ROXANA ROBINSON

Cost

Table of Contents

Part - I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part - II

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part - III

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Part - IV

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Note About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART I

ONE

Her memory was gone.

It came to Katharine like a soft shock, like a blow inside the head. She was in the yellow bedroom at her daughter's house in Maine, standing at the bureau, getting ready for lunch. She'd just finished doing her hair, smoothing it back to her modest bun, tucking in the small combs to hold it in place. The combs were hardly necessary now, her long, fine hair—still mostly black—had turned wispy and weightless, and no longer needed restraint. But vanity, like beauty, is partly habit, and Katharine still put the combs carefully into her thinning hair, though now they slipped easily out, then vanished, beneath the furniture, against the patterns of the rugs.

Hair done, combs briefly and precariously in place, Katharine looked around for her scarf. It was an old soft cotton one, a blue paisley square. She'd worn it once at a birthday party, and now, for a moment, in her daughter's guest room with its faded yellow walls, the sunlight slanting onto the worn wooden floors, the idea of the scarf and the party seemed confusingly to merge. She had a sudden sense of the party blooming around her—a blur of voices, laughter, a fireplace—a sense of pleasure at being with these people, whoever they were. Green demitasse cups, those tiny tinkling spoons, a tall brass lamp by the fireplace—or was that somewhere else?

She tried to remember herself further into it, but could not. She could not mentally arrive at the event. She stood at the bureau, her mind groping. Everything else about the party—whom it was for, when it had happened, where—had vanished. The small, hard, bright facts, like nails that should connect it to the rest of her life, were missing. The place where her memory had been was gone, blurrily erased, like a window grayed by mist. Beyond it was unknown space.

Other things, besides that party, were vanishing—the names and places she depended on, the familiar links that made up her past. This was happening gradually, as though pieces of her mind were breaking off and floating away, like ice in a river. She couldn't stop it, she didn't want to think about it.

But now, standing at the bureau, this realization rose up around her, closing in on her like a high breaking wave. She felt as though she were being held helpless and still, while the rest of her awareness slid past her, increasingly fast. Who were you if you had no past? If you existed nowhere but in this room, right now? If your life were being swept away from you?

Katharine stood still, disoriented by the thought. She held on to the bureau with both hands, bracing herself, as though this were a fast current she might be able to resist. She looked down at the hands before her: they did not seem to be hers. They were mottled and swollen, slow with arthritis, the knuckles thick. She'd always had graceful hands, pale, with long narrow fingers. Hadn't she?

She stood without moving in her daughter's yellow guest room, gripping the bureau and looking down at her things as though they might keep her steady: the blue cotton scarf, which was right in front of her; the spray bottle of lavender cologne—the scent reminding her of her mother—missing its cap; a round silver pin etched with leaves—a birthday present, years ago, but from whom? One of the children, she thought: it still held a strong charge of affection. She saw all these things in front of her, whole, present, while that thought ranged greedily through her mind—radical, bewildering, calamitous—her memory was gone.

Julia, in the kitchen, was making lunch, moving quickly, her movements hurried, slightly inept: having her parents in the house put her on high alert, her pulse thrumming. When they were here, there was not enough of her. She should be everywhere, all the time—in the bedroom, helping her mother find a lost comb; in the cellar, looking for a tool for her father; out on the porch, quickly sweeping it before lunch; in the kitchen, fixing meals.

Julia wanted her parents here—she loved them—but their presence altered her gravity. She had to struggle to stay upright. As she swung open the door of the refrigerator, leaning into its chilly radiance, taking out the wrapped packet of ham, the mayonnaise, she could feel the beat of anxiety, the hurrying of her pulse. Down the hall, in the yellow room, were her parents, breathing, speaking, about to need something.

What she felt when her parents were here was something large and unsayable, confusing, nearly unbearable. Affection, anxiety, resentment— although she was an adult, with her own children, nearly grown, and she should long ago have moved beyond this confusion. But her parents' presence still unsettled her. When they were here, the house seemed small and ill equipped, the doors put on backward, the light switches unconnected, a troubling dreamscape where nothing was right.

Deliberately, Julia slowed herself down. She drew a long breath. Relax. Deliberately she took down the blue-and-white-striped plates, set them down on the counter. You can't do everything, she told herself sensibly. (Why did good advice come in platitudes?) Her parents enjoyed it here. The visit itself, that was what she was giving them. Julia liked having them here, liked offering them all this, the summer day, the house, with its faintly spicy, cedary smell. The early-morning twittering of finches in the lilacs. The sun on the tall ferns that crowded the back porch. The long pink grass of the meadow, rippling down to the cove. These were the things her parents were here for. And herself. Her parents were here to see her. They loved her.

She drew another long, calming breath, releasing the clutch of anxiety. She picked up the jar of mayonnaise. Twisting the top, she felt its hidden threads turn smoothly beneath her hands, unlocking the grip of metal on glass, and felt sudden pleasure at the way things worked, at the way one neat circular motion did exactly what it should. A ripple of admiration for the whole mechanized world of gears, cogs, ratchets, levers, pulleys—the physical systems that made things work. It was brilliant, the way people—men, really, engineers were mostly men, despite feminism—had established such ingenious control over the world of objects.

What she wanted was to make her parents happy. It didn't matter when they had lunch, or if the porch had been swept. She unwrapped the damp translucent packet of meat. (There was something indecent about sliced ham, about the look of it, that pink succulence, its clinging moistness.)

