the end of that story? It is now Miss M’s to tell and tell again, how, as an angry girl, she ran through the woods and there was this little child in a cottage with golden hair. Now this guy knows it, so thinks he knows Sissy, the angel baby of that tale. Well, the middle is left out, no-show father, dead flesh of the burn on her shoulder, making out with her body in New York, the loco parentis who fostered her. What she remembers of two years in Springfield, cleaning their loveless house, swiping their moldy tub with Clorox, closing her door against the clattering Wheel of Fortune, the siren screech of ER, then being ordered to close her book, turn off her light, so costly. Approaching eighteen, she was allowed to come home, home to her mother who could not look her straight in the eye.

She thinks to say the little house where she lived with her family, the house that went up in flames, is now the ramp where a cop car cruises to the bypass, bypass to highway. She says, It’s safe here for the women and the kids. Some come on buses.

Yeah, I know. He knows who pays for that service and that Marie Claude has looked into the price of an elevator. Glad he’s made the trip up here. It had always seemed improbable, a house by this name. Sorry his wife did not come.

Hey, she was invited. Six months down the road, going to have a baby, so.

So? Felice Martinez comes down from Lanesborough in her dinged Toyota with twins in her belly, every day writes down new English words, but why would Sissy, an angel, want to say that? She hands over Pat Laughlin’s best towels and lavender soap, how after the long drive he might want to wash up.

He catches her going down from the tower. Their hands touch on the newel post, withdraw in a swift avoidance of flirtation. Lunch is followed by Pat in her best classroom manner leading preschoolers through deer, a female deer, much rehearsed. Their high voices fill the front hall with a desperate cheer, a faltering then recovery of doe, a deer, the audience joining in. Cupcakes are passed round by two elderly volunteers helping out before heading for points West or South to avoid Winter.

I am a teacher, Miss M begins, makes that point each time she comes, that she instructs her mixed bag of students at a school much like the schools the successful graduates of Mercy, and so forth. It is not quite true, but they love her for speaking of their progress, urging them to take their place in the community, take pride in their economic self-sufficiency and so forth. The late Dr. Gruen’s death is finally mentioned, just a note of thank-you by his widow for their condolences. Though the duties of his professional life prevented him from witnessing the students’ achievements, his heart was always, and so forth, until a catch in Miss Montour’s voice cuts short her usual pep rally for the learning season to come.

Ned, I’m Ned, takes over. Prime-time slick and easy in his role of we’re in this together, how he’d never been much for the books as a kid but now values. . . . Sissy thinks what a crock: now he values, and clueless besides, as if these women were ever given a choice to value more than a few pesos in their pockets, and goes on to his remarkable father’s reach to the ailing world, and of family too good to be true, then falters. He is one of three men in the gracious entry hall of Mercy: Ned, Father Rooney who’s nodded off in a high-back chair of time past, and a handyman, plumber’s wrench at the ready. I’m Ned shuffles up a few stairs, and of course he’s a charmer, his sappy embrace of Pat Laughlin, then scooping the kid in a wheelchair into his arms. Guapo, guapo. More than Sissy can take, and she pokes the good Father, hustles him fast out the door. No formal farewell was planned. What is it she wants? Not to let Father mess up his final blessing. These people come up from the city don’t know him as the parish priest who never outgrew his belief or life stage of plain kindness.

A story told to Hans Gruen, her husband, who then spoke to her of the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob, how they had gathered tales mostly from one woman of Kassel with an amazing memory. That was before the philologists got hold of folklore, he said, cutting off the brutal end of his wife’s tale. The police had found her sleeping that night in the cottage and taken her back to the maiden aunts. Sissy and family then evicted, but not before candles caught the curtains, the father stinking of drink and kerosene, sirens in the night. Mrs. Gruen, née Montour, had not said in her remarks today that her prince did come, just once to the tower. That’s a motif, for heaven sake; she might put it that way to her class or to Sissy, now in college. Hans drove up the Taconic, found his way to the old house she inherited just as she was about, about to kiss the young lawyer handling the estate which is now Mercy. Not today or any day ever did she tell that part of the story, though when rescued, she married Hans and they were contented and happy, of course. Though her husband, ever the economist, said Grimm’s Fairy Tales was first published during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, when fantasy didn’t sell, that footnote of history, as so often, diminishing the personal story.

