She nodded. “I'm mostly being selfish,” she said. 'Tm afraid one day we'll just be, you know. Relatives.”
'I'll always recognize you, Zo. I'll know you by your hair.”
“I wish I could go, too,” she said.
He took her hand. He wanted to say to her, I can't stay because I don't belong to the family anymore, but I can't find a way to leave it either. He wanted to tell her everything. But Zoe was still part of the house, and he needed this secret. He needed flight.
“You'll be gone soon enough,” he said. “And you can come up and stay with me in Cambridge anytime, okay? I can always afford a train ticket for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“You want to smoke a joint?” he asked.
“Mm-hm.”
He took a joint from his jacket pocket, lit it, and handed it to her. She inhaled, gave it back to. him, brushed the hair out of her face, and something in the combined gestures showed him that she was grown. It had happened. She had a life of her own, a plan and a body of secrets. He watched her with a certain mute wonder. This, he realized, was where adults came from. They developed, suddenly, out of strange unhappy children like Zoe and himself. They would live into the next century.
“Zo?” he said.
“Mm-hm?”
“Nothing.”
What had he wanted to tell her? That he loved her and feared for her, that he wanted to save her from pain. That he was turning into someone else and she was, too. They sat quietly together, passing the joint. The foil stars, glued to the ceiling when he was twelve years old, shed their tiny light.
1973/ Constantine worked seed into the soil and the soil answered him with red-leaf lettuce, with the curl of string beans and the sexual heaviness of bell peppers. He and Zoe worked the garden together, and there were times. He might find a perfect crookneck squash, just the length of his ring finger, shimmering under a leaf, or Zoe might stand up in the afternoon light with, her arms full of basil. There were times when he believed he had gotten where he'd wanted to go. But they passed. They always passed.
There used to be a tumble. There used to be a queasy brightness.
Now Mary wore gloves to bed at night; she arranged flowers on a little circle of pins. Susan had gone. She'd hardly glanced at him from under her veil as he'd led her down the aisle. She called sometimes, but she wasn't company anymore.
And what had happened to his son? At twenty, he was a boy with little round eyeglasses, the kind worn by bitter old maids. A boy whose hair touched his thin shoulders with a nervous dryness, like an old woman's curtains. Sitting up at Harvard, getting pious about the meek of the earth who in the whole of their lives never worked as hard as Constantine did in a single week. He could tell a few stories about disadvantages. Try coming to this country with no money, knowing no English beyond 'hello' and 'please.' From 'hello' and 'please,' how many men could build what he'd built? So you're black. I'm sorry. Now tell me your real story.
What had happened? Someone like Billy, a young man so well provided for, should be devouring the world. He should be striding through his life, able as a horse, smart as a wolf, squeezing the rich meek blood out of women's hearts. When Mary'd given birth to a son, Constantine had imagined himself taking handfuls of the future and stuffing them in his mouth. Daughters, even the best of them, disappeared into the lives of men. But a son carried you. His pleasures included you; you lived in your skin and you lived in his as well.
Maybe, Constantine thought, I made mistakes. He knew he suffered from fits of passion, a violent largeness that refused to live in the small. He had always numbered his passions among his virtues. He'd had every reason to believe a boy needs discipline the way a tree needs pruning. Constantine's own father had cracked Constantine's head open on the stove, had pulled his arm so hard it slipped from the socket as easily as a bean popping out of its skin. The punishments had cauterized Constantine's will, made him into someone. The punishments had invented him, a strong ambitious man who'd survived enough damage to live fearlessly. But he did not love his father. He'd