Julia sliced a tomato, opening its juicy scarlet core, then lapping the slices in a neat circle on a plate. She opened the jar of mustard, for her mother and herself. Her father's sandwich would not have mustard or lettuce. The list of things her father did not like was legion: Edward viewed the world as a student project offered up to him for correction.

Edward's presence flooded through the house, powerful, demanding, judgmental. At any moment he might appear in the doorway, offering criticism, finding fault. The day before, while Julia was fixing dinner, Edward had arrived in the kitchen with a peremptory request for a flashlight to check beneath the sink in his bathroom.

“Water's dripping onto the floor,” he announced. “I want to see what's going on.”

“It's probably only condensation on the pipes,” said Julia, her heart sinking. “Not a leak.” Surely she'd know if there were a leak? Surely this wasn't a leak?

“I'd like to have a look at it,” he told her, as though she hadn't spoken. “Could I have a flashlight?”

He'd stood in the doorway, waiting, while Julia stopped chopping carrots to root through the kitchen drawer. She found a flashlight, but it was dead, and there seemed to be only one new battery—a mystery, since they came in pairs.

“Sorry,” she said, irritated at herself. Her father turned without a word and went back down the hall.

It was a fact that the house was shabby, and that many aspects of it were primitive or provisional. Julia and her ex-husband Wendell—both underpaid university professors—had always had less money than her parents, and now that she was single again, Julia had even less than be fore. Her father, who'd been a brilliant and successful neurosurgeon, had offered her no financial help during the divorce, believing that beds should be made and then lain in. He'd always seemed to take a stern relish in reminding her of her impecuniousness, pointing out the flaws in her house, her life, and the way she ran them. Now that she was poorer it seemed to Julia that he did this more often, as though being poor were merely an oversight on her part, and, if offered enough convincing evidence from him, she would change her mind and decide to be rich.

It was the constant threat of her father's appearance, his criticisms and demands, that made Julia feel harried. (“Rattled,” her mother would say. “Nettled.” She used those old-fashioned expressions. No one nowadays would know what a nettle felt like, the faint silvery irritation made by the leaves against your bare leg.)

She must relax, Julia told herself. Though why was he so rude about her house? And so casually rude, as though finding fault were his right. As though he had some special entitlement to criticism.

She drew another deep breath and laid out the slices of bread on the counter in rows, like bread solitaire. She spread the mayonnaise, smoothing it creamily out to the edges. The tangible world: she admired the rich surface of the mayonnaise. Opaque, succulent. How would you paint it, she wondered, and get both the glitter and opacity? Who used that heavy, creamy brushstroke? Chase? Sargent? It all looked like a painting already.

Her father was eighty-eight, her mother eighty-six. Julia loved them, and they were getting old. She didn't think of them as actually old, but as getting old. They were nearing that country, their bodies were less present in the world, they were losing height and weight and bulk. Her parents were being diminished. She could feel them moving away, withdrawing, sweeping out like the tide toward the distant horizon.

Her father appeared now in the doorway.

How is it, she thought, that when we see someone, all the disembodied thoughts and emotions of that-person coalesce in that figure, that presence? How does the body carry that dense weight of being?

Her father's body held him, his character within it. If the body was lost, all his thoughts and feelings, his opinions, his irascibility, his surgical skills would be lost, swept into deep space. He would be intact then only in memory—a system so flawed and arbitrary, so unreliable, so wanting. The thought made her panicky. She looked at her father and was struck by her deep knowledge of him, by the way their lives were wrapped around each other's, the many times she'd seen him walk into a room. How she'd longed, she supposed, for his approval.

Her father was now shockingly small, nearly her own height. In her childhood, when she'd first learned him, her father had been immense, massive-chested, towering over her like a cliff. His head was in the upper regions of the air; she'd had to call up to his great height, her own voice tossed and tiny. Even when she'd grown up, her father had been tall. At her wedding, walking down the long aisle of the church, her father remote and distant beside her, in his dark suit, she'd felt his looming, powerful presence.

But now her father's eyes were nearly level with hers, and his movements slow. Now his forehead rose to the top of his head, and fine white hair ringed his bare pate like a tonsure. His hair was too fine and weightless to lie down, and it stood up wildly, as though blown by a small personal wind. His nose had become bulbous; on his pouched yellowy cheeks were faint brown stains. His small piercing eyes were faded blue, and deep disapproving lines were etched from nose to mouth.

He wore old khaki pants, ponderous white running shoes, and a stained blue windbreaker, zipped up to his chin. He wore the jacket every day, indoors and out, as though it were the only thing he owned. This was not the way he'd used to dress. Julia remembered him leaving for the hospital each morning wearing elegant suits, dull silk ties, soft leather shoes. Now he looked like a poor person, homeless. Which was what age did to you, it stripped you of what you'd had, of your presence in the world. The sight of him like this, shuffling, heavy-footed, in his stained windbreaker, made Julia feel helpless with tenderness.

Her father frowned at her. “Do you have an atlas?” he demanded. “I want to look up where we are.”

At once Julia forgot her tenderness, her anxiety. He had restored himself to despot. His manner—autocratic, imperious—never ceased to exasperate her.

“We do have an atlas,” Julia said. “I'll get it for you.”