Ned and Sissy are drinking the bottle of wine meant to go with supper. Pat Laughlin, exhausted by the day’s festivities, had ordered in roast chicken. She is preparing, overpreparing, for a meeting of the board: a local builder, librarian, school principal. Hans called them doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. So Ned is pouring the cheap Chardonnay in the dusk of a chill evening. He pulls off Sissy’s red cap, roughs up her hair. Marie Claude looks away to a scattering of early stars, attempts to spot Venus. The show below her window is more compelling. They are laughing, their movements caught in the network of bare limbs. Lights turned on, both driveway and front porch on a timer. Day and night the old house is connected to the fire station, the precinct. It’s safe at the house of learning. Now they get up and come forward, as if onstage, her stepson and the young woman, Sissy. Their kiss is prolonged. She caresses his beard, then gives in to the scrape of it. Marie, call me Marie, remembers their need. Believes nothing will come of it. They drive off in the SUV borrowed for this trip from his brother, Hans Gruen’s reliable son. In the backseat a soccer ball, skateboard, a book she meant to read tonight, Billy Budd, attempting to lay that war story on her class in Jersey City. She fears that the students will favor Claggart, the mean master-at-arms, not Billy, the Handsome Sailor, too good to be true. Favor is not the right word, not a possible response to a complex moral story, not even to a fireside tale of the scholarly Brothers Grimm.

She has looked on their need, watched the instant lovers drive off. Now it is full night. The security lights of the old house do not banish the stars.

He recalled the questions she’d posted early in the Fall—Where were you when?—and discovered she had started that parlor game again.

He read on in the posthumous file, calling it that only to himself. She was no longer here to correct him, to say she was wired as she wrote her last days, fully alive as she spritzed the terrarium, the little kids caught up in the season, writing to Santa. Kate, in newly acquired script, had her doubts about Prancer and Vixen stomping the roof on 90th Street. A whiff of Pascal’s Wager here—believe it, girl, you’ve nothing to lose: Please drop by with my first cell phone ever. Finding her way into last thoughts, perhaps believing they were passing thoughts, she directed a note his way: Nick likes hermit crabs, the pet store on Broadway. A turtle less boring. Check the house in the Berks for mice. Exterminator in Pittsfield—New Age kills with kindness.

If I’d taken a cab, it would not have been to Macy’s. I’d have left the Christmas tree gala in the lobby, given my destination as Fifth and 72nd, overtipped my Muslim driver, ’tis the season, then found my way past the empty arc of band shell, a few chairs loitering long after a show; walked the length of the Mall past poets great and small, the arching beauty of the leafless elms etching the leaden sky. After the dog walker with assorted breeds, after the lovers—brave couple on this single-digit day, their down jackets in a slithery embrace, I would come at last to the bridge overlooking the Terrace where one baby stroller bounced up the broad steps, the mother’s up-we-go, up-we-go ditty vaporizing in cold air while down I’d go, faltering yes, down past Jacob Mould’s birds carved in a marble nest, his fruits of Fall, each season noted by our maiden lady poetess, Marianne Moore, “Autumn a leaf rustles. We talk of peace. This is it. One notices that the angel hovering over the pool is really hovering, not touching the water.” Why is Miss Moore not here? Memorialized in her tricorn and cape.

The Angel of the Waters is well draped and girded. Perhaps when not healing the lame, halt, or head cold, a troubling thought may occur. Unlike Magdalene and Cassandra—her myth may have outlived its time. Energetic flow of bronze gown, an athletic girl, sturdy bare calf thrust forward, a goalie protecting us all. I’d have the Angel to myself in the abandoned living room of the Terrace. There is no one about, no gentle young man just arrived in this place called Bethesda—recognizable fellow with a clipped beard, eyes burning bright, who asks: Do you want to be cured?

I’ve come to the healing waters without my cup.

