Galilee

PART THREE. An Expensive Life

You remember Rachel Pallenberg? I spoke about her briefly several chapters back, when I was figuratively wringing my hands about whose story I was first going to tell. I described her driving around her hometown of Dansky, Ohio-which lies between Marion and Shanck, close to Mount Gilead. Unpretentious would be a kind description of the town; banal perhaps truer. If it once had some particular charm, that charm's gone, demolished to make room for the great American ubiquities: cheap hamburger places, cheap liquor places, a market for soda that impersonates more expensive soda and cheese that impersonates milk product. By night the gas station's the brightest spot in town.

Here, Rachel was raised until she was seventeen. The streets should be familiar to her. But she's lost. Though she recognizes much of what she sees-the school where she passed several miserable years still stands, as does the church, where her father Hank (who was always more devout than her mother) brought her every Sunday, the bank where Hank Pallenberg worked until his sickness and early demise-all of these she sees and recognizes; and still she's lost. This isn't home. But then neither is the place she left to drive here; the exquisite apartment overlooking Central Park where she's lived in the bosom of wealth and luxury, married to the man of countless women's dreams: Mitchell Geary.

Rachel doesn't regret leaving Dansky. It was a claustrophobic life she lived here: dull and repetitive. And the future had looked grim. Single women in Dansky didn't break their hearts trying for very much. Marriage was what they wanted, and if their husbands were reasonably sober two or three nights a week and their children were bom with all their limbs, then they counted themselves lucky, and dug in for a long decline.

That was not what Rachel had in mind for herself. She'd left Dansky two days after her seventeenth birthday without giving it so much as a backward glance. There was another life out there, which she'd seen in magazines and on the television screen: a life of possibilities, a movie-star life, a life she was determined to have for herself. She wasn't the only seventeen-year-old girl in America who nurtures such hopes, of course. Nor am I the first person to be recounting in print how she made that dream a reality. I have here beside me four books and a stack of magazines-the contents of most of which don't merit the word reportage-all of which talk in often unruly metaphor about the rise and rise of Rachel Pallenberg. I will do my best here to avoid the excess and stick to the facts, but the story-which is so very much like a fairy tale-would tempt a literary ascetic, as you'll see. The beautiful, dark-eyed girl from Dansky, with nothing to distinguish her from the common herd but her dazzling smile and her easy charm, finds herself, by chance, in the company of the most eligible bachelor in America, and catches his eye. The rest is not yet history; history requires a certain closure, and this story's still in motion. But it is certainly something remarkable.

How did it come about? That part, at least, is very simple to tell.

Rachel left Dansky planning to begin her new life in Cincinnati, where her mother's sister lived. There she went, and there, for about two years, she stayed. She had a brief but inglorious stint training to be a dental technician, then spent several months working as a waitress. She was liked, though not loved. Some of her fellow workers apparently considered her a little too ambitious for her own good; she was one of those people who didn't mind voicing their aspirations, and that irritated those who were too afraid to do so for themselves, or simply had none. The manager of the restaurant, a fellow called Herbert Finney, remembers her differently from one interview to the next. Was she "a hardworking, rather quiet girl?" as he says to one interviewer, or "a bit of a troublemaker, fluting with the male customers, always looking to get something for herself?" as he tells another. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between. Certainly waitressing didn't suit her for very long; nor did Cincinnati. Twenty-one months after arriving there, in late August, she took a train east, to Boston. When she was later asked by some idiot magazine why she'd chosen that city, she'd replied that she'd heard the autumn months were pretty there. She found another waitressing job, and shared an apartment with two girls who were, like her, hew to the city. After two weeks she was taken on by an upscale jewelry store on Newbury Street, and there she worked through the fall-which was indeed beautiful, crisp and clean-until, on December 23rd, late in the afternoon, Christmas came visiting in the form of Mitchell Geary.

It began to snow that afternoon, somewhere around two, the first flurry coming as Rachel returned from lunch. The prediction for the rest of the day, and into the night, was worsening by the hour: a blizzard was on its way.

Business was slow; people were getting out of the city early, despite the fact that they could calculate the shopping hours left to Christmas morning on their fingers and toes. The manager of the store, a Mr. Erickson (a forty-year-old with the wan, weary elegance of a man half his age), was on the phone in the back office discussing with his boss the idea of closing up early, when a limo drew up outside and a young dark-haired man in a heavy coat, his collar pulled up, his eyes downcast as though he feared being recognized in the ten-yard journey from limo to store, strode to the door, stamped off the snow on the threshold and came in. Erickson was still in the back office, negotiating closing times. The other assistant, Noelle, was out fetching coffee. It fell to Rachel to serve the customer in the coat.

She knew who he was, of course. Who didn't? The classically handsome features-the chiseled cheekbones, the soulful eyes, the strong,.sensual mouth, the unruly hair-appeared on some magazine or other every month: Mitchell Monroe Geary was one of the most watched, debated, swooned-over men in America. And here he was, standing in front of Rachel with flakes of snow melting on his dark eyelashes.

What had happened then? Well, it had been a simple enough exchange. He'd come in, he explained, to look for a Christmas gift for his grandfather's wife, Loretta. Something with diamonds, he'd said. Then, with a little shake of his head: "She loves diamonds." Rachel showed him a selection of diamond pin brooches, hoping to God Erickson didn't come off the phone too soon, and that the line at the coffee shop was long enough to delay Noelle's return for a few minutes longer. Just to have the Geary prince to herself for a little while was all she asked.

He declared that he liked both the butterfly and the star. She took them from their black velvet pillows for him to examine more closely. What was her opinion, he asked. Mine? she said. Yes, yours. Well, she said, surprised at how easy she found it to talk to him: if it's for your grandmother, then I think the butterfly's probably too romantic.

He'd looked straight at her, with a mischievous glint in his eyes. "How do you know I'm not passionately in love with my grandmother?" he'd said.

"If you were you wouldn't still be looking for someone," she'd replied, quick as silver.

"And what makes you think I am?"

Now it was she who smiled. "I read the magazines," she said.

"They never tell the truth," he replied. "I live the life of a monk. I swear." She said nothing to this, thinking she'd probably said far too much already: lost the sale, lost her job too, if Erickson had overheard the exchange. "I'll take the star," he said. "Thank you for the advice."

He made the purchase and left, taking his charm, his presence, and the glint in his eye away with him. She'd felt strangely cheated when he'd gone, as though he'd also taken something that belonged to her, absurd though that was. As he strode away from the store Noelle came in with the coffees.

"Was that who I think it was?" she said, her eyes wide.

Rachel nodded.

"He's even more gorgeous in the flesh, isn't he?" Noelle remarked. Rachel nodded. "You're drooling."

Rachel laughed. "He is handsome."

"Was he on his own?" Noelle said. She looked back out into the street as the limo was pulling away. "Was she with him?"

"Who's she?"

"Natasha Morley. The model. The anorexic one."

"They're all anorexic."

"They're not happy," Noelle remarked with unperturb-able certainty. "You can't be that thin and be happy."

"She wasn't with him. He was buying something for his grandmother."

"Oh that bitch," Noelle sniped. "The one who always dresses in white."

"Loretta."

"That's right. Loretta. She's his grandfather's second wife." Noelle was chatting as though the Geary family were next door neighbors. "I read something in People where they said she basically runs the family. Controls everybody."

"I can't imagine anybody controlling him," Rachel said, still staring out into the street.

"But wouldn't you love the opportunity?" Noelle replied.

Erickson appeared from the back office at this juncture, in a foul temper. Despite the rapidly worsening storm they had been instructed to keep the store open until eight-thirty. This was a minor reprieve: two days before Christmas they were usually open till ten at night, to catch what Erickson called "guilty spouse business." The more expensive the present, Erickson always said, the more acts of adultery the customer had committed during the preceding year. When in a particularly waspish mood, he wasn't above quoting a number as the door slammed.

So they dutifully stayed in the store, and the snow, as predicted, got worse. There was a smattering of business, but nothing substantial.

And then, just as Erickson was starting to take the displays out of the window for the night, a man came in with an envelope for Rachel.

"Mr. Geary says he's sorry, he didn't get your name," the messenger told her.

"My name's Rachel."

"I'll tell him. I'm his driver and his bodyguard, by the way. I'm Ralph."

"Hello, Ralph."

Ralph-who was six foot six if he was an inch, and looked as though he'd had a distinguished career as a punching bag-grinned. "Hello, Rachel," he said. "I'm pleased to meet you." He pulled off his leather glove and shook Rachel's hand. "Well, goodnight folks." He trudged back to the door. "Avoid the Tobin Bridge, by the way. There was a wreck and it's all snarled up."

Rachel had no wish to open the envelope in front of Noelle or Erickson, but nor could she stand the idea of waiting another nineteen minutes until the store was closed, and she was out on the street alone. So she opened it. Inside was a short, scrawled note from Mitchell Geary, inviting her to the Algonquin Club for drinks the following evening, which was Christmas Eve.

Three and a half weeks later, in a restaurant in New York, he gave her the diamond butterfly brooch, and told her he was falling in love.

This is as good a place as any to attempt a brief sketch of the Geary family. It's a long, long drop from the topmost branch, where Rachel Pallenberg was poised the moment she became the wife of Mitchell Geary, to the roots of the family; and those roots are buried so deep into the earth I'm not sure I'm quite ready to disinter them. So instead allow me to concern myself-at least for now-with that part of the family tree that's readily visible: the part that appears in the books about the rise and influence of the Geary engine.

It quickly becomes apparent, even in a casual skimming of these volumes, that for several generations the Gearys have behaved (and have been treated) like a form of American royalty. Like royalty, they've always acted as though they were above the common law; this in both their private and their corporate dealings. Over the years several members of the dynasty have behaved in ways that would have guaranteed incarceration if they hadn't been who they were: everything from driving in a highly intoxicated state to wife-beating. Like royalty, there has often been a grandeur to both their passions and to their failures which galvanized the rest of us, whose lives are by necessity confined. Even the people that they'd abused over the years-either in their personal lives or in their corporate machinations-were entranced by them; ready to forgive and forget if the gaze of the Gearys would only be turned their way again. And, like royalty, they had their feet in blood. No throne was ever won or held without violence; and though the Gearys were not blessed by the same king-making gods who'd crowned the royal heads of Europe, or the emperors of China or Japan, there was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary daemon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights. It made them fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred, it made them iron-willed and long-lived; it made them casually cruel and just as casually charismatic.

Most of the time, it was as though they didn't even know what they were doing, good, bad or indifferent. They lived in a kind of trance of self-absorption, as though the rest of the world was simply a mirror held up to their, faces, and they passed through life seeing only themselves.

In some ways love was the ultimate manifestation of the Geary daemon; because love was the way that the family increased itself, enriched itself.

For the males it was almost a point of pride that they be adulterous, and that the world know it, even if the subject wasn't talked about above a whisper. This dubious tradition had been initiated by Mitch's great-grandfather, Laurence Grainger Geary, who'd been a cocksman of legendary stamina, and had fathered, according to one estimate, at least two dozen bastards. His taste in mistresses had been broad. Upon his death two black women in Kentucky, sisters no less, claimed to have his children; a very well respected Jewish philanthropist in upstate New York, who had served with old man Geary on a committee for the Rehabilitation of Public Morals, had attempted suicide, and revealed in her farewell letter the true paternity of her three daughters, while the madam of a bordello in New Mexico had showed her son to the local press, pointing out how very like a Geary child he looked.

Laurence's wife Verna had made no public response to these claims. But they took their toll on the unhappy woman. A year later she was committed to the same institution that had housed Mary Lincoln in her last years. There Verna Geary survived for a little over a decade, before making a pitiful exit from the world.

Only one of her four children (she'd lost another three in their infancy) was at all attentive to her in her failing years: her eldest daughter, Eleanor. The old woman did not care for Eleanor's constant kindness, however. She loved only one of her children enough to beg his presence, in letter after letter, through the period of her incarceration: that was her beloved son Cadmus. The object of her affections was unresponsive. He visited her once, and never came again. Arguably Verna was the author of her own son's cruelty. She'd taught him from his earliest childhood that he was an exceptional soul, and one of the manifestations of this specialness was the fact that he never had to set eyes on any sight that didn't please him. So now, when he was faced with such a sight-his mother in a state of mental disarray-he simply averted his eyes.

"I want to surround myself with things that I enjoy looking at," he told his appalled sister, "and I do not enjoy looking at her."

What was pleasing the twenty-eight-year-old Cadmus' senses at that time was a woman called Katherine Faye Browning-Kitty to those dose to her-the daughter of a steel magnate from Pittsburgh. Cadmus had met her in 1919 and courted her fiercely for two years, during which time he had begun to work his financial genius on his father's already considerable wealth. This was no chance collision of circumstances. The more Kitty Browning toyed with his feelings (refusing to see him for almost two months in the autumn of that year simply because-as she wrote-"I wish to see if I can live without you. If I can, I will, because that means you're not the man who rules my heart") the more frustrated love fueled young Cadmus's ambition. His reputation as a financial strategist of genius-and a demonic enemy if crossed-was forged in those years. Though he would later mellow somewhat, when people thought of Cadmus Northrop Geary it was the young Cadmus they brought to mind: the man who forgave nothing.

In the process of building his empire he acted like a secular divinity. Communities dependent upon industries he purchased were destroyed at his whim, while others flourished when he looked upon them favorably. By his early middle age he had achieved more than most men dream of in a hundred lifetimes. There was no place of power in which he was not known and lionized. He influenced the passing of bills and the election of judges; he bought Democrats and Republicans alike (and left them at the mercy of their parties when he was done with them); he made great men look foolish, and-when it suited him, as it occasionally did-elevated fools to high office.

Need I tell you that Kitty Browning finally succumbed to his importunings and married him? Or add that he committed his first act of adultery-or philandering, as he preferred-while they were on then- honeymoon?

A man of Cadmus's power and influence-not to mention looks (he was built after the classic American model, his body graceful in action and easy in repose, his long, symmetrical features perpetually tanned, his eyes sharp, his smile sharper still)-a man such as this is always surrounded by admirers. There was nothing languid or dull about him; nothing that bespoke doubt or fatigue: that was the heart of his power. Had he been a better man, his sister once remarked, or a much worse one, he might have been president. But he had no interest in wasting his attributes on politics. Not when there were so many women to seduce (if seduction was the word for something so effortless). He divided his time between his offices in New York and Chicago, his houses in Virginia and Massachusetts, and the beds of some several hundred women a year, paying off irate husbands when they found out, or employing them.

As for Kitty, she had a life of her own to lead: three children to raise, and a social calendar of her own which was nicely filled. The last thing she wanted was a husband under her feet. As long as Cadmus didn't embarrass her with his shenanigans, she was perfectly content to let him go his way.

There was only one romance-or more correctly a failed romance-that threatened this strange equilibrium. In 1926, at the invitation of Lionel Bloombury, who was then the head of a small independent studio in Hollywood, Cadmus went west. He considered himself quite the connoisseur when it came to movies, and Lionel had suggested he could do worse than invest some of his capital in the business. Indeed he would later do so; he put Geary money into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and saw, during its golden years, a substantial return on his investment; he also purchased sizable parcels of land in what would later become Beverly Hills and Culver City. But the only deal he really wanted in Hollywood he failed to make, and that was with an actress called Louise Brooks. He met her first at the premiere of Beggars of Life, a Paramount picture she'd made, starring opposite Wallace Beery. She'd seemed to Cadmus an almost supernatural presence; for the first time, he'd said to a friend, he believed in the idea of Eden; of a perfect garden from which men might be exiled because of the manipulations of a woman.

The subject of this metaphysical talk, Louise herself, was without question a great beauty: her dark sleek hair cut almost boyishly to frame a pale, exquisitely sculptured face. But she was also an ambitious and intellectually astute woman, who wasn't interested in being an objet d'art for Cadmus or anybody else. She left for Germany the next year, to star in two pictures there, one of which. Die Biichse de Pandora, would immortalize her. Cadmus was by now so enraptured that he sailed to Europe in the hope of a liaison, and it seems she was not entirely scornful of his advances. They dined together; and took day trips when her filming schedule allowed. But it seems she was dallying with him. When she went back to filming she complained to her director, a man called Pabst, that the presence of Geary on set was spoiling her concentration and could he please be removed? There was some kind of minor fracas later that week, when Cadmus-who had apparently attempted to purchase the studio that was making Die Btichse de Pandora in the interim, and failed-forced his way onto the set in the hope of talking to her. She refused to speak to him and he was forcibly removed. Three days later he was on a ship headed back to America.

His "folly," as he would later call this episode, was over. He returned to his business life with a sharpened-even rapacious-appetite. A year after his return, in October of 1929, came the stock market crash which marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Cadmus rode the calamity like a broncobuster from one of his beloved Westerns; he was unshakable. Other men of money went into debt and penury or ended up dead by their own hand, but for the next few years, while the country suffered through the worst economic crisis since the Civil War, Cadmus turned the defeats of those around him into personal victories. He bought the ruins of other men's enterprises for a pittance; putting out lifeboats for a lucky few who were drowning around him, thus assuring himself of their fealty once the storm was over.

Nor did he limit his business dealings to those who'd been relatively honest but had fallen on hard times; he also dealt with men who had blood on their hands. These were the last days of Prohibition; there was money to be made from supplying liquor to the parched palates of America. And where there was profit, there was Cadmus Geary. In the four years between his return from Germany and the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, he tunneled Geary family funds into several illicit booze and "entertain ment" businesses, raking off monies that no taxman ever saw, and ploughing it back into his legitimate concerns.

He was careful with his choice of business partners, avoiding the company of individuals who took too much pleasure in their own notoriety. He never did business with Capone or his like, preferring the quieter types, like Tyler Burgess and Clarence Filby, whose names didn't make it into the headlines or the history books. But in truth he didn't have the stomach for criminality. Though he was reaping enormous sums of money from these illicit dealings, in the spring of 1933, just before the repeal was passed by Congress, he broke all contact with "The Men in the Midwest," as he called them.

in fact it was Kitty who forced his hand. Normally she kept herself out of financial affairs, but this, she told him, was not a fiscal matter: the reputation of the family would be irreparably harmed if any association with this scum could be proved. He readily bowed to her pressure; he didn't enjoy doing business with these people anyway. They were peasants, most of them; a generation ago, he'd said, they'd have been in some Godforsaken corner of Europe eating scabs off their donkeys. The remark had amused Kitty, and she took it for her own, using it whenever she was feeling particularly vicious.

So Prohibition and the grim years of the Great Depression passed, and the Gearys were now one of the richest families in the history of the continent. They owned steel mills and shipyards and slaughterhouses. They owned coffee plantations and cotton plantations and great swaths of land given over to barley and wheat and cattle. They owned sizable portions of real estate in the thirty largest cities in America, and were the landlords of many of the towers and fancy houses and condominiums that were built on that land. They owned racehorses, racetracks, and racing cars. They owned shoe manufacturers and fish canneries and a hot dog franchise. They owned magazines and news papers, and distributors who delivered those magazines and newspapers, and the stands from which those magazines and newspapers were sold. And what they could not own, they put their name on. As though to distinguish his noble family from the peasants with whom he had ceased to do business in '33, Cadmus allowed Kitty to use tens of millions of Geary dollars in philanthropic endeavors, so that in the next two decades the family name went up on the wings of hospitals, on schools, on orphanages. All these good works did not divert the eyes of cynical observers from the sheer scale of Cadmus's acquisitiveness, of course. He showed no sign of slowing up as he advanced in years. In his middle sixties, at an age when less driven men were planning fishing trips and gardens, he turned his appetites eastward, toward Hong Kong and Singapore, where he repeated the pattern of plunder that had proved so successful in America. The golden touch had not deserted him: company after company was transformed by Cadmus's magic. He was a quiet juggernaut, unseen now for the most part, his reputation almost legendary.

He continued his philandering, as he had in his younger days, but the hectic business of sexual conquest was of far less significance to him now. He was still, by all accounts, a remarkably adept bed partner (perhaps consciously he chose in these years women who were less discreet than earlier conquests; advertisements for his virility, in fact); but after the Louise Brooks episode he never came so close to the blissful condition of love as when he was in full capitalist flight. Only then did he feel alive the way he had when he'd first met Kitty, or when he'd followed Louise to Germany; only then did he exalt, or even come close to exaltation.

Meanwhile, of course, another generation of Gearys was growing up. First there was Richard Emerson Geary, born in 1934, after Kitty had suffered two miscarriages. Then, a year later, Norah Faye Geary, and two years after that George, the father of Mitchell and Garrison.

In many ways Richard, Norah, and George were the most emotionally successful of any of the generations. Kitty was sensible to the corruptions of wealth: she'd seen its capacity to destroy healthy souls at work in her own family. She did her level best to protect her children from the effects of being brought up feeling too extraordinary; and her capacity for love, stymied in her marriage, flowered eloquently in her dealings with her children. Of the three it was Norah who was most indulged; and Cadmus was the unrepentant indulger. She rapidly became a brat, and nothing Kitty could do to discipline her did the trick. Whenever she didn't get what she wanted, she went wailing to Daddy, who gave her exactly what she requested. The pattern reached grotesque proportions when Cadmus arranged for the eleven-year-old Norah-who had become fixated upon the notion of being an actress-to star in her own little screen test, shot on the backlot at MGM. The long-term effects of this idolatry would not become apparent for several years, but they would bring tragedy.

In the meanwhile, Kitty dispersed her eminently practical love to Richard and George, and watched them grow into two extraordinarily capable men. It was no accident that neither wanted much to do with running the Geary empire; Kitty had subtly inculcated into them both a distrust of the world in which Cadmus had made a thousand fortunes. It wasn't until the first signs of Cadmus's mental deterioration began to show, in his middle seventies, that George, the youngest, agreed to leave his investment company and oversee the rationalization of what had become an unwieldy empire. Once in place, he found the task more suited his temperament than he'd anticipated. He was welcomed by the investors, the unions, and the board members alike as a new kind of Geary, more concerned with the welfare of his employees, and the communities which were often dependent upon Geary investment, than with the turning of profit.