She strode into the living room, bare heels thudding confidently on the floor. Crouching by the bottom shelf, where the big books lay flat, she ran her fingers briskly and uselessly down the spines: the atlas, she could see at once, was gone.

She looked further, her gaze ranging back and forth across the shelves, lunch unfinished on the counter, her father standing ponderously behind her, judgment gathering in the silence. The atlas had its own place on the bottom shelf, everyone knew it. Why, right now, her father's frown embedding itself on his forehead, was the atlas elsewhere? More evidence of her inability to run a household. Where could it possibly be, that big ungainly volume?

Julia sat back on her heels. “It's not here, Daddy. Sorry.” She made her voice brisk and offhand.

“It's not there?”

“Someone's taken it and not put it back.” She stood and headed for the kitchen, head high.

“I wanted to see just where we are on the coast.” Her father shook his head. “You don't have an atlas.”

“I do have an atlas,” Julia corrected him. “Someone's taken it.”

There was a pause.

Edward said, “I don't see how you can say you have an atlas if you don't have it.”

“I do have an atlas,” Julia repeated. “I just can't find it right now.”

Edward shook his head. “I'd call that not having one,” he said, almost to himself. “Do you have a map of the region? A local map? I want to see where we are on the coast.”

“We're Down East,” Julia said. “That's what you say up here. You don't say north or south, you say Down East. Because of the schooners, and the prevailing winds.”

“I know that,” Edward said. “I know about being Down East. What I want to know is where. I want to look at a map and see exactly where we are on the coast.”

“There might be a map in the car,” Julia said, though right now she doubted it, “but I'm in the middle of making lunch. Can it wait until afterward?”

What her father made her feel was incompetent: the missing atlas, the absent husband, the shabby house. Don't say anything more, she silently commanded.

She peeled off a translucent slice of ham and laid it carefully onto the bread. Her father waited for a moment, but she did not look up.

Frustrated, he turned away. She heard him heading slowly down the hall, the floor creaking beneath his steps.

At once she was ashamed.

Why did this happen? Why did she snap at her father like an adolescent? Why did he unsettle her? She was an adult. She had two wonderful sons, an ex-husband, and a possible new boyfriend; she taught at a distinguished university, she was a working artist, she showed her work regularly at a good gallery. She should be far beyond the reach of her father. But her father, though he himself was diminishing, still cast a long shadow over her life.

Julia and Wendell had bought this house years ago, when the boys were small. It was supremely inconvenient—an eight-hour drive from Manhattan—but supremely cheap. Even so, the upkeep and taxes had always been a struggle, and many times they'd almost sold it. The house would never be worth much, though; it was not on a fashionable part of the coast: no presidents or Wyeths or Rockefellers lived in this small stretch of bays and coves and wild islands.

The clapboard house stood at a little distance from the weathered barn. This was unusual here: during the old, bitter winters it had been too dangerous to venture outside. The old farmhouses were connected to their barns by a telescoping series of constructions. Bighouse, little-house, backhouse, barn, they were called. Julia liked the notion of continuous shelter, and she liked the rhythm of the phrase. Sometimes she said it silently to herself as she passed an old farmstead.

This house—now entirely hers—was lapped by meadows. In the upper field, above the house, were ancient apple trees gone exuberantly wild, their branches tangled into a sweet green net. The lower field was only grass, soft and silky, sloping mildly down to a sheltered tidal cove. Now, in late summer, the grass had turned a tawny pink, and glowed mysteriously at sunset. Julia's studio was in the barn overlooking the meadow. Through the big picture window she had painted this many times, the rich rippling grass, the moving water beyond it, the glittering sea-bright light. It was a symphony; she had never come to the end of it.

Julia and Wendell had always planned to fix up the house properly, but they could never afford it, and the house had stayed shabby. The white paint peeled in the scouring Maine weather, the shingles turned mossy, the shutters drooped at the windows. “Look on the bright side,” Wendell said. “No one would break into a house that looks like this.”

Every summer Wendell and Julia had worked together on the house. Since the divorce, it was Julia and the boys, Steven and Jack. Julia tried to paint one outside wall every other year. It was peaceful work. She liked sitting high on the stepladder, scraping at the worn paint in the bright sun, no sound but the wind sifting through the grass.

Inside, she'd learned basic maintenance—fuse boxes, simple plumbing. How the window sashes worked, the hidden weights plummeting inside the wall. She liked knowing the house in this intimate way, the dim earthy spaces of the damp cellar, the cool touch of the pipes, the tiny beads of moisture on the singing metal. The hot motionless air of the attic, the sloping eaves, the faint desultory hum of wasps. She liked using the solid-headed hammer, the long gleaming nails. She liked the screwdriver, the firm twists sending the grooved shaft spiraling deep into the wood. She liked responding to the old house, earning her ownership.

Wendell had loved the house, too. It had been the biggest issue in their divorce, but Julia had been obdurate. At first Wendell had been furious, but then he'd married a woman who didn't like Maine. It was too far away, pronounced Sandra, too cold. They went to Bridgehamp-ton. If Wendell had kept the house, he'd have sold it when he married Sandra, and that would have killed Julia.

Julia liked Sandra, despite her wrong-headed views on Maine. Sandra was small and smart and friendly, like a terrier. Wendell was lucky to have her. As he'd been lucky to have her, Julia. Men were lucky to have any women, any women at all, she thought, laying down the top slices of bread. Her father would never realize how fortunate he'd been to have her mother at his side, patient, merry, forgiving. Men shuffled

and stomped their way through life, women smoothed out the rucked-up mess they made with their big boots.

