Your Sad Eyes And Unforgettable Mouth Part 21

"We'll have to dig a hole."

"Yes, right," Patrick said. "Let's bury him."

Patrick told us it was illegal to bury a body and not report a death. He said we had to keep it a secret, that if we told someone, it would inevitably get out, because people always reveal secrets that aren't theirs. Then his mother would find out and we'd be charged with committing a crime. Even if we had lovers, he said, or got married, we had to promise not to tell.

He remembered that there had once been a flower garden by the side of the house. He thought that would be the best place to bury Anthony because the top layer of rocks had been cleared. He said the hole had to be deep so animals wouldn't dig the corpse out. I'd never thought of that, of animals digging up human corpses, and that this was why you had to bury bodies six feet underground. It would be impossible to do manually, he said-we'd hit granite-but we could probably manage to dig three or four feet down, and we could cover the grave with a mound of earth and rocks. And we'd plant a tree in the centre, so the mound wouldn't look strange.

Patrick said he had rope in the trunk of his car. Rosie and I went into the house while Patrick watched over you. We pulled a quilt out of the linen chest, a white quilt covered with green and blue leaves. We found the rope and brought it back with the quilt. We wrapped your half-hidden body in the green and blue shroud and then bound you with rope like Inuit cargo. Patrick made a special knot and we tried to drag you out of the forest.

You'd think people brought together by some dire mission would feel close, connected-rescue workers in a war zone, for example-but it isn't like that. The magnitude of what you have to do weighs you down, the nerve and stamina needed to overcome horror-these things narrow your focus, and there's nothing left for communion with the person at the other end of the stretcher or running with you through the flames. All our energies were concentrated on getting through the task; and we recoiled from the task, and from everyone and everything involved in it.

Or is it only grief that makes the world fall away, makes its arrangements impenetrable? Rosie rubbed my back as we struggled with the rope, but the gesture didn't translate into anything other than mechanical pressure on a part of my body. And then there was Patrick, radiating devastation like a natural force, like a hurricane coming our way, and it made us take cover inside ourselves.

They say that memory clings to times of dread. I became aware of a clicking in my brain, the kind people with photographic memories must experience all the time, because it was like the click of a camera shutter. My mind was doing something it had never done before and hasn't done since: it was seeing everything twice, once to observe and once to memorize and store, and I can recall the smallest detail-the angle of the rope, the number of times we twisted it around Anthony's body, the trilliums nearby, white trilliums that had sprung up by miracle in this forest, cascading in all their wondrous splendour, vain and oblivious and generous. I remember being certain, in a hallucinatory flash, that Anthony had moved and then, a few seconds later, that a raven was watching us.

We worked in silence. It wasn't anything new, bodies and corpses and graves, not really; they had always been a part of our lives, the frayed hand-me-downs we inherited from our parents. Only dragging Anthony's body was difficult because he'd grown so heavy and there were brambles in the way. When we reached the house, we laid him down on the back lawn and covered him with a sheet of tarp we found under the porch, in case anyone came. If someone did happen to come, we'd say we'd decided to plant some trees. We took turns, though Patrick did most of the digging and Rosie and I only helped when he stopped to rest. The ground was hard, and farther down it was full of complicated stones. We had to find the edges of the stones so we could pull them out. I know exactly how many stones there were-their shape, their curves, the way the dank earth clung to them when they emerged reluctantly from their tombs and lay on the gra.s.s as if stunned because they'd been buried for thousands or maybe millions of years.

The exertion made us thirsty, and we drank the soda water our visitors had brought. Patrick's physical strength, the ease with which he lifted large rocks, dug at hard earth-I'd had a glimpse of it when he carried Rosie. He hid that strength, had no use for it.

We hit granite three or four feet in, as Patrick had predicted. And now we had to lower Anthony inside. We sat on the lawn to gather courage. It makes no difference, what you do to a dead body, everyone knows that, but the suffocation seems ruthless, a treacherous discarding. Rosie reached out, took my hand. I shook her off and said, "I'll get more soda."

Patrick followed me inside and asked if there was any beer left. All I could find was a half-finished bottle on the counter. I offered it to Patrick but he said, "I'm not that desperate."

