Union Atlantic Page 0,62

banking, he had asked Henry over for a drink. Their house had struck him as the cross between a playpen and a corporate retreat center. But what could you do about it?

When the waiter asked if he'd like a third glass of wine, he said yes.

Back at the house, Charlotte made tea and they sat at the kitchen table. The table where their father had liked nothing better than to set out broken gadgets on a Saturday morning, a radio or toaster or lamp that had given up over the winter, and opening his tool kit begin to fiddle. Recalling such mornings, Henry, a bit drunk, felt a bone-tiredness, the kind he couldn't afford to let in too often, not in a job where the travel never stopped. It was the sort of tiredness a mind allows a body only when it knows it's home.

"So, did you manage the coup all right?" Charlotte said. "Is everyone's money safe?"

"It'll work out in the end. A few days of caution won't hurt anyone."

"Such an anonymous sort of power you wield. So far from the madding crowd. It's always intrigued me. Thinking about the people affected by what you do. The fact that they'll never know you. Sure, Daddy tried cases, but he met his defendants. There was a scale to the thing. It's not a criticism. It's just I wonder sometimes what it does to you. What it's already done to you. The abstraction. Lives as numbers. We all do it, of course. We do it reading the paper. What does ten thousand dead in an earthquake mean? Nothing. It can't. The knowledge just breeds impotence. But your abstractions, your interest rates, they change people's lives. And they'll never know who you are."

"When things get bad enough, they tend to find out."

"That's not my point. I'm talking about you, Henry. I'm sure there are plenty who simply enjoy your kind of influence, the ambitious. The ones whose power makes them furious. And there are the crypto-sadists, such an underestimated lot. But you're neither of those, however much of a fellow traveler you may have been over the years. And yet there it is - your system and other people's pain."

"It's not all pain," he said. "Money allows things."

"Of course. It's just a matter of to whom. But, then, that's not your area, is it? That's someone else's set of choices."

Sauntering drowsily in from the living room, the Doberman rested his head in Charlotte's lap, and Henry watched his sister pat him gently on the head.

"You know it's funny," she said. "All weekend, I've tried to convince Wilkie here that you're a good sport but he won't believe me, will you Wilkie? He's convinced you're a member of the Klan."

HENRY SLEPT rather poorly that night, waking more than once to what sounded like growling. The Klan? He could just see the expression on the face of the director of an assisted-living facility when Charlotte dropped a comment such as that into an interview. He got a few solid hours toward morning before his sister woke him, warning that they'd be late to court.

"We can't take them with us," he said, standing bleary-eyed by the rental car, as she came down the walk with Sam and Wilkie.

"Why not?"

"It's a government facility, not a kennel."

"Don't be silly. The bailiff's an old student of mine."

The county courthouse was a Greek Revival affair whose sandstone had gone gray with soot. The main hallway, adorned with portraits of deceased superior court judges, was already bustling at eight thirty: an officer showing a line of jurors into a waiting room, lawyers hunched with clients, explaining to bewildered family members the nature of their loved one's predicament, while on the benches nearby policemen killed time before being called to the stand.

Lo and behold, when they reached the courtroom door, a balding guard in his forties lit right up with a smile.

"Miss Graves," he said. "How ya been? I saw the name on the sheet and I wondered if it was you."

"I've been very well, thank you."

"I saw that business in the paper a few years back about the school and all. That was no good the way they let you go." He reached out to shake Henry's hand. "Best teacher I ever had," he said, his voice filled with wonder at the discovery of his own nostalgia.

"How kind of you to say. Now, Anthony, I was wondering. There is just a small favor I was going to ask. My dogs.