To be fair, Julia remembered the smooth slide of the mayonnaise jar in her hands, engineers, the way men understood the physicality of the world, and their readiness to take risks, their reckless courage; she forgave them the boots.

To be fair, there were men who were wonderful, too, and women who were not. She herself was not so wonderful. She was often impatient, often ungenerous: look at the way she behaved toward her father—but she would do better. She would make it up, with her father.

There was the awful woman Wendell had left her for, ghastly and dead-eyed from drink or drugs. She'd been arrested once on the Mass Pike, Wendell had told her, DUI. So unseemly! Julia had been delighted. That was a woman who had not been wonderful in any way, except possibly in bed.

No, Wendell was luckier than God to have sane, comforting Sandra now in his life, a family therapist, and very kind. Kind to Wendell, kind even to Julia, and, most wonderfully, kind to Steven and Jack. And Simon, the man Julia had started seeing just before the summer began (a mathematician, and how unlikely was that?), was lucky to have her, Julia, in his life, too. Wasn't he? Though this was precipitate. She wasn't sure yet if she were in his life, or he in hers. He had become a presence— thoughtful, quiet, sympathetic—but things between them were in the early stages. She was cautious, he was reserved. It was too soon to say if either of them were lucky.

Julia leaned over the bowl of peaches, inhaling the rich sunny scent, inspecting them for ripeness. Two were dark tawny pink, gently yielding; one was darker, suspiciously soft. She took the bad one for herself, as penance for her behavior to her father.

She carried the lunch tray out the back door, to the porch overlooking the meadow. As she stepped onto it, the porch floor yielded slightly beneath her weight: it was rotting. Fungus and mold and many-legged creatures were burrowing furiously and constantly into its boards, slowly turning the wood into crumbling humus. It was a kind of alchemy, this continual mindless urge on the part of everything in the material world to return to an earlier, more primitive form: wood to soil, metal to rust, plaster to dust.

Julia imagined prizing up the soft wood with a crowbar, ripping up everything, revealing the damp splinters, the damp scuttling creatures. Banishing them, sweeping everything out, setting out the heavy new boards. Lining them up, measuring, sawing—though this was real, serious carpentry, electric saws, unwieldly lumber. It was beyond her. She'd take it up in some other life. The one in which she got along with her father.

She set down the tray and went back inside. In the front hall she called to her parents, still in the guest room: “Lunch is ready.”

“All right.” Her mother's voice was high and sweet and frail, like an old woman's. “I'm just putting on my scarf.”

Her father did not answer. He would be standing beside her mother, his awful windbreaker zipped up to his chin, waiting, proud of his patience.

Julia waited, too. For this moment—the lunch tray out on the porch, the water pitcher coated with fine cold droplets, the sandwiches neatly cut—she was idle.

On the hall floor lay an ancient, threadbare Persian rug, its fringe ragged and meager. On the wall an old etching hung over a small, ponderous mahogany table. Beside it was a black Windsor chair. Sunlight irradiated the plaster walls, slanting past the etching. It was a picture of Paris at twilight, black roofs and chimneypots against a crepuscular sky. Julia liked the idea of Paris—its narrow streets and gilded salons, its worldliness and complexity—set here in the bare old house with its painted wooden floors, in the empty windswept countryside. She liked the sense it gave of the great reach and swing of the world. She liked the house itself, its simplicity, its worn surfaces, its offer of comfort and shelter. Its dry cedary smells, and its deep, deep silences.

The Windsor chair's narrow spindles fanned gracefully out, the lines set in rhythmic intervals, like a dark chord against the pale wall. The chair, the table, the picture of Paris, the wash of sunlight all seemed to form some mysterious balance. The house was soundless. Shafts of sunlight struck through the rooms, across the walls, the old rugs, the rickety furniture. The day was suspended, the earth paused. In this moment it seemed that a celestial order ruled. The sun flooded through her, she felt herself dissolving into luminous silence. She was here, in this moment, in the old house. Nothing was more luxurious than this deep soundlessness and light. Her parents, whom she loved, and who loved her—who were the great high cliffs of her world, still towering over her, though beginning to dissolve into the radiant dusk—were nearby. They were alive, they were here, and about to emerge into the sunlit hall.

Suspended, invisible, Julia waited for her parents to appear. She wondered what their life was like, their private life, when they were alone together in a room. Their shared silences. Who were you when you were unobserved? What were the things they kept from her? What were the things you kept from your children?

What did she keep from her own children? Very little now. When your children were small you tried to conceal your doubts and fears, your pettiness and failures. You tried to be what they needed—strong and certain, pure and loving. Of course they learned quite soon who you were—weak, uncertain, impatient, ungenerous. There was nothing of your character they did not know.

Though there were parts of your life you kept to yourself. There were things Julia would never tell them, things that should stay unshared, unconfessed. There were secrets that should die with people.

When Julia was alone, her personality unbound, drifting, she had no idea what she was like. Would her children recognize her? Didn't she twist herself, quickly, instinctively, into the shape she always wore for her children? Was it different from the shapes she wore for other people? For her parents?

The guest-room door opened, and Katharine stood in the doorway, leaning on her cane. Over her hair was a blue paisley scarf, tied dashingly at the nape of her neck, like a Gypsy's. She smiled at her daughter.