The sun was setting. We couldn't put it off any longer; it would be even harder, burying Anthony in the dark. We went back out and Patrick wondered whether we ought to remove the cement bag, to help with decomposition. We weren't sure. We talked about it, and in the end we decided to leave the bag but remove the quilt. In the failing light we sliced the rope with a knife and the quilt unravelled and the cement bag crept up Anthony's body. Patrick half-retched and we were afraid he'd pa.s.s out but he didn't.

We lowered Anthony inside and covered him with earth. "Poor Tony," Rosie said. "Poor Tony." But I told myself that she was merely producing from her storehouse another morsel of solicitude; I told myself that her selflessness was an absence of self, and it allowed her to stand apart, untouched and unharmed.

His rage depleted by exhaustion, Patrick sighed and said, "Okay, I'll try to find potting soil-I think I saw some outside the nursery."

"I'll come with you," I said. "Rosie, you'd better stay here, keep an eye on things."

She was afraid of staying alone, I knew she was afraid, but everything had changed. Heartlessness is contagious, that's what Anthony didn't take into account. It's catching, and I'd caught it from him. And Rosie, whom I thought I'd s.h.i.+eld forever, was now at the mercy of mine.

She nodded and I avoided her eyes, the sad eyes that all this time I'd seen and not seen.

In the car Patrick said, "We used to talk about what if. What if you went blind, would you kill yourself? What if you had to choose between killing yourself and killing an innocent person? And then about how we'd do it, if we had no choice, if there was a nuclear war and it was better to die fast."

He rubbed his eyes with his left hand as he drove, the way men do, without thinking, without tears. A mime of misery.

It was dark by the time we reached the town. Everything was closed, and the nursery lot was fenced in by wire netting, but in the light of a streetlamp we could make out large bags of earth and a row of potted firs near the wall. The gate was unlocked; it was only a question of tracking down the owner. Go dig my grave, make it wide and deep- Go dig my grave, make it wide and deep- Patrick stopped someone on the street and asked him who owned the nursery and where they lived. We followed the man's directions to a farmhouse. In front of the house, like oversized lawn ornaments, a scattering of tractors were being their usual tractory selves, and it didn't matter that Icarus had fallen into the sea. a louer louer, the sign said. Patrick rang the front doorbell and asked whether he could pay for the bags of earth and one of the fir trees. They didn't ask why we needed them, they didn't seem curious or baffled. Who knew what hippies from the city did, or why? We returned to the nursery and loaded the car. We brought the bags to the cottage and then we made a second trip.

On the way back with the second load I asked Patrick to stop the car. "I'm going to be sick," I said. I rolled down the window and waited for the nausea to pa.s.s.

"f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Patrick said. "He brought the gun with him, he planned everything. f.u.c.k him."

Rosie was sitting on the steps of the front porch, like a child waiting for her parents. I didn't ask her if she was all right.

We ripped open the bags and poured earth on the grave. There was always less than we thought once we poured it on the ground. But the grave was deep enough now, with the new earth lying heavily on top of it. We planted the fir tree in the centre and we covered the s.p.a.ce around the tree with heavy rocks, a last precaution against predators.

"It looks like a grave," I said. "Marcel will know."

Patrick said, "No, it would never occur to him."

I said, "What if your mother comes up here?"

He said, "She never comes here. And if she did, she'd think we planted a tree. It looks like a tree, that's all it looks like."

Patrick said, "We should have a service-something."

We went inside, to the bookshelf, and took down anthologies, searched for a paragraph or a poem to read at Anthony's grave. I suggested Housman, but Patrick said, "All that angst," and Rosie suggested "Dover Beach," but we both said, "All that angst," and Patrick suggested "No Man Is An Island" and I said, "Too pedantic," and in the end we settled on "Fern Hill."

Patrick read the poem and his voice broke several times. We tried not to cry so that he wouldn't cry, because we knew he didn't want to. Then he left to sell Anthony's jeep.

We were covered with dirt. "I need a shower," Rosie said.

"Go ahead. I'll wash in the lake," I told her.

"I'll come with you."

"No," I said. "No, I want to go by myself."

"I know what you mean," she said, not knowing at all. "I need some time to think too. It's so sad."