He was also a successful family man, in a rather old-fashioned way. He married one Deborah Halford, his high school sweetheart, and they lived a life that drew inspiration from the kind of solid, loving environment which Kitty had tried so hard to provide. His older brother Richard had become a trial lawyer with a flair for murderers and rhetoric; his life seemed to be one long last act from an opera filled with emotional excess. As for poor Norah, she'd gone from one bad marriage to another, always looking for, but never finding, the man who would give her the unconditional devotion she'd had from Daddy.

By contrast, George lived an almost dull life, despite the fact that he ruled most of the Geary fortunes. His voice was quiet, his manner subdued, his smile, when it came along, beguiling. Despite his skills with his employees, stepping into Cadmus's shoes wasn't always easy. For one thing, the old man had by no means given up attempting to influence the direction of his empire, and when his health crisis was over he assumed that he'd be returning to his position at the head of the boardroom table. It was Loretta, Cadmus's second wife, who persuaded him that it would be wiser to leave George in charge, while Cadmus took up an advisory position. The old man accepted the solution, but with a bad grace: he became publicly critical of George when he disapproved of his son's decisions, and on more than one occasion spoiled deals that George had spent months negotiating.

At the same time, while Cadmus was doing his best to tarnish his own son's glories, other problems arose. First there were investigations on insider trading of Geary stocks, then the complete collapse of business in the Far East following the suicide of a man Cadmus had appointed, who was later discovered to have concealed the loss of billions; and, after half a century of successful secrecy, the revelation of Cadmus's Prohibition activities, in a book that briefly made the bestseller list despite Richard's legal manipulations to have it withdrawn as libelous.

When things got too frantic, George took refuge in a home life that was nearly idyllic. Deborah was a born nest-builder; she cared only to make a place where her husband and her children would be cared for and comfortable. Once the front door was closed, she would say, the rest of the world wasn't allowed in unless it was invited; and that included any other member of the Geary clan. If George needed solitude-time to sit and listen to his jazz collection, time to play with the kids-she could be positively ferocious in her defense of her threshold. Even Richard, who had persuaded juries of the impossible in his time, couldn't get past her when she was protecting George's privacy.

For the four children of this comfortable marriage-Tyler, Karen, Mitchell, and Garrison-there was plenty of affection and plenty of pragmatism, but there was also a string of temptations that had not been available to the previous generation. They were the first Gearys who were regularly followed around by paparazzi during their adolescence; who were squealed on by classmates if they smoked dope or tried to get laid; who appeared on the cover of magazines when they went skinny-dipping. Despite Deborah's best efforts, she could not protect her children from every sleazehound who came sniffing around. Nor, George pointed out, was it wise to try. The children would have to learn the pain of public humiliation the hard way, by being hurt. If they were smart, they'd modify their behavior. If not, they'd end up like his sister Norah, who'd had almost as many tabloid covers as she'd had analysts. It was a hard world, and love kept no one from harm. All it could do, sometimes, was speed the healing of the wounds.

So much for my promised brevity. I intended to write a short, snappy chapter giving you a quick glimpse of the Geary family tree, and I end up lost in its branches. It's not that every twig is pertinent to the story at hand-if that were the case, I'd never have undertaken the task-but there are surprising connections between some of what I've told you and events to come. To give you an example: Rachel, when she smiles a certain way, has something of Louise Brooks's wicked humor in her eyes; along with Louise's dark, shiny hair, of course. It's useful for you to know how devoted Cadmus was to Louise, if you're to understand how the presence of Rachel will later affect him.

But even more important than such details, I suspect, is a general sense of the patterns these people made as they passed their behavior, good and bad, on to their children. How Laurence Grainger Geary (who died, by the way, in a prostitute's bed in Havana) taught his son Cadmus by example to be both fearless and crueL How Cadmus shaped a creature of pure self-destruction in Norah, and a man subtly committed to his own father's undoing in George. George: we may as well take a moment here to finish George's story. It's a sad end for such a good-natured man; a death over which countless questions still hang. On February 6th, 1981, instead of driving up to his beloved weekend house in Caleb's Creek to join his family, he went out to Long Island. He drove himself, which was strange. He didn't like to drive, especially when the weather was foul, as it was that night. He did call Deborah, to tell her that he'd be late home: he had an "annoying bit of business" he needed to attend to, he told her, but he promised to be back by the early hours of the morning. Deborah waited up for him. He didn't come home. By three a.m. she had called the police; by dawn a full scale search was underway, a search which continued through a rainy Saturday and Sunday without a single lead being turned up. It wasn't until seven-thirty or so on Monday morning that a man walking his dog along the shore at Smith Point Beach chanced to peer into a car that had been parked there he'd noticed, close to the sand, for three days. Inside was the body of a man. It was George. His neck had been broken. The murder had taken place on the shore itself-there was sand in George's shoes, and in his hair and mouth-then the body had been carried back to the car and left there. His wallet was later found on the shore. The only item that had been taken from it was a picture of his wife. The hunt for George's killer went on for years (in a sense, I suppose, it still continues; the file was never dosed) but despite a million-dollar reward offered by Cadmus for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, the felon was never found.

The major effects of George's demise-at least those relevant to this book-are threefold. First, there was Deborah, who found herself strangely alienated from her husband by the suspicious facts of his death. What had he hidden from her? Something vital; something lethal. For all the trust they'd had in one another, there had been one thing, one terrible thing he had not shared with her. She just didn't know what it was. She did well enough for a few months, sustained by the need to be a good public widow, but once the cameras were turned in the dkection of new scandals, new horrors, she quickly capitulated to the darkness of her doubts and her grief. She went away to Europe for several months, where she was joined by (of all people) her sister^m-law Norah, with whom until now she'd had nothing in common. Stateside, rumors began to fly again: they were living like two middle-aged divas, the gossip columnists pronounced, dredging the gutters of Rome and Paris for company. Certainly when the pair got back home in August 1981, Deborah had the look of a woman who'd seen more than the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower. She'd lost thirty pounds, was dressed in an outfit ten years too young for her, and kicked the first photographer at the airport who got in her way.

The second effect of George's death was of course upon his children. Fourteen-year-old Mitchell had become a particular focus of public attention after his father's demise: his looks were beginning to deliver on their promise (he would be, by general consensus, the handsomest Geary yet) and the way he dealt with the invasiveness of the press spoke of a maturity and a dignity beyond his years. He was a prince; everyone agreed; a prince.

Garrison, who was six years his senior, had always been far more retiring, and he did little to conceal his discomfort during this period. While Mitchell stayed close to his mother throughout the period of mourning, accompanying her to philanthropic galas and the like in his father's stead, Garrison retreated from the limelight almost completely. And there he would remain. As for Tyler and Karen, both of whom were younger than Mitchell, their lives were left unexamined by the columnists, at least for a few years. Tyler was to die in 1987, along with his Uncle Todd, Norah's fourth husband, when the light aircraft Todd was piloting came down during a sudden storm near Orlando, Florida. Karen-who in hindsight probably most closely resembled her father in the essential gentility of her nature-became an archeologist, and rapidly distinguished herself in that field.

The third consequence of George Geary's sudden demise was the reascension of Cadmus Geary. He had weathered the physical and mental frailty that had been visited upon him just as he'd weathered so much else in his life, and now-when the Geary empire needed a leader, he was there to take charge. He was by now in his eighties, but he behaved as though his little sickness had been but a palate cleanser, a sour sorbet that had sharpened his appetite for the rare meat now set before him. In a decade of naked acquisitiveness, here was the triumphant return of the man who'd written the modem rules of combat. At times he seemed to be at pains to compensate for hi& late son's humanity. Anyone who stood against him (usually for principles espoused by George) was summarily ousted; Cadmus didn't have the time or the temper for persuasion. Wall Street responded well to the change. Old Man Cadmus Back in Charge, ran the headline of The Wall Street Journal, and in a couple of months there were profiles running everywhere, plus the inevitable catalogues of Cad-mus's cruelties. He didn't care. He never had and he never would. This was his style, and it suited the world into which he had resurrected himself more than a little well.

There'll be more about Old Man Geary later; a lot more. For now, let me leave him there, in triumph, and go back to the subject of mortality. I've already told you how Laurence Geary died (the whore's bed, Havana) and Tyler (Uncle Todd's plane, Florida) and of course George (in the driving seat of his Mercedes, Long Island) but there are other passages to the great beyond that should be noted here. Did I mention Cadmus's mother, Verna? Yes, I did. She perished in a madhouse, you'll remember. I didn't however note that her passing was almost certainly also murder, probably at the hands of another inmate, one Dolores Cooke, who committed suicide (with a stolen toothpick, pricking herself so many times she bled to death) six days after Verna's demise. Eleanor, her rejected daughter, died in hearty old age, as did Louise Brooks, who gave up her career in cinema in the early thirties, finding the whole endeavor too trivial to be endured.

Of the significant players here, that only leaves Kitty, who died of cancer of the esophagus in 1979, just as

Cadmus was emerging from his own bout of frailty. She was two years younger than the century. The next year, Cadmus remarried: the recipient of the offer a woman almost twenty years his junior, Loretta Talley, (another sometime actress, by the way: Loretta had played Broadway in her youth, but, like Louise, tired of her ppwer-lessness).

As for Kitty, she has little or no part in what follows, which is a pity for me, because I have in my possession a copy of an extraordinary document she wrote in the last year of her life which would fuel countless interesting speculations. The text is utterly chaotic, but that's not surprising given the strength of the medications she was on while she was writing it. Page after page of the testimony (all of which is handwritten) documents the yearnings she felt for some greater meaning than the duties of mother, wife, and public philanthropist, a profound and unanswered hunger for something poetic in her life. Sometimes the sense of the text falls apart entirely, and it becomes a series of disconnected images. But even these are potent. It seems to me she begins, at the end of her life, to live in a continuous present: a place where memory, experience and expectation are all folded together in one delirious stream of feeling. Sometimes she writes as though she were a child looking down at her own wasted body, fascinated by its mutinies and its grotesqueries. She also talks about Galilee.

It wasn't until I read the document for the third time (combing it for clues to her beliefs about George Geary's murder) that I realized my half brother was present in the text. But he's there. He enters and exits Kitty's account like the breeze that's presently ruffling the papers on my desk; visible only by its effect. But there's no question that he somehow offered her a taste of all that she'd been denied; that he was, if not the love of her life, at least a tantalizing glimpse of what changes a love of real magnitude-reciprocated love, that is-might have wrought in her.

Let me now give you a brief guided tour to the Geary residences, since so many of the exchanges I will be reporting occur there. Over the years the family has accrued large amounts of real estate and, because they never needed to realize the capital, seldom sold anything. Sometimes they renovated these properties, and occupied them. But just as often Geary houses have been kept for decades-regularly cleaned and redecorated-without any member of the family stepping over the threshold. As of this writing, I know of houses and apartments the family owns in Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, Montana, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Hawaii. In Europe they own properties in Vienna, Zurich, London, and Paris; and further afield, in Cairo, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.

For now, however, it's the New York residences that I need to describe in a little detail. Mitchell has a pied & terre on the fringes of Soho, far more extravagantly appointed inside, and far more obsessively guarded, than its undistinguished exterior would suggest. Margie and Garrison occupy two floors dose to the top of the Trump Tower, an apartment which commands extraordinary views in all directions. The purchase was Margie's suggestion (at the time it was some of the most expensive space in the world, and she liked the idea of spending so much of Garrison's money) but she never really warmed to the apartment, for all its glamour. The decorator she hired, a man called Jeffrey Penrose, died a month after finishing his transformation, and posthumous articles about him mentioned the Trump Tower apartment as his "last great creation; like the woman who employed him-kitschy, glitzy, and wild." So it was; and so was Margie, back then. The years since haven't been kind, however. The glitter looks tawdry now; and what seemed witty in the eighties has lost its edge.

The one truly great Geary residence in the city is what everyone in the family refers to as "the mansion; a vast, late nineteenth century house on the Upper East Side. The area's called Carnegie Hill, but it might just as well have been named for the Gearys; Laurence was in residence here twenty years before Andrew Carnegie built his own mansion at 5th and 91st. Many of the houses surrounding the Geary residence have been given over to embassies; they're simply too large and too expensive for one family. But Cadmus was born and raised in the mansion, and never once contemplated the notion of selling it. For one thing, the sheer volume of possessions the house contains could not be transferred to a more modestly scaled space: the furniture, the carpets, the clocks, the objets d'art; there's enough to found a sizable museum. And then there are the paintings, which unlike much of the other stuff were collected by Cadmus himself. Big canvases, all of them; and all by American painters. Magnificent works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Frederick Church, enormous paintings of the American landscape at its most awe inspiring. To some, these works are regressive and rhetorical; the products of limited talents overreaching themselves in pursuit of a sublime vision. But hanging in the mansion, sometimes occupying entire walls, the paintings have an undeniable authority. In some ways they define the house. Yes, it's dark and heavy in there; sometimes it seems hard to draw breath, the air is so dense, so stale. But that's not what people remember about the mansion. They remember the paintings, which almost look like windows, letting onto great, untamed wildernesses.

The house is run by a staff of six, who work under Loretta's ever judgmental eye. However hard they labor, however, the house is always bigger than they can manage. There's always dust gathering somewhere; they could work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and still not tame the enormity of the place.

So: that's the New York City residences. Actually, I haven't told you everything. Garrison has a secret place that even Margie doesn't know he owns, but I'll describe that to you when he visits it, along with an explanation as to why he's obliged to keep its existence to himself. There's also a house upstate, near Rhinebeck, but that also has a significant place in the narrative ahead, so I'll delay describing it until then.

The only other residence I want to make mention of here is a long way from New York City, but should be mentioned here, I think, because in my imagination it forms a trinity with the mansion and L'Enfant. That house is a far more humble dwelling than the other two. In fact it's probably the least impressive of any of the major residences in this story. But it stands a few yards from the blue Pacific, in a grove of palm trees, and for the lucky few who've spent a night or two beneath its roof, it evokes Edenic memories.

That house we'll also come to later, and to the secrets it contains, which are sweatier than anything Garrison hides away in his little bolthole, and yet so vast in their significance that they would beggar the skills of the men who painted the wildernesses in the mansion. We are a while away from being there, but I want you to have the image of that paradisiacal spot somewhere in your head, like a bright piece of a jigsaw puzzle which doesn't seem to fit in the scheme, but must be held on to, contemplated now and again, until its significance becomes apparent, and the picture is understood as it would not have been understood until that piece found its place.

I must move on. Or rather back; back to the character with whom I opened this sequence, Rachel Pallenberg. The last two chapters were an attempt to offer some context for the romance between Rachel and Mitchell. And I hope as a consequence you'll feel a little more sympathy for Mitchell than his subsequent actions might seem to deserve. He was not, at least at the beginning, a cruel or reprehensible man. But he had lived most of his life in the public eye, despite his mother's best efforts. That kind of scrutiny creates an artificiality in a person's behavior. Everything becomes a kind of performance.

In the seventeen years since his father's funeral, Mitchell had learned to play himself perfectly; it was his genius. In all other regards-excepting his looks-he was average, or below average. An uninspired student, a so-so lover, an indifferent conversationalist. But when the subject of the exchange vanished and charm alone held the air, he was wonderful. In the words of Burgess Motel, who'd spent half a day with him for a profile piece in Vanity Fair, "The less substance there was to what he was saying, the more at ease he seemed; and, yes, the more perfect. If this seems to tread perilously dose to nonsense, it's because you have to be there, watching him perform this Zen-like trick of being in nothingness, to believe just how persuasive and sexy it is. Do I sound entranced? I am!" This wasn't the first time a male writer had swooned girlishly over Mitchell in print, but it was the first time somebody had successfully analyzed the way Mitchell ruled a room. Nobody knew charm like Mitchell, and nobody knew as well as Mitchell that charm was best experienced in a vacuum.

None of this, you may say, reflects well upon Rachel. How could she have fallen for such triviality? Given herself over into the arms of a man who was at his best when he had nothing of consequence to say? It was easy, believe me. She was dazzled, she was flattered, she was seduced, not just by Mitchell but by all he stood for. There had never been a time when the Gearys had not been a part of her idea of America: and now she was being invited to enter their circle; to become a part of their mystique. Who could refuse an offer like that? It was a kind of waking dream, in which she found herself removed from the gray drudgery of her life into a place of color and comfort and plenty. And she was surprised at how well she fitted into this dreamscape. It was almost as though she'd known in her heart that this was the life she'd one day be living, and had unconsciously been preparing for it.

All of which is not to say there weren't times when her palms got a little clammy. Meeting the whole family for the first time on the occasion of Cadmus' ninety-fifth birthday party; the first time down a red carpet, at a fund-raiser at the Lincoln Center, just after the engagement had been announced; the first time she was flown somewhere in the family jet, and turned out to be its only passenger. All so strange, and yet so strangely familiar.

For his part Mitchell seemed to read her anxiety level instinctively in any given situation, and act appropriately. If she was uncomfortable, he was right there at her side, showing her by example how to fend off impertinent questions politely and ease the flow of small talk if somebody became tongue-tied. On the other hand if she seemed to be having a good time he left her to her own devices. She rapidly gained a reputation as lively company; at ease with all kinds of people. The chief revelation for Rachel was this: that these power brokers and potentates with whom she was now beginning to rub elbows were hungry for simple conversation. Over and over again she would catch herself thinking: they're no different from the rest of us. They had dyspepsia and ill-fitting shoes, they bit their nails and worried about their waistlines. There were a few individuals, of course, who decided she was beneath them-generally women of uncertain vintage-but she rarely encountered such snobbery. More often than not she found herself welcomed warmly, often with the observation that she was the one Mitchell had been looking for, and everyone was glad she was finally here.

As to her own story, well she didn't talk about it much at first. If people asked about her background, she'd keep the answers vague. But as she began to trust her confidence more, she talked more openly about life in Dansky, and about her family. There was a certain percentage of people whose eyes started to glaze over once she mentioned anywhere west of the Hudson, but there were far more who seemed eager for news from a world less sealed, less smothering than their own.

"You will have noticed," Garrison's garish and acidic wife Margie-whose tongue was notoriously acidic-remarked, "that you keep seeing the same sour old faces wherever you go. You know why? There's only twenty important people left in New York, twenty-one now you're here, and we all go to the same parties and we all serve on the same committees. And we're all very, veryv bored with one another." She happened to make the remark while she and Rachel stood on a balcony looking down at a glittering throng of perhaps a thousand people. "Before you say anything," Margie went on, "it's all done with mirrors."

Inevitably on occasion a remark somebody would make would leave her feeling uncomfortable. Usually such remarks weren't directed at her, but at Mitchell, in her presence.

"Wherever did you find her?" somebody would say, meaning no conscious offense by the question but making Rachel feel like a purchase, and the questioner fully expected to go back to the same store and pick up one for themselves.

"They're just amazed at how lucky I am," Mitchell said, when she pointed out how objectionable she found that kind of observation. "They don't mean to be rude."

"I know."

"We can stop going to so many parties, if you like."

"No. I want to know all the people you know."

"Most of them are pretty boring."

"That's what Margie said."

"Are you two getting on well?"

"Oh yes. I love her. She's so outrageous."

"She's a terrible drunk," Mitchell said curtly. "She's been okay for the last couple of months, but she's still unpredictable."

"Was she always…?"

"An alcoholic?"

"Yes."

"Maybe I can help her," Rachel said.

He kissed her. "My Good Samaritan." He kissed her again. "You can try but I don't hold out much hope. She's got so many axes to grind. She doesn't like Loretta at all. And I don't think she likes me much."

Now it was Rachel who offered the kiss. "What's not to like?" she said.

Mitchell grinned: "Damned if I know," he said.

"You egotist."

"Me? No. You must be thinking of somebody else. I'm the humble one in the family."

"I don't think there's such a thing-"

"-as a humble Geary?"

"Right."

"Hm." Mitchell considered this for a moment. "Grandma Kitty was the nearest, I guess."

"And you liked her?"

"Yeah," Mitchell said, the warmth of his affection there in his voice. "She was sweet. A little crazy toward the end, but sweet."

"And Loretta?"

"She's not crazy. She's the sanest one in the family."

"No, I meant, do you like her?"

Mitchell shrugged. "Loretta's Loretta. She's like a force of nature."

Rachel had met Loretta only two or three times so far: this was not the way the woman seemed at all. Quite the contrary. She'd seemed rather reserved, even demure, an impression supported by the fact that she always dressed in white or silvery gray. The only theatrical touch was the turbanish headgear she favored, and the immaculate precision of her makeup, which emphasized the startling violet of her eyes. She'd been pleasant to Rachel, in a gentle, noncommittal sort of way.

"I know what you're thinking," Mitchell said. "You're thinking: Loretta's just an old-fashioned lady. And she is. But you try crossing her-"

"What happens?"

"It's like I said: she's a force of nature. Especially anything to do with Cadmus. I mean, if anyone in the family says anything against him and she hears about it she tears out their throats. 'You wouldn't have two cents to rub together without him,' she says. And she's right. We wouldn't. This family would have gone down without him."

"So what happens when he dies?"

"He isn't going to die," Mitchell said, without a trace of irony in his voice. "He's going to go on and on and on till one of us drives him out to Long Island. Sorry. That was in bad taste."

"Do you think about that a lot?"

"What happened to Dad? No. I don't think about it at all. Except when some book comes out, you know, saying it was the Mafia or the CIA. I get in a funk about that stuff. But we're never going to really know what happened, so what's the use of thinking about it?" He stroked a stray hair back from Rachel's brow. "You don't need to worry about any of this," he said. "If the old man dies tomorrow we'll divide up the pie-some for Garrison, some for Lor-etta, some for us. Then you and me… we'll just disappear. We'll get on a plane and we'll fly away."