As a young woman, Katharine had been beautiful, with high cheekbones, liquid brown eyes, a square Gallic face and aquiline nose. She was still a beauty; the soft skin was weathered, but the cheekbones and profile were still firm. Her loveliness lay now in her warm luminous eyes, her inclusive smile: Katharine had always enjoyed her days.

Julia saw her mother's younger face beneath this one, as though a steadily thickening net, a veil of age, were being set over it. The earlier face was still present, but dissolving into this one, soft, lined, mottled.

Katharine made her way slowly down the hall. She wore baggy blue pants, a loose flowered shirt. Her small body was now shapeless— thick and bulky at its middle, slack and gaunt elsewhere. The womanly landmarks—waist, breasts, hips—had slid into insignificance.

Katharine walked unevenly, her torso dipping with each step. Her hip had been injured long ago, before she'd been married. It was part of the family history. An accident: icy roads, a skidding milk truck. Before it, Katharine had swum, skied, danced, played tennis. She'd famously climbed to the top of Mount Washington with her older brothers. Afterward, for a while she'd seemed to recover, but over the years everything had steadily worsened. Her spine had shifted, compensating for the damaged hip. An ankle had given way and had been fused. The other ankle weakened, a shoulder froze. In spite of operations and therapy, her body had become increasingly twisted. Now she leaned heavily on a cane, her movements slow and awkward.

What was her mother like, alone in a room?

Alone with her pain. Pain was the thing that was never mentioned. Katharine never spoke of it, nor did Edward, though they all knew it was present. There was nothing to be done; it was to be endured. To talk about it, even to admit it existed, was somehow shameful.

Her mother's life swam around Julia, a dense transparent layer of existence, like the veil of atmosphere surrounding her planet. Julia held in herself the sunny stretch of her mother's childhood as the darling of the family, the youngest child, the only girl. The Depression, when she'd nearly had to drop out of college. The accident, then the dark stretch of the war. Her domestic world, her husband, her three children. The ebbs and flows of Katharine's marriage—would Julia ever know about these things? Did she want to? Could she bear knowing them? She did not want to know her mother's pain, it was unbearable to consider. The intimate knowledge of her mother's life was charged, dangerous, too powerful and frightening to approach. Though in some way she did know these things, she knew them by breathing in her mother's life with her own. Julia was encased by her mother's life; she saw her own life through it, it was her air. We think back through our mothers, if we are women, Virginia Woolf had said. But it was alarming to think back, to venture into the closed and secret chambers of the mother's life.

Now Katharine smiled up at her. “I love those yellow walls in the guest room,” she said. “It's such a pretty color. And thank you for the flowers. You know rugosas are my favorites.”

“Oh, you're very welcome,” Julia said lightly.

Her tone—airy, noncommittal—implied that the walls just happened to be that shade, that the flowers had somehow gotten into the room by themselves, that she didn't know her mother loved rugosas. Julia would not admit to trying to please her mother, though she did. She would not accept her mother's gratitude or praise. She resisted her mother, held her at a tiny stubborn distance. Some subterranean line had been drawn between them, sealing Julia off.

Edward appeared now, behind Katharine. “I wanted to look up where we are,” he complained, “but Julia doesn't have an atlas.”

“I do have an atlas,” Julia corrected him. “I just can't find it right now.”

“Well, I don't know how you can say you have it if you can't find it,” said Edward to himself.

“Edward,” Katharine said humorously. She caught Julia's eye and shook her head. She was used to this, distracting attention from Edward's bad manners, making him seem charming and funny. Julia saw her father smile to himself, pleased, like a naughty boy.

Julia turned away from them both, from their collusion, her father's irritating manner. “I thought we'd eat out on the porch.”

They sat in a row in the bright shade. The air was hot and dry, with a whiff of cinnamon from the ferns. Before them the long pink grass rippled down to the cove.

Katharine sighed. “This is awfully nice. You have such a lovely place.”

“It's a pretty nice view,” Julia said.

“But the house,” Katharine insisted, “the house is lovely.”

“Falling to bits,” Julia said cheerfully.

“But in such a charming way,” Katharine said, smiling.

“I wish I'd found that leak in the bathroom,” Edward mused. “I'd have fixed it for you.”

Julia said nothing. Having her parents here roused something in her. She felt she was holding something at bay. She was patrolling the border. She was never not patrolling the border. It was a peacekeeping mission, she would not provoke an incident, but she would patrol, with armed guards. She picked up her sandwich and squinted into the bright light. For the meadow, for that smoky pink grass, first an undercoat of dead green, for depth. Or maybe yellow, deep yellow, for vitality.

The sky was brilliantly clear and blue, but the sun had moved around behind the house, and the shadows—still short and black— were beginning to lean toward sunset.

TWO

Edward followed his wife as she made her way to the back door and carefully onto the porch. As Edward stepped down, he felt the floorboards yield springily beneath him.

Rotten, Edward thought, pleased. He liked discovering flaws, it made him feel successful. Through some arcane law of psychophysics, every flaw that Edward discovered elsewhere increased his own sense of well-being.

He knew what should be done to this, the rotten boards ripped out, the punky orange shards piled on the lawn. New dry wood, the snapping of the chalked string against it, the blurred shadow flawlessly straight. The boxy, blunt-tipped pencil, the dull iron shine of the nails. Everything set in place.