But she wasn't sad at all. She was exulting in the manifold delights of requited love. Anthony's death was nothing but a temporary inconvenience, like fog on a rainy day. And now the fog had lifted and she could get on with her new life.

It was very dark by the lake. I stripped and washed the earth off my arms and legs. Then I submerged my jeans and s.h.i.+rt in the water, washed them too.

If I were Karen, I thought, there would not have been suicide, and if someone died because of an accident or because they were sick, there would be a funeral and mourning and forgiveness and recovery. There wouldn't be deception. If I were Karen, I would have given myself to Anthony and loved him the way he wanted to be loved. That's what I thought then. But now I know that I was mistaken about that, too, because no one is immune, not Karen and not anyone else, and what I a.s.sumed other people had-a simple life-no one has.

I hugged my knees and buried my head in my arms and cried, furiously. Nothing would ever be the same, and I didn't want it to be the same. They were both wrong about my dream, Vera and Anthony. I was gutted out-that was what the dream meant. I was watching myself lying on a table, my insides removed, and I didn't much care. And it would be that way from now on.

Patrick still hadn't returned by sunrise. Rosie slept downstairs on the sofa, and I climbed into the bed Anthony had crashed on the night he arrived. I wanted to go back in time; I wanted to breathe in all that was left of him. Rosie had caught on-how could she not-and she didn't try to talk to me, not even to ask what ignorant sin she'd committed. She thought I was upset, and that soon everything would be as it was before; soon she'd be kissing me h.e.l.lo and goodbye and I'd tell her everything and love her fiercely.

And Glenn would understand that I was her best friend, and he'd be happy for her, because you can be devoted to more than one person.

But a mountain of crushed gla.s.s had risen between us. As I watched her sleeping on the sofa, I knew I'd refuse to see her again, once we were back in the city, and I told myself she wouldn't mind, because I'd never been important, I was only another fan, another hanger-on. And she'd been waiting all along for the prince, and the prince had come.

Patrick crept in some time in the morning, but only came as far as the front porch, and neither of us heard him. He left us a note on the porch floor, next to a tin: There's money for you in the coffee tin. I've notified Marcel that we're leaving. Take a taxi home. Marcel will close the house There's money for you in the coffee tin. I've notified Marcel that we're leaving. Take a taxi home. Marcel will close the house.

I opened the tin and counted two thousand dollars. I knew by the time I'd finished counting that Patrick was buying us off-that he, too, was going away and not coming back.

Rosie didn't want the money. "He left it for you, Maya," she said. She wanted to even things out; she wanted us each to have a gift, and though it wasn't even, because money is only money, at least it was something. She tried to hug me, but with the expertise that comes of years of practice, I eluded her.

She asked me if she could call Glenn, if that was okay with me, and I said yes, of course. "I'll never tell him," she promised. "I'll keep the secret, even from him." It was a sacrifice I was in no mood to appreciate. Oh, the blunders of our sad, stupid souls!

We walked to the gas station and phoned him. We told him that Patrick had been called back to town because of a death in the family, and Glenn said he was on his way. We waited by the flea market, our backs pressed against the hot metal. Glenn arrived ten minutes later in the little white car with the four red crescents. He'd told his aunt, Jean-Pierre's mother, about the emergency, and she insisted he bring us over to their place.

When we stopped at Vera's cottage to collect our things, Rosie and Glenn moved in a pas de deux, their hands touching whenever they pa.s.sed each other, a festive mating dance. I couldn't find anything of Anthony's, apart from his tie and the drugs. I'd forgotten about the drugs. I dumped them in the trash and draped the tie around my neck. I wanted to bring back some of Vera's books. No one would read those books here, no one would come back for them. But I didn't have the heart for it. We dumped our things in the car and drove off, with Glenn at the wheel.

Hunched in the back seat, I considered Patrick's bequest. I'd be able to move out now. I'd go to Cegep, which was free, and work in the evenings. Start a new life.

The cool layout of plans sustained me all the way home. But when I walked through the doorway of our duplex, everything in it bore down on me-the sallow carpet and brittle furniture and dejected ca.n.a.ls trapped in hideous gold frames-and above all my mother, my mad mother, who was propelling herself towards me with her usual gasping and wheezing and thras.h.i.+ng.