"We could do that now if you want to," Rachel said. "I don't need the family, and I certainly don't need to live the high life. I just need you."

He sighed; a deep, troubled sigh. "Ah. But where does the family end and Mitchell begin? That's the question."

"I know who you are," Rachel said, drawing close to him. "You're the man I love. Plain and simple."

Of course it wasn't that plain and it wasn't that simple.

Rachel had entered a small and unenviable coterie: that group of people whose private lives were deemed publicly owned. America wanted to know about the woman who had stolen Mitchell Geary's heart, especially as she'd been an ordinary creature so very recently. Now she was transformed. The evidence was there in the pages of the glossies and the weekly gossip rags: Rachel Pallenberg dressed in gowns a year's salary would not have bought her six months before, her smile that of a woman happy beyond her wildest dreams. Happiness like that couldn't be celebrated for very long; it soon lost its appeal. The same readers who were entranced by the rags-to-riches story in February and March, and astonished by the way the shop girl had been made into a princess in April and May, and a little tearful about the announcement of an autumn wedding when it was made in June, wanted the dirt by July.

What was she really like, this thief who'd run off with Prince Mitchell's eligibility? She wouldn't be as picture-perfect as she seemed; nobody was that pleasant. She had secrets; no doubt. Once the wedding was announced, the investigators went to work. Before Rachel Pallenberg got into her white dress and became Rachel Geary, they were going to find something scandalous to tell, even if they had to turn over every rock in Ohio to do it.

Mitchell wasn't immune from the same zealous muckraking. Old stories about his various liaisons resurfaced in tarted-up forms. His short affair with the drug-addicted daughter of a congressman; his various trips around the Aegean with a small harem of Parisian models; his apparently passionate attachment to Natasha Morley, who'd lately married minor European royalty, and (according to some sources) broken his heart by so doing. One of the sleazier rags even managed to find a classmate from Harvard who claimed that Mitchell's taste for girls ran to the barely pubescent. "If there's grass on the field, play ball, that's what he used to say," the "classmate" remembered.

Just in case Rachel was tempted to take any of this to heart, Margie brought over a stack of magazines that her housekeeper, Magdalene, had hoarded from the early years of Margie's life with Garrison, all of which contained stories filled with similar vitriol. The two women were in almost every way dissimilar: Rachel petite and stylish, reserved in her manner; Margie big-boned, overdressed, and voluble. Yet they were like sisters in this storm.

"I was really upset at the time," Margie said. "But I've begun to wish ten percent of what they were saying about Garrison was true. He'd be a damn sight more interesting."

"If it's all lies, why doesn't somebody sue them?" Rachel said.

Margie offered a fatalistic shrug. "If it wasn't us it'd be some other poor sonofabitch. Anyway, if they stopped writing this shit I might have to go back to reading books." She gave a theatrical shudder.

"So you read this stuff?"

Margie arched a well-plucked eyebrow. "And you don't?"

"Well…"

"Honey, we all love to learn about who fucked who. As long as we're not the who. Just hold on. You're going to get a shitload of this thrown at you. Then they'll move on to the next lucky contestant."

Margie, God bless her, hadn't offered her reassurances a moment too soon. The very next week brought the first gleanings from Dansky. Nothing particularly hurtful; just a willfully depressing portrait of life in Rachel's hometown, plus a few pictures of her mother's house, looking sadly bedraggled: the grass on the lawn dead, the paint on the front door peeling. There was also a brief summary of how Hank Pallenberg had lived and died in Dansky. Its very brevity was a kind of cruelty, Rachel thought. Her father deserved better than this. There was much worse to come. Still sniffing after some hint of scandal, a reporter from one of the tabloids tracked down a woman who'd trained with Rachel as a dental technician. Giving her name only as "Brandy," because she claimed not to want the attention of the press, the woman offered a portrait of Rachel that was beyond unflattering.

"She was always out to catch herself a rich man," Brandy claimed. "She used to cut pictures out of newspapers-pictures of rich men she thought she had a hope of getting, you know-but rich, always real rich, and then she pinned them all up on the wall of her bedroom and used to stare at them every night before she went to sleep." And had Mitchell Geary been one of Rachel Pallenberg's hit-list of eligible millionaires, the reporter had asked Brandy. "Oh sure," the girl had replied, claiming she'd got a sick feeling when she'd heard the news about how

Rachel's plan had worked. "I'm a Christian girl, born and raised, and I always thought there was something weird about what Rachel was doing with those pictures up there. Like it was voodoo or something."

All idiotic invention, of course, but it was still a potent mixture of elements. The headline, accompanied by a picture of Rachel at a recent fund-raiser, her eyes flecked with red from the photographer's flash, read: "Shocking Sex-Magic Secrets of Geary Bride!" The issue was sold out in a day.

Rachel did her best with all this, but it was hard-even accepting that she'd been a consumer of this nonsense herself, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now it was her face people were staring at as they waited at the supermarket checkout, her life they were half-believing these lies about. All the detachment she was able to muster didn't spare her the hurt of that.

"What are you doing even looking at that shit?" Mitchell asked her when she raised the subject over dinner that night. The establishment was Luther's, an intimate restaurant round the corner from Mitchell's apartment on Park Avenue.

"They could be saying anything," Rachel said. She was close to tears. "Not just about me. About my mother or my sister or you."

"We've got lawyers watching them all the time. If Cecil felt they were going too far-"

"Too far? What's too far?"

"Something worth fighting over," Mitchell said. He reached over and took hold of her hand.

"It's not worth crying about, baby," he said softly. "They're just stupid people who don't have anything better to do than try and tear other people down. The thing is: they can't do it. Not to us. Not to the Gearys. We're

stronger than that."

"I know…" Rachel said, wiping her nose. "I want to be strong, but-"

"I don't want to hear but, baby," he said, his tone still tender despite the toughness of the sentiment. "You've got to be strong, because people are looking at you. You're a princess."

"I don't feel much like a princess right now."

He looked disappointed. He pushed the plate of kidneys away, and put his hand to his face. "Then I'm not doing my job," he said. She stared at him, puzzled. "It's my job to make you feel like a princess. My princess. What can I do?" He looked up at her, with a kind of sweet desperation on his face. "Tell me: what can I do?"

"Just love me," she said.

"I do. Honey, I do."

"I know you do."

"And I hate it that those sleazeballs are giving you grief, but they can't touch you, honey. Not really. They can spit and they shout but they can't touch you." He squeezed her hand. "That's my job," he said. "Nobody gets to touch you but me."

She felt a subtle tremor in her body, as though his hands had reached out and stroked her between her legs. He knew what he'd done too. He passed his tongue, oh-so-lightly, over his lower lip, wetting it.

"You want to know a secret?" he said, leaning closer to her.

"Yes, please."

"They're all afraid of us."

"Who?"

"Everybody," he said, his eyes fixed on hers. "We're not like them, and they know it. We're Gearys. They're not. We've got power. They haven't. That makes them afraid. So you have to let them give vent once in a while. If they didn't do that they'd go crazy." Rachel nodded; it made sense to her. A few months ago, it wouldn't have done, but now it did.

"I won't let it bother me any more," she said. "And if it does bother me I'll shut up about it."

"You're quite a gal, you know that?" he said. "That's what Cadmus said about you after his birthday party."

"He barely spoke to me."

"He's got eyes. 'She's quite a gal,' he said. 'She's got the right stuff to be a Geary.' He's right. You do. And you know what? Once you're a member of this family, nothing can hurt you. Nothing. You're untouchable. I swear, on my life. That's how it works when you're a Geary. And that's what you're going to be in nine weeks. A Geary. Forever and always."

Marietta just came in, and read what I've been writing. She was in one of her willful moods, and I should have known better, but when she asked me if she could read a little of what I'd been writing, I passed a few pages over to her. She went out onto the veranda, lit up one of my cigars, and read. I pretended to get on with my work, as though her opinion on what I'd done was inconsequential to me, but my gaze kept sliding her way, trying to interpret the expression on her face. Occasionally, she looked amused, but not for very long. Most of the time she just scanned the lines (too fast, I thought, to really be savoring the prose) her expression impassive. The longer this went on the more infuriated I became, and I was of half a mind to get up, go out onto the veranda. At last, with a little sigh, she got up and came back in, proffering the pages.

"You write long sentences," she remarked.

"That's all you can say?"

She fished a book of matches out of her pocket, and striking one, began to rekindle her cigar. "What do you want me to say?" she shrugged. "It's a bit gossipy, isn't it?" She was now studying the book of matches. "And I think it's going to be hard to follow. All those names. All those Gearys. You don't have to go that far back, do you? I mean, who cares?"

"It's all context."

"I wonder whose number this is?" she said, still studying the book. "It's a Raleigh number. Who the hell do I know in Raleigh?"

"If you can't be a little more generous, a little more constructive…"

She looked up, and seemed to see my misery. "Oh, Eddie," she said, with a sudden smile. "Don't look so forlorn. I think it's wonderful."

"No you don't."

"I swear. I do. It's just that weddings, you know," her lip curled slightly. "They're not my favorite thing."

"You went," I reminded her.

"Are you going to write about that?"

"Absolutely."

She patted my cheek. "You see, that'll liven things up a bit. How are your legs by the way?"

"They're fine."

"Total recovery?"

"It looks that way."

"I wonder why she healed you after all this time?"

"I don't care. I'm just grateful."

"Zabrina said she saw you out walking."

"I go to see Luman every couple of days. He's got it into his head that we should collaborate on a book when I'm finished with this."

"About what?"

"Madhouses."

"What a bright little sunbeam he is. Ah! I know! This is Alice." She tossed the book of matches into the air and caught it again. "Alice the blonde. She lives in Raleigh."

"That's a very dirty look you've got in your eyes," I observed.

"Alice is adorable. I mean, really… sumptuous." She picked a piece of tobacco from her teeth. "You should come out with me one of these days. We'll go drinking. I can introduce you to the girls."

"I think I'd be uncomfortable."

"Why? Nobody's going to make a pass at you, not in an all-girl bar."

"I couldn't."

"You will." She pointed the wet end of her cigar at me. "I'm going to get you out enjoying yourself." She pocketed the book of matches. "Maybe I'll introduce you to Alice."

Of course she left me in a stew of insecurity. My mood now perfectly foul, I retired to the kitchen, to eat my sorrows away. It was a little before one in the morning; Dwight had long since retired to bed. L'Enfant was quiet. It was a little stuffy, so I opened the windows over the sink. There was a light breeze, which was very welcome, and I stood at the sink for a few moments to let it cool my face. Then I went to the refrigerator and began to prepare a glutton's sandwich: several slices of baked ham, slathered with mustard, some strips of braised aubergine, half a dozen sweet cherry tomatoes, sliced, and a dash of olive oil, all pressed between two slices of freshly cut rye bread.

Feeding my face put everything in context for me. What was I hanging on Marietta's opinion for? She was no great literary critic. This was my book, my ideas, my vision. And if she didn't like it, that was fine by me. Her opinion was a complete irrelevancy. I didn't just think all of this, I talked it through to myself, a mustardy mingling of words and ham.

"Whatever are you chattering about?"

I stopped talking, and looked over my shoulder. There, filling the doorway from side to side, was Zabrina. She was dressed in a tent of a nightgown, her face, upon which she usually puts a little paint and powder, ruddily raw. She had tiny eyes, and a wide thin-lipped mouth; Marietta called her a beady, fat frog once, in a moment of anger, and-cruel though the description may be-it fits. The only glamorous attribute she has is her hair, which is a deep, luxurious orange, and which she's grown to waist length. Tonight she had it untied and it fell about her shoulders and upper body like a cape.

"I haven't seen you in a long while," I said to her.

"You've seen me," she said, in that odd, breathy voice of hers. "We just haven't spoken."

I was about to say-that's because you always rush away-:but I held my tongue. She was a nervous creature. One wrong word and she'd be off. She went to the refrigerator and studied its contents. As usual, Dwight had left a selection of his pies and cakes for her delectation.

"Don't expect any help from me," she said out of the blue.

"Help for what?"

"You know what," she said, still studying the laden shelves. "I don't think it's right." She reached in and took out a pie with either hand, then, pirouetting with a grace surprising in one of her extreme bulk, turned and closed the refrigerator door with her backside. "So don't expect me to be unburdening myself."

She was talking about the book of course. Her antipathy was perfectly predictable, given that she knew it to be at least in part Marietta's idea. Even so, I wasn't in the mood to be harangued.

"Let's not talk about it," I said.

She set the pies-one cherry, one pecan-on the table side by side. Then she went back to the refrigerator, with a little sigh of irritation at her own forgetfulness, and took out a bowl of whipped cream. There was a fork already in the bowl. She lowered herself gently onto a chair and set to, loading up the fork with a little cherry pie, a little pecan, and a lot of whipped cream. She clearly had done this countless times before; watching the skillful way she created these little towers of excess, without ever seeming to drop a crumb of pastry into the cream, or a spot of cream onto the table, was an entertainment unto itself.

"So when did you last hear from Galilee?" she asked me.

"Not in a long while."

"Huh." She delivered a teetering mound between her lips, and her lids flickered with bliss as she worked it around her mouth.

"Does he ever write to you?"

She took her leisurely time to swallow befire abswering. "He used to drop me a note now and again. But not any more."

"Do you miss him?"

She frowned at me, her lower lip jutting out. "Don't start that," she said. "I told you already-"

I rolled my eyes. "In God's name, Zabrina, I just asked-"

"I don't want to be in your book."

"So you said."

"I don't want to be in anybody's book. I don't want to… be talked about. I wish I was invisible."

I couldn't help myself: I smirked. The very idea that Zabrina, of all people, would dream of invisibility was sadly laughable. There she was, conspiring against her own hopes with every mouthful. I thought I'd wiped the smirk off my face by the time she looked up at me, but it lingered there, like the cream at the corners of her own mouth.

"What's so funny?" she said.

I shook my head. "Nothing."

"So I'm fat. And I wish I was dead. So what?"

The smirk had gone now. "You don't wish you were dead," I said. "Surely."

"What have I got to live for?" she replied. "I've got nothing. Nothing I want anyway." She put down her fork, and started on the cherry pie with her fingers, picking out the syrupy fruit. "Day in and day out, it's the same story. Serving Momma. Eating. Serving Momma. Eating. When I sleep I dream I'm up there with her, while she talks about the old days." With sudden vehemence she said: "I hate the old days! What about tomorrow? How about doing something about tomorrow?" Her face, which was, as I men tioned, flushed to begin with, was now beet red. "We're all so passive," she said, the vehemence mellowing into a sadness. "You got your legs back but what did you do with them? Did you walk out of here? No. You sat exactly where you'd been sitting all these years, as though you were still a cripple. That's because you still are. I'm fat and you're a cripple, and we're going to go on, day after day after day living our useless lives, till somebody from out there-" she pointed out toward the world "-comes and does us the kindness of putting a bullet through our brains."

With that, she rose from the ruins of the pies, and made her exit. I didn't attempt to delay her. I just sat back in my chair and watched her go.

Then, I will admit, I sat for a while with my head in my hands and wept.

A ssaulted by both Marietta and Zabrina, feeling thoroughly uncertain of my talents, I returned to my room, and sat up through the rest of the night. I'd like to tell you that I did so because I was agonizing over the literary problems I had, but the truth was rather more prosaic: I had the squirts. I don't know whether it was the baked ham, the braised aubergine, or Zabrina's damn conversation that did it: I only know I spent the hours till dawn sitting on my porcelain throne in a private miasma. Somewhere around dawn, feeling weak, raw, and sorry for myself, I crawled into bed and snatched a couple of hours of sleep. By the time I woke my slumbering mind seemed to have decided that I'd be best writing about Rachel and Mitchell's wedding in a rather curter style than I'd been employing so far. After all, I reasoned, a wedding was a wedding was a wedding. No use belaboring the subject. People could fill in the pretty details for themselves.

So then: the bare facts. The wedding took place in the first week of September, in a little town in New York State called Caleb's Creek. I've already mentioned it in passing, I believe. It's not far from Rhinebeck, close to the Hudson. A pretty area, much beloved of earlier generations of American royalty. The Van Cortandts built a home up here; so did the Astors and the Roosevelts. Extravagant houses where they could bring two hundred guests for a cozy weekend retreat. By contrast, the property George Geary had purchased in Caleb's Creek was a modest place, five bedrooms, colonial style: described in one book about the Gearys as "a farmhouse," though I doubt it was ever that. He'd loved the place; so had Deborah. After his death she'd many times remarked that the best times of her life had been spent in that house; easy, loving times when the rest of the world was made to wait at the threshold. It was actually Mitchell who had suggested opening the house up again-it had been left virtually unvisited since George's death-and holding the wedding celebrations there. His mother had warmed to the idea instantly. "George would like that," she'd said, as though she imagined the spirit of her beloved husband still wandering the place, enraptured by the echoes of happier times.

To clinch the deal, Mitchell drove Rachel up to Caleb's Creek in the middle of July, and they stayed over at the house for one night. A couple from the town, the Ryland-ers, who had been housekeeper and gardener during the halcyon days, and had kept the place clean and tidy during its years of neglect, had worked furiously to give the house a second chance at life. When Mitchell and Rachel arrived it looked like a dream retreat. Eric Rylander had planted hundreds of flowers and rosebushes, and laid a new lawn; the windows, doors, and shutters had been painted, so had the white picket fence. The small apple orchard behind the house had been tidied up, the trees pruned; everything made orderly. Inside, Eric's wife Barbara had been no less diligent. The house had been thoroughly aired, the drapes and carpets cleaned, the woodwork and furniture polished until it shone.

Rachel was, of course, completely charmed. Not just by the beauty of the house and brightness of the garden, but by the evidence everywhere of the man who'd fathered her husband-to-be. At Deborah's instruction the house had been left as George had liked it. His hundreds of jazz albums were still on their shelves, all alphabetically arranged. His writing desk, where according to Mitchell he'd been making notes for a kind of memoir about his mother Kitty, was just as he'd left it, arrayed with framed family photographs, which had lost most of their color by now.

The visit had not only served to confirm Mitchell's instincts that this was indeed the place to have the wedding; it had turned into a kind of tryst for the lovers. That night, after a splendid supper prepared by Barbara, they'd stayed up sitting out watching the midsummer sky darken, sipping whiskey and talking about their childhoods; and of their fathers. It had got so dark they couldn't even see one another's faces, but they kept talking while the breeze moved in the apple trees: about times they'd laughed, times they'd lost. When, finally, they'd retired to bed (Mitch would not sleep in the master bedroom, despite the fact that Barbara had made up the old four-poster for them; they slept in the room he'd had as a child), they lay in each other's arms in the kind of blissful exhaustion that usually follows lovemaking, though they had not made love.

When they went back to New York the following morning, Rachel held Mitchell's hand the whole way. She'd never felt the kind of love she felt for him that day in her life; nothing even close to it.

On the Friday evening, with the whole place-house, garden, orchard, grounds-overrun with people (lantern-hangers, sign-posters, bandstand-erectors, table-carriers, chair-counters, glass-polishers; and on, and on) Barbara Rylander came to find her husband, who was standing at the front gate watching the trucks come and go, and having sworn him to secrecy, said she'd just been out in the orchard, taking a break from the commotion, and she'd seen Mr. George standing there beneath the trees, watching the goings-on. He was smiling, she said.

"You're a silly old woman," Eric told his wife. "But I love you very much." And he gave her a great big kiss right there in front of all these strangers, which was completely out of character.

The day dawned, and it was spectacular. The sun was warm, but not hot. The breeze was constant, but never too strong. The air smelt of summer still, but with just enough poignancy to suggest the coming fall.

As for the bride: she outdid the day. She'd felt nauseous in the morning; but once she started to get dressed her nerves disappeared. She had a short relapse when Sherrie came in to see her daughter and promptly burst into happy tears, which threatened to get Rachel started. But Loretta wasn't having any of that. She firmly sent Sherrie away to get a brandy, then she sat with Rachel and talked to her. Simple, sensible talk.

"I couldn't lie to you," Loretta said solemnly. "I think - you know me well enough by now to know that."

"Yes I do."

"So believe me when I tell you: everything's fine; nothing's going to go wrong; and you look… you look like a million dollars." She laughed, and kissed Rachel on the cheek. "I envy you. I really do. Your whole life ahead of you. I know that's a terrible cliche. But when you get to be old you see how true it is. You've got one life. One chance to be you. To have some joy. To have some love. When it's over, it's over." She stared intently at Rachel as she spoke, as though there was some deeper significance in this than the words alone could express. "Now, let's get you to the church," Loretta said brightly. "There's a lot of people waiting to see how beautiful you look."

Loretta's promise held. The service was performed in the little church in Caleb's Creek, with all its doors Sung wide so that those members of the congregation who weren't able to be seated-fully half of them-could either stand along the walls or just outside, to hear the short ceremony. When it was over the whole assembly did as wedding parties had done in Caleb's Creek since the town's founding: they walked, with the bride and groom hand in hand at the head of the crowd, down Main Street, petals strewn underfoot "to sweeten their way" (as local tradition had it), the street lined on either side with local people and visitors, all smiling and cheering as the procession made its triumphant way through the town. The whole affair was wonderfully informal. At one point a child-one of the Creek kids, no more than four-slipped her mother's hand and ran to look at the bride and groom. Mitchell scooped the child up and carried her for a dozen yards or so, much to the delight of all the onlookers, and to the joy of the child herself, who only began to complain when her mother came to fetch her, and Mitchell handed her back.

