the grass soon. The shutters needed paint. Inside, nothing had changed for a long time.
They had arrived for the first time at this house in a rainstorm, he and his brother and sister standing in the front hall listening to their mother shout at their father about how dark it was, how cramped the kitchen and ugly the cabinets and ugly the wallpaper, how the boxes hadn’t arrived and there were no blankets upstairs, and what would they do? How would they manage? As if he had led them all into disaster.
That was ten years ago and the wallpaper was still there, and the cabinets, and the mirror at the top of the stairs which his mother had never liked.
Climbing onto the porch, he closed the front door quietly behind him and switched off the porch light.
Once, when their mother had taken their father off to New York to see a specialist, his sister had thrown a party at the house and a girl had been sick on the front staircase, and though she’d tried her best to clean it, the detergent his sister had used had left a paling stain, which Nate passed over now as he headed up the stairs.
Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over. But in this house, since his father had died, it seemed sediment was all that was left: the banister, the hall mirror, the bathroom’s black-and-white tile, the ticking on the runner carpet that led to the foot of his mother’s door—all of it heavy with his absence.
This was the trouble with staying away with friends and getting high. He felt wrong for forgetting his family even for a few hours, as if to keep faith with his father required an unceasing grief.
Knocking gently on his mother’s door, he turned the handle open. She was reading in bed, the covers pulled up to her waist. She glanced up over her reading glasses, her oval face gaunt, as it had been for months. She’d lost considerable weight in the last year and still ate very little.
“Was that Emily dropping you off?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We saw a movie.” He paused for a moment, feeling the obligation to offer her something more.
“I went to that lady for tutoring.”
“That’s right, I’d forgotten. How was it?”
“She’s a little strange. But it was okay.”
It never stopped being terrible, how alone his mother looked. He couldn’t make it go away, even by being here, even if he were never to leave.
“Sleep well,” she said, looking at him with a tender, somewhat distant expression, as if she hadn’t seen him in a very long time.
Chapter 6
By Nate’s third visit, Ms. Graves had stopped discussing American history altogether and thus any topic that might appear on his exam. Jumping off from Wilson at Versailles, she had waded into the diplomatic correspondence that detailed Britain’s haphazard Middle East strategy following the Armistice.
“It came down to a lack of troops. Their army was fading away, you see. Someone had to maintain law and order. And so the British did what empires always do—they installed puppets. The Hashemites! Losers to the Sauds in the battle for the Arabian Peninsula! Why not give them Jordan! Of course it was only supposed to be a temporary fix, six months of police work until the mandate could be rearranged, a gentlemen’s agreement, but look what we got! What should obviously have been the Palestinian state run for eighty years by an imported monarchy. Cancer number one. But why stop there? Ms. Gertrude Bell is a very fine and knowledgeable woman but not quite fit to rule Mesopotamia and given that the French had chucked brother Faisal out of Syria, he was in need of a job, so why not give him Baghdad—another Hashemite installed to rule an incoherent people in an incoherent country! Truck in the Sunni elites! Throw in the Kurds! Can’t you just picture it?” she asked, tossing her arms in the air. “Little Mr. Whatsit in his Whitehall office carefully drawing his map. If it weren’t so lethal it could be read as farce.”
When Nate ventured that the units he’d missed in class were on the Revolutionary War, Ms. Graves closed her eyes, held her palm out like a guard at a crosswalk instructing him to halt, and said, “I can’t do George Washington. I simply can’t. Triumphalist or otherwise. You’ll have to go