The Winceworthys

THE WINCEWORTHYS

a novel by

PAUL REIDINGER

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 by Paul Reidinger

By the same author

Novels

The Bad American (2012)

The City Kid (2001)

Good Boys (1993)

Double Jeopardy (first published as Intimate Evil) (1989)

The Best Man (1986)

Novella

The Varieties of Erotic Experience (2013)

Essays

American Empty: Nine Lamentations for the Republic (2018)

Hipsters of the Civil War: Essays in American History and Culture (2013)

Patchwork: Essays and Criticism (2010)

History and Memoir

The Roujet Symphony: An American Revelation in Four Movements (2016)

Lions in the Garden: A Canine Meditation (2010)

The world is all that is the case.

-- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1*

Forgiveness is mine, sayeth the Lord

-- after Romans 12:19

Call no man indifferent until he is dead.

-- after Herodotus, Histories, I (32)

In memory of my mother, and her mother

Table of Contents

I. The Place

II. The Plot

Postscript: Why Fiction?

About the Author

I. The Place

When Buddy was zero, he sat beneath the Christmas tree on Christmas morning in his parents' apartment and clanged pots and pans together. The pots and pans were gifts, but they were not gifts for him, but he did not care. The pots and pans were excellent for clanging together, and so he clanged them. They made a tremendous racket. The making of racket gave deep pleasure. His mother photographed him in mid-clang, and the photo, in black and white, captured a look of perfect bliss on his face.

A few weeks later Buddy turned one. He achieved oneness. He broke the shutout. He put his first point on the board. He was not at all nostalgic or sentimental about the bygone age; he did not think, Oh, to be zero again! In celebration of the great moment, his mother threw him a birthday party and baked him a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, the first of many such birthday cakes. The frosting and crumbs he somehow got all over his face. He looked like a little boy who needed a shave. He looked like a tiny bum.

Later that year, at Christmas, still one but almost two, in the red zone for another birthday score, he ran around his grandmother's dining table with whipped cream smeared on his cheek. He went from looking like a little boy who needed a shave to a little boy getting ready to shave. Little girls might be made of sugar, spice and everything nice, but little boys were made of whipped cream and heaven only knew what else. Whipped cream was nice, too.

Buddy could talk by then, but he preferred to dart. He had gained his feet, he had achieved dartworthiness, and so he darted. He was on the move. He rambled and he prowled. Rambling and prowling were better than talking. They gave the greater pleasure and paid the greater rewards. He took his chances as he found them, and he found such a chance as the adults of his small world yakked and yammered over the Christmas dinner table and its largely emptied bottles of wine. While they flapped their gums at one another, he made a break for it. He darted off.

He darted from the dining room through the parlor to the foyer, then clambered up the staircase to the second floor and the bedrooms. He darted down the long corridor with its Persian runner and into his grandmother's bedroom. There he peeked in her closet in search of monsters. Monsters were known to hide in closets, biding their time until little boys went to bed. Buddy saw shoes and smelled mothballs. The closet smelled strongly of mothballs. He did not see, stashed in a far corner on the floor, under a pair of winter boots, a small wicker hamper. He did not see any monsters, either, and, his investigations complete for the moment, he darted back downstairs to the dining room, where he’d hardly been missed and where it did not smell strongly of mothballs.

There, in the fresh air, the adults yakked and yammered on, but his grandmother Isabel sat silent and resplendent at the head of the dinner table, her steel-gray hair arranged in a bun – a battle bun – with only a slight glint in her eye to indicate that she saw anything at all out of order in Buddy's behavior. She caught Buddy’s eye with her own. She fixed him with a glance, and he eye-glinted back. They exchanged eye glints. They understood each other. He was only one, but he knew what her glint meant. He got the message and issued a receipt.

She said nothing about his unseemly disappearance and disorderly conduct, but that was because she did not have to. The two of them struck a wordless deal, and it would not be their last. Buddy would cease and desist from further running around like a maniac, at least until the dinner had ended and the adults had adjourned to the parlor, and his grandmother would continue to keep her mouth shut. She would decline to speak up in remonstrance. She would look the other way. She would let May handle this lesson in manners, though she had reason to doubt May’s will in the face of male resolve, even the resolve of a quite tiny male. A son was important, and a little boy, especially a little boy with a strong will – a will as strong as Isabel's, as Buddy’s was -- needed a firm hand on the tiller.

Gentlemen, even little gentlemen of one year, did not get their faces full of whipped cream, and they did not flee unceremoniously from dinner tables. They waited to be excused, or, if they did flee, they did so ceremoniously, with punctilio and excuses all around.

Neither did Isabel rebuke Buddy for poking around her bedroom and her closet, because she did not know that's what he'd been doing. She did not even suspect. She generally suspected the worst of people, but not of him. Still she did not care to have him, or other rambunctious little boys, or indeed anybody else, poking around her camphor-scented closet. Her bedroom was a sanctum, and her closet a sanctum within that sanctum, a sanctum sanctorum, holy of holies.

If she had known or even suspected what he'd been up to, she might have spoken up. She did not hesitate to rebuke people as needed, but she was never quick to rebuke Buddy, and it was Christmastime. In these festive circumstances she held her fire.

Until Buddy's arrival, at the cocktail hour of the long and placid Eisenhower administration, his mother and her family had zero experience of little boys. They were novices in the matter of raising a son. They had no idea. Buddy's mother May had been an only child, an only daughter, and May's formidable mother had been her formidable father's only issue. The family pattern of daughterliness, like the family pattern of formidability, stretched back into the fogs and rumors of the nineteenth century.

