In the night room Page 0,118

hoops above the garage doors wore nets that looked like off-center beards. The numbers on the mailboxes, some of them as big as Santa’s sack and painted with ducks in flight, windmills, sailboats, tennis rackets, went by: 3509, 3510.

Down at the far end of the cul-de-sac, a Bauhaus-influenced house seemed to emerge from the giant trees behind it like a yacht cutting through thick fog. White, bare except for the nautical details, solid and functional, beautiful in its unforgiving way, this had to be Lily Huntress’s house. A plain metal mailbox stood at the end of the driveway, and when my headlights picked it out, we saw, unaccompanied by a name, the number 3516.

I stopped the car and turned off the headlights. Light shone from an upper window on the left side of the house and in a ground-floor window on the right side of the front door. Dimmer light appeared in a round window like a porthole directly above the front door.

“Look what she did,” I said. “Her back is protected by the wall at this part of the golf course, and facing forward, she can see anyone who comes down the street. It’s like taking the farthest seat in a restaurant and watching the door. I bet she has the best security system you can buy.”

“So what?” Willy asked. “She’s scared?”

“She’s dealing with it,” I said. “Like you. She has her whole life brilliantly controlled, so that she can feel safe without turning into a recluse. I know guys who bought houses in the middle of the woods in Michigan and rigged up perimeters of barbed wire and floodlights. Plus a couple of tormented dogs. They had terrible experiences, but Lily Kalendar’s were worse.”

“Are you going to knock on the door, or ring the bell, or whatever?”

“I’m going to sit here and think about it,” I said.

“I hope she doesn’t walk past the window or anything.”

I realized that what Willy dreaded was what I had driven to Meeker Road to see. It would be enough; it would be all I needed. I thought of Lily Kalendar watching out for her patients’ arrival, waiting for her receptionist to confirm what she already knew, then treating the children who came to her by giving them the generosity and mercy her early childhood had never known. Diane Huntress had said, “Now she helps children, that’s her life. I think she thought of it as the most beautiful thing she could do. That’s the way her mind works.” That last sentence offered an implied touch of criticism, to be taken up or not, in the observation that Lily had aesthetic motives for her moral decisions. I saw it the other way around, that her choice of profession was beautiful in a moral sense.

Then the world changed. A woman with bright blond hair that fell to within two inches of her shoulders walked past the window holding an open book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She appeared to be slender; there was a slight stiffness in the way she slipped through the air. The tumult I had experienced when we came upon Lily Kalendar’s street reawakened, amplified to an internal earthquake. The woman’s face was turned from us, and all I could glimpse was the side and back of her head. She wore a dark green blouse, or maybe it was a light cashmere sweater. It was still warm, though not as warm as it had been during the day, and her air-conditioning was running. She liked cold rooms anyhow, I thought. A moment later, we were looking at an empty window.

The thought came to me that I was the one man in the world who could restore what was missing, and make Lily Kalendar whole as she had never been. In the next second I realized that many, many men had known the same impulse, and that none of us could offer her anything commensurate with her beauty, her pain, or her history. To the extent that these had been overcome, it had been done by her own efforts: she had so thoroughly absorbed the cruelty and wickedness visited upon her that they had been rendered all but invisible, and she paid for what she had absorbed with a hundred daily acts of kindness and generosity. I could not rescue her. When devotion still had an effect, she’d had Diane Huntress; after that, she had simply rescued herself, and done it, with her magnificent intelligence, as