The actress and the landscape-architect-come-lately perform for each other. Little Miss Stebbins is flustered by the might of these two. She’s in a romantic friendship with Cushman, turbulent waters. They live an arty life in Rome with women free of American decorum. They have come back to New York for this grand balabusta with the mug of a pit bull to enchant Broadway. The actress “plays the breeches” as Romeo, as Hamlet, though keeps her nightdress on to rage as the bloodiest of all Lady Macbeths. Whether I can bear to imagine Cushman’s elocution ary delivery of great tragedy is beside the point of her stunning career. Her breast cancer harbored both pain and the lovely angel for our Park. Emma nursed her lover through slow agony, following Miss Cushman from engagement to engagement, all triumphal, not attending to her own considerable talent. The maquette of an angel stowed away in her heart, the tribute she would create for Charlotte.

If I’d taken a cab, I’d have found my way to The Angel of the Waters, not working that day, idly dripping icicles from her wings. Baby, Baby—pity the naked cherubs in her pool.

I’d snap off a sharp dagger of ice. Verily, verily, the waters melt in my mouth.

The fragment seemed to him story enough. She had gone back to her Park puzzle, not to forget Emma. Hard to decode his wife’s handwriting, ink on yellow pad as if tracking back—before the old Remington, upgrade to Olivetti, before her anxious love affair with Windows. Where are you now?

When he bought the cell phone, he said, Black will do to the clerk promoting pink. Those first days, he heard his wife having the last word, the last laugh. Then the silence of his sorrow was heavy as stone, as the dark outcropping she had scaled that day in the Park to feel the height and weight of the place unknown, a semblance of wilderness plotted by Olmsted and Vaux. She should not have awarded herself the pleasure of that final misadventure. In the North Woods, there was a sign posted on the lone circle of lawn: PASSIVE ACTIVITIES ENCOURAGED.

She had been fine till the end of her adventure, until the slippery steps led down to Duke Ellington Boulevard.

He had not remembered. The entrance to the Park above 96th Street is called Stranger’s Gate.

She had fallen, been vetted by the doctor, no hemorrhage; an appointment set up for a look-see at a troublesome artery. He’d brought her home from the cardiac center in a cab, of course, tucked an afghan around her as she lay on the couch. She threw it off to go down the hall, back to her workroom.

Of course she had remembered when the Loop the Loop plane did its trick before the key was lost; when the corn-husk doll wore a Mammy turban; when Pinhead, Beano and Buster (the dog) stood their ground as the red rubber ball came their way in a bowling game pre-Disney. Always such elation in her display of the tin trolley, the inevitable story: how her grandfather, aloft in his Locomobile, directed his workmen ripping out the trolley tracks on Main Street, making way for the future.

I opt for the tree, he said to the children. Bring on the clowns, her tightrope walker, the dancing bear. One cymbal missing. He left them to their grief, having discovered soon—too soon—that sorrow came over him solo, could only partially be shared. He stood at the door of her back room, Stranger’s Gate indeed. Only days ago he had pushed the towers of discarded books out of her way. She had fallen on her way home from the Park, above 96th Street, forbidden ground. He opened a manila folder on her desk. She would have noted his hands trembling as he adjusted his glasses to read an article from Science Times. It seems the universe is expanding. He could not follow why dark matter doomed the theory of everything. Why we need new laws of nature. If you can’t do the numbers, must we take it on faith? What use would she make of this prediction, which was surely beyond her? Science for the general reader, nothing to do with the Park. He thumbed through what had seemed an unmanageable mess of clippings, photos, postcards, her scrawl in notebooks half empty, half full. She had called this room her estate of confusion. In days to come, he would figure that the accumulation seemed to have a method, even a message, if he could decode it. But now Christmas was immediate, inevitable. When he flipped through her calendar, each day of the countdown was leavened with predictable pleasures—the kids’ pageant (apron for Mrs. Cratchit), her baking duties: Glo’s biscotti, bread pudding laden with rum. Family Not Invited to his office party, the firm cutting costs. Lightly penciled in, the midnight Mass at St. Greg’s. Every year she hedged her bets. Should she sign on as a Christmas-carol believer?