Isabel did have a brother, Stuart, who was really a half-brother. They shared a mother. But the discrepancy in parentage wasn't widely known; in fact it was all but unknown. May didn't know about it. Neither did Isabel's husband Rhys.

Stuart himself didn't know, insofar as Isabel knew. She hadn't told him, and he said nothing to suggest that he knew or guessed the truth. In recent years Stuart had gone rather dotty. He had been gassed as an American soldier in France in 1917, and family legend held that he'd never altogether recovered from the episode.

In his later years, his large silvery head perpetually wreathed in cigarette smoke, he became eccentric and vague, so that whatever he might once have known about the fissured family of his birth, he knew no longer. But he still liked to wear expensive suits and handsome bow ties when he went out. He looked the part of the debonair man about town even if time and circumstance had filled his head with confetti.

Buddy continued the family tradition of wearing bow ties and other such gentlemanly periphernalia. From his earliest days, his mother fitted him with bow ties – and neckties and pocket squares, and little suits and blue blazers with brass buttons that glinted like gold in the light, and nice Buster Brown shoes. He looked like a little Republican. He was a little Republican, a pint-sized Republican, since his mother's clan consisted of rock-ribbed Republicans who'd voted for Republicans from the days of Lincoln to those of Alf Landon and then Eisenhower, and now Buddy was one of them, though not yet a voter.

He was a tiny little boy in a blue blazer and a bow tie with red polka dots, racing around the table like a whirling dervish in white ankle boots. Such a sight had never before been beheld in that house, the house his mother had grown up in, the house of the Mackenzies. The Mackenzies had seen a lot in their day, but they had never seen anything quite like Buddy. They'd lived through blizzards and tornados and depressions and Red scares, and then along came Buddy.

Despite the small mishap with the whipped cream – an occupational hazard of wolfing down dessert -- the boy brought a welcome jolt of freshness to the old homestead. He was life itself. He was the future. He meant that there would be a future. It was as if he'd been sent as a gift from above, or beyond, to assuage the loss of Isabel's mother, who'd died just the past autumn, a few days before Halloween, at the great age of eighty-eight.

The deceased woman's proper name had been Elizabeth, but for decades in mid-life she was known as Bessie or Bess, until she lived so long that everyone started calling her Granny. Even Isabel, her daughter, called her that. Of course, Isabel didn't like or approve of her mother. It was easier to call her Granny than Mother. Granny established distance and conveyed disapproval, with a light and seemingly affectionate touch.

Granny's vacated seat, fitted with a high chair, became Buddy's. Buddy became her successor, and there he sat as if he'd just joined the Supreme Court. He was the junior justice. He was also the only justice in a high seat, and from his lofty new perch he greedily stuffed his face. To one side sat his mother, May; to the other, his father, Mr. Karper.

Isabel did not care for Mr. Karper. In fact she disliked him a good deal more than she'd disliked her own mother, and that was saying something. In fact she loathed Mr. Karper, and Mr. Karper loathed her back. Mr. Karper was not one to be out-loathed. He was a highly competitive loather. In matters of loathing and hostility, he made it a point to give at least as good as he got. In the spirit of the season, in the gathering of family at the Christmas dinner table, mother-in-law and son-in-law loathed each other with evident zeal.

Poor May felt the mutual loathing. The exchange of unspoken acrimony made her tremble with fear, shame and a strong sense of powerlessness. She tried to assure herself that her little son, the tiny Republican, perceived none of this menacing atmosphere. She hoped he did not. She protected him as best she could. She did what she could to ensure that the sun shone in his life. If it no longer shone in hers, if darkess gathered like a thundercloud above the Christmas table, she would see that it shone in his.

The boy sat in his high chair as a uniter, not a divider – or so May hoped. Certainly he had his work cut out for him. The family, such as it was – if family was even the word for such a fraught tribal arrangement -- consisted of little besides deep and bitter divisions. But everybody loved small children, and everybody loved Buddy, even mortal enemies committed to each other's destruction.

Everybody especially loved a son. A son was the gift most devoutly to be wished for, and thus everyone gave thanks for Buddy. On Buddy, at least, they could all agree. Buddy constituted a rare, indeed a unique, point of agreement. Buddy brought them together as they had not before been brought together. Under the aegis of Buddy, they at least appeared to be a family.

Yet families were more than appearances. Families were not apparitions, and they were made, not proclaimed. Or they were not made. Families did not necessarily, automatically, inevitably occur. In certain exceptional circumstances they could fail to occur. They could miscarry. There were families, and then there were un-families. It was not always easy to tell one from other other, which from which, especially when there was a young child involved, a young heir, a scion.

A scion could calm, for a time, a sea of troubles and tensions. A scion could bring people to the table for Christmas dinner and mute their differences, but he could not resolve those differences. He could attract love and attention from every quarter, but he could not redistribute that love among the combatants. No one could. That power did not exist on Earth. The scion could not make the combatants around him love one another. He could not make enemies into friends. He could not turn that fetid water into wine.

Isabel's table, a bold oaken rectangle at the heart of her dining room, had come to her from her father. It had passed with the blessing of his widow, Marjorie, who'd outlived her husband by the better part of two decades and had arranged the final disposition of his effects, including the dining-room table.

The table had been brought from New England by Isabel’s Lamont grandparents when they'd moved west, into the Great Lakes, in the years before the Civil War. The table had long graced the dining room of Lamont fils’s large and handsome house in nearby Ojibwa Falls, but Marjorie, after the death of the great man, became a recluse who never entertained and had no use for a dining-room table or even a dining room. When she died in 1939, it emerged in her will that she'd left the table to Isabel, as her husband had wished.