Needless to say there were plenty of photographers on hand to record the incident, and it was invariably an image that editors chose when they were putting together their pieces on the wedding. Nor was its symbolism lost on the scribblers who wrote up the event. The anonymous girl-child from the crowd, lifted up into the strong safe arms of Mitchell Geary: it could have been Rachel.

Once the pressures of preparation and the great solemnity of the service were over, the event became a party. The last of the formalities-the speeches and the toasts-were kept mercifully short, and then the fun began. The air remained warm, the breeze just strong enough to rock the lanterns in the trees; the sky turned golden as the sun sank away.

"Perfection, Loretta," Deborah said, when the two women chanced to be sitting alone for a moment.

"Thank you," Loretta said. "It just takes a little organization, really."

"Well it's wonderful," Deborah replied. "I only wish George were here to see it."

"Would he have liked her?"

"Rachel? Oh yes. He would have loved Rachel."

"Unpretentious," Loretta observed. She was watching Rachel even as she spoke: arm in arm with her beloved, laughing at something one of Mitchell's old Harvard chums had said. "An ordinary girl."

"I don't think she's ordinary at all," Deborah said. "I think she's very strong."

"She'll need to be," Loretta said.

"Mitchell adores her."

"I'm sure he does. At least for now."

Deborah's lips tightened. "Must we, Loretta…?"

"Tell the truth? Not if you don't want to."

"We've had our happiness," Deborah said. "Now it's their turn." She started to get up from the table.

"Wait-" Loretta said. She reached out and lightly caught hold of Deborah's wrist. "I don't want us to argue."

"I never argue," Deborah said.

"No. You walk away, which is even worse. It's time we were friends, don't you think? I mean… there's things we're going to have to start planning for."

Deborah slipped her arm out of Loretta's grasp. "I don't know what you mean," she said, her tone making it perfectly clear that she did not wish the conversation to continue.

Loretta changed the subject. "Sit down a moment. Did I tell you about the astrologer?"

"No…" Deborah said, "Garrison mentioned you'd found someone you liked."

"He's wonderful. His name's Martin Yzerman; he lives out in Brooklyn Heights."

"Does Cadmus know you go to one of these people?"

"You should go to Yzerman yourself, Deborah."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"Advice like that's very useful if you're trying to make long-term plans."

"But I don't," she said. "I gave up trying. Things change too quickly."

"He could help you see the changes coming."

"I doubt it."

"Believe me."

"Could he have predicted what happened to George?" Deborah said sharply.

Loretta let a moment of silence fall between them before she said: "No question."

Deborah shook her head. "That's not the way things are," she said. "We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Nobody does." She rose from her chair. This time Loretta didn't try to stop her. "I'm astonished that a smart woman like you would put faith in that kind of thing. Really I am. It's nonsense, Loretta. It's just a way to make you feel as though you're in control of things." She looked down at Loretta almost pityingly. "But you're not. None of us are. We could all be dead this time tomorrow." And with that, she walked away.

This odd little exchange wasn't the only crack in the bliss of the day. There were three other incidents which are probably worth remarking upon, though none of them were significant enough to spoil the celebrations.

The first of the three, perhaps inevitably, involved Margie. Champagne was not her preferred mode of transport, so she'd made sure that the bar was stocked with good whiskey, and once the first round of bubbly was drunk she switched to Scotch. She rapidly became a little testy, and took it into her head to tell Senator Bryson who, along with his family, had flown up from Washington, what she thought of his recent comments on welfare reform. She was by no means inarticulate and Senator Bryson was plainly quite happy to be chewing on a serious issue rather than nibbling small talk; he listened to Margie's remarks with suitable concern. Margie downed another Scotch and told him he was talking out of both sides of his mouth. The senator's wife attempted a little leavening here, remarking that the Gearys weren't likely to be needing welfare any time soon. To which Margie sharply replied that her father had worked in a steel mill most of his life, and died at the age of forty-five with twelve bucks in his bank account; and where the hell was the man with the whiskey anyway? Now it was Garrison who stepped in to try and bring the exchange to a halt, but the senator made it perfectly plain that he was enjoying the contretemps and wished to continue. The man with the whiskey duly arrived, and Margie got her glass refilled. Where were they, she said; oh yes, twelve bucks .in his bank account. "So don't tell me I don't know what's going on out there. The trouble is none of you high and mighties gives a fuck. We've got problems in this country, and they're getting worse, and what are you doing about it? Besides sitting on your fat asses and pontificating."

"I don't think any caring human being would disagree with you," the senator said. "We need to work to make American lives better lives."

"And what does that all add up to?" Margie said. "A fat lot of nothin'. Is jt any wonder nobody in this country believes a damn word any of you people say?"

"I think people are more interested in the democratic process-"

"Democratic, my ass!" Margie said. "It's all lobbies and paybacks and doing your friends favors. I know how it works. I wasn't born yesterday. You just want to make the rich richer."

"I think you're mistaking me for a Republican," Bryson chuckled.

"And I think you're mistaking me for someone who'd trust a fucking word any politician ever said," Margie spat back.

"That's enough now," Garrison said, taking hold of his wife's arm.

She tried to shake him free, but he held on tight. "It's all right. Garrison," the senator said. "She's got a right to her opinion." He returned his gaze to Margie. "But I will say this. America's a free country. You don't have to live in the lap of luxury if it doesn't sit well with your political views." He smiled, though there was not a trace of warmth in his eyes. "I really wonder if it's entirely appropriate for a woman in your position to be talking about the agonies of the working man."

"I told you, my father-"

"Is part of the past. This administration is part of the future. We can't afford sentiment. We can't afford nostalgia. And most of all, we can't afford hypocrisy."

This little speech had the ring of an exit line, and Margie knew it. Too drunk by now to mount any coherent riposte, all she could say was: "What the fuck does that mean?"

The senator was already turning to leave, but he pivoted on his heel to reply to Margie's challenge. The smile, even in its humorless form, had gone.

"It means, Mrs. Geary, that you can't stand there in a fifty-thousand-dollar dress and tell me you understand the pain of ordinary people. If you want to do some good, maybe you should start off by auctioning the contents of your closet and giving away the profits, which I'm sure would be substantial."

That was his last word on the subject. He was gone the next moment along with his wife and entourage. Garrison went to follow, but Margie clutched his arm.

"Don't you dare," she told him. "Or I'll quote what you said about him being a spineless little shit."

"You are contemptible," Garrison said.

"No. You're contemptible. I'm just a pathetic drunk who doesn't kno"w any better. You want to take me inside before I start on somebody else?"

Rachel didn't hear about Margie's exchange with the man from Washington until after the honeymoon, when Margie herself confessed it. But she was very much a part of the second of the three notable exchanges of the afternoon.

What happened was this: toward dusk Loretta came to find her and asked if she'd mind bringing her mother and sister to meet Cadmus, who was going to be leaving very soon. The old man hadn't joined the celebration until the cake was about to be cut, at which point he'd been brought out to the big marquee in his wheelchair-to much applause-and made a short, eloquent toast to the bride and groom. He'd then been taken to a shady spot at the back of the house, where the flow of folks who wanted to pay their respects to him could be strictly controlled. Apparently he'd been anxious to meet Rachel's family earlier in the day, but only now, at nine in the evening, had the line of people eager to shake his hand diminished. He was very tired, Loretta warned; they should keep the conversation brief.

In fact, despite the demands of the day, Rachel thought he looked better than he had at his birthday party, certainly: positively robust for a ninety-six-year-old (sitting comfortably in a high-backed wicker chair generously packed with cushions in a backwater of the garden, nursing a brandy glass and the stub of a cigar). His face was still handsome, after its antique fashion; he'd aged beyond the gouges and furrows into a kind of skeletal grandeur, his skin so tanned it was like old wood, his eyes set in the cups of his sockets like bright stones. His speech was slow, and here and there a little slurred, but he still had more charisma than most men a quarter his age, and sufficient memory to know how to work it on the opposite sex. He was like some much beloved movie star, Rachel thought; so adored in his season that now, though he was well past his prime, he still believed in his own magic. And that was the most important part, belief. The rest was just window dressing.

Loretta made all the introductions, and then returned to the party, leaving Cadmus king of his own court.

"I wanted to tell you how proud I am," he told Rachel, "to have you, and your mother and your sister, as part of the Geary family. You are all so very lovely, if I may say so." He handed his glass to the woman (Rachel assumed it was a nurse) who stood close to his chair, and reached out to take the bride's hand. "Excuse my chilly fingers," he said. "I don't have the circulation I used to have. I know how strong the feeling is between you and Mitchell and I must tell you I think he is the luckiest man alive to have won your affections. So many people…" He stopped for a moment, and his eyelids fluttered. Then he drew a deep breath, as if pulling on some buried reserve of energy, and the moment of frailty passed. "I'm sorry," he said. "So many people, you know, never have in their lives anything like the kind of deep feeling you two have for one another. I had it in my life." He made a small wry smile. "Regrettably it wasn't for either of the women I married." Rachel heard Deanne suppress a guffaw behind her. She glanced back, frowning, but Cadmus was in on the joke. His smile had spread into a mischievous grin. "In fact, you my dear Rachel, bear more than a passing resemblance to the lady I idolized. So much so that when I first set eyes upon you, at that little party Loretta threw for me-as if I wanted to be reminded how antiquated I am-I thought to myself: Mitchell and I have the same taste in beauty."

"May I ask who this was?" Rachel asked him.

"I'd be pleased to tell you. In fact, I'll do better than that. Would you care to come to the house next week?"

"Of course."

"I'll show you the lady I loved," Cadmus told Rachel. "Up on the screen, where age can't touch her. And I'm afraid… neither can I."

"I'll look forward to that."

"So will I…" he said, his voice a little fainter now. "Well, I suppose I should let you ladies go back to the celebration."

"It's been wonderful to meet you," Sherrie said.

"The pleasure's all mine," Cadmus replied. "Believe me. All mine."

"They just don't make men like that any longer," Sherrie observed when they were out of the old man's presence.

"You sound quite smitten," Deanne said.

"I'll tell you this," Sherrie replied, directing her remarks to Rachel, "if Mitchell is half the man he is, you won't have a thing to complain about."

The third and final event I'm going to report took place long after dark, and it was the one that could have potentially spoiled the glory of the day. Let me first set the scene for you. The evening, as I've said, was balmy, and though the number of guests slowly dwindled as the hour grew later a lot of people stayed longer than they'd planned, to drink and chat and dance. The time and trouble that had been taken to hang the lanterns in the trees around the house paid off handsomely. Though about nine-thirty or so clouds came in from the northeast, the lamps more than compensated for the lack of stars; it was as though every tree had luminous fruit swaying in its branches, lilac and lemon and lime. It was a time for whispered expressions of love, and among the older folks, a renewal of vows and the making of promises. I'll be kinder; I'll be more attentive; I'll care for you the way I used to care when we were first married.

Nobody gave any thought to being spied on. With so many luminaries in attendance the security had been fierce. But now, with many of the more important guests already departed and the party winding down, the vigilance of the guards was not what it had been, so nobody saw the two photographers who scrambled over the wall to the east of the house. They didn't find much that would please their editors. A few drunks passed out in their chairs, but nobody of any consequence. Disappointed, they moved on through the grounds, concealing their cameras beneath their jackets if they passed anyone who might question them, until they got to the edge of the dance floor. Here they decided to part.

One of them-a fellow called Buckminster-went to the largest of the tents, hoping he might at least find some overweight celebrity still pigging out. His partner Penaloza headed on past the dance floor, where there were still a few couples enjoying a moody waltz, toward the trees.

None of what Penaloza saw looked particularly promising. He knew the sordid laws of his profession by heart. The readers of the rags to whom he hoped to sell his pictures wanted to see somebody famous committing at least one-but hopefully several-deadly sins. Gluttony was good, avarice was okay; lust and rage were wonderful. But there was nothing significantly sinful going on under the lanterns, and Penaloza was about to turn back to see if he could talk his way into the house when he heard a woman, not far from him, laughing. There was a measure of unease in the sound which drew his experienced ear.

The laughter came again, and this time he made out its source; And, oh my Lord, did he believe what he was seeing? Was that Meredith Bryson, the daughter of Senator Bryson, swaying drunkenly under the tree, her blouse unbuttoned and another woman's face pressed between her breasts?

Penaloza fumbled for his camera. Now there was a picture! Perhaps if he could just get a little closer, so that no one was in doubt as to Meredith's identity. He took two cautious steps, ready to shoot and run if the need arose. But the women were completely enraptured with one another; if things got much more heated the picture would be unpublishabk.

There was no doubting the identity of the Bryson girl now; not with her head thrown back that way. He held his breath, and got off a shot. Then another. He'd have liked a third, but Meredith's seducer had already seen him.

She gallantly pushed the Bryson girl out of sight behind her, giving Penaloza one hell of a shot of her standing full on to him, shirt unbuttoned to the waist. He didn't wait for the bitch to start screaming.

"Gotta go," he grinned; then turned and ran.

What happened next confounded his every expectation. Instead of hearing one or both of the women set up a chorus of tearful hollering, there was silence, except for the din of his own feet as he ran. And then suddenly there was somebody catching hold of the collar of his shirt, and swinging him around, and it was he who let out the yelp of complaint as his attacker wrenched his camera out of his hands.

"You fucking scum!"

It was Meredith's lover, of course; though God knows she'd put on a supernatural turn of speed to catch up with him.

"That's mine!" he said, grabbing for his camera.

"No," she replied, very simply, and tossed it back over her shoulder.

"Don't touch it!" Penaloza yelled. "That camera is my property. If you so much as lay a finger on that camera I'll sue you-"

"Oh shut up," the woman said, and slapped him across the face. The blow stung so badly his eyes watered.

"You can't do this," he protested. "This is a Fifth Amendment issue."

The woman hit him again. "Amend that," she said.

Penaloza was a reasonably moral man. He didn't take pleasure in hitting women; but sometimes it was a necessity. Blinking the tears out of his eyes he feinted to the right, and then swung a left that caught the woman's jaw a solid crack. She let out a very satisfying yelp and stumbled backward, but to his surprise she was back at him before he recovered his own balance, throwing herself at him with such violence she brought them both to the ground.

"Jesus!" he heard somebody say, and from the corner of his eyes saw Buckminster standing a few yards away, photographing the fight.

Penaloza managed to pull one hand free and pointed toward his camera, which still lay on the grass a few yards from the senator's daughter. "Grab it!" he yelled. "Buck! You shit! Pick up my camera!"

But he was too late. The Bryson bitch was already there, snatching the camera up off the ground, and Buckminster-having decided he'd risked enough as it was-now turned on his heels and fled. Penaloza struggled to pull himself out of his attacker's grip, but she'd pinned him down, her knees clamped to either side of his head, and he had no energy left to throw her off. All he could do was squirm like a child while she casually beckoned Meredith Bryson over.

"Open the camera up, honey." Meredith did so. "Now pull out the film."

Penaloza started to shout again; there were people coming to see what all the commotion was about. If one of them could prevent Meredith from opening the camera, he might still have his evidence. Too late! The back of the camera snapped open, and the Bryson girl pulled the film out.

"Satisfied?" Penaloza growled.

The woman perched on him considered the question for a moment. "Did anybody tell you how lovely you are?" she said, reaching behind her. She took hold of his balls, clutching them tightly. "What a fine, wholesome specimen of manhood you are?" She twisted his scrotum. He sobbed, more with anticipation than fear. "No?" she said.

"… no…"

"Good. Because you're not. You're a worthless piece of rat's doo-doo." She twisted again. "What are you?" If he'd had a gun at that moment he'd have happily put a bullet through the bitch's brains. "What. Are. You?' she said again, giving his balls a yank with every syllable.

"Rat's doo-doo," Penaloza said.

The woman who'd laid Penaloza low was of course none other than my darling Marietta. And you're probably sufficiently familiar with her by now to know that she was very proud of herself. When she got back here to L'Enfant she gave Zabrina and myself chapter and verse of the whole escapade.

"Why the hell did you go there in the first place?" I remember Zabrina asking her.

"I wanted to cause some trouble," she said. "But once I got there, and I'd had a few glasses of champagne, all I wanted to do was fuck. So I found this girl. I didn't know who she was." She smiled slyly. "And neither did she, poor sweetheart. But, I like to think I helped her find out."

There's one footnote to all of this, and it concerns the subsequent romantic career of the senator's daughter.

Maybe a year after the Geary wedding, who should appear on the cover of People magazine, there to announce her membership of the Sapphic tribe, but the radiant Meredith Bryson?

Inside, there was a five page interview, accompanied by a number of photographs of the newly uncloseted senator's daughter. One in the window seat of her house in Charleston; another in the back yard, with two cats; and a third of her and her family at the President's inauguration, with an inset blowup of Meredith herself, caught looking thoroughly bored.

"I've always been interested in politics," she averred in the body of the piece.

The interviewer hurried her on to something a little juicier. When had she first realized she was a lesbian?

"I know a lot of women say they've always known, somewhere deep down," she replied. "But honestly I didn't have a clue until I met the right person."

Could she tell the readers who this lucky lady was?

"No, I'd prefer not to do that right now," Meredith replied.

"Have you taken her to the White House?"

"Not yet. But I intend to, one of these days. The First Lady and I had a great conversation about it, and she said we'd be very welcome."

The article twittered on in the same substance-free manner for several pages; I don't think anything of any moment was said from beginning to end. But after the talk of White House visits I couldn't help but imagine Marietta and Meredith in Lincoln's bedroom, doing the deed beneath Abe's portrait. Now there was a picture the sleaze-hounds would have paid a nice price to own.

As to Marietta, she would not be drawn out any further on the subject of the senator's daughter. I can't help wondering, however, if at some point down the line the fate of L'Enfant and the secret lives of Capitol Hill won't again intersect. This is, after all, a house built by a president. I won't argue that it's his masterpiece-that's surely the Declaration of Independence-but L'Enfant's roots lie too dose to the roots of democracy's tree for the two not to be intertwined. And if, as Zelim the Prophet once claimed, the process of all things is like the Wheel of the Stars, and what has seemed to pass away will come back again sooner or later, is it unreasonable to suppose that L'Enfant's demise may be caused or quickened by the order of power that brought it into being?

So now you know how Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary became husband and wife-from their first meeting to the vows at the altar. You know how powerful a family she had entered, and how possessive it was; you know she was in love with Mitchell, passionately so, and that her feelings were reciprocated.

How then, you ask, does such a romance fall from grace? How is it that, a little over two years later, at the end of a rainy October, Rachel was driving around the benighted streets of Dansky, Ohio, cursing the day she'd heard the name of Mitchell Geary?

If this were a work of fiction I could invent some dramatic scenario to explain all this. She'd step into the house one day and find her husband in bed with another woman, or they'd have an argument that would escalate into violence, or he'd reveal to her in the heat of an angry exchange that he'd married her for a bet with his brother. But there was nothing like that in their lives: no adulteries, no violence, and certainly no raised voices. It just wasn't the way Mitch dealt with things. He liked to, be liked, even when being liked meant avoiding a confrontation that would be to everybody's good. That meant turning a blind eye to Rachel's discomfort if there was the least risk of stirring up something unpleasant. His former empathy, which had been so much a part of what had enchanted her about him, disappeared. If she was unhappy, he simply looked the other way. There was always plenty of Geary family business to justify his inattention; and of course the inevitable seductions of luxury to soften Rachel's loneliness when he was gone.

It would be wrong to claim that she was not in some fashion complicit in all of this. It became apparent to her very quickly that her life as Mrs. Mitchell Geary was not going to be as emotionally fulfilling as she'd hoped. Mitchell was wholly devoted to the family business, and as she had no role in that business, nor wanted one, she found herself alone more often than she liked. Instead of sitting Mitch down and talking the problem through-telling him, in essence, that she wanted to be more than a public wife-she let his way of doing things carry the day, and that soon proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less she said the harder it became to say anything at all.

Anyway, how could she claim the marriage wasn't working when to the outside world she'd been given paradise on a platter? Was there anywhere she couldn't go if she wanted to? Any store she couldn't shop in until she was tired of saying I'll take it? They went to Aspen skiing, Vermont for a weekend in the autumn, to enjoy the turning of the leaves. She was in Los Angeles for the Oscar parties, in Paris to see the spring collections, in London for the theater, and Rio and Bali for spur-of-the-moment vacations. What did she have to complain about?

The only person in whom she could confide her growing unhappiness was Margie, who wasn't so much sympathetic as fatalistic.

"It's a trade-off," she said. "And it's been going on since the beginning of time. Or at least since the first rich man ever took himself a poor wife."

Rachel flinched at this. "I am not-"

"Oh honey."

"That's not why I married Mitch."

"No, of course it isn't. You'd be with him if he was ugly and poor and I'd be with Garrison if he was tap-dancing on a street corner in Soho."

"I love Mitch."

"Right now?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, sitting here right now, having said all the things you've just said about how he's neglectful, and doesn't want to talk about feelings, and so on, sitting right here right now, you love him?"

"Oh Lord…"

"Is that a maybe?"

There was a pause while they thought about what she was feeling at that moment. "I don't know what I feel," she admitted. "It's just that he's not…"

"The man you married?" Rachel nodded. Margie refilled her whiskey glass and leaned forward as though to whisper something, though they were the only people in the room. "Sweetheart, he never was the man you married. He was just giving you the Mitch you wanted to see." She leaned back, waving her free hand in the air as though to swat a swarm of phantom Gearys out of her sight. "They're all the same. Christ knows." She sipped her whiskey. "Believe it or not. Garrison can be charm personified when it suits him. They must get it from their grandfather."

Rachel pictured Cadmus the way he'd been at the wedding; sitting in his high-backed chair dispensing charm like a benediction.

"If it's all a performance," she said, "where's the real Mitch?"

"He doesn't know any more. If he ever did, which I doubt. It's sort of pitiful when you think about it. All that power, all that money, and there's nobody home to use it."