Not this year, though she had posted an e-mail from Cleo, her brother’s scholarly wife. St. Anselm’s Argument, right over her desk with the gallery of ghosts she believes in.

She insisted on singing O holy night . . .

He places Mary and the Babe into position on the front hall table. The familiar story comes to mind, how her mother modeled these clay figures attended by chubby angels with broken wings, glazed them, fired them in a mail-order kiln installed in the cellar. Yet another attempt at art. Well art they are, for over the years he’s noted the mystery of the crackled patina, the expression of wonder on the Madonna’s face, the concealing folds of her veil. A lone shepherd held a staff in his hand, but no Wise Men, no Joseph. The crèche was incomplete, or her mother’s belief in the project waned. The stable insufficiently rustic, at which point the artist’s daughter might hold out her glass for a refill, her Christmas Eve pleasure in the neighborhood choir at St. Gregory’s forgotten or forgone. Faith put on hold by the very woman who wrote ahead in her Daybook an almanac posting: Winter Solstice, December 22, 2007, 1:08 AM, True. Sagittarians prefer the journey to the arrival. Unreliable.

To write ahead, what could that mean? Then a query, a one-liner on the lined page: Where were you on the Eighth Day?

He discovered that these lines had been read out to her brother when our President, playing do-si-do with Russia, proposed once again our antinuke missiles—useless, obsolete—be stuck in Czech soil. Had he not noted, back on the day the Supreme Court said OK to listening in, scanning our e-mails, that her rage petered out? No place to go with a thin bleat of complaint. Let a borrowed poem say it. Let the Park flourish day by passing day—with never enough stories. She had scratched fury, turned to old recipes for comforts of the season, linzer torte and strudel. Turned back in time to when they were first together, proving herself in the kitchen, having proved themselves in bed. And here was the famous shot of Olmsted, the only man he was ever jealous of, rather a stern young fellow in a seaman’s cap, primed to create a world. Well, the photo was famous to her family along with the old prints—Pierrot and Columbine, pantomime lovers in their kiss and make up routine—with her circus folk in the dining room performing their breathtaking feats, showing off for the devout maiden of The Angelus.

He opened the FedEx from Macy’s. On her last day, she had found time for his gift, a sweater more plum than red. It zips with ease, though his hand quivers each time he puts it on. Soon that will pass. He will simply enjoy its cashmere embrace as he looks down this day at Short Readings for Dr. Shah—Cather’s The Old Beauty, Beckett’s Company, Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. That’s the list she boldly crossed out. Perhaps not missing the point, though he had lived with her a lifetime, perhaps was not the right word. The point being each one of the readings was about death, immobility, angry old age, not stories for the charming young doctor who had little time to read in emergency, attending to probable death every day. The list was appropriate to herself, to finding her way out of this room with a voice not yet silenced.

Contrary, my father called me, wishing I’d fall for Happy or Doc, not the Prince that’s for sure. Perhaps Disney. He admired conservative gents who made money within the limits of the law.

Our Scene neither animation nor tragedy:

The drama of the day was not my taking the bus in the right direction to confront at last what I’d seen in many photos of the Park, and read of in Olmsted’s papers. My venture was personal. What lies above 96th Street? The question you never would answer.

A wilderness for dangerous games. Well, for city boys pretending to danger, or simply for the thrill of knowing you should not be far from your East Side home scaling these rocks with the janitor’s boy who’d steal a kid’s lunch box, threatened frail old women till they dealt out a dollar. Did you look on from a moral height? We all have need of a Bimbo to take the rap as we watch from a safe distance.

I was no sooner out of the bus, halfway up the steep steps, so many, when I understood I’d come not to discover the dangers of your boyhood revelations so edited they might have been printed in Boys’ Life, which my brother subscribed to, stories of good-family kids escorted from the crime scene having learned their lesson.