The table thus was a talisman, and Isabel set great store by talismans. They told her who she was. They told her where she belonged. They told her that she belonged. Isabel and Rhys's house was full of such objects – lamps, end tables and coffee tables, the large mirror in the foyer, a footstool, a writing desk – and indeed the house itself was the greatest talisman of all, a talisman filled with talismans.

The house could not have meant more to Isabel. It was the seat of her sense of herself. It was the seat of her power, and she was its sovereign. Within its walls she could not be overcome, she could not be conquered. Within its walls, she was invincible.

Alone of the family Mackenzie, she felt this way about the house and its furnishings. Her husband, as she well knew, did not. Rhys regarded the place as his wife's amusing boondoggle and a yawning money pit. He did not feel about it as she felt about it, but he did understand how she felt about it, and he allowed for her feelings. He recognized the great depth and strength of those feelings. He understood their great force. He knew those feelings must always be taken into account. They were not to be made light of or disregarded. A man's home was his castle, unless it was Isabel's home, in which case it was her castle.

As for May: She'd been just a small child when the house had nearly been lost in foreclosure. Her mother supposed she had only dim and fragmentary memories of those bleak times, and she was both right and wrong in so supposing. May’s memories of those times were fragmentary, but they were vivid. She did remember.

For several years early in the Great Depression, Rhys was out of work, and there was no money to buy coal to heat the house, there was no money for clothes or even food. May wore homemade sweaters and often went hungry, and she did not forget. Isabel made soup by boiling the skins of potatoes Rhys had grown in his garden behind the house; she served the soup because she had to serve her family something to eat, even when the larder was all but bare. Potato-skin soup was better than nothing at all, but not much.

The less any of them remembered of all that, Isabel thought, the better. There was little to be gained in reminding May of those trials, and Isabel herself did not willingly or often revisit her own recollections of those hardships and deprivations. Fate or fortune – or bad fortune – had brought her then to a place she had not anticipated or prepared herself for, and fate did nearly bring her down.

But she had survived. The family had survived. They'd all survived to see better days. And, thanks to Granny, they'd held onto the house. Isabel took that as a sign. The house was meant to remain hers. It was meant to stay in the family. It would pass to May and then to May's son. It would pass to Buddy. One day Buddy would climb down from his high chair and become the man of the house. By then Isabel would be long gone, but in the meantime she took comfort in the knowledge of what the future was sure to bring.

The only fly in ointment, the only complication, was the large and uncouth object known as Mr. Karper. Isabel had not anticipated such a noisome figure blundering into the plan. Mr. Karper was beyond anticipating. No reasonable person would have anticipated Mr. Karper.

Isabel had not thought to see the likes of Mr. Karper under her roof, let alone seated at her beautiful Christmas table, eating from her English bone china and scarfing wine from her German lead crystal stemware. But May had insisted on doing the unthinkable and marrying the unmarriageable, and the result was Mr. Karper. There he was, in all his Yuletide glory.

•••

The future Mr. Karper's first visit to Isabel's manse, years before, during the war, had filled Isabel with disquiet. She felt at once that an alien and malevolent spirit had entered her redoubt. Mr. Karper then was but a lad of fourteen, good-looking, with a shock of black hair, and interestingly short an eye. He was polite and even deferential, but Isabel perceived a studied quality to his obsequiousness. He was up to something. He wished to be seen in a certain way so that he would not be seen in some other way. He wished not to be seen as he really was.

The two young people had been talking raucously when they'd come through the front door into the house, but by the time they'd reached the threshold of the kitchen, where Isabel was baking chocolate-chip cookies, they'd piped down.

May knew enough not to step into Isabel's kitchen, and Mr. Karper followed her lead. She presented him to her mother at the door between the kitchen and dining room.

Smells good! Mr. Karper said. The kitchen and indeed all the back of the house swelled with the fragrance of fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies, as well as with the simple and welcome warmth of the oven. Outside it was April and sunny, but still quite cold. It had rained early in the morning, and the lingering dampness added to the chill.

I'll set a plate out for you in the dining room, Isabel had said by way of gentle dismissal. They're cooling now. Almost ready.

May well understood her mother's complex message. They were not to enter Isabel's kitchen, and Isabel would allot the cookies. She would ration them so that May would not spoil her appetite for dinner. Isabel was a remorseless campaigner against snacking. She regarded chocolate-chip cookies as decadent, but she liked baking them and eating them, so her position did suffer from a certain lack of internal consistency. She herself recognized as much, and children, she had noticed, were keenly aware of these sorts of contradictions in their parents, or at least her child was. Children, like dogs, were quick to sense any opening or weakness in the authority structures around them. Once they did, they could make their move without warning.

Isabel had taken an instant dislike to Mr. Karper. She had not liked him even before he turned up in her house, when he’d been no more than a name and a rumor, and she did not like him even more when he appeared in the flesh. She looked him in the eye as she welcomed him into her house, and he looked right back with both eyes, one of which seemed a little droopy, but she already knew about that. He did not look away. He did not defer; he defied. She felt it. She felt his challenge. She was being challenged in her own house by a fourteen-year-old boy her daughter had dragged in.

Nice house, he said, looking around like a burglar.

Thank you, Isabel said.

I’ll show you around, May said.

I'll set out some milk for you, Isabel said, as a way of saying, I won't follow you around, but I am keeping tabs on this situation, and don't be away too long. Don't try any funny business when you think I'm not looking, because I'm right here, waiting for you. I am counting the seconds. I am counting on my cookies to bring you back down here, where I can keep an eye on you, and when is he due home for supper? When does his mother expect him? When will he be leaving?