Edward once would have done it himself, though now it was beyond him. Still, he'd have liked to watch it. He enjoyed watching construction—carpentry, wiring, plumbing—anything with mechanical complexity. He liked this larger, inanimate counterpart to his own world of cutting and clamping and reconnecting. He liked knowing how systems worked, all of them; he used to read instruction books on wiring and plumbing. He'd once done those things. He liked having the tools laid out on his bench, clean and ready. He liked making things function properly, correcting flaws. And there was a dark, subversive thrill about using hammers, awls, saws. Power tools: the spinning disk of silver teeth turned smooth by speed. The high whine of danger as his hands approached it, feeding the wood steadily into the lethal cut. Putting at risk his own irreplaceable tools, his hands.

He'd always been proud of his hands. They were small, with strong, supple fingers; he'd kept them clean and well-tended, the nails short, the skin pink. The harsh surgical scrub soap was abrasive, you used lotion to keep the skin from drying and cracking. They all did. At first it seemed girlish and sissy, but later it seemed normal.

All that was over. Edward could risk his hands however he liked, though he could now only do minor handiwork, nothing difficult. He had become clumsy, his agile hands were paws, the fingers thickened, joints stiff. One hand would not entirely open, because of Dupuytren's contracture, a spontaneous scarring of the fascia. The other hand opened and closed, but with difficulty: Edward was being slowly hobbled by his own body.

Worse than clumsiness, though, was the ebbing of his energy. Things he'd once have done in a moment, before breakfast, without thinking, now took him all morning. Everything was slow and hard to manage, even talking. There were moments when he could not produce a simple, common word, one he'd known his whole life. It frustrated him. He'd always been in control of things; his limbs, his mind, his life. How had he been so quietly, so irrevocably, deposed from power? He was helpless before this. All he could do was keep his secret from the world.

Part of the pleasure Edward took in discovering flaws had always lain in his ability to correct them. He'd have liked to fix the leak beneath the sink, the rotting floor. He'd have liked to fix all these things, he liked to make contributions, but offering anything to Julia was risky. He hadn't dared suggest help when Wendell left her. She'd always been touchy, and whenever he made suggestions she turned antagonistic. She was like that, his older daughter, challenging, argumentative. Something in her was abrasive. There was a gritty vein that would not rub smooth, that ran all the way through her.

Her younger sister, Harriet, was easier in that way; Harriet didn't argue. She didn't get angry with him; she said what she meant. But she was cold, somehow. Both his daughters were difficult. For some reason, he'd gotten stiff-necked, cantankerous ones. It was too bad; he'd have liked soft, winsome daughters, that kissed and petted him.

Julia helped Katharine into a chair, and Edward lowered himself beside her. The springy metal chair sank disconcertingly.

“Oh,” said Katharine, as the chair dropped beneath her. “What a nice surprise!” She bounced gently. “I think this is lovely.” She crossed her wrists primly in her lap. “How do you do, Mrs. Astor?” She nodded to them as though she were at a tea party, rising and falling decorously.

Julia laughed. They had the same sense of humor; Edward did not. He gave a bemused smile and looked into the distance. He didn't share Katharine's penchant for the absurd. He tolerated it, but did not approve.

Katharine looked out over the meadow, still smiling.

She took pleasure in the world, it was her great gift, though Edward would admit this only to himself. It was his policy not to admit anything publicly: neither flaws in himself nor strengths in other people. He gave compliments sparingly. Praise made people soft, he'd never looked for it himself. Success at the task was its own reward. Successful surgery was a serious achievement.

To himself, he admitted to admiring this about Katharine—the way she took pleasure in the world. Now that his days were quieter, now that they were alone together so much, he was more aware of what she did. He could see that it had given him—all of them in the family—pleasure. He was beginning to admire other things about her, too. She'd stood up to him. He could not now remember why, but there had been times when he'd nearly crushed her. She wouldn't let him do it, she'd resisted him. He admired that, though it wasn't something you talked about. Paying compliments made him uncomfortable, so did talking about emotions.

What you felt you should keep to yourself. The current rage for telling everyone how you felt, talking about your parents to a stranger, was ill-advised. You could talk to a therapist for the rest of your life and all that would change was your bank balance. It was self-indulgence. People should take responsibility for their own lives, get on with things.

Julia offered him a plate. “This is yours, Daddy. No mustard.”

Edward looked at the sandwich. “Thank you.”

He was looked after now. Other people chose what he would eat. It was a strange way of living. He looked out across the meadow and took a bite.

Take responsibility for your own life, your own actions: it was a favorite theme of Edward's. He was now alone, much of the time; in his mind, and he'd begun thinking more and more about these things. How his life had gone, how he felt about it.

Therapy was pointless, he agreed with himself once more. Subjective, irrational, unquantifiable, it was directly opposed to the fundamental premise of science. Therapy was for whiners, neurosis was self-indulgence, though it was unfashionable to say so. Serious mental disorders were different: psychosis, schizophrenia, severe dementia, those were all organic. They were caused by physical pathology and should be treated physically. At one time Edward had been involved in that kind of treatment. It was called somatic. Then those disorders had been treated surgically, though now the treatments were mostly chemical.