Halfway up the steps, bare branches glistened with ice-palace glamour. Three-thirty. I had studied the map, knew my way to the circle of lawn frosted over. Worth the climb to see in the distance the Harlem Meer, saved that for another day. I turned at once to the trail leading down to the Pool. Thought I knew the route from maps and picture books, and the stone outcropping from our scrambles up Monument Mountain. The path was lonely as promised, until the open view of the wildflower meadow mowed low for the season; and there was Vaux’s charming rustic bridge over the silent stream, the dark rocks in the distance walling me from the city. I might have been where the architects wanted to place me in their pictorial semblance of wilderness—the Adirondacks, or the heights overlooking the Hudson. I stumbled—a tree root but did not fall. You see, you must see, this was not an escapist journey. It led me far beyond a disclosure of the guarded stories of your nefarious past. What struck me when I found a place to rest, was the reality of the landscap ers’ contrivance, not the contrivance of reality. It seemed a challenge to nature or God, whichever way you’ll have it. The sun made a mirror of the water. I went close to see the clouds float by at my feet but did not see myself, nor did I want to. Nor, nor—quaint diction. There could be no charm in seeing myself. Reflection being in the mind, it came easy, remembering my way back to when I first read Walden.

She had lost herself in the Park. It was The History of the World all over again, arranging events as she wanted them to be.

Mercy is sought for my solo flights in the workroom; and the consequent break of unity in my design—that’s Mrs. Woolf who confessed to a childlike trust in her husband, while we have been sparring. Mercy on me, RC.

A listing of American military deaths on Nov. 8 misidentified the country in which Sgt. First Class Johnny C. Walls was killed. It was Afghanistan, not Iraq.

I took your semaphore out to put under the tree with our old toys. Meddling, I dusted it, now the caution arm flops, won’t give its warning of the possible train wreck down the line. Bread pudding—3 eggs, 5 egg yolks, heavy cream—is lethal. I presume you still crave your holiday helping unless otherwise directed. In my recipe files I came across fragments written back when I was into the notion that time bends. My intention had nothing to do with fast trains and synchronized clocks. Three dimensions are all I can handle. Though a math teacher had a walk-on, all I intended was the leap forward, the years flipping by like calendar pages: not where were you when we sang—We will all go together when we go? Where are you now? The more difficult question. I must have set these butter-stained pages aside as I measured out sugar and cream, not knowing the answer. Our mother taught trigonometry, which you mastered, though it was art that she favored, and craft. I suppose I can figure why I’ve stayed up half the night to finish this story of an artist—stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, God, I loved Travolta in that movie; and why I’m sending the story to you. Time having flipped ahead. I don’t intend a tearjerker. Dickens sure pulled out the stops with those Christmas Books.

On an easel, Louise Moffett seems to have been copying the Poussin The apparatus of her craft—paint, turpentine, brushes—are displayed on a table nearby. They may be for real or props. Perhaps the copy will always remain half done, those two figures arguing, stuck in their best moment. Mealy or tart; what were apples like back then, or for that matter in 1662? Looking back to postcards posted on canvas, The Ruins of San Francisco City Hall (1906), the gilt dome intact as well as the classical columns at its base. Only the center did not hold. The stretched canvas that displays the postcards is painted black. A big bulletin board, that’s all it appears to be.

Louise wears a painter’s smock, a thrift-shop treasure. You recall the floppy garments worn so as not to soil the artists’ clothes in the atelier photos of Matisse, Mary Cassatt, et al. She places a wooden palette with dabs of color—some right from the tube, some mixed—on the table, runs her hand over soft sable brushes. The smell of oil paint, a thrill. Deep breathe it. She is a good looker heading toward middle years, her gray hair dusted with leftover gold. Winsome? That may be the word, as though something she once cared for has gone by and she wonders. . . . A sweet wince of a smile as she pins St. Catherine of Siena Dictating Her Dialogues (Giovanni di Paolo, 1460?) to the canvas. One more postcard may be the answer for this particular day.