She heard them tromping around upstairs. Had she caught a whiff of cigarette smoke amid the regnant scent of fresh-baked cookie? She was prepared to believe the very worst about Mr. Karper, and she didn't want him leading May down the primrose path to ruin. She didn't want him to introduce May to cigarettes. Having one cigarette smoker in the house already was bad enough. She didn't want another. She didn't want smelly furniture or smoke-stained ceilings. She didn't want her daughter taking up such a vulgar and revolting habit. Most of all, she didn't want May doing whatever it was Mr. Karper wanted her to do.

Previous to this momentous visit, May had given her mother the back story on Mr. Karper's missing eye. As a tot, she explained, Mr. Karper had gotten into some kind of playground scuffle with another thuggish tot who’d poked Mr. Karper in the face with a stick. The stick poke damaged one of Mr. Karper's eyes, which was removed as a precaution, to keep the other eye from becoming infected.

May had laid out this strange and rather gruesome tale for her mother as proof of Mr. Karper's notable qualities. She'd gone on to mention, in a voice of admiration verging on awe, that Mr. Karper starred on several of the school's more important sports teams notwithstanding his physical deficit. May seemed to be paying tribute to some great quality of soul in this monoptic youth. She seemed to be implying that he was blessed or favored in some way to be able to do with a single eye what everyone else needed both eyes to do, and even then, they weren't as good as he was. He beat them not with one arm tied behind his back but with one eye missing.

Isabel had felt a slight shiver at this boy's presence, as if a draft of cold air creeping through a door thoughtlessly left ajar had had laid its fingers on her, but she had lived long enough to know that fourteen-year-old girls changed their minds often. She herself had been a fourteen-year-old girl who'd sometimes, though not really all that often, changed her mind.

Young people changed their minds and underwent changes of heart. Change was the essence of youth. Isabel need only wait. Youthful passions and obsessions shifted like the weather, or the sands of the desert; youth's social alliances and affections were fluid. Tomorrow her daughter would be smitten by someone else, and the day after that she would be off to college, there to undertake the serious work of finding a suitable life companion, a boy of her own sort, a boy with with strong prospects, and marrying him.

What happened in high school stayed in high school, at least for those who went away, or were sent away, to college. The one-eyed boy named Mr. Karper would sign May's senior yearbook, and that would be that. He would go on playing his sports until he vanished in the gaping maw of oblivion and indifference, while May, like a guided missile, would zero in on her doctor-to-be husband-to-be.

The lives of May and Mr. Karper would run askew, as was meant to be, with their only intersection brief and early on, which would limit the damage. Their connection would be all the more exciting for its inevitable brevity, which Isabel would see to if she had to, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have to. The unwelcome tide would recede as it had come in, and the smelly kelp would be washed out to sea. Isabel would watch and wait, and with any luck, that would be enough.

Isabel had no more use for sports than for sportsmen. She quite resembled her father in this respect. Gilbert Lamont’s disdain for the sporting life and for sportsmen had been legendary. Isabel believed in physical fitness – swimming and calisthenics – not as ends in themselves but as a means of maintaining the temple of the body and thus the mind within the temple.

She preached a gospel of good nutrition on the same grounds, and she practiced what she preached. You took care of your body not for its own sake, not for the sake of vanity – a sin – but so that it could sustain your mind. Pleasure in food and eating thus was incidental and secondary, though not undesirable. There was no point in serving nutritious food if it tasted bad and no one would eat it.

That was, for her, the value of the pleasure principle. She took an instrumental and skeptical view of pleasure. Pleasure served higher masters. The lively spirits of pleasure could be useful but were also dangerous and had to be kept an eye on. You couldn't trust them. You didn't dare. Only fools trusted in pleasure. That was the wisdom of Isabel's Puritan forebears.

Isabel had long assumed that May would end up with a man like Rhys, with the addition of college and medical degrees. Rhys was a decent and gentle man if not quite a gentleman. Isabel had undermarried, there was no denying it, but May would make good the difference. Daughters married their fathers as surely as sons married their mothers, and May did resemble Isabel in temperament. Mother and daughter were quite alike. Perhaps that helped explain why they so often failed to get along. Each was introverted, careful, concrete, respectful of rules and tradition, inexpressive of feeling, rather stony of mien.

It was hard enough to be a woman at all, Isabel had often thought, but it was even harder to be a woman who had trouble showing her feelings. It was especially hard for such a woman to be the mother of children. Children needed love, they needed that warm bath of affection, those steady beams of singing sunshine, and a mother was supposed to sing and shine. A mother was supposed not merely to be loving but demonstrably loving.

A woman whose pale sunshine mostly lay hidden behind brooding clouds of stoicism was bound to seem cold and dour to those around her, in particular to her children. She would have trouble connecting with them and with others. People expected women and mothers to be warm, loving and nurturing; the expectation wasn't fair, but it was real. It was a grim truth of the world. The world abounded in such grim truths. Most truths, in fact, were quite grim. That had been Isabel's experience.

Isabel herself had accepted motherhood with resignation (graceful resignation, she hoped) as one of life's basic duties, along with getting married, remaining calm as your hair turned gray, paying your taxes and facing your mortality. You had to get married, and when you got married you had to have children. Marriage and children were not optional in her world.

The fact that these rules were nowhere written down did not make them less commanding. It was understood that all adults of her sort must follow this well-marked course, unless some biological sorrow intervened or, as happened on rare occasions, certain individuals descended into the labyrinth of perversity.

