hidden music of icy cracks and groans. Something bright and promising, something invisible, moved with unhurried certainty from room to room. It was not a ghost—the house was too immaculate for ghosts, too scoured by light. But something inhabited it along with his grandfather and Magda, a living non-human spirit Ben thought of as a white peacock, fabulous and proud and serene, strutting now up the curve of the staircase, now down the carpeted hall to the third-floor turret room, where the telescope turned its eye to the garden and the ocean and where the American flag snapped on the roof.
He lay on the bed he'd claimed for himself, in the small room that looked over the tree, where the chest of drawers had brass pulls shaped like scowling, indignant eagles. He let a minute pass, and another. Then he got up, briefly practiced a look of innocence in front of the mirror, and went out to find his grandfather.
His grandfather had gone downstairs, to the kitchen, where he was arranging tomatoes on the windowsill. His grandfather was broad in a dark blue shirt, kind and soft-haired in a battered straw hat.
“Hi,” Ben said, and thought his voice sounded properly ordinary. His grandfather turned. His grandfather had the meek generosity of old men, the blunted needs.
“Hey, buddy. Your mother was looking all over for you.”
“I've been here,” Ben said. He walked quickly to the windowsill and picked up a tomato, which shone, heavy and translucent, in his hand. There was the tomato and there was his grandfather's smell, the layers of his after-shave and his spicy, acrid flesh.
“She went down to the beach to look for you,” his grandfather said.
Ben balanced the tomato on his palm. “Beefsteak,” he said.
“The pride of New Jersey,” his grandfather answered. “C'mon, let's go get your mother. Your dad'll be here any minute to pick you up.”
Ben put the tomato back, reluctantly, and followed his grandfather out the kitchen door. As they walked toward the ocean his grandfather took his hand. Ben, at seven, was too old for a gesture like that but he permitted it, even desired it, from his grandfather, because his grandfather had secret knowledge and a truer, more satisfied life. Ben held his grandfather's hand and walked along the outer edge of the garden and he was filled with a flushed buoyancy, a large unfocused desire made of his grandfather's smell and the remembered heft of the tomato in his hand, its fullness and shine, the fat irregularities of its flesh. He knew a pure, tingling exultation—there was a fullness between his legs, the word beefsteak in his head—and then he fell immediately into shame. He was wrong, though he could not have said exactly how. He was his lesser self, the craven one, the one who hid, and soon, very soon, they'd find his mother, who would need him to be otherwise. As he and his grandfather passed the garden and started down the slope that led to the beach Ben imagined himself climbing inside his grandfather, riding in him like a soldier inside a tank, steering him toward the woman in the pink skirt who demanded righteousness. There she was, on the sand with the ocean behind her, searching.
“Hey, Susie,” his grandfather called. “Look who I found.”
She turned, and saw him. Ben was never sure how much she knew, how deep her eyes could go. He put his face in order, let go of his grandfather's hand. He ran to her and in running he began to catch up with himself, his own strength and purity. When he called, “Hi, Mom,” his voice was solid as the waves.
“Hey, you,” she said, and she was not angry or disappointed. Her face darkened with pleasure at the sight of him, the running fact. “I've been looking everywhere,” she said.
“I was around,” he told her. It was beginning to happen. He could feel it. He'd run right out of his fears and wrongness, he'd eluded everything, and here he was, a cheerful boy with nothing to hide. He ran to his mother, did a quick feinting little dance before her, picked up a stone and threw it into the blue water. He felt the strength of his arm, the heat of her pleasure in him.
“Come on,” she said. “Your father'll be here any minute, and we're not even half ready.”
Ben threw another stone, and another. He danced on the shore, a spastic jig in celebration of his own rightful life. “Come on,”