"They use it all the time," Rachel said.

"No," Margie replied. "It uses them. They're not living. None of us Gearys are. We're all just going through the motions." She peered at her glass. "I know I drink too much. It's rotting my liver and it'll probably kill me. But at least when I've got a few whiskeys inside me I'm not stuck being Mrs. Garrison Geary. When I'm drunk I give up being his wife, I'm somebody he wishes he didn't know. I like that."

Rachel shook her head in despair. "If it's so bad," she said, "why don't you just leave?"

"I've tried. I've left him three times. Once I stayed away for five months. But… you get into a certain way of being. You get comfortable." Rachel looked uneasy. "It doesn't take long. Look, I don't like living in Garrison's shadow, but I like living without his credit cards even less."

"You could divorce him and get a very nice settlement, Margie. You could live anywhere you wanted, anyway you wanted."

Now it was Margie who shook her head. "I know," she said softly. "I'm just making excuses." She picked up the whiskey bottle and poured herself another half tumbler. "The fact is, I'm not leaving because somewhere deep down I don't want to. I guess maybe what's left of my self-esteem's wrapped up in being part of the dynasty. Isn't that pathetic?" She sipped on her drink. "Don't look so appalled, honey. Just because I'm too screwed up to leave, doesn't mean you can't. How old are you now?"

"Twenty-seven."

"That's nothing. You've still got your life ahead of you. You know what you should do? Tell Mitch you want a trial separation. Get a few million in your pocket and go off to see the world."

"I don't think seeing the world's going to make me happy."

"All right. So what is going to make you happy?"

Rachel thought it over for a moment. "Being with Mitch the way he was before we got married," she finally replied.

"Oh Lord," Margie sighed. "Then you know what? You have a big'problem."

Some of Mitchell's old charm returned, albeit briefly, when he talked with Rachel about their having children. More than once he rhapsodized about how blessed their kids were going to be: the girls beautiful, the boys all studs. He was keen to start a family as soon as possible, ^nd he wanted the brood to be large. In fact, Rachel got the unwelcome impression that he wanted to make up for Garrison's relative lack of productivity (Margie having borne one child only: a girl, now eight, called Alexia).

But the act of love was welcome, even if it was in service of Geary productivity rather than pleasure. When Mitchell was close to her, his hands on her body, his lips against hers, she remembered how she'd felt when they'd first touched, first kissed. How special she'd felt; how rare.

He wasn't an inspired lover. In fact Rachel had been surprised at how gauche he was in bed; almost shy, in fact. He certainly didn't act like a man who'd reputedly bedded some of the most beautiful women of the day. She liked his lack of sexual sophistication. For one thing, it matched her own, and it was nice to be able to learn together how best to pleasure one another. But even at his best, he left her wanting more. He didn't seem to understand the rhythms of her body; how she wanted to be held tenderly sometimes, and sometimes fiercely. When she attempted to express those needs in words he made his discomfort clear.

"I don't like it when you talk dirty," he said to her after one of their lovemaking sessions had ended. "Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but I don't think women should talk that way. It's not…"

"Ladylike?" she said.

He was standing in the bathroom door, tying the belt of his robe. He made a little fussy business of it so as not to look at her. "Yeah," he said. "It's not ladylike."

"I just want to be able to say what I want, Mitch."

"You mean what you want when we're in bed?" he said.

"Isn't that allowed?"

He made an exasperated sigh. "Rachel…" he said, "I told you before. You can say whatever you want to say."

"No I can't," she replied. "You tell me that, but you don't mean it. You're ready to snap at me if I say anything critical."

"That's not true."

"You're doing it right now."

"I'm not. I'm just saying I've been brought up in a different way than you. When I'm in bed with somebody I don't want to be given orders."

Now he was beginning to annoy her, and she wasn't in the mood to keep her irritation out of sight. "If you think me asking you to fuck me a little harder-"

"There you go again."

"-is me giving you orders we've got a problem, because-"

"I don't want to hear this."

"-and that's part of the problem."

"No, the problem is you having a foul mouth."

She got up out of bed. She was still naked, still sweaty from their lovemaking (he was always the first to the shower, scrubbing himself clean). Her nakedness intimidated him. It was the same body he'd been coupling with ten minutes before; now he couldn't look at her below her neck. She'd, not thought of him as absurd until that moment. Arrogant sometimes, childish sometimes. But never, until now, absurd. There he was, a grown man, averting his eyes from her body like a nervous schoolboy. She would have laughed had it not been so pitiful.

"Just so we understand one another, Mitchell," she said, her tone scarcely betraying the fury she felt. "I do not have a foul mouth. If you've got a problem with talking about sex-"

"Don't put it on me."

"Let me finish."

"I've heard all I need to hear."

"I haven't finished talking."

"Well I've finished listening," he said, crossing to the bedroom door.

She moved to intercept him, feeling bizarrely empowered by her own nakedness. She saw him cowed by her lack of shame and it aroused an exhibitionist streak in her. If he was going to treat her like a coarse woman, then damn it she'd behave like one, and take some pleasure in his discomfort.

"Is that all the baby-making we're going to be doing tonight?" she said to him.

"I'm not sleeping in this room with you tonight, if that's what you're asking."

"The more often we do it," Rachel pointed out, "the more chance I'll produce a little Geary. You do know that?"

"Right now, I don't care," he said, and walked out on her.

It wasn't until she'd showered, and was toweling herself dry, that the tears started to come. They were surprisingly inconsequential, given what had just taken place. She made swift work of them, then washed her face clean, and went to bed.

She'd slept alone for many years, and been none the worse for it, she told herself. If she had to do so again for the rest of her life, then so be it. She wasn't going to beg anyone for their company between the sheets; not even Mitchell Geary.

Paradoxically, they'd made a baby the very night she'd ended up sleeping alone. Seven weeks later Rachel was sitting in the office of Dr. Lloyd Waxman, the Geary family physician, with Waxman telling her the glad news.

"You're in very good health, Mrs. Geary," he said. "I'm sure everything's going to proceed along just fine. Did your mother have easy pregnancies, by the way?"

"As far as I know."

"Well that's another good sign." He jotted the information in his notes. "Maybe you'd like to come in and see me again in, say, a month's time?"

"No instructions in the meantime?"

"Nothing to excess," Waxman replied,, with a simple little shrug. "That's what I always tell people. You're a healthy woman, there's really no reason why this shouldn't be a breeze for you. Just don't go out on the town with Margie. Or if you go out, let her do all the drinking. She's very capable of that. Lord knows, it'll probably kill her one of these days."

Rachel had made a tentative peace with Mitchell about a week and a half after the argument in the bedroom, but things had not been fully repaired between them. She wasn't so much hurt by the exchange as she was insulted, and she wasn't about to kid herself that just because he was making an effort to be conciliatory the opinions he espoused weren't still lurking behind his smile. As he'd said at the time, they were part of the way he'd been brought up. Such deeply held feelings weren't going to disappear overnight.

But the news from Dr. Waxman was so rapturously greeted on all sides she forgot about the argument, for at least a few weeks. Everybody was so pleased, it was as though something miraculous had happened.

"It's only a baby," she remarked to Deborah one day.

"Rachel," Deborah said, with a faintly forbidding tone. "You know better than that."

"All right, it's a Geary baby," Rachel said. "But Lord, all this hoopla! And there's still seven months to go."

"When I was pregnant with Garrison," Deborah said, "Cadmus sent me flowers every day for the last two months of my pregnancy, with a little card attached, and the number of days left."

"Like a countdown?"

"Exactly."

"The more I know about this family, the stranger it seems."

Deborah smiled, her gaze sliding away.

"What does that mean?" Rachel said.

"What?"

"The smile."

Deborah shrugged. "Oh, just that the older I get the stranger everything seems." She was sitting on the sofa beside the window, and the sun was bright; it made her features hard to discern. "You know how you assume things'll come clear as you get older? But of course nothing does. Sometimes I find myself looking at the faces of people I've known for years and years and they're complete mysteries to me. Like something from another planet." She paused, sipped her peppermint tea, stared out of the window. "What were we talking about?"

"How strange all the Gearys are."

"Hm. I suppose you think I'm the oddest of the lot."

"No," Rachel protested. "I didn't mean to say-"

"Say whatever you feel like saying," Deborah said, her tone still distracted. "Take no notice of Mitchell." She looked in Rachel's direction, her gaze uncommitted. "He told me you were angry at him. I don't blame you, frankly. He can be very controlling. He doesn't get that from George, he gets it from Garrison. And Garrison gets it from Cadmus." Rachel didn't remark on any of this. "He said you had quite an argument."

"It's over with now," Rachel said.

"I had to pry it out of him. But he knows better than to try and conceal anything from his mother."

Several thoughts had come into Rachel's head at the same time and were competing for attention. One, that if Deborah didn't find it odd that her son was sharing bedroom conversation with her, then she was indeed just as strange as the rest of the family. Two, that Mitchell wasn't to be trusted to keep their intimate business to himself. And three, that she would hereafter take her mother-in-law at her word, and say whatever the hell came into her head, however unpalatable it sounded. They were stuck with her now. She was going to give the Geary clan a child. That conferred power upon her.

Margie put it best, in fact, when she remarked that "the kid's going to give you something to bargain with." This was a grim vision of things, to be sure, but by now all of Rachel's romantic delusions were in retreat. If the child she was carrying was a necessary part of getting her way, then so be it.

In late January, on one of those crystalline days that make even the most Arctic of New York winters bearable, Mitchell came to the apartment at noon and told Rachel he wanted to show her something; would she come with him? Right now? she asked him. Yes, he said, right now. The traffic was abnormally snarled, even for New York.

The leaden sky had begun to shed snow; a blizzard was promised within hours. It reminded her of that first afternoon, in Boston. Snow on the sidewalk, and a prince at the door. It seemed so very long ago.

Their destination was Fifth Avenue, at 81st: a tower of condominiums which she knew by reputation only.

"I bought you something," Mitchell said, as they stepped into the elevator. "I think you should have a place you can call your own. Somewhere you can shut out all the Gearys." He smiled. "Except me, of course."

His gift awaited them at the top of the tower: the penthouse duplex. It had been exquisitely appointed, the walls hung with modern masters, the furniture chic, but comfortable.

"There are four bedrooms, six bathrooms, and of course…" he led her to the window "… the best view in America."

"Oh my Lord," was all Rachel could say.

"Do you like it?"

How could she not? It was beautiful; perfection. She couldn't imagine what it had cost to create luxury on such a scale.

"It's all yours, honey," Mitchell said. "I mean, literally yours. The apartment, everything it contains, it's all in your name." He came over, and stood behind her, looking out over the snow-brightened rectangle of Central Park. "I know it's hard for you sometimes, living in the middle of this fucking dynasty. It's hard for me, so God knows what it's like for you." He put his arms around her from behind, his palms laid against her swelling belly. "I want you to have your own little queendom up here. If you don't like the pictures on the walls, sell 'em. I tried to choose things I thought you'd like, but if you don't, sell them and get something you do like. I put a couple of million dollars in a separate bank account for you, to change whatever you want to change. Put in a pool table. Or a screening room. Whatever you want. You call the shots here." He put his mouth close to her ear. "Of course, I hope you'll let me have a key, so I can come in and play sometimes,"There was a gravely tone to his voice, and his hips were moving gently but insistently against her backside. "Hey, honey?"

"Yes?"

"Can I come in and play?"

"You need to ask?" she said, turning in his arms so that she faced him. "Of course you can play."

"Even in your delicate condition?"

"I'm not delicate," she said, pressing against him. "I'm feeling fine. Better than fine." She kissed him. "This is an amazing place."

"You're amazing," he said, returning her kiss. "The more I know you, the more I fall in love with you. I'm not very good at telling you that. You throw me off my stride. I'm supposed to be Mr. Cool, but when I'm with you, I get stupid, like a kid." He put his mouth against her face. "A very, very, very horny kid."

She didn't need to be told; he was so hard against her. And his pale face was flushed, and his neck blotchy. "Can I put it in you?" he said.

That was always his overture; can I put it in you? When she'd been angry with him, and thought of this phrase, it had struck her as perfectly ridiculous. But right now she was persuaded by its idiot simplicity. She wanted it inside her; that it which he couldn't bear to name.

"Which bedroom?" she said.

They made love without fully undressing, on a bed so big she could have thrown an orgy amid its countless pillows. He was more passionate than she could ever remember his being, his hands and mouth returning over and over to her silky belly. It was as if he was aroused by the evidence of his own fecundity; muttering words of adoration against her body. The session didn't last more than fifteen minutes; he couldn't hold back. And when he had finished, he was up and showering, and then away downstairs to make some calls. He was late for his meetings, he said; Garrison would be cursing him.

"I'll catch a cab and leave the limo downstairs for you," he told her, leaning over to kiss her forehead. His hair was still wet from the shower.

"Don't get a chill. There's a blizzard out there."

He glanced out. The snow was coming down so heavily it had almost obscured the park.

"I'll stay warm," he said softly. "I'll think of you two lying here, and I'll be toasty."

When he was gone her body remembere'd the motion of his erection inside her, as though there were a phantom phallus still sliding in and out of her. And she remembered too the way he spoke when he was aroused. Often, in the heat of the moment, he'd called her baby, and this afternoon had been no different. Baby o baby o baby, he'd said as he put it in. But now, when she conjured his voice, it was as if he were speaking to the child in her; calling to it in her womb. Baby o baby o baby.

She didn't know whether to be moved or disturbed, so she told herself to be neither. She pulled the sheets and quilt up around her, and slept, while the snow lay its own fat white quilt on the park below.

Since I wrote the foregoing passage-which was yesterday afternoon-I've had no less than three visits from Luman, which have so distracted me that I haven't been able to get back into the mood for continuing my story. So I've decided to tell you the matter of my distractions, and maybe that will put them out of my mind.

The more time I spend with Luman, the more troubling he seems to be. He'd decided from our last conversation-after all these years of estrangement-that I was now his best buddy: a smoking companion (he's been through half a dozen of my havanas), a confidante, and of course a fellow writer. As I told Zabrina, he's got the notion lodged in his head that I'm going to collaborate with him on the definitive tome about madhouses. I've agreed to no such thing, but I haven't got the heart to spoil his dream; it's plainly very important to him. He comes to my room with odd little scribblings he's made (actually, he doesn't barge in the way Marietta would; he waits on the veranda until I chance to look up, see him there, and invite him in) and gives me what he's written, telling me where he thinks it's going to fit in the grand scheme of his book. He's obviously thought the whole project through in great detail, because he'll say: this belongs in Chapter Seven; or: this goes with the stories about Bedlam, as though I shared his vision. I don't. I can't. For one thing, he hasn't communicated what this book of his is going to be (though he clearly assumes he has) and for another I've got a book of my own to think about. There isn't room in my head for two. In fact there's barely room for this.

I suppose it would have been better for all concerned if I'd just told him that I had no intention of collaborating with him. Then he'd have gone away and left me to get on with telling you what happened to Rachel. But he was so impassioned about it, I was afraid he'd be a wreck if I did that.

That's not the only reason that I didn't tell him the truth, I'll admit. Though it's a disruption having him come in and pick my brains the way he's been doing, he's also been strangely stimulating company. The more comfortable he becomes in my presence, the less effort he makes to keep his conversation on any coherent track. In the midst of telling me some lunatic detail of his book he'll veer off onto a completely different subject, then veer again, and again, almost as though there was more than one Luman in his head, and they were all vying for the use of his tongue. There's Luman the gossip, who has a chatty, faintly effeminate manner. There's Luman the metaphysician, who gazes at the ceiling while he pontificates. There's Luman the encyclopedia, who'll out of the blue talk about Roman law, or the finer points of topiary. (Some of the information he's provided in this latter mode has been fascinating. I didn't realize until he told me that in some species of hyena the female is indistinguishable from the male, her clitoris the size of a penis, her labia swollen and drooping like a scrotum. No wonder Marietta took to them. Nor did I know that the temples where Cesaria was worshipped were often also tombs; and that sacred marriages, the heiros games, were celebrated there, among the dead.) And then there's Luman the impersonator, who can suddenly speak in a voice that is so unlike his own it's as though he were possessed. Last night, for instance, he impersonated Dwight so well if I'd dosed my eyes I wouldn't have been able to tell it from the real thing. And then later, just as he was leaving, he spoke in Chiyojo's voice, quoting a piece of a poem my mother wrote:

"My Savior is most diligent;

He has me in his book

With all my faults enumerated,

And I am certain there.

It's only the Fallen One

Who wants us perfect;

For then we will not need an angel's care."

You can imagine how strange that was to hear: my wife's voice, still distinctly Japanese, speaking a thought that came from my mother's heart. The two great women in my life, emerging from the throat of this raddled, wild-eyed man. Is it any wonder I've been distracted from the flow of my story?

But the strangest portions of these exchanges are those with a metaphysical cast; no question. He's evidently thought long and hard about the paradoxes of our state: a family of divinities (or in my case a semidivinity) hiding away from a world which no longer wants us or needs us.

"Godhood doesn't mean a damn thing," he said to me. "All it does is make us crazy."

I asked him why he thought it had done that. (I didn't argue with his basic assumption. I think he's right: all the Barbarossas are a little mad.) He said he thought it was because we were just minor gods.

"We're not that much better than them out there, when you come to think of it," he said. "Sure, we live longer. And we can do a few tricks. But it's not the deep stuff. We can't make stars. Or unmake 'em."

"Not even Nicodemus?" I said.

"Nah. Not even Nicodemus. And he was one of the First Created. Like her." He pointed up to Cesaria's chambers.

"'Two souls as old as heaven…"'

"Who said that?"

"I did," I replied. "It's from my book."

"Nice," he said.

"Thanks."

He fell silent for a few moments. I assumed he was mulling over the prettiness of my phrasing, but no, his grasshopper mind had already jumped to something else; or rather back, to our problematical godhood.

"I think we're too farsighted for our own good," he said. "We can't seem to live in the moment. We're always looking off beyond the edge of things. But we're not powerful enough to be able to see anything there." He growled like an ill-tempered dog. "It's so fucking frustrating. Not to be one thing or the other."

"Meaning?"

"If we were real gods… I mean the way gods are supposed to be, we wouldn't be pissing around here. We'd be off-out there, where there's still things to do."

"You don't mean the world."

"No, I don't mean the world. Fuck the world. I mean out beyond anything anybody on this planet ever saw or dreamt of seeing."

I thought of Galilee while he was talking. Had the same hunger as Luman was describing-unarticulated, perhaps, but burning just as brightly-driven Galilee out across the ocean on his little boat, daring all he knew how to dare, but never feeling as though he was far enough from land; or indeed from home?

These ruminations had put Luman into a melancholy mood, and he told me he didn't want to talk any more, and left. But he was back at dawn, or a little thereafter, for his third visit. I don't think he'd slept. He'd been walking around since he'd departed my study, thinking.

"I jotted a few more notes down," he said, "for the chapter on Christ."

"Christ's in this book of yours?" I said.

"Has to be. Has to be," Luman said. "Big family connection."

"We're not in the same family as Jesus, Luman," I said. Then, doubting my own words: "Are we?"

"Nah. But he was a crazy man, just like us. He just cared more than we do."

"About what?"

"Them," he said; "Humanity. The fucking flock. Truth is, we were never shepherds. We were hunters. At least, she was. I guess Nicodemus had a taste for domesticity. Raising .horses. He was a rancher at heart." I smiled at this piece of insight. It was true. Our Father, the fence-builder.

"Maybe we should have cared a little more," Luman went on. "Tried to love them, even though they never loved us."

"Nicodemus loved them," I pointed out. "Some of the women at least."

"I tried that," Luman said. "But they die on you, just as you're getting used to having them around."

"Do you have children out there?" I asked him.

"Oh sure, I've got bastards."

It had never occurred to me until this moment that our family tree might have undiscovered branches. I'd always assumed that I knew the extent of the Barbarossa clan. Apparently, I didn't.

"Do you know where they are?" I asked him.

"No."

"But you could find them?"

"I suppose so…"

"If they're like me, they're still alive. Growing old slowly, but-"

"Oh yeah, they're still alive."

"And you're not curious about them?"

"Of course I'm curious," he said, a little sharply. "But I can barely stay sane sitting out there in the Smoke House. If I went out looking for my kids, turning over the memories of the women I bedded, I'd lose what little fucking sanity I still possess." He shook his head violently, as though to get the temptation out from between his ears.

"Maybe… if I ever go out there…" I began. He stopped shaking his head, and looked up at me. His eyes were sparkling suddenly: tears in them, but also, I think, some little flame of hope. "Maybe I could look for them for you…" I went on.

"Look for my children?"

"Yes."

"You'd do that?"

"Yes. Of course. I'd… be honored."

The tears welled in his eyes now. "Oh brother," he said. "Imagine that. My children." His voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. "My children." He caught hold of my hand; his palm was prickly against my skin, his agitation oozirig from his pores. "When would you do this?" he said.

"Oh… well… I couldn't go until I'd finished the book."

"My book or yours?"

"Mine. Yours would have to wait."

"No problem. No problem. I could live with that. If I knew you were going to bring me…" He couldn't finish the thought; it was too overwhelming for him. He let go of me and put his hand over his eyes. The tears coursed down his cheeks, and he sobbed so loudly I swear everyone in the house must have heard him. At last, he recovered himself enough to say: "We'll talk about this again some other time."

"Whenever you like," I told him.

"I knew we'd become friends again for a reason," he said to me. "You're quite a man, Maddox. And I choose my words carefully. Quite a man."

With that, he went out onto the veranda, stopping only to take another cigar from my humidor. Once outside, however, he turned back. "I don't know what this information is worth," he said, "but now that I trust you as I do, I think I ought to tell you…"

"What?"

He began feverishly scratching his beard, suddenly discomfited. "You're going to think I'm really crazy now," he said.

