but it’s pretty. The song that the Halcyon sings by the sea.
My father had told me that the young men would rule. But what happens when the young men aren’t up to the task? What then?
It had fallen to me to look out for my mother and my sister in the years ahead. That was the mission I had accepted, when my father squeezed my hand and said, Be the man. But how does one learn to be a man—or, for that matter, a woman? By what process does our destiny become clear to us? What if, in spite of all our searching and wandering, our hearts refuse to reveal themselves to us? Or worse, if the demands our hearts make seem to place our very lives in danger?
I sat there under my grandfather’s withering gaze. The thought of driving to Nova Scotia came to me then.
Then, unexpectedly, there was Brown. She looked at me with love and forgiveness. The dog placed her soft face in my lap.
Do not be dismayed, for I am thy Dog. Anyone who does not love does not know Dog, because Dog is love. Whoever lives in love lives in Dog, and Dog in him.
From the Penn Central tracks a mile away came the sound of a coal train passing through, on its way to Bethlehem. The engineer blew the whistle. G-major sixth.
You are not nothing, the dog suggested. No one is nothing, if they know love.
Brown looked at me with steadfastness and adoration, and her tail thumped against the floor. There’d been scars on her legs. But maybe, with time, they could be healed.
V
Alex, 1993
You’re not lost, he said.
We were deep in it now. Alex was a Gordon setter, like a black Irish setter, a beautiful dog. I’d inherited him from my friend Zero, who’d raised him from a pup but then found, as the dog grew older and Zero’s own life grew more complex, that he couldn’t care for his friend anymore. And so Alex had joined me up in Maine, where I’d landed at the end of the eighties, in a farmhouse on the edge of a huge forest, married to a woman named Deirdre Finney and drunk on love and good fortune.
Now I was lost.
Alex and I worked our way through the forest. A stream trickled in the woods before us. Its waters, rich with iron, had a deep brownish-red tint. Alex turned to look at me. You okay?
I don’t know, I told the dog. I don’t know where I am.
The dog looked at me, then turned to gaze deeper into the woods. Then he froze, tail erect, one paw raised. Look ahead.
He held that pose for a long time. I stared in the direction of his point, but I didn’t see anything. After a while Alex relaxed, turned back to me. You didn’t see it? It was right there.
I didn’t see it, I told him.
Sometimes I disappointed the dog, and this was one of those times. You need to look harder.
There were moments, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when “looking harder” was not in my tool kit, and not only because I was tired of looking hard. Against all odds, a series of generous miracles had taken place in those years, and I felt as if questioning my good fortune might make it all vanish, like a magic trick that loses its charm after you learn how it is done.
Against all odds, I had found, as Evelyn Waugh had written, that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
After what had felt like thirty years of wandering lost, I had fallen in love with Deedie Finney, whom in an earlier book I called “Grace.” It was a good name for her. We got married. I had published a book. I got a job teaching at a college, Colby, up in Maine.
I looked around the dark forest. From somewhere in the heart of those woods I could almost hear the sound of Lloyd Goodyear drawing a bow across the strings of a cello.
Alex gave me that look again. You’re not lost, he said.
* * *
After my father died, I did make that long trip up to Nova Scotia and stood at the edge of a cliff, looking down at the waters of the North Atlantic. On that occasion I was prevented