When Edward had done his training, the treatment of mental illness was almost entirely physical. Little had changed since the Middle Ages, though during the twentieth century there were experiments with insulin, horse serum, electric shock. One surgeon took out women's reproductive organs, claiming he'd eliminate madness in the next generation. Nothing had really been successful, and by the late forties the public hospitals were still using isolation and restraint. Locked wards and straitjackets were pretty much all they'd had.

After the war, thousands of soldiers came home traumatized by battle, psychologically incapacitated. The country was unprepared and the health-care system swamped. Mental patients occupied one out of two hospital beds in the country. Hospitals were overwhelmed, understaffed, and underfunded. In the V.A.s, the ration was one staff member for every two hundred patients. Mental health was a national crisis.

It was a crisis and became a scandal. There were exposés, grim photographs in Life magazine. Images of hell: crowds of naked patients in straitjackets sitting on the floor in bare rooms. These were our brave boys come home, and this was how we treated them. The government called for investigations, medical science called for a cure. Edward's field was galvanized with urgency.

Psychosurgery was the answer. Edward remembered the first time he'd heard the term “leucotomy”—at a staff meeting, everyone's face solemn. It was a new procedure, the severing of connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain. A Portuguese doctor, Moniz, had invented it, and an American, Walter Freeman, brought it here. It seemed to be the answer to mental illness.

Freeman's operation was simple and swift, and the VA. embraced it. This was the answer to those hordes of desperate, hopeless patients. This was the silver bullet, modern, scientific, and humane. There were federal grants and public funding, a health initiative. Forty or fifty thousand operations were performed across the country. The symptoms were gone, and the brave boys went home to their families. It wasn't just soldiers: the procedure seemed to work on all mental patients. It was a miracle. The national emergency had been resolved. It was a triumph for his field. Edward had been right in the middle of it.

A few years later, when psychotropic drugs emerged, treatment shifted toward medication, psychopharmacology Edward shifted, too, away from mental illness, toward other pathologies. He wanted to perform surgery, not write prescriptions. For the next forty years he addressed neurological disorders, physical malfunctions within the nervous system. He became an expert on certain procedures.

The sunlight here was dazzlingly bright, and the long grass hissed mildly in the wind. It reminded Edward of Cape Cod, his parents' house, the old saltbox on a low rise among the cranberry bogs. Those runty scrub pines, stunted by the wind. The air there smelled of the pines, and of the sweet, tangy bayberry; even, faintly, of salt, though the house was several miles from the beach.

Here, salt was heavy in the air, drifting up from the shore. The tides were high—he liked that about Maine, the great sweeping shifts of its waters, the brimming heights, the draining lows. The brutal iciness of the sea, closing like a fist around your heart. You couldn't swim here, there was no thought of it.

He'd never see the Cape house again. When Katharine could no longer manage the steep slope of the lawn, they'd stopped going there. Rather than leave it in his estate to be taxed, he'd asked Harriet if she'd like it, she'd always used it the most. He'd never thought to ask her to keep it, and two years after he gave it to her, she sold it to a developer.

It still made him angry, he felt it now in his throat. When he found out about it, Harriet told him coldly that she'd had no choice. She couldn't afford the taxes and the maintenance. She wasn't using it much, and she needed the money to start her practice. But if she'd only told him, of course he'd have paid the taxes.

Edward didn't want to see it now, crowded by other buildings, the bogs drained. He wanted to hold it in his mind as he'd known it, on its small hill, the old silvery-barked cedar trees on the front lawn, the high thick tangle of wild sweet pea and honeysuckle cascading down the hill behind it.

In the pond were snapping turtles. Once, when he was rowing across it, a turtle had clamped itself invisibly onto the oar, hanging on. He'd been small, only eight or nine. He remembered the sudden inexplicable weight, like a spell cast on the left oar. The smell of the flat green water, the stand of pines on the far hillside: mornings in that house had been pure and blue, silent and untouched. His father, in white duck trousers and faded blue sneakers, walking back and forth on the wiry grass, spreading the sails out to dry. Edward helped, tugging the heavy canvas from its damp folds.

No, he didn't want to see the place again. It was safe in his memory. Did it matter if it existed nowhere but in his mind? His memory seemed a better and better place to live. As he grew older, what was stored there grew more and more different from the world around him. The worlds diverged—did it matter? He wondered how Julia's sons were doing.

“Now, tell us, how are the children?” Katharine asked.

Edward thought, confused, that she'd just asked that question. Or had he just asked it? He looked sideways at Julia, to see if Katharine had repeated herself. Julia wouldn't say so, but her voice would be slow and patient. Edward hated people being patient with him, it was so patronizing.

“The boys are both fine,” Julia said, frowning, looking out over the pink grass.

Julia wouldn't say if they weren't. She never did, though Edward knew things had been pretty bad at times. Both with the children and her divorce: she led a chaotic life, as far as he could tell. She never talked about it. I'm fine, she always said forbiddingly. She wanted privacy, he understood that. He didn't want to know everything, either. Hearing about other people's lives was either tedious or frustrating, they made so many mistakes. Katharine, of course, heard all those things; she was interested.

Edward had disapproved of Julia's divorce. He didn't know why Wendell had left Julia, and he supposed no one would ever tell him. Wendell was married now to someone else, so it had probably been woman trouble. Of course you had these urges, everyone did, but you didn't leave your wife. People were so ready now to give up, throw everything away, but divorce was the solution to nothing. It made everything worse, usually. Look at Wendell, off with some inferior woman, Julia on her own now. For good, probably, her face turning lined and leathery.