I turned on her. "It's your fault, it's all your fault-you've ruined my life!" My voice was shrill, hateful. Her eyes glazed over, her body went limp. I didn't care-on the contrary, this was exactly what I was trying to say, that she tricked me always out of my life, and even now was trying to trick me out of my moment of reprisal. "You ruined everything, and now look at me, look at what's happened! I hate you, hate you, hate you!" I wondered, as I lost control, what would hold me back, and why. I wanted to strike her.

Instead, I fled to my room, slammed the door, threw myself on my bed-Anthony's bed-and sobbed. Between bouts of weeping I was aware of a great deal of movement and clattering outside my room, mostly in the kitchen. When I came out some time later to make myself coffee, I saw that Bubby and my mother had prepared, in an urgent, intimidated hush, all my favourite dishes.

Mourning drains you. I sat down at the table and let my mother pile food on my plate.

-has your heart been broken in love mamaleh- One might as well be good to one's parents, I thought. Nothing comes of hurting them except more reasons to feel remorse, unbearable remorse. We were all stuck inside the city of refuge-not just me.

"Yes," I said. "My heart has been broken in love."

-poor mamaleh-she muttered, stroking my hair-such a world such a world we live in- The next day I set out in search of a place to live. Plateau houses were not yet attracting the affluent professionals who have since claimed the neighbourhood, and within hours of apartment-hunting I'd found a beautiful, inexpensive flat-a raft in the midst of calamity.

I longed for beauty. Anthony's suicide didn't prevent me from yielding to pa.s.sion; I wasn't planning to reduce myself to an automaton. On the contrary, I wanted more than ever to plunge myself into the world of pure, seductive aesthetics-dance and theatre, museums and music, objects and books. Here were finished products with endless possibilities, here were the embowered tapestries the poets liked to imagine when they wrote about art. There she weaves by night and day- There she weaves by night and day-I would remain in that bower, not weaving but watching, and there I'd be safe from the unconsummated work-in-progress, the appalling muddle that intimacy turned out to be.

Only my mother wasn't impressed by the Plateau apartment. She stood on the balcony and shook her head. Who were my neighbours? What if they were delinquents, drunks, criminals? Who would hear me if I cried for help? And the plumbing-the electric wiring-the toilet would overflow, the sockets were unsafe. But Bubby approved, and when we came home after signing the lease, she chose the best linen and blankets for me, the best towels, and stacked them on my bed.

We hired someone's cousin to move my things: the sleigh bed, my desk, two chairs, a lamp, dishes, books. My mother's card-playing friends donated other odds and ends: an old sofa, a bridge table, more lamps, and, as if I were not only moving but also losing access to the usual resources, bags of useless clothes.

My mother helped me unpack and subjected every available surface to her soapy sponges. But her efforts were symbolic, for the Greek family who'd lived in the flat before me had scoured it from top to bottom. They'd even left me a tiny cross in the kitchen drawer, for good luck.

I managed, eventually, to send my mother home. I walked her to the bus stop and promised to phone that evening and go over for supper in three or four days. After she left, I took a long bath in the deep claw-foot bathtub. Then I lay in my bed in the strange, lonely flat. Its empty rooms felt as foreign as another language, the prowling remnants of someone else's story. Between the cool ironed sheets, amidst the smell of apples and soap, I was free to reinvent Anthony's exit. In my fantasy I turned away from Rosie, asked him why he was carrying a cement bag. I went with him to the forest, talked to him, stroked his arm, hugged him, told him all would be well. You can have love and light here You can have love and light here, I said. I made him open his knapsack and fling the gun into the lake. He'd be back in L.A. by now, and Rosie would knock on the door of my new place and come in, and I'd make her tea in a gla.s.s. She'd tell me about Glenn and I'd tell her about my plans and we'd hang out.

It was a good deed, and a bad one. I'm not sorry. We saved Vera, and also Gerald, anguish. But at a cost to ourselves, or to myself, at any rate. Because Rosie could take cover in her newfound love and Patrick could take cover in his intransigence, but I was naked in the icy wind.

-but this is all wrong! Rosie was as windswept, as alone as I was, and I punished her for things that were not her fault. The truth is that I didn't want that part of myself any more, the part that had loved Rosie and been loved in return, because if not for me, Anthony would be alive.