"Tell me."

"Well… I have a theory. About Nicodemus."

"Yes?"

"I don't believe his death was an accident. I think he orchestrated the whole thing."

"Why would he do that?"

"So that he could slip away from her. From his responsibilities. I know this may be hard to hear, brother-but I think the company of your wife gave him a hankerin' for the old days. He wanted human pussy. So he had to get away."

"But you buried him, Luman. And I saw him trampled, right there in front of me. I was lying on the ground, under the same hooves."

"A corpse ain't evidence of anything," Luman replied.

"You know that. There are ways to get out, if you know 'em. And if anyone knew those ways-"

"-it was him."

"Tricky sonofabitch, that father of ours. Tricky and oversexed." He stopped scratching his beard and made me an apologetic little shrug. "I'm sorry if it hurts to have me bring it up, but-"

"No. It's all right."

"We have to start being honest around here, it seems to me. Stop pretending he was a saint."

"I don't. Believe me. He took my wife."

"There, you see," Luman said. "Lying to yourself. He didn't take Chiyojo. You gave her to him, Maddox." He saw the fierce look in my eyes, and faltered for a moment. But then decided to stay true to his own advice, and tell the truth, as he saw it, however unpalatable. "You could have taken her away, the moment you saw what was happening between them. You could have packed up in the middle of the night, and let him cool down. But you stayed. You saw he had his eyes on her, and you stayed, knowing she wouldn't be able to say no to him. You gave her to him, Maddox, 'cause you wanted him to love you." He stared at his feet. "I don't blame you for it. I probably would have done the same thing in your shoes. But don't be thinkin' you can stand back from any of this and pretend you're just observin' it all. You're not. You're just as deep in this shit as the rest of us."

"I think you'd better go," I said quietly.

"I'm going, I'm going. But you think on what I've said, and you'll see it's true."

"Don't come back for a while," I added. "Because you won't be welcome."

"Now, Maddox-"

"Go, will you?" I said. "Don't make it any worse than it is."

He gave me a pained expression. He was now obviously regretting what he'd said; he'd undone in a few sentences the trust we'd so recently forged. But he knew better than to try and explain himself further. He took his sad eyes off me, turned, and walked off across the lawn.

What can I tell you about this terrible accusation of his? It seems to me very little. I've recounted as honestly as I could the salient points of our exchanges, and I'll return to the subject later, when I have a better perspective on it all. It probably goes without saying that I wouldn't have been so distracted by all this, and felt the need to report it as I have, if I didn't think there was some merit in what he said. But as you can imagine it's not easy to admit to, however much I may wish to be honest with myself, and with you. If I believe Luman's interpretation of events, then I am to blame for Chiyojo's demise; and for my own injuries; and thus also for the years of loneliness and grief I've passed, sitting here. That's hard to accept. I'm not sure I'm even capable of it. But be assured that if I come to some peace with this suspicion, then these pages will be the first to know.

Enough. It's time to pick up the story of Rachel and Mitchell Geary. There's sorrow to come, very shortly. I promised early on that I'd give you enough of other people's despair to make you feel a little happier with your own lot. Well now it's me who needs the comfort of somebody else's tears.

The Monday following Mitchell's gift of the apartment, Rachel woke with the worst headache of her life; so bad it made her vision blurred. She took some aspirin, and went back to bed; but even then the pain didn't pass, so she called Margie, who said she'd be over in a few minutes and take her to Dr. Waxman. By the time she reached Waxman's office she was shaking with pain: not just a headache now, but crippling spasms in her stomach. Waxman was very concerned.

"I'm going to put you into Mount Sinai right away," he said. "There's a Dr. Hendrick there, he's wonderful; I want him to take a look at you."

"What's wrong with me?" Rachel said.

"Let's hope nothing at all. But I want you to be examined properly."

Even through the haze of pain Rachel could read the anxiety in his voice.

"I'm not going to lose the baby, am I?" she said.

"We'll do everything we can-"

'I can't lose the baby.''

"Your health's what's important right now, Rachel," he said. "There's nobody better than Gary Hendrick, believe me. You're in good hands."

An hour later she was in a private room in Mount Sinai. Hendrick came to examine her, and told her, very calmly, that there were some troubling signs-her blood pressure was high, there was some minor bleeding-and that he would be monitoring her very closely. He had given her some medication for the pain, which was beginning to take effect. She should just rest, he said; there'd be a nurse in the room with her at all times, so if she should need anything all she had to do was ask.

Margie had been calling around looking for Mitchell during this period, and upon Hendrick's departure came back in to say that he hadn't yet been located, but his secretary thought he was probably between meetings, and would be calling in very soon.

"You're going to be just fine, honey," Margie said. "Waxman likes to be melodramatic once in a while. It makes him feel important."

Rachel smiled. The painkiller Hendrick had given her had induced a heaviness in her limbs and lids. She resisted the temptation to sleep however: she didn't trust her body to behave itself in her absence.

"God," Margie said, "this is a rare occurrence for me."

"What's that?"

"Cocktail hour and no cocktail."

Rachel grinned. "Waxman thinks you should give it up."

"He should try being married to Garrison sober," Margie quipped.

Rachel opened her mouth to reply, but as she did so she felt a strange sensation in her throat, as though she swallowed something hard. She put her hand up to touch the place, a squeak of panic escaping her.

"What's wrong, honey?" Margie said.

She didn't hear the last word; her head filled with a rush of sound, like a dam bursting between her ears. From the corner of her eye she saw the nurse rising from her chair, a look of alarm on her face. Then she felt her body convulse with such violence she was almost thrown from the bed. By the time the spasm had passed she was unconscious.

Mitchell arrived at Mount Sinai at a quarter to eight. Rachel had lost the baby fifteen minutes before.

Once Rachel was feeling well enough to sit up and talk-which took eight or nine days-Waxman came to visit, and in his kindly, avuncular manner explained what had happened. It was a rare condition, he said, called eclampsia; its causes were not clearly known, but it frequently proved fatal to both mother and child. She had been lucky. Of course it was a tragedy that she'd lost the child, and he was deeply sorry about that, but he'd been talking to Hendrick, who'd reported that she was getting stronger by the day, and would soon be up and around again. If she wanted any further details about what she'd endured he'd be happy to explain it more fully to her when she was ready. Meanwhile, she had one task and one only: to put this sorry business behind her.

So much for the medical explanation. It meant very little; and in truth she didn't entirely believe it. Whatever the doctors' reports said, Rachel had her own theory as to what had happened: her body had simply not wanted to produce a Geary. Her secret self had sent a message to her womb and her womb had sent a message to her heart, and between them they'd conspired to be rid of the child. In other words it was her fault that the infant had died before it had had a chance to live. If she'd only been able to love it, her body would have nurtured it better. Her fault; all her fault.

She shared this certainty with no one. When she got out of hospital after two weeks of convalescence Mitch suggested she see a counselor to talk it all through with.

"Waxman said you'll grieve for a time," he said. "It's like losing somebody, even though you didn't really know them. You should talk it all out. It'll be easier to deal with."

She couldn't help but notice that as far as Mitch was concerned it was her grief, her baby that had been lost, not his. All of which irrationally supported her thesis. He knew what she'd done; he probably hated her.

She refused to see a counselor however: this was her pain, and she was going to keep it for herself. Maybe it would fill up the emptiness in her where the child had been. .

She had plenty of visitors. Sherrie came in from Ohio the day after the baby's death, and was a nearly constant presence at the hospital. Deborah came and went, as did Margie. Even Garrison visited, though he was so plainly uneasy Rachel finally told him he should leave, and he gladly took up the suggestion telling her he'd come back the next day when he had less on his mind. He didn't, and she was glad.

"Where do you want to stay when we get you out of here?" Mitchell asked after about ten days. "Do you want to go to the duplex or stay with Margie for a while?"

"You know where I'd really like to go?" she said.

"Tell me and it's done."

"George's house."

"Caleb's Creek?" He looked thoroughly perplexed that she'd choose such a place. "It's so far out from the city."

"That's what I want," she replied. "I don't want to have visitors right now. I want to just… hide away for a while. Think about things."

"Don't think too hard," Mitch said. "It's not going to do any good. The baby's gone and all the thinking in the world isn't going to bring him back."

"It was a boy…?" she said softly. She'd kept herself from asking, though Waxman had told her he'd share any information she felt she needed to know in order to deal with the loss.

"Yes," Mitchell said, "it was a boy. I thought you knew."

"We had better names for the boy than the girl," she said, feeling the tears shaking in her. "You liked Laurence, right?"

"Rachel, don't do this…"

"I liked Mackenzie-"

"Please. God. Rachel."

"Trouble with Mackenzie… everybody would have…" and now the tears were too close to be held back "… called him Mac…"

She put her hand to her mouth to stop the sob that was coming. But it spilled from her anyway. "He wouldn't have liked Mac," she wept, reaching for a tissue to wipe her runny nose.

As she did so she looked up at Mitch. He had half turned from her, but even through the tears she could see that his face was crumpled up, his body wracked with sobs. She felt a sudden rush of love for him.

"Oh my poor honey," she said.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't be-"

"No. Honey. Na," She opened her arms to him. "Come here." He shook his head, still turned from her. "Don't be ashamed. It's good to cry."

"No," he said. "No, I don't want… I don't want to cry. I want to be strong for us both."

"Just come here," she said. "Please."

Reluctantly, he turned back toward her. His face was red and wet, his mouth turned down, his chin crumpled. "Oh God, oh God, oh God. Why did this have to happen? We didn't do anything to deserve this."

He was like a child who'd been punished, and didn't know why. Weeping as much for the injustice of his suffering as the suffering itself.

"Let me hold you," she said. "I need to hold you."

He went to her, and she put her arms around him. He smelled stale; his sweat had gone sour on a day-old shirt. Even his cologne had turned bitter.

"Why?" he asked her through his grief. "Why? Why?"

"I don't know why," she said. Her own sense of culpability seemed at that moment horribly self-indulgent. He'd been hurting quietly all along; she'd just chosen not to see it. But now, though she was looking at him through her own tears, she saw him more clearly than she'd seen him in weeks: the flecks of gray at his temples, the shadows around his eyes, the fever blister on his lip.

"Poor husband…" she murmured, and kissed his hair.

He put his face against her breast, and the sobbing went on, both of them crying, rocking one another.

Things got better after that. She wasn't alone with her pain after all. He felt it just as strongly in his way, and that was a comfort to her. It wasn't the last time they cried together-many times somebody would say something that would catch one of them amiss, and the other's eyes would fill with sympathetic tears. But there wasn't total darkness around her now; she could see the possibility that in a while her need to mourn would fade, and she'd be able to get on with her life.

There would be no further pregnancies; Dr. Waxman made that absolutely clear. If by some unlucky accident she were to become pregnant again they would need to terminate the pregnancy as quickly as possible so as to prevent any unnecessary stress upon her body.

"Am I frail?" she asked him when he told her this. "I don't feel frail."

"You're vulnerable, put it that way," Waxman replied. "In every other way but this, you can live a perfectly normal life. But as far as kids are concerned…" He shrugged. "Of course you can adopt."

"I don't know if the Gearys would approve."

He raised his eyebrow. "Perhaps you're being a little oversensitive," he said. "Which is perfectly understandable right now, by the way. But I think if you were to ask Mitch or his mother or even the old man you'd be surprised how open they'd be to the idea of adoption. Anyway that's all for the future. What matters right now is that you take care of yourself. Mitch says you're going up to his father's house for a while."

"I'm hoping."

"That's a beautiful part of the state. I've been thinking of retiring up there. My wife didn't care for it, but now she's dead…"

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did you lose her recently?"

Waxman's easy smile had faded from his face. "Last Thanksgiving," he said. "She had cancer."

"I'm so sorry."

He sighed; such a sad sigh. "I don't suppose you want to hear platitudes from your old fart of a doctor, but if I may just say: you only get one life, Rachel, and nobody can live it for you. That means you have to take a long, hard look at what you want." He was taking just such a look at her as he spoke. "One door's just closed, and that's a terrible shock. But there's plenty of others, especially for a woman in your position." He leaned forward, his leather chair squeaking. "Just do one thing for me."

"What's that?"

"Don't end up like Margie. I've watched her for the last God knows how many years, drinking herself into an early grave." Again, that laden sigh escaped him. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'll shut my mouth now."

"No…" Rachel murmured. "It's good for me to hear this right now."

"I wasn't always such a melancholy old bird. But since Faith passed away I see things differently. I knew her for forty-nine years, you see. I met her when she was sixteen. So I saw almost a whole life come and go. That makes you think about things in a different way."

"Yes…"

"I said to one of my colleagues after Faith died that I felt like I'd been shot out into space, and I was looking back at everything that had seemed so permanent and what I saw was this fragile blue rock in all that… nothing ness." His gaze had emptied as he spoke; now, when he looked up at Rachel again, she seemed to see right into him; into a loneliness that made her want to run from the room.

"You just be happy," he said to her softly. "You're a good person, Rachel. I see that. And you deserve happiness. So do what your instincts tell you, and if the Gearys don't like it then you just walk away." The words made her catch her breath. "Of course if you quote me," he went on, "I'll deny I ever said it. I'm hoping Cadmus is going to give me a little piece of land when I retire as a thank-you for putting up with his brood over the years."

"I'll put in a good word for you," Rachel told him.

There are occasions when the responsibilities of a storyteller and those of a simple witness contradict one another. For example: had I told you from the outset that the chief catalyst of Mitch and Rachel's separation was the loss of their child, I would have bled away what little suspense the previous chapters possessed. But I don't believe I misrepresented the facts. I began this portion of my account by telling you that there was no single calamitous event that began to undo the marriage, and I would still say that was the case. If the child had survived perhaps Rachel would have stayed with Mitchell a while longer, but she would have left him sooner or later. The marriage was in trouble long before the pregnancy; the most the death of the child did was hasten its collapse.

As Rachel had requested Mitchell took her up to the farmhouse in Caleb's Creek and stayed with her for almost ten days, going down to the city three or four times for meetings but returning in the evening to be with her. Though the Rylanders were there in his absence to attend to all Rachel's needs, Barbara told Mitch that Rachel had taken over most of her duties. It was true. The general homeliness of the house-its lack of expensive works of art, its modest scale-brought out the domestic side of Rachel's nature. She usurped the kitchen from Barbara and started to cook, remarking to Mitch one day that she hadn't so much as boiled a pot of water since they were married. She wasn't a particularly sophisticated cook, but she knew how to put a hearty meal together. There was a healing simplicity to the rituals of the kitchen: fresh vegetables from the garden, good wine from the cellar, the plates washed and neatly stacked when the meal was over.

After two weeks of this, Mitch asked her how she was doing, and she said: "I'll be fine on my own, if that's what you were wondering. Do you want to spend a few nights in the city?"

"I was just thinking about going until the weekend. I'll come back here on Friday night, and maybe if you're feeling better we can go home to New York on Sunday."

"Is somebody going to be using this house?"

"No," Mitch said. "Nobody uses this place any more."

"So why can't I stay?"

"Well you can stay, baby. I just thought you'd be wanting to get back with some of your friends."

"I don't have any friends in New York."

"Rachel, don't be silly. You've got plenty of-" He saw the unhappiness in her eyes, and raised his hands in surrender. "All right. If you say you've got no friends, you've got no friends. I only thought if you were making progress, it would be good for everybody to see you again."

"Oh, now I get it. You want to show me around so the family doesn't start thinking I've lost my mind."

"That's not it at all. Why do you have to be so paranoid?"

"Because I know the way you think. All of you. Always watching out for the family reputation. Well, right now I don't care about the family reputation, okay? I don't want to see anybody. I don't want to talk to anybody. And I certainly don't want to go back to New York."

"Calm down, will you?" Mitch said. "I just wanted to find out where we stand. Now I know." He left the kitchen without another word, but he came back in again ten minutes later. His anger hadn't dissipated, but he was doing his best to conceal it. "I haven't come back here for another argument," he said, "I only want to point out that you can't stay here forever. This is not a life I want my wife to be living, puttering around like an old woman, cutting roses and peeling potatoes."

"I like peeling potatoes."

"You're being perverse."

"I'm being honest."

"Well, that's all I wanted to say. I'm going to be staying with Garrison for the next few days, so we can work through all this Bangkok business." She didn't have a clue what he was talking about; nor did she care to inquire. "So if you need me…"

"I know where to find you," she replied, though she'd realized several seconds before that she wouldn't be coming to look.

Where would she go? That was the question that vexed her for the next few days. Even assuming she did what would once have been unthinkable, and actually left her husband, where would she go? She couldn't stay here at the farmhouse, though that would be blissful. It was Geary property. She could take up residence in the apartment, of course-that was hers-but she'd never feel comfortable there; certainly not without completely remodeling the place in line with her own tastes, and that was too large a scale of undertaking. Perhaps she'd be better off selling it, even if it didn't make a particularly good price, and finding a smaller place to purchase: perhaps somewhere off the beaten track like Caleb's Creek.

She slept on the thought, though not well. She passed the night in an uneasy state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, and when she dreamed the dreams were of the room in which she was lying, only bleached of all color, like the photographs in George's study that had been left in the sun too long. There were people passing through the room, a few of them glancing down at her, their faces impassive. She knew none of them, though she had the suspicion that she'd known them once, and forgotten their names.

The next day she called Margie, and invited her to visit.

"I really can't bear the country," Margie protested. "But if you're not going to be coming back here for a while…"

"I'm not."

"Then I'll come."

She arrived the next day, her limo packed with boxes of her favorite indulgences-smoked bluefish pate, the inevitable Beluga, Viennese coffee, a box of bitter chocolate florentines-plus, of course, a case of libations.

"This isn't the back of beyond," Rachel pointed out as she watched Samuel, Margie's driver, unload the supplies. "We have a very good market ten minutes' drive from here."

"I know, I know," Margie said, "but I like to come prepared." She pulled a bottle of single-malt Scotch out of one of the boxes. "Where's the ice?"

Margie had plenty of gossip. Loretta had become quite the harridan in the last few weeks, she reported. There'd been a very acrimonious exchange with Garrison a week ago, in which Loretta had inferred some misconduct in the way Garrison had disposed of several million dollars' worth of family holdings.

"I didn't think Loretta had any interest in the business side of things," Rachel said.

"Oh don't you believe it. She likes to pretend she's above it all. But she's watching her empire. In fact, the more I see her operate, the more I think she was always working behind the scenes. Even when George was alive. He did all the talking, but she was the one telling him what to say. And now she's seeing things she doesn't approve of, so she's showing her hand."

"So what happened with Garrison?"

"Oh it was a mess. He told her she didn't know what she was talking about, which was exactly the wrong thing to say. Apparently she went into the boardroom the next day and dismissed five of the board members on the spot."

"She can do that?"

"She did it," Margie replied. "Told them all to pack their bags and go. Then she gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal saying they were incompetent. They're all suing of course. I'm surprised Mitchell didn't say anything about any of this."

"He doesn't talk about the business. He never has."

"This isn't business. This is civil war. Garrison was madder than I've seen him in a long time. It was all very satisfying." They exchanged smiles; co-conspirators in their pleasure at all this unrest. "The way he was talking," Margie went on, "I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't come up with some kind of ultimatum. You know: either she goes or I go."

"And who's going to make that decision?"

"I don't know," Margie laughed. "Especially now Lor-etta's put half the board out of a job. I suppose in the end it'll come down to whether Mitchell sides with Garrison or his grandmother."

"It all seems so old-fashioned."

"Oh, it's positively feudal," Margie said. "But that's the way the old man set it up when he retired. He kept all the power in the family."

"Does Cadmus have any kind of vote?"

"Oh sure. He still sends memos to Garrison, believe it or not."

"Do they make any sense?"

"I think it depends how much medication he's had that day. Last time I went to see him he was flying. Talking about something that happened fifty years ago. I don't think he even knew who I was. Then there's days when he's really sharp, according to Garrison." She grew a little pensive. "I think it's pretty sad, personally. To be so old and not be able to let go of his little empire."

"Isn't that what keeps him alive?" Rachel said.

"Well it's pitiful," Margie said. "But it's the way they are. Control freaks."

"Including Loretta?"

"Especially Loretta. She's got nothing better to do."

"She's not too old to many again, once Cadmus dies."

"She'd be better off taking a lover," Margie said. She had a sly expression on her face. "It's a nice feeling."

"Are you telling me-?" The slyness became a smile. "You have a lover?"

"Doesn't everyone?" Margie laughed. "His name's Danny. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him, but he's a wonderful distraction in the middle of a dreary afternoon."

"Does Garrison know about him?"

"Well we haven't had a nice chat about it, if that's what you mean, but he knows. I mean Garrison and I haven't slept together for six years, except for a rather wretched night after that damned birthday party for Cadmus, when both of us got a little mawkish. Otherwise he goes his way and I go mine. It's better that way."

"I see."

"Are you shocked? Oh, please tell me you're shocked."

"No. I'm just thinking…"

"About?"

"Well… the reason I asked you to come here's because I'm going to leave Mitchell." It took a lot to silence Margie, but this did the trick. "It's for the best," Rachel added.

"Does Mitchell agree?"

"He doesn't know."

"Well when exactly were you intending to tell him, honey?"

"When I've got everything sorted out in my head."

"Are you sure you wouldn't be wiser doing what I've done? There's a lot of cute bartenders in New York."

"I don't want a bartender," Rachel said. "With the greatest respect to… what's his name?"

"Daniel." She grinned. "Actually it's Dan Dan the Fuck Fuck Man."

"With the greatest respect to the Fuck Fuck Man it's not what I'm looking for."

"Was Mitchell any good in bed?"

"I don't have that much to compare him with."

"Put it this way: it wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime experience?"

"No."

"So you don't want a bartender. What do you want?"

"Good question," Rachel said.