Such individuals usually had the good sense to move far, far away, to the coasts and their great seething cities, where corruption was routine and depravity a way of life. These odd people divorced themselves, in effect, from the lands of their birth and from their families, and the repellency was mutual. They did not want to stay, and they were not wanted.

There was an efficacy and neatness to these separations Isabel found satisfactory. Everybody got what they wanted. The dissolute got out, leaving behind only the wholesome to reproduce in peace in the broad green midlands of the country, the home of wholesomeness and the old ways.

In truth, Isabel felt at times an impatience with wholesomeness and the old ways. There could be too much wholesomeness and too much mindless fealty to tradition. It was possible to be too nice and too ordinary. One accepted ordinariness as life's main stream, but one should not aspire to it.

Of course Isabel kept such passing heretical thoughts to herself. She kept them secret. Passing heretical thoughts did not make one a heretic, and she was not a heretic and did not want to be seen as one. Heretics did not find the going easy in the land of the wholesome.

Nor did she want to give her daughter any ideas about flouting social convention or her parents' wishes. Others would do that – the one-eyed sportsman for one, the boy called Mr. Karper. Isabel did not doubt that he would try to make trouble sooner or later. He was a troublemaker, and troublemakers made trouble. They lived to make trouble. They enjoyed making trouble.

She had come across troublemakers before. Usually they were men, but not always. There was no preventing a measure of sordidness and disappointment from tinting every life, but it was a mother's duty to her child to keep such tincture to a minimum. It was a mother's duty to set a proper course for her child, even if she could not control the weather.

The weather would bring what it would. Other people would bring what they would, and all this was called education. An education was a phenomenon you survived, Isabel had come darkly to think in middle life. Still, education was preferable to a lack of education. The only thing worse than education was no education. So May would be educated. Education entailed risks and uncontrolled variables, but some risks must be run. Some bets must be placed. Faith must be kept.

Isabel's sibling, Stuart, presented any number of interesting issues with respect to sordidness and education. He had little of the latter, and as to the former, she wondered without exactly wanting to know. Though older than she, and male, he had somehow managed not to go to college, while she had graduated from a Big Ten university as the Great War neared its close.

Despite stunning good looks in youth, Stuart had never married. Instead he had spent his adult life living with Granny in their grand but drafty pile at the crest of a hill in Ojibwa Falls, just a few miles upriver. He had never worked but did often take the train to Chicago. Isabel regarded these vaguely described journeys with suspicion, though she declined to speculate. They did not talk about it. In fact they talked about very little. They had little to talk about. They had little in common, though they did get on.

Rhys and Stuart had more in common, but they did not get on. They had both served in France during the Great War but had come away from that experience alienated from, rather than bonded to, each other. Unlike Stuart, Rhys had managed to avoid being gassed and developing shell-shock, but he was by nature a sympathetic and well-mannered fellow, so his indifference to Stuart's sufferings and his personal hostility to Stuart defied explanation. Isabel could not account for this state of affairs, and neither of the principals would say much on the subject. She ascribed the whole mess to the sinister mysteriousness of men and did what she could to keep them apart.

It was possible that the feud between the two males to whom she was closest in life involved some dimension or element she could not perceive, some scent she could not detect. Men, for all their brutishness, were not without their perceptiveness and perceptions. In particular, they seemed to have a keen sense of other men's secrets and vulnerabilities. She had noticed as much over the years without being able to enter their secret society of awareness. Rhys disliked Stuart, perhaps, for reasons having nothing to do with their service in the war.

She had never asked Rhys to explain himself on the question of Stuart. She did not wish to hear unkind or judgmental words spoken about her sibling; she did not wish to push Rhys, who was otherwise so mild and thoughtful, so accommodating and easy to live with, so averse to conflict, into some pointless interrogation or confrontation.

She did not, moreover, wish to learn too much about Stuart and his life. She preferred to remain in the peaceful country of ignorance. She preferred to see Stuart as a harmless eccentric, not as an agent of some nameless and unspeakable squalor. She would not ask Rhys to say what he knew or thought about Stuart. She tried to keep as much distance as she could from the world of men, that swirling and unstable globe. She did not like men, but she did not envy them, either.

•••

The big house was big enough for Isabel and Rhys to have separate bedrooms. Separate bedrooms meant that they did not have to touch each other often, and Isabel did not like to be touched. As mistress of the house, she claimed the grand prize, the large bedroom at the rear of the second floor, with its en suite bathroom and wall of windows looking across the back of the property, including Rhys's vegetable garden. There, since time out of mind in the short but sweet growing season of the Great Lakes, he had cultivated tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, pole beans and kohlrabi.

During the war they had called the garden a victory garden like everybody else. The usage gave a sense of solidarity and contribution while also helping to conceal the garden's true origins and the sorrow and shame associated with them.

The truth was that Rhys had first planted the garden many years before the outbreak of the war, and he'd done so not because he wanted to but because he had to. He'd begun it in the early days of the Depression, when he'd lost his job as had so many others, and suddenly there was no money to pay for food or for anything else, and so there was no food. The Mackenzies were moneyless. They were penniless, and they were hungry.

If you had no coal to heat your house, you put on a sweater if you had one, but food, at least, could be grown. You couldn’t grow coal or sweaters, but you could grow potatoes. An enterprising, or desperate, homesteader could raise his own crops. He could grow his own food. He had a bit of land if nothing else, and on it he could cultivate vegetables and fruits as the weather permitted. He had those few brief, precious months of summer to bring forth what bounty he could, and what he and his family couldn't immediately eat from the harvest, his wife would can or pickle to sustain them through the harsh winter.