THE E EIGHTH Y YEAR OF.

THE N NEW M MILLENNIUM,.

COMMON E ERA.

These days my mother lives with Gustav, her former suitor and present husband, in an apartment complex in Cote St. Luc. Squat, brutal, stubbled with concrete balconies, these cement monstrosities appear to have been inspired by an H.G. Wells dystopia-human dwellings for when machines take over. But as soon as one enters the apartments themselves, a magic transformation takes place, and the Fort Knox doors that line the tenebrous halls give way to small oases of comfort and light.

I visit once a week. Gustav and Fanya both greet me with enthusiasm, help me take off my coat, usher me in. An addict of low-volume television, Gustav was a limousine driver in his preretirement days, but his pa.s.sion was the moonlighting he did, and still does, at The Workmen's Circle. He's a slight, tidy, swarthy man with accommodating eyes and a steady disposition. I've never seen him eat anything other than Mandelbrot-a relative of biscotti-dipped in tea. Though he's never been interviewed, he is, remarkably, one of the few children from Korczak's orphanage who survived the extermination camps.

The minute I enter the little sanctuary, a profound lethargy spreads through me. I sink down on the plush sofa, and my mother enumerates all the items on the Levitsky menu. I nod submissively. At some point during the procession of dishes, I fall into a limp, dreamless sleep. When I wake, I take the elevator down to the pool to swim laps. Sometimes I'm joined by Max, a hollow-chested man who before going into the water dons, with the shamelessness of the elderly, a white spandex bathing cap and state-of-the-art scuba gear. Then I head back upstairs for another carbohydrate-enriched meal, while on the television the mysteries of woodwork are unlocked by a man we can't exactly hear but who inspires confidence. My mother continues to recount stories of sedition on the part of manufacturers-she calls them corporations, these days-and her victories over them. But Gustav has succeeded in s.h.i.+fting her base of operations, and her narratives are now confined to the present. She no longer mentions the war.

Everyone else mentions the war; the silence has been lifted, replaced by a flood of memory and monuments. A search for information on the Internet yields millions of sites.

I'm interested, now, in my mother's past, but having trodden those merciless waters for so many years, she's better off on sh.o.r.e, and I let the past be. Instead, I tell her and Gustav about my life-the sort of people I meet at Sororite, the dramas I watch from the sidelines or hear about at my table. I'm considered a good listener, a safe repository for confessions of harboured resentments or infatuations. "I'm the on-site Mother Superior," I say, and they chuckle. They chuckle at all my stories; I make them funny. Since I'm not involved in any of them, it's no effort to take a lighter view. But about Tyen I haven't breathed a word. I don't know yet where, among the dramatis personae dramatis personae of this mystery play, she'll be cast. of this mystery play, she'll be cast.

In the evening, I return to my place. I bought this triplex with the war reparations that for years had been arriving regularly from Germany. My mother never touched those payments; she thought they were a trick, and that if she withdrew so much as a dollar, uniformed n.a.z.is might spring from behind the counter at the Bank of Montreal and take her away. But a few years after I moved into the flat, the building went up for sale, and I persuaded my mother to release the money for two down payments: the triplex for me, a condo unit for her and Bubby.

Fanya resisted at first, but the Bedford Street neighbourhood had deteriorated, and one evening hoodlums s.n.a.t.c.hed her famous alligator purse. Mrs. Bl.u.s.tein came to my mother's rescue once more; there was an apartment for sale in the Cote St. Luc building where she lived. Pleased with its immediate availability, the security features, and the idea of a friend close by, my mother overcame her fear of moving house. She gave me custody of her account and asked me to go ahead with both purchases. When the last papers had been signed, Gustav insisted on treating us to a meal at Ruby Foo's, famous for Cantonese egg rolls, boisterous celebrity diners, and the beautiful silk-clad woman who sold cigarettes on a tray. Bubby, as always, preferred to stay at home, but she was happy about the move, and while we were at the restaurant she baked us an apple cake. That evening we all gathered around the kitchen table in the Bedford Street flat for the last time.

Bubby is gone, of course. If she were alive, she'd be well over a hundred. She was sick for a week, unable to swallow or eat. I came to Intensive Care and said her name, held her smooth, round hand, now s.h.i.+ny and slightly waxy. If she felt my hand on hers or knew I was there, she didn't respond. An hour later the nurse told me it was over; she'd stopped breathing.