She closed her eyes so as not to be distracted by the quizzical look on Margie's face. "I guess… I just want to feel more passionate."

"About Mitchell?"

"About… getting up in the morning." She opened her eyes again. Margie was perusing her, as though trying to decide something.

"What are you thinking?" Rachel asked her.

"Just that it's all very fine talking about passion, honey. But if it ever came along-I'm talking about real passion, not some soap-opera baloney-it'd change everything in your life. You do know that? Everything."

"I'm ready for that."

"So you've given up on Mitchell completely?"

"Yes."

"He's not going to let you divorce him without a fight."

"Probably not. But I'm sure he doesn't want us all over the tabloids either. Neither do 1.1 just want to live my life as far away from the Gearys as I can get."

"What if you could have both?"

"I don't follow."

"What if you could have all the passion you could take, and still keep your share of the Geary lifestyle? No divorce proceeding; no judge going through the dirty linen."

"I don't see how that's possible."

"The only way it's going to happen is if you promise to stay with Mitchell. He's got his eye on a place in Congress, and he wants his private life to be as squeaky clean as possible. If you help him look like a saint, maybe he'll look the other way when you go have an adventure."

"You make it sound all very civilized."

"Why shouldn't it be?" Margie said. "Unless he decides to get jealous. Then… well, then you might have to talk some reason into him. But you're smart enough to do that."

"And where am I going to find this adventure?"

"We'll talk about that later," Margie said with a little smile. "Right now, you've got some deciding to do, honey. But let me remind you of something. I tried leaving. And I tried and I tried. And, believe me, it's a hard world out there." iii

Perversely enough it was this last remark that finally convinced Rachel that she had to leave. So what if it was a hard world? She'd survived out there for the first twenty-four years of her life, without the Gearys. She could do so again.

When Margie finally rose, sometime after noon, and was downing her first Bloody Mary of the day (complete with a stick of celery, for the roughage) Rachel explained that she'd thought everything over and decided to take a long drive, back to Ohio. It would give her time to think, she said; time to make up her mind about what she really wanted.

"Do you want Mitchell to know where you've gone?" Margie asked her.

"Preferably not."

"Then I won't tell him," Margie said, very simply. "When are you planning to go?"

"I'm already packed. I just wanted to say goodbye to you."

"Oh Lord. You don't waste any time. Still, maybe it's for the best." Margie opened her arms. "You know you're very dear to me, don't you?"

"Yes I know," Rachel said, hugging her hard.

"So you be careful," Margie said. "No picking up hitchhikers because they've got pretty asses. And don't stay in any sleazy motels. There's a lot of strange folks out there."

So she began the homeward journey. It took her four days and three nights, stopping off, despite Margie's warnings, at a couple of less than salubrious motels along the way. Though she'd thought the journey would give her plenty of time to think, her mind didn't want to be bothered with problems. Instead it idled, concerning itself only with the practical problems of finding places to eat, and choosing between routes. Whenever there was a choice between a bland highway and something more picturesque (but inevitably longer), she picked the latter. It was nice to be in the driving seat again, after two years of being chauffeured around; turning up the radio and singing along with old favorites.

But once she crossed into Ohio, with Dansky only a couple of hours away, her high spirits faded. She had some difficult times ahead. What would she say when people asked her how her life in the lap of luxury was going? What would she tell them when they enquired about Mitchell, her handsome husband, who had given up his eligible bachelorhood to be with her? Oh Lord, what would she say? That it had all gone to hell, and she was running home to escape? That she didn't love him after all? That he was a sham, he and his whole damn world, a hollow spectacle that wasn't worth a damn. They wouldn't believe her. How could she complain, they'd say, when she had so much? When she was rolling in wealth, and they were still living in their one-bedroom tract homes worrying about the mortgage and the cost of a new pair of sneakers for the kids?

Well, it was too late to turn back now. She was crossing the railroad tracks that had always been in her childhood the limits of the town; the place where the world she knew ended and the greater world began. She was back in streets that she still dreamed about some nights; wandered the way she'd wandered in the troubled years before puberty, when she didn't know what to make of herself (doubted, indeed, that she would ever amount to anything). There was the drugstore, owned by Albert McNealy, and now by his son Lance, with whom Rachel had had a brief but innocent affair in her fifteenth year. There was the school where she'd learned something of everything and nothing in particular, its yard still fenced with the same chain-link, like a shabby prison. There was the little park (or so the city fathers dubbed it; in fact the term was pure flattery). There was the birdshit-bespattered statue of Irwin Heckler, called the founding father of the town, who had in 1903 started a little business manufacturing hard, tartly flavored candies which had proved uncommonly popular. There was the town hall and the church (the only building that still possessed some of its remembered grandeur) and the little mall that contained the hairdresser's and the offices of the town lawyer, Marion Klaus, and the dog groomer's, and half a dozen other establishments that served the community.

All of them were closed at this hour; it was well past nine o'clock in the evening. The only place that would still be open would be the bar on McCloskey Road, close to the funeral home. She was tempted to drive over there and get herself a glass of whiskey before she called on her mother, but she knew the chances of getting in and out of the bar without meeting somebody who knew her were exactly zero, so she drove straight to the house on Sullivan Street. She wasn't arriving unannounced; she'd called her mother from somewhere outside Youngstown and told her she was on her way. The porch light was on and the front door stood an inch or two ajar.

There was a sublime little moment on the front step, when-after she'd called out to Sherrie and before the answering call came-she stood there and listened to the sounds of the night around her. There was no traffic: just the gentle hiss of the leaves of the holly tree that had grown unchecked to the side of the house, and the rattle of a piece of loose guttering, and the tinkle of the wind chime that hung from the eaves. All familiar sounds; all reassuring. She took a deep breath. Everything was going to be fine. She was loved here; loved and understood. Maybe there'd be some people in town who'd look at her askance and spread rumors about what had happened, but here she was safe. Here was home, where things were as they had always been.

And now here was Sherrie looking a little fretful, but smiling to see her daughter on the step.

"Well this is a surprise," she said.

The night after Rachel started her drive to Ohio, "Garrison invited Mitchell out for dinner. It was a long time since they'd had a heart-to-heart, he said, and there was no better time than the present.

When Ralph brought him to the restaurant Garrison had chosen, Mitchell was certain there'd been a mix-up. It was a dingy little Chinese place on Canal Street and Mott; not the most welcoming of neighborhoods. But Ralph hadn't made an error. Garrison was there, sitting toward the back of the narrow room at a table that could have seated six but was set for two. He had a bottle of white wine in front of him, and was drawing on a havana. He offered Mitchell a glass of wine, and a cigar, but all Mitchell wanted was a glass of milk, to settle his stomach.

"Does that really work for you?" Garrison said. "Milk just gives me gas."

"Everything gives you gas."

"That's true," Garrison said.

"Remember that kid Mario, used to call you Stinky Geary?"

"Mario Giovannini."

"That's right, Giovannini. I wonder what the fuck happened to him?"

"Who cares?" Garrison said, sitting back in his chair. "Hey, Mr. Ko?" The manager, a rather dapper fellow with his hair plastered to his pate so carefully it looked as though it had been painted on strand by strand, appeared. "Can we get some milk over here for my brother? And some menus."

"I'm not hungry," Mitchell said.

"You will be. We've got to get your energies up. We've got a long night ahead of us."

"I can't do that, Gar. I've got two breakfast meetings tomorrow."

"I took the liberty of canceling them."

"What for?"

"Because we need to talk." He took out a box of matches and carefully rekindled his cigar. "Chiefly about the women in our lives." He drew on the cigar. "So… tell me about Rachel."

"There isn't a lot to tell. She was up at the farmhouse-"

"-with Margie."

"Right. Then she decided to take a road trip. Nobody knows where."

"Margie knows," Garrison said. "The bitch probably suggested it."

"I don't know why she'd do that."

"To cause trouble. That's her favorite thing. You know what she's like."

"Will you see if you can get some answers out of her?"

"You'd be better off trying instead of me," Garrison replied. "If I ask for something we're guaranteed not to get it."

"Where's Margie tonight?"

Garrison shrugged. "I don't ask 'cause I don't care. She's probably out drinking somewhere. There's three or four of them just go out and get plastered together. That bitch who was married to Lenny Bryant-"

"Marilyn."

"Yeah. She's one of them. And the woman who ran the restaurants."

"I don't know who you mean."

"Thin woman. Big teeth, no tits."

"Lucy Cheever."

"You see you've got a good memory for these women."

"I had an affair with Lucy Cheever, that's why."

"You're kidding. You did Lucy Cheever?"

"I took her down to New Orleans and fucked her brains out for a week."

"Big teeth. Small tits."

"She's got nice tits!"

"They're fucking minuscule. And she's never sober."

"She was sober in New Orleans. At least some of the time."

Garrison shook his head. "I don't get it with you. I mean, she's got to be fifty."

"This was five or six years ago."

"Even so. You could have any piece of ass you want and you go spend a week with a woman who's ten, fifteen years older than you are? What the fuck for?"

"I liked her."

"You liked her." Mr. Ko had returned with the menus and the milk. "Get me a brandy will you?" Garrison said to him, "We'll order later." Ko withdrew, and Garrison returned to the mystery of his brother's liaison with Lucy Cheever. "Was she good?"

"Will you just let it alone? I've got more important things to think about than Lucy fucking Cheever." He drank half of his glass of milk. "I want to know where Rachel is."

"She'll come back. Don't worry."

"What if she doesn't?"

"She will. She's got no choice."

"Of course she's got a fucking choice. She could decide she wants a separation."

"She could, I suppose. She'd be stupid, but she could." He drew on his cigar. "Does she know anything she shouldn't?"

"Not from me she doesn't."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning she talks with Margie. Who knows what the hell they've discussed."

"Margie knows better."

"Maybe when she's sober."

"You've had Rachel sign some kind of prenuptial agreement, right?"

"No."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Don't raise your voice."

"I told Cecil to have her sign it."

"I convinced him it wasn't necessary," Mitchell said. Garrison snorted at the absurdity of this. "I didn't want her thinking she was entering a business arrangement. I was in love with her, for fuck's sake. I still am."

"Then you'd better make sure she keeps her mouth shut."

"I know," Mitch said.

"Well if you know why the fuck didn't you have her sign the prenuptial?" He leaned across the table, catching hold of Mitchell's arm. "Let me put this really simply. If she tries to say anything about our business, family business, to anyone, I'm going to slap a gag order on her."

"There's no need for that."

"How do you know? You don't even know where she is right now. She could be sitting down talking to some dickhead journalist." Mitchell shook his head. "I mean what I say about the gag order," Garrison reiterated. "I don't mind being the heavy if you think you've got a chance of patching things up."

"It's not a question of patching things up. We've had a bad time, but it's nothing permanent."

"Sure, sure…" Garrison said, his tone wearied, as though he'd heard this kind of self-deception countless times before. "You tell yourself whatever the fuck you need to hear."

"I married her because I feel something for her. That feeling hasn't gone away."

"It will," Garrison replied, waving Mr. Ko over, "Trust me, it will." ii

Mitchell discovered he had a better appetite than he'd expected. The food was good, though Garrison was able to tolerate far spicier versions of the dishes than Mitchell. Twice during the meal he exhorted Mitchell to try a forkful of something he was eating, and Mitchell was left gasping, much to Garrison's amusement.

"I'm going to have to start educating your palate," he said.

"It's a little late for that." Garrison glanced up from his plate, his spectacles slightly fogged.

"It's never too late," he said.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"You've always had a more delicate stomach than me. But that's got to change. For all our sakes." Garrison set down his fork and picked up his glass of wine. "Did you know Loretta goes to an astrologer?"

"Yes, Cadmus let it drop one day. What's that got to do with anything?"

"Last Sunday I got a call from Loretta. She wanted me to come over to the house. Urgently. She'd just been to see this astrologer, and he was full of bad news."

"About what, for God's sake?"

"About us. The family."

"What did he say?"

"That our lives were going to change, and we weren't going to like it very much." Garrison was cradling his wine glass in his hands, staring out past his brother with middle distance. "In fact, we're not going to like it at all."

Mitchell rolled his eyes. "Why the hell does Loretta waste money on this bullshit-"

"Wait. There's more. The first sign of this…" Garrison paused, searching for the word "… big change, is that one of us is going to lose our wife." His gaze finally came back to Mitchell. "Which you have."

"She'll be back."

"So you keep insisting. But whether she comes back or she doesn't, the point is she left."

"Are you telling me you believe what this guy was saying?"

"I haven't finished. He said the other sign was going to have something to do with a man from the sea."

Mitchell sighed: "That's so lame," he said. "She probably told him something about the situation… and he just fed it back to her."

"Maybe," Garrison said.

"Well what's the alternative?" Mitchell said, a little irritably, "That this dickhead's right, and we're all heading for disaster?"

"Yeah," Garrison said. "That's the alternative."

"I prefer my version."

Garrison sipped his wine. "Like I said…" he murmured, "you've always had a weak stomach."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Garrison gave a rare smile. "That you don't want to even contemplate the possibility that there's something going on here we should be taking seriously. That maybe things are falling apart?"

Mitchell threw up his hands. "I can't believe I'm having this conversation," he said. "With you, of all people. You're supposed to be the rational one in the family."

"And look where it got me," Garrison growled.

"You look just fine to me."

"Jesus." Garrison shook his head. "That goes to show how much we understand one another, doesn't it? I'm chewing antidepressams like fucking candies, Mitch. I go to analysis four times a week. The sight of my wife naked makes me want to puke. Does that help paint the picture for you?" He eyed his wine. "I shouldn't really be drinking alcohol. Not with antidepressants. But right now I don't give a fuck." He paused, then said, "You want something more to eat?"

"No thanks."

"You've got room for ice cream. Allow yourself some childish pleasures once in a while. They're very therapeutic."

"I'm putting on love handles."

"No woman on the fucking planet's going to throw you out of bed because you've got a fat ass. Eat some ice cream."

"Don't change the subject. We were talking about you mixing drink and pills."

"No we weren't. We were talking about me getting a little crazy, because it's done me no fucking good staying sane."

"So get crazy," Mitchell said. "I don't give a shit. Take the next board meeting naked. Fire everyone. Hire deaf-mutes. Do whatever the fuck you want, but don't start listening to some crap from a fucking astrologer."

"He was talking about Galilee, Mitch."

"A man from the seal? That could be anybody."

"But it wasn't anybody. It was him. It was Galilee."

"You know what," Mitchell said, raising his hands, "Let's.stop talking about this."

"Why?"

"Because the conversation's going round in circles. And I'm bored."

Garrison stared at him, then expelled a long, strangely contented breath. "So what are you doing with the rest of the night?" he said.

Mitch glanced at his watch. "Going home to bed."

"Alone?"

"Yes. Alone."

"No sex. No ice cream. You're going to die a miserable man, you know that? I could arrange some company for you if you like."

"No thanks."

"Are you sure?"

Mitchell laughed. "I'm sure."

"What's so funny?"

"You. Trying to get me laid, like I was still seventeen. Remember that whore you brought back to the house for me?"

"Juanita."

"Juanita! Right. Jesus, what a memory!" .

"All she wanted to do-"

"Don't remind me-"

"-was sit on your face! You should have married her," Garrison said, pushing his chair back and getting up. "You'd have twenty kids by now." Mitchell looked sour. "Don't get mad. Ypu know it's true. We both fucked up. We should have married dumb bitches with childbearing hips. But no. I choose a drunk and you choose a shopgirl." He picked up his glass and drained the last of his wine. "Well… have a nice night."

"Where are you off to?"

"I've got an assignation."

"Anyone I know?"

"I don't even know her," Garrison said as he headed away from the table. "You'll see. It's much easier that way."

There was a time in my life-many, many years ago; more years than I care to count-when nothing gave me more pleasure than to listen to songs of love. I could even sing a few, if I was drunk enough. On occasion, before I lost the use of my legs, we'd venture out together, my wife Chiyojo, Marietta and myself, to see traveling players in Raleigh, and there'd always been a spot or two in the show when the mood would become sweetly melancholy, and a crooner, or a quartet of crooners, or the leading lady with a handkerchief clutched to her bosom, would offer up something to tug at our hearts. "I'll Remember You, Love, In My Prayers," or "White Wings"; the more grotesquely sentimental the better as far as I was concerned. But I lost my appetite for such entertainments when Chiyojo died. A plaintive ballad about love irrevocably lost was a fine thing to indulge in when the idol of your affections was sitting beside you, her hand clutching yours. But when she was taken from me--under circumstances so tragic they beggared anything a songwriter might dream up-I would start to weep as soon as a minor chord was played.

And yet, in spite of my resistance to the subject, it creeps closer to these pages with every passing moment. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, this account draws nearer and nearer to a time when love must appear, transforming the lives of the characters I've set before you. Few will be untouched by its consequences, however immune they may believe themselves.

And that, of course, includes myself. I've wondered more than once if fear of my own vulnerability was not the reason I didn't attempt to put pen to paper earlier. The passion for words was always in me, from my mother, and I've certainly had plenty of spare time in the last century or so. But I could never do it. I was afraid-I am still afraid-that once I begin to write about love I will find myself consumed by the very fire I am building to burn other hearts.

Of course in the end I have no choice. The romance approaches, as inevitable as the apocalypse Garrison was telling his brother about in the restaurant: because, of course, they are one and the same.

Garrison parted from Mitchell outside the restaurant, dismissed his driver and went uptown to an apartment which he had purchased, unknown to anyone else in the family, for exactly the purpose he intended to use it tonight. He let himself in, pleased to find that the temperature of the place was far lower than would usually be thought to be comfortable, which fact meant the erotic rituals of the evening had already begun. He didn't go directly to the bedroom, though he was now in a state of excitement. In the living room he poured himself a drink, and stood by the window to sip it and savor the moments of anticipation. Oh, if only all life were as rich and real to him as these moments; as charged with meaning and emotion. Tomorrow, of course, he would despise himself a little, and behave like a perfect sonof abitch to any and all who crossed his path. But tonight? Tonight, marinating in the knowledge of what lay before him, he was as dose as he knew how to being a happy man. At last he set down the glass, without really drinking much at all, and loosening his tie wandered through to the elegantly appointed bedroom. The door was ajar. There was a light burning inside. He entered.

The woman was lying on the bed. Her name was Melodic, he'd been told (though he doubted any woman who sold her body for this kind of purpose used the name they'd been brought with to God). There she lay, under a sheet, perfectly still, her eyes closed. There were a dozen white and yellow lilies on the pillow around her head; a nice funereal touch, courtesy of the man who arranged these scenarios for Garrison, Fred Platt. The smell of the flowers was not strong enough to compete with the other scent in the room however: that of disinfectant. Again, one of Plan's felicities, this piney scent; one which Garrison had been a little unsettled by at first, pressing his fantasies as it did still closer to grim reality. But Platt knew Garrison's psyche well: that first time with the disinfectant stinging the sinuses had been an erotic revelation. Now the scent was an indispensable part of the fantasy.

He approached the bed, and stood at the end of it, looking down at the woman, studying her body for some sign of a shudder. But he could see only the very slightest tremor, which clearly the woman was doing her best to suppress. Good for her, he thought; she was a professional. He admired professionalism in all matters: in the trading of stocks, in the cooking of food, in the imitation of death. If it was worth doing, as Loretta was fond of saying, then it was worth doing properly.

He reached down and plucked at the sheet, sliding it out from beneath Melodie's hands, which were crossed on her breasts. She was naked beneath the sheet, her body made up with a pale pancake, then dusted down, to lend her a cadaverous hue.

"Lovely," he said, without a trace of irony.

She was indeed a pretty sight: her breasts small, her nipples alert with cold, and long. Her pubic hair was neatly trimmed, so as to offer him a glimpse of her intricately-made labia. He would lick there soon.

But first, the feet. He pulled the sheet off her completely, and let it drop to the floor. Then he went down on his knees at the end of the bed and applied his lips to the woman's flesh. She was cold: the consequence of lying on a bed of ice sealed in plastic. He kissed her toes, and then the soles of her feet, slipping his hands around her slim ankles while he did so. Now that he had his skin against hers he could feel the tremors deep in her tissue, but they weren't violent enough to distract him from the illusion. He could believe she was dead with very little difficulty. Dead and cold and unresisting.

I won't go on with the description; there's no need. For those of you who wish to picture Garrison Geary pleasuring himself with a woman playing dead, you have all the information you need to conjure it; go to it if you wish. For the rest of us, enough to know that this was his special pleasure, his most-anticipated bliss. I can't tell you why. I don't know what strange twist his psyche took that made this ritual so arousing to him: or who put it there. But there it was; and there I'll leave him, covering the pseudo-corpse with kisses in preparation for the so-called act of love.

For his part, Mitchell had decided to go back to the apartment to sleep. Rachel would come back there, tonight, he thought, and all would be forgiven. He'd hear a sound in the bedroom, and open his eyes to see her silhouette against the starry sky (he hated to sleep with the drapes closed; it made him dream smothering dreams), and she'd shed her clothes, and say she was sorry, so sorry, then slip into bed beside him. Perhaps they'd make love, but probably not. Probably she'd just put her head in the crook of his arm, and lay her hand on his chest, and they'd fall asleep that way, as they had when they'd first shared a bed.

But his romantic expectations were dashed. She didn't come home that night. He slept alone in the huge bed; at least he slept for the first hour or so, before waking with a stabbing ache in his lower abdomen, so sharp it made him want to cry like a baby. Cursing Garrison and his damnable Mr. Ko, he staggered, bent nearly double, into the bathroom, and dug through the medications there for something to soothe the pain. His sight was blurred with agony, and his hands shaking. It took him fully two or three minutes to locate the appropriate bottle of tablets and he'd no sooner fingered a couple of them onto his tongue than he felt a crippling spasm in his bowels, and only just reached the toilet in time before expelling a watery stream of foul-smelling feces. When the expulsion came to an end he stayed put, knowing the respite was only temporary. The ache in his belly had not been mellowed at all; he still felt as though his bowels were being pierced with needles.