The garden had helped the Mackenzies ward off starvation. It had meant survival. It was a survival garden. Survival might not mean victory, but at least it didn't mean defeat. It meant they would live to see another day.

The idea of starvation as a trial Isabel might someday personally confront had not once crossed her mind in her early years. Starvation was a misfortune that happened to other people, strangers in distant and less blessed lands. It happened to them in books. She read about it in books, as she read about earthquakes and bubonic plague and painters and poets and famous Gothic cathedrals in France. She was a reader who read a great many books, but nothing in in those many volumes prepared her for the prospect of her own hunger and her family's wider condition of impoverishment.

Her first experiences in life had indicated to her that she stood quite high in the scheme of things, about as high as could be, near if not quite at the pinnacle – not yet – and nearly in reach of it. She'd arrived on top, like a cherry on a hot fudge sundae. That sense became a part of her personality and told her that a big, beautiful house in the best neighborhood was just where she belonged.

She did not need Rhys to tell her how much it grieved and humiliated him not only to have lost his livelihood – for men of that era as of many others a central aspect of their selves and self-worth – but through his failure to have placed his entire family at risk of poverty and dislocation. He was taking his wife and daughter down with him. She knew all this without needing to have it spelled out. She could see it. She could read regret and apology in his shoulders as he toiled in his garden, watering and pulling weeds; she could read his shame in his grayish-blue eyes.

It was so typical of Rhys, she thought, that he put his energy into atonement and melioration rather than getting angry and throwing tantrums about the unfairness of life. What a waste that would be, though surely some would find it emotionally gratifying. Some would be unable to resist. Of course life was unfair, of course it was. If life was anything, it was unfair.

It struck her as especially unfair – as a gloss of gratuitous unfairness – that a man as reliable and uncomplaining as Rhys should be put to such a test. He might not take offense at fate's affront, but she did. Privately she seethed on his behalf. She was a seether. When she was not seething, she glowered and fumed, and when that became too much she worried and fretted.

She also coped. Coping was her great task in life. Coping made her useful as seething, stewing, worrying and fretting did not. She sewed clothes for her beleaguered family and scrounged up meals for them. Waste not, want not was the old bit of Yankee wisdom she'd heard as a girl. Then, she'd admired the modest poetry of the phrasing; later, in want, she came to appreciate its severe wisdom.

She became a keen judge of value and took care not to throw anything valuable away. She hoarded value. She came to understand, as she could never have done as a silver-spooned girl, something of what those long-ago settlers and pioneers, her own distant ancestors, had endured in daring to come to the New World and the frontier and set themselves up at the edge of an indifferent wilderness simmering with Indians and bad weather.

The wilderness had cared nothing whether those pioneers starved or suffered, whether they lived or died, but they'd lived through starvation and suffering. They had survived, and so would she survive. As they had done, so she would do. She would do what she needed to do, and in so doing, she would discover her deeper resources, her greater capabilities. She gathered her anger and her fear and used them. They strengthened and drove her. With their help and their energy, she would overcome. She would, somehow, reach the safe shore. She would lead her little flock to safety.

The house, like the flock who lived in it and called it home, survived the storm and a close call. After four years of emptiness and dread, Rhys found work, and it was better work. He found a job as an insurance agent, and it was a white-collar job. The job was a step up in several senses, including pay, and the financial and social enhancements came as a great relief to Isabel.

No longer was she, a university graduate, married to an uneducated man who had lost his job selling iceboxes. She was now married to an uneducated man who sold insurance policies and wore a suit and tie to his office every morning. Insurance agents were presentable. The icebox business had died at the hands of the electric refrigerator, but the insurance business would never die. Disaster and misfortune were forever, uncertainty was forever, and therefore insurance was forever. Like religion, it offered a hedge against fear.

The mortgage they'd taken out on the house after Rhys had lost his old job was quickly paid off with a loan from Granny, secured by the proceeds from the new job, and the foreclosure proceeding did not proceed. It had been too close for comfort; when the loan went into arrears, a foreclosure sale of the house had been scheduled. The place was to have been auctioned out from under them. But, just in time, payment was made. Rhys, once crushed by failure, nodded in silent satisfaction as the papers recording payment in full of the debt were signed and the lien on the property removed.

May had been told nothing of this drama. Isabel told her nothing, and she had admonished Rhys to do likewise. Grade-school children did not need to know such things, which they were in no position to understand. Even adults barely understood. Such an episode was too powerfully unpleasant and frightening to be comprehensible. Moreover, it suited Isabel's disposition to say nothing. The less said the better, she thought in nearly every situation, and best to say nothing at all, if at all possible. Best to keep silent. Silence was golden.

Even so, Isabel knew that May sensed disquiet in her surroundings. It was a mistake to underestimate children. Children might not understand, but they certainly perceived. They perceived all the more keenly for not understanding. Understanding clouded perception. You saw most clearly when you had no idea what you were seeing and had no expectations or preconceptions. Children's perceptions were unsullied by experience or education. Only a fool would suppose that he could fool children.

May was as close-mouthed as her mother, but surely she had sensed her father's frustration and anxiety. Surely she noticed how cold the house was in winter and how careful her mother was about food, extravagance and waste. Surely she had noticed that life was different under the roofs of at least some of her friends – that their houses were warm in winter, that the food at their tables was more plentiful and varied, that their clothing was newer and not hand-sewn.

May would have noted these details, no doubt, as differing from those in her own life. Children were immensely attentive to the details of their friends' lives and how the particulars of their own lives compared, especially if they differed. Difference fascinated children before it terrified and shamed them.

At some point May was bound to mention to her mother some luxurious touch – a new pair of calfskin gloves, a box of exotic bonbons – she had seen at a friend's house, and why didn't they have that, why couldn't she have one of those? Why weren't they plucking delicious chocolately bonbons from a golden box wrapped in a red bow? Why weren't they swathing their fingers in elegant calfskin when the weather turned cold? May would want an explanation for these discrepancies, and the older she got, the more specific and persuasive any explanation would have to be.

It was easier to consider discussing the crisis once the crisis had passed. It would be easier to say, Yes, for a while money was tight once money was no longer quite so tight and the memories of the tightness had faded a bit. The family crisis could then be set within the frame of the wider national crisis, now largely past: Yes, times were tough all over, not just here, not just for us. It wasn't anyone's fault. It wasn't your father's fault.

This was true, and the truth of it might lessen the shock. Rhys's being out of work for several years could not discredit him personally when tens of millions of other people had found themselves in the same position and when, at last, he'd found his way out of the morass. May could and should be proud of her father. He'd done all he could, he'd never given up and he'd pulled through – he'd pulled them all through.

As for Isabel: She didn't need May to be proud of her. Isabel was not one to seek the approval of others, certainly not of her own child. She did what she thought was right, she did the best she could do and she let the chips fall where they would. She answered to her own conscience, not to anyone else's.

In her heart, she hoped her daughter would come to show a similar streak of independence, a willingness to think for herself and have the courage of her convictions. These were old and real American virtues, but expressing them and living by them was harder for a woman. Women were not raised to be that way or act that way. They were supposed to be kind, empathetic and supportive.

Isabel, though not much liking men as a group or subspecies and not envying their lot in life, could not quite help casting a covetous eye at certain of what she saw as their rights and entitlements. Men weren't expected to be nice all the time; they weren't expected to bake cookies and cupcakes and comfort weeping children who'd scraped a knee on the playground. They could be bold and aggressive; they could be angry and surly; they could be cold and indifferent, and no one would mark them down for it.

These hard qualities – qualities almost absolutely forbidden to women – actually seemed to contribute to men's worldly success. Nice guys didn't necessarily finish last, but they rarely if ever finished first. Bullies, tyrants and sociopaths finished first. They demolished the competition. She knew. She'd seen it firsthand. She'd felt the truth of it. She bore witness to much of Rhys’s life, and that was the truth of it.

Her own father, a great worldly success, had been agreeable enough in private, kind and attentive, generous and encouraging. In public, as a public man, an eminence, he had been formidable. He carried a formidable reputation for brooking no nonsense and being all business. He'd been a tall, brawny, unsmiling man who commanded awe and fear just by stepping into a room. She remembered him vividly, his moustache and his motorcars, in which he so often traveled back and forth to the state capital. He'd held a high position there. He'd been a man of the world, a figure of consequence.

She wondered sometimes what he would think if he could see where fate had landed her and what fate had done to her. Would he share her dismay and shame, or would he blame her? Would he regard her performance as inadequate and unworthy? He was not one to accept excuses. She was his daughter, and he was a mighty figure, and how could she have let these things happen? How could she have allowed herself to end up in such humiliating straits? How could she have fallen so low?

He had been rich, but she was not rich. After his death, his wealth had flowed not to her but elsewhere. It had been guided elsewhere. Pots of gold always attracted attention and flimflammery, and the best flimflammers tended to be intelligent, determined, unscrupulous and well-camouflaged. They looked respectable and seemed conscientious. They understood the value of appearances and kept them up accordingly. The worst people were often the most intelligent people. Intelligence so seldom corresponded with decency – a bitter truth, a bitter pill to swallow.

Some of Isabel's father's wealth, at least, should have come to her, despite the awkward relationship between parent and child, despite the stooping of clever vultures on the money. He had meant to look after her; he had written his will, in part, to protect her interests. But despite a lifetime spent among clever vultures, he underestimated them – underestimated the greed, vanity and ambition that drove them and the mischief they could make.

If the money had come when it should have come, she wouldn't have become rich, but she would have been spared becoming poor. She would have been spared that indignity, and she would have known less. She would have been better able to keep her family fed and clothed through those dark days when the cold sky itself seemed to have fallen in on them, and certain experiences would have remained foreign to her. She would have shivered less in an unheated house in the depths of those gelid Great Lakes winters. She wouldn't have felt, as she so often did, that she and her loved ones were teetering at the edge of the abyss, forgotten by God Himself. But He moved in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, including, perhaps, the education of Isabel.

He could have done a better job, she often found herself thinking of her father, he should have done a better job. She was merely disappointed in him, but she hated the vultures, especially the chief vulture, the vulture-in-chief, who'd served as executor of her father's estate and manager of the fortune and had succeeded in managing most of it right into his own hands.

Those hands, or talons, were now those of a United States senator. She'd been mugged and robbed in broad daylight by a member of the U.S. Senate. He was her first cousin, and he had an office with a fireplace and a marble floor in the U.S. Capitol while she could see her breath in the kitchen as she boiled her heap of potato skins into pale soup. She was tempted to believe that there could not possibly be a God in a universe of such insults and indignities, but she believed in God, and she further believed, as Thomas more or less, had once put it, that God's justice could not be delayed forever.

Justice would be done sooner or later, she believed because she had to believe. Eventually justice would find her, just as it would find, from a slightly different angle of approach, Senator Andy Nelson. Meanwhile there was the disturbing question of Mr. Karper and his disturbing interest in her young daughter.