I remembered a story my mother used to tell me. I'd lost the story inside the maelstrom of my mother's memories and my resistance to those memories, but it resurfaced now. When my father was a baby, my grandmother had taken him with her to visit friends in the country. She left him in the garden, under a tree in bloom. My father lay on his back in his baby carriage, looking up at the white and pink blossoms. Miriam was indoors, having tea, biting into a cookie, when all of a sudden she cried out, He can't breathe He can't breathe. She ran out to the pram and saw that two petals had fallen on my father's nose and mouth, and she was right, he couldn't breathe, he was suffocating.

Her sixth sense gave him sixteen more years that were good, before the war came. Her sixth sense gave me life.

I phoned my mother from the hospital and told her Bubby Miriam was gone. There was no funeral; my grandmother didn't want one. No one in her family, other than my father, had had a funeral: everyone else had been thrown onto piles. My mother, under the influence of Gustav, behaved well. Every day I thank the good angels for bringing Gustav into our lives.

As for the Michaelis, Glenn moved in with them that September. My mother, who kept up with developments from her post at the dry cleaners, informed me that Glenn's high school, Seed, had allowed him to complete his last year by correspondence. Rosie was taking music at Cegep and Glenn accompanied her to her cla.s.ses. I was at Cegep, too, but not the same one, as the last thing I wanted was to see the Eden gang. I enrolled at a more offbeat, inner-city campus, a converted St. Henri factory, not far from the Camp Bakunin pickup spot, as it happened.

That winter, Mr. Michaeli died; my mother called to tell me, and I considered going to the funeral, but in the end I came down with the flu and couldn't make it even if I'd wanted to. Sheila had also gravitated to the St. Henri Cegep, and sometimes we ran into each other in the college's lounge, where between cla.s.ses we lazed about on red and grey ottomans. Sheila told me that Glenn had been accepted by the Math department at Harvard. They were all moving to Boston: Glenn, Rosie, Mrs. Michaeli.

"How come you're not in touch?" Sheila asked. "You used to be inseparable."

I shrugged. "Things change." Rosie had left several messages for me with my mother, but I never answered and she'd given up. I did hear from Mrs. Michaeli, though. The trip to Paris had whet her appet.i.te for travel, and she joined a trekkers' club. At regular intervals, my mother and I received postcards from her of desert dunes, children in holiday costume hugging s.h.a.ggy llamas with oddly anthropoid legs, sci-fi peaks of aquamarine glaciers. The world is larger and more diverse than anyone imagines The world is larger and more diverse than anyone imagines, she wrote.

Dvora is in touch with Rosie-she's in touch with everyone. Two days after high school, Dvora found work as a waitress at a seafood restaurant, and there she met an Australian obstetrician who was in Montreal for a convention. When he returned to Australia, she went with him. They have five children and a horse farm, or maybe not exactly a farm, maybe just a large field that allows them to keep horses and enter compet.i.tions. Banished, as she puts it, to antipodean Australia, Dvora maintains contact via email with what she likes to call "life on the outside." She mentions mutual acquaintances from time to time, but the information is skeletal: Rosie's had three children, all boys; Earl and his wife are real estate agents in Toronto; Avi is a lawyer. A catalogue of lives.

Sheila phones me once in a while, or I phone her. She teaches at a high school in Vancouver; I gather that she's popular with her students. Her two marriages ended in divorce, but she has a son, currently studying at Stanford, from a third liaison. Last year, her father fell off a ladder at work and died shortly afterwards. Her mother is at a nursing home in New Brunswick which is run, conveniently, by one of Sheila's sisters. In her usual wry, dry way Sheila explained why she didn't attend her father's funeral and hasn't been to see her mother. "My mother wouldn't recognize me, and my father wouldn't have, either." She's invited me to visit her in Vancouver, but I can't leave Sailor. In any case, between semesters I find I want only to vegetate on the sofa under a mohair blanket and watch movies from La Boite Noir.

Anthony has a child. Gloria came searching for him in late August; she'd had a change of heart and was looking forward to a happy reunion-especially in light of the good news that she was pregnant with Anthony's child. Patrick had already absconded, and Gloria, scrounging for information about her husband, asked to see me, so I went round to Vera's to meet her. Vera left us to ourselves.