He began to cry while he sat there, the tears coming haltingly at first, then as a flow he could not halt. He put his hands over his face, which was burning hot, sobbing behind his palms. It seemed he could not imagine misery profounder than the misery he felt now: abandoned, sick, confused. What had he done to deserve this? Nothing. He'd lived the best life he knew how to live. So why was he sitting here like a damned soul, smelling his own stench rising all around him, tormented by the predictions Garrison had whispered in his ear? And why didn't he know where his wife was tonight? Why wasn't she here to comfort him, waiting in the bed to hold him in her arms once the spasms had passed; her touch cool, her voice full of love? Why was he alone?

Oh Lord, why was he alone?

Across town. Garrison returned from the bedroom where he had lately shot his seed. The icy recipient of his love had been admirably inert throughout his plugging of her body; not once had she grunted or cried out, even when his ministrations had become less than gentlemanly. Sometimes, not satisfied with his vaginal explorations, he liked to roll the "corpses" over and take them anally.

Tonight had been one of those times, and once again Mr. Platt had planned for the eventuality. When Garrison had rolled the girl over and parted her fesses, he'd found the back passage already lubricated for him. In he'd gone, eschewing the protection that most would think advisable when screwing with this class of woman, and had discharged inside her.

Then he'd got up, wiped himself on the sheet, and zipping up his pants (which he had not even dropped to mid-thigh during this whole business), left the room. As he exited he said: "It's over. You can get up," and was curiously comforted to see that the woman made a move to rise from the bed before he departed the room. It was all just a game, wasn't it? There was no harm in it. Look, she was resurrected! Stretching, yawning, looking for her envelope of cash, which Garrison had placed on the bedside table, as always. She would go on her way without even knowing who her violator was (or so Garrison liked to imagine. The women were instructed to keep their eyes closed throughout the game. If they peeped, Platt could be cruel).

Garrison went straight down into the street, to his car, and drove away. Anyone catching sight of him in the driver's seat would have thought: there goes a man happy with his lot in life.

As I said earlier, it wouldn't last. He would get up tomorrow feeling thoroughly disgusted with himself; but the self-disgust would last twenty-four hours-forty-eight at most-and then the desire he'd quenched tonight would flicker into life again, and grow in strength over a period of a week or two, until at last he couldn't resist it any longer, and he'd be on the phone to Platt in a kind of trance, saying that he needed one of his "special nights," just as soon as possible. And the whole ritual would be repeated.

What a strange thing it was, he thought, to be Garrison Geary. To possess as much power as he possessed, and yet feel in his troubled soul such a lack of self-regard that he was only able to make love with a woman who passed for dead. What a peculiar specimen of humanity he was! And yet he could not feel entirely ashamed of this peculiarity. There was a part of him that was perversely proud tonight; proud that he was capable of doing what he'd just done; proud that even in this city, which was a magnet for men and women who lived unusual lives, the fantasy he'd enacted would be thought disgraceful. What might he not do with this perversity of his, he wondered, if he once unleashed it outside the bounds of his sexual life? What changes might he work upon the world if he put his darker energies to better purpose than fucking an icy cunt?

But what, what? If there was some greater purpose to his life, why couldn't he see it? If there was a path that he was intended to follow, why hadn't he stumbled onto it by now? Sometimes he felt like an athlete who'd sweated himself into a frenzy in preparation for a race that nobody had summoned him to run. And with every day he failed to compete his chances of winning that race-when he finally knew what course it would follow-became more remote.

Soon, he thought to himself; I have to know what my purpose is soon, or I'll be too old to do anything about it. I'll die without having really lived, and the moment I'm in the ground I'll be forgotten.

It has to be soon.

The night Rachel had come home she'd told her mother that she wanted as few people as possible to know that she was here, but in a community as small and as well-knit as Dansky no secret so large could be kept for very long. The following morning she'd gone out to put some letters in the postbox for her mother, and had been seen doing so by Mrs. Bedrosian, the widow who lived next door.

"Well, well," Mrs. Bedrosian had said, "Is that you Rachel?"

"Yes. It's me."

That was the full extent of the exchange. But it was all that was needed. Half an hour later the telephone started to ring-people from around town making apparently casual calls to see how Rachel's mother was doing, then lightly dropping into conversation the fact that they'd heard Rachel -was home for the weekend; and-just by the way-had she brought her husband home with her?

Sherrie simply lied. She hadn't been feeling very well, she told everyone, and Rachel had come to spend a few days with her. "And no," she invariably added, "Mitchell isn't with her. So you can stop sniffing after an invitation to meet him, if that's why you're asking."

The lie worked well. After half a dozen such calls word spread that even if there was something worth gossiping about here, Sherrie Pallenberg wasn't going to be providing any fuel.

"Of course that won't stop them talking," Sherrie remarked. "They've got nothing better to do, you see. This damn town."

"I thought you liked it here," Rachel said to her.

They were sitting in the kitchen at lunchtime, eating peach cobbler.

"If your father was still alive, it might be different. But I'm on my own. And what do I have for company? Other widows." She rolled her eyes. "We get together for brunches and bridge, and you know they're all sweet souls, they really are, and I don't want to sound ungrateful, but, Lord, after a while I get so bored talking about drapes and soap operas and how little they see their children."

"Is that one of your complaints?"

"No, no. You've got your own life to live. I don't expect you to be on my doorstep every five minutes checking up on me."

"You might be seeing rather more of me in future," Rachel said.

Her mother shook her head. "It's just a bad patch you and Mitch are going through. You'll come out the other side of it, you'll see."

"I don't think it's as simple as that," Rachel said. "We're not suited to one another."

"Nobody ever is," her mother replied nonchalantly.

"You don't mean that."

"I certainly do. Honey, listen to me. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is ever deep in their hearts perfectly suited to anybody else. You have to make compromises. Great big compromises. I know I did with Hank and I'm sure if Hank were alive he'd say exactly the same thing about me. We decided to make it work. I suppose…" she allowed herself a sad little smile. "… I suppose we realized that we weren't going to do any better than what we had right there and then. I know it doesn't sound very romantic, but it's the way it was. And you know, once I got over that silly feeling that this wasn't Prince Charming-that he was just an ordinary man who farted in bed and couldn't keep his eyes off a pretty waitress-I was quite happy."

"The thing is Mitch doesn't look at waitresses."

"Well… lucky you. So what's the problem?"

Rachel set down her fork and stared at her half-eaten cobbler. "I've got so much to be grateful for," she said, as though she were saying her prayers. "I know that. Lord, when I think of how -much Mitch has given me…"

"Are you talking about things?'

"Yes, of course."

Sherrie waved them away. "Irrelevant. He could have given you half of New York and still be a bad husband."

"I don't think he's a bad husband. I just think he's never going to belong to me the way Daddy belonged to you."

"Because of his family?"

Rachel nodded. "God knows, I don't want to feel like I'm in a competition with them for his attention, but that's how it feels." She sighed. "It's not even as though I could point to something they do that proves it. I just feel excluded."

"From what, honey?"

"You know, I don't really know," Rachel said. "It's just a feeling…" She exhaled; puffing out her cheeks. "Maybe the problem's all in here." She tapped her fingers to her breast. "In me. I don't have any right not to be happy." She looked up at her mother, her eyes brimming. "Do I? I mean, really and truly, what right in all the world do I have to be unhappy? When I think of Mrs. Bedrosian losing her family…"

Judith Bedrosian had lost her husband and three kids in an automobile accident when Rachel was fourteen. Everything the woman lived for-all the meaning in her life-taken away from her in one terrible moment. Yet she'd gone on, hadn't she?

"Everybody's different," Sherrie said. "I don't know how poor Judith made peace with what happened to her, and you know what? Maybe she never has. The way people are on the outside and the way they feel deep down are never the same. Never. I do know she still has very bad times, after all these years. Days on end when I don't see her; and when I do she's obviously been crying for hours. And at Christmas I know she goes to her sister's in Wisconsin, even though she doesn't like the woman, because she can't bear to be alone. The memories are too much. So…" She sighed, as though the weight of Judith's grief was heavy on her too. "Who knows? All you can do is just get on with things the best way you know how. Personally, I'm a great proponent of Valium, in reasonable moderation. But each to their own."

Rachel chuckled. She'd always known her mother to be an entertaining woman, after her odd fashion. But as the years went by Sherrie's sophistication became more apparent. Under the veneer of small town pieties lay a self-made mind, capable of a willfulness and a waywardness Rachel hoped she had inherited.

"So now what?" Sherrie said. "Are you going to ask him for a divorce?"

"No, of course not," Rachel replied.

"Why's that such a surprising idea? If you don't love him-"

"I didn't say that."

"-if you can't live with him then-"

"I didn't say that either. Oh God, I don't know. Margie said I should get a divorce. And a nice big settlement. But I don't want to be on my own."

"You wouldn't be."

"Mom, it sounds like you think I should leave him."

"No, I'm just saying you wouldn't be on your own. Not for very long. So that's not a reason to stay in a marriage that's not giving you what you want."

"You amaze me," Rachel said. "You really do. I was absolutely certain you were going to sit me down and tell me I had to go back and give it another chance."

"Life's too short," Sherrie said. "That's not what I would have said a few years ago, but your viewpoint changes as time goes on." She reached up and touched Rachel's cheek. "I don't want my beautiful Rachel to be unhappy for one more moment."

"Oh, Mom…"

"So if you want to leave the man, leave him. There are plenty more handsome millionaires where he came from."

That night Deanne had invited them both to a church barbecue, assuring Rachel the guests were all people she knew and liked, and she'd already passed the word around that nobody was to ply Rachel with questions about life in the fast lane. Even so, Rachel wasn't keen to go. Deanne, however, made it plain that she'd take it as personal affront if she declined. Once they got to the barbecue, however, Rachel lost her protection. The kids went off to play, and her sister-despite promising to stay close by-was off after five minutes to have a heart-to-heart with the hostess. Rachel was left in the midst of people she didn't know but who were all too familiar with her.

"I saw you and your husband on television just a few weeks ago," one of the women, who introduced herself as Kimberly, Deanne's second-best friend, whatever that meant, remarked. "It was one of those gala nights. You all looked to be having such a wonderful time. I said to Frankie-that's my husband, Frankie, over there, with the hotdog; he used to work with your sister's husband-I said to Frankie don't they look as though they're having a wonderful time? You know, everything so polished."

"Polished?"

"Everything," Kimberly repeated, "so polished. You know, everything sparkling." Her eyes gleamed as she recalled the sight; Rachel didn't have the heart to tell her what a drab affair the gala had been; the food sickly, the speeches interminable, the company wretched. She just let the woman blather on for a few minutes, nodding or smiling when it seemed appropriate to do so. She was saved from this depressing exchange by a man with a napkin tucked in his shirt, a sizable sparerib in his hand and his face liberally basted in barbecue sauce.

"You don't mind me barging in," he said to Rachel's captor, "but it's a long time since I saw this little lady."

"You're a mess, Neil Wilkens," the woman declared.

"I am?"

"All round your mouth."

The man plucked his napkin from his shut and wiped his mouth, giving Rachel time to realize who this was: Neil Wilkens, the first boy who'd had her heart (and broken it) all grown up. He had a gingery beard, a receding hairline, and the beginnings of a beer belly. But his smile, when it emerged from behind the napkin, was as bright as ever.

"You do know who I am?" he said.

"Neil."

"The same."

"It's wonderful to see you. I think Deanne told me you'd gone to Chicago."

"He came back with his tail between his legs," Kimberly remarked, somewhat uncharitably.

Neil's brightness was undimmed. "I didn't like living in a big city," he said, "I guess I'm a small-town boy at heart. So I came back home and started up a business with Frankie-"

"That's my husband," Kimberly put in, in case Rachel had missed this fact.

"We do general house repairs. A little bit of plumbing, a little bit of roof work."

"They argue all the time," Kimberly said.

"We do not," Neil said.

"Fighting like dogs one minute. Best friends the next."

"Frankie's a Communist," Neil said.

"He is not," Kimberly protested.

"Jack was a card-carrying Commie, Kimberly," Neil replied.

"Who's Jack?" Rachel asked him.

"Frankie's Dad. He died a while back."

"Prostate cancer," Kimberly put in.

"And when Frankie was going through the old man's papers he found a Communist Party card. So now he carries it around with him, and he's talking about how we should all rise up against the forces of capitalism."

"He doesn't mean it," Kimberly said.

"How do you know?"

"It's just his stupid sense of humor," she said. Neil caught Rachel's eye, and gave her a tiny smile. He was obviously stirring Kimberly up.

"Well you can say whatever you like," he remarked, "but if a guy's carrying a Commie card, he's a Commie."

"Oh you are so infuriating sometimes," Kimberly said, and without another word, stalked away.

"It's too easy," Neil chuckled. "She gets so hot under the collar if you say anything about her Frankie, but she gives the poor man hell day and night. He had a good head of hair when he married her. Not that I have much to boast about." He ran his palm over his semi-naked pate.

"I think it rather suits you," Rachel said.

Neil beamed. "Do you? Really? Lisa hated it."

"Lisa's your wife?"

"The mother of my children," Neil said, with ironic precision.

"You're not married."

"We were. Actually technically we still are. But she's in Chicago, with the kids, and I'm… well, I'm here. They were going to come back and join me when I was all set up, but that's not going to happen. She's got someone else now, and the kids are happy. At least, she says they are."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah," he said, the word one long sigh. "I suppose it's happening all the time, but it's hard when you want to make something work but you just can't." He stared down at his paint-stained boots, as if embarrassed by this confession.

"Did I know Lisa?" Rachel asked.

"Yeah, you knew her," he said, still studying his boots. "Her name was Froman. Lisa Angela Froman. She's the same age as your sister. In fact, they were in Sunday school for a year or so."

"I remember her," Rachel said, picturing a pretty, bespectacled blonde girl of sixteen or so. "She was very quiet."

"She still is. She's very smart and the kids got her brains, which is great for them, 'cause God knows I'm not the brightest guy on the block."

"So you miss them?"

"Like crazy. All the time. All the time." He said it as though it was still hard for him to believe. "I mean, you'd think after a while it'd become easier, but…" He shook his head. "… you want a beer or something?" He made a halfhearted little laugh. "I got a joint."

"You still smoke?"

"Not like I used to. But, you know, when things are boring I like to tune out. Then I don't think about things too much. I mean, it could break your heart…"

They wandered down to the bottom of the yard. There, at Neil's instigation they clambered over the low wall onto a strip of land which had been used as a dumping ground for vehicles, including an old school bus. It was all delightfully furtive, which made the mild high Rachel got when she took a hit of Neil's joint all the more fun.

"Ah, that's better," Neil said. "I should have done this before I came. I don't like these shindigs any more. Not on my own." He took his third drag on the reefer and passed it back to Rachel. "In fact, you know what?"

"What?"

"I don't like much any more. I'm going to end up like my Dad. Did you meet my Dad?"

"Everrett."

"You remember."

"Of course I remember," Rachel said, with a little laugh.

"Everrett Hancock Wilkens."

"Hancock?"

"Hey, don't knock it. Hancock's my middle name too."

She repeated the name, through mounting laughter. The syllables suddenly seemed funny as hell. "Does anybody ever call you Hancock?" she giggled.

"Only my Mom," he said, dissolving into laughter himself. "I always knew I was in trouble when I was a kid 'cause I'd hear her yelling-"

They yelled together-"Hancock!"-then in perfect synchronicity glanced guiltily back toward the yard, where several heads had turned in their direction.

"We're making fools of ourselves," Rachel said, attempting to suppress her laughter.

"That's the story of my life," Neil said. There was hurt behind the remark, despite his offhand manner. "But I'm past caring."

By sheer force of will Rachel wiped the smirk off her face. "I'm sorry things turned out the way they did," she said; then lost her composure completely, and began laughing so hard she was doubled up.

"What's so funny?" Neil wanted to know.

"Hancock," she said again. "It's such a silly name." She wiped the tears away from her eyes. "Oh Lord," she said, "I'm sorry. You were saying…"

"Never mind," Neil said. "It wasn't anything important." He was still grinning; but there was something else in his look.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"Nothing's wrong," he replied. "I was only thinking…"

She suddenly knew what he was going to say, and willed him not to spoil the moment by doing so. But she failed.

"… what an idiot I was…"

"Neil."

"… giving you up…"

"Neil, let's not…"

"… no, please let me. I might never get another chance to tell you what's in my head…"

"Are you sure we shouldn't just have another smoke?"

"I've thought about you such a lot over the years."

"That's nice of you to say."

"It's true," he said. "I've had so many regrets in my life. So many things I wished I'd done differently; wished I'd done right. And you're at the top of the list, Rachel. The number of times I've seen you in a magazine, or on the television, and thought: she could have been with me. I could have made her so happy." He looked directly into her eyes. "You know that, don't you?" he said. "I could have made you so happy."

"We took different paths, Neil," she said.

"Not just different. Wrong."

"I don't think-"

"Not you. I'm not talking about you. God knows, you made a smart move marrying Geary. No. I'm talking about my screwups." He shook his head, and she realized that there were sudden tears in his eyes.

"Oh, Neil-"

"Don't mind me. It's just the fucking pot."

"Do you want to go back to the party?"

"Not particularly."

"I think we should. They'll be wondering where we got to."

"I don't care. I don't even fucking like 'em. Any of 'em."

"I thought you said you were a small-town boy at heart," Rachel countered.

"I don't know what I am," Neil confessed. "I used to know…" His gaze lost its focus; he stared off between the rusted vehicles into the darkness. "I had such dreams, Rachel…"

"You can still have them."

"No," he said. "It's too late. You have to seize the moment. If you don't seize the moment suddenly it's passed, and it doesn't come again. You get one chance. And I missed mine." He returned his gaze to her. "You were that chance," he said.

"That's sweet, but-"

"You don't have to tell me, I know. You never loved me, so it wouldn't have worked anyway. But I still think about you, Rachel. Never stopped thinking about you. And I swear I could have made you love me. And if I had…" He smiled, so sadly. "If I had everything would have been different."

She got a little lecture from Deanne the morning after the barbecue. What was she thinking, going off like that, with Neil Wilkens, of all people, Neil Wilkens? thai kind of thing might be all right in New York, but this was a small community, and you just didn't behave like that. Rachel felt as though she were being chastised like an errant child, and told Deanne to keep her opinions to herself. Besides, what the hell was wrong with Neil Wilkens?

"He's practically an alcoholic," Deanne said. "And he got violent with his wife."

"I don't believe that."

"Well it's true," Deanne said. "So really, Rachel, you'd be better off staying away from him."

"I wasn't intending to-"

"You can't just waltz in here-"

"Wait-"

"-as if you owned the place-"

"What are you talking about?"

Deanne looked up from her cleaning, her face flushed. "Oh you know damn well."

"I'm sorry, I don't."

"Embarrassing me."

"What? When was this?"

"Last night! Leaving me with all these people asking where you'd gone. What was I supposed to say? Oh she's off somewhere flirting with Neil Wilkens like a fifteen-year-old-"

"I was not."

"I saw you! We all saw you, giggling like a schoolgirl. It was very embarrassing."

"Well I'm sorry," Rachel said coolly. "I won't embarrass you any longer."

She went back to her mother's house, and packed. She wept while she packed. A little out of anger at the way Deanne had talked to her; but more out of a strange confusion of feelings. Maybe Neil Wilkens had beaten his wife. But, Lord, she'd liked him, in a way she couldn't entirely explain. Was it that she half-believed she belonged here? That the girl who'd been enamored of Neil all those years ago had not entirely disappeared, but was still inside her, trembling in expectation of a first kiss, her hopes for perfect love still intact? And now she was weeping, that girl, out of sorrow that her Neil and she had taken separate roads?

How perfectly ridiculous all this was; and how predictable. She went to the bathroom, washed her tearstained face, and gave herself a talking to. This whole trip had been a mistake. She should have stayed in New York and faced what was going on between herself and Mitch head-on.

On the other hand, perhaps it was healthy to have been reminded that she was now an exile. She would no longer be able to entertain sentimental thoughts of returning to her roots; she had to be ready to move on down the road she'd chosen. She would go back, she decided, and talk everything out with Mitch. She had nothing to lose from being honest. And if they decided they were mismatched, then she'd explain that she wanted a divorce, and they'd begin proceedings. Maybe she'd get some advice from Margie about what she was worth on the ex-wife market. After that? Well, she'd have to see. The only thing she knew for certain was that she wouldn't be coming back to live in Dansky. Whatever she was at heart (and right now she didn't have a due) she was absolutely certain she was no longer a small-town girl.

She left that day, despite her mother's protests. "Stay another night or two at least," Sherrie said. "You've come all this way."

"I really need to get back."

"It's Neil Wilkens, isn't it?"

"It's nothing to do with Neil Wilkens."

"Did he make a pass at you?"

"No, Mom."

"Because if he did-"

"Mom, he was a perfect gentleman."

"That man doesn't know the meaning of the word gentleman." She stared at Rachel fiercely. "A hundred Neil Wilkens aren't worth one Mitchell Geary."

The observation stayed with her, and on the long drive back to New York she found herself idly musing on the two men, like a princess in a storybook weighing the relative merits of her suitors. One handsome and rich and boring; one balding and beer-bellied but still capable of making her laugh. They were in every way different, except in this: they were both sad men. When she brought their faces to mind they were sad faces, defeated faces. She knew where the source of Neil's defeat lay: he'd told her himself. But why was Mitch, with all the gifts history and genetics had showered upon him, ultimately just as sorrowful? It was a mystery to her; and the more she thought about the mystery the more it seemed there could be no healing the wound between them until she'd solved it.