He'd never wanted to divorce Katharine, though he'd been interested in other women. He'd had flings. But he'd never have left her. His marriage was part of himself, like being a surgeon. Each day he had waked up married to Katharine, and a surgeon.

Surgery had been the thing, the center of everything. The operations he'd performed were still part of his consciousness. He could go through each step of each one. They were like the house on the Cape— still there, still real, ready for him to inhabit.

Surgery had been his life. He'd done thousands of operations, over nearly four decades. It had engaged him utterly, it had given him his greatest pleasure. There was nothing more serious, more crucial, more delicate. He'd welcomed the challenges. He'd welcomed risk—he liked it—and often taking a risk was the right thing to do. He'd been good and he'd been lucky, and he'd been rewarded for both. Young doctors came to train with him, he'd been twice head of the National Association of Neurosurgeons, which he'd helped found. Surgery had been his life, a continuing challenge, one he always rose to. It had been intoxicating: the excitement, the urgency, the thrill of commencement.

Pushing through the swinging doors into the operating theater he entered a separate world, self-contained, professional, purposeful. The clean, cold, invigorating room. The bold, caustic smell of antiseptic, and the draped motionless body, stark and shadowless beneath the bright lamp. The pale, exposed, shaved skin, brilliant in its glowing pallor, vulnerable and still. The body was now defenseless, its mind absent. The body was no longer the house of the soul but the site of the performance. All of them drew near, the nurses, the assisting surgeons, the anesthesiologist. All of them ready.

Gowned, masked, gloved, costumed as his professional self. That first moment of infinite possibility: making the first incision, the bright metal edge sliding easily into the elastic skin, as he entered his world. Once the opening incision was made, everything else fell away. Then everything was in his grasp.

The crimson interior of the body was his landscape. Cutting through the dense carapace of bone, removing its protective helmet, exposing the secret tissues of the brain: soft, intricate, pulsing, full of their own mysterious life. Here was the true center of the organism, this rosy, glistening, underground labyrinth, coiled, folded, furled, lobed, branched, and connecting, each a part of the quick, mysterious response to life.

Standing under the lamp, leaning into the terrible exposure of the wound he had made, Edward was focused and intent, drawn into himself, to a place without connection to the rest of his life. He felt utterly aware, calm, capable. Masked people stood silently by, all of them part of it, ready to suction out blood, hand him instruments, take them away, raise or lower the level of consciousness. The thudding heartbeat steady on the monitor, a bass line of reassurance. Edward heard the sound without attending to it, aware only when it changed. His own breathing was muffled and magnified by his mask. He probed delicately among the glistening tissues; he took a narrow-bladed instrument.

All this was present for him still, but gone now, vanished from the real world like the house on the Cape. He had saved people's lives, their senses, their movement—but it was now like a movie about someone else.

His skills were gone, his hands were mitts. Edward could no longer even shave himself properly. It still looked all right, or at least he hoped it did, but his cheeks were unevenly smooth, rough in places, though he drew the razor carefully across them every day. He passed his hand across his jaw. It was worse on the left, the stubble coarser there. That was the side away from the window. He turned his head slightly, offering the others the smoother side of his jaw. It was humiliating. The flesh had no business betraying him.

“What are they doing right now?” Katharine asked.

For a moment he was confused, but it was the children again, Julia's children.

“Well, Steven's been in Seattle,” Julia said. “You know, he's been working for a conservation group there.”

“Oh, that's right,” Katharine said. “I can never remember what a conservation group is. Is it people who are conservative?”

“The opposite,” Julia said. “Very liberal.”

“That's right,” Katharine said. “And what's he doing for them?”

“Trying to save the forests.”

“Good for him,” Katharine said stoutly. “Somebody should save them.” She took a bite of sandwich. “From what?”

“Logging companies, mostly,” Julia said.

“I bet that's tough,” Edward said. “How's he doing?”

“He's kind of burning out. He's thinking of moving back East and doing something different. He's coming up here to talk about it.”

“Well good for him,” Katharine said again. “I'd love to see him. Will we get to?”

Julia shrugged. “I don't know. It's impossible to pin him down. My children come and go as the breezes of the air. They answer to no woman.”

“I think he should come up here,” Edward announced.

“I hope he will,” Julia said.

“And dear Jack?” Katharine asked. “Where is he?”

Julia frowned. “Jack's in Brooklyn.”

Julia offered no further information. She didn't like to talk about him, Edward could see. He couldn't blame her. Jack had always been a problem.

“Dear Jack,” Katharine said again. “Does he have a job? Or what is he doing?”

“He doesn't seem to have a job,” Julia said carefully. “It's not exactly clear what he's doing.”

“He must be living on something,” Edward pointed out. “He must be,” Julia agreed, “but it's impossible to say on what. He's still playing music, but there's no visible means of support.”

There was silence for a moment. Far out on the horizon, the line between sea and sky was becoming indistinct.

“Well, I'm very fond of Jack,” Katharine said loyally. “Give him my love.”

“I will,” Julia said, smiling at her.

“I'm very fond of him,” Katharine said. “And what is Steven doing?”

Julia looked at her for a moment.

“That's fog, out along the horizon,” Edward announced. His voice was flat, absolute, as though he dared anyone to contradict him. “That gray line.”

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