I don't know exactly what Anthony saw in her; we hardly ever know. To me, she seemed unengaging, but maybe pregnancy had made her placid, flattened an alluring intensity or hunger that had been there before. Or maybe I was too distraught to see her clearly. I gave her a truncated version of our last encounter: the restaurant, the nightclub, Anthony's intimations that he was leaving soon, though he didn't say where. My voice almost betrayed me, but Gloria didn't know me well enough to identify as out of the ordinary the irregular pitch and halting syntax.

She nodded as I spoke. When I'd finished, she said, "We fought, you know. We fought over nothing. He was trying to protect me, I guess, and I kept saying, you're being patronizing. But he wasn't, I don't think. Anyhow, he was right about those guys I went off with. All they wanted was for me to make them coffee and sandwiches. Women's rights, that's just lip service. They weren't a real group. There's power in sticking together, not in dividing up again and again. And sisters have to stick together if we're going to get anywhere."

It was my turn to nod.

I felt small, physically, I felt I was shrinking. Lying had shrunk me. I made my excuses as soon as I could and ran down the street, disoriented and ashamed. At the water's edge I caught my breath. The lake's soft beauty, its gentle desolation in the ethereal light of dusk, s.h.i.+fted me back into place. Anthony's reach was long, but it weakened in the face of such distractions.

I worried about Gloria, pregnant and husbandless, and I was relieved to hear that two months after her fruitless visit she moved in with a famous New York theatre director. Vera bought an apartment in Brooklyn Heights so she could help with the baby. Gloria sent me news of the birth on a postcard of the Manhattan skyline. She'd had a boy on December 11, his name was David. If you hear from Tony, tell him we miss him If you hear from Tony, tell him we miss him, she wrote.

At first, Vera phoned me every few months. Skimming was not her style, and her conversation drew on unanswered, and unanswerable, questions. She a.s.sumed there had been a romantic entanglement up at the country house-heartbreak, unrequited love, perhaps a triangle that had driven us all apart. She asked if I'd heard from her sons. No, I said, we weren't in touch. Facts are elusive, she said; they serve to hide more than they reveal. Like language itself, she mused. And did I know that Patrick was in Alberta in a small northern town, working as a s.h.i.+pper? He phoned her on Sundays but didn't have much to say. He seemed to like the job and the people he worked with. He was on the defensive, she told me, torn between concern for her and resentment. She hoped he would find a way out.

The s.h.i.+pping stint lasted two years. Then Patrick had a fight with a new manager and quit. He continued westward to Vancouver-"even farther from me," Vera commented, with her usual stricken composure. He decided to go back to school and study library science. And it was at the library that he met a woman who was translating a thesis on the medieval Jewish commentator Abravanel. Or Abrabanel. Or Abarbanel. That was the difficulty that brought them together: the many spellings of the commentator's name. She was separated and already had a child; Patrick moved in with her, and they married when she became pregnant again. Their daughter is nineteen now, or maybe twenty. "It would be good if he found some balance," Vera said. "Adar initiated the relations.h.i.+p, I think. She is the expressive, vulnerable self he longs to release but can't. That can spell disaster." As for Anthony, he was still at the monastery in India. "Searching for something, just like his father," she sighed. She heard from him once a year, she told me; he sent her long letters. He was doing well; he liked the life he led; it was peaceful. Gerald, on the other hand, had returned from his travels. Did I want to come for supper and meet him?

I declined. It was hard enough lying to her on the phone; I couldn't imagine maintaining the deceit for an entire evening, making small talk with Anthony's parents while images of his freakish burial forced themselves on me like a movie reel spinning out of control. And Vera, who had struck me as a mind reader when I first met her, would notice at once that something was awry. No wonder Patrick had left.

Three months ago, I ran into Vera at a bookstore. She wanted to buy a gift for her grandchild, Anthony's son. He liked biography, did I have any ideas? In her billowing beige windbreaker she looked like a sad old owl. She was glad to see me, and we talked about my job, my mother, the weather. Then suddenly she peered at me and said, "I think you know where Tony is. I think you know and don't want to tell me."