The studio is an outbuilding, a quarter mile up a path from the white clap-board house where she lives with her family. Her husband is home today, caring for Maisy, down with her third cold of the season. Cyril has gone off on the school bus, no sweater, a ripped T-shirt proving he’s cool. Everything now arranged. North light filters through bare branches of maples. Her studio with a sliding glass door may have been a small barn. Canvases are properly stacked in a loft above, temperature control softly humming, kettle on the boil, tidy kitchenette in a cubby once a stall. Louise, raised on a farm, knows it’s too narrow for horses, perhaps goats for their milk, for cheese. Exactly eleven o’clock when the curator arrives. He has been told to follow the path back, a bit bumpy in this first November freeze. Louise has not expected the driver. Will he come in with Blodgette, who is to look over her new work for a show? She’s expected a tête-à tête. Blodge, still in the black BMW with New York T plates, looks to the driver, taps his watch briefly as if to say he’ll not be long. Through the shingle side of the studio, she hears the blast of music—salsa, Afro-Cuban? No way Blodgette’s choice.

Now, bussing her, one cheek then the other.

The world he brings with him is of this moment, apparent in lightly streaked hair, two-day beard. Torn jeans sport their patch like a price tag. The black leather jacket, silky soft, seems live as she takes his arm, faces him toward the postcards on display. It’s been some years since she’s seen Blodge in the city, at openings, or at the museum properly suited for the trustees. To be fair, they are both costumed. They now stand side by side, Louise in that artist’s smock over black turtleneck and L.L. Bean cords, wool socks, leather sandals. Her glasses, thick lenses, hang round her neck from a chain mended with twisties, at the ready in case, just in case she does not see the aerial view (6” × 4½“) to be Wells Cathedral, or that the bombed church (Moselle, France) with the big clock face standing in rubble (Paul Strand, 1950) reads 9:35. Time of the blast?

Blodge will have tea. No milk, no sugar.

But when steeped, poured into their mugs, the smoky fragrance mingling with the oils and turp is faintly nauseating. The music blasts its way in from the car. Like street music, do what you will, no way to silence the din, as in the city on Lower Broadway where Louise Moffett worked in her loft, mid- to late nineties. Blodge takes in the current scene. In this barn she has set up a diorama—his term, calling it that, arms spread in an expansive gesture—her postcards on canvas, tools of the painter’s trade abandoned? Half-executed copies, her Poussin missing its tiny human figures; St. Catherine delivering her dialogues to an inkpot. No scribe. Louise has set her postcard next to the frozen moment of the original. Moffett’s men: Duchamp without chessboard; John James Audubon birdless, eyes scummed with cataracts in his demented old age.

Christopher Blodgette leans in, examines the background, the canvas itself (4’ × 6’), size of a throw rug.

Louise on the defensive, laughing. It’s not black-black, not a shroud, don’t you see? More organic, like soil composted with manure. Now why talk country to this creature of the city?

She bridles at his untranslatable instruction, or (more likely) at his deep misreading of her work past and present. He goes on about her continuing vitality as though she must be propped up to carry on beyond time allotted. Music now pulsing, Pearl Jam or maybe Nirvana. Once she could have called: Teen Spirit. Louise claps her hands over her ears.

Blodge raps on the glass door. Keep it down. They watch in the blessed silence as his driver jogs round the car pursuing his puffs of cold air, then stretches against the hood.

Back to Blodgette’s curatorial business. Truly amazing, the random collection. Great work so diminished. Then rescued with the investment of your documentation.

He takes up a small drawing, size of a postcard, Washington Crossing the Delaware. In Moffett’s rendering, only the prow and founding father are sketched in. The rest of the crew still awash in the cold river?

She takes that as a cut. Since when did dusty old draftsmanship figure in his vocabulary? Since he learned to please old ladies with money, partner them at benefits, Park Avenue dinners. Louise remembers Blodgette just down from Cambridge with the proper degrees, a lanky boy scarfing the hors d’oeuvres at every opening, gobbling art world in one viewing. Fond of him, she had so looked forward to this day. They’d been friends on the rise, not close but of an age. Once they stayed up all night in her shoe-box apartment, pre-loft, drinking jug wine, last of the easy tokers, that’s how she remembers it, Coltrane on a Summer night, pressing PLAY again and again, the window thrown open to the noise of revelry below. They had no interest in each other, not really. Discreet fondling, sex consumed by their dreaminess, or was it ambition? She was ahead of the game, her first postcards so carefully observed and painted, photographic in detail. Small sightings of where she came from—dairy farm in Wisconsin, the landscape of memory mocked, distorted as memory will have it.