•••

News of the European war, second of her lifetime – the first one had only just ended five minutes ago, it seemed to her, before the next one broke out – filled the papers from the autumn of 1939, but she paid scant attention. She had been to Europe long ago. She had spent a long summer in the 1920s wandering through the Old World, riding its rails and walking its cobbled streets, visiting its museums and galleries, its squares and cafes. She had loved it; she had fallen in love with it. But that was in another age, when she had been a different age, much younger, a youth still filled with youth's eager hungers.

And she'd had money then. She hadn’t worried about money then. She had no husband, she had no house and she hadn't become a mother. Thoughts of money seldom crossed her mind. A death in the family had made money available. When she'd run low, she’d just gone to the nearest American Express office and got more, as if going to a well to draw water. She assumed there would always be enough; she assumed the well would not run dry.

She trusted in the well, and in those days the well repaid her trust. A woman of her position, a person of her social caste, did not lower herself to obsessing about money. She was sure to inherit more money from her rich Uncle Gilbert – as she still knew him -- who'd died the year before her great European odyssey and had remembered her in his will.

Obsessing about money was an unseemly preoccupation of middle-class people, and she was not middle-class. She did not belong to the middle classes. She had grown up in a big, handsome, turreted Victorian house at the crest of a hill in Ojibwa Falls, several of the elders of her clan were prominent and wealthy public men, and from her earliest days she'd had a sense of the world being spread quite literally not just before but below her.

She stood atop the world as mistress of all she surveyed. The cares and concerns of the masses, wherever, whatever and whoever they were, did not concern her. Her interests ran elsewhere, to paintings and poetry, Wedgwood and Beethoven. She would rather have a piano than a new car. She had been sent to college not so that she could become a nurse or nanny but so that she might become a lady.

She was sufficiently self-aware to understand how at odds she stood with certain cherished American myths. America exalted the middle classes and all things middle-class because America had been founded by middle-class people. Her own ancestors, the Puritan colonists of New England, were descended from the shopkeepers and preachers of little English towns. They'd not been poor, a few had been even modestly rich and several had been well-educated at Cambridge; they were, in the main, middle class before the term existed, with enough resources, imagination and confidence to consider making the great leap across the sea.

It was odd, in this light, that she should have ended up with such an exalted and dynastic sense of herself, but she took after Gilbert Lamont in this respect. He'd been like that. He loved to tell her tales about the Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror and poor King John at Runnymede, the knights and barons of medieval England, the Magna Carta, the Plantagenets, the Tudors. He seemed to think that that was the world he'd come from, and since he was always reading – was known for much of his life as an indefatigable reader and scholar as well as a famous judge – she was inclined to believe him. And if he came from all that and she came from him, then she must have come from all that too.

Since these sorts of aristocratic structures didn't officially exist in America and indeed were formally forbidden by the Constitution, it was awkward and even embarrassing to find that her identity had tended in such a direction. She kept the truth to herself as much as she could; she kept it secret, as she kept many secrets. She did not talk about it with anyone, not even Rhys, though she knew that he knew. She knew that he was amused by her posturing and by her attempts to suppress her posturing. She knew that he, a good and decent American, regarded the whole business of transplanted English toffery as ridiculous and comic.

She struggled not to seem comic. She had no knack for comedy and did not wish to appear ridiculous. At the same time, she felt bound to take steps to ensure that May knew she came from something. The girl didn't have to know all the convoluted and sordid details to understand that she belonged to a high social caste, her mother's caste, the highest, and that she must comport herself accordingly. She must live accordingly.

No, they weren’t plutocrats. They weren’t Astors or Rockefellers. The Mackenzies didn't have money. Even when Rhys went back to work in 1935, the family was never more than comfortable. They weren't rich, and they weren't educated professionals with graduate degrees. But there were different sorts of aristocracies, some consisting of people who did certain things, others consisting of people who were certain things – who had emerged from certain lines of descent and ancestry and who had a certain sense of themselves. A true aristocracy, as Isabel saw it – and her view was old-fashioned, as she would be the first to admit – consisted of pedigree and upbringing. You were either born to and raised in it or you weren't. You couldn't earn your way in, or for that matter out. You were born in or out, and that was that.

At the same time, a birthright was not a license to loaf. It imposed obligations. Everyone to whom much is given, said a passage from the gospel of Luke Isabel was fond of quoting, of him much will be required.

Or of her. She often recited this passage from memory to May. A high position in society carried serious expectations and demands; a high position must be lived up to. It did not fundamentally consist of beautiful clothes and cocktail parties, leisure and indolence. It involved setting a good example, adhering to the highest standards of personal behavior, of doing right and making a contribution.

It did not, either, necessarily result in happiness or contentment. Those were middle-class preoccupations. The fulfillment of one's duties might bring satisfaction of a sort, and that satisfaction would have to do. It would have to suffice. That was the reward.

In any case, no one seemed to have a clear idea of what happiness meant. Everyone spoke of it and aspired to it, but they could not say what it was they aspired to. When Isabel thought about the meaning of the word, it dissolved before her eyes, like a puff of smoke in a spring breeze. It was there and then it wasn't. It was a word used with such freedom and carelessness as to rob it of any meaning it might otherwise have had. It had become an empty incantation, a kind of secular prayer. It had to do with personal fulfillment, not virtue.

She had no use for such tosh. She used words with all possible precision, and she did not expect life to bring joy. Joy was not the point of life. Joy might come to you for a moment, unexpectedly, like a sunbeam breaking through a cloud, but it would vanish just as quickly. The cloud would knit itself back together, and