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the people afraid of the risk. I was in the money, Doug. It was all profit. I was getting ready to hand you a windfall bigger than you'd even imagined, wrapped up in a bow. But when the market turned I just froze. And I had to keep asking for all that cash. To post margin, to keep the positions open. And you ... you kept feeding it to me."

Doug tasted the remains of his breakfast at the back of his throat and then in his mouth and he leaned over to vomit on the grass. A shiny feathered rook looked on in perfect indifference. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"You're lying," he said. "Tell me you're lying."

Chapter 12

As Henry climbed the narrow back staircase of Charlotte's house on the last Friday in June, and set his bag down in the room where he had spent his boyhood summers, he realized his mistake: here nothing changed. Not the ancient lumpy mattress, not the frayed satin lampshade, not the linen square on the water-stained bedside table. At the inn in town, where Betsy had always insisted they stay during their annual visit, out there in the light of day, at a restaurant or coffee shop, his sister's predicament could be broken down, its components approached diplomatically, each of them discussed and resolved. But here? Here, Charlotte's circularities drew energy from the very decrepitude of the place. The house was her argument, its density of association imperative to preserve. It may have belonged to others once, to his ancestors or his parents, but it was all hers now, the physical form her opinion of the world had come to take. How could he ever change her mind while living inside of it like this?

Indeed, the initial signs were not positive. The entire first afternoon, during which he'd thought they might take a walk and ease into things, Charlotte spent conducting some half-cocked tutoring session with a sunken-eyed youth, who listened in rapt attention to a lecture that jumped from William Jennings Bryan and the gold crisis to Father Coughlin and the paranoid style in American politics. Sitting in the front room trying to keep up with the day's blizzard of e-mail, Henry marveled that a woman who'd retained this much history could nonetheless be so far gone when it came to ordering her own life.

"I didn't know you were still taking students," he said once the boy had left.

"I imagine," she said, "that he doesn't have many books in his own house. It's so easy to assume people do. But then many don't. And he's lively. I thought he was one of the usual dullards at first. But he's got promise. The world - the actual state of things - it's broken in on him. Which is moving. You have no idea what it was like at the school toward the end. How the content remained the same while the meaning of the exercise changed so entirely. From enlightenment to the grooming of pets."

Here was his sister's familiar recipe: well-meaning condescension leavened by faith in meritocracy and finished off with a dose of liberal apocalypse. She was the classic mid-century Democratic idealist, who'd lived long enough to see hope's repeated death. Raised on Adlai Stevenson, Richard Hofstadter, and redemption through rigor. It would have been easier for Henry if he hadn't agreed with her about so much. If their father hadn't stamped them at such an early age with a patriotism for process and an aesthetic revulsion at display of whatever kind.

Also, if he hadn't loved her. Ineluctably. Love tinged by an envy he'd never understood.

Practicality had been their dividing line. By choice or circumstance or fate - the lines between these seemed less discreet to him the older he got - he had been the practical one, devoted to practical functions. Not a judge of acts, not even a creator of much, but a watchman, guarding the largely unseen. She had read, studied, and taught, loved a doomed man once, and through all of it somehow retained the energy for a more or less permanent outrage at the failure of the shabby world to live up to its stated principles. She followed politics assiduously, rejecting all the while its premise of compromise. If she hadn't been so well versed in the checkered moral record of most actual martyrs, she might have allowed herself to become one, finding her single cause. As it was, she'd served and