been so happily captive. In Rye, he used to trail her for hours from the playroom into the yard and back upstairs to the inner sanctum of her bedroom, where he'd been allowed only on her capricious wish, the air there shaded in the afternoons by the giant copper beech. Even now, he could remember how the sun used to play over her dresser and the rich, red carpet and the bed where she lay reading or writing in her diary. He doubted he and Betsy had ever created a paradise such as that for their daughter, Linda. Perhaps because she was an only child. Or maybe it was just that Henry, as an adult banished from the kingdom of mystery, could never fully credit its existence for his daughter, and could only fake a belief in it for her sake in the hope that somehow, on the far side of that impenetrable divide, the garden was still damp and lush and time had yet to be invented. Impenetrable except perhaps in the most fleeting moments, together with the person you'd adventured with there once.
What was a brother supposed to do? Charlotte was happy for the moment because her outrage had found a target closer to home than the halls of Congress and she'd managed to convince herself that she had a chance to win. But none of that changed the obvious: she was barely feeding herself; the house was more of a ruin than ever; and however you wanted to describe them, her relations with the dogs had gone beyond mere eccentricity.
Sunday he drove into town to buy proper sandwiches for lunch and insisted they go out for dinner. At the restaurant he tried to make up for lost time, keeping gently at her, drawing the conversation around to the difficulties of maintaining the house on her own.
"If it would make you feel better," she said, "you're welcome to hire me a cleaning lady. Though she'd only be allowed in the kitchen."
"That's not what I mean."
"Of course it isn't. You don't mean anything you're saying. You want to ship me off somewhere so the idea of me here doesn't weigh on you. It's not like you can hide that, Henry. From your own sister. But even if I were inclined to go, which I'm not, now is the last time I'd budge. Here on the verge. I mean, just look at what's going on. Take a step back for a moment, and look at what's going on in this country, and I don't mean just the criminals at the top - they'll do their damage and stumble out eventually - I mean the last thirty years. And then tell me if you can honestly say that the intrusion of that house, the cutting down of those woods, whoever they might have belonged to once, doesn't stand for something, for a rot more pervasive. And then tell me I'm wrong to want to take a stand. You can't. Not without betraying language, and I think you're better than that. I know you are. Because that really would be the end. To accede to that. To the notion that words mean nothing anymore. That they're pure tactics. You don't believe that."
And on she went, speechifying, close, he had to admit, to the height of her powers.
Letting go his mission for a while, he ordered another drink and let himself enjoy her company. Most of his colleagues didn't read much other than the Journal. Betsy had kept up with things, novels and films and biographies, but they agreed with each other about so much that at a certain point they'd stopped discussing it all. The fierceness of his sister's opinions had never dimmed. It was the spirit of their father in her, the old man's crusading energy, difficult at times for their mother to bear, but so obviously the thing she'd fallen in love with.
When the young couple at the adjacent table began arguing about their renovation, the husband insisting they fire the architect, whom the wife described as not only visionary but, in case he hadn't read a magazine or newspaper in the last year, "quite fucking important," Charlotte granted Henry a conspiratorial smile, gathering him into her fold, an invitation that in the moment he couldn't help accepting with a roll of the eyes. Who was he kidding? His new neighbors in Rye were absolute pills. Their children were deplorable in the manner of over-bred dogs. The fellow being in