Now the sky performs one of its tricks, quick clouds moving in. Louise gets a glimpse of herself in the glass door: the weight she’s put on, the uncontrollable blink of her tired eyes while Blodge drinks the dregs of his tea as though sipping an elixir from the fountain of youth, a rather crusty cosmeticized youth, still. . . . And the show he proposes is a group show, planning stages. Louise has missed a beat in his e-mail request for the studio visit. Retro: had he not made that clear? Artists of the Nineties, Eighties if we can look back that far. He runs through a list of possible survivors, Moffett’s pulled through. She must suck that hard candy as a compliment.

He speaks of the return to her strong suit, narrative, then pops Spiral Staircase, Statue of Liberty off the canvas for a closer look. Two boys and a man who might be their father are trapped in the belly of this cast-iron symbol, climbing toward the deleted torch as Blodge reads it. The visit dwindles to gossip, past the demise of po-mo to talk of the art market, holding despite . . .

Christopher? Her voice barely audible. We’ll have lunch up at the house.

Lou-Lou, I must take a pass. On the road to New Haven, chat up the folks at the Mellon. . . . They are distracted by the driver huffing and puffing at the glass door. He sweeps his hands toward the heavens, protests snow gently falling. He is a large, untidy boy. His sad moon face begs his release.

When they are gone—Bing and Blodge, really!—she reposts Spiral Staircase: unlovely industrial green, the great weight propping Miss Liberty—that’s all she meant, if she meant anything at all. She wraps a shawl round her smock, begins the walk back up to the house.

Artie will ask. How’d it go?

Her husband never got the hang of these visits. In his world of mathematics, things mostly work. If they don’t, go figure. He understands her anxiety. Lou no longer courts, perhaps fears exposure. It’s not unlike . . . but there his comparison ends. Math is most often content with its equal signs, unlike art’s uncertain proof of the pudding. Today she tells Artie that the visit was something like a courtesy call.

Best keep it to herself, the group show with golden oldies. Blodgette’s response to her installation—she will call it Last Mailing—was inattentive, rambling at best. He had not opened the book right there on the table, a ledger with a worn marbleized cover. On its pages lined for debit or credit, she had written messages for each postcard mounted, and for those stacked, which he did not shuffle through. On the path home, Louise experiences not anger, just the melancholy of solo flight often felt when she’s working. Her ledger has no narrative at all; jottings, no story. She kicks a stone aside with the artsy sandals; now she will have a sore toe. Bing, huffing and puffing, or his friend the curator who had not been curious about her new work, just dropped by, pumping her studio full of hot air. Her bitter thought: He must call his exhibit “Old Masters,” not her way of thinking at all, but it lightens her way to the house, where a child is sick and needs her attention. A dusting of snow in the tire ruts is already melting away.

Then, too, a flock of red-winged blackbirds flitter across her path, birds now seen too often in the marsh encroaching on the Freemans’ land. Birds that should be out of season. For a moment she longs for Central Park with its spectacular migration, that rectangular plot with less acreage than her father’s megadairy. Or, on this last lap of her journey, did she long for a girl with a neat ponytail who flagged down a bus early, before milking? It stopped by the side of the road, picked her up with one suitcase and a portfolio of drawings to show the world. The bright image of that girl long abandoned, only the looming shadow in which she might see herself, sharp as a silhouette with all the forgiving details gone.

Should have said? The old chestnut of regret.

Open the book. You see, it’s people I’ll never meet, greetings from where I’ve never been, but where I might like to go. To Marienbad (1923), pink clouds over the Grand Hotel. Allegory of the Planets and Continents, Tiepolo (1770-96). Open the book, Blodge: 0 through 9, Jasper Johns (1960), the artist’s numbers consuming each other in a magician’s scribble. That’s for Artie, my math husband, who will love my Cobb salad, Bibb lettuce scooping still-life goodies presented on an Italian platter (Deruta, 2003). You might say an inspired show curated for Christopher Blodgette with a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau in season.

What’s this? Tablecloth, weird gourds in a basket. He slings down his backpack.

No thank you. Pepperoni pizza at school, it being Zig’s birthday. Cyril is ten, a scrawny kid, red hair courtesy of a grandmother long gone, owl glasses, wry smile as though he knows what’s up. Maybe he does. Shivering in a T-shirt though he will never admit it. Good boy, he asks after his sister. Maisy is watching, is allowed to watch a cartoon. Odd about his parents drinking wine middle of the day, like they were practicing for Christmas when the whole dairy-land crew comes from Wisconsin. General talk of the weekend, last soccer match at the high school where afreeman.edu teaches. His father is pals with advanced nerds, writes their language. His mother offers cumulus clouds on a soupy pudding.

It is awfully quiet. Only Maisy’s cough, now persistent, finds its way to where they sit at the round table with candles unlit and bread crumbs. Louise runs for the stairs, turns back to her boy.

Run down to the barn. Not calling it my studio. Latch the door. Pleading as though urgent, Please put on your sweatshirt. Do it. She never does lock up. There have been no incidents. Moffett’s barn is safe as houses. But today there has been an intrusion. And who knows? In the bluster of this cold wind, could be her postcards will scatter.

He opens the book. His mother’s swirling cursive, the way she writes notes to Maisy’s teacher, even the list of stuff she needs at the store. He reads, but only pieces that go with the pictures he likes.

Cyril flips pages but stops where his mother draws a little nest of numbers. He’s good at math, even at this early age can deal with negative numbers. His mother has written: Artie likes teaching his students to see the beauty of shapes and numbers. At night he is often content with his mathematical journals, or so I believe. Must believe he has survived his youthful promise. I do know I will never balance this book of my magpie collecting and spending. No final answer.

Well, that’s his mother, loopy. He closes the ledger, suddenly shy as any child should be, embarrassed by the note about his father. He shuffles the stack of postcards, comes up with a smiling lady. Her plump body takes up most of the foreground. It’s hard to see the sheep, cows, and men working. Mrs. Heelis on Her Farm (Beatrix Potter, watercolor, D. Banner). It’s sunny, so why the shawl and umbrella? She holds a quill pen in her hand. Cyril remembers when he was little, liking her stories. He takes a thumbtack, pins Mrs. Heelis right up there on the canvas, between paradise and earthly destruction.

He would keep the terrarium sweating for its unnatural life. Someday in the future, he might show them a book with Magic Marker slashing down the pages; and the printout of her revision. They must know she never got the love story right, said perhaps it was not meant to be a love story at all.

He would walk with them to the Park, to the empty slope that was Seneca Village, or, in a pleasant season view the Pool and wilderness where she climbed slippery rocks though did not fall to her death. Her end was delayed mysteriously, a stunt of the body. Question is, why did she scale the heights? To see beyond her limited view of the Park and the brazen towers of El Dorado. He might say, Come along, let’s look at the mural in the lobby where golden skyscrapers are sketched in, phantoms set beyond the horizon line, the dim arena of the future raised above the fantasy life below. Do you think she preferred to stay in the foreground? Costumed, up for the performance?

They might ask, What’s that box?

If it can be imagined, RC. She was so far beyond me, that Austrian student stroking the cross buried in the throbbing pit of her neck. Schande, the shame was all mine.

Then RC on an illustration scanned from Willy Pogany’s Parsifal, the young knight having discovered the Grail. Finding the initials again and again, he believes she was back to figuring herself at the starting line in a parochial school with a crucifix over the blackboard, which had always made him uncomfortable. A secular Jew, her wager with the gods was improbable to him. Then RC on a turned-down page in the biography of Oppenheimer who—he is pleased to discover—studied the rock formation in Central Park when he was twelve. The mystery cleared up with the disappointing annual report of The El Dorado Gold Corporation: Reality Check says it’s old news. That was her pet name for him when they were first together. He did not mind it, Reality Check—not then, not now—but minded that he had failed, for a moment, to understand she was only attempting to square the circle